What's really behind our trade deficit?

Every year the US Census tabulates our imports and exports. Following that link, you can see that the current value of net exports, i.e. the difference between exports and imports is -$500 billion.

So what's the big deal about a trade deficit?

Historically, a trade deficit meant gold and other commodities were leaving your country. Today it means that US dollars are leaving.  As I've mentioned on this blog in the past, the effect is that less money is spent on domestic goods resulting in slower GDP growth.

The biggest single driver of our trade deficit is oil imports. Last year alone we imported about 6.9 million barrels of oil per day -- and thanks to Obama's energy policies, that's actually at a 25 year low. Today on Twitter, I decided to quantify that a little:

@LupoYigal @donnastjohn @TheEconomist the bulk of the deficit is oil related. You want to eliminate our trade deficit, switch the US off oil

— Daily Combover (@tgcCombover) January 19, 2017

@LupoYigal @donnastjohn @TheEconomist under @BarackObama net oil imports lowest since '93, but still 7M bbl per day. https://t.co/brQDvNsnBs

— Daily Combover (@tgcCombover) January 19, 2017

@LupoYigal @donnastjohn @TheEconomist @BarackObama Even at $50/bbl, that's still > $125B. & oil prices are now on the rise. #PetrolPriceHike

— Daily Combover (@tgcCombover) January 19, 2017

@LupoYigal @donnastjohn @TheEconomist @BarackObama Most worrisome is the import growth under Reagan and Bush. We are likely to repeat that.

— Daily Combover (@tgcCombover) January 19, 2017

@LupoYigal @donnastjohn @TheEconomist @BarackObama meanwhile Trump talks about punitive tariffs on manufactured good. That hurts consumers.

— Daily Combover (@tgcCombover) January 19, 2017

Even if oil does fall back to $50 a barrel, that's still $125 billion out of $500 billion, or a quarter of our deficit. At $100 a barrel, we'd be looking at 40% of the deficit.

The answer is simple. We don't need tariffs, we need to get off oil.

Why We Can't Have a Tea Party

I don't anticipate writing that much today; I need a bit of a break and I know I'm going to spend a decent amount of time on the post-mortem roundup tomorrow. I just wanted to share an article from Thursday's USA Today by Jason Sattier about one of the topics I've written a decent amount about, the need for some big money behind an organized liberal movement. In this case, he explains why it probably won't happen.

So why aren’t liberal donors trying to spark a Tea Party of the left?

They know as well as anyone that the “spontaneous” uprising of 2009 was fed or led by an extremely well-financed web of conservative networks. How else do you get a movement enraged by teacher’s salaries and government regulation during an apocalyptic financial crisis caused by bankers exploiting a lack of government regulation?

Conservative donors have spent tens of millions of dollars and decades building a movement that revolves around resentment of liberals and the government. The gains of tax breaks, deregulation and privatization are massive — so massive that the donor class is willing to suffer some demands from an activated grassroots, as long as those demands don’t get in the way of tax breaks, deregulation and privatization.

Big Democratic donors also tend to have their pet causes, such as guns and climate change. And in some cases, such as climate and immigration, a Demos study shows, these funders actually push the party to the left. But the story is different when it comes to "pocketbook" issues such as the budget and taxes.

Democrats in general were nearly six times as likely to support raising taxes to reduce the deficit as Democratic donors who gave $5,000 or more, the Demos research found. Organized labor, meanwhile, the backbone of the left, has been systemically hollowed by the right while Democrats failed again and again to strengthen unions when they had the chance.

Yes, the left needs a movement that rivals the Tea Party movement’s passion, reach and influence. But rather than happening with the encouragement and funding of the party’s rich donors, it might have to happen in spite of them.

He's probably right, and it bums me out. I do think that we can win the Presidency back in 2020, and maybe even get a slim margin in the House and Senate by 2021. But we're never getting a majority of state legislatures back, at least not while I'm still *fairly* young, unless we can get a mass national movement like the Tea Party. I've been trying to make the point over and over, to no avail -- because, really, who the hell am I? -- that I think the Indivisible crowd is making a mistake to frame the Tea Party as a grassroots movement:

As much great energy as we have at the bottom in the progressive movement, we need real, well-funded leadership at the top, as well. It's largely because of the lack of that that despite the fact that we're on the right side of history that we're still relitigating the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1960s, the 1930s, hell, even the 1890s! It's why when they had Brooks Brothers Riots while we have somber press conferences. They've been building a movement for decades with tremendous resources behind them, win or lose, while we appear to dissolve and start anew after each loss because we have nothing to fall back upon

I should amend that to say "relitigating the 1870s... or even 1850s." And given that there's a lot of talk comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson, maybe we're looking further back. A Trail of Tears for Latinos isn't really out of the question.

But I digress. One of the reasons I was so excited about a Hillary Clinton presidency was the potential for a liberal-leaning Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United and start to take at least a chunk of the money out of politics. We're pretty clearly going the other way for at least the next decade or two. So we're going to need money. We can't pretend we don't, and we can't pretend that it wasn't big money that built the other side.

I continue to admire the goals of Indivisible, but it's really, really tough to get to the right conclusion when you're starting with the wrong premises. And until people like them acknowledge that they need to fight fire with fire, we're going to keep trying to douse gunfire with water because we learned the wrong lessons from history (and metaphors).

Post-Mortem Roundup, Week of 12/25/16

Lots of stuff to go through this week, though I'm guessing it'll be pretty soon that post-mortems will start to dwindle. At least Ramona Grigg hopes so:

All I ask is, no more postmortems. I don't want to rehash how or why Trump won. I don't want to hear that it was all Hillary's and the DNC's fault, or that anti-government voters wanted massive change, or that the racists won the day, or that Vladimir Putin and the Koch Brothers caused enough of a sneaky upheaval to cause half of America to go crazy and vote for an unqualified, ruthless carnival barker who lies with every breath he takes. I've read and heard it all.

We're not there yet. There's still new information coming out, and Ari and I will be working on ours for another month or two. Then we'll stop (mostly).

I was going to start by dissecting Nate Cohn's piece on the dissolution of the "Obama Coalition," particularly white working class voters (boy, am I sick of that term) in the northern Midwest. However, Ari beat me to it:

Nate Cohn's December 23rd column points to the cause of Clinton's loss as her inability to hold Obama's coalition together. His two pieces of evidence are:

1. Undereducated whites in Northern states voted for Trump in greater numbers than they did Romney.

2. Black voters in key Southern states did not vote at the same level as in 2008 or 2012.

The first point is wrong and the second completely misses the reason why.

Read more here.

Ari's basic assertion is that the 2008 "Obama Coalition" was more of a fluke caused by both the Bush economic collapse (which resulted in scenarios like this, which could only hold for so long), and because heck, Obama has the kind of charisma we really haven't seen in American politics in ages. If we're depending on that, we're in trouble... or not. The demographic progression John Judis and Ruy Texeira wrote about years ago appears to be real; it's just that as the groups that make up the Democratic coalition grow, Nixon's Southern Strategy, which won over the Southern working class whites from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, may taken hold among rural and exurban white in the North, or as Booman puts it, the Southification of the North. If that's the case, it ain't economic anxiety causing Rust Belt whites to vote more Republican. If it were, you'd expect nonwhite working class voters to trend in that direction, too. But it's not new for American white people in the lower-to-middle classes, who have been told for centuries that minorities are coming to take their stuff, to respond to that by digging in further.. In any case, 2016 was not the year the demographic bubble burst for the Republicans.

