Amy Chozick at The New York Times provides a rundown of Hillary Clinton's speech on the economy:
Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday blamed Republicans for “35 years” of policies that have exacerbated income inequality by giving “more wealth to those at the top” through tax cuts and corporate loopholes.
“Twice now in the past 20 years a Democratic president has had to come in and clean up the mess,” Mrs. Clinton said in New York, as she called for tax relief for middle-class families, an increase in collective bargaining and other incentives to raise middle-class wages.
“I believe we have to build a growth and fairness economy — you can’t have one without the other,” she said.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post explains what the focus on inequality means for her messaging against Republicans:
The biggest advantage Clinton may have in this debate is that as a Democrat, she believes that government can take an active role in shaping the economy for people’s benefit. That means she can address a wide range of economic and workplace challenges and offer new ideas for how they might be confronted, whether it’s paid sick leave or Wall Street regulation or early childhood education.
You can argue that these ideas are good or bad, but she’ll have many more of them than Republicans will. Because Republicans think government’s role should be far more limited, they have much less to offer on those specific questions. They’d rather not have a debate on things like sick leave, because their default answer — just get out of the way and let the market work its magic — sounds like they don’t want to fix the problem.
Philip Bump at The Fix looks at Donald Trump's poll numbers:
One of the giant caveats floating around next to Donald Trump's 2016 candidacy has been that, despite his decent standing in a splintered field, he was viewed so negatively by Republican voters that it was hard to see how he could actually build on his base of support.
Well, guess what.
When Monmouth University polled Republican voters in June, Trump barely registered, showing up at 2 percent in the polls and with favorability ratings that were far under water; 20 percent of voters viewed him positively and 55 percent viewed him negatively. That gave him a net negative-35 favorability -- by far the worst in the field. But, again, he was polling at 2 percent. In Monmouth's new poll, he's jumped to 13 percent in the crowded field -- by far the biggest improvement. (Anyone below that diagonal line is doing worse. Anyone above, doing better -- and the further from the line, the bigger the improvement.)
[...] He's now seen positively by 40 percent of Republicans, compared to 41 percent who view him negatively. Most of the Republican candidates still have higher net favorable ratings than Trump, yes, but no one has seen any jump like his.
On to Scott Walker's campaign announcement. First up,
America's Best had fun with the fact that his logo looks a lot like there logo:
Click here to see their full feed...it's very puny.
Tom Kertscherof the Journal Sentinel fact checks Walker's announcement speech:
ACT scores: Walker said during his announcement that four years after Act 10 -- his signature law sharply curtailing collective bargaining for most public employees -- that Wisconsin scores on the ACT college-entrance exams were now second-best in the country.
That’s virtually the same as a June 2015 Walker claim that we rated Mostly False. Wisconsin's rank moved from third to second in 2012, the year after Act 10. But the rank didn’t improve because of an improvement in Wisconsin’s score. Rather, Iowa’s scores dropped slightly. And there is no evidence that Act 10 affected the ranking.
And on his attempt to run on his jobs record, Philip Bump at
The Fix notes his job record falls far short of his competition:
Relative to their first months in office, Perry's tenure saw much larger job growth than Walker's -- larger, in fact, than any of the six other governors running in 2016. Walker is in fourth of the seven. [...] Walker's argument for his candidacy is a complex one, centered around being a conservative in a blue state. The jobs message that Walker hoped would derive from his policy changes, though, doesn't seem to have materialized to the extent he would have liked.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes that Scott Walker is "the most boring presidential candidate ever":
But Walker's biggest liability may be this: He is incredibly dull. Not just plodding-speaker dull, though he’s often that, too, but an actually boring person. Mitt Romney is nobody’s caricature of a party animal, but he could legitimately boast of being an industrial titan, a fixer, and a man of the world. Hillary Clinton isn’t particularly charismatic, but her life story is filled with dramatic tension, and nobody who masterminded #Benghazi can be credibly dismissed as boring.
Walker, by contrast, is painfully boring. His boringness is encapsulated by this sequence of 37 incredibly boring tweets, going back more than four years.
On a final note,
Chris Christie is tired of all the Donald Trump questions on the trail:
Chris Christie is done with the media’s questions about Donald Trump’s immigration remarks.
“You know, enough. We’ve answered the questions,” Christie said Monday on “Fox and Friends.” “It’s inappropriate. The comments were inappropriate. But listen, Donald is a friend, I’ve known him for 13 years, and I like him personally. But his comments were inappropriate. That’s now the 50th time I’ve said it. It’s going to be the last time I say it.”
Unfortunately for Christie, Walker, and the rest of GOP primary candidates, it looks like Donald Trump will be around -- and dictating the debate -- for quite a while.