Tag Archives: 2016 Election

05.17.16
by

Donald Trump Foreswears Getting Nasty

“Just getting nasty with Hillary won’t work,” Mr. Trump said. “You really have to get people to look hard at her character, and to get women to ask themselves if Hillary is truly sincere and authentic. Because she has been really ugly in trying to destroy Bill’s mistresses, and she is pandering to women so obviously when she is only interested in getting power.”  –Times

 

“Don’t you people think Hillary is gross?”

 

Donald Trump has openly outlined his campaign, which is going to revolve around:

  • Bill’s infidelities (and Hillary’s role)
  • All the crackpot conspiracies from the 90s (including cattle futures and probably Vince Foster)
  • Benghazi
  • Ties to Wall Street corruption.

The thing here is that while the first three are nonsense, they all tie in together to portray someone as essentially being sleazy. For Trump to focus on money-and-power grubbing or sexual pecadillos is obviously insane, but it might work. He’ll still lose, I think, as demographics make it very difficult, but the media loves stories about Hillary being crooked and the Clintons as being low and grubby farm people. Maureen Dowd is going to have no less than 11 columns between now and November that are transcripts of phone interviews with Trump (and another 5 which are saucily imagined conversations between Hillary and Bill. Every single one of these columns will mention Lena Dunham). It’s going to be as ugly as you imagine.

On the other hand, I’m not yet emotionally ready to talk about this labor/environmentalist article. I hope Loomis has something about it.

05.05.16
by

Bernie Sanders and the Limits of Non-Politics

 

How can you not love this guy? Well, there’s a way…

 

“I know that the Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over. They’re wrong,” Sanders said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from New Albany, Indiana. “Maybe it’s over for the insiders and the party establishment but the voters today in Indiana had a different idea.”

Here’s the problem with leading a revolution. Anything that is opposed to it is, by definition, counter-revolutionary. And it isn’t just that: opposition becomes the enemy of progress, it becomes and ill and evil thing. It falls short of perfection, and a revolution doesn’t want to live in a fallen world.

The Bernie Sanders campaign has been incredible. He has changed the tenor of the campaign, and pulled a cautious Hillary Clinton to the left. This is good for policy, of course, but it is also good politics. Forcing her to hedge on trade will be good in November, acolytes of “tacking to the center” be damned. Forcing her to the left on economic inequality will be an enormous boost in the generals, even if it makes pundits itch. Bernie has helped the country, and he has, so far, helped to make sure a Democrat beats Donald Trump.

But it won’t be him. All he can do now is make it harder for Hillary Clinton. And given what he’s done, that’s a damn shame. The legacy of this incredible campaign shouldn’t be the election of Donald Trump. The problem is that Bernie, and a lot of his supporters, seem to feel that math is damnably counter-revolutionary, and so it too must be fought against.

Read more on how Bernie can still help the fight for progress

Continue reading →

05.04.16
by

A Farewell To Cruz, And A Warm Hello To The Reign of Locusts


And the great day of wrath has come
And here’s mud in your big red eye
The poker’s in the fire
And the locusts take the sky

-Tom Waits, Earth Died Screaming

I mean, in a just world, seeing Ted Cruz fail would be cause for celebration, right? This hateful messianic, the culmination of every rotten political trend of the last 40 years, this embodiment of a movement that screechingly defines itself entirely as opposition to progress, this sneering elitist, this violent bigot, the nihilistic self-serving fraud: his sadness and defeat should be a time for joy.

But it isn’t, because 1) for god’s sake, that means Trump, and 2) he’ll be back, claiming in 2020 that he was defeated by a liberal billionaire who hijacked the party. Oddly, I’ll turn this over to Ross Douthat, who has written what I think are the two best paragraphs of his tenure at the Times (if you can ignore how he helped, in his fundamentally sad way, to enable these trends by attempting to put a nice Catholic spin on the snarling hatred underneath).

Cruz will be back, no doubt. He’s young, he’s indefatigable, and he can claim — and will claim, on the 2020 hustings — that True Conservatism has as yet been left untried. But that will be a half-truth; it isn’t being tried this year because the Republican Party’s voters have rejected him and it, as they rejected another tour for Bushism when they declined to back Rubio and Jeb.

What remains, then, is Trumpism. Which is also, in its lurching, sometimes insightful, often wicked way, a theory of what kind of party the Republicans should become, and one that a plurality of Republicans have now actually voted to embrace.

