Sunday School 1/27/19

Lots going on this morning on the talk shows, most of which will not be addressed in today's post.

For example, I won't say much of anything about Roger Stone's TV appearance but he was asked this absurd question by George Stephanopoulos:

You're in good shape but you're not a young man, 66 years old. Are you prepared to spend the last, best years of your life in jail?

The point of the question, which must have been a plant, was to allow Stone to plug his legal defense fund. If ABC has an ombudsman, I hope that person looks at this interview. Shame on the network for giving Stone this platform. And shame on Stone for having a tattoo of Richard Nixon's face on his back. That's just wrong.

Also on with George today? Former NJ Governor Chris Christie, an ABC News contributor and now the author of  "Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey and the Power of In Your Face Politics" (a book not to miss, according to USA Today).  Here's a snippet of that interview:

What I outline in the book, though, is garbage in, garbage out. And the problem for the president has been at time, and especially the people he had around him in the beginning, were just not suited to be there. And when you're getting advice from those people, lie the executive orders we talk about right in the beginning, with Steve Bannon and others writing them on the back of an envelope essentially, not vetted... you know, when you do that kind of stuff, when you have people who think they can be rogue actors like that, that ill-serves the president. They got him off to a really bad start in that regard, and it drove me crazy because I knew we had a plan for him that would have gotten him off to a good start with good people. 

It's important to remember that while Steve Bannon formally fired Christie, it was Jared Kushner who gave the order.

Sunday School 11/4/18

One classroom and only one, I told myself this morning. It was totally random that I picked MTP with Chuck Todd; I honestly scribbled show names on scraps of paper, wadded them up and picked one.

After all, since this is the Sunday before Election Day, the shows were going to pretty much the same anyway - heck, they're pretty  much the same every Sunday, truth be told.

First up was Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who's the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; he was followed by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, chair of the Republican Governors Association.

Van Hollen was in charge of the DCCC in 2008, when the Dems picked up 21 seats in the House and 8 in the Senate, and in 2010 when they lost 63 seats in the House and another six in the Senate. He was asked to compare the atmosphere between 2010 and today.

There are big differences between the House and Senate seats in this cycle, Chuck because on the one hand you have kind of a wave, a blue wave, although how big it will be, we don't know. But then in the Senate races, we've got a lot of senators who are running in states that Donald Trump won. And for them, they've been very clear from the beginning that their number one job is to stand up for the people of their states. And if that means working with Donald Trump on something that helps their states, they will. If it means opposing him and Republicans, they will also do that, for example, on protecting people with pre-existing health conditions. So it's a very different, sort of, political battlefield in Senate races than House races. 

Interesting answer, there -- not because he didn't answer the question he was asked, really, but more because he actually came out and said that Democrats who are running in purple states are going to do what they're supposed to do, instead of doing what the party leadership says they're supposed to do.

Van Hollen spoke about the narrow path to a Senate majority (holding on to most of their current seats and picking up a few more), but the real issue is voter turnout, he said. Todd then described what he thought would be a good night would be winning one of the races in Missouri, Tennessee, Texas and North Dakota; they'd need two, he said, to even think about a majority. Both of them agreed that going 0-4 would be bad, with Van Hollen saying it wasn't going to happen.

Todd then turned to the Dem's approach, and asked whether it was better to do a Beto O'Rourke in Texas and go so far as to mention impeaching Trump, or to take the Phil Bredesen approach in Tennessee, who's running almost as a label-free centrist. 

Well, Chuck it tells you that the quality of the candidate is really important and their ability to communicate on issues that people in their states care about. And we have candidates in both Texas and Tennessee who are doing exactly that...

It was at this point that Todd asked the question I thought he would have earlier, about Dems running on the promise to be their own person, not a party person,and whether the Dems need new leadership.

Well, those members running, I'm sure, will fulfill their commitments but that doesn't mean that we don't have a strong leadership team in the United States Senate. Look, this is an example of what I as talking about earlier, that what voters want are senators whose number on job is to stick up for their states. And sometimes that means working with their party leadership, sometimes that means working in the opposite direction. But that's very different than, you know, Republican candidates who are simply rubber-stamp Trump supporters...

Haslam was next, asked to define what a good night would be for the Republicans, given there are 36 gubernatorial races up for grabs this year, which is a lot compared to other presidential mid-term years. 10 are shown as toss-ups.

...we feel good about the position we're in but we're not blind to the fact that a president's first midterm when we have this many seats up... that's why at RGA we've worked hard, we've raised a record amount of money this cycle. And we're making certain we're putting all that money to good use here in the last three weeks of the campaign.

Todd honed in on the Midwest as an area where the Rs could be in trouble, that it was possible all of the states touching a Great Lake could have a Democratic governor.  He wondered what it would take to prevent that. Haslam thought that Scott Walker will hang on in Wisconsin, but that Michigan was an uphill battle.

Wisconsin and Michigan are important, you remember, because those are two of the states that Trump won by next to nothing when, honestly, Hillary Clinton thought they were in the bag.

I'm going to give the last word to Tom Brokaw, who was on the panel today.

