Well, this is the last pundit round-up I do before the election, I‘m next up Wednesday. Hope to have some happy things to cover (and I think I will). See you then.
NY Times:
The government, delivering the last major snapshot of the economy before Election Day, reported on Friday that employers added 161,000 workers in October, a performance that suggested a healthy outlook for the months ahead.
The official unemployment rate dropped to 4.9 percent, from 5 percent. And average hourly earnings rose 2.8 percent year over year, a level not reached since 2008.
“It was pretty positive across the board,” said David Berson, chief economist at Nationwide Insurance, adding that “most importantly, we got a nice jump in average hourly earnings and that actually corresponds with other data.”
See Nevada.
Sí se puede.
Jelani Cobb/NewYorker:
Goldwater is heralded as the father of modern conservatism, but he could occupy that niche only because successive generations of his heirs refined and streamlined his message, buffing away the elements that the public saw as extremist. The modern Republican Party staked its claim on conservatism, not on Goldwaterism.
All this points to yet another reason why Trump represents a unique danger in American politics. Trumpism does not seek simply to make a point and pass on its genes to more politically palatable heirs, nor is it readily apparent why he would need to settle for this. When George Will announced his departure from the G.O.P., last summer, he offered a modified version of Ronald Reagan’s quote about leaving the Democrats—“I didn’t leave the Party; the Party left me.” But a kind of converse narrative applies to Trump; he didn’t join the Republican Party so much as its most febrile elements joined him. Trump is partly a product of forces that the G.O.P. created by pandering to a base whose dilated pupils the Party mistook for gullibility, not abject, irrational fear that would send those voters scurrying to the nearest authoritarian savior they could find. The error was in thinking that this populace, mainlining Glenn Beck and Alex Jones theories and pondering how the Minutemen would have fought Sharia law, could be controlled. (For evidence to the contrary, the Party needed look no further than the premature political demise of Eric Cantor.) The old adage warns that one should beware of puppets that begin pulling their own strings.
Jeet Heer/New Republic:
[Stephen] Bannon’s use of the word “movement” is revealing. He’s one of the few genuine ideologues in the Trump circle. He has a very clear and coherent idea of what Trumpism is, perhaps more so than the candidate himself. For Bannon, “the movement” isn’t just about electing one man, but a worldwide revolt of different nationalist groups opposing a globalist elite. “This whole movement has a global aspect to it,” Bannon noted on the Breitbart.com podcast. “People want more control of their country. And they are very proud of their countries. They want borders. They want sovereignty. It’s not just a thing that is happening in any one geographic space. You can see it happening in Asia, you can see it happening in Europe, you can see it happening in the Middle East, and you’re seeing it happen in the United States.”
James Hohmann/WaPo:
Rural strategy takes Trump to very red places in final days
SELMA, N.C.—As he barnstorms the country in the final days of the campaign, Donald Trump has made a notable number of stops in relatively out-of-the-way places like this one, most of which are already guaranteed to break heavily for Republicans.
After his motorcade traveled 47 miles from the Raleigh airport last night, the GOP nominee spoke to an energetic crowd of 15,000 during an outdoor rally on a farm in this town of 6,000.
Max Ehrenfreund/WonkBlog:
An updated analysis from Gallup this week has revealed another factor that could be behind Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's popularity: expensive mortgage-interest payments.
According to the analysis, respondents in hundreds of surveys were more likely to view Trump favorably if they lived in Zip codes with heavy mortgage-interest burdens relative to local incomes, after taking into account a range of socioeconomic factors.
Ryan Cooper/The Week uses the right word: it’s not sympathy for Trump voters, it’s empathy.
How to force Donald Trump voters away from the dark side
First, I think it's important to make a distinction between sympathy, defined as earnest fellow feeling for someone else; and empathy, defined as an attempt to understand another person in detail, regardless of their moral character.
To understand sympathy, you should read this profile of a number of working-class black Americans transfixed with horror over the election. The palpable and entirely rational fear they have of a Trump presidency is simply heartbreaking. Their motives are also extremely obvious, which probably is part of the reason they have gotten less attention from the press. Like any demographic who is being systematically disenfranchised by one party, they are naturally ironclad devotees of the other party, despite the fact that they don't have all that much in the way of positive benefits to show for it over the last 20 years.
Contrast that idea with Robert McNamara's notion of empathy. In the documentary The Fog of War, he describes how the diplomat Tommy Thompson helped defuse the Cuban missile crisis. Thompson had actually lived with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for some time. When the Kennedy administration got two cables during the crisis, one diplomatic and one aggressive, Thompson advised Kennedy to respond to the softer message, predicting that Khrushchev would accept it — and he was right.
Conservative Eli Lake/Bloomberg:
The FBI Wants to Make America Great Again
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the FBI is trying to send a message about next week’s election.
It’s not just that FBI Director James Comey informed Congress that there may be things on Anthony Weiner’s computer pertinent to his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. Nor is it the extraordinary Wall Street Journal coverage this week that revealed frustrations in the bureau over alleged Justice Department pressure to slow-walk an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
The cherry on this banana-republic split is a tweet published Monday from a long-dormant Twitter account called @FBIRecordsVault. It disclosed that new records of the bureau’s probe into Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich had been released because of a Freedom of Information Act request.
The FBI has since assured the public that this was all standard operating procedure. The records were requested. The request was approved. And the Twitter account automatically tweets out new files sent to the bureau’s electronic reading room.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to credit this explanation.
Julia Azari/Vox:
Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination
After observing what's gone on this cycle, I've come to this conclusion: The defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong. What we've known about party organizations has long indicated that they are weak, with little to hold over candidates or officeholders.
Theories of parties that move away from the formal structures of the RNC and DNC, emphasizing networks of policy demanders instead, seemed to give parties as organizations a reprieve. But 2016 showed the weakness of the networks approach. This idea suggests that officeholders and the various interest groups that constitute parties — labor, environmentalists, the National Rifle Association, etc. — coordinate to narrow the field to a few choices.
In 2016, we learned the weaknesses of the network method of controlling party politics: Voters do not have to listen to elite signals. Elites do not have to listen to each other's signals. Parties have been stripped (in part by their own actions) of their ability to coordinate and bargain. As I noted back in May, bargaining breaks down when no one has anything that anyone else wants.
Bring back earmarks!!
Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg:
Clinton Must Begin Waging Her Next War
Clinton, the subject of "Lock her up!" chants at her opponent's political rallies, will not be afforded Obama's multi-hour honeymoon. The moment the election is over, Republicans will resume their effort to destroy her. (It's the one course they agree on.)
Clinton will need to begin building trust among the public immediately, preparing for the twilight struggle ahead. This will require magnanimity, determination and occasional bouts of phoniness as she publicly reaches out to opponents who she knows have no intention of working with her. (If Speaker Paul Ryan steps down, as seems increasingly possible, or even if he stays, Clinton will likely be dealing with a House leader who lacks even the capacity to work with her due to the fractious and dysfunctional House Republican Conference.)
Americans will still expect Clinton to reach across the aisle, but she needn't limit the outreach to Congress, where Republicans have few incentives to cooperate. She should shower attention on the handful of pragmatic GOP governors, including Ohio Governor John Kasich, who will probably run against her in 2020. It will be a difficult dance. But Kasich, who knows he cannot win another GOP anger primary, will relish the opportunity to show national leadership. And Clinton will gain credit, and public trust, for the effort.