Jonathan Ladd, political scientist, no axe to grind:
First, Zaller argues that media negativity follows a "rule of anticipated importance," in which a politician receives media scrutiny in proportion to his or her future importance in American politics…
Second, Zaller claims that media negativity follows a "rule of product substitution." Journalists resist politicians' efforts to control their coverage...
Since the 1990s, the Clintons have been caught in a cycle of escalation with the political press. The press investigates some possible wrongdoing from the Clintons. The Clintons perceive the investigation to be grossly unfair, and in response stonewall and restrict press access. The press sees this obstruction as suspicious and investigates harder. The Clintons stonewall harder, the press investigates harder, and the cycle continues.
Some politicians in similar circumstances figure out how counterproductive the whole thing is and de-escalate. But not the Clintons. Since the amount of coverage is driven by this arms race, not the offense that started it all, it is not surprising that when these investigations finally end, we often discover that the original wrongdoing is disappointingly trivial.
Third, the social dynamics of the DC press corps likely play some role, although I suspect the effect is smaller than for the first two factors. The DC press corps is a social system which has evolving social norms. For whatever reason, early after Bill Clinton was elected, a social norm developed where attacks on the Clintons, especially deep dives into their personal lives and psyches were acceptable or even encouraged, even more than for Obama and the Bushes. I don't want to overstate things, because I think the Rule of Anticipated Importance and the Rule of Product Substitution are the main factors, but it could be that once the pattern of conflict with the Clintons was in place, social norms among the DC press exacerbated the hostile dynamic and made it harder to break out of. From the beginning, a segment of the DC elite media viewed the Clintons as low class hicks, the opposite of how the elite press viewed John F. Kennedy. Pillar of the DC media establishment David Broder epitomized this sentiment when he famously said during the Lewinsky scandal, "[Bill Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place." Some form of this dynamic has persisted. You can see it in the special relish with which major DC reporters have gone after Hillary in the wake of the e-mail scandal. (See here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)
Josh Marshall, from March 2015 and very relevant:
Clearly this [no drama Obama] is characterological: it stems directly from the people involved and what they generate around them. I don't mean this as a "character" issue as the press like to put it. But people are just different; they live in the world differently; they have different patterns, which they generate and perpetuate again and again in different contexts.
I have my own theory about this with Obama. Whether it was chicken or egg, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and the first black President of the United States was never going to be someone who was governed by impulse and intuition. It was going to be someone controlled, careful, deeply considered in his decisions. Obama never would have gotten where he did if he was not also capable of being daring and bold - but bold and daring after giving the available options a good deal of thought. I don't know if Obama was born that way or whether he shaped himself into that person. But the role, the job, was going to select for it. I have little question.
That is, needless to say, not Bill Clinton. But it's not just Monica and all the other Clinton baggage. It's also a lot of the political genius, the effortless magic as a public speaker, his ability to charm and connect emotionally with people of so many different kinds, from so many different backgrounds. This is the thing with Bill Clinton, which I suspect anyone who has watched him closely over the years will grasp, that his political genius and skills are inseparable from his crushing flaws.
If you were around in the 90s you've seen this movie before. The Clintons are great. But there is always something. Always. Always a dance, always drama. It's just inseparable from who they are.
CDS (Clinton Derangement Syndrome) was, and maybe is, a thing. Funny thing is, it’s not Bill that’s running. Sometimes when people and institutions overreach, it’s worth reminding ourselves.
In any case, the press has a pattern to run. It’s well laid out in the two pieces above.
Hard to imagine that a day’s worth of preparation (Comey is testifying today) is going to turn out any better for Republicans than years and millions of dollars worth of planning did in the Benghazi hearings. Then again, Republicans have anger and CDS issues to work out, and it looks like they are choosing to do so in public, setting themselves up for more anger and CDS down the road. Voters know it. It’s why it never seems to win elections. Hey, at least it’s good for Fox and talk radio’s bottom line.