And so the Great Day of Wrath has come. The Party is Trump; Trump is the Party. L’état est orange. And while I agree with the experts that he doesn’t have much of a chance- it’s hard to when without getting votes from blacks, or Latinos, or women*- who the hell can say? We’ve entered the time of the seriously Weird. There is nothing normal about this. This will be the single-most dangerous nomination in American history. Even if he loses, enormously, this will be written in history books as the time America embraced sheer unvarnished hatred as a replacement for anything good, decent, or intelligent. It isn’t like Romney or McCain or (god knows) George Bush or Reagan appealed to the head, but they tempered their pleas to the angry and disaffected jackals with some human decency.

That isn’t Trump’s way. There has been nothing in his campaign that has had any substance, unless you think a raging chemical fire is something that can be held and cherished. We’ve seen a few campaigns like this in our history, like Pat Buchanan, who surprised people by doing fairly well in primaries. But they’ve never won. This is uncharted territory for America. It is not normal. It is not just upsetting. It is genuinely terrifying, and even a nutcrushing loss in November will only partially mitigate the effects. What Trump has unleashed will be barking madly down our streets for decades to come.

 

*What will be exciting is the first time Trump or a pundit says that Hillary is running a “divisive” campaign and only “appealing to special interest groups” by winning with everyone except older white people. They’re the only baseline, god dammit!

05.03.16
by

Indiana Tuesday: It’s All Over But The Guttural Howling of Diseased Sewer Rats

On most mornings, if I’m not feeling too lazy, I have the privilege of walking along Lake Michigan, up here in Evanston, where the southernmost portion of this vast and ferocious lake system begins its final curve. This morning it was incredibly clear and impossibly still, where there isn’t the slightest movement in the air, nothing to stop the rising sun from gently pushing away the final hint of the dawn’s early chill.

On a morning like today, Chicago’s stunning skyline looms in all its roaring glory. And past that, further southeast, where the lake curves, you can make out the hulking outline of one of the giant Great Lakes freight ships, leaving the port on the far south side. And beyond that, beyond what is usually hidden by clouds, you can just barely make out a puff of smoke rising from the sprawling industrial areas of Indiana, that bizarre and wrecked land where hints of ancient prairie still poke out among the post-industrial poverty, the rows of tumbledown houses and cracked roads, the cheap glitz of casinos, the belching smokestacks, and the sunshine, normally shrouded by haze, that glints and shatters on dirty rivers. It’s here, the far bitter end of the rust belt, where the American dream first crashed and broke, where the horrible forces of the global economy first poisoned then wrecked a land and people. And it’s here, in Indiana, where Donald Trump, the gaseous avatar of America’s inchoate anger, can all but clinch the most terrifying nomination in our nation’s history.

whiting-in-wide-shot-smalljpg

“Is this hell?” “No, it’s Indiana”

Read more about Indiana and the end of the line

Continue reading →

05.02.16
by

Game of Thrones, Contested Conventions, and the Death of Surprise

(SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for last night’s Game of Thrones, and for last season’s too, I guess, although if you pay any attention to GoT it isn’t really a spoiler, which is sort of the Point…)

(ALSO SPOILERS for Walking Dead and Mad Men, but at some point, come on, you know?)

(IMPORTANT NOTE: I promise this isn’t some Maureen Dowd-like piffle-paffle, where “Donald Trump may think he’s Tywin Lannister, but he’s really Lady Melisandre. I get paid millions for this. My brother’s writing tomorrow’s column!” It might not be any good, but it won’t be that.)

The last scene of last night’s Game of Thrones was the Red Lady attempting to resurrect Jon Snow, the erstwhile hero killed in last season’s finale, using what seemed to be the laziest spell ever (basically cutting his hair and saying, like, “hey, come back to life” in a magic language. It seemed really easy, honestly). At first, it seemed like failure, and Lady Melisandre and Snow’s allies left in despair. But then…panning over his prone body, a rush of air, a gasp, a convulsion, and an opening of eyes. Cut to black. What was dead is now alive.

Holy cow, right? That’s bonkers. Except that everybody watching the show knew it was coming. There was no way not to. From the moment Snow was killed last summer, all speculation has been on how he’s coming back to life, and when, not if. There were elaborate theories about his parentage and how that ties everything together, meaning he can’t be dead dead. There were people spotting him near the set. Kit Harrington’s haircut was parsed with a sort of Jesuitical ferocity for clues as to his role. Almost before the credits rolled on his death scene the internet was, collectively, sure he’d be back.

