When You're A Star

   

         I’ll admit it.  When I first heard about Donald Trump’s lewd remarks about groping women, I wasn’t outraged.  In fact, the first thing I did was to look at the vintage of the words.  He’d made those comments over ten years ago during what he probably thought was a private moment. To me, this seemed like a “gotcha” that members of the media live for.

        I thought, well, tThis is Donald Trump, after all.  If we’ve learned nothing else about the man over the last 15 months, we should have learned that for him, women are just collections of legs, butts, breasts, faces and “wherevers” that can be compared, rated and used for his own gratification.  It’s no wonder that the Clinton campaign has recorded a sufficient number of Trump’s derogatory comments about women to have cobbled together a devastating ad showing girls listening to those comments while looking sadly at themselves in mirrors. 

            So why are these newly unearthed comments news?  Why are Republican politicians—including his own running mate, Mike Pence—scurrying for cover and even urging him to get out of the race?  Are they only now discovering that this man means electoral disaster for the party?

            At first blush, I figured that this was just more of the same.  Donald Trump seems to have gotten away with disparaging remarks about Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, Jews and war heroes.  The next outrageous thing he says seems to wash over the last outrageous thing he’s said.  In fact, in the last 15 months, he’s said so many outrageous things that it’s hard to remember them all.  Why would anyone think that the public would take this episode any more seriously than it has taken any of the others?

            Perhaps it is the crude language.  He used several of the words that George Carlin told my generation couldn’t be said on television. Of course, those words can be said on cable TV shows and movies, and with such resources readily available, it could be that nobody thinks anyone should have to suffer hearing those words from a Presidential candidate.

            Not.

            I think I could have simply shrugged off the latest Trumpisms, attributing them to the fact that this man seems never to have grown out of his adolescence.  This was high school locker room banter.  But then I read his statement in its entirety, and I realized that Donald Trump had gone much farther.  Here are the words that most upset me:

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it.  You can do anything.”

            These 14 simple words say it all.  They explain what’s wrong with Donald Trump.  They explain his race for the Presidency.  And they explain why this man should never be allowed anywhere near the White House.

            The President of the United States is the world’s ultimate celebrity (aside, of course, from Beyonce).  The person occupying that office is completely surrounded by the media.  Everything that person says or does gets reported, not just locally, but globally.  Everyone on earth who has access to a television or computer connected to the internet knows who the American president is and what the American President looks like.  The President can summon the media on a whim and even demand TV and radio airtime on a few moments notice.  For a person who craves attention, the presidency is nirvana.

            Is there any wonder that Donald Trump wants to be president?

            Americans expect that anyone who reaches the pinnacle of American governmental power will be ruthless to some extent.  All the same, we expect this ruthlessness to be exercised within the context of certain norms and expectations that will eventually be enforced by our political system.  It’s why Richard Nixon didn’t get away with Watergate.

            But 2016 is not 1974.  We’ve obliterated so many of those norms since then, and our expectations for our political leaders are much lower.  So much of what would have been unthinkable in 1974 is commonplace now.  The growing gridlock in Congress has encouraged presidents of both parties to expand their powers beyond presumed Constitutional limits, setting precedents for their successors in office.  What limits will there be on a president like Donald Trump who has evidenced no understanding of our Constitution, no understanding that the oval office does not convey upon its occupant unlimited power, and who feels that becoming an even bigger celebrity than he is now by winning an election will give him license to do whatever he wants.

            Our politics has grown far more tribal than it was 42 years ago.  Nixon realized that the jig was up when Republican Senator, Barry Goldwater explained to him that counting both Democratic and Republican votes, there weren’t enough supporters in the Senate to avoid conviction and removal from office.  I have my doubts that, were Donald Trump to win the presidency and then step out of line, Republican Senators would intervene they way they did in 1974.  Neither Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell nor House Speaker Paul Ryan have yet repudiated Donald Trump. They’ve calculated that having Trump in the White House is in their interests.  What would it take for them to put country ahead of party?

            The Republican objections I’ve heard to Donald Trump’s comments focus on how insulting and demeaning they were to women.  Not unexpectedly, they seem to ask men to consider how people under their care—their wives, their daughters—feel.  That’s the wrong question.  We should all be embarrassed by what Donald Trump said.  We should all feel threatened. We should all feel insulted.

            The right question to ask is why anyone would want to make a person like Donald Trump, a man who cannot empathize, a man who objectifies others, a man who cannot express remorse or shame, a man who thinks he knows everything and cannot admit a mistake, the face of the United States and an ex officio role model for our children?  And that begs another question.