On Twitter, Elliott Lusztig's tells us why he believes that bubble is getting ready to burst soon:

Today is an awful day. But Resistance fighters, take heart: The GOP has now fully outed itself as the party of racism, sexism, and bigotry.

— Elliott Lusztig (@ezlusztig) December 20, 2016

11. To win one election, the GOP erased its own horizon. Destroyed its own future. I truly believe this. The arc does bend toward justice.

— Elliott Lusztig (@ezlusztig) December 20, 2016

Kurt Eichenwald disagrees; he thinks the Dems need to not lose the white working-class vote in order to win:

@Laezerwolf U cant dismiss half the country as stupid and racist - as if that was all there is -- and expect to appeal to them.

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 26, 2016

Hot off the presses, Ari points out that the "white working class" is, for the most part, too small to swing a presidential election based on addressing their issues alone. It is especially important to note that whites make up a small portion of the overall working class.

Of the 43.1 million people living under the poverty line, white people account for 28.6 million or 66%.  On the other hand, whites account for 79% of the people living over the poverty line. The CPS data does not breakdown age-race demographic combinations but we do also know that of the 43.1 million poor, 66% are above the age of 18.  If those people voted at the same rate as wealthier Americans (our first assumption), then we would be looking at about 15.7 million people under the poverty line that voted.  Since the CPS does not offer data for race-age subdivisions, we have to make a second assumption that the distribution of the poor over the age of 18 is the same as the distribution of the poor in general, such that 66% are white.  Multiplying that 15.7 million by 0.66 we find a total of 10.4 million voters here that make up the "White Working Class" - in effect, 7.6% of all voters.

Hillary turning Obama's 28-point margin of victory into a 12-point margin of victory, therefore means she lost 1.2% net votes to Trump. Compare that to the 2-3% that she lost because of Comey's interference and another 2-3% that she lost because of Putin's interference. And don't forget that a good sized chunk of that 1.2% may have flipped because of Comey or Putin. 

Booman doesn't quite agree with Ari (we're back and forth on this today), but regardless of whether the WWC vote is necessary to bring back to 2008 levels to win the Presidency back, there are other considerations:

But they haven’t been voting Democratic because they agree with us on pluralism or America’s proper role in the world or how to conduct diplomacy or the importance of science-informed education and policy or the importance of female autonomy and empowerment or the minimum requirements of temperament and experience expected of a president. They are probably more inclined to support the police than Blacks Lives Matter, don’t give a damn about climate change, and are conservative about gay rights. They voted for Obama despite all of these differences from Obama’s metropolitan “coalition of the ascendant.”

What this election did was cleave these voters from the Democratic Party even as the opposite thing was happening in our suburbs.

But the most threatening thing, in my view, is that too many of the suburban voters who abandoned the GOP's presidential candidate wound up sticking with downticket Republicans. In other words, it isn't an even swap.

Worse, even if it were an even swap, it would still be a bad trade due to the demographic dispersion of the vote. The Democrats will continue to lose most districts in this country if all their strength is confined to cities, suburbs, and college towns, and that means Republican dominance in state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives for as far as our eyes can see.

Through partisan redistricting, like it or not, Republicans have handed the keys to Congress to rural and exurban white voters, and we can't change that until 2021 at the earliest. So in the meantime, what can we understand about their needs?

Ian Reifowitz says there's a kernel of truth this time to jobs moving from whites to minorities, but that's based on location:

Let’s start with the topline stuff. This data, produced by the independent Economic Cycle Research Institute, covers the past nine years since the peak in employment we hit in November 2007, i.e. before the Great Recession. Before I dive in deeper, this sentence from the ECRI’s report sums it up:

Whites actually have fewer jobs than nine years ago, while Hispanics, Blacks and Asians together gained all of the net jobs added, and more.

ECRI explained the importance of place, and how it affected the data on race and employment:

Part of the reason may be that these jobs, predominantly in services, were created in metropolitan areas, rather than in rural areas and small towns where factories were shuttered as the manufacturing jobs disappeared. There is little reason to expect that those jobs are coming back to those areas away from the urban centers.

Looking at the numbers, metropolitan areas gained jobs over the past nine years, 5 percent more than they had in 2007, while the rest of the country shed 2 percent. In that sense it has been a lost decade for large geographic swaths of the country, in particular rural America—which has seen death rates increasing among rural whites, especially women, with suicide and drug overdose causing just about all the spike among younger people.

All these things connect. They help explain why Trump won enough votes in non-urban parts of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to put him over the top. Overall, among whites without a college degree, Trump won by 39 points. More importantly, he outperformed Mitt Romney by 14 points among that group, while Hillary gained 10 points among whites with a degree compared to President Obama four years ago. Even if the exit polls are off, they’re not off by enough to undercut what those figures tell us about the white working class vote.

Whites are losing jobs while others are gaining them because the jobs have been moving to the cities and out of the rural and exurban areas that used to be  "company towns."

"Icallbs" explains why, despite the fact that Hillary would likely help those voters more (to the extent they can be helped), they voted for Trump:

In the end it is not about the solutions that Trump is or is not providing, it is about his attitude toward minorities and anger at the “elite” that attracted them. The black President oversaw an economic recovery that benefited urban areas and minorities. As they see it, he helped “his kind”. Hillary is an educated woman who they felt would do the same, no matter what she said. They want someone instead who gives them permission to lash out at these people and provides them empty promises that the white rural working class will rise again without them having to adapt to accommodate technology, diversity and a new economy.

But according to Kevin Drum, we wouldn't even be talking about any of this if it weren't for the Comey letter:

Let's add this up:

• Trump gained 0.9 + 3.1 - 1.7 = +2.3 percent
• Clinton gained -0.9 + 2.3 - 3.1 = -1.7 percent

The October poll ended on the 24th. FBI Director James Comey released his infamous letter on the 28th. The November poll then showed Hillary Clinton with a net loss of 4 percent compared to Trump. This compares to net movement of only a few tenths of a point in the final days of the 2012 election. 

Nate Silver agrees:



Russian interference (covered up by Comey) likely also affected the race negatively for Clinton. Say that's worth another point in either direction, and without two incredibly unlikely occurrences, not only would Hillary have won, her raw numbers could have approached Obama's 2008 numbers and Trump's could have been similar to McCain's -- in other worse, if Russia and the FBI had stayed out of our election, not only would Hillary have won, but she would've won by quite a bit, potentially carrying a couple of the closer Senate seats as well as some additional House races. But it wasn't to be. However, it may indicate that Trump performed near the top of the range of where a Republican can, and Hillary was near the bottom for a Democrat -- in the final weeks, a worst-case scenario happened to her, and yet she lost by 70,000 votes in three states.

But perhaps we should've seen something like that  coming. We know that Republicans play dirty tricks and then use the media to amplify them --- in the last few cycles, we've had "Al Gore Said He Invented the Internet," Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and Birtherism. In the cases of Gore and Kerry, those were Rovian "attack their strength" approaches (probably the nearest equivalent this time was the Clinton Foundation, which should've been a real boon for her). But this is the first time in decades (though certainly not the first in the last century) that a political party has colluded with a hostile foreign government or one of our intelligence agencies (so far as we know) put its thumb on the scale of our election. And Oliver Chinyere, a former Clinton staffer, said they tried to warn us:

The KKK/Alt-Right/Men’s Rights Activists now see their hero as leader of the Free World. Racism and xenophobia won too, but so did stupidity. Now that Donald Trump is breaking from decades of bipartisan diplomatic foreign policy and US underwater drones are being stolen by the Chinese as we watch, remember there were people telling you this would happen. But back then, everyone seemed more concerned about potentially finding another killer risotto recipe in John Podesta’s emails so…

One thing we haven't considered enough is that, as inconceivable as it is to some of us, Donald Trump actually appealed to some people (scary, I know), or at the very least, could be looked at as a viable President who wouldn't be a major threat to the American way of life. Slate's Michelle Goldberg has a number of quotes obtained from a focus group Planned Parenthood held with Trump supporters.

