POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Ehhh, you folks might want to redo this a bit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/u...-platform.html“The Middle East is more dangerous now than at any time since the Second World War,” the platform reads. “Whatever their disagreements, presidents of both parties had always prioritized America’s national interests, the trust of friendly governments, and the security of Israel. That sound consensus was replaced with impotent grandstanding on the part of the current President and his Secretaries of State. The results have been ruinous for all parties except Islamic terrorists and their Iranian and other sponsors.”

I kept thinking about this and wondering when, since Johnson, it would NOT have been applicable...

[Pannonian]

I kept thinking about this and wondering when, since Johnson, it would NOT have been applicable...

The last few months have been the quietest that I can remember in my lifetime.

[ReluctantSamurai]

What we are now seeing, is the expression of the one thing Trump excels at---subterfuge. He knows his SARS-2 response is more than abysmal, and he knows it's difficult to campaign on the economy when the economy has disappeared down the shit-hole. The one single thing he and his campaign can do, and do quickly, is to fulminate anger and unrest so that enough Americans will forget about the first two and hand him the White House for a second term.

What's frustrating is how media has bought into this, and therefore heavily influencing the general public. When was the last time you viewed mainstream media content of any kind where the pandemic or the economy held the lead story and had articles and opinions in support. Now it's unrest in Portland, Chicago, New York, and the latest media love interest, Kenosha Wisconsin. If Trump is one thing, it's an opportunist. When presented with these "opportunities" to advance his "Law & Order" platform (and by advance I mean do everything possible to make the situation worse), he's made hay, so-to-speak. He's using Terry Goodkind's "Wizard's First Rule" to perfection.

Democrats have run a sensible campaign, up to this point, but are now simply reacting to what the President says or does. Voicing outrage Trump's latest flaunting of law (for which he knows nothing will be done about it) is not going to cut it. If the Dems don't start acting pro-actively, they will see their large leads in the polls vanish as the election approaches.

[Hooahguy]

Completely agree. Biden's speech today I think was a step towards the right direction. Jennifer Rubin had a good article yesterday about just this:

Trump amplifies White fears. Brookings explains: “His efforts to claim that the legitimate protesters are all Antifa, blame ‘liberal Governors and Mayors’ for the unrest, and declare that ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ all exacerbate tensions. Such statements are likely to provoke strong and divergent reactions from across the political spectrum rather than bring Americans together in outrage over George Floyd’s murder and the need to reject violence in favor of genuine reform.”

Republican elected officials feel comfortable reverting to the Southern Strategy, portraying themselves as the only thing standing between White people and violent Black people. It is a tune they have been singing since 1968.

Naturally then, the news media is holding Trump accountable for violence, insisting that he condemn police excesses and … no, that is not happening. Instead, they amplify Trump’s demand that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden do something about the violence. Biden’s weak-kneed supporters (playing into Trump’s hands) blame Biden for not denouncing violence — which Biden has repeatedly done. That in turn generates a spate of “Democrats worried violence hurts Biden” articles. The media focus on the same few incidents of violence drowns out reports (mostly in print, rarely on TV news) explaining White instigators’ role in these events. (When the role of White provocateurs does make the news, there is rarely video to accompany the brief reference to White agitators.) And you wonder how Trump gets away with rabid race-baiting?

A few Democrats have figured out what is going on. Appearing on CNN, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) observed, “They believe the violence is helpful to them. And the president is only motivated by one thing: ‘What is in it for him?’ He sees this violence — and his ability to agitate more of it — as useful to his campaign.” He added, “What it does to the country, the loss of life, he doesn’t care.”

I think that things will calm over the next few weeks like it has before and the news can focus on COVID again, but the real question will be what will happen if there is another killing and it all kicks off again right before the election.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I think that things will calm over the next few weeks like it has before and the news can focus on COVID again

That, I'm afraid, the Trump Administration will not allow to happen. The call to 'defend our cities' will only increase in the coming weeks, and Kenosha will be repeated again and again.

