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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): From the launch of his campaign to stump speeches on the trail, former Vice President Joe Biden is running on the idea that President Trump and his administration are an aberration. “This is not the Republican Party,” Biden recently told a crowd in Iowa. But some pundits, party operatives and other 2020 candidates think Biden’s stance is shortsighted and argue that Trump’s presidency is a symptom of a much bigger problem in the GOP.

So how much of an aberration is Trump? He has challenged norms and democratic values while in office, but Republicans have largely declined to break rank. Does this mean that Trump’s candidacy was just a reflection of the direction the party was already headed in?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Can you draw a through-line between Trump and the Republicans that came before him? Sure, yeah. I’m not sure it’s a particularly linear through-line, though.

Something can be in line with a trend but still be an outlier. Home runs are way up in baseball this year, but if someone winds up finishing the season with 83 home runs, that’s still an outlier. Climate change makes heat extremes much more likely, but if it’s 105 degrees in Boston in May, that’s still an outlier.

matt.grossmann (Matt Grossmann, political science professor at Michigan State University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): And the tendency for Republicans to get behind their president is actually one area of continuity. Republicans trust government consistently more under Republican presidents, often dramatically reversing course after a Democratic president.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): But at what point does it make sense to characterize something as an outlier? For example, people often point to the “Access Hollywood” tape or Trump’s remarks about the appearance of women, or his statements about immigrants as instances of norm violation. If you look at American history, racism and sexism aren’t unfamiliar themes, but it is unusual, especially in the modern era, for them to be so front and center.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Some Republican politicians were proto-Trumps. Think former Maine Gov. Paul LePage or Iowa Rep. Steve King. The rise of the tea party foregrounded a lot of Republicans who were saying outrageous things. And I don’t know if we want to count dog whistles, like the Willie Horton ad.

julia_azari: I would count those dog whistles and point out that Democrats were not immune to the temptations of making these kinds of appeals in that era either.

natesilver: Well, you can’t really characterize it as an outlier until you see where the next couple of data points line up, Julia. Which is why my basic meta-argument is that people are way too confident about this question, in either direction.

But that’s why I like the baseball or climate change analogy. Boston might be many times more likely to have a 105-degree day now than it was 50 years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s the new normal, however.

julia_azari: Of course we can’t know if Trump is the new normal yet. But I am not satisfied with this answer. I think we can and should have some sort of metric for whether his presidency is truly out of step with trends or historical patterns.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer):

In New Hampshire, Joe Biden predicts that once President Trump is out of office, Republicans will have “an epiphany” and work with Democrats toward consensus.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 14, 2019

So this is the core question to me.

Does Biden actually believe this? Or is he just saying it because swing voters might like it?

sarahf: Right. On the question of whether Trump is an aberration, a lot of what we’re asking, I think, is whether a “return to normalcy” is even possible. Within the Democratic Party, there is a perception that former President Barack Obama spent years trying to compromise with congressional Republicans and that those efforts often fell flat — Merrick Garland’s thwarted nomination to the Supreme Court is an example these folks point to. And so now it’s a question of whether Democratic voters actually think bipartisanship can still work. Biden is clearly running on a platform that he thinks it can.

julia_azari: The normalcy Biden describes was never a thing.

perry: Do you think Biden is being sincere? Biden’s comment was almost exactly what Obama said in 2012 about how his victory would break the fever of GOP opposition, and Obama was totally wrong, of course. I was shocked that Biden said something that seemed so obviously clueless, but it might fit with his electoral strategy.

natesilver: I think Biden is being sincere, for what it’s worth. He came up in an era of relatively high comity and bipartisanship in the Senate.

nrakich: And Biden is friends with many Republicans in the Senate, like Lindsey Graham. It makes sense that he thinks he can woo them to his side.

But also a President Biden would probably need to get buy-in from only a few Republican senators in order to pass his agenda and get this “bipartisanship” thing to work.

I don’t think even Biden thinks he will convince a majority of the GOP caucus to vote for his policies.

matt.grossmann: Biden was the primary Democrat involved in cutting three separate budget deals with Mitch McConnell under Obama (going in wildly different directions), so he may have little reason to believe it can’t still be done. Believe it or not, most new laws are still bipartisan, and majority parties are getting no better at enacting their agenda.

sarahf: The McConnell whisperer!

julia_azari: Ha. From a strategic perspective, maybe it makes sense. It could be that people in the primary electorate are thinking more “I would like to get something done, and maybe Biden can do it” than “fuck the other party.” I’m not sure how any of the other Democratic presidential candidates think they will get their big policy ideas through a GOP-controlled Senate.

nrakich: I do think Biden has the best chance of striking deals with a GOP Senate. It’s just that people are overestimating how big of a difference he would make. Biden might be able to convince three GOP senators to vote with him. A President Tulsi Gabbard might be able to convince zero.

natesilver: TuLsI GaBBaRd hAs BiPaRtIsAn FrIeNdS ToO, Rakich, such as former Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock.

nrakich: Ha. That’s actually true — lots of Republicans are outspoken about how much they like Gabbard, so maybe she was a bad example.

