Lotsa good stuff, longer than usual, so let’s dive right in.
Birmingham News:
Our view: Alabama voters must reject Roy Moore; we endorse Doug Jones for U.S. Senate
This election is a turning point for women in Alabama. A chance to make their voices heard in a state that has silenced them for too long.
The accusations against Roy Moore have been horrifying, but not shocking.
Every day new allegations arise that illustrate a pattern of a man in his 30s strutting through town like the cock of the walk, courting and preying on young women and girls. And though Roy Moore has denied the accusations of these women, his own platform and record is hostile to so many Alabamians.
Unlike the national party, the Alabama Republican establishment has chosen to stand by him, attacking and belittling the brave women who have come forward.
As a news organization, we have independently investigated stories of several Alabama woman who have spoken to us and the Washington Post about the abuse they say they suffered at the hands of Roy Moore decades ago.
The seriousness of these incidents, including one involving a 14-year-old child, cannot be overstated.
No, it can’t be overstated. It was a 14 year old child. Yes, it’s a Weinstein moment, with talk swirling around many figures. But this was a 14 year old, and Moore is a predator. Many Alabamians will do the right thing. We’ll see in a month how many.
ABC:
Special Counsel sends wide-ranging request for documents to Justice Department
In particular, Mueller's investigators are keen to obtain emails related to the firing of FBI Director James Comey and the earlier decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the entire matter, according to a source who has not seen the specific request but was told about it.
Issued within the past month, the directive marks the special counsel's first records request to the Justice Department, and it means Mueller is now demanding documents from the department overseeing his investigation….
Mueller's investigators now seek not only communications between Justice Department officials themselves, but also any communications with White House counterparts, the source said. Before this request, investigators asked former senior Justice Department officials for information from their time at the department, ABC News was told.
The latest move suggests the Special Counsel is still actively digging into, among other matters, whether Trump or any other administration official improperly tried to influence an ongoing investigation.
Jeff Sessions, call your office.
Michael Nelson/The Hill (political scientist, my bold):
Americans think Trump is really bad at being president
To be sure, as 2017 has worn on, most self-identified Republican voters have remained steadfast in their support — about 80 percent in all polls. But the number of people who professed to being Republicans has declined. At the start of the Trump presidency, 31 percent of voters surveyed in the Gallup poll identified with the GOP. By October, only 24 percent did.
A president’s job approval rating has no constitutional meaning, of course. What does have meaning is the effect the president’s standing has on voting in the first midterm election. Unless Trump is somehow able to turn things around, there’s a very good chance the Republicans will lose one or both houses of Congress to the Democrats next year.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
Sorry. There’s no equivalence between Republicans and Democrats on sexual harassment.
But we should all be asking ourselves some very hard questions, not only about the people now in positions of power but about how we’ve each thought about these issues in the past and what we want to change in the future. Democrats are doing that — perhaps imperfectly and arriving at different answers of varying quality, but at least they’re grappling with it. Republicans, by and large, are doing anything but.
The reaction to the revelation about Franken shows what I’m talking about. Despite the fact that he is a widely admired senator some were hoping would run for president, his actions were immediately condemned by many in his own party, including his Senate colleagues. No prominent Democrat is defending what he did.
Ruth Marcus/WaPo:
So what should happen to Al Franken?
The notion of the cleansing purge has its satisfactions, and for Democrats in Franken’s case, the added appeal of excising a political liability. No one wants to keep seeing that picture.
Yet I recoil at the employment equivalent of a mass death sentence for all sexual harassers. For some offenders — Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Moore — I have no sympathy. Their alleged conduct is close to, if not across, the line of criminality.
Others pose a harder case. Must they remain forever pariahs? Is rehabilitation possible? The focus is, and should be, on victims. But as employers engage in an overdue reckoning on how to rid workplaces of intolerable conduct, they — we — are going to have to wrestle as well with how to treat the victimizers.
Politico:
Moore will lose only if enough moderate Republicans, many of whom consider him an embarrassment, vote for Jones, Alabama political experts say.
“They think he has been a dirty spot on the party for some time,” says Powell, the professor and political consultant. “But their quandary is: Can they bring themselves to vote for a Democrat?”
It’s like the fabled divide between fans of the Alabama and Auburn collegiate football teams, says Britt, the political editor. “If you’re an Alabama fan, you just don’t go to the other side and root for Auburn.”
George Will/WaPo:
Roy Moore is an embarrassment. Doug Jones deserves to win.
