Jay Rosen/PressThink:
Bad headline, small changes at the New York Times
Anxiety over the core audience's rising influence helps explain events after 'Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism.'
Picture a power shift. The core readers have more power now. They are a bigger part of the mix. How that power should be recognized, when it might be used, how to listen carefully to it without listening too much… no one really knows yet. The digital audience itself, the Times own interconnected public, does not know its own power.
But how to achieve independence from the newest corrupting influence — the most attached part of the audience — is already a live concern among Times editors. These events lie in the background of Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism, which is not just a shamefully abandoned headline but the name of a public episode now.
The readers have more power:
They have more power because they have more choices. And because the internet, where most of the reading happens, is inherently two-way. Also because Times journalists are now exposed to opinion and reaction on social media. And especially because readers are paying more of the costs. Their direct payments are keeping the Times afloat. This will be increasingly so in the future, as the advertising business gets absorbed by the tech industry. The Times depends on its readers’ support more than it ever has.
1.) Depends on readers’ support more than it ever has. 2.) Got rid of the public editor. That’s an example of the kind of disconnect that has created tension.
It’s generational. It’s also editor driven, methinks, so don’t blame the reporters.
Brian Beutler/Crooked:
DON’T BE SCARED OF RUNNING AGAINST TRUMP’S RACISM
Before this summer, when Donald Trump did something racist, reporters swarmed Democrats to ask them whether Donald Trump was a racist. Now, they swarm Democrats to ask them whether Donald Trump is a white supremacist. “An extraordinary charge,” Axios tells us.
It’s disturbingly easy to imagine this tedious go-round repeating itself when Trump eventually settles the question of whether he’s a white supremacist and we move on to the next, more terrifying one.
But for the time being Democrats should address the issue squarely, even if the people asking mean only to stoke conflict or make telling plain truths seem politically risky. Because the fact that the president is a racist and indeed a white supremacist is very relevant to the campaign they will have to wage in the coming year to defeat him.
When Trump says things to incite racist hatred, and uses the power of the state to inflict harm on the objects of that hatred, we are told that his purpose is to mobilize voters to help him secure re-election. This is, perhaps, the only way to grapple with the repugnance of Trump’s conduct without peering into his soul, but it both cheapens and misses the real point.
Tom Nichols/USA today (Georgia covered this yesterday but I had a nice chat about it):
Why this Never Trump ex-Republican will vote for almost any 2020 Democratic nominee
I'm good with anyone who is mentally stable and in no way sympathetic or beholden to a hostile foreign power. That's it. Policy just doesn't matter.
I don’t care if Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a mendacious Massachusetts liberal. She could tell me that she’s going to make me wear waffles as underpants and I’ll vote for her. I don’t care if Sen. Kamala Harris is an opportunistic California prosecutor who wants to relitigate busing. She could tell me that I have to drive to work in a go-cart covered with Barbie decals and I’ll vote for her. I don’t care if Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a muddle-headed socialist from a rural class-warfare state (where I once lived as one of his constituents). He could tell me he’s going to tax used kitty litter and I’ll vote for him...
The Democratic candidate will promise to nominate people into Cabinet posts who will make me tear my hair out. But at least I will be confident that they are in charge of their own inner circle, instead of surrounded by unprincipled cronies who keep their own boss in the dark while taking a hatchet to the Constitution. Is there anyone that Warren or former Vice President Joe Biden could bring to, say, the Justice Department, whom I would fear more than an odious and sinister courtier like William Barr?
I never thought I could miss Eric Holder, yet here we are.
Really. Take the vote. Just take the vote.
Clare Malone/FiveThirtyEight:
Americans Are Sad About Politics. Who Could Blame Them
Disillusionment played a role in the last presidential election. Indifference, too. Trump and Hillary Clinton were historically unpopular candidates. Trump’s election was a shock in part because pre-election day polls and models were on shakier ground than in years past, thanks to the high number of undecided voters (you can read Nate Silver in depth on the phenomenon here), and a whole lot of people Democrats depended on to elect Barack Obama ended up staying home that November. There’s nothing to say that the 2020 election won’t see similar dynamics.
I’m just one woman, with only the thoughts stirring in my own brain to offer, but I think America’s ennui, its pervasive, high-information sadness, has something to do with the blurring line between what is a “political issue” and what is a “moral issue.” Partisan discourse is so strong, so all-encompassing, that to render judgements about what is a violation of those inalienable rights we are all supposed to cherish, is to take a political stance. Today, the issue of immigration — portrayed on the national stage not long ago in the dry language of H1 visas, pathways to citizenship and legislative solutions — is now a moral morass of separated families, dead children and unsanitary, overcrowded holding facilities. Massacres of elementary school children have become common enough that schools have adapted with the brisk practicality we expect of our teachers — active shooter drills help little children envision what to do in the event their nightmares are made flesh. Writing these sentences will make some readers angry since they will be seen as a promotion of a Democratic Party line — but what’s a political journalist to do when she lays her moral compass on the table, and it points in just one direction on these things?
Americans of both parties oppose family separation. You can also watch a steady, national trend toward greater support for stricter gun control over the past decade. The public expressions about the need for change on our new moral issues are clear, but the political system isn’t built to acknowledge this.
Bill Scher/Politico:
The Real Reason Obama Didn’t Pass Gun Control
Democrats had downplayed the issue for years. If they’re serious about changing things, that needs to stop now.
America’s gun control majority hasn’t decided that the murder of children is a “bearable” cost for preserving our constitutional freedoms. It simply hasn’t figured out how to overcome the intense opposition from the gun rights minority, in a system of government designed to give disproportionate power to lightly populated rural areas, where love of gun rights runs deep, and intense minority opposition, a category that includes gun owners. Figuring it out is crucial for gun control advocates, and it requires a better understanding of why the gun control push failed after Sandy Hook….