But FWIW, according to a March poll from Quinnipiac University, Democrats said 52 percent to 39 percent that they would prefer a candidate who mostly works with Republicans rather than one who mostly stands up to them.

julia_azari: I just wonder if people want compromise in practice as much as in theory — and how having a divisive Republican president like Trump may have changed that.

sarahf: So, Julia, you’re saying that there might be a larger appetite now for a more combative Democratic president who is less willing to compromise?

I buy that, and I think we’re seeing that reflected in the messaging of several candidates.

julia_azari: Yeah, I think that’s a possibility. There is still this idea about building a new national consensus (at least on the Left). People think that there will be an election like 1964 or 1980 (at least, the narrative of 1980 as a landslide — Reagan won only 50.7 percent of the popular vote) and that there will be a 55 percent to 60 percent majority for a general approach to governance. But I think that’s a steep climb no matter how many rallies in the heartland or Amtrak trips through Scranton one takes.

matt.grossmann: 100 percent agree.

natesilver: I do think we have to ask how Republicans would react to Trump being defeated, by Biden or someone else.

Let’s say it’s pretty bad, for instance. The GOP loses the popular vote by 6 points, and all the major swing states go to the Democrat. Republicans lose another 15 House seats. And Democrats eke out a 51-49 Senate majority.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a one-term president, and that president (George H.W. Bush) came after Reagan had held two terms, so Republicans couldn’t feel too upset. Trump being a one-termer would be different, more analogous to Jimmy Carter.

nrakich: I’m not sure they would react that much, Nate? I feel like McConnell is just doing his thing, Trump or no.

matt.grossmann: Republicans would act like they usually do — a big backlash against the new Democratic president.

sarahf: You don’t think it matters to Republicans who the Democratic candidate is because party trumps everything?

nrakich: Sarah, I think some Republicans would prefer Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders because they’re easier to demonize (in the same way that some Democrats preferred having Trump as the GOP nominee in 2016), and some would prefer Biden because they think the country would be less ruined under a more moderate president.

natesilver: But if Trump loses, we’d be looking at the Republican nominee having lost the popular vote for the presidency in seven out of eight election cycles.

And all of this happening despite a pretty good economy.

I don’t know. I think the party might react a lot differently than in 2008 when John McCain losing was more or less inevitable.

nrakich: Maybe Republicans would come out with an autopsy report again, like they did after the 2012 election, for how they can return to relevance — and then ignore it again in 2024, like they did in 2016.

matt.grossmann: But isn’t a backlash against the new Democratic president the best way to deal with that?

julia_azari: In the past, it has mattered somewhat whether the defeat was expected, but otherwise, losing parties have reacted by building up institutions, thinking about innovation, etc. My research on election interpretation and what we have seen with 2016 and 2018 suggest to me that Republicans would try to put forth an election narrative to serve their ends. For example, after 2012, some conservative commentators on Twitter advanced this “it’s hard to compete with Santa Claus” narrative, suggesting that Democrats’ victories were because they had promised unrealistic benefits to voters, rather than that they had won based on the strength of the campaign or the ideas.

nrakich: I’m sure there would be hand-wringing, but I just don’t know if it will change Republican behavior.

McConnell will still try to make the new Democratic president impotent, and the party’s new presidential hopefuls — the Tom Cottons and Mike Pences and Nikki Haleys of the world — will still go to Iowa talking about how unfairly Trump was treated.

natesilver: I’m reallllly not sure about that, Rakich. I think a lot of Republicans would be happy to throw Trump under the bus.

nrakich: You don’t think GOP voters (as opposed to elites) would still be loyal to Trump?

And therefore that the path to the 2024 nomination for Republican hopefuls would be cozying up to him?

If Trump loses, he will certainly remain a major force in the party. He’ll keep tweeting stuff to his base, and he might even run again in 2024! The GOP might be stuck with Trump as long as he’s still alive.

natesilver: I think you’re forgetting how much presidents are treated as losers once they lose.

Hillary Clinton has become relatively unpopular among Democrats, for instance, even though there might be a lot of reasons to feel sympathetic toward her.

matt.grossmann: And would it be that hard for Pence or Haley to thread the needle? They can offer a very different style of leadership but still say they believe Trump protected America and brought about economic recovery.

julia_azari: Yeah. I think it’s possible you will see Trumpism without Trump. In my opinion, the party has moved in a Trump-y direction (although I know Matt disagrees somewhat at least on the direction).

natesilver: “Trumpism without Trump” reminds me of “Garfield minus Garfield”:

nrakich: If it’s a close election, how many Republicans will think Trump lost fair and square, though?

natesilver: Well, I’m stipulating that it won’t be a close election.

nrakich: That’s true.

natesilver: (Stipulating, not predicting, for the case of this hypothetical.)

julia_azari: Even if it’s not, I think there will be narrative delegitimizing it.

matt.grossmann: Did we ever answer the question of whether calling Trump an aberration was a good strategy for Biden? It’s very similar to what Clinton and Obama said in 2016, but it may have been an ineffective strategy then; some Democratic-leaning voters decided it meant that Trump was less conservative than the Republican Party.

julia_azari: I’ve been thinking of the question as: “Will reaching out to anti-Trump Republicans in the electorate in this way convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate?”

But as Rakich said earlier, I think the conventional wisdom might overestimate the difference between having Biden in this position relative to any of the other candidates.

natesilver: Liberals on Twitter don’t seem to like Biden’s strategy, which is a strong sign that it’s a good strategy.

I think his comments about Republicans magically deciding to compromise were dumb, but overall the “Trump is an aberration” message is liable to be fairly well-received.

After all, Democrats spend a whole ton of time talking about how Trump is historically, unprecedentedly terrible and must be curbed, impeached, etc.

julia_azari: But Democratic primary voters might see it as a signal of less animosity toward Republicans, and my rather depressing read of a rather depressing political science literature suggests that may not be all that strategic.

natesilver: I think a lot of Biden’s messages are things that will do “just fine” with primary voters but are fairly good general election messages.

matt.grossmann: “I will be able to reach out to disaffected Obama-Trump supporters” is a good argument. “We have to get things done and I’m the one to do it” is a good argument. “I will get us past this horrible era” is even a good argument. But saying positive things about Republicans might not be necessary or even helpful.

nrakich: Remember that Biden has paired his “This is not the Republican Party” with a healthy dose of “Trump is a terrible human being and the worst thing to ever happen to America and someone who should be punched in the mouth,” which probably will appeal to primary voters.

natesilver: Also, keep in mind that Biden specifically rests his case on electability.

So if, hypothetically, independents like him because he seems more reasonable and that helps to prop him up in the polls, that could make primary voters more likely to stay with him.

julia_azari: Put that way, it comes down to whether Democratic primary voters hate Trump or Republicans more.

nrakich: (I think the answer is Trump.)

natesilver: Democratic primary voters hate Trump more than the Republican Party, right?

matt.grossmann: They do, but they dislike both.

natesilver: Or maybe it’s pretty close, actually. Only 10 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of the GOP.

nrakich: So maybe they don’t think of Trump as an aberration. Maybe they don’t overthink it. Maybe they just think the Republican Party is whatever it is in the moment.

natesilver: The fact that George W. Bush’s image has been rehabilitated quite a bit is interesting. And maybe suggests that Biden is right (strategy-wise) to treat Trump as an aberration. Bush left office with a very, very low approval rating, and now a lot of people feel nostalgic for him.

nrakich: Yeah, 61 percent of Americans said they viewed Bush favorably in this 2018 poll, including 54 percent of Democrats.

matt.grossmann: Trump was perceived differently than the Republican Party in early 2016, which is often what happens in a presidential contest. Opinions of Bush became less aligned with opinions of Republicans once Trump came along. But I don’t think it will be an issue in the same way this time around: Trump is now a known quantity and opinions won’t likely change until Republicans have another nominee.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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phroyd · 6 years ago

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Joe Manchin is shouting in the middle of a job fair. It’s in an exhibition space at a community college in Parkersburg, West Virginia, an industrial town on the Ohio river. He is going booth to booth to booth, making conversation and taking selfies.

Manchin has come to one table that provides office workers to companies on a provisional basis and is convinced that someone he just met is a perfect fit. He starts asking his staffers to find the young man who was looking for an accounting job and direct him over to the booth.

The Democratic senator could have come out of a lab for politicians. The 71-year-old Manchin has salt and pepper hair and just the right amount of twang. He comes across as one of God’s natural retail politicians, treats every voter like a friend. Most return the adoration, although there are a few rolled eyes. High schoolers ask him to come to their football game and grown men excitedly pile next to him to pose for a photograph.

However, less than 24 hours after Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate judiciary committee, he kept getting asked about Brett Kavanaugh – the conservative supreme court pick whom Manchin would eventually vote for.

West Virginia was a traditionally Democratic state for generations. However, it has pivoted on a dime. A former bastion of blue-collar New Deal Democrats it has become a Republican stronghold based on issues like guns, abortion and the “war on coal”. Although West Virginia has long been economically populist, it is socially conservative and the coal industry occupies a key place in the state’s psyche.

West Virginia is one of two races – alongside one in Tennessee – that are crucial to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the Senate in next month’s midterm elections. Democrats probably need to win in both West Virginia and Tennessee to have a chance of flipping the slim 51-49 Republican majority in the Senate. Democratic control of the upper chamber would mean that they could block not just legislation but Trump appointees to office, including the courts, as well.

Manchin and Bredesen are both willing to embrace Trump at times and practice a Clintonian brand of politics

Thus Democratic fortunes in the Senate rest on the unlikely shoulders of two septuagenarian white men in states that Donald Trump won overwhelmingly. These two older white men are a world away from the slate of diverse candidates that the Democrats are running across America for the House.

Although much has been made of the so-called “blue wave” that Democrats are counting on in the midterms to win control of the House of Representatives, their task in taking back the Senate is a much stiffer challenge. And in the centre of that challenge are Manchin in West Virginia and Phil Bredesen in Tennessee.

These two candidates differ markedly from the new slate of Democratic candidates who are rushing to embrace progressive causes like Medicare for All, a $15-an-hour minimum wage and flirt with the concept of abolishing Ice (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Manchin and Bredesen are from a different school of centrist Democrats. They are also both willing to embrace Trump at times and practice a Clintonian brand of politics where they look at both political parties in Washington and proclaim “a plague upon both your houses”.

Both men supported the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the supreme court – the two most prominent Democrats to do so.

A clear sign of why Manchin eventually backed Kavanaugh was evident in Parkersburg where attendees were invariably coming up to Manchin to urge him to support the embattled nominee – while the West Virginia senator was staying perched precariously on the fence. To one woman, he simply laid out the recent history of judicial nomination fights on Capitol Hill. He said Democratic anger on the issue was rooted in the showdown over Merrick Garland that Republicans “wouldn’t even meet him and that’s what makes ’em mad”. Manchin went on to point to fault on “both sides” and insisted “we want to get everyone back together”.

Speaking to the Guardian afterwards in a public park before a veterans event, Manchin pointed out “there’s still more Democrats than there are anything else in West Virginia. The bottom line is they got upset after it got to the point that the Washington Democrats forgot about the rural Democrats.” Manchin, who is the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, instead tried to emphasize his independence. “I don’t care whether [you’re a Democrat or a Republican] … it’s about West Virginia first and that’s where I’ve always been.”

His Republican opponent, Patrick Morrisey, is almost the antithesis of Manchin. While Manchin is a native West Virginian who grew up as the star high school quarterback, Morrisey is a New Jersey native who worked as staffer and lobbyist on Capitol Hill before moving to the Mountain State and beating a five-term incumbent to become the first Republican state attorney general since before the New Deal.

The Republican regularly branded his opponent as “dishonest Washington liberal” and painted him as a pawn of the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer. Trump has appeared regularly with Morrisey and the West Virginia Republican could not name one area of disagreement with him.

“I want to emphasize my areas of commonality with the president because the body of his work has been very impressive for the people of West Virginia,” insisted the Republican Senate candidate. “No one is an ideological twin of another person. President Trump has been a strong ally for West Virginia and we’re going to keep emphasizing that.”

The message may not be cutting through in polls. Manchin has maintained a steady lead in West Virginia and has consistently been hitting Morrisey on his past as a pharmaceutical lobbyist, an important issue in a state that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic as well on the Republican’s opposition to Obamacare and the effect that would have on West Virginians with pre-existing conditions.

However, while that message and approach may be working for Manchin in West Virginia, it may not be as successful in Tennessee.

As a fellow centrist Democrat, or blue dog, Bredesen is running a similar race to Manchin. However, although his Republican opponent, Marsha Blackburn, is just as ardent a Trump fan as Morrisey, the state has surprisingly little in common with West Virginia save the Appalachian mountains and a blowout margin for Trump in 2016.

Tennessee is divided into three parts by the swoop of the Tennessee river, which rises in the eastern part of the state, descends into Alabama before emerging to flow northward into the Ohio river in Paducah, Kentucky. The key battlefield is middle Tennessee, the central part of the state penned inside the river.

Centered around Nashville, the region is economically thriving. Nashville is a tourist hub that has attracted Fortune 500 companies and the population of the metro area has doubled since 1990. One of the key figures in this process was Bredesen. First as mayor of Nashville and then as Tennessee’s governor, the 74-year-old played a key role in reviving the city, attracting pro sports teams and reviving Tennessee’s once sleepy capital city.

A wealthy former CEO of a healthcare company and transplant from the north, Bredesen long cut an almost disconcertingly moderate figure in the state.

He has tried to run a campaign that avoids national politics as much as possible. In one television ad, Bredesen looks squarely at the camera and says: “Look, I’m not running against Donald Trump.” Instead, he paints himself as a bipartisan problem solver and deflects any talk of the Democrats taking control of the Senate. “The chances of my party of being in the majority are minuscule,” he said in a debate.

Instead of making it about party labels or national figures, Bredesen has tried to keep things local in a state that has been strongly Republican in recent decades. In an interview with Politico, the former governor said if the race is about, “‘do you want to send a Democrat or Republican to Washington?’ I would lose. If it’s, ‘Do you want to send Phil Bredesen or Marsha Blackburn to Washington?’ I think I can win that.”

In contrast, his opponent Marsha Blackburn, a 16-year-veteran of Capitol Hill, is fully embracing Trump. Blackburn, who uses the masculine title ofcongressman, is a bomb thrower who long irritated many establishment Republicans in Tennessee dating back to her time in the state legislature.

Blackburn, who has been a frequent cable television presence, is a fervent social conservative. She has been an implacable opponent of abortion and even co-sponsored legislation, prompted by conspiracy theories about then President Barack Obama, to force presidential candidates to disclose their birth certificates.

During the campaign, she has consistently echoed Trump’s rhetoric. On television, she slams Bredesen for opposing the Trump travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries and for his skepticism about the efficacy of a wall on the US-Mexico border.

Blackburn’s hard-right policies even prompted an intervention by Taylor Swift, a Tennessee resident in the race. Swift endorsed Bredesen in an Instagram post and cited the Republican’s record on gay rights and women’s issues in doing so

However, demographic changes in the state and not its pop singers represent her key vulnerability. Her home base, the well-to-do Nashville suburb of Williamson, was one of only four in the state where Hillary Clinton did better than Barack Obama in the general election and was the sole holdout from Trump in the primary, when it went for Marco Rubio.

Although Nashville suburbs are still solidly Republican, that is starting to change ever so modestly and in the long term are trending towards Democrats. This combined with Blackburn’s weak personal poll numbers has given Democrats hope.

Scott Golden, the chair of the Tennessee Republican party told the Guardian, “there are no moderates left in Washington DC … it is a partisan team sport.” He cited the divisive vote over Kavanaugh.

In recent weeks Tennessee voters have seen the race through the same lens. In the aftermath of the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, Blackburn has surged while before the showdown, Bredesen held a narrow lead.

For Republicans, the hope is these highly charged and highly partisan national issues can trump the brands carefully built by both Bredesen and Manchin over decades in public office. The two men both came out in support of Kavanaugh’s nomination, trying to thwart one potential line of attack and cool the partisan enthusiasm of the Trump voters whom they will be relying on in November. The result was that one major Democratic Super Pac, Priorities USA, announced that it would no longer be supporting the two Senate candidates in November. The decision is simply another indication that their politics as moderate, red state Democrats may increasingly be outliers in a party that is moving leftwards.

Many liberal activists have argued that leftwing candidates in diverse states like Andrew Gillum in Florida or Beto O’Rourke in Texas are their party’s future. But for now, in a Senate map that is tilted towards red states, Democrats have no other options but to embrace throwbacks to a moderate past if they have any hopes of regaining the majority.

Phroyd

#us midterms 2018 #west virginia #tennessee #republicans #democrats

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cksmart-world · 4 years ago

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The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

September 29, 2020

OUR DUTY TO WRECK THE DEMOCRACY

OK, it wasn't exactly our duty to screw the Democrats and Obama out of their Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016, but we had 'em over a barrel — we had control of the Senate — so, tough cookies. We got the public to fall for the old “we can't appoint anyone to the high court in an election year” gag. The people have to have a voice, Itchy Mitchy McConnell said with a straight face. Now the Dumb Democrats have their hair on fire again because with only days until the election we're going to replace liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg with a right-wing woman who hates birth control and the Affordable Care Act. It's almost as good as when we replaced civil-rights hero Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas, who scoffs at affirmative action and all that equality bull. Haha.Well anyway, the Dems are so pissed off now that they are threatening to expand the court when they control the Senate. And if they weren't mad enough, Trump is saying we'll seat the new justice to make sure he wins the election. So subtle. The whiney liberal pundits are crying that we'll wreck the democracy with our hypocrisy and downright shittiness. But look, the Constitution says it's our duty to nominate justices. We Senate Republicans are just doing our duty as good Americans. Politics isn't patty-cake, so shut the 'F' up.

MADAME TRUE-SO READS THE PRESIDENTIAL TEA LEAVES

Things are so crazy what with the election and Covid and police shootings and everything that the staff here at Smart Bomb is about to go bonkers — check that, we are bonkers. We're so shook up that we went to see Madame True-so who can read tea leaves and tell the future. We said, Madame True-so, there are more than 205,000 dead Americans from Covid — 20 percent of all global coronavirus fatalities. She peered at the tea leaves and said: “I see a fat guy golfing in white pants and a red hat with dead bodies stacked like cord wood all around him.” OK, OK, will the fat guy in white pants steal the election in November? She wrinkled her nose and said: “I see a man hanging from a gallows wearing a T shirt that says, 'U.S. Constitution.' ” Is it the fat guy in white pants? Madame True-so got a distant look and said: “I see a line of cars heading for Canada and a billboard with an ugly, orange face that says, “I'm Great Again.” Oh no. This could be horrible. Who will be president, Madam True-so? Tell us, please. She said: “I see a woman with the initials N.P. drinking tea in the Rose Garden.” OMG. Will Trump be impeached again? Will he get indicted for tax fraud? With that she got up and said, “I have to go, I'll be late for pilates.”

SAY HER NAME

Here is a scenario: You're hanging out at your girlfriend's place watching TV in bed. After a while, you both begin to drift off to sleep. You awake to someone pounding on the front door and then it bursts open. So, like a good American you own one of the 400 million firearms in this country (this is sadly true) and shoot at whoever is breaking in. Immediately a hail of at least 30 bullets rip into the apartment, your girlfriend is shot six times and dies bleeding out in your arms. The cops search the place up and down, as per their warrant that was based on false information, and don't find anything illegal — including drugs. Three months later, the police finally release the incident report that says under injuries for your girlfriend, “None.” Next to the box that says, forced entry, the cops check “no.” The police were not wearing body cameras. Your girlfriend was shot by a cop firing into a side window although he could not see inside. The attorney general presented the case to a grand jury and did not ask for murder or manslaughter charges against the cops. We know this because in grand jury proceedings, where there is no defense, prosecutors can get an indictment against a baloney sandwich. In effect, the ruling said your girlfriend is collateral damage. She was 26 years old and she's dead. Say her name.

Post script — OK cadets and cadetettes, we have to start looking on the bright side, despite the fact that the stars are aligned against us. It's true, 2020 is the Year of the Rat on the Chinese calendar (we would never lie about that). But look, we aren't in danger of being killed by volcano ash, there aren't any floods coming, that big comet missed us last week, so we won't go extinct like the dinosaurs, and the Utes are playing football again. And consider this: we aren't living in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or Utah County — something Wilson and The Smart Bomb Band are very grateful for. You see, there is good news almost everywhere you look: Police dogs in Salt Lake City can't bite you anymore on account of they've been put on administrative leave; Republican candidate Burgess Owens hasn't declared bankruptcy since he announced his run for Congress; and there is no way in hell that Mike Lee will ever be appointed to the Supreme Court. Things really are coming up roses. No one in Utah was deemed “The World Dumbest Person” this week, although the title is still held by a woman from St. George. And Utah remains number one in Jell-O consumption — eating at least twice as much per capita as any other state. So chin up, put on your rose-colored glasses and if you get feeling a little low, just do some Jell-O shooters. Ah, that's better.

Well Wilson, you and the guys in the band have been sampling the famous Smart Bomb tequila Jell-O shooters, so we know you're in a good mood. Why not take us out with a little something that will soothe our senses after another week of cataclysm:

I'm going up the country, babe, don't you wanna go? I'm going up the country, babe, don't you wanna go? I'm going to some place where I've never been before

I'm going, I'm going where the water tastes like wine I'm going where the water tastes like wine We can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time

I'm gonna leave this city, got to get away I'm gonna leave this city, got to get away All this fussing and fighting, man, you know I sure can't stay

(Going Up The Country — Canned Heat)

PPS — During this difficult time for newspapers please make a donation to our very important local alternative news source Salt Lake City Weekly at PressBackers.com, a nonprofit dedicated to help fund local journalism. Thank you.

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andrewromanoyahoo · 8 years ago

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Meet the Democratic superlawyer who could save Jared Kushner

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and former U.S. Deputy Attorney General, Jamie Gorelick. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images, Sue Ogrocki/AP)

If Hillary Clinton were president right now, Jamie Gorelick might have been her attorney general.

Instead, Gorelick — a Democratic power player who served as deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton and raised more than $100,000 for Hillary in 2016 — could wind up serving as Jared Kushner’s savior.

Gorelick, as you may have noticed from any number of recent news reports, is Kushner’s lawyer. And Kushner, as you may have also noticed, is someone who is going to be spending a lot of time talking to his lawyer over the next several months.

Federal investigators are now focusing on Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top White House adviser after he failed to disclose several meetings with Russian officials and reportedly endeavored to establish a secret backchannel to the Kremlin during Trump’s transition — which means that Gorelick, who initially signed on to help Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, sort through various nepotism and conflict-of-interest concerns, is suddenly responsible for keeping the crown prince of Trump World out of much more serious trouble.

This odd coupling has attracted considerable attention — much of it negative — on both sides of the political peanut gallery, with conservatives warning Kushner to steer clear of “swamp queen” Gorelick and progressives accusing the Clintonista of assisting an administration they abhor.

“Hey Jamie Gorelick, you’ve just pored [sic] that ‘Complicit’ perfume on yourself,” fellow Democrat Hillary Rosen tweeted in March. (Rosen was alluding to a recent “Saturday Night Live” sketch about an Ivanka-branded scent.)

In an interview with Yahoo News, Gorelick admits that “it hurts my feelings when people I otherwise like say things like that.”

But while “I can understand the criticism,” she adds, “I just don’t agree with it.”

The truth, according to those who know her best, is that Gorelick (pronounced Guh-REH-lick) is neither a Democratic plant nor a Trumpian turncoat. They say she is a rarer species altogether, at least in today’s overly polarized, ultra-specialized Washington, D.C. — the last, perhaps, of a dying breed of Beltway superlawyers who spent much of the 20th century leveraging their broad experience and deep connections to become all-purpose political fixers for members of both parties.

“I handle big messes,” Gorelick says. “I consider this the best tradition for lawyers in Washington and I have tremendous respect for what these [superlawyers] did in their careers. I think of myself as having a similar point of view.”

The D.C. superlawyers were “the ultimate ‘go-to guys,’” as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius once put it, “who could get a bill passed or a presidential appointment scuttled or a secret deal negotiated.”

Members of this mandarin class included Clark Clifford, who counseled all four Democratic presidents of the Cold War era; Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran, the first of the modern lobbyists; Robert Strauss, who advised and both Republican and Democratic presidents over three administrations; and the most legendary superlawyer of them all, Edward Bennett Williams.

“Jamie Gorelick is a flashback to an earlier time,” says Williams’s authorized biographer Evan Thomas, who in his 1991 book The Man to See, chronicled Williams’s inexorable rise and decades-long reign as king of the Washington establishment — and who knows Gorelick from his days as Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief. “If Williams liked to be the man to see, then Jamie likes to be the woman to see.”

Attorney Edward B. Williams in 1958; former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford in 1972; and, attorney Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran in 1946. (Photos: Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images, AP Photo, George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

“She has a breadth of experience that is a match for — or better — than any Washington lawyer,” adds Ricki Seidman, who served under Gorelick in Clinton’s Justice Department. “If I were looking for someone to guide me through the complicated terrain of Washington, D.C., in any official capacity, she would be the first person I’d turn to.”

Gorelick acknowledges that many Democrats consider Trump and his associates to be out-of-bounds — so politically abnormal that the old Washington rules should no longer apply. But she doesn’t see it that way.

“The Trump administration has really unsettled people,” Gorelick says. “But I have a view of the tradition that is pretty fixed. I don’t think it’s antique. I think it holds today as much as it ever did. And if people criticize me for living within that tradition, so be it.”

“You have to be a little bit battle-hardened in this profession,” she sighs. “I guess I am.”

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In retrospect, it seems as if Gorelick was born to play the superlawyer role. In high school, she worked so hard that her father offered her $10 to get a B. A friend predicted in her yearbook that she would end up as one of two things: Supreme Court Justice or housewife. (The housewife part was a joke.)

At Harvard, Gorelick impressed and befriended everybody, including upperclassmen and professors. “The mark of destiny was on her when she was 19” is how one of her teachers, Martin Peretz, put it in a 1995 Washington Post profile.

Gorelick’s first law school class was taught by Alan Dershowitz, a provocative thinker who relished hard cases. “That stayed with me,” she told DCBar.org in 2011. “The joy and the thrill of … prevailing against all odds was just exhilarating.”

At the end of her first year, Gorelick became Dershowitz’s research assistant; at the beginning of her second year, he arranged for her to interview with Edward Bennett Williams. “You belong in Washington,” Dershowitz told Gorelick. She was hired to worked at Williams’s firm the following summer, even though they didn’t technically have a summer program.

Gorelick has remained in Washington ever since. After declining a Fulbright scholarship and passing on a clerkship with a federal judge, she took a job at a small D.C. firm specializing in criminal law. She was the first — and for many years, only — woman there.

“It was challenging,” Gorelick told the Washingtonian in 2011. “We represented NASCAR, and Bill France Sr., the founder, and Bill France Jr., his son and the past leader of NASCAR, used to compete to see who could tell me the grossest joke.” On another case, she continued, “this very senior lawyer would never address me directly.”

Yet Gorelick continued to climb the Washington ladder, bouncing back and forth between government service and white-collar litigation (even as she maintained her public-sector influence by securing spots on key governmental advisory boards and commissions.)

Jamie Gorelick, accompanied by Attorney General Janet Reno, meets reporters at the Justice Department in Washington, Feb. 23, 1994, after Reno announced that President Clinton will nominate Gorelick to become deputy attorney general. (Photo: Shayna Brennan/AP)

“Jamie crossed a lot of barriers without acting like she was crossing barriers,” says Seidman.

Gorelick vice chaired a Pentagon commission during her third year as an associate, then worked directly for the secretary of energy during the oil crisis of 1979. After another dozen years of private practice, she was elected president of the 80,000-member D.C. bar, cementing her insider status and “learn[ing],” as she once put it, “about this town in a way I hadn’t before.”

“I met people in large firms and in small firms,” Gorelick explained. “I came to see Washington as more of a village than an impenetrable city.”

When a Democrat finally returned to the White House, Gorelick followed. During the Clinton administration, she was never far from the center of action. One of Gorelick’s first tasks on the transition team was handling the confirmation process for Zoë Baird, Clinton’s nominee for attorney general. After Baird was derailed by Nannygate, Gorelick was assigned to Janet Reno, for whom the process went more smoothly. Gorelick went on to become general counsel at the Defense Department just in time to deal with the raging debate over gays in the military — and did a “masterly” job implementing Clinton’s controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, according to the 1995 Post profile, making the politically and legally dicey compromise work as well as it possibly could.

Next up was the Justice Department, where as deputy attorney general under the disorganized, distant Reno, Gorelick essentially ran the 100,000-employee operation, maintaining order during the Oklahoma City bombing and congressional inquiries into the Waco and Ruby Ridge confrontations. She presided over meetings with a gavel that read, “Because I said so.”

“Gorelick is strong where Reno is weak,” the Post wrote at the time. “She is a tough, demanding manager, exerting an influence over every policy and practice that emanates from the top.”

At the same time, Gorelick groomed a generation (or two) of influential D.C. lawyers, hiring them, advising them and helping to secure them jobs in both the public and private sectors. Two of her most prominent protégés were Beth Wilkinson, one of the top trial lawyers in the country, and Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s ill-fated Supreme Court nominee.

After her eventful stint in the Clinton administration, Gorelick returned to private practice, where she seemed to actively court controversy, surfacing at some of the most contentious moments of the 2000s: as vice chairwoman at Fannie Mae, where she earned $25.6 million even as the giant mortgage lender was coming under attack for massive accounting failures; as a member of the 9/11 Commission, where she was (falsely) accused by conservatives, including then Attorney General John Ashcroft, of creating an intelligence “wall” that hindered counterterrorism agents in the years before the attacks; as lead defense counsel for Duke University in 2006 during the highly publicized rape scandal there; as a lobbyist for Sallie Mae, seeking to stymie student loan reform; and as a lawyer for BP after the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010

Sen. Hillary Clinton hugs Jamie Gorelick, a commission member, during the second public hearing of the 9/11 Commission. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif, is also pictured. (Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images)

“The highest and best use of a lawyer’s talent is to represent people when they need you the most, which is often when there are governmental inquiries,” Gorelick tells Yahoo News. “If you look at the work I did for BP or for Duke in the lacrosse matter — or at the very first case I ever worked on, which was Jack Miller’s representation of Richard Nixon in the taking of Nixon’s papers — that’s what I do. That’s what my law firm does.”

***

Which brings us back to Kushner.

Democrats can’t comprehend why a fellow progressive like Gorelick would aid and abet President Trump’s slick son-in-law; conservatives can’t imagine that someone who dutifully served both Clintons — and was reportedly one of Obama’s top picks for FBI director — could possibly have Kushner’s best interests at heart.

What Gorelick’s bipartisan critics don’t understand is that she’s actually part of a long Washington tradition. And they don’t understand this because the Washington that gave rise to such a tradition no longer really exists.

Consider Williams. In 1954, he advised Joseph McCarthy after the Senate moved to censure the bullying anti-Communist for his conduct during public hearings; that same year, Williams also represented two Hollywood writers cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about their own alleged Communist activities.

“Both Republicans and Democrats sought his friendship and counsel,” Albin Krebs wrote in his New York Times obituary of Williams, “and he seemed always to be in good standing with the occupant of the Oval Office.”

What made the old model work, David Ignatius has explained, was “the illusion that a Washington lawyer could somehow be above the fray.”

“Williams, Clifford and their fellow superlawyers hated the idea that they were mere partisans — in their minds, they were legal statesmen,” he wrote. “That lofty self-image allowed them to advise, simultaneously, all the various parties in a dispute — to be the president’s friend, and the Ways and Means chairman’s friend and the tax-lobbying corporate CEO’s friend.”

Today’s D.C. is different. Extreme polarization has forced everyone in Washington to see everything through a partisan lens. Power is more diffuse, amorphous. The economics of specialization have discouraged younger lawyers from becoming generalists like Gorelick, with her expertise in the fields of national security, law enforcement, ethics, regulation, politics and criminal litigation. And our obsessive 24/7 media ecosystem has put an end to the whole clubby, smoke-filled-room style of dealmaking that superlawyers such as Clifford thrived on.

Some of these changes are improvements; others aren’t. But they help to illuminate why Gorelick seems to confound so many observers, especially now that she’s counseling Kushner.

Gorelick questions CIA Director George Tenet during his testimony before the 9/11 Commission on Capitol Hill, April 14, 2004. in Washington. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)

The reason Kushner came to Gorelick is clear enough: He and Ivanka wanted to work in Ivanka’s father’s White House — an unprecedented and potentially unethical situation — so who better to untangle the requisite corporate and legal knots than the last of the superlawyers? The fact that Gorelick is a dyed-in-the wool Democrat only lends more credibility to the arrangement.

“She’s a powerhouse,” says Amy Jeffress, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Gorelick at the Justice Department and has known her since childhood. “Very high-level clients are going to seek out someone of her stature” — regardless of political affiliation.

The reason Gorelick accepted Kushner as a client is also pretty clear: She relishes the hard cases.

“I’ve been doing this exact thing since 1975,” Gorelick told the Washingtonian. “You have to enjoy long odds. You have to enjoy trying to right the system, in that the government and Congress, the executive branch, the press have enormous power to bring criticism to bear and to sue, to indict — and often the case is overstated. The obligation of someone representing an individual or a company in those circumstances is to make sure that the other side of the argument is heard and that the result is fair. I enjoy that.”

Initially, the conflicts of interest surrounding Kushner were thorny enough; Gorelick spent two months late last year arranging for him to resign from his real estate and publishing businesses, shed most of his other assets and recuse himself from matters that would directly affect his remaining financial interests — just like “any other person entering public service,” according to Gorelick.

But now, with the recent Russia revelations, Gorelick’s client is swimming in much hotter legal waters.

So far, Gorelick has mostly just insisted that Kushner is ready and willing to explain himself to the FBI. “Mr. Kushner previously volunteered with Congress what he knows about these meetings,” she has told the press. “He will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry.”

It will be interesting to watch how the Kushner case develops in the months ahead — and how Gorelick defends him.

“If Jared Kusher wants me to assist in these other matters, I will do so,” Gorelick says. “We are not going to refuse to represent him in the Russia probe because many of us in the law firm don’t agree with the Trump administration’s political views.”

Gorelick notes that, even as she counsels Trump’s family, she continues to work on cases involving climate change and sanctuary cities that directly contradict the president’s policies. “Jared and Ivanka hired me for my legal advice,” she says. “I’m not changing who I am.”

Despite the bipartisan chorus of criticism, many Beltway insiders insist that the president’s son-in-law went to see the right woman.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner walk out to join President Trump aboard Marine One for the short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., May 19, 2017. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Asked whether “it’s a good thing” that Gorelick is representing someone many Democrats seem to revile, Amy Jeffress doesn’t hesitate before answering.

“It’s a good thing for Kushner,” she says.

Evan Thomas goes one step further. “Some people get all snooty about Jamie taking the filthy lucre of the Trumps,” he says. “But look, it’s better from country’s perspective to have a savvy Washington hand defending Kusher someone who can still make deals that are sensitive to the national interest without selling out her client. It’s tricky, but if anybody can figure out the line here, it’s Jamie Gorelick.”

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