And so what could have been an interesting, if not mind-blowing scene, was only watched to see if the showrunners were going to make it interesting or if they were going to much it up. There was absolutely no suspense, and that is through no fault of their own. The writers and directors did as good a job as possible, I suppose, making us think he might be fully dead. But they knew that we knew he wasn’t going to be.

The creators of Cartoon Networks’ mind-bendingly brilliant Rick and Morty talked about this problem in an interview with the AVClub last year. As Dan Harmon put it:

I think that’s a really remarkable thing about today’s TV audience. You cannot write payoff-based TV anymore because the audience is essentially a render farm. They have an unlimited calculation capacity. There’s no writers’ room that can think more than 20 million people who can think about it for an hour a day.

Harmon was being complimentary, and said that for some shows it was a bonus, since they could focus mostly on jokes and characters, and the audience would fill in the plot. They’d even get credit for references they weren’t making. (“‘Was this a that reference?’ And I always want to answer them like: ‘Why, would that be cool?'”).

But for a drama, that can be a real problem. There is little room for surprises, especially in huge, world-building shows with legions of devoted fans. Smaller shows like Better Call Saul or Fargo can have interesting twists, but the only way for huge shows like GoT or The Walking Dead to do so is to jerk around the audience.

The way art is consumed has changed entirely. There has always been a weird relationship between creator and consumer, with an alchemic interplay, but in some ways the consumer has leapt in front of the creator. It’s not just mashups and remixes or whatever, but it is anticipation and analysis before creation. It’s putting people into corners, where they have to really stretch in order to surprise. That’s not always a bad thing, but it could be. In The Walking Dead, which was never really a well-written show anyway, the endless speculation about who Negan was going to kill meant that the only way to surprise was to not show who he did, and that didn’t turn out very well.

The artists behind TV shows, especially, have to create in anticipation of fan reaction in every corner, and have to deal with the hive mind that, as Harmon pointed out, collectively thinks about the show exponentially more than even its creators. No one really bought the “Don Draper is DB Cooper” theory, as fun as it was, because Matt Weiner wasn’t a “connect the dots” storyteller. But there was part of me that imagined that it was his plan, and then some jerk on the internet figured it out, and he had to change his vision to avoid being “scooped” in his own imagination.

This knowledge of what is going to happen reduces our capacity to be surprised, and really just heightens our innate lust of critique: we just want to see how well the story conforms to our expectations, and then rush to publicize our disapproval. Most of us I think do the same thing. My wife and I tend to talk more about if the showrunners are making the right choice or doing it well rather than if it was good or not, and if we don’t do so publically, our private conversations are no more generous to the spirit of artistic intention.

In a way, it’s the same thing with contested conventions. This feedback loop moves so quickly that, even in a contested convention, which we haven’t seen since 1976, every move is essentially choreographed in advance. We know which delegates are in play, and which ones aren’t Legions of pundits and people who actually know what they’re talking about have mapped out every scenario in advance. We know what parliamentary tricks Ted Cruz might try to use. The only drama comes in if he can do it well enough to work. But there won’t be any real surprises.

This, as much as anything, explains why the media and the public (and me) can’t stop talking about Trump. There isn’t a strategy or a plan. It’s terrifying, and that mentality would make for a horrible President (just as his instincts and personality would as well). But there is a certain thrill in not having any idea what will happen. We just know it will be monstrous and revolting and probably dangerous. But for many, that barely matters. Trump is the only unpredictable phenomenon out there. (Bernie is different, because while it isn’t totally predictable, he is sticking to the rebel script, to the detriment of his campaign and possibly his putative party. But more on that later).

I’m not saying that our knowing about Jon Snow’s resurrection is why Trump is winning. There are a lot of reasons, each one worse than the last. But a huge factor in his ascendancy has been the breathless attention being paid from the beginning. Much of this was valid; especially as his candidacy grew, it needed to be exposed as the dangerous sham it still is. But the reason for so much of the coverage is because it was wholly unpredictable, and in its own way, a true artistic enterprise. Not a good one; it’s a sick parody of Weimar porn, a clanging dissonant soundscape that reduced bowels to mush and drove people into mad syphilitic fits. But it was original, and for many, that’s all that matters.