NY Times (my bold):
Donald J. Trump on Wednesday offered a defiant defense of his campaign’s decision to publish an image widely viewed as anti-Semitic — saying he regretted deleting it — and vigorously reaffirmed his praise of Saddam Hussein, the murderous Iraqi dictator.
In the span of 30 minutes, an often-shouting Mr. Trump breathed new life into a controversy that was sparked on Saturday by his posting of an image on his Twitter account of a six-pointed star next to a picture of Hillary Clinton, with money seeming to rain down in the background. The image was quickly, and broadly, criticized for invoking stereotypes of Jews. Mr. Trump deleted it two hours later, and replaced the star image with a circle.
“ ‘You shouldn’t have taken it down,’ ” Mr. Trump recalled telling one of his campaign workers. “I said, ‘Too bad, you should have left it up.’ I would have rather defended it.”
“That’s just a star,” Mr. Trump said repeatedly.
It was a striking display of self-sabotage from a presumptive presidential nominee and underscored the limitations of Mr. Trump’s scattershot approach during the Republican primaries — not to mention how difficult he often makes it for his campaign team to control him.
Trump talked more about Chuck Todd, Saddam, mosquitoes, his Jewish friends and his anti-Semitic tweet than Clinton. It was a bizarre and ineffective response to Clinton’s clubbing of his NJ business practices today, the day after the FBI report. Who could have predicted it?
I say again: he is not a normal candidate. Don’t treat him as one. Don’t prop him up just because he’s the presumptive GOP nominee and ‘we are supposed to’. Don’t wait to pivot. He has no idea what he is doing. He is not fit to be President. It is clear to anyone watching, even to Republicans. Even to Paul Ryan, poor guy.
Greg Sargent:
Republicans are wringing their hands this morning: Donald Trump is already blowing what should be a sterling opportunity to fatally damage Hillary Clinton! FBI director James Comey’s announcement recommended against criminal charges, but it also strongly criticized Clinton in ways that undercut her self-defense on the emails and her broader argument for the presidency. And the New York Times reports that Republicans worry that Trump’s lack of discipline is already undercutting their chances of capitalizing on it.
But allow me to suggest another possibility: If Clinton does manage to get through this mess relatively unscathed, perhaps the Republican Party more broadly, and not just Donald Trump, will be appropriately seen as the culprit. Perhaps the conduct of Republicans overall — both in previous efforts to target Clinton, such as over Benghazi, and, now, in this one — could get priced into the public’s reaction…
Democratic strategist Robert Shrum predicts that Republicans will overreach once again on the emails: “I think it will go about as well as the Republicans did on Whitewater or Benghazi or anything else. I just think it’s fundamentally over.” I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that Clinton, whose trust numbers are dismal, could sustain further damage. But GOP overreach now looks like a very real possibility. If so, the problem here isn’t necessarily just Trump. It’s the broader GOP willingness to play these games to “rally the base.” And it’s possible this will be priced into the broader public reaction to GOP criticism of Clinton over the emails, perhaps helping mitigate what could otherwise be more damaging.
Brian Beutler:
The problem is that, even faced with the degree of discomfort Trump has created for them, GOP leaders have been unable to unleash themselves from his politics. When Trump attacked Hillary Clinton on Independence Day weekend with an anti-Semitic smear, Republicans completely ignored it. That Republicans feel trapped, even under such baleful circumstances, is a bad omen for the next chapter in American politics. Especially if, as now seems likely, the third straight term of Democratic rule will be led by an unpopular politician who has been a target of offensive conservative vitriol for 20 years. Trump could lose the election badly and the incentives in Republican politics would still point to race-baiting, conspiracy peddling, and appeals to white-male grievance as useful tools of political battle.
For all the uncomfortable truths that Trump has clarified, his success in Republican politics tells us little about how the country is supposed to deal more productively with its constituency of white, mostly male supremacists, confined as they are largely in one of the two parties. They’re entitled to political representation just as much as any other citizens, and, within constitutional bounds, to promote policy ends that advance whatever they perceive to be their interests. As long as that’s the case, a significant segment of the political class will be able to thrive on a platform of gutting welfare spending, persecuting immigrants, and stigmatizing religious minorities.
