WaPo:
Like Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers, justice has been elusive for women allegedly abused by his modeling agent friend
Nineteen-year-old Courtney Powell was among a handful of young models who took the bold step of publicly accusing Jean-Luc Brunel of sexual misconduct — ranging from groping and other sexual advances to drugging women’s drinks and rape — in the hope that he would be stopped.
But their allegations, nationally televised on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 1988 and echoed later in a book and court records, sparked no apparent investigation. Nor did they prevent Brunel from continuing to exploit and assault others, according to two other former models recently interviewed by The Washington Post. Brunel went on to befriend a wealthy, jet-setting American financier named Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly abused dozens of minors; one, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has said in court documents that Epstein pressured her to have sex with Brunel when she was a teenager.
When celebs who don’t know each other interact…
Afaik, this is the first and only woman on Wall Street to sue for a MeToo issue:
Anna Silman/The Cut:
Feeding the Wolves
Sara Tirschwell accused her Wall Street boss of misconduct, but that was just the beginning of her troubles
On December 14, 2017, Tirschwell was fired from her job at TCW, the $200 billion asset-management firm where she had been brought on to manage and launch a distressed-debt offering, one of the first of its kind helmed by a woman. Tirschwell claims that she was repeatedly coerced into sex by her boss, Jess Ravich, and that the firing was “retaliation” for filing an HR complaint against him. A month after her firing, Tirschwell filed a lawsuit against Ravich and TCW alleging retaliation, gender discrimination, and breach of contract and asking for $30 million in damages. These sorts of complaints are typically handled with hush-hush settlement agreements, yet Ravich and TCW have opted not to settle quietly. Ravich denies any sexual contact occurred while he and Tirschwell worked together at TCW, and he and TCW deny that they retailated or discriminated against her.
Now Ravich, Tirschwell, and TCW are in the midst of a long and messy discovery process with a trial date yet to be scheduled. If the case does go to trial, it will be the first major Wall Street #MeToo-era battle to see the inside of a courtroom. And yet unlike similar stories emerging from the media and entertainment worlds, the Tirschwell case hasn’t set off Wall Street’s own #MeToo reckoning. In part, this is because Tirschwell and Ravich had dated years earlier. Her claims that she “reluctantly acquiesced” to Ravich’s sexual advances, instead of being physically forced into sex, have made it difficult for some of their peers on Wall Street to see this as a case of workplace abuse as opposed to an alleged affair between two consenting adults (even if one of the adults was the other’s supervisor). Many of the people I spoke with who were sympathetic to Tirschwell still seemed to view it mostly as an office romance gone wrong and refused to be quoted on the record. Ambiguity has always been the enemy of sexual-misconduct cases, and few want to litigate a he-said-she-said. Yet Tirschwell has pressed forward, putting her reputation and livelihood on the line.
“I understand why people don’t understand,” said Tirschwell during a conversation at Aquavit in midtown. “It’s hard for me to understand how someone I had a relationship with treated me like that,” she added.
Theory of the case: these tweets and the interview that follows puts a new and fascinating spin on “electability”:
Paul Rosenberg/Slate:
Does anyone understand the 2020 race? This scholar nailed the blue wave — here's her forecast
Rachel Bitecofer predicted last year's midterms with incredible accuracy. Her 2020 forecast is … not too bad
The good news is that so long as Trump is in office, negative partisanship gives Democrats an edge, as electoral realignment continues. Rather than fearing Trump’s ability to repeat his 2016 upset, on July 1 of this year Bitecofer released her 2020 projection, which shows Democrats winning 278 electoral votes versus 197 for Trump, with several swing states too close to call. Bitecofer also isn't worried about the Democrats losing their House majority. On Aug. 6, Bitecofer released a preliminary list of 18 House seats the Democrats could flip in 2020, nine of them in Texas. The most significant threats that concern Democrats are actually golden opportunities, according to her model.