This leads to an obvious question: If these women think defunding Planned Parenthood is a deal-breaker, why did they vote for a candidate who promised to do exactly that? After all, in a September letter addressed to “Pro-Life Leaders,” Trump pledged to strip Planned Parenthood’s federal funding unless it stops performing abortions. But many of the people in the focus groups didn’t know he’d made this assurance, and those who did didn’t take it seriously.

Goldberg concludes:

If Democrats ever want to regain power, they don’t need to wedge Trump away from the Republican Party. They need to yoke him to it. These voters might be OK with Trump talking about grabbing women by the pussies. What they didn’t know is that they were voting for the federal government to do it.

Yes and no. One of the problems here is that many people just can't believe that certain things can happen -- overturning of Roe v. Wade, elimination/privatization of Medicare and Social Security. Many came of age in the '80s and '90s when those really were third rail issues. Unfortunately, I think those people are wrong. And they voted accordingly -- many even liked him -- his status as a TV celebrity helped.

And finally, I'm not going into detail on this now, but it seem like SurveyMonkey's blog about the election results might be a great resource to tap into for the next few weeks. A taste:

A full accounting for a range of mis-estimates remains months away with the still-to-come release of 2016 voter files and government surveys, but our own, preliminary look at the performance of SurveyMonkey Election Tracking provides an initial take on some of the possible sources of error. Here, we share our initial conclusions about what we did well, what not so well, and why what we’re learning makes us optimistic about the future.

The mission of the SurveyMonkey’s Election Tracking project is provide a platform to collect raw data that can be used by clients in the media and beyond to apply their own weighting, analysis, and interpretation. We also wanted to test whether our approach — recruiting respondents from among the three million people a day who complete a survey on SurveyMonkey — could provide a solution to the challenge of single-digit response rates that relies on traditional polling theory instead of less-tested modeling techniques. 

We went a long way toward accomplishing the goals for 2016 by tracking election preferences at the national level all year and for 97 separate state level contests (including the presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial races) from Labor Day through Election Day. We offered multiple media partners interactive cross-tabs and the ability to select from multiple weighting schemes and filter the data by registered or likely voters. 

Yes, like almost every other poll out there, our final numbers pointed to a likely Clinton victory, but our data revealed important state-level dynamics.

Mmmm... nerdy.

Who is politicizing the economy?

In 2009 President Obama inherited the worst economic conditions this country had seen since at least 1981, if not 1929. Investors had lost faith in financial markets. Uncertainty in goods and services markets locked up the labor market. And newly indebted home owners lost the means to consume.  There was no bottom in sight. Gallup recorded an economic confidence (ECI) score of -65 when Obama took office. And that number never got back to black until this month when it magically shot up 31 points after Trump's election.

Obviously we can speculate that Republicans are only now accepting Obama's economy as good because a Republican is about to take office. But then shouldn't we expect Democrats to shift the opposite way? In that "both siderist" scenario, the ECI should look fairly flat.  As any liberal blogger can tell you, both siderists don't deal in reality.

So what is the reality here? It's quite simple actually. Liberals view economic conditions the way they are supposed to look at them. If the economy is doing well they have a favorable view (even when a Republican is sitting on the Iron Throne). If the economy is doing poorly, they have an unfavorable view (even when a Democrat is in charge).  But it's pretty clear that Conservatives don't operate the same way.  With the economy collapsing in 2008, Conservatives were saying things like "the fundamentals of the economy are strong." They pointed to Bush's housing-led growth from 2003 to 2007 as "52 months of ... uninterrupted job creation, longest in the history of the country."

But as this chart from politicsthatwork.com shows,  that clearly was not the case:

Which brings me to my main question, who is to blame for this divide? As it turns out, in the 1990s, Republicans actually thought the Clinton economy was great... at least until 1998. In 1998 even as we were experiencing the best economic growth in the post-war period, a new channel was starting to become available on TV sets nationwide.  In 1996, 17 million households had access to Fox News. Over the next four years that number was up 440%.  And with that greater reach came the first steps toward the idiocracy.

For the Record

I've been seeing the Indivisible document swirling through the tubes of the Interweb for a few days now, and figured I'd chime in.

I think it's great that it's happening; people are hungry for techniques to fight back, and Indivisible is basically a codification of a lot of the best practices that activists have been using for years, kind of a drier Rules for Radicals for our time.

I'm not going to chisel at the substance of the document, because it's generally solid and useful, but I want to take a sledgehammer to one of the basic premises. Quoting the mighty Driftglass:

THERE. IS. NO. TEA. PARTY

You see,  back in 2009, millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done foe the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat on 1,000 suns.  In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax.  In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth,  In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were.  Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

I don't want to patronize the team of writers who put this document together too much (they're in their 20s and early 30s, from what I understand), but I happened to be watching CNBC on that fateful day in 2009 when the "Tea Party" equivalent of the Franz Ferdinand shot was fired:

 

 

 

We knew way back then that this was nothing more than astroturf. From the Atlantic, on April 13, 2009:

 



Here is the organizational landscape of the April 15 tea party movement, in a nutshell: three national-level conservative groups, all with slightly different agendas, are guiding it. All are quick to tell you that the movement is a bottom-up affair and that its grassroots cred is real.

They are: FreedomWorks, the conservative action group led by Dick Armey; dontGO, a tech savvy free-market action group that sprung out of last August's oil-drilling debate in the House of Representatives; and Americans for Prosperity, an issue advocacy/activist group based on free market principles. Conservative bloggers, talk show hosts, and other media figures have attached themselves to the movement in peripheral capacities. Armey will appear at a major rally in Atlanta, FreedomWorks said.

Armey was doing the Tea Party thing waaaay back in 2002:

In 2002, CSE launched the website USTeaParty.com, with a video game that encouraged users to toss crates of tea off a ship in Boston Harbor while then-Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle stood on the dock, wearing a British redcoat and taunting: “Just pay me and shut up.”

Armey joined CSE as co-chairman the next year, providing political star power that the organization lacked. He made $430,000 a year, on top of the $750,000 salary he earned as a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.

But shortly after his arrival at CSE, a boardroom dispute split CSE in two. The Kochs broke off and founded Americans for Prosperity while Kibbe partnered with Armey to form FreedomWorks in 2004. Kibbe wanted to make sure FreedomWorks couldn’t disband the way CSE had, Armey says, so he structured the nonprofit with an unusual three-person board of trustees that had the final say in all organizational matters. Kibbe and Armey took two of the three seats.

Together they organized activists to support small-government initiatives throughout the country. But without the Kochs’ financial backing, FreedomWorks struggled to make payroll. Kibbe and Armey organized anti-tax protests each April 15 at post offices around the country—rarely drawing more than two dozen people.

They penned an op-ed submission in 2007 advocating the Boston Tea Party approach to citizen revolt. “[Samuel] Adams was the first American to recognize that ‘it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather, an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds,’ ” they wrote, according to Kate Zernike’s book Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America.

Editors yawned; the op-ed was never published. No matter what they tried, Kibbe and Armey couldn’t seem to ignite their modern-day Tea Party movement. 

And this goes back even further:

The spring of 1993 was a lousy time to be associated with the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. Bill Clinton had just stormed into the White House. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. Even undersecretaries of powerful cabinet departments from the Bush administration discovered that they were unloved, unwanted, and unemployed in the nation’s capital. 

