Some days the pundit round-up writes itself.
Now, whichever side you fall in the Clinton email saga, understand four things:
1. FBI Director James Comey stuck us in the middle of an inter-agency fight about security classification. Use of the word “drones”. Over-classification. Maybe after the election we can have a conversation about this and how State needs to up its game in regard to IT and security, but impossible to have now.
2. The GOP is already overreaching by attacking Comey. Incredibly, stupid, incredibly GOP. (And add that Trump turned story to himself by praising Saddam Hussein).
3. No indictment for this, no smoking gun on Benghazi. She was rebuked but is in better shape than the critics will acknowledge, though she does have damage control to do (last night’s Ipsos/Reuters pre-FBI report has her up by 13).
4. Obama supporting Clinton (yesterday, NC) is huge politically. The crowd loved it. It felt like payback for Bill Clinton as explainer-in-chief in 2012. No, he didn’t overpower her. You had different styles, the teacher and the preacher. It worked.
Paul Waldman:
To anyone who has been following this story, the FBI’s conclusion is not a surprise. I’ve been saying all along that while what Clinton did was dumb and violated State Department policy, it wasn’t a crime. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out.
For at least a while, the discussion about this subject will be all about the “optics,” how it will affect Clinton’s poll ratings on trustworthiness, whether Trump will be able to capitalize on it, how it might affect turnout among left-handed divorced baby boomer Browns fans in the Cleveland suburbs, and so on. But let’s ask some more fundamental questions.
What does this outcome really tell us about Clinton, and what lessons should she take from this whole mess?
Jill Lawrence:
What Clinton needs is a Jiminy Cricket to neutralize the blind spots and impulsive decisions that contributed to her husband’s second-term impeachment and her own current campaign problems — and that could hamper her ability, if elected, to achieve her goals as president. This person wouldn’t have to be the vice president. But there’s a good argument that it could and should be.
Eli Lake:
Clinton's case here is instructive. While the FBI has not made public the classified information she discussed in her unclassified e-mails, many outlets have reported that some of this dealt with the U.S. targeted killing program. Until recently these drone strikes were considered top secret. At the same time they were widely reported and discussed in Washington, to the point where President Barack Obama himself joked about his drone strikes at a White House Correspondents Association dinner.
"We know that until very recently the administration considered the discussion of specific targeted killing operations to be highly classified, and in fact covert action," said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "Outside of government most people find that ridiculous because it has been reported around the world."
It's not just drone strikes. The details of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority today are classified. That means it's technically illegal for you or me to know how much money the U.S. has withheld in compliance with a 2014 law to cut off payments to Palestinian prisoners and the families of "martyrs." The same is true for the vast majority of documents uncovered in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound or the details about whether Russia has complied with its arms-control agreements.
In all of these instances, conservatives have an interest in diminishing state secrecy, not empowering it.
NY Times with a good discussion of the issues, given that we do not know what was in the emails:
This finding seems to suggest that a small number of Mrs. Clinton’s emails did include government secrets. This helps to explain why Mr. Comey, despite recommending no criminal charges against Mrs. Clinton, rebuked her and her team as “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
At the same time, the far larger share of 2,000 other emails considered “up-classified” do not fall into this category — and speak to long-running criticisms that Washington has a problem with overclassifying banal information.
These designations shed light on the nature of the information in Mrs. Clinton’s emails and on the debate around them.
In non-Clinton email news, go here for a lovely Rory Cooper (GOP strategist) short tweet storm on Trump’s anti-Semitism.
BuzzFeed reports that David Duke is all in on Trump’s anti-Semitism:
Prominent white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke on Tuesday dismissed Donald Trump’s explanation of his controversial tweet featuring Hillary Clinton next to a pile of money, a Star of David, and the words the “most corrupt candidate ever.”
A Trump staffer took the blame for the tweet on Monday evening, saying he took the image from an anti-Clinton Twitter account and believed it was a sheriff’s star, not a Star of David. Duke, however, said it was clearly not a sheriff’s star.
“Let’s go to the tweet. The tweet again shows Clinton, it shows a Star of David. Of course later the campaign made the excuse, ‘well, no, that’s like a sheriff’s badge.’ Well, no way folks. Clinton, money, the most campaign corrupt person,” said Duke.