Rather ironic that Fearless Leader attacks Biden for wanting to 'defund police' when it's actually the other way around:

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/16/212866...ing-the-police

President Trump has repeatedly proposed cuts in federal funding for police, criticized landmark legislation that boosted financial support for police departments, and is currently involved in blocking legislation that would greatly reduce pressure on local governments to cut police funding.

This dispute about budgeting — where Democrats are fighting against austerity and Republicans are fighting for it — is different from the theoretical argument police abolitionists want to have about the future of law enforcement. But it’s a real one playing out this summer in Congress with real consequences for the lives of hundreds of millions of people. And in this debate, it’s Trump who wants to defund the police.

In early February of this year, the Trump administration proposed a 58 percent cut in the federal government’s COPS Hiring Program, a federal program that supports police department staffing. That’s not a one-off; his administration’s budget proposals have routinely called for huge cuts to this program, which was inaugurated in the 1990s as part of Bill Clinton’s pledge to hire 100,000 new police officers (Congress keeps declining to do this).

Why the Dems don't focus in on this, and tie the actual defunding of local and state governments (and therefore police departments) to the economic downturn as a result of the abysmal pandemic response, is a mystery to me. What the eff are they waiting for?

[Montmorency]

The Republican soul. If only police had the restraint of customer-facing staff.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1299914167525216256 [VIDEO]

What we are now seeing, is the expression of the one thing Trump excels at---subterfuge. He knows his SARS-2 response is more than abysmal, and he knows it's difficult to campaign on the economy when the economy has disappeared down the shit-hole. The one single thing he and his campaign can do, and do quickly, is to fulminate anger and unrest so that enough Americans will forget about the first two and hand him the White House for a second term.

What's frustrating is how media has bought into this, and therefore heavily influencing the general public. When was the last time you viewed mainstream media content of any kind where the pandemic or the economy held the lead story and had articles and opinions in support. Now it's unrest in Portland, Chicago, New York, and the latest media love interest, Kenosha Wisconsin. If Trump is one thing, it's an opportunist. When presented with these "opportunities" to advance his "Law & Order" platform (and by advance I mean do everything possible to make the situation worse), he's made hay, so-to-speak. He's using Terry Goodkind's "Wizard's First Rule" to perfection.

Biden has kind of boxed himself out of running on 'the entire Republican party is a fascist conspiracy (and a pretty overt one) toward the overthrow of republican government. Get mad you son of a bitches, peace was never an option!'

One might suggest, boss-man don't need to say it, his allies and operatives do, while Biden waxes about decency, harmony, and the Light side of the force. The problem is that the bipartisan comity mentality is fractal down the layers of Democratic politics. They desperately believe in the need for love and unity among Americans - which we don't and can't have in the status quo. Also, they fear alienating moderates and the politically passive. Same logic as Obama
putting the lid on Russian active measures intel in fall 2016 (by the way, about that...)

It's taken all of - THIS *waves at last 4 years* - for at least some Democratic electeds to reach the point of: being uncustomarily disrespectful toward the President and his performance; voicing their fear that the character/future of the country is at stake; considering thinking about bypassing some of the procedural barriers of government.

The most aggressive Democrats have been against Trump was their narrow and somber impeachment inquiry.

Half a year ago Democrats eagerly helped Trump take up the biggest economic relief program in American history, sacrificing trillions in transfers to big business and billionares in exchange for hundreds of billions for desperate families and small businesses. The stimulus was successful enough that Republicans have stonewalled all further legislation even as accumulated savings run dry and evictions kick up as we close on the election. Does that sound like the Republicans care about how the mood of the electorate will manifest at the ballot box? Should the Dems then not have played hardball? I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but it's clearly a sign of a mindset trapped in "normal" politics.