.
.
.

So I did what many others did in that spring of 1993 in the nation’s capital: I began consulting. My first client was a think tank that I’d never heard of—a small outfit with big dreams and a curious checkbook.

At the time, no one knew much about Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). When I’d asked about funding for CSE, it had taken a while to get a clear answer. But, eventually, it became obvious when Rich Fink showed up at critical strategy sessions and spoke with unblinking certainty about what Charles Koch was interested in and wanted done without question. Though few have heard of Rich Fink, he’s been in the inner circle of the Koch brothers’ movement-building efforts for decades, influencing the creation and actions of Koch-funded front groups.

CSE was, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, with interests in manufacturing, trade, and investments.

But what I didn’t know when I began consulting for Citizens for a Sound Economy was what any of the connections between CSE and the Koch brothers were really all about. What was the endgame? Today, we know.

Charles and David Koch—who, if their individual fortunes were combined in one place, would quite possibly represent the wealthiest person on earth—have almost certainly spent or raised more than a billion dollars to successfully bend one of the two national parties in America to their will. The long rise of the Tea Party movement was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington. And it has nearly succeeded, as America saw in the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011, prompted by the Republican Party’s demand that the president negotiate over deficit reduction in exchange for an increase in the maximum amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to borrow. There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that.

On top of all of that, they had a whole TV network behind them:

Some on the left are dismayed at Fox News for its unabashed support of the "tea party" protest movement, wherein citizens protest the government's use of taxpayer money in its response to the economic crisis--primarily in the TARP bailout, and also the $787 economic stimulus package.

Frustration culminated this week with Glenn Beck, who promoted the tea parties on his show Monday, encouraging viewers to "celebrate with Fox News" and join the protests April 15. Some of Fox's more popular personalities--Greta Van Susteren, Neil Cavuto, Sean Hannity, and Beck himself--will broadcast live from tea parties in DC, Sacramento, San Antonio, and Atlanta on tax day.

What's our real equivalent to Fox News? It really doesn't exist (no, MSNBC doesn't count).

Anyway, this is not to say that there was no grassroots conservative activity during the time of the "Tea Party." There was some. But unlike Occupy Wall Street, and most of what pissed off and scared liberals doing right now, it was building on a foundation and frame that already had existed for years and just needed walls and some paint. Kibbe and Armey, among others, were making salaries well into the six figures to provide leadership, and the Fox talking heads were making millions. I don't think any member of OWS ever took a salary.

Conservatives are great at taking the long view -- Rick Perlstein's series on the rise of the modern conservative movement is required reading.

(An aside: we need a word that combines "pissed off" and "scared" to pithily describe what we're all feeling right now.)

So what's my point? It's really to address this disclaimer that was only in the original Indivisible Google document and colored the way I read the rest: "P.S. We’re doing this in our free time without coordination or support from our employers. We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything."

Um, WHY NOT?

As much great energy as we have at the bottom in the progressive movement, we need real, well-funded leadership at the top, as well. It's largely because of the lack of that that despite the fact that we're on the right side of history that we're still relitigating the 2000s, the 1990s, the 1960s, the 1930s, hell, even the 1890s! It's why when they had Brooks Brothers Riots while we have somber press conferences. They've been building a movement for decades with tremendous resources behind them, win or lose, while we appear to dissolve and start anew after each loss because we have nothing to fall back upon.

I don't expect the writers of this document to fix all of our problems alone, but they need to know their enemy. Why? Because their revolution was televised:

Why can't ours be?

Post-Mortem Roundup, 12/18/16

I appear to be doing these roughly weekly, and I'm going to try to continue with that.

There are a lot of contradictions in this bunch. Let's start with the Clinton campaign.

I told a friend a couple of weeks before the election that I felt really good about Clinton's chances based on the fact that the campaign appeared to be using a lot of the Obama strategy and infrastructure.  However, I was viewing that from the bubble of the volunteer room at Brooklyn HQ and the Brooklyn field office, where, yes, it appeared we were doing things right between sending hundreds of people every weekend to canvass in Philly and making hundreds of thousands of calls to Florida. But the fact is that that I cannot speak for what the campaign was doing in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Edward-Isaac Dovere at Politico said that the Clinton strategy in Michigan was just off:

FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

Building on Dovere's piece, Ed Kilgore says the campaign was too smart for its own good (which is silly in itself, but I'm sure worked well as clickbait):

Now the Clinton campaign was not unique in its reliance on a “model” for understanding election dynamics. One of the big trends since 2012 among political practitioners and observers alike has been the gradual displacement of random-sample polling with models of the electorate based on voter-registration files, supplemented by tracking polls of this fixed universe of voters. This approach tends to create a more static view of the electorate and its views, and probably builds in a bias for thinking of campaigns as mechanical devices for hitting numerical “targets” of communications with voters who are already in your column. You could see this new conventional wisdom (and the pseudoscientific certainty it bred) in pre-election models published by Bloomberg Politics and in an Election Day modeling experiment conducted by Slate. Having invested heavily in its own “model” for what it needed to do when and where, the Clinton campaign was naturally resistant to conflicting signals from the ignoramuses on the ground.

It is in that respect that just about everyone within and beyond the Clinton campaign erred in crediting it with a state-of-the-art “ground game” worth a point or two wherever it was deployed. Clinton had lots of field offices, to be sure. She had more money for get-out-the-vote operations. Team Clinton did much, much more targeted outreach to key voters in key states than did Team Trump. But in the end “Brooklyn’s” decisions were based on assumptions that had very little to do with actual developments on the “ground;” its hypersophisticated sensitivity to granular data about many millions of people made it fail to see and hear what was actually happening in the lead-up to the election.

For now it probably doesn’t matter whether it was James Comey or the campaign’s faulty self-confidence that cost Clinton the election. But when it comes time to build the next presidential general-election campaign, the people setting up the organization and paying the bills might want to rely a bit less on any system that values analytical omniscience at the expense of a willingness to change the game plan if there are signs that that is needed.

This is where I step in and say that one of the things we found was that maybe Trump didn't have a ground game, except he sort of did...

Josh Marshall implies also, that factors other than Comey helped create the rift in the "Blue Firewall," in this case in Wisconsin.:

What all of this comes down to is that something very big happened in this election that was quite separate from Comey and Putin. Let's put a pin in that for a moment before we discuss what that 'something' was. These outside interventions (obviously of very different kinds) were something like the straw that broke the camel's back. I think it's quite likely that without them Clinton would have held on in a tight race. Perhaps the shift in Wisconsin would have been 6% or 6.5% rather than 7.7% The consequences of this defeat, which are frankly massive, would be vastly different. But the shifting politico-demographic shift would be only slightly less steep.

If you believe in the integrity of our elections, American sovereignty and - yes, let's say it - the importance of the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, the Russian sabotage and influence campaign is hugely important. But if you can't distinguish between let's say the 1 or 2 percentage point shift caused by Russia and Comey, from the 5 or 6 or 7 percentage point shift that made that small shift so consequential, I really don't know how to help you. They're both extremely important, but for very different reasons.

Krugman also places the blame on Russia and the FBI:

Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?

And it wouldn’t have been seen as a marginal victory, either. Even as it was, Mrs. Clinton received almost three million more votes than her opponent, giving her a popular margin close to that of George W. Bush in 2004.

So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement. 

Back to bashing the Clinton campaign, in what appears to be John Judis's final postmortem, he calls the Clinton campaign "abysmal" and that they got outflanked.