Well, one of the things that troubles me a lot is when I think of the projected results of this election, we'll end up again with a pudding without a theme. We're going to have Democrats, probably, in the House on the upside. I think the Senate will probably stay the same. And we're just going to have to muddle through for the next two years. 

The country is still going to be deeply, deeply divided.  

But remember - we can fix that. 

See you around campus. 

Sunday School 11/5/17

So what were the hot topics in today's classrooms? Russia, Donna Brazile, and taxes.

On Meet the Press, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary tomorrow, Chuck Todd talked first with Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asking if the Mueller indictments would have any impact on the truthfulness of folks testifying before the Senate Committee. Here's Warner's response.

Well, the committee itself has been aware of some of this information... What we did see this week, though, was one more example of at least where the Russians had what appeared to be a fairly organized effort in terms of trying to reach out to folks affiliated with the Trump campaign to share 'dirt' or emails about Hillary Clinton... We've got a lot more questions to get answered. 

Todd wondered if the threat of more indictments would make people more cooperative with the Committee, or more fearful of testifying. Warner noted they had talked with a couple hundred people (with the press being kept in the dark many times) but he was generally pleased with the cooperation they were getting.

Then, Todd asked four  times, trying - and failing - to get more details on who the Committee has been talking to or whether there would be any collision with Mueller's work.  Here's Warner's fourth deflection.

Chuck, again, the way we get the kind of cooperation with the witnesses is frankly, to not share the kind of weekly box score of who we've seen and who we've not seen...And at the end of the day, what we owe the American people is the truth and, most importantly, how we make sure we don't have a foreign power like Russia intervene again in our elections.

Senator James Langford (R-OK), also a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, shared a similar response to the question about the two investigations running into each other.

I'm actually not concerned about that at all... they're focused on criminal investigations, we're focused on armchair quarterbacking, making sure every witness has been seen, every fact has been checked, and we're going through the policy aspects, because long-term, we have policy issues we have to discuss on how we handle elections, how we handle social media, how we're handling classified information, how that's getting out into the public sphere. Those are uniquely things that we will work on. The special counsel has things that he will uniquely work on as well.

Langford also noted that there was no threat that Mueller's work would be shut down, by the White House or by the House of Representatives, and that there was no need at this point for any Congressional action to prevent that from happening.

On Donna "Hey Look at Me, I Wrote a Book about the 2016 Election" Brazile's allegations that the Clintons and the DNC rigged the election against Bernie Sanders (who has never been a Democrat), there were two good comments, the first from current DNC chair Tom Perez:

When I hear the word "rigged," let's be very clear. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary by four million votes. The DNC does not run elections for primaries. The RNC does not run elections. States run elections - and those elections were run by the states.

The other was from Tom Brokaw.

Well, I think this is a manifestation of all that's wrong with the Democratic party, frankly. I mean, this is a time when they ought to be talking about the future and they ought to be organizing themselves about what they want to do for the country...

Donna is well known, as you all know, for 'ready, fire, aim' on a lot of the stuff that she does. But to go back over this now, when they're trying to win Congressional races and trying to get ready for '18 seems to me to be beyond counterproductive. 

Quickly, over to Fox News Sunday, where Chris Wallace talked to House Speaker Paul Ryan on the DNC issue as well as on the Trump Dossier, about which it was revealed that the Clinton campaign kept this initially Republican donor initiative going as part of their 'opposition research.' (Opposition research, of course, is what the Trump team has said they were lousy at getting on Clinton).

Ryan was nonchalant on the latter (yeah, our investigation was discovering that too); not so much on the former.

The second thing -- that story just broke. I've never seen anything like that. I mean, we all said that the Clintons thought they lived above the rules. So, this takes the cake. I mean, this is pretty amazing. For them to basically be running the DNC in a primary. To see such a deck stack is really pretty jaw-dropping to me. No wonder the Democrats are ticked off. I would be, too. It's amazing to me on the Clintons, this live above the law or above the rules in this thing. 

I understand why the Democrats are mad about this. They should be mad about this, and I don't think I've ever seen anything like this frankly. 

We are fortunate that he got to the tax plan (file on a postcard, death tax, keep your money, special interest loopholes, just don't pay taxes in the first place) and why he's no longer a deficit hawk.

Paul Ryan deficit hawk is also a growth advocate. Paul Ryan deficit hawk also knows that you have to have a faster growing economy, more jobs, bigger take home pay -- that means higher tax revenues. 

Wallace pressed him on the $1.5T deficit spending allowance that the House passed in their budget bill. Oh that? No big deal.

The reason we did it that way is because we believed that the Senate parliamentarian won't let us use what we call dynamic scoring which - that figures out growth. So, we basically did not want to take the chance that some bureaucrat, unelected, would deny our ability to bring a tax bill through that is pro-growth and that reflects those pro-growth estimates. That's why it's done that way.

But we are absolutely convinced -- and we all have economic models that will show this - that this will help the economy grow... we are going to make sure that we actually get this economy growing and this tax reform bill does that. 

Assuming their economic models are even half as accurate as weather models... But that was a whole nother post.

See you around campus.