I don't mean to rag on Democrats too much. The electorate, and not just at the margins, is clueless, disengaged and performatively cynical (disclosure: I was like that 4 years ago); the fears of alienating them, to say nothing of the mainstream media, are not entirely unreasonable. And besides overcoming deeply-held personal beliefs, the path dependence of messaging-as-ideology is a hell of a thing. The longer you spend doing the same thing, the more difficult it is to overcome that inertia. It would take true leadership to move the whole party culture on a dime and change strategies. Circling back, naturally, Biden is, and was chosen for being, the exact last person who could demonstrate this kind of pathbreaking leadership. But this is a unique world-historical moment, and the people in power have a responsibility to the gravity of the situation and to posterity.

If I had my druthers, every Democratic elected from Biden down would (have) spend/t each day hammering the stakes in this register:



Orgah Idaho's signature is a good start.

Democrats have run a sensible campaign, up to this point, but are now simply reacting to what the President says or does. Voicing outrage Trump's latest flaunting of law (for which he knows nothing will be done about it) is not going to cut it. If the Dems don't start acting pro-actively, they will see their large leads in the polls vanish as the election approaches.

Marginal fluctuations in public opinion are now less relevant as a threshold matter than the looming extinction of free and fair elections in this country.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...oting-n1112436

[ReluctantSamurai]

The most aggressive Democrats have been against Trump was their narrow and somber impeachment inquiry.

And it's obvious that isn't going to cut it any longer. Fearless Leader has finally found a chink in the Dems armour, and is hammering away with full force. If there is any backbone to their leadership, they need to take the fight to the President. Bleating like a bunch scared sheep is no longer an option.

An interesting read from a week ago:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-loses/615835/

Here is a prediction about the November election: If Donald Trump wins, in a trustworthy vote, what’s happening this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, will be one reason. Maybe the reason. And yet Joe Biden has it in his power to spare the country a second Trump term.

Events are unfolding with the inevitable logic of a nightmare. A white police officer shoots a Black man as he’s leaning into a car with his three sons inside—shoots him point-blank in the back, seven times, “as if he didn’t matter,” the victim’s father later says. If George Floyd was crushed to death by depraved indifference, Jacob Blake is the object of an attempted execution. Somehow, he survives—but his body is shattered, paralyzed from the waist down, maybe for life. Kenosha explodes in rage, the same rage that’s been igniting around the country all summer long, fading in Minneapolis only to flare up in Portland. In Kenosha, as elsewhere, what starts in peaceful protest soon leads to violence: cars burned, shops smashed, local businesses destroyed. Police and rioters incite one another to escalate; armed vigilantes take matters into their own hands; and a teenager from out of state kills two local men with an AR-15-style rifle. The authorities are overwhelmed and ineffectual, offering little in the way of information or protection. Within a couple of days, much of the small city is a ruined landscape.

It’s no use dismissing their words as partisan talking points. They are effective ones, backed up by certain facts. Trump will bang this loud, ugly drum until Election Day. He knows that Kenosha has placed Democrats in a trap. They’ve embraced the protests and the causes that drive them. The third night of the Democratic convention was consumed with the language and imagery of protest—as if all Americans watching were activists.

Harris, a Black former prosecutor and now an advocate for police reform, seems uniquely positioned to speak to the crisis. But she has said little all week, which suggests that there might be things she doesn’t want to say. On Thursday, Harris directly addressed the events in Kenosha, affirming that Americans “must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protesters. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence.” She quickly moved on. Democratic leaders, from the nearly invisible mayor of Kenosha up to those on the presidential ticket, are reluctant to tarnish a just cause, amplify Republican attacks, or draw the wrath of their own progressive base (Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut deleted a tweet saying that both the Blake shooting and the riots were wrong after commenters accused him of equating the two). So Democrats continue to mute their response to the violence and hope it will subside, even though it has persisted straight through the summer.

Nothing will harm a campaign like the wishful thinking, fearful hesitation, or sheer complacency that fails to address what voters can plainly see. Kenosha gives Biden a chance to help himself and the country. Ordinarily it’s the incumbent president’s job to show up at the scene of a national tragedy and give a unifying speech. But Trump is temperamentally incapable of doing so and, in fact, has a political interest in America’s open wounds and burning cities.