 

04.27.16
by

Like Reagan With Schweiker, Cruz VP Pick Shows Again He’s More Clever Than Smart

(12:10 CST, so things can change, but the point remains)

The political world is abuzz with the speculation that Ted Cruz, fresh off devastating losses last night, and looking to change the conversation away from Trump’s supposed inevitability, is just a few hours away from announcing his Vice President.

There is some precedence to this. In 1976, locked in a tight race with the incumbent Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan surprised everyone by announcing a VP pick, a hapless liberal Republican named Richard Schweiker, who died just last year. This was a disaster of a move, and many of the far-right movement which helped push him so close to the nomination felt betrayed.

(That this is largely unknown is because history has scrubbed how a greedy Reagan attacked Ford throughout a contentious primary, helping to elect Jimmy Carter. His “11th Commandment” apparently didn’t cover the incumbent President.)

Reagan had what seemed like a good reason for it. Ford had dropped Nelson Rockefeller, the VP he chosen after he was appointed President following Watergate, who was despised by the right. He had yet to say who Rocky’s replacement would be, and so Reagan hoped to either back him into a corner or make him look like he had something to hide. Conservatives, the thinking went, shouldn’t back him if he just might appoint another liberal. That Reagan picked a liberal was spun as just an opportunity for the Great Communicator to convert young Schweiker to conservativism, because, as always, Reagan was an incredible liar and self-mythologizer.

I think Cruz will do the same thing, self-righteously spin this to say that he is the principled one, and who knows who the liberal Donald Trump will pick, probably a tranny, you know? He’s standing up for people, and giving voters the right information, because he’s the only one with real values.

Ted Cruz’s gift is being able to convince himself that whatever craven move he’s making is one of unassailable principle, a trait he shares with Reagan. Reagan could convince them with charm. Cruz doesn’t have that, so his abilities speak more of his audience than it does of his innate gifts. But this move, like the Kasich alignment, is nothing more than a desperate move to change the headlines.

And the thing is, it will sort of work: it will change the headlines to talk about what a desperate clown he is, just like with Kasich. Because Cruz, for all his campaign’s organizational prowess, is a debater, not a strategist. He thinks in quips and believes that a clever move can carry the day. His soundbites sound good, and he is generally good with a zinger, if you are already in the tribe, but he trips over himself too much (to say nothing of when he calls a hoop a “basketball ring” in goddamn Indiana).  His line about transgendered bathrooms was a perfect example of this.

“Let me make this real real simple for folks in the media who find this conversation very confusing,” he said. “If Donald Trump dresses up as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t go to the girls’ bathroom!”

It works on the surface because it sounds simple, and makes the whole enterprise sound threatening, and mocks the media, and most importantly makes people think of Donald Trump in a dress like a girl or a queer, and somehow mocks Hillary Clinton, but it elides the point, ignores the real issue, and makes him seem like an idiot. It’s clever without being smart.

That’s what will happen here. He’ll sneer about how he’s standing up for people, but it won’t work. It will make him look desperate, and there is no real pick, outside of maybe a David Petreaus (who wouldn’t do it) who won’t make things even worse. It’s the flopsweat move of a man who thinks he’s twice as smart as he really is.

Especially if it is Carly Fiorina. Man, I’d laugh my ass off. That’d be great.

04.27.16
by

Breaking! Lesser of Two Evils Still Better Than Greater of Two Evils

“Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card,” Trump said during a news conference at Trump Tower. “And the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”

gettyimages-524732160_wide-1951934875efc83bfeb5db5285f91a29052bffbb-s1100-c15

The new and more Presidential Donald Trump:

“I haven’t quite recovered, it’s early in the morning, from her shouting that message. And I know a lot of people would say you can’t say that about a woman, because, of course, a woman doesn’t shout, but the way she shouted that message was not– ooh, I just, that’s the way she said it. I guess I’ll have to get used to a lot of that over the next four or five months. -On Morning Joe

Yes…and well, we’ll all have to get used to a lot of things. Even those who understood early on- though not early enough- that the Trump phenomenon was something real and dangerous never quite came around to emotionally reconciling ourselves to his nomination. It’s one thing to imagine the hypothetical; it’s another to imagine one of the worst people in America in front of a cavernous arena, filled with fulsome county clerks and backwater ward heelers, decked in their finest patriotic hats, yowling his name every time he mentions “crooked Hillary” and how he’s going to win, as a 200-foot banner with his grotesquely swollen visage unfurls behind him, and the lights around the stadium syncopate in flashes of his name, as he snarls and preens and basks in his Roman glory while the band plays a discordant national anthem, the kind you’d hear if it was interpreted by Stravinsky as he drove a bus straight into a mountain…