Earlier in the broadcast, Duke praised Trump for the tweet, saying his tweet was “all true.”
Observer.com (publisher is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law):
An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees
And now, Mr. Kushner, I ask you: What are you going to do about this? Look at those tweets I got again, the ones calling me out for my Jewish last name, insulting my nose, evoking the holocaust, and tell me I’m being too sensitive. Read about the origins of that image and see the type of people it attracted like a flies to human waste and tell me this whole story is just the work of the “dishonest media.” Look at that image and tell me, honestly, that you just saw a “Sheriff’s Star.” I didn’t see a sheriff star, Mr. Kushner, and I’m a smart person. After all, I work for your paper.
Edmund Burke once said, in times that are starting to seem more and more similar: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Well, here I am, and here we are. Both Jewish, both members of the media. And you might choose silence, but I’ve said my piece.
Respectfully,
Dana Schwartz
Josh Marshall:
One of the most telling things Trump has said during this campaign is that he doesn’t go into rallies with any script or even terribly prepared sense of what he’s going to say. He starts talking and then waits to get a feel for what the audience responds to. In other words, he homes in on affirmation.
This is largely because Trump is a narcissist. But it’s also a trait of a salesperson. You intuit and understand what the client wants or needs (not the same thing) and then get about selling it to them. For these reasons and on both these fronts, I doubt Trump believes 3/4 of what he says on the campaign trail in the sense most of us understand the word. That is to say, things we believe in or believe to be true and would largely continue to believe even if it became less helpful to do so.
Racism and authoritarianism are core Trump values that predate and are separate from this campaign. The other thing that’s very apparent about Trump is that he’s shockingly, almost totally ignorant of the details of almost every public policy issue - much, much more than even your typically caricatured politician who knows little about the issues of public life without their advisors feeding them lines. This makes him more porous to the views and desires of his supporters because he has little to no matrix of pre-existing knowledge or core beliefs to reference them against or challenge them with.
Because of this - intuiting his audience and almost total ignorance and indifference to policy questions — Trump's core racism and authoritarianism have been amplified and accentuated, even radicalized to an almost unprecedented, perhaps unique degree by his interaction with his supporters. This is not to exonerate Trump in any way. But it's important to see that 'beliefs' isn't really a metric that is very useful with Trump. If you see a chameleon who is orange, it doesn't tell you much about the chameleon. It just means he's standing in front of an orange background. Trump may himself be intrinsically orange. But the analogy definitely applies.
Let’s not lose sight of how this plays. See tweets above. Despite it, Trump is not galvanizing the GOP as a whole. His supporters are another thing entirely.
Pew:
Independents outnumber either Democrats or Republicans. A Pew Research Center analysis that examined partisan affiliation from 1992 to 2014 found that, in 2014, 39% of the public identified as independents, which was larger than the shares calling themselves Democrats (32%) or Republicans (23%). In 2004, roughly equal shares identified as Democrats (33%), independents (30%) and Republicans (29%).
However, most independents express a partisan leaning: In 2014, 17% of the public leaned toward the Democratic Party while 16% leaned toward the GOP; just 6% declined to lean toward a party. When the partisan leanings of independents were taken into account, 48% either identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic; 39% identified as Republicans or leaned Republican. …
Why do Republican leaners choose not to identify as Republicans? About half (52%) say a major reason they do not affiliate with the party is their frustration with its leaders; 40% say it is because they disagree with the party on important issues.
Among Democratic leaners, no single reason stands out. A third say a major reason they do not identify as Democrats is that they disagree with the party on key issues, while 28% cite frustration with the party’s leadership.
AP on the rural/urban divide (link fixed):
DIVIDED AMERICA: Town and Country Offer Differing Realities
Bloomberg on no college/college divide:
Clinton Targets College-Educated Whites in Bid for Swing States
Long a Republican mainstay, white college graduates are trending Democratic in 2016.
Nate Silver touches on a topic that comes up now and again:
Election Update: Swing State Polls And National Polls Basically Say The Same Thing