Laura Reston at The New Republic writes—Republicans Spent Hundreds of Millions on Primary Ads. This Is the Best They Could Do:
In 1964, a blond girl plucked the petals off a daisy. In 1984, morning broke across America, and a menacing grizzly bear lumbered through the woods. Four years later,Willie Horton’s mug shot glowered across everybody’s screens. In 2004, John Kerrywindsurfed to the Blue Danube Waltz. These iconic campaign ads—among the precious few that have changed the way people thought about campaigns and candidates over the last half-century—stuck in the American consciousness, more than anything, because they were weird. Each diverged from the typical fare—the candidates talking soulfully into the cameras, the bang-bang-bang attacks with slashing imagery and menacing narrators, and (after Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide) the myriad knockoffs of “Morning in America.”
You’d think it would surprise no one to learn that the commercials that can change people’s political perceptions are the ones that look and sound fresh, the ones you can watch without thinking, “Geez, another campaign ad.” The ones that, even if you live in Iowa or South Carolina or New York, you still wouldn’t mind watching.
But Republican campaigns and consultants roundly ignored that lesson—as they always do—during the GOP presidential primary season. Given the huge field of candidates, the fireworks repeatedly set off by Donald Trump, and the ever-mounting desperation of the Republican establishment to derail Trump, you might have expected one of those iconic spots to emerge. Instead, for the hundreds of millions Republicans spent on more than 300 commercials since April 2015—when Ted Cruz launched “Blessing,” the first televised ad of the 2016 cycle, over Easter Weekend in Iowa—not one truly defined a candidate or lastingly changed the course of the race. The vast majority were the same old, same old: vicious attack ads, grainy contrast spots, sunny biographical hymns.
Syreeta McFadden at The Guardian writes—We’re in an amazing black cultural moment. Can we avoid the backlash?
Black American culture is experiencing a kind of delicious dominance at the moment. It’s one that might seem odd given its contrast with the resurgence of racism embodied by some supporters of Donald Trump. But Trumpism, as my colleague Steven Thrasher has noted, is just the latest version of a pattern in America: black progress beckons white rage.
This artistic triumph isn’t a new movement, then, but rather reads like one because this time around, creators aren’t making work that over explains black life or that makes white society comfortable, centered or even included. Beyoncé’s Lemonade was made to speak to black women. Larry Wilmore’s N-word use at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner wasn’t meant for the white people it offended. Shonda Rhimes is the most successful showrunner in television, creating space for black actors to feature complex representations of black life. Claudia Rankine’s critically acclaimed volume, Citizen, explicitly interrogates micro aggressions that shape black life in America.
As black deaths overtake the news cycle and the current presidential campaign slog has shaken awake racist, inflammatory rhetoric that many non-black Americans want to believe was dead, black art is unconcerned with the emotional wellbeing of white folks. The cultural work of black American creators at this moment is exciting, energizing and a reflection of the ever maturing consciousness in black America.
The dominant narrative of American identity, one centered in whiteness and its aesthetics, is one that black American artists have explored, confronted and challenged since the nation’s beginning. Black American artists, writers and creators have long asserted the personhood of black people. From Phyllis Wheatley’s poems On Being Brought From Africa to America, to the compulsive portraiture of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, to the novels and poets of the Harlem Renaissance era, the paintings of Jacob Lawrence to the works Carrie Mae Weems, Mikalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley, these artists have pivoted from a presumed white gaze, and expanded definitions of the American self.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Trump’s Asymmetric Warfare:
It has been somewhat fascinating and sometimes fun to watch Elizabeth Warren do battle with Donald Trump in alternating salvos of tweets, but in the end I fear that this approach of trying to “beat a bully,” as Warren put it in one of her tweets, is a futile effort.
There is no way to sufficiently sully a pig or mock a clown. The effort only draws one further onto the opponent’s turf and away from one’s own principles and priorities.