The Hillary Clinton camp continues to dwell on the fact that she won the popular vote by 2.8 million, even though she lost the electoral college. But Clinton spent twice as much on the election as Trump did, and spent money to drive up the vote in Chicago, New Orleans, and California. According to Politico, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee were actually worried that while Clinton would win the electoral college, Trump would win the popular vote.

Trump, as his pollster Tony Fabrizio later explained, focused entirely on swing states, and didn’t try to “run up the score” in states like Texas, Georgia and Arizona that Trump expected to win. From October 21 to election day, Trump’s ad spending was entirely focused on swing states, while Clinton was still spending in Texas and California. If the two candidates had spent an equal amount, and if Trump had spent in states like Texas that he assumed he would win and in states like California where his margin was well below Mitt Romney in 2012, I believe the popular vote would have been much closer.

I do seem to remember Trump showing up in puzzling states like New Jersey down the stretch, so I don't think that she really got outflanked in that sense. She could've done better, but nearly everyone thought Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were in the bag, and there were plenty of calls for Hillary to expand the playing field (which she did, in making Arizona and Texas much closer than expected).

Here's a handy graphic of the candidates' appearances down the stretch:

The last 10 weeks of 2016 campaign stops in one handy gif: https://t.co/Hxc9cbKtTV pic.twitter.com/nYGulLESwN

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) December 17, 2016

Judis continues:

FBI Director James Comey definitely hurt Clinton’s chances when he re-raised the issue of her emails on October 28, but he may not have cost her the election. If you look at the Los Angeles Times tracking poll, which proved to be the most accurate predictor of the results, Clinton had pulled even with Trump soon after the release of the NBC videotape showing Trump bragging about his sexual exploits, but Trump had begun to pull ahead again on October 26, two days before Comey stepped in.

The LAT tracking poll was actually the most inaccurate of all of the polls. Additionally, Nate Silver would beg to differ about Comey, saying that the Comey letter (which maddeningly, was NOTHING), did move the needle by a couple of points among late deciders:

Comey had a large, measurable impact on the race. Harder to say with Russia/Wikileaks because it was drip-drip-drip. https://t.co/LgJkfYpZCk https://t.co/9FYMNz763b

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016

and

There's more evidence, too: Late-deciding voters broke strongly against Clinton in swing states, enough to cost her MI/WI/PA. pic.twitter.com/8r801ahDQO

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016

and

I'll put it like this: Clinton would almost certainly be President-elect if the election had been held on Oct. 27 (day before Comey letter).

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 11, 2016

Nate also says:

Data was clear that white noncollege voters were overrepresented in swing states, helping Trump in EC. Narrative-driven coverage ignored it.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 17, 2016

Ron Brownstein discussed how traditional energy impacted the votes of said white voters.

Comparing the latest federal figures on states’ per capita carbon emissions with the 2016 election results produces a clear pattern. Trump carried all of the 22 states with the most per capita carbon emissions, except for New Mexico, and 27 of the top 32 in all. (Colorado, Illinois, Delaware, and Minnesota were the Clinton-voting exceptions.) The Democratic nominee won 15 of the 18 states with the lowest per capita emissions—with the exception of Florida, North Carolina, and Idaho.

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The Democrats’ challenge is that their coalition has crumbled in states that fear these changes, particularly in the Rustbelt, faster than it has coalesced in the states benefiting from them, which are mostly across the Sunbelt. To recapture the White House in four years, they’ll need recovery on both fronts. But the Democrats’ long-term prospects will likely rely on accelerating their leap across these overlapping economic, cultural, and energy divides.

Though renewable sources are gaining ground in some Midwest states, Democrats face structural challenges in a preponderantly white and older region where manufacturing powered by low-cost, coal-generated electricity looms so large. More promising for them may be racially diversifying Sunbelt states that are also decoupling from fossil fuels as they shift toward both renewable energy sources and post-industrial employment. Already, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida rank in the bottom 20 states for carbon emissions.

There might be something to it; I noticed driving through rural Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia today, I saw a number of billboards essentially saying that without fossil fuels, particularly coal, jobs there are gone, I don't know who paid for them. Could the Dems have put up billboards talking about bringing jobs to those areas? Should they have?


Digby also shared a post from Craig Newmark about who actually did and didn't vote. Some takeaways:

-Trump cleaned up with older voters and white voters

-Blacks turned out at a greater rate than Hispanics or white (which would seem to contradict what we've heard about them staying home)

-Hispanics and blacks were much more likely to have wanted to vote but found they were unable than whites.

-Hispanic voters had much longer waits to  vote than whites did

-Black and Hispanic voters were almost twice more likely to have had to fill out a provisional ballot (could've been the difference right there; do we know how many were ultimately counted?)

-Millennials were the most likely to have had to file a provisional ballot, followed by Gen X. Once again, how many were actually counted?


Jenee Desmond Harris interviewed Cornell Belcher about his new book, and I picked up on this:

In battleground states, particularly more diverse states, the percentage of white people voting Democrat decreases significantly as that population gets more diverse. So diversity is having an opposite impact that is harmful to Democrats.

That’s why I argue to Democrats that you are going to lose more and more white votes, and unless there is a major party realignment, this is going to continue to be a phenomenon. As the Republican Party is seen more and more as the racial identification party for white people, you’re not gonna see us all of a sudden winning blue-collar white voters.

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Jenée Desmond-Harris

So is there a way any of this — the strong influence of racial aversion and racial antagonism in politics — can be brought under control or stopped, or do we just have to wait for demographic changes that will make people who are motivated by racial antagonism less influential?

Cornell Belcher

I think the point I would argue it has to happen before demographic change — you already have people taking to the streets yelling they want to take our country back. What does that look like 10 years from now? What happens when that angry 45, 46 percent think they’re losing power, because they are losing power? We have to solve for this.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

But nobody has figured out how to solve for that, right?

Cornell Belcher

But we have to stop pretending that it doesn’t exist. That’s a start.

Jenée Desmond-Harris

I can see how pretending it doesn’t exist would be an important first step. It’s always strange to me to hear people say that Obama “triggered political polarization,” without explaining the race part. As if it’s a total mystery why that happened.

Cornell Belcher

One of the great tragedies is that the election of the first black president, as opposed to being a racial breakthrough, has in fact given rise to the opposite. It really has triggered an antagonism, or uncertainty, or fear that was dormant, at least up until now.

Ta-Nahisi Coates talked to President Obama and said a bit more about the above:

Whiteness in America is a different symbol—a badge of advantage. In a country of professed meritocratic competition, this badge has long ensured an unerring privilege, represented in a 220-year monopoly on the highest office in the land. For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him. They saw footage of the president throwing bounce passes and shooting jumpers. They saw him enter a locker room, give a businesslike handshake to a white staffer, and then greet Kevin Durant with something more soulful. They saw his wife dancing with Jimmy Fallon and posing, resplendent, on the covers of magazines that had, only a decade earlier, been almost exclusively, if unofficially, reserved for ladies imbued with the great power of the badge.

For the preservation of the badge, insidious rumors were concocted to denigrate the first black White House. Obama gave free cellphones to disheveled welfare recipients. Obama went to Europe and complained that “ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs.” Obama had inscribed an Arabic saying on his wedding ring, then stopped wearing the ring, in observance of Ramadan. He canceled the National Day of Prayer; refused to sign certificates for Eagle Scouts; faked his attendance at Columbia University; and used a teleprompter to address a group of elementary-school students. The badge-holders fumed. They wanted their country back. And, though no one at the farewell party knew it, in a couple of weeks they would have it.

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When I told Obama that I thought Trump’s candidacy was an explicit reaction to the fact of a black president, he said he could see that, but then enumerated other explanations. When assessing Trump’s chances, he was direct: He couldn’t win.