            As of this moment 74% of Republicans say that Republican party officials should continue to back Donald Trump. Have they no sense of decency, at long last?  Have they left no sense of shame?          

Chill

     

       Today, I want to talk to my Democratic friends.  If you’re a Republican and a Trump supporter, you’ve got the day off.  What I’ve got to say today will be of absolutely no interest to you.

            It’s time for the freak-out over Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers to stop.  Put the worry beads away.  And stop thinking about the logistics of moving to Canada.  Donald Trump is not going to win this election.

            I know.  You’re obsessed with the election forecasts on FiveThirtyEight.com and Nate Cohn’s Upshot column in the New York Times.  You probably look at both first thing in the morning, at lunch and just before you go to sleep at night.  And you’ve been watching incredulously as Hillary Clinton’s odds of winning the election have slowly eroded.

            What you need is a reality check and some perspective. 

            Here’s the reality check.  We live in a country that is split pretty evenly between Democrats and independents who lean left on the one hand and Republicans and Independents who lean right on the other.  And, let’s face it, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy comes with a whole lot of baggage.

            Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton got bounces after their conventions over the summer.  Hillary got a bigger bounce than Donald Trump did, but that’s neither here nor there.  We call them bounces because public opinion goes up and then it comes down.  The race has settled down to about where it was in the Spring.  Hillary Clinton still enjoys a small but significant advantage over Donald Trump.   FiveThirtyEight.com and the New York Times are still saying that despite Clinton’s slide in the polls, she has a substantially better chance of winning the election than Donald Trump has.

            Here’s the perspective.  Take a look at this graph from RealClearPolitics.com.  This shows you aggregated polling numbers for the 2012 election.  You probably don’t remember this, but President Obama’s reelection was no sure thing.  As of September

21, 2012, Barack Obama held a polling lead of only 3.5 percentage points.  As of the day before the election, the polls were showing an extremely tight race.  Obama led by only 0.7 percentage points. 

            On Election Day, though, Obama beat Romney by a 6 percentage point margin.

            There are a number of lessons to learn from this.  The first is that even if you aggregate polls as RealClearPolitics.com does, the results are still only probabilities.  Polls can only tell us only what particular people said at a particular moment in time.  The math we use to impute what we learn from a relatively small subset of people to the entire population of voters has its limits.  The best we can do is use that math to come up with an estimate of what is really going on in the population at large.  And that estimate is going to be subject to a margin of error that we can never reduce to zero.

            The second is that unless you want to believe that something miraculous happened between November 5 and November 6—and, being liberals, you probably aren’t that much into miracles—you need to look for an explanation for the difference between the predicted margin of 0.7 and the actual margin of 6.  And, there are at least two.

            First, you may have noticed that the polls have seemed to respond to the news.  That’s kind of puzzling, since by now, most people have made up their minds about who they’re going to vote for.  According to FiveThirtyEight.com, there still seems to be an unusually large chunk of voters who haven’t decide yet.  But given the fact that Clinton and Trump are extremely well known, it’s likely that these people will never resolve their ambivalence about these two candidates and that they just won’t vote at all.  The volatility we are seeing in the polls may be coming from this group.

            Political science tells us rather definitively that something like 90% of people who are Democrats or Democratic leaners will eventually vote for their party’s nominee, and the same is true of Republicans and Republican leaners.  Our politics has become increasing tribal.  This election is not a grand policy debate.  It’s a football game, and we just want our side to win.

            If our politics is largely tribal and most people have already decided who their going to vote for, then you’d wouldn’t expect many people to change their minds definitively even after a bad campaign week.  Instead, you’d expect public opinion to be relatively stable.

            What may be going on is known as “non-response bias.”  Writing in The Daily Kos, David Jarman explains that when a candidate has a bad series of days on the campaign trail, his or her supporters may temporarily become somewhat demoralized and not want to talk to pollsters.  When that happens, the polling results reflect an oversample of the other candidate’s supporters.

            You can see how this might work if you look again at the Real Clear Politics graph.  The first presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney took place on October 3, 2012.  As you may recall, the president’s performance was--how to say this--AWFUL.  The day before the debate, the tracking poll had the president leading Romney by 3.3 percentage points.  By October 8, Obama’s polling lead had collapsed to 0.5 percentage points, and by October 15, the day before the second debate, the president’s polling lead was only 0.1 percentage points.  According to Jarman, pollsters who were using more sophisticated techniques “found that there really wasn’t much of a debate effect at all, and the race stayed in pretty much the same narrow band from April on.”

