[Meteor Blades is on vacation]
Paul Kane/WaPo:
House GOP’s suburban slide a worrisome trend for party despite narrow N.C. win
“They do not want socialism,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 member of GOP leadership, said of voters Wednesday. “They do not want to see their private health insurance taken away. They do not want to see illegal immigrants given free health care. They do not want to see the economy destroyed by the Green New Deal.”
That’s a risky bet for a party that continues to hemorrhage support in suburbs that serve as political cornerstones in swing states such as North Carolina, where Charlotte’s suburban voters on Tuesday continued to break against Republicans.
Voters in Mecklenburg County, a suburban stronghold, gave Democrat Dan McCready a margin of 12 percentage points over Republican Dan Bishop, bigger than the nine-point advantage McCready posted there during last year’s invalidated race in the state’s 9th Congressional District.
Bishop won the race based on running up the count in the more exurban and rural portions of the district in the south-central part of the state, continuing the geographical divide in the era of President Trump. That provided a sigh of relief for Republicans worried that defeat would have prompted even more retirement announcements.
It could be that Lumbee Indian areas were helped by Bishop sponsoring a bill to help recognize them as a tribe (bill is here), coupled with voter registration drives, another reason not to jump to conclusions about ‘what this all means for 2020’ :
And before you assume that either Democrats are unmotivated or that they aren’t progressive enough consider observations from Nate Silver and G Elliott Morris:
CNN:
CNN Poll: Biden leads as Warren and Sanders battle for second on eve of debate
Enthusiasm is more fervent at the ideological edges of each party, with 54% of liberal Democrats and 56% of conservative Republicans deeply enthusiastic vs. about 4 in 10 in the ideological middle.
Asked to rate the importance of seven top issues, voters overall place health care at the top of the list (51% call it extremely important to their vote for president, the only issue to top 50%), followed by the economy (48% extremely important) and gun policy (47% extremely important).
But the partisan divide on which issues matter is stark. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 59% call health care extremely important vs. 40% of Republicans and Republican-leaners. A majority on the GOP side consider the economy critical (53%), while fewer Democrats agree (45%). The sharpest gap comes over climate change. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaners, 56% call it extremely important vs. just 11% of Republicans and Republican-leaners.
That includes Ds and Rs and indies. There are even reports that in the next district over, North Carolina voters showed up and were mad they couldn’t vote (there was no race for them to vote in). But something about the message McCready had did not work.
Also consider this:
Can’t take black vote or D vote for granted. We know Rs will show. Of course, this was an off year special, in a district we had no business being competitive in. But let the debate begin. And include this:
So, changing topic, want more reading on the MIT Media Lab scandal? Here’s what they do there: Top 25 Ideas & Products from the MIT Media Lab (2010) including Kindle and Guitar Hero.
Justin Peters/Slate:
The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab
Like its parent university, the famed research center became far too comfortable selling its prestige. Even to Jeffrey Epstein.
I kept returning to MIT for years for various reasons, but the bloom eventually fell off the rose. You didn’t have to squint to see that the Media Lab’s whiz-bang vibe was made possible—and was constrained—by the corporate partnerships it worked so hard to cultivate. The building functioned less like a university department than an independent R&D firm for industry; its research groups were conduits for corporate and institutional investment. Each year, it hosted a sponsor week, during which research groups were expected to dance for their big-money benefactors, corporations like Exxon Mobil, Citigroup, PepsiCo, GlaxoSmithKline, and Verizon. Many of its scientists were also involved with private companies that had been founded to monetize their discoveries. A year after I turned in my master’s thesis, the key members of the affective computing group I had studied founded a company that today partners with “1400+ brands,” builds “automotive AI,” and works with market research firms and other companies to “measure consumer emotion responses to digital content, such as ads and TV programming.” This was what the idea factory was incubating?
A. K. M. Adam:
On Joi
This is where matters stand this morning; I’ve tried to keep this to agreed facts in the public domain.