It has been widely postulated that three consecutive losses at the presidential level will force even the most recalcitrant party into a realignment. The GOP’s method of dealing with Trump suggests that axiom is about to be disproved.
Franklin Foer:
Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump. Over the past decade, Russia has boosted right-wing populists across Europe. It loaned money to Marine Le Pen in France,well-documented transfusions of cash to keep her presidential campaign alive. Such largesse also wended its way to the former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who profited “personally and handsomely” from Russian energy deals, as an American ambassador to Rome once put it. (Berlusconi also shared a 240-year-old bottle of Crimean wine with Putin and apparently makes ample use of a bed gifted to him by the Russian president.)
There’s a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO. He’s been a patron of Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. Joe Biden warned about this effort last year in a speech at the Brookings Institution: “President Putin sees such political forces as useful tools to be manipulated, to create cracks in the European body politic which he can then exploit.” Ruptures that will likely multiply after Brexit—a campaign Russia’s many propaganda organs bombastically promoted.
NYDN:
It’s happened again.
Chilling cell phone video surfaced Tuesday of two Louisiana cops killing a 37-year-old man selling music outside a Baton Rouge convenience store after an anonymous caller claimed he had a gun.
The police gunfire sparked impassioned protests that continued past midnight outside the store — 24 hours after authorities shot Alton Sterling during a fatal 12:35 a.m. encounter. More than 100 demonstrators shouting “no justice, no peace” clogged the street, setting off fireworks and blocking an intersection to protest Sterling's death.
Libby Nelson:
Hillary Clinton just made her college affordability plan a whole lot bolder. She announced Wednesday that she will call for college tuition at public universities to be free for families making less than $125,000 per year — a dramatic departure from President Obama’s higher education policy that shows the impact Bernie Sanders’s candidacy has already had on the Democratic Party.
This is a major change for Clinton. In the past, the presumptive nominee has proposed that students should be able to afford tuition without taking out student loans. But the difference between "affordable tuition" and "free tuition" is a lot bigger than semantics.
Bernie Sanders liked it, and all this might lead to an endorsement next week (reports MSNBC). We’ll see. Though Clinton’s looking pretty good right now, it’d make for a bigger and more satisfying win.
Robert Costa:
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has recently emerged as a finalist in the search for Donald Trump’s running mate, told The Washington Post in an interview Wednesday that he has taken himself out of consideration for the position.
Corker said that he informed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee of his decision during their day together on Tuesday, when the senator had a series of meetings with campaign officials in New York and then flew with Trump to an evening rally in North Carolina.
“There are people far more suited for being a candidate for vice president and I think I’m far more suited for other types of things,” Corker said in an extensive phone interview where he repeatedly praised Trump and said he is eager to serve as an informal adviser to the candidate.
Too late, taint is there. Looks like Chris Christie to me. He’s the only one that sucks up enough to satisfy the narcissist. I don’t know that Mike Pence would be enough for Trump.
Brian Beutler says maybe Gingrich:
As you can see from this chart, the last one to really threaten Romney before voting began, and the only one who had a second, smaller surge—before Romney’s Super PAC clobbered him—was Newt Gingrich.
The thought that they had been wrong all along, and that they might end up running against Newt instead of Romney, left Democrats absolutely beside themselves. As it happened, I interviewed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in December 2011 just as Gingrich was reaching peak strength. She seemed to struggle with the tension between her giddiness at the thought of taking on the former speaker, and her strategic intuition that she could hurt Gingrich’s chances by divulging damaging information about him.
“I like Barney Frank’s quote the best, where he said, ‘I never thought I’d live such a good life that I would see Newt Gingrich be the nominee of the Republican party,’” she told me. “That quote I think spoke for a lot of us.”
Then her game face slipped, and let it be known that she knew more damning information about Newt than almost anyone working in politics. “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” she added. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”