            Clinton got a strong bump after her convention, and its effects were probably prolonged as Donald Trump had a number of unforced errors, including a stupid fight with the Khans, a Gold Star family who had lost a son in the war in Iraq.  You can well imagine that Trump supporters might have been demoralized by all of this and how they might not have wanted to talk to pollsters.  Trump’s mistakes were serious, and that may explain why Hillary Clinton’s probability of winning the election began to flirt with 90%.

            But what goes around comes around.  Trump hired a much more competent campaign staff that obviously managed to impose some discipline on him. He started using a teleprompter, and for a stretch, he stopped making unforced errors.  Far worse, though, more Clinton emails surfaced, Trump’s campaign reared up in righteous indignation over Clinton’s description of a portion of Trump’s supporters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable,” and Clinton was less than forthcoming about the case of walking pneumonia that caused her to collapse in the heat at the September 11 Commemoration in New York.  Clinton’s polling numbers fell back to earth.

            But a second explanation is the fact that modern elections are all about who gets their voters to the polls on Election Day.  Obama, in 2012, knew exactly who his marginal voters—people who generally liked him but might not have prioritized voting--were and had built an organization that could mobilize these voters on Election Day.  The Romney operation was a shadow of the Obama machine, and just didn’t have the wherewithal to do the same thing.  As a practical matter, Democrats tend to live in much more densely packed communities, and so it’s easier to get them to the polls than it is to mobilize Republicans, who like live in less compact geograpies.  The difference between the Real Clear Politics polling average and actual turnout could merely reflect the difference between the marginal Democratic voters who expressed an intention to vote and were mobilize by the Obama machine and the marginal Republican voters who said they were going to vote but never made it to the polls.

            Clinton has spent the better part of the last two years learning from Obama’s experience in 2008 and 2012.  She’s got an army and she’s running it with state of the art analytics.  In comparison, Trump’s team looks like a group of neighborhood kids who have gotten together to play pickup football on a Sunday afternoon.

            Listen, I know you want this to be easy.  Nobody likes to take chances, particularly with something so important.  But even if Clinton’s numbers were still brushing up against 90%, that still wouldn’t be a sure thing.  When her probabilities were that high, Nate Cohn was still comparing her possibility of losing the election to the possibility that a NFL field goal kicker would miss from the 20 yard line.  But as the 2012 Baltimore Ravens will tell you, sometimes field goal kickers do miss.

            So go pour yourself a nice cup of chamomile tea and relax for a few minutes.  Clinton should win this election. My prediction, though, depends on how well Democrats do the nitty-gritty work of getting people to the polls.  I’m assuming that Clinton’s machine will do its job effectively, but if you want to reduce the risk that Clinton will lose, get up off the couch and write a check, or, better yet march yourself down to Clinton headquarters and put in some time canvassing or phone banking.

            Feel better?  Good.  Now be a dear and invite our Republican friends back into the room.

Clinton Takes the Gloves Off

            Donald Trump’s supporters like him because he hates political correctness.  Clearly speaking for a vast number of Trump supporters, one woman remarked, “I like the fact that he’s not afraid to say what we’re all thinking.” 

            Kind of begs the question, doesn’t it?

            What, pray tell, is it that Trump supporters have longed to say, but can’t because they believe they will suffer condemnation from people outside of their tribe?  Alas, they won’t tell you.  And for good reason.  They’re right.

            Political correctness, at least as practiced by people outside the right-wing tribe, is simple courtesy.  It’s a sensitivity to the feelings of others, a willingness to drop assumptions about other people and to treat others as they themselves wish to be treated.  The so-called “War on Christmas,” for example, is a mere recognition that not everyone in the United States celebrates the Christian December holiday and a willingness to accept and legitimize the practices of non-Christians.  Thus, the “politically correct” say “happy holidays” to others, not to denigrate the Christian observance of Christmas, but both to acknowledge that the person offered the greeting may celebrate some other holiday as the calendar year comes to a close and to express a degree of tolerance and even acceptance that others may have other faith traditions.

            Donald Trump doesn’t get it. “If I become president,” he’s said, clearly oblivious to the First Amendment, “we’re gonna be saying Merry Christmas at every store . . . You can leave happy holidays at the corner.”  But you knew that.

            Political correctness also means, among other things, that you can’t say or insinuate any of the things that were staples of humor when I was growing up, including that blacks are lazy, Jews are stingy, Poles and blondes are stupid, businessmen are heartless, or, more recently, that Muslims are terrorists.