The Sandy Hook massacre, which took place one month after the 2012 election, upended Obama’s second-term legislative agenda. The national trauma resulting from the murders of 20 small children was so profound that Obama reasonably concluded this was not a time for caution and calculation. In January 2013, Obama proposed a long list of measures, including bans on assault weapons ban and armor-piercing bullets and a limit on the size of magazines.
And yet he began his gun control push from a position of political weakness. He had not campaigned on gun control, let alone a specific set of gun control proposals. He couldn’t influence lawmakers with clear evidence of red- and purple-state voters who were dedicated to his proposals. No broad-based gun control movement was in place to apply grassroots pressure (despite the efforts of billionaire Michael Bloomberg to build one with his Everytown for Gun Safety organization).
Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association had cultivated for decades a movement of single-issue voters, fostering a cultural identity around gun ownership that fortifies its legal and constitutional arguments. We now know that the NRA leadership was internally conflicted about how to respond to the unique horror that was Sandy Hook, but the ultimate decision to continue its unwavering defiance against any gun restrictions worked perfectly, and kept most Republicans (and a few Democrats) in line.
Important read, but note it isn’t that America did “nothing”. Individual states did a great deal, new organizations like Sandy Hook Promise, Newtown Action Alliance (and outside CT — because of local massacres — many others who have gone national, including Everytown, Giffords and March for Our lives. There is an infrastructure now.)
Elizabeth Bruenig/Politico:
In God’s country
Evangelicals view Trump as their protector. Will they stand by him in 2020?
But Jeffress didn’t see Trump pausing the disintegration of evangelical fortunes by way of personal virtue — or even cultural transformation. He spoke instead of “accommodation,” perhaps alluding to the kind of protections announced only a few weeks after our talk by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, which safeguards the jobs of health-care workers who object to participating in certain procedures for religious reasons. Rather than renewing a culture in peril, in other words, Jeffress seemed to view Trump as someone who might carve out a temporary, provisional space for evangelicals to manage their affairs.
That sounded familiar to Lydia Bean, 38, a researcher who taught at Baylor University and devoted her graduate sociological work at Harvard to studying the comparative politics of evangelicals in the United States and Canada. These days, Bean is a fellow with New America’s Political Reform program, where she writes and consults on political organizing and faith. When we spoke, she was gearing up to a run as a Democrat for a seat in the Texas State House.
“Basically, it’s like a fortress mentality, where it’s like — the best we can do is lock up the gates and just pour boiling oil over the gates at the libs,” Bean said as we ate dinner at a tiny German restaurant near Texas Christian University in Fort Worth that night. Among evangelicals, she said, “I really think one of the things that’s changed since I did my fieldwork at the very end of the Bush administration is a rejection of politics in general as a means to advance the common good, even in a conservative vein.” In that case, politics “becomes a bloodsport, where you’re punishing and striking back at people you don’t like” without much hope of changing anything. For that kind of “hopeless cynicism” regarding politics — walls up, temporary provisions, with just enough strength and zeal left to periodically foil one’s enemies — Trump is an ideal leader.
WSJ:
Elizabeth Warren Unveils Plans to Boost Support for American Indians
Democratic presidential candidate outlines legislation with freshman Rep. Deb Haaland, one of first Native American women elected to Congress
The proposals for Tribal Nations and indigenous peoples comes ahead of the Native American Presidential Forum in Sioux City, Iowa, where Ms. Warren is slated to appear along with a handful of other presidential candidates on Monday.
Last October, before announcing her White House bid, the Massachusetts senator released the results of a genetic test in a high-profile attempt to refute President Trump’s claim that she had been lying about her family history. The analysis found that while the vast majority of her ancestry is European, she likely had a Native American ancestor six to 10 generations back.
Ms. Warren and freshman Rep. Deb Haaland (D., N.M.) outlined legislation that would separate federal funding for Indian Country programs from the regular appropriations process in Congress. Mses. Warren and Haaland, one of two Democrats who in 2018 became the first Native American women elected to Congress, proposed several options, including moving the funds into the federal pool of so-called “mandatory spending,” which includes Social Security and Medicare.
Ms. Warren also called on Congress to expand tribal criminal jurisdiction to cover non-natives accused of offenses on tribal land, arguing that the move would help address the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. Since the 1978 Supreme Court decision, Oliphant v. Suquamish, non-Indians cannot be tried in tribal courts for crimes committed against tribe members on reservations.
Traditional D arguments work. Don’t abandon them. Even as you point out he’s flawed personally, his incompetence and lack of policy chops matter.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Don’t tell me Trump’s words don’t matter
Moreover, this is a new phenomenon. “ABC News could not find a single criminal case filed in federal or state court where an act of violence or threat was made in the name of President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush.”
So let’s review: Trump openly expresses overtly racist sentiments and propagates the notion that Hispanic and black immigrants are squalid and disease-ridden, have terrorists in their midst and are staging an invasion. White supremacist murderers in the Trump era cite Trump personally (not just his white supremacist rhetoric), and we’re supposed to believe Trump has no responsibility for the mass killings.
Right-wing apologists can tell us that this is equivalent to killings by those with left-wing views, but that’s a pathetic lie. In the latter, no one is citing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) by name, no one is quoting their language and in almost all instances (e.g., Dayton) there is no evidence the motive is political at all.
Thread:
Bloomberg:
In Warning Sign for Trump, Independents Lose Confidence in the Economy
“What I’d keep my eye on is the independents because whoever wins the majority of independents will win the presidency,” Richard Curtin, director of the Michigan survey, said on a conference call with reporters.
Your polling lightning round: