Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight:
Trump Keeps Doubling Down On The Same Failed Strategy
Indeed, the act of declaring a national emergency to build a wall is even more unpopular than the wall itself — and the wall isn’t popular. Polls as tracked by PollingReport.com show an average of 32 percent of Americans in favor of the declaration and 65 percent opposed. Even in an era where many of Trump’s top priorities poll only in the low-to-mid-40s, that’s an especially large split, with roughly twice as many voters opposed as in favor.
Timothy O’Brien/Bloomberg:
In Trump’s World, He Never Loses
His Rose Garden speech declaring a national emergency and his decades of self-aggrandizement are more closely related than you might think.
Back in the early 2000s, his casino company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, was in familiar territory: mismanaged, saddled with debt it had trouble repaying, and ultimately forced into bankruptcy. The enterprise had to be restructured, and Trump saw his stake in the company reduced. “I don’t think it’s a failure; it’s a success,” he told the Associated Press after his casinos filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2004. “It’s really just a technical thing.”
None of that amounted to failure, he also assured me at the time, because he still had a (much smaller) ownership stake after the bankruptcy. “It’s a successful deal,” he told me. “You’ll never write that, but it’s a great deal.”
"The only thing bad about it is I get some unsophisticated press that says, ‘Trump went into bankruptcy,’” he added. “Somehow the B-word [bankruptcy] never caught on very well in this country. But the smartest people in the country call me and say, ‘How the [expletive] did you pull that off?’”
Guardian:
Flag-waving and Democrat-bashing: Trump's blueprint to win in 2020
Trump plans to sell a simple message of economic prosperity threatened by radical leftwingers. Could it really work?
“The Democrats have never been more outside of the mainstream,” Trump said. “They’re becoming the party of socialism, late-term abortion, open borders and crime.” ...
Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, said Trump was also trying to shore up the evangelical Christian vote by talking about abortion, and he was bashing Democrats out of necessity, because his relatively low approval rating means he cannot simply run on his record.
“The main challenge for Democrats is not to take the bait,” Lake said. “It’s easy to want to defend against this kind of stuff. But the most important thing is for Democrats to define themselves, and the most important issue for them to define themselves on is the economy.
“And it would be a huge mistake to take this bait all the time, and that’s what I think Democrats have to guard against.”
Axios:
Trump’s invisible tax cut
The big picture: When Trump cut taxes in 2017, the White House also cut the amount that workers saw withheld from their paychecks. The result was an immediate pay hike — that went largely unnoticed.
- The whole purpose of income tax withholding was to make taxes less salient — to make workers notice them less. According to a Harris poll for Axios, less than half of American workers know exactly how much their take-home pay will be. When that pay went up at the beginning of 2018, they probably noticed for a week or two — and then forgot.
- When Obama cut taxes for 95% of workers in the wake of the financial crisis, most of them didn't notice. It was implemented via the withholding system, by design, to ensure that the extra disposable income was spent immediately to boost the economy, rather than being saved.
Jonathan Cohn/HuffPost:
2 Liberal Democrats Are Promoting A Twist On ‘Medicare For All’
It would create a big government plan but keep a role for private insurance.
The legislation, which DeLauro and Schakowsky are calling “Medicare for America,” would create a comprehensive, government-run insurance program that would replace the big existing federal programs as well as the private insurance policies that people today buy on their own. But large employers would get to keep offering private coverage, leaving employees with the choice of sticking with their company plans or moving to the new public option, where they could potentially get much lower premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.
Like any health care initiative, the DeLauro-Schakowsky bill would entail real and complicated trade-offs. A skeptical take on the proposal is that it’s just ambitious enough to carry the same political liabilities as something like the Sanders bill but not ambitious enough to carry its strengths. “Medicare for America” envisions less sweeping changes than “Medicare for all” does, but that could mean leaving in place more of the current system’s waste and complexities.
Bill Scher/Politico:
How Does a Straight White Male Democrat Run for President?
Very carefully
Most of the straight while male fence-sitters come from the pragmatic corners of the Democratic Party, and they may want to position themselves as less susceptible than the early declared candidates to knee-jerk pandering to the left. Polls show that most Democrats are not inclined to put primary candidates through an obstacle course of purity tests, so there is likely room for such a candidate. But trying to seize the pragmatic mantle comes with a risk, especially for the straight white men. Hectoring others about what’s politically realistic could easily get a candidate tagged as a “mansplainer.” Moreover, any attack by a white man against a woman or a minority—be it from the candidate or from his supporters—would be extremely dangerous to wage, especially if those attacks come from the relative right of the party.
One question that will be particularly tough for any male candidate: Why shouldn’t the next president be a woman? After all, just among the five female members of Congress already in the field, Democratic voters can choose among different ideologies, geographic and demographic backgrounds, and types of experience. With so many qualified choices, shouldn’t the male candidates just get out of the way?
Trysh Travis/Gainesville Sun:
What were they thinking?
Inspired by the recent controversy embroiling Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, this group chat (which began as a series of profane texts about which emojis best expressed “This can’t be happening!”) ultimately organized itself around one substantive issue: “What were they thinking?!” That question has surfaced again and again as the Virginia scandal has played out in the headlines.
My friends and I are only about five years younger than Northam and Herring; like them, we’re white, and life-long Democrats. They grew up in Virginia and Tennessee, we’re from Texas — all part of the Confederacy, but not “the deep South.”
We are all from modest backgrounds. We attended public, desegregated high schools and went to well-regarded universities on merit scholarships. I went North for college and lived there for about 20 years, but many of my friends, like Northam and Herring, attended college in the South and Southwest. Our work and our families are here. Demographically speaking, we are all more alike than not.
Speaking for myself and the other members of my small and unscientific sample, I can say definitively that we were normal, slightly ridiculous teenagers in the ’70s and ’80s, into drugs, sex, and rock and roll (with a sprinkling of “Monty Python” and “Star Trek”). No one could call us “woke.” Yet the idea of mocking black disenfranchisement and celebrating white supremacy were literally unthinkable to us.
“It never would have occurred to me to dress up like that,” one friend wrote. “And if I did you know my mom would’ve killed me.”
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