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This speech ran counter to the history of the people it sought to address. Some of those same immigrants had firebombed the homes of the children of those same slaves. That young naval lieutenant was an imperial agent for a failed, immoral war. American division was real. In 2004, John Kerry did not win a single southern state. But Obama appealed to a belief in innocence—in particular a white innocence—that ascribed the country’s historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism. America was good. America was great.

Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center—and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. (“As a general proposition, it’s hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,” Obama once said to me.)

But if the president’s inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing.

 I've been wondering if happenings during Obama's second term had an effect on the Democrats' chances in 2016. For one thing, many non-liberal whites circled the wagons around Robert Zimmerman and thought of Black Lives Matter (which Clinton embraced) as a racist institution. Also, from the Weekly Standard:

Then there's race relations. Obama was elected in large part because of his promise to heal racial wounds. It hasn't worked out that way. In 2001, Gallup found that 70 percent of blacks and 62 percent of whites thought race relations in America were somewhat or very good. By the time Obama was inaugurated those numbers had flipped, with 61 percent of blacks and 70 percent of whites (having just absolved themselves by voting for Obama, one suspects) rating race relations as good. During Obama's tenure, both numbers have been in freefall. Today, only 51 percent of blacks and 45 percent of whites think relations between the races are good.

and from Trump himself:

“The country has practically never been as divided as it is now,” the billionaire added. “We’re going to bring everybody together. white, black. We’re going to bring everybody together. We’re bringing our country together, the richer the poorer, everybody!”

The talking point went around and we heard  many quotes along those lines from Trump voters, as well as the one (which for some reason I can't find) about how Hillary talked to Latinos, blacks, and other minority groups, but not "regular Americans."

We've been told a lot about how Hillary Clinton didn't speak to white working class voters (ignoring that a huge part of the working class isn't white), and that she needed to speak more about economics. From David Roberts at Vox:

Put aside, for a moment, the notion that economic issues can be separated from identity politics (they cannot). Let’s focus on the critique of Clinton. It’s one I’ve heard so many times that I got curious: What did Clinton talk about?

To find out, I gathered all her campaign speeches (from both the primary and general campaigns) into one document and did a simple word-frequency analysis.

The results are below. As you can see, I’ve been as generous as possible in filing things under “identity politics.” Anything about minorities or criminal justice or gay people or immigrants, I filed as identity politics. I even included mentions of climate and clean energy in that category, though in a sane world those would be top-tier economic issues.

So, without further ado, what did Hillary Clinton talk about?

 

 

That bliie line at the bottom that's three times as long as any others? "Jobs."

 

So, this is another time where the numbers don't bear out the assertions.

 

Still so much to unravel!

 

 

 

The Spread of a Witchhunt

As I was driving from Cincinnati back to NYC today, I caught up on my favorite longer-form blogs, including Stonekettle Station, via @Voice text-to-speech software. Jim Wright posted a few days ago about his encounters with insane Twitter users who continue to believe #Pizzagate is a real thing. What he found:

The people who believe this, and there are many, believe it hard.

The very suggestion that their narrative is quite literally insane sends them into fury.

There is simply no proof, none, you can offer that will convince them their narrative is false. When I suggested such on social media I was instantly attacked. 

Jim had hundreds of users, not bots, come after him with some insane stuff. He challenged others to try doing the same -- Tweeting about how #Pizzagate is (obviously) a fantasy. I'm going to give it a shot, but I probably don't have enough followers to be noticed.

The main point of Jim's post is to talk about how mass hysteria spreads over crazy stories.

None of it is that surprising, other than one thing. He discusses the McMartin Preschool Trial, which was a scandal involving a preschool where a woman accused the operators of a preschool of sodomizing her child. The trial ran from 1983-1990 and involved some truly far-out claims:

In addition, Johnson also made several more accusations, including that people at the daycare had sexual encounters with animals, that "Peggy drilled a child under the arms" and "Ray flew in the air."[1][5] Ray Buckey was questioned, but was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. The police then sent a form letter to about 200 parents of students at the McMartin school, stating that their children might have been abused, and asking the parents to question their children.

I vaguely remember the story from when I was a kid. I didn't remember the craziest parts, but I do remember that we, as the public, seemed to take most of it as truth. It was news to me today, 26 years later, that all were acquitted and the plaintiff was a paranoid schizophrenic. I guess that proves Jim's overall point -- the media took a ridiculous, untrue story and ran with it. Sound familiar?

An aside: When @Voice reads "#Pizzagate," it pronounces "Pizza" like Brian Butterfield does:

 

 

How long until we have a mass shooting over #HoisinCrispyOwl?

Going Local

I'm running out the door for the evening, but I really have been meaning to share this important piece by New York's Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman (the same one who got Trump to cough up $25 million settlement for the fraud that is Trump University).

The big takeaway from 2016 is that, despite the public supporting many Democratic positions on policy, Republicans are now reaping the benefits of their 30-year organizing strategy, supported by dozens of mega-wealthy donors. As someone who has recruited and fundraised for state candidates, I know that while Democrats have been great at raising money for presidential candidates, Republicans have an overwhelming advantage as you move down-ballot.

Since 2010, Republican candidates at the state level have outraised their Democratic counterparts by more than $700 million, according to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. In that same period, the Republican Governors Association outraised its Democratic counterpart by a nearly 2-to-1 margin and, at the state legislative level, Democrats were outraised nearly 3-to-1 before we even take into account independent expenditures, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

And as Republicans have gained control at the state level, they've used their power to enact a massive phalanx of legal voter suppression -- strict voter ID laws, cutbacks in early voting, new registration requirements and other regulations -- aimed at depressing voters in core Democratic constituencies.

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The good news for Democrats is that this problem has a clear solution. The founders actually designed our federalist system to deal with attempts at overreach by the federal government. The provisions they put into place to check the power of a "tyrant" may now be put to their greatest test in American history. To be sure, faced with hegemonic Republican power at the federal level, our representatives in Washington need our support, but we may best have their backs by girding for real action at the state level. 

The first line of defense will be Democratic governors, attorneys-general and legislatures. Democratic activists must demand that their Democratic state leaders stand up to federal overreach and protect our most vulnerable residents, including immigrants and racial and religious minorities. Those activists should support Democrats when we do the right thing, and get in our faces when we shirk moral leadership.

Read the rest here.

Should We Be Surprised That the New York Times Protected a Republican Before an Election?

If you're over 30, no.

Exactly a week before Election Day, The New York Times published a story entitled, "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. sees no clear ties to Russia." (I'm not even going to link directly to it because we now know, and even knew then, it to be most certainly untrue.

If we knew that, the Times must have too. But they cherrypicked facts and asserted, based on the FBI, who was complicit in its own way in attacking Hillary Clinton inappropriately to affect the election, The FBI had no qualms about publishing a letter accusing but not accusing Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing a week before the election, but even CNBC, which is not the most pro-Clinton news source, could see on the same day that Comey was covering up Russia's involvement in our election.

Well, not we have evidence that the Times purposely covered up information that contradicted what Comey was telling them. From the Hiil:

A spokesman for Rep. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Saturday blasted the New York Times for publishing a story before the election downplaying Donald Trump's links to Russia without using quotes from Reid that challenged the story.

Adam Jentleson tweeted a link to an Oct. 31 Times article headlined "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia."

"I'll say it: NYT interviewed Reid for this story. He said things contrary to the story. NYT discarded the interview," he added.

"Maybe some want to know why the NYT seemed to cover for Comey's FBI? Maybe even some at the NYT? Maybe not? I'm just asking questions," Jentleson added later.