There is no way to shame a man who lacks conscience or to embarrass an embarrassment. Trump is smart enough to know what he lacks — substance — and to know what he possesses in abundance — insolence.
Christopher Phelps at Jacobin writes—From Slump to Trump: The electoral ascent of Donald Trump is not the fault of unbridled democracy, but of unbridled capitalism:
To explain the rise of Donald Trump — and his Mexican-bashing, Muslim-baiting, violence-condoning, woman-denigrating, trade-skeptical, insult-driven, blustery kind of politics — Andrew Sullivan offers us this pearl of wisdom: blame democracy.
Perhaps only a sophisticate steeped in Anglo-Catholic conservatism, having left behind the old neoliberal New Republic for New York magazine, could imagine our new Gilded Age to be a time of excessive democracy in which “barriers to the popular will” are “now almost nonexistent.” Though delivered with unique aplomb, Sullivan’s condescension merely echoes a more general view now common in the corporate press: that Trump’s base of support is a rabble of no-nothing ignoramuses at the bottom of society, the losers left behind by globalization.
Trump himself has fed this myth. “I love the poorly educated,” he said after one victory, prompting Edward Luce of the Financial Times to write, “Mr. Trump knows his market.”
Actually, Trump’s aim is upmarket. His instincts, after all, were honed in selling garish real estate and running gaudy casinos, followed by years of reality TV. If white working-class voters play a definite part in his surge, they are not where the real money is to be made or the real votes are to be found. Exit polls confirm that the primary force in his success is not the working class.
Ruth Conniff at The Progressive writes—The Snake Oil Salesman and the Carnival Barker: Ryan vs. Trump:
The House Speaker will have his moment, staring off into the distance and doing his best impression of a principled, visionary leader for the future. But a return to Ryan-style trickle-down economics is not the forward-looking plan the Republicans need.
People who live in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville understand that.
The most passionate reaction Trump got in his Janesville was when he mentioned Ryan—and the crowd booed. Ryan did nothing to protect workers who lost jobs when the local GM plant closed. True, he tried to blame the plant closing on President Obama—who wasn’t even in office yet when GM pulled up stakes and moved production to Mexico. But Ryan supported the trade deals that cost Janesville workers their jobs. And he went on to oppose extending unemployment benefits after his constituents lost 30 to 50 percent of the district’s manufacturing jobs. [...]
The real problem for Republicans like Ryan is not that Trump is a gauche idiot. Sure, he’s a racist loudmouth who drowns out the subtler racism behind Ryan’s talk about the safety net becoming a “hammock” with blaring, Archie Bunker-style bigotry.
But the bigger problem for Ryan’s GOP is that Trump supporters have seen through their trickle-down hokum. They know those rich guys who want to offshore their jobs do not have their best interests at heart.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—It Takes A Policy:
[A]lmost all advanced countries provide paid leave from work for new parents. We don’t. Our public expenditure on child care and early education, as a share of income, is near the bottom in international rankings (although if it makes you feel better, we do slightly edge out Estonia.)
In other words, if you judge us by what we do, not what we say, we place very little value on the lives of our children, unless they happen to come from affluent families. Did I mention that parents in the top fifth of U.S. households spend seven times as much on their children as parents in the bottom fifth?
But can our neglect of children be ended?
Gillian Thomas at the Los Angeles Times writes—It's illegal to discriminate 'because of sex.' But what does that actually mean?
Since 1964, “sex discrimination” has come to mean far more than Title VII's framers could have imagined. For one thing, men have long been able to claim Title VII's protections, too. Moreover, sexual harassment, which did not even have a name until 1975, has been recognized as discrimination “because of sex,” and it is illegal whether it occurs between employees of the same sex or different sexes. Height and weight restrictions that disproportionately exclude women applicants — usually deployed in historically male jobs like law enforcement and firefighting — also can be discrimination “because of sex.”
The Court also has repeatedly affirmed that the law protects women whose very identities set them apart in some way from other women — mothers versus women without children, pregnant versus non-pregnant women, women whose dress and demeanor is more “masculine” than the norm. [...]