            “Jeez,” Trump’s supporters ask, “why can’t we just say what everyone knows is mostly true?”

            Which leads me directly to Hillary Clinton’s comments last week on Donald Trump’s “basket of deplorables.”  Last week, at a tony Democratic fundraiser where Barbra Streisand performed, Clinton, speaking in a “grossly genealistic way,” called out the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” people who account for “half” of Trump’s supporters.  These people, she said, were “deplorable,” “irredeemable,” and ultimately “not America.” Clinton later walked the “half” back and nothing else.

            The anti-PC crowd, clearly not used to being the subject of politically incorrect commentary, was not amused.  The right-wing outrage machine joyfully cranked itself up to full power.  Donald Trump tweeted “Wow.  Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people.  I think it will cost her at the polls.” 

       Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, in a speech he gave to the Values Voter Summit used even stronger language:

The truth of the matter is that the men and women who support Donald Trump’s campaign are hard-working Americans, farmers, coal miners, teachers, veterans, members of our law enforcement community, members of every class in this country, who know that we can make America great again . . .Let me just say, rom the bottom of my heart, Hillary, they are not a basket of anything.  They are Americans and they deserve your respect.

       Trump commented that it was “disgraceful that Hillary Clinton makes the worst mistake of the political season  . . .For the first time in a long while, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans.”  Trump and his minions must have been positively gleeful about finally having acquired a cudgel they believed to be as potent as Mitt Romney’s 2012 comments about the 47% to use against the Democrats.

            Let’s put to the side the fact that Trump and Pence have expanded Clinton’s condemnation of a fraction of  Trump’s supporters to include all Americans.  In fact, Clinton also spoke of a second fraction of Trumps supporters deserving of understanding and empathy.  Regardless of that, let’s stipulate that Clinton was in fact denigrating millions of her fellow Americans.

            From the standpoint of people who reject political correctness, what’s the problem?  I thought the right-wing tribe appreciated blunt talk. Clinton was only saying out loud what most of us are already thinking and are simply too polite to say in public.  

            And I do mean “most of us.”  Among likely voters, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, almost 60% believe that “the way Donald Trump talks appeals to bigotry.” That includes 87% of likely Democratic and 59% of Independent voters.  62% of female likely voters and 57% of white female likely voters hold this opinion as do 58% of white likely voters with college degrees.  Small wonder that Trump is having difficulty with these groups.  That’s probably also why Congressional Republicans have refused to take turns with Trump and Pence in cranking the outrage machine.

            These poll numbers, together with the fact that Hillary Clinton is a much more disciplined candidate than many others suggest that she fully intended to breach “political correctness” protocols to get these ideas into the mainstream.  Trump has clearly been making an effort to gather up the Republicans and Independent voters who haven’t yet warmed to him.  His latest campaign team has probably made it clear to him that he can’t win unless he expands his coalition.

            But if Clinton’s statement was intended, it may well serve as a way of neutralizing Trump’s efforts.  American politics has become extremely tribal, and it matters to most people who’s company they are seen keeping.  Clinton’s suggesting to these undecided people that if they lie down with dogs, they’ll get up with fleas.  The McCain campaign tried something similar in 2008 when its “The One” and “Celebrity” spots suggested that Barack Obama was an empty suit who was bamboozling voters into joining his cult of personality.

            It’s generally a bad idea for a politician to lash out at voters.  Voters, after all, can fight back.  Yet, Clinton’s calculation is simple.  The “deplorables,” Hillary Haters, and staunch Republicans aren’t going to vote for her under any circumstances.  And the Democrats and Democratic leaners who have stuck with her through everything up until now aren’t going anywhere either.  Clinton may well be thinking that eschewing “political correctness and dragging the underlying racial dynamics of this race into the open gives her the best chance of keeping the basket of Republican and independent voters deserving of understanding and empathy out of Trumps clutches, and, perhaps, even winning their votes.

You're Being Ridiculous

            Let’s start out with three stone-cold facts. First, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton do not receive so much as a penny in compensation or expense reimbursement from the Clinton Foundation.

            Second, the Clinton Foundation is an “operating foundation” that puts boots on the ground to implement its programs instead of a pass-through foundation that simply makes grants to other organizations.  Charity Watch an independent organization that monitors charities, gave the Clinton Foundation its highest rating because the Clinton Foundation devotes 88% of its revenue to its programs.