So, according to Harry Reid's spokesman, the Senate Majority (EDIT: Minority) Leader of the United States made a statement to the Times that contradicted the FBI director, but left that out, thus changing the whole meaning of the story. That should be a shocker, right?

Well, not really, to me. I don't think that six weeks ago is long enough for us to forget how the Times shamelessly perseverated on Hillary Clinton's e-mails... On a Google search of "New York Times Hillary Clinton E-mails" I received about 22,800,000 results, including "Why Clinton's Emails Matter, 10 Questions (and Answers) About New Email Trove, "Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton's Campaign," "Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, and a Test of Loyalty" (don't even get me started on how awful the press was to Huma, who is an incredible person that didn't deserve anything she got), "Hillary Clinton Assails James Comey, Calling Email Decision 'Deeply Troubling," "Justice Department Obtains Warrant to Review Clinton Aide's Emails," "FBI Begins Review of Clinton Aide's Emails, "Donations to Foundation Vexed Hillary Clinton's Aides, Emails Show," and "Chappatte on Hillary Clinton's Emails." Those were all just on the first page of Google, and all were published within ten days before Election Day. And this was, as Matthew Yglesias put it, "The Real Clinton Email Scandal Is That a Bullshit Story Has Dominated the Campaign," which I had put an entire Saturday into documenting waaaaay back on September 3rd.

But feeling free to make editorial decisions that deliberately damage the Democrat in a Presidential election is one thing; hiding important information to keep the Republican safe is another. And this is not the first time they've done it. They did this in the 2004 election as well, protecting George W. Bush:

The New York Times' revelation yesterday that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping raised eyebrows in political and media circles, for both its stunning disclosures and the circumstances of its publication.

In an unusual note, the Times said in its story that it held off publishing the 3,600-word article for a year after the newspaper's representatives met with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny."

The Times said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting."

The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.

The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story's path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier.

Those who forget history and all that...

Another Gaggle of Post-Mortems

It's been a busy week, both in my life and in the more immediate volley from the tennis ball machine that is the Trump Presidential transition (TM Bob Cesca). I've been accumulating more columns and data dissecting last month's tragedy. I'm hoping I can pull this many into something coherent. Well, here goes.

Since I just referenced Bob Cesca, let's start with his piece from Wednesday. He asserts that the Dems really didn't experience much of a loss, having won the popular vote by so much, and the loss of white working class voters is overblown:

The shift in white blue-collar voters from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 is much more anecdotal than is being acknowledged among A-list pundits. It’s a fluke that largely reflects a narrow pocket of voters who hate Clinton due to an ongoing geyser of attacks, mostly unfair or based on nonexistent complaints, that has been erupting constantly for 25 years. This was more about a reaction in a small handful of battleground districts rather than a coast-to-coast existential crisis within the Democratic Party.

He believes the Democrats need to ignore the Beltway conventional wisdom that comes up about their party every election, win or lose, that they need to tack to the center. Rather, he feels, going left is the way to go, and he has statistics to back that up:

On health care, 86 percent of Americans with insurance policies purchased via the Affordable Care Act like their coverage. Furthermore, if we take the word “Obamacare” out of the equation, most Americans love the individual parts of the law.

Regarding taxes, 61 percent of voters surveyed think the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share in taxes and 67 percent believe corporations aren’t paying enough.

Concerning Wall Street, 58 percent of those surveyed support breaking up the big banks. Much of the credit here should go to Sen. Bernie Sanders, for setting an example of how Democrats can sell leftist issues without apology.

On income inequality, 66 percent of respondents agree that wealth should be more evenly distributed.

When it comes to college tuition, 62 percent of those polled want debt-free higher education.

Regarding abortion, most Americans surveyed believe abortion should remain legal in some if not all circumstances. Only 19 percent of voters think it should be illegal in all cases.

I'm with him on policy; not sure yet on the "WWC." (though I'm leaning that way, there are stats showing otherwise too)

Just one disagreement, and it's more a matter of degree because I think it's overblown:

The shift in Republican control over state legislatures, governorships and the U.S. Congress is less a consequence of the Democratic platform and more about the rise of conservative media, conservative propaganda and, yes, fake news.

Yes, conservative media and fake news are problems, but the bigger factor, as I've said in the past, appears to be how the mainstream media covers politics. I'm not going to link to anything I've written, because the inimitable Driftglass has written a tour de force (the danged thing, including citations, is about 5000 words) about it (SOMEBODY PAY THE MAN -- DAVID BROCK, I'M TALKING TO YOU). Take it away, Mr. Glass:

This is why I can tell you that this idea that "better messaging" to the white working class is somehow the royal road back to political majorities for the Democratic party is nonsense.  Sure, Democrats always need to work on speaking like mortal human beings and progressives in general suffer from an inexplicable inability to kill the fucking bunny even with all the claws and fangs at their disposal:

But messaging itself is not the problem.  The media is the problem.  And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing.

This is shaping up to be a long post because sometimes I feel the need to drive a point home using a great big hammer, so if you want to scroll on down, be my guest.  But before you move along, my premise is fairly easy to summarize:

For a variety if reasons, white working class Americans have been taking a pounding since the late 1970s.  And for a different variety of reasons, a disturbingly high number number of white working class Americans keep voting for the people that fuck them over.

Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower.  In fact, outside of health care (and turkey pardons), I would wager a penny and a fiddle of gold that in the last eight years the Obama administration put more effort into promoting American manufacturing than into any other domestic policy priority.

If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.

If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels.  Email servers and Benghaaaazi.  A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party".  Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!

So, as the late, great Al Smith used to say, let's take a look at the record...

I have spent a couple of days going over hundreds of White House press releases, public statements, sections of each of President Obama's State of the Union addresses, etc. all on the subject of American manufacturing.  This is a small, representative sample from that gargantuan pile, with emphasis added by me as the spirit moves me.  

And he presents exactly that. Bottom line, the Obama administration presided over the creation of 800,000 new manufacturing jobs since the end of the Bush recession (note that that's about the likely exaggerated number that Bernie Sanders said NAFTA cost the sector, so at worst the Democrats caused a net gain over time, and that's if you even consider NAFTA a Democratic deal) , but nobody noticed because the media rarely talked about it.

Anyway, read the whole thing, but I want to bring in a little more detail from a couple of the articles Driftglass cites.

Tons of useful stuff (of course), from Rick Perlstein. The meat for me, for the purpose of my post-morteming:

Trump boogied his way to Pennsylvania Avenue to the tune of the extraordinary finding by a Washington Post-ABC News poll that “corruption in government” was listed by 17 percent of voters as the most important issue in the presidential election, second only to the economy, and ahead of terrorism and health care—and that voters trusted Trump over Clinton to be better on the issue by a margin of 48 to 39 percent, her worst deficit on any issue. This is the part of my article where rhetorical conventions demand I provide a thumbnail sketch of all the reasons why it’s factually absurd that anyone would believe that Donald Trump is less corrupt than Hillary Clinton. I have better things to do with my time than belabor the obvious.

Yet somehow, the great mass of Americans believed Clinton was the crook. Might it have something to do with the myriad articles like, say, “Smoke Surrounds the Clinton Foundation,” by The Los Angeles Times’s top pundit Doyle McManus? This piece, all too typically, despite endeavoring to debunk Trump claims of Clinton corruption, repeated charges like “Doug Band, who helped create the Clinton Global Initiative, sought access to State Department officials for Clinton Foundation donors”—even though donors did not get that access). And that donors harbored the “assumption” that they would “move to the head of the line”—even though they never did.