Terrible, horrible visions, a nightmare of democracy, and now all be inevitable. His managing to get over 50% in the last six states shows a momentum and acceptance and a rejection of Ted Cruz. Cruz might still compete in a couple of states, and might try to prove that he’s somehow the will of the people, the only way he knows how- by lying– but it is essentially too late. There can still be political fixes, and the conventions will be ugly, but no matter what we’ve entered a howling wilderness, brought on by greedy politics and the dissolution of the Republican Party into a million little hateful camps, driven by anger and institutionalised racism and racist anti-institutionalism. It’s where the broken come not to feel whole, but to break something else. That’s the Trump appeal.

Read more on why you should support Hillary Clinton, even if you don’t like her…

Continue reading →

04.20.16
by

Voter Suppression In New York! Or, The Revolution Has Gone Mad

duck-soup-4

Remember 2008? As it became clear that Barack Obama was going to win the nomination, Hillary Clinton and her supporters become more fervent that not only would he not, but that he was a weak candidate who couldn’t possibly beat the Republicans (Hillary less so than her supporters and surrogates, honestly). To me, the culmination of this nonsense was when she won West Virginia in mid-May. It was a rout, and the Clinton camp used that to argue that they were better positioned to win in November, because, as the candidates said “I’m winning Catholic voters and Hispanic voters and blue-collar workers and seniors, the kind of people that Sen. McCain will be fighting for in the general election.”

Those of us in the Obama camp were obviously incredulous. There was no way that she was going to win West Virginia in November. Winning the Democratic primary there was about as valuable as in Idaho or Wyoming, places that wouldn’t go blue if a Democrat promised to make potatoes our new currency. She was losing the popular vote, states won, and total voters. There was no case that she should be the nominee.

So basically, this is kind of weird mirror year, no?

Continue reading →

04.19.16
by

Why Losing New York Won’t Bother Ted Cruz

The brutal and terrifying interrogation scenes in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon are, in some ways, a generational clash. Rubashov, the old revolutionary, is interrogated primarily by two men, Ivanov and Gletkin. Ivanov is a contemporary, a former running mate, and has some sympathy for Rubashov, if not for his apostasy. This sympathy and inability (or unwillingness) to get a confession by any means necessary leads to Ivanov’s own execution. Gletkin has no such hangups, and not out of fear. He’s a child of the Revolution, essentially born into it, and has had his moral compass shaped entirely by the revolutionary rhetoric. He doesn’t just force Rubashov to confess. As Hitchens put it, “Orwell’s more widely read Nineteen Eighty Four, which has many points of similarity with Darkness at Noon, makes the same terrifying point that the fanatics don’t just want you to obey them: They want you to agree with them.”

Anyway, long story short, I think Ted Cruz is actually pretty happy he’s going to lose New York today.

980x

Continue reading →

04.18.16
by

Hillary Clinton Is Not The Enemy

And neither, for that matter, is George Clooney. He is someone who wants a Democrat to win against either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz (or Paul Ryan)!

Come on… 

Money plays a damningly huge role in our elections. It has transformed American democracy into a weak and flickering simulation, corrupting everything it touches. There clearly needs to be a change, but that won’t come without winning elections. It certainly won’t come if a Republican wins and they solidify their grip on the House and Senate.

Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, and for all the moneyish grasping that marked Bill’s tenure and her political career, is not the enemy of the progressive movement. She’s another side of it: less radical, more cautious, not a true soldier, but not a summer one, either. Vote for Bernie (I did!) and agitate for him. Drag Hillary even further to the left. Make her work for votes. But she shouldn’t be treatead her as an alien, as someone to unload upon. She shouldn’t be equated with the desperate venal clowns in the GOP.

It is great that people are fighting for Bernie, and in any election there are going to be hard feelings. But the #bernieorbust movement is an absurdity, a privileged expression of pique. Does it suck to vote for the “lesser of two evils”? Of course it does. But the alternative is the greater of two evils, so come on.

Protesting George Clooney because he is raising money for Hillary Clinton is just as bizarre as anything on the other side. It’s a weird moment in our politics.