            Third, as much as Republicans want to insist that the last 8 years should be described as the “Obama-Clinton administration,” the fact is that Hillary Clinton was only the Secretary of State.  Any authority Clinton had to spend money or take other actions depended on appropriations from Congress and the authorization of others, including the President of the United States.  During her time in office, she implemented the President’s foreign policy, not her own.  All of that is how it should be in a democracy.

            But now such august authorities as the Boston Globe and the Associated Press and other media outlets are complaining about interactions between Hillary Clinton, while she was at the State Department, and people associated with the Clinton Foundation.

            The media is feeding a narrative about Hillary Clinton that has enable Donald Trump and his henchmen to rail

It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office. They sold access and specific actions by and really for, I guess, the making of large amounts of money. The specific crimes committed to carry out that enterprise are too numerous to cover in this speech.

            The narrative is false and naïve.  It doesn’t traffic in reality at all.  It attempts to hold Clinton to a higher standard than other contemporary politicians.  And because of this kind of nonsense, it diverts attention away from the fact that Donald Trump won’t let anyone see how wealthy he is or the extent to which he’s entangled with Russia or China by releasing his tax returns.

            Let’s stipulate that the Clinton Foundation has a lot of wealthy donors, including foreign governments.  Let’s admit that many of these donors gave hefty contributions.  And though we can only speculate about this, let’s also stipulate that among the motives some of these donors had for giving the Clinton Foundation money was to curry favor with a sitting Secretary of State who seemed a good bet for becoming president one day.

            So what?

            There is no evidence at all in the pile of emails Clinton and the State Department has delivered to the FBI or to Judicial Watch, the right wing organization currently prosecuting a Freedom of Information Act law suit designed to keep this controversy festering and hoping to find a silver bullet it can use against Clinton this fall, that Clinton, her husband or daughter received a “quid pro quo” for anything she did as Secretary of State.  And, as former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell will happily tell you, “quid pro quo”  is the standard for deciding on a public servant’s corruption.  Setting up a meeting, says a unanimous Supreme Court, isn’t enough.

            The argument these publications are making is that there was something wrong or improper about people associated with the Clinton Foundation calling the State Department, either for help with a problem or a sit down with either the Secretary or somebody else associated with the State Department.  Bono, for example, wanted to “do a linkup with the International Space Station on very show during the tour this year.”  Like most of the other supplicants, he didn’t get what he asked for from State.

            According to the AP:

the meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.

            Let’s parse this out.  Was there a violation of any law or agreement to which either Clinton was subject?  No, and that means that all of the stuff about corruption and criminal activity being spouted by Trump and his surrogates is nonsense.

            Then, what’s the problem?  Well, the fact that Clinton or her State Department staff sometimes made time to talk to people who were also donors to the Clinton Foundation “fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton.”

            Really?

            Whose perceptions are we talking about here?

            It couldn’t be the perceptions of the donors.  I’ve yet to see any evidence or even any allegation that anyone who wanted to see Clinton or wanted her help believed that giving money to a particular charity with which she was not associated at the time and from which neither she nor any of her family received money, was a prerequisite.

            The record shows that not everyone who wanted something from Clinton got what they wanted.  And it’s far from clear that donors such as Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Muhammed Yunus or philanthropist Melinda Gates wouldn’t have gotten face time with Clinton without having first made donations.

            In any event, do we really want to say that it’s a problem for a public official to pay attention to somebody who has done something that the public official thinks is morally commendable, like giving a large sum of mnoney to a worthy charity?

            Perhaps we’re talking about the perceptions of people who are determined to find wrongdoing on the part of every politician.  If that’s the standard, then everyone who wants to do anything flunks.  It’s always possible to spin every story into skullduggery.

            Or, perhaps we’re talking about the perceptions of the media who are either bored with Donald Trump’s mendacity, xenophobia, narcissism and inability to articulate policy or need a way to “balance out” the admittedly awful press he has earned, with some negativity directed at Hillary Clinton.  Clinton’s way ahead in the polls, and unless she gets knocked off her game, she’ll win this election in a walk.  Boring presidential races don’t serve the career interests of the reporters dispatched to cover them or their employers who are constantly in a pitched battle for eyeballs.

            Washington D.C. is a town that runs on connections.  Politicians don’t arrive here through an immaculate conception.  Every    one of them brings every mentor, donor, assistant, boss, classmate, campaign worker, and business associate together with every person any of those people has ever been associated with here when they take office.  To expect otherwise is naïve. To demand that upon taking office they sever those connections is absurd.

            Please, just stop it.  You’re feeding an unnecessary cynicism about government that makes it impossible for anyone to claim a mandate for getting something done once elected.

            You’re being ridiculous.