CNN:
Secret Service agents on Tuesday kept five people in #BlackLivesMatter T-shirts from entering a Hillary Clinton event in New Hampshire, but the candidate later met with them in an overflow room set up near the event.
The Secret Service had closed the doors to the event, a forum focused on combating substance abuse, in Keene after it reached capacity, a Clinton spokesperson and a Secret Service agent told CNN.
One of the five kept outside the event was Daunasia Yancey, the organizer from the Boston chapter of #BlackLivesMatter. The New Republic had quoted her earlier Tuesday saying the group planned to disrupt Clinton's event with questions about her previous support for "draconian penalties for drug possession and abuse" and the "hyper-militarization of urban police forces."
An overflow room was set up at Clinton's Keene event, where the protesters watched the event via a live stream. After the forum, Clinton headed over to the room to meet with them, said Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign.
Vox:
This is really just the latest mutation of an ongoing conflict. Right now, the two sides are Black Lives Matter activists and Bernie Sanders supporters. But white economic progressives and left-leaning activists of color have been struggling over what it means to be a progressive for decades.
Over the past 20 years, both within the Democratic Party and outside of politics, the vision of progressivism that's attracted the most energy and organizing strength has been a progressivism of identity: recognizing the different ways that various groups are marginalized, and working to reduce those disparities both in policy and in everyday interactions. But many progressives in the Democratic Party are inheritors of a labor-liberal progressive tradition that is primarily worried about economic inequality, and are most excited by economic populists like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Sanders supporters see it as obvious that their candidate's platform would be better for people of color than any other candidate's, and they don't understand what else supporters would want. But for the activists challenging Bernie Sanders and his supporters, it's not enough for progressives or Democrats to call for policies that they think would help people of color — they need to be listening to and incorporating the agendas of people of color themselves.
All votes need to be earned. True for Hillary, true for Bernie. How they deal with BLM and other protestors will matter in the long run. For right now, it's an asymmetric story (e.g., Bernie doesn't have Secret Service.) So continue to follow this as it unfolds. Check out the two pieces at the end.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Best candidate video ever!
Harry Enten:
Support for Sanders rocketed up in Iowa but has leveled off since June. The story is nearly the same in New Hampshire. Sanders rose from June to July in the Granite State, but his ascent slowed.1
So what’s going on? Sanders is maxing out on gains simply because of increased name recognition. Different pollsters ask about favorability and name recognition in different ways — making comparisons tricky — but the University of New Hampshire (UNH) polled Democrats in the state in April, June and July. Sanders’s favorable rating went from 45 percent in April to 66 percent in June and then to 69 percent in July. The share of respondents with a neutral opinion or no opinion of Sanders fell from 44 percent to 24 percent and then to 20 percent during that period. In other words, between April and June, Sanders was picking up low hanging fruit: The liberal wing of the Democratic Party learned about Sanders and liked him. But now, most voters who are predisposed to like Sanders already know about him.
set on 'most sensitive'.
Good news for Bernie, though. There's a new
Franklin Pierce/Herald poll showing Bernie leading Hillary in NH. Not a gold standard poll, though, and confirmation with other polls is needed.
WaPo:
The news that Rick Perry has stopped paying all of his campaign staff following Thursday's debate is a sure sign of major troubles -- and could be the leading edge of the collapse of his campaign.
If this is the end -- and Perry's super PAC support could well keep him on life support for a bit longer -- it would be a remarkable bit of timing: Perry entered the 2012 presidential race as its frontrunner on August 13, 2011 -- almost four years to the day when it's become clear that his second bid for the presidency has faltered badly.
The Hill:
A Senate Republican is predicting opponents of the Iran nuclear deal won't be able to overcome a veto by President Obama of a resolution disapproving the accord.
"I still believe that the president will have enough votes to sustain a veto," Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) told the The Arizona Republic in an interview published over the weekend.
The comments from Flake — who has emerged as one of the few possible Republican supporters of the nuclear deal — could be troubling for its opponents.
Despite Sen. Charles Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) announcement that he would oppose the deal, critics of the Iran deal have been confronted with a steady stream of Democratic lawmakers backing it.
While a resolution of disapproval will surely pass the House and could win the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, winning the two-thirds majority in each chamber to overcome veto looks difficult. If all Republicans vote to kill the deal, they will need to peel off 13 Democrats in the Senate and 44 in the House to override a veto.
Hunter Walker:
"If the group had said Donald Trump won this debate ... I would be the world's greatest pollster," [Frank] Luntz said. "Because it didn't, I'm not."
Trump provided Business Insider with copies of multiple emails in which he said Luntz's assistant asked to set up meetings with him.
"He called me incessantly to meet with me. Finally, I said, 'Look, let's get rid of this guy,'" Trump said of Luntz. "He's on a lot of television programs, I guess I've got to see him. And he wanted me to hire him on a commercial basis, meaning hire him to work on various — you know, you see, I have many companies."
Trump said he rejected Luntz's pitch.
"I said, 'Frank, when I make deals I make them myself," Trump said. "I don't need focus groups or whatever it is you do.' I said, 'Frank, if you were so good at this, you'd be me.'"
Jamie Utt:
Two Black women called for a moment of silence for Mike Brown a year after he was gunned down, left bleeding in the street for 4.5 hours, and White “progressives” shouted, booed, and chanted the name of a White man throughout that moment.
How much more committed to a “negative peace” can we get than literally shouting down the memory of a Black youth whose murder helped to spark this movement?
And how much more “devoted to ‘order'” can we be than to lecture Black people about what direct actions are and are not “hurting your cause”? (Notably, this language I’ve seen from countless White folks shows that we do not see the cause of racial justice as OUR cause – it’s that cause over there that we will tolerate so long as it doesn’t disrupt our Bernie rally.)
And how much more of a “stumbling block” can our self-proclaimed “allyship” be to racial justice when it’s so feeble as to proclaim, “I am a strong ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, but I’m not sure how to be an ally when they are this disrespectful to the only candidate that has actually done anything for minorities” (actual quote from one of the 15 or so social media threads I’m following as I write this article)?
Jamil Smith:
I'm not against criticizing activist tactics, but the idea that #BlackLivesMatter protesters are hurting their cause by challenging candidates, even those considered allies, is based in the notion that the burden of making change is on them. It isn't. Too many Sanders supporters appear to be caught up in their feelings when a protester rubs them the wrong way. They ask, why are the protesters so rude, or annoying, or targeting the “wrong guy”?
In response, I ask simply: Since when are protest tactics designed to make the people whom they are targeting feel more comfortable and less annoyed? And since when is Sanders, or Carson, or any candidate exempt from being pushed?