I confess that I haven’t had time to read this presentation from 2014 by Steve Bannon, which was sent me by a reader. But I thought it might be good to mention it, since it at least gives us some information about what Steve Bannon says while in public. Since he’s the big mystery man, it might be of interest.
So, why did Trump have a meeting with the press and then excoriate them?
By now you probably have read the stories about how Trump called a meeting with the press, only to give them a dressing down. If you don’t care much—well, the press certainly does.
Just as an example, see this from David Remnick of the New Yorker:
The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump””the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory””should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.
First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?
For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage…
This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.
The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”
Another participant at the meeting said that Trump’s behavior was “totally inappropriate” and “fucking outrageous.” …
“I have to tell you, I am emotionally fucking pissed,” another participant said. “How can this not influence coverage? I am being totally honest with you. Toward the end of the campaign, it got to a point where I thought that the coverage was all about [Trump’s] flaws and problems. And that’s legit. But, I thought, O.K., let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. After the meeting today, though””and I am being human with you here””I think, Fuck him! I know I am being emotional about it. And I know I will get over it in a couple of days after Thanksgiving. But I really am offended. This was unprecedented. Outrageous!”
I keep waiting for the punch line.
Seriously, who sounds more like blustering blowhards, Trump or the quoted press (quoted by the sympathetic Remnick)? Who sounds more unforgiving, vain, and distracted, Trump or the quoted press? Who sounds more full of invective and resentment, Trump or the quoted press? Who sounds more outrageous and out of line (not to mention biased), Trump or the quoted press?
And who outside of the press thinks the press was fair to Trump after his nomination? It was pretty clear during his campaign that—after the first month or two of their unfavorable coverage didn’t hurt him, and it became apparent he wasn’t just a joke but had a chance for the nomination—that they were essentially fattening him up for the kill (in the metaphoric sense), promoting him till he was nominated and then portraying him unfavorably afterward so that their favored one, Hillary, could beat him.
It didn’t work out quite that way.
You wouldn’t put me in the category of “Trump fan,” and yet it’s clear to me that the press lies about him with some regularity. I’ve been chronicling press bias on a host of issues for many many years; it’s nothing new and nothing unexpected.
I think the more interesting question right now is why Trump called the meeting in the first place only to excoriate them during it. So I’ve prepared a little survey for you, with a choice of answers:
(1) He didn’t excoriate them; the press lied about how he behaved in order to smear him.
(2) He didn’t plan to criticize them so strongly, but he’s emotionally impulsive and lost control of himself.
(3) He purposely did it because he was angry with them, but thought they’d keep it off the record, as he’d requested of them.
(4) He purposely did it because he thought it would intimidate them into covering him more fairly in the future.
(5) He purposely did it and knew it would be leaked, because he wanted to play to the majority of Americans who happen to agree with him that the press is a bunch of no-good liars.
(6) He purposely did it and knew it would be leaked, because he figured it would cause the public to discount future bad press for Trump as a spiteful and retaliative backlash on the part of the press.
(7) He purposely did it and he knew that articles such as Remnick’s, quoting the over-the-top nearly-hysterical reaction of the press, would be written, and that those articles would end up reflecting poorly on the press. In other words, he set a trap for the press, and they fell right into it.
(8) None of the above.
You can choose more than one answer.
I know what I think, but I’ll tell you later.
About that “Hamilton” thing
I’m not so very interested in an incident that seems to be absorbing people so heavily this days, in which an actor in the Broadway show “Hamilton” made a condescending speech from the stage around curtain call time suggesting that Mike Pence—who was in the audience—should respect diversity, yada yada yada.
Everyone else seems to be highly interested in it, though, so I’ll say my piece.
No, this wasn’t about “an actor deign[ing] to speak respectfully about his concerns and the concerns (as he saw them) of non-white Americans to an elected official.” If actor Brandon Victor Dixon had met Pence at a party and spoken of those concerns, or run into him on the street or at a rally or even in the theater lobby or at the stage door: great, fine, no problem. Speak of any concern you want. Freedom of speech, yay!
If Dixon had said it on his Facebook page—likewise, fine. Or written a Letter to the Editor that was published in the Times—great, more power to him. Or even written a play with that theme and performed it—no problem.
The issue for me is that he did this in his role as actor on the stage in an altogether different play, albeit an actor taking a bow, and blindsided Pence who was sitting in the audience (a captive audience, you might say) as the theater’s paying guest.
Inappropriate and wrong. And that would be true no matter what the political persuasion of the actor and the elected official. I’d say exactly the same thing if the actor had been on the right and the politician were Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
The talented creator of “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, tweeted out how proud he was of Dixon for “leading with love.” Miranda added, “And proud to remind you that ALL are welcome at the theater.” Gee, even our terrible VP-elect? Are ALL welcome to attend without being lectured to from the stage about how they should run their affairs, before they’ve even taken office? It makes me wonder what the word “welcome” means.
The left is at war with science, not the right
I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?
Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced?…
Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.
All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left…
… two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left””and they’re getting worse.
The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices…
Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics…
…the second great threat from the Left…[is]… its long tradition of mixing science and politics. To conservatives, the fundamental problem with the Left is what Friedrich Hayek called the fatal conceit: the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society.
The article is long, but please read the whole thing. If you’re into sending friends links to articles, it might be one to send to those on your list who think the right is the group that is impeding the objectivity and progress of science.
Did the national polls get it so very wrong?
Yes, polls. Again. Why am I still talking about them?
