Astead W Herndon/NY Times:
How ‘White Guilt’ in the Age of Trump Shapes the Democratic Primary
The changing racial attitudes of white liberals are changing how 2020 candidates try to win votes.
White liberals — voters like Mr. Olsen — are thinking more explicitly about race than they did even a decade ago, according to new research and polling. In one survey, an overwhelming majority said that racial discrimination affects the lives of black people. They embrace terms like “structural racism” and “white privilege.”
Good.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg/NY Times:
Impeachment Support Grows, but So Does the Public Divide
Americans are as divided over impeachment as they are over President Trump. But support for the Democrats’ inquiry is building even in places Mr. Trump won, and among politically crucial independents.
An average of impeachment polls calculated by the website FiveThirtyEight found that, as of Oct. 11, 49.3 percent of respondents supported impeachment and 43.5 percent did not. A survey released this past week by The Washington Post found 58 percent said the House was correct to open an inquiry.
And polling by a group of Democratic strategists found a potential opportunity to sway the public still further: nearly a quarter of the respondents categorized by strategists as “impeachment skeptics” opposed the inquiry but were not ready to say that Mr. Trump did nothing wrong.
Also good.
Aaron Blake/WaPo
Gordon Sondland is about to blow a hole in Trump’s Ukraine defense
Ever since former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker handed over those text messages, President Trump’s defenders have pointed to one of them as supposedly exonerating Trump. “Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions,” Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, told another diplomat. “The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s [sic] of any kind.”
This text has been a linchpin of the Trump Ukraine defense. But on Saturday night, the linchpin broke…
The implosion of this particular Trump defense epitomizes the broader problem his supporters have here. The vast majority of Republicans have been unwilling to go to bat for Trump, avoiding the questions or deflecting them and talking about something else (like about how there really is corruption in Ukraine). That’s largely because they have little faith that something more incriminating might eventually come out, making their defenses look silly. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, simply don’t appear to have taken much care to avoid at least the appearance of soliciting foreign influence on an American election.
WaPo:
Trump’s envoy to testify that ‘no quid pro quo’ came from Trump
The U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, intends to tell Congress this week that the content of a text message he wrote denying a quid pro quo with Ukraine was relayed to him directly by President Trump in a phone call, according to a person familiar with his testimony.
Sondland plans to tell lawmakers he has no knowledge of whether the president was telling him the truth at that moment. “It’s only true that the president said it, not that it was the truth,” said the person familiar with Sondland’s planned testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
“The truth is, these aren't very bright guys, and things got out of hand." ~ "Deep Throat" from All the President's Men.
Tom Nichols/USA Today:
Ex-Republican: Do we still agree on beating Trump? After your LGBTQ forum, I'm not sure.
I'm not asking you to betray your principles, but Republican culture warriors are lying in wait. Why let them divide us where we already agree?
When we watched the LGBTQ town hall on CNN recently, we had very different reactions. This is the event, you remember, where Beto O’Rourke said he’dpunish religious institutions for refusing gay marriage, and where Kamala Harris started by informing us of her pronouns, and then Chris Cuomo, after a mild and dopey joke, had to go on Twitter the next day and apologize for making light of it. This is where Elizabeth Warren fielded a question about traditional marriage by with a sneering, smug insinuation that the only people who would ask her about that are men who can’t find a woman.
You thought it was great. You saw a ringing defense of LGBTQ rights and a reaffirmation of what Democrats stand for.
I saw it and thought: Are these people insane? Are they trying to lose the election?
While I don’t agree with Tom, I get his point, which is hardball politics, not what’s right (he is not defending discrimination). The culture war is what motivates Trump voters, so play up the common ground and downplay that you’re winning it.
However, this is a really smart piece from Julia Azari, lightly edited:
I think there are 3 things going on here, all of which ultimately ask us to look at Warren's remarks through a power lens, regardless of what conclusions we draw:
1. multiple types of claims about disempowerment. it's probably not exactly a secret where my sympathies lie on this one, but i want to present it as analytically as I can. One the one hand the positive reaction to the statement comes from a v real sense of marginalization of the lgbt community. I still vividly remember Al Gore stating his views against gay marriage in a 2000 general election debate. violence against this community remains real and endemic despite growing social acceptance overall. However, as
@DaveAHopkins has written about, the sense of losing the culture war among conservatives is also real and based in some empirical truths. so you have clashing - if not necessarily morally equivalent - claims about who lacks power.
2. Presidential candidates and especially presidents do face different communication standards. insert all important caveats about how the presidency isn't exactly operating under normal rules right now.
But.
Here's my piece in Politico from 9/16 (which obviously envisioned a different political future) that explains how the powerful can't make the same kinds of quips.
3. I think this is especially true when you come from a group that hasn't traditionally held power, and that's in play here too. talk of Warren alienating men.... someone correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding was she was running pretty even among men and women but what it does is illustrate a divide among Dems that isn't exactly about m4a or why 2016 was a loss or whatever, but among progressive vs. preservationist visions of the party's goals. Status quo vs. challenges. Serious reconsideration over who holds power.
You know my position on this. This is politics and doing what’s right isn’t always best when it’s done in your face. Persuasion is better than FU, we will win and destroy you. YMMV, but in my mind I want every vote against Trump to register. The bigger the win, the more progress we make. Most people support same sex marriage, and white evangelicals don’t get to decide. But there are swing voters, pay attention to them and don’t poke their eye if you don’t have to.
Yes, it is asymmetric, we have to be nice and they don’t. We do it knowing we have the majority view. That’s what winners do.
The analogy that springs to mind was the Paul Wellstone event (see Six years later, Wellstone memorial host Latimer still agonizes over event’s political fallout).
Dan Balz/WaPo:
Impeachment has put Trump in a different place. He’s showing it every day.
Many Americans have become inured to the president’s volatile behavior. Yet even by the standards of this presidency, Trump has been operating beyond his often-untethered bounds. His Twitter feed has been more frantic, his public comments angrier and more abusive, his sense of victimhood more visible than ever. Including his attacks on the investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, there may be no period in the entirety of Trump’s presidency comparable to the behavior now on display….
“I suspect part of what has happened,” Gingrich said in an interview, “is just kind of exhaustion. It’s a little bit like being in the batter’s box, and you endure the entire Mueller process. It disappears. You take a deep breath and think you can go out for a beer, and you’re still in the batter’s box. And there’s a cycle which I think drives him crazy.”
He added: “I think Trump’s a pretty good fighter who sort of thought in his mind we’d get to the end of this cycle. And what he’s discovered is, he can’t move on. . . . I think there will come a point where he will shift gears and go into more of an endurance mode.”
Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster, said he sees Trump as ill-suited by temperament for the impeachment test. Impeachment is a lengthy process, he said, but Trump “looks at every day as a fire sale. How many things can I do to control or dominate the day. . . . Every day is a new day and a new war.”
He’s ill-suited, indeed.