When made your initial prediction of a 42-seat wave, other analysts weren’t even sure there would be any blue wave at all, and everybody had toss-ups where you are saying these will flip or are likely to flip. You were proven right, but the common-sense explanation that Democrats won over moderate Republicans by campaigning on health care was very much at odds with your explanation. You had this very prescient insight, and then everyone else catches up, but they sort of drop your insight. So how did you know, and how is that explanation mistaken?
I'm really glad to hear you frame it that way. I haven't heard it framed that way, even in my own brain, but you're exactly right. I am way ahead of everybody, they finally catch up as we move into the final two months before Election Day — certainly that last month — and then the election happens and it happens exactly that way, and then they abandoned my explanation. Now I’m out there trying to fight to get the explanation accepted.
The explanation, of course, is that it was this giant turnout of core constituencies, that either are Democrats or favor Democrats — they’re independents who favor Democrats — and they have a huge turnout explosion. So it's not the same pool of voters changing their minds and voting Democrat after voting Republican because of the issue of health care. It's a whole different pool of voters.
Republicans will turn out, too, so expect that. They have to be outvoted and not persuaded. Whereas persuasion is great, remember you are persuading independents and not Republicans. That’s why this primary is good, not bad. Whoever motivates the base and subsequently independents, wins (states where indies vote in primaries will be fascinating). That means no Joe Biden-Mr Generic Bland ticket, if you get my drift. If Biden wins, he may well have to pick a strong voter motivator. And he may not win the primary if he is not a vote motivator. Another excerpt:
In Texas and Georgia, O'Rourke and Abrams both carried the votes of independents, whereas in Missouri and Indiana, where [incumbent senators] Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly positioned themselves much more in the Blue Dog camp in terms of issues positions, both of them lost independents.
So you might think, "Why is that? If one group of candidates took more liberal issue positions, why did they win over independents?" It seems counterfactual, and the reason is what mattered was turnout. O’Rourke and Abrams carried independents because turnout surged, with different independents showing up to vote, motivated by the targeting strategy deployed by those campaigns, which were run under my suggested model rather than the old playbook that used to work back in the '90s and '80s.
Read the whole piece, it’s great.
And squaring the circle:
Jesse Ferguson/Morning Consult:
To Persuade or to Turn Out Voters — Is That the Question?
The persuasionists wax nostalgic about changing the hearts and minds of voters who are already going to vote in 2020. They obsess about the 206 pivot counties that voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Donald Trump in 2016. They focus on the suburban voters — especially professional, college-educated white women — who fueled the flip of 37 suburban House districts to Democratic control in 2018. From rural diners to suburban office parks, persuasionists think our path to victory in 2020 relies on persuading these voters.
The turnouters see the world the other way. Instead of changing hearts and minds, they want to change motivation and behavior. They obsess over the 30 percent of the country who didn’t vote in 2016 — more than half of whom are nonwhite and two-thirds of whom are under 50. They fondly remember the breathless coverage of a rising American electorate that fueled Obama in 2008 and 2012, hoping we can replicate it.
The reality is that persuasionists and turnouters are both right — and they’re both wrong. …
In the end, we need to work on persuasion and turnout simultaneously, and to do that, we need to find the through-thread that works for both.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal (read with the Bitecofer piece):
Why Elizabeth Warren Is Trump’s Weakest Opponent
The progressive senator from Massachusetts has an outside shot at winning the presidency. She also has a real chance to hand Trump a second term.
The other argument Warren’s team advances is that candidates seen as polarizing can win presidential elections, though the assertion dodges the fundamental question at hand. Modern presidential elections demonstrate that some candidates viewed as too far outside the mainstream—like Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Donald Trump in 2016—can indeed prevail. Yet other ideologically driven presidential hopefuls, such as Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972, have suffered embarrassing defeats.
The relevant question isn’t whether an ideologically extreme nominee can win a presidential election. As I’ve written, Trump’s consistently weak approval ratings all but guarantee that any Democratic candidate will be competitive. The question is how costly choosing such a nominee will be. The threat that Warren poses to Democrats is that she could turn an easily winnable election into a dogfight.
