This morning’s pundit round-up comes amidst tightening polls and tonight’s debate. The pundits will have a lot more to say about those things in the next few days (surprisingly few quality items on the debate up until now, post ‘em if you got ‘em).
Kirk Douglas, now 100 years old and sharper than many half his age:
I was 16 when that man came to power in 1933. For almost a decade before his rise he was laughed at ― not taken seriously. He was seen as a buffoon who couldn’t possibly deceive an educated, civilized population with his nationalistic, hateful rhetoric.
The “experts” dismissed him as a joke. They were wrong.
A few weeks ago we heard words spoken in Arizona that my wife, Anne, who grew up in Germany, said chilled her to the bone. They could also have been spoken in 1933:
“We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here…[including] new screening tests for all applicants that include an ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values…”
These are not the American values that we fought in World War II to protect.
Upshot/NY Times on birtherism:
These results highlight both the potential and the limits of corrective information. Mr. Trump’s statement renouncing the myth might provide an especially credible and persuasive signal about the falsity of the claim to true believers.
Yet the human capacity to resist contradictory evidence can be remarkable.
Isaac J. Bailey/Politico:
Birtherism Isn’t Going Away
Trump knows his white base will forgive him for simply dropping it, without explanation, after five years of fanning the flames. And that’s the problem.
And let’s not kid ourselves: Trump, in his phony ploy to win even more white voters by pretending to court black ones, may have technically disavowed birtherism (even as he blamed Hillary Clinton, falsely, for starting it), but it’s not going away. It affects not just Obama but young Hispanic immigrants, though they may be here legitimately, who’ve known no other country but this one, like one of my former students who, through tears, revealed to me she was a “Dreamer” in constant fear of being outed and deported. She didn’t let that burden hold her back and became one of my most accomplished students anyway, reminding me of the everyday black Americans I know who grin and bear daily slights and bouts with bigotry while never revealing the challenges they face.
It means you can be forever an alien in the place where you were born, no matter how far removed you are from the blood of stolen generations that fertilized the ground and made America’s prosperity possible. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
Vox has a conversation with conservative Samuel Goldwyn:
“The great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives,” Goldman told me during a sit-down near his office. “Since conservative politicians and policies have stopped delivering peace and prosperity, I think it’s more or less inevitable that voters have become dissatisfied.”
Moreover, he argued, the GOP and conservative movement has embraced a vision of America — Sarah Palin’s “Real America,” more or less — that can’t appeal to anybody but white Christians. A (somewhat controversial) census projection suggests that the US will be a majority minority country in the next 30 years — an unfriendly environment, to say the least, for the GOP.
“If you project yourself as a white Christian provincial party, you're not going to get very many votes among people who are none of those things,” Goldman says. “That's what's happened over the last 10 or 15 years.”
The obvious question then becomes — what next? If movement conservatism is doomed, then is the kind of white identity politics that Trump has pioneered the Republican future? Goldman and I talked at length about how the dividing line between liberals and conservatives today appears to be less about economics and more about identity.
LA Times editorial/endorsement:
Hillary Clinton would make a sober, smart and pragmatic president. Donald Trump would be a catastrophe.
NY Times editorial/endorsement:
Running down the other guy won’t suffice to make that argument. The best case for Hillary Clinton cannot be, and is not, that she isn’t Donald Trump.
The best case is, instead, about the challenges this country faces, and Mrs. Clinton’s capacity to rise to them.
Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight:
Election Update: The Case For And Against Democratic Panic
Still, the disagreement between polls this week was on the high end, and that makes it harder to know exactly what the baseline is heading into Monday’s debate. The polls-only model suggests that Clinton is now ahead by 2 to 3 percentage points, up slightly from a 1 or 2 point lead last week. But I wouldn’t spend a lot of time arguing with people who claim her lead is slightly larger or smaller than that. It may also be that both Clinton and Trump are gaining ground thanks to undecided and third-party voters, a trend which could accelerate after the debate because Gary Johnson and Jill Stein won’t appear on stage.
Cook Political election map (with leaners):
Clinton 272 EV
Trump 196 EV
Up for grabs 70 EV (FL, NV, NC, OH, one each ME and NE)
Emmett Rensin/Newsweek on the wrongheadedness of blaming the kids:
I would like to suggest that the threat these young [millennial] voters pose to technocratic liberalism is not the possibility of electing Donald Trump. Despite Clinton’s flagging numbers, her chances of success remain high. Rather, the fear is that if younger voters really are committed to a host of ideological positions at odds with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, then that Party, without a Trump-sized cudgel, is doomed. It should not escape anybody’s notice that politics by negative definition—the argument, at bottom, that “we’re better than those guys”—has become the dominant electoral strategy of the Democratic Party, and that despite the escalation of the “those guys” negatives, the mere promise to be preferable has yielded diminishing returns. At some point, the Democratic Party will either need to embrace a platform significantly to the left of their current orthodoxy, or they will lose.
There are only so many times one can insist that young voters capitulate to a political party’s sole demand—vote for us!—in exchange for nothing.
This might not seem such a bad thing. Positions shift. Parties evolve. A serious threat of millennial desertion might lead to a natural compromise: support, in exchange for real policy concessions going forward. So why have liberal pundits resisted such a move? Why are they intent on not just defeating but discrediting the ideological preferences of the young left, dismissing them not as a legitimate divergence but as mere ignorance and confusion?
Probably because Trump really is an existential threat, more than because [insert corporatist and neoliberal somewhere in here as a substitute for meaningful explanation]. But the kids are alright. They have the right idea.
Joy Reid/Daily Beast:
Barack Obama’s election represented a complete break with the previous iterations of our national self. Not only was the new president black. He was exotically black, and with a foreign-sounding name; an African Muslim-turned-atheist father and a white mother whose taste for adventure included breaking the taboos of racial and cultural miscegenation not once but twice. Obama possessed some of the tropes of traditional American identity—his maternal grandfather fought in World War II and his grandmother was a real-life “Rosie the Riveter.” He was an academic standout and was earnest in telling the allegory of America. He represented a hopeful and audacious country seeking economic revival after the Great Recession, but also racial and political renewal. Obama was and is the face of the “new America”—young, urban and multiracial—that elected him.
Some Americans haven’t gotten over it.
From the start, Republicans, led by Sarah Palin and her vicious rally crowds, questioned everything from Obama’s religion (with their pointed references to his middle name … Hussein) to his very love of country.
TPM:
Why Trump's Shady Foundation Practices Are A Major No-No In The Charity World
“The philosophy behind these rules is that the grant of a tax exemption is a privilege. It’s something valuable that the government gives and there are strings attached to that grant of privilege,” said Pamela Mann, the head of the tax exempt organizations group at the New York City law firm Carter Ledyard, who for 11 years served as chief of the Charities Bureau at the New York Attorney General’s office.
“One of the strings is that the organization really has to be run for proper charitable purposes,” Mann told TPM.
The tax implications are two-fold, according to experts. The charity itself benefits from a tax-exempt status, and those who contribute also get to deduct their donations from their taxes.
Just another part of the Trump scampaign. The guy is a swindler. That’s who he is.