Recognition that sex encompasses not just one's biology, but conformance with a wide variety of expectations about appearance, demeanor and identity underpins the movement to win Title VII coverage for lesbian, gay and bisexual workers as well as trans employees. But in this one area, trans individuals attracted legal attention before the LGB community.
Trans workers were the most obvious analogues to Ann Hopkins — in that their appearance deviates from gender stereotypes about what a “real man” or “real woman” should look like.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—Clinton and Sanders Should Fight Together for a Democratic Platform That Backs DC Statehood:
When it comes time to write the Democratic platform, it is likely that the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns will have their disagreements. But there is one place where they can find common ground and address a glaring omission in the party’s statement of principles and purposes.
As recently as 2000, the Democratic platform declared support from what should be a basic premise of a party that advocates for voting rights and robust democracy: statehood for the District of Columbia. The platform on which Al Gore ran for the presidency that year declared, “Just as our country has been the chief apostle of democracy in the world, we must lead by example at home. This begins with our nation’s capital. The citizens of the District of Columbia are entitled to autonomy in the conduct of their civic affairs, full political representation as Americans who are fully taxed, and statehood.”
In 2004, however, the word “statehood” was dropped. While the party still advocated for equal rights and representation, it no longer declared that the residents of Washington, DC, should be able to lock in their rights as residents of a state that is equal to every other American state. Despite efforts by DC officials and statehood advocates to get the word restored in 2008 and 2012, the platform has remained vague on the issue.
That should change in 2016.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Obama didn’t birth Trump’s movement
It should be said that many conservatives are resisting the Blame-Obama-First temptation by trying to come to terms with what has happened to their cause. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru offered an admirably sober assessment of his side’s role in Trump’s emergence that included this observation: “We have come to reward the expression of resentment and anger more than the mastery of public policy.”
This is an accurate and powerful critique of a movement that once claimed to have all the new ideas.
Now their main insight is that Obama is wrong about everything. The Wall Street Journal drew on dialectic to editorialize on the Obama-leads-to-Trump concept: “Every thesis creates its antithesis.”
Oliver Milman at The Guardian writes—'Smog is our best advertising': pollution has an upside for some:
More than half of the world’s 30 most polluted cities are in India, according to a new World Health Organisation database, with places across Europe and the US also choked by outdoor air that causes an estimated 3 million deaths a year.
The past week has also identified the culprit for this smoggy malaise. The torching of fossil fuels has grown so quickly that the world is hurtling to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide beyond 400 parts per million – a level unseen in human history. Particles and chemicals released from power plants and vehicles are killing us as the CO2 dissolves the Great Barrier Reef and helps rob Alaska of a winter.
The world is in the grip of a pollution emergency engineered on an industrial scale. Not content with befouling the skies, we’ve ensured that trillions of tiny pieces plastic are strangling the web of life found in the oceans.
Indeed, if humans vanished tomorrow, our great contributions as evidenced in epochs to come will not be mass-marketed angst at infidelity or non-hovering hover boards, but our pollution. Recent research concludes that on vast geological timescales, humans will leave behind just a layer of plastic and a blanket of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Judith McDaniel at TruthOut writes—The Supreme Court Is at Stake: Why the Presidential Election Matters:
It is no secret that the makeup of the US Supreme Court will be a major issue as the fall election campaigns unfold. And yet, many voters will choose not to vote. "It's too much effort. I forgot to register when I moved. My vote won't matter."
I've heard every excuse, but whatever the reason, not voting gives power to others to make decisions that do in fact affect most of our lives.
Examples? Here are some cases and issues to watch. [...]
Gore was only the most obvious victim of this conservative court makeover. One by one we have seen affirmative action, voting rights, separation of church and state, and reproductive rights denied, overturned and limited.
Voters who don't vote have elected (by default) extremely conservative state legislatures, governors and attorneys general. And this is also true at local levels.