But think about this and imagine what people said about Beto and Stacey Abrams before their campaigns. Remember, the idea is to motivate the base where you have one + pick up indies. And, as it happens, not all indies are disaffected Republicans. So, it might not work in KY with Mitch but might well work in TX or AZ where there are independent suburban women to win over, etc. as well as MI and PA. WI is gonna be close, whatever you do.
Dan Balz/WaPo:
Trump has one playbook, and very few plays left in it
Trump is following the same limited playbook that got him elected. Whether those tactics have the same potency they once did is the question that will determine his and the country’s future. Meanwhile, serious problems are in front of him, and he is struggling to find the answers.
Dan Hopkins/FiveThirtyEight:
Obamacare’s Unpopularity Suggests Medicare For All May Be A Hard Sell
Let’s take the Affordable Care Act as an example. Just before Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, 51 percent of Americans in an Associated Press poll said “implementing a national health care plan” was a top priority. And early in Obama’s presidency, the majority of Americans surveyed in a 2009 CNN poll approved of the job he was doing on health care. But once the law passed in 2010, it was generally rated unfavorably until President Trump took office and the prospect that the law would be scrapped became real.
...
Still, if Americans’ overall attitudes toward the ACA were a weighted average of their views on its individual parts, the ACA should have been popular. But that clearly wasn’t the case: In that KFF survey, 41 percent had a favorable view of the law overall compared with 46 percent who had an unfavorable view. In other words, Americans’ opinion of the law overall were quite close to their opinion of the individual mandate, its least-popular provision.
And that may be in part because of the law’s many provisions, only a few have gotten sustained public attention, including some of the law’s more unpopular features. In a March 2017 KFF survey, 82 percent of Americans said they knew about the individual mandate while 69 percent said they knew about the subsidies for low-income Americans and 65 percent said they knew about the Medicaid expansion.
Complex means hard to sell, even if complex works better. There’s always something opponents can fixate on (like individual mandates, death panels, or “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor”) even if untrue or nuanced or incomplete. And when you’re explaining, you’re losing.
Jeff Jarvis/Medium:
Worries
Oh, I hear a lot of talk about impact in journalism but it is reliably egocentric: ‘What did my story accomplish?’ Impact starts with journalists, not the public. And it’s always positive in discussion. I rarely hear talk of our negative impact, how we in media polarize, fabricating and pitting sides against each other, exploiting attention with appeals to base instincts.
Coming to a university I learned the need to begin curriculum with outcomes: What should students learn? I wonder about outcomes-based journalism, which would begin by asking not just what the public needs to know (our supposed mission) but how we can improve the quality of the public conversation, how we can bring out voices rarely heard, how we can build bridges among communities in conflict, how we can appeal to the better nature of our citizens, how we can help build a better society.
If we did that, our metrics of success would be entirely different — not audience, attention, pageviews, clicks, even subscriptions. Thus our business models must change; more on that below. We cannot begin this process until we respect the public’s voices and build means to better listen to them. We also need research to understand communities’ needs and our impact on them. This is not nearly so practical a worry as Jay [Rosen]’s are, but it’s my biggest concern.
See also Jay Rosen/Pressthink:
1. The entire system for covering the Trump presidency is wrongly conceived. It needs to be rebuilt, faulty premise by faulty premise. But there has never been such a rebuild while the story is running hot. No one knows how it can be done. Reporting what he said today amplifies his falsehoods and hatreds, which is unacceptable, but ignoring what he said pretends it never happened, which is unacceptable in a different way.
(Here’s my thread about that problem. Here’s an article about it. This podcast is also good.)
2. Explicitly or implicitly, it seems likely that Trump is going to run a racist re-election campaign in 2020, in which “othering” (not a word I like, but it’s the best I can do…) is basic to his appeal to voters. This goes way beyond noisy controversies like whether to use the term “racist.” Is the press ready for a campaign like that? Does it have the people and practices in place to respond? Is it willing to break with precedent to meet a threat without parallel? I doubt it.