Now, all of this unravels in a world criss-crossed by incoherent institutions relative to shame and honour. ‘Shame’ has been deprecated by many commentators; it has been used overwhelmingly to constrain and punish women, it provides a convenient outlet for anonymous bystanders to shore up their self-righteousness by piling on with others in convulsive mass condemnation, and its mechanisms entail attributing some sort of reality to entities such as reputation or souls or character or a moral status that subsists over time. Those are problematic and unpopular qualities.
But I’m not sure we can do without some manner of thinking and acting with the categories of honour and shame, and to some extent their widespread unpopularity makes it difficult to work out the way a populace should handle behaviour that may not be judicially culpable, but which nonetheless corrupts a community’s integrity, aspirations, and internal practices of informal moral evaluation. We have seen a long succession of public figures wanting, trying to make comebacks from wrongdoing of various kinds, and no coherent set of heuristic standards has emerged to guide publics’ deliberations of ‘how much is enough’, ‘what must they do’, or ‘there is no coming back’. We need to do better, for the sake of those who suffer wrong (that they may know that some consensus view of recompense, penitence, or retribution has been fulfilled) and for the sake of the society (lest it be continually be afflicted with wrongdoers who sashay back into roles of prominence and power by observing minimal markers of contrition, or none at all).
Here is an excellent write-up of post-9/11 journalism from Jeremy Littau:
Been thinking about this from Damon today a lot. It strikes me that 9/11 could be considered a dividing line in the history of journalism education as well as journalism practice when it comes to how we think about the mission. Some thoughts below:
Post-Watergate, there was a ripple effect in journalism programs toward investigative journalism. Woodward & Bernstein took on a type of hero status that inspired investigative journalism’s growth at news outlets of all sizes.
By the time I got to college in the 1990s, it had infected the culture of journalism education. We watched “All The President’s Men” in my upper-level reporting classes. The way journalism was framed was in terms of democratic accountability, investigation, fierce independence.
We were told it was *cool* to be at odds with those in power. It’s why a lot of us caught the fire and went into media.
I think that legacy still lives on in media but 9/11 has changed some of how we talk about it.
Julia Azari/Mischiefs of Faction:
A presidency-centered party is a weak party
If we look at it this way, the cancelation of primaries builds on a long trajectory of party weakness, adding a Trumpian twist. American politics scholars have observed for years that political parties have become more presidency-centric as they’ve nationalized. Presidents have been uneven in their investment in long-term party infrastructure.They are, on the other hand, very well-positioned to use rhetoric and symbolism to cultivate partisanship in the electorate. This combination contributes to anemic, “hollow” parties of the sort that Sam Rosenfeld and Danny Schlozman are writing about. Parties that lack a distinct political base from the president also make the system more dependent on informal norms about presidential political restraint, and we’re seeing the consequences of that now.
The other question here is whether competition can be a healthy part of a presidential party, and the problems here, too, predate Trump. Commentators have rushed to note that challenges from the likes of Weld, Walsh, and Sanford are unlikely to sink Trump, but are more likely indicative of his existing weakness. Is this inevitable? It’s never exactly been standard – or a positive sign – for incumbent presidents to face serious challenges within their own parties, but the development of a strong norm against primary challenges in the modern era is one more example of how presidential nominations have backed away from competition, ultimately creating political stagnation and a crisis of legitimacy within the parties. And, while it’s not a feature of our system, it seems not completely absurd to imagine that the incumbent party in the White House, like the out-party, might weather a real competition in which front-runners have to prove themselves better than potential challengers. In other words, it’s not really enough for serious analysts to note that only catastrophically weak presidents face primary challenges; we should also ask why that’s the case and how it contributes to a presidency-centric political system.
Angie Maxwell WaPo:
What we get wrong about the Southern strategy
It took much longer — and went much further — than we think.
Understanding the full range of the GOP’s efforts in the South since Nixon clears up any confusion as to how Trump, a man whose personal life seems to violate every moral precept avowed by most Southern white conservatives, secured their unyielding allegiance. Trump has wielded the GOP’s Southern playbook with precision: defending Confederate monuments, eulogizing Schlafly at her funeral and even hiring Reagan’s Southern campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Trump, in many ways, is no anomaly. He is the very culmination of the GOP’s long Southern strategy.
See Trump rally, North Carolina.