Trump gave absolutely no indication that he was anything but corrupt since the first time he ever seriously considered running for President back in 2000. And it's not even worth linking to how corrupt he's turning out to be as President-Elect because it would take me from now until Inauguration Day just to cover the first week post-election.

And what were pundits like McManus smoking? The vapors from a cunning long-term disinformation campaign run by the man Donald Trump appointed as his chief White House political strategist. Steve Bannon chartered a nonprofit “Government Accountability Institute,” whose president, Peter Schweizer, hacked out an insinuation-laden tome, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, then offered its “findings” on an exclusive pre-publication basis to the Times, which shamefully accepted the deal—with, predictably, the public’s perceptions of Clinton’s trustworthiness cratering in tandem with our national Newspaper of Record’s serial laundering of Steve Bannon’s filth.

So where did it come from? A book published by STEVE BANNON that the New York Times took as gospel for just long enough to not be able to put that cat back in the bag. This is why I tend to fact-check the Times nearly as much as I do PolitiUncutCo or whatever these days. The New York Times has been at the wide end of the anti-Clinton puke funnel since the Whitewater days. Fuck 'em. I'm never subscribing.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic makes a point I tried to make a couple of weeks back -- Hillary did have a message for the working class (white or not):

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word  “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

What’s more, the evidence that Clinton lost because of the nation’s economic disenchantment is extremely mixed. Some economists found that Trump won in counties affected by trade with China. But among the 52 percent of voters who said economics was the most important issue in the election, Clinton beat Trump by double digits. In the vast majority of swing states, voters said they preferred Clinton on the economy. If the 2016 election had come down to economics exclusively, the working class—which, by any reasonable definition, includes the black, Hispanic, and Asian working classes, too—would have elected Hillary Clinton president.

The more frightening possibility for liberals is that Clinton didn’t lose because the white working class failed to hear her message, but precisely because they did hear it.

That message either wasn't heard, or Trump's message of fear, xenophobia, and hate resonated more with whites because they care about keeping others down than improving or even maintaining their own lot in life (which is basically the definition of a conservative).

After everything I've read over the last month, I'm inclined to agree with that last sentence. But Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr at Slate do not (go figure; contrarianism for contrarianism's sake is essentially what Slate is about). But I'm willing to hear them out without much commentary from me. These are their five main points supporting their thesis about how Hillary lost the Rust Belt rather than Trump winning it:

1. In the Rust Belt 5, the GOP’s pickup of voters making $50,000 or less is overshadowed by the Democrats’ dramatic loss of voters in that category.

2. Republicans in the Rust Belt 5 picked up almost as many wealthy voters making over $100,000 as voters who made less than $50,000.

3. Trump did not flip white voters in the Rust Belt who had supported Obama. Democrats lost them.

4. The real story—the one the pundits missed—is that voters who fled the Democrats in the Rust Belt 5 were twice as likely either to vote for a third party or to stay at home than to embrace Trump.

The work of Martin Longman, whom I've cited a lot on this, plus the fact that Trump appears to have hit the high water mark for Republicans (more on that another time) in terms of total votes while Hillary appears to be approaching the second-highest mark in the popular vote for any candidate, ever. But I'll be digging into their work more because their viewpoint is as valid as any, until it's not.

Ari was just saying to me that in the last week, undecided broke for Trump, and he and many others believe that's due to the Comey letter. Kevin Drum's got a post up about the generally negative coverage of the campaign, but this is the part that stands out to me:

I can see how the Comey letter would dip Clinton's numbers at the end, but why did the media (relatively) fawn all over Trump over the last three weeks? Did they shine a positive light on his sexual assault stories? I honestly don't remember; once I started working heavily with the campaign in October, I mostly only had time to keep my eye on the polls more than the stories.

What post-morteming since 1992 would be complete without talking about conservative evangelical Christians? Digby shares a Washington Post article that tells us that conservative evangelicals sided with Trump because of some Supreme Court decision from last year:

The presidential election was so close that many factors were “but-for” causes of Donald Trump’s victory. One that’s been mostly overlooked is Trump’s surprising success with religious voters. According to exit polls, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, and Hillary Clinton only 16 percent. Trump did significantly better than the overtly religious Mitt Romney and the overtly evangelical George W. Bush. He likely over-performed among other theologically conservative voters, such as traditionalist Catholics, as well. Not bad for a thrice-married adulterer of no discernible faith.

To what can we attribute Trump’s success? The most logical answer is that religious traditionalists felt that their religious liberty was under assault from liberals, and they therefore had to hold their noses and vote for Trump.

The DID NOT "hold their noses and vote for Trump." They enthusiastically voted for Trump. They had 16 other god-bothering candidates they could've voted for in the primary, yet they voted for him. Why? For the same reason the "white working class" did. Fear, hate, and xenophobia. These are the same people who tried to hold on to segregation as stridently and longer than just about anyone else. Trump gave them a much more luscious taste of that cracker-white apple than Bush, McCain, or Romney did. As we Jewish people say, "Zehu!"

Washington Post, you should know better already.

From the Washington Post to the Washington Monthly:

We’ve heard for months now that Donald Trump is as much a threat to the Republican Party as to the Democrats – and that part of his appeal was being tough on both of the stale/corrupt two parties.

Sure enough, there is evidence that on November 8, voters simultaneously said they liked Trump but disliked Republicans. Because the Democrats fell short of both expectations and winning power, it was barely noticed that:

40% of voters viewed Republicans favorably compared to 47% for the Democrats.

The triumphant, newly-re-elected Republican Congress has a 15% approval rating.

Republicans did lose two Senate seats and six House seats – a horrible disappointment for Democrats but still, you know, an actual loss of seats.

More people voted for Democrats in the Senate races than for Republican.

And yet the Republican Party has more power now than it has in decades, and is acting as if the party received a tidal-wave mandate.

Why? Because they cheat.

Aaaaand finally, I have to *#%@ing celebrate the return of the Rude Pundit, who comes back just in time to make the cut on this post. And he needed no stretching, or shootaround, or practice swings... he's on fire:

When I first put myself in a self-imposed time out, one of the reasons was that I was really fucking pissed at myself for getting the presidential election so wrong, for thinking that it was a no-brainer that Hillary Clinton would be elected, that the country wasn't so stupid and deluded and hateful that it would elect a fuzzy, bulbous fungus in human form instead.

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But lately, I've come around to another way of thinking. I wasn't wrong. Our election system is so innately fucked that it got it wrong. Right now, Clinton is up by nearly 3 million votes. That's 2 percent more than Donald Trump, with a lead that's growing with every precinct finalized. Yeah, yeah, she didn't win the presidency. But I wasn't wrong about the country. Nearly 54% of voters rejected Trump. And a plurality supported Clinton by far.  

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Trump won because the Founders created a fucked-up system to make slave states feel wanted because conservatives have always thrown a fit if you don't just accept their ignorance. We can delude ourselves and say that "in their wisdom" the Founders created the Electoral College as a way to put the brakes on the election of a vile blithering idiot with dictatorial aspirations. But it's that very system that has gotten us to this point.

And the kicker, which is an actual, honest-to-FSM ACTION that addresses the desperate pleas I've made the last two days, which agreeing with me about the reason said action just ain't gonna happen:

(If Clinton truly wanted to fight, she'd take Lawrence Lessig's advice and go after the constitutionality of the apportionment of the electors. Republicans would do it in a heartbeat if the electoral and popular vote were reversed. But Democrats never fight like that. The GOP is throwing sand in our eyes and stomping us while we're wondering why the ref doesn't call a penalty.) 

Fuck yes, Mr. Papa. Welcome back to the good fight.