Nothing about Moore’s political, financial or glandular history will shake his base, unless the credible accusations of serial pursuit of underage girls are suddenly overshadowed by something his voters consider serious, such as taking sides in the Alabama-Auburn game. Jones’s hopes rest with traditional white Democrats (scarce), Republicans capable of chagrin (scarcer) and African Americans. They are 27 percent of this state in which “civil rights tourism” (the 16th Street church, Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Montgomery church, and more) is economically important.
Politico:
The Moore situation presents a complicated choice for Republican candidates facing tough 2018 primaries: Side with Moore and risk suburban swing voters will think you're defending a pedophile; call for him to drop out and risk hardcore conservative voters believing you're buying into a liberal witch hunt. And while Democratic strategists say they don't expect Moore himself to be a central plank of any candidate's 2018 campaign six months from now, they are working to ensure the overall Republican brand is associated with Moore more broadly as a way of tarnishing it early in the cycle….
"This is smart psychological warfare that both parties implement to force the other side off message," said Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist at SKDKnickerbocker. "The longer Moore stays in the race the worse it gets for the GOP. Ironically, the worst-case scenario for Senate Republicans is if Moore actually wins and they are stuck with an alleged sexual predator and pedophile in their conference."
Tom Ricks/Foreign Policy:
Babylon Revisited: Melancholy Thoughts After a Short Trip to Washington, D.C.
Then came Trump. Now, I feel like we got out just in time, before the slow-motion train crash began. Even from here, I find Trump disorienting and disgusting. I don’t know how I would be able to stand being in the same city with him. It is a great time for journalism, but it wouldn’t be for me. I admire people like Peter Baker, an old colleague now at the New York Times, for their stamina and persistence. I would not be able to do it.
I’ve been thinking about this because a few months ago I flew down to Washington to be interviewed by C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb about my recent book on Winston Churchill and George Orwell. As I walked around Capitol Hill, watching the conservatively attired young staffers hurry to and fro (the prevailing mode of those associated with Congress is “small town bank branch president”), planning their next moves, the thought occurred to me: “This is no longer my city.” I didn’t enjoy it at all. It wasn’t just disoriented, I was alienated. I’d see the staffers chuckle as they walked and I would think, What are you people doing? What events will break your hearts?
I couldn’t wait to get to the airport and head home.
The Economist:
Goodbye to values
America’s foreign policy: embrace thugs, dictators and strongmen
Past presidents believed that American power should be used as a force for good in the world. Not Donald Trump
Mr Obama was more of a Wilsonian than a neo-Wilsonian; his idealism tempered by a cool realism that verged on cynicism. For him the Middle East, exemplified by Libya, was a “shit show” that America could do little to change. But critics saw his reluctance to intervene in Syria as an abdication of American responsibility.
Mr Obama reflected a loss of confidence in the certainties of the neolibs and neocons. He may have allowed the pendulum to swing back too far, but he reflected the mood of war-weary voters. Mr Trump stands for something different and darker: a contemptuous repudiation of the use of American strength in the service of anything other than self-interest. His enthusiasm for a brute like Mr Duterte gives heart to brutes everywhere. The consequences for America’s power and influence are likely to be grave.
NY Times:
Republican Governors’ 2018 Dilemma: What to Do About Trump?
Republicans have long anticipated that the midterm campaign will prove difficult. But the drubbing they suffered in Virginia, where they lost the governorship by nine percentage points, along with at least 15 State House seats threaded throughout the state’s suburbs, has the party’s governors worried that 2018 could be worse than feared.
Voters appear eager to punish Mr. Trump.
Jim Messina/Politico:
Based on the focus-group findings, we drafted four distinct messages about Trump and his handling of the economy. In one, we explained that he had stacked his cabinet with billionaires who weren’t looking out for everyday Americans; in another, we offered facts about the economy under Trump, including stagnant wages; in the third, we highlighted how Trump’s budget would cut programs important to the middle class and reroute the money into tax cuts for the wealthy. And finally, we tied his incendiary, all-hours tweets to his failure to bring jobs back to the U.S.
When exposing all voters in the survey to a tough message laying out the consequences of Trump’s tweeting—how it signals what he really cares about and prevents him from focusing his energy on making good on his promises to improve people’s lives—we found that the overall rating of Trump’s handling of the economy dropped by 6 points. And among the key Obama-Non-Clinton voter demographic? It dropped a staggering 21 points.
Similarly, when voters were told that Trump wants to give massive tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting programs for middle-class families, voters’ ratings of his handling of the economy sunk by 8 points overall and by an astounding 24 points among Obama-Non-Clinton voters.
Perhaps even more interesting is that when we re-surveyed Obama-non-Clinton voters six weeks later, those who’d been exposed to the tweeting message had a much dimmer view of Trump than those exposed to other messages.