Quick Takes (v5): Brokaw and Trump

Quick Takes

I don't think Tom Brokaw likes Donald Trump.

For the second time in about ten days, Brokaw has offered commentary on Trump and what he's doing to this election cycle, and perhaps, to all elections in the future.

On Meet the Press at the end of January, Brokaw allowed as how the thrice-married Trump, a man who has had affairs all over the world, was doing just fine with evangelicals in Iowa (although he under-performed the polling and only finished second).

Tonight, on NBC's Nightly News, Brokaw lamented the loss of civility personified by Trump. The name calling, Brokaw pointed out. The finger-wagging; the shushing; the sneering, the whole mess that is Trump on the campaign trail, he left out.

The latest example of this?  Trump's repeating of an audience member's comment (a woman's comment, by the way) that Ted Cruz is a "pussy."  Which, of course, drew a huge roar from the crowd. We would expect nothing less.

It is hard to imagine any other candidate lasting a week using his language and style. But it is working for him, helped by the echo chamber of social media and cable television. 

Brokaw is right on one point - no one else could get away with this. But he's wrong on one very significant point: it's not just social media and cable TV that are keeping Trump alive. It's the mainstream media, like his very own NBC, which keeps Trump alive, in the news, all the time -- and for free.

While other significantly more civil candidates struggle to get air time, and have to pay millions to get ads on television, Trump is there, every night, for free. It's so ridiculous, he even points it out to them, and they do it anyway.

Brokaw notes that

By tonight we'll know if the Trump 'take-no-prisoners' style adds up to a big victory.

The answer, we have learned, is yes.

Trump was projected the winner with barely over 10% of the vote counted; as I write this, now less than a quarter of the votes have been tallied, and Trump, at 34%, is leading John Kasich (15%), with Jeb! and Ted Cruz tied at 12%.

Sunday School 1/31/16

Time for today's edition of Sunday School, an overview of who some of the talking heads were talking to, and what they were talking about.

Chuck Todd and the gang at Meet the Press talked with, among others, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Cruz, who has tried to keep hold of the 'real conservative' mantle, summed everything up like this:

You know, the most common sentiment you hear from people is they're frustrated with Washington. They're frustrated with politicians. They say one thing and do another. We can't get burned again. And that frustration, the reason I see conservatives uniting behind our campaign, is they're looking for a consistent conservative. Someone they can trust to be a fiscal conservative, a social conservative, and a national security conservative. 

Rubio, for his part, tried hard to explain that it's OK to work with people to get things done.

I think voters understand that to solve problems, it's going to take the ability to work with people that you don't agree with on a bunch of other issues. But we're not going to compromise on principles... So I think if there's a chance to work together, and you don't have to betray your principles, you work together. And that's why we have elections and debate and all those sort of things in America. 

On Face the Nation, you can hear more from Rubio and Trump, who was also interviewed and actually said something policyish on Fox News Sunday.

Wallace: ...sir, are you saying that if you become president, you might try to appoint justices to overrule the decision on same-sex marriage?

Trump: I would strongly consider that, yes.  

On ABC's This Week, former Clinton confidant George Stephanopoulos had Hillary (with her NY Times endorsement) and Bernie Sanders talking about electability. First, Clinton:

Well, look, I'm a progressive who think it's important to actually make progress. That's what I've done my entire life. That's what I'll do as president. 

Obviously, I have big goals (and proceeds to list them). I have big goals. And I tell you how I'm going to get there and how I'm going to pay for them. And I think that is what the Americans want. I'm not going to sit here and over-promise and under-deliver. I'm going to tell you what I know we can achieve, and that's going to take the political system we have right now, and then I intend to bring in more people, as I always have, George...

So I understand politics. I understand a campaign. I am focused on my mission to make sure this country work for everybody, including hardworking middle-class families who rightly feel they've been left behind. I think I know how to do that, and I think the voters know that I know how to do that.

Sanders, asked by Stephanopoulos how he would respond to Clinton's comments, answered:

I respond to it by saying that every proposal that I am bringing forth is, in fact, supported by the vat majority of the American people. The problem is, is that Congress is so dominated by big money interests, they are much more concerned about campaign contributions than they are about the needs of working families. 

And what I am saying is that, yes, the United States should join the rest of the industrialized world, guarantee health care to all people, have paid family and medical leave, make public colleges and universities tuition-free, create millions of decent paying jobs by rebuilding our infrastructure.  

These are not radical ideas, George. And demanding that the wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country start paying their fair share of taxes, that we break up these large Wall Street conglomerates - these are not radical ideas.

This is what the American people want. 

The last word today goes to Tom Brokaw who, talking about the Republicans, managed to sum things up quite well.

I really think a big piece of what Donald Trump has going for him is the celebrity culture that we live in in America. And he is everywhere, he comes in with that big airplane, and people say "I'd like to have a little piece of that."

Here's a guy running strongly among evangelicals, been married three times, he had affairs around the world with other people, he went broke a couple of times. They blow right through that. So we're playing in a different ballpark this year.  

Indeed, we are.  And Iowans will tell us all about that tomorrow night.