Unfortunately, Fearless Leader has beaten them to the punch, and is visiting Kenosha today. Lost opportunity for Biden, Harris, and the Dems. They should have already been there and pre-empted The Bully from using Kenosha to further his agenda of sowing more chaos. This isn't the Karate Kid where the loud mouthed bully gets felled in the end by the Crane Kick.

A further knock on the Democratic response to the shifting public attention:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...-strife-405578

For months, the contrast of Biden's caution with Trump's Twitter tirades reinforced Democrats’ claims that the president never took the virus seriously enough — and never would. Biden's constant presence in his basement over the summer was mocked by Trump but seemed to help the candidate with voters who welcomed the Democrat's restraint.

“He’s trying to model what national leadership should look like. It’s not about yourself, it’s about protecting others,” said Michigan state Senate Minority Leader Jim Ananich, a Democrat from Flint. “It’s been the reality TV star versus someone acting responsibly.”

As polls have shown modest tightening in the race, Biden surrogates and Democratic strategists said in interviews that they’ve been urging the campaign to be more explicit in linking Trump’s early failures on coronavirus with the sluggish economy and high jobless rates.

“Trump and the RNC are preying on legitimate fears to lie about defunding police, destroying suburbs, and more, labeling the vice president as `Joe the destroyer,’” one questioner said to Harris. “What's our strategy to cut through all of this and communicate a simple, clear understandable message that will resonate with undecided voters?”

Your strategy needs to be to get your ass out on the campaign trail and show people what was voiced at the DNC wasn't just political rhetoric, as put by a Republican pollster in Arizona:

Biden needs to "show that he cares about Arizona, and that he’s attentive to Arizona,” said Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster in the state. “If Biden wants to win Arizona, he has to come here.”

The same reason why he should have already been in Kenosha

Marginal fluctuations in public opinion are now less relevant as a threshold matter than the looming extinction of free and fair elections in this country.

Marginal in the national sense, perhaps, but it's obvious that the election will come down to the Rust Belt states again, and if Fearless Leader carries those, the 'extinction of free and fair elections' won't matter much.

[Montmorency]

Is this like the fifth piece I've posted on the Org that makes the implicit case for disestablishing DHS? (Though no doubt having Trump in office has emboldened the supremacists in the service beyond baseline.) It's about the horrific racism a black diplomat was subjected to by our border thugs, like the extended version of what AOC described on her day trip to one of the ICE camps.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...arassed-325676

Marginal in the national sense, perhaps, but it's obvious that the election will come down to the Rust Belt states again, and if Fearless Leader carries those, the 'extinction of free and fair elections' won't matter much.

How would you be able to tell? The only firm indicator would be a heavy polling shift before the event, which isn't evident yet. But in abstract, I would prefer Biden to emphasize Trump's failure to resolve unrest as well as his contributions toward it (which Biden has been doing to some extent), as well as outlining simple steps - in a campaign we can allow them to be simplistic - that he would take/encourage in office to resolve it. What do you think of Biden's Pittsburgh speech?

[Hooahguy]

I agree that Biden should have gone to Kenosha. Though consider the governor asked Trump not to come, I wonder if a similar request was made to the Biden campaign, just less public. Biden has also launched a $45 million ad buy with a focus on the swing states about how Trump is fanning the flames of unrest (though to be honest I'm not really sure I like the ad so much, to me it kinda starts off weirdly). Good to put some of that over $300 million the campaign got in donations in August alone, which apparently broke a record. As I've mentioned before, every dollar needs to be spent plastering the airwaves with ads. I was amused to hear that they even got some ads going in Animal Crossing. Of course, video game political ads are not unprecedented, as Obama did the same thing in 2008.

On a side note, the Trump folks posting a photo of Trump surveying damage in Kenosha with the caption about how this is what Joe Biden will do to America is...