Well, I see a lot of statements on the subject, here and elsewhere, that are just plain incorrect. That’s not new, either; it’s been going on as long as I remember. And not just concerning the recent election (the one I’ll mainly be discussing here); about past ones, too. So I think it’s good to point out a few salient facts—and then everyone can keep on arguing about the value of polls, the methodology of polls, and the intentions of pollsters.
To begin with, it’s necessary to understand that polling is inherently difficult to get right. That makes it flawed as a predictor (as I often say) but not totally flawed by any means. And besides, it’s the best predictor we’ve got. Crowds don’t matter, nor do yard signs (as I explained here, and as Romney discovered in 2012).
But if one pollster keeps getting it wrong when all the other pollsters get it right, that pollster isn’t going to last long, or if they last for a while they won’t have a good reputation. Pollsters’ most financially productive money-making activities—internal polling for candidates, and market research for businesses—depend on maintaining their reputation for accuracy, so they are interested in getting it right. There are also organizations that rank pollsters for accuracy over time, so among people who hire pollsters (for example, for market research, which is lucrative), the pollsters’ reputations are known.
But what if most of the pollsters get it wrong? Or did they?
I have yet to understand why so many people seem to think that the polls were so very, outlandishly wrong this year (except at the state level in a couple of states, particularly Wisconsin; but state polls are known to be much more difficult to do in terms of sampling, and are often somewhat outdated by the time the election rolls around). Why do I say the national polls were not so far off? Take a look at what the polls were actually saying the day before the election, rather than what you think you remember about what they were saying.
Remember also, when you look at this article (written one day before the election), that Hillary Clinton (so far, anyway) has won the popular vote by 1.27%. So any poll that showed her winning the popular vote by around that figure would have been remarkably accurate:
With just one day to go until the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s support is at 46.8% while Donald Trump’s is at 44.3%.
When analysts refer to the Democrat’s 2.5 percentage point lead, they are talking about the difference between those two figures in polling averages.
It’s an important number but it’s also probably an inaccurate one. That’s because polling averages do not capture fully a few factors that will affect the final outcome.
So, the average of polls right before the election was only off from the actual result by 1.23%, and they got the popular vote winner (which is what national polls measure) right. That’s really pretty close.
The article goes on to state some of those factors that are not reflected in the polls but which affect the final outcome—early voters, turnout, margin of error, and vote distribution and the Electoral College (this turned out to be a very large factor which determined Trump as the winner). The article also mentions an unusual amount of uncertainty for this particular election. It doesn’t mention the undecideds, but we have learned since the election that they broke disproportionately for Trump, and this may indeed have made the difference between his winning and losing.
So I actually don’t see that the polls were especially inaccurate.
Take a look at what Nate Silver was saying two days before the election (Silver isn’t a pollster, but he analyzes polls and makes predictions based on them, and he has a pretty good track record):
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” the FiveThirtyEight chief claimed Clinton is a “2-to-1 favorite,” but noted that recent polls show Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump with a slight edge in electoral college-heavy states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina.
“The electoral college math is actually less solid for Clinton than it was for Obama four years ago, where four years ago we had Obama ahead 320-some electoral votes. Clinton has about 270,” Silver said.
“So she’s one state away from potentially losing the electoral college. You’d rather be in her shoes than Donald Trump’s, but it’s not a terribly safe position.”
Finally, take a look at Nate Silver’s list of polls taken right before the election, from an article written two days before the election. Fourteen polls are listed. Two show Trump leading (by +1, and by +8). One shows a tie. Four more show Clinton leading by either 1% or 2%—and since it turns out she actually won the popular vote by 1.27% (at the time of this writing), I’d say those particular polls were highly accurate, the most accurate of all. That means that seven out of fourteen polls either got the winner right (Trump) or got the actual vote right or extremely close to right. That sounds accurate to me for six of the polls, which is approximately half (one of those that got the winner right was very inaccurate, so I’m not adding that to the “accurate” list, although it was right about the Trump win).
What’s more, three more of the polls measured Clinton at +3 in the popular vote. That turned out to be only 1.73% off. Not too shabby, either. That leaves two polls that said Clinton +4, and two that said Clinton +5. So the majority (9 polls) got it right or came quite close. And the LA Times poll, one of the two that got the winner right, was also the most inaccurate poll, because it showed Trump ahead by +8, which was actually 9.27 points off, whereas many of the polls that got the winner wrong actually were quite accurate about the popular vote.
Polling is flawed, as I’ve said almost every time I write about it. It’s just a guide. In races that aren’t close, it can be a very good guide. In close races (and this was definitely a close race) polls are iffy. But, contradictory to many people’s recollections, most of the polls this year right before the election predicted a close race. And if most also predicted a Clinton victory in the popular vote—well, they turned out to have been correct about that, too.
Here’s what Silver wrote two days before the election, and remember again that in the actual election Clinton seems to have won by about 1.27% (and that figure could actually rise over time, and has been steadily doing so):
On average across the 14 polls, Clinton’s lead is 1.9 percentage points…Or you can take the median instead of the average, which is also 2.5 points. Use only polls rated A-minus or higher? Her lead is 2.6 points. Use live-telephone polls only? It’s 2.3 points. Use only polls used to determine eligibility for the presidential debates? That gets you to 3.5 points. Use only the very recent surveys, which conducted all of their interviews in November? Her lead averages 2.3 points in those.
Not so very far off. And after reading the following from that same November 6th article by Silver, you may agree with me that Silver (who works with the poll figures as a whole, analyzing and commenting on them) was surprisingly accurate:
How about polls of swing states in particular? Right now, the tipping-point state in our forecast ”” the state that would provide the decisive 270th electoral vote if the polls got things exactly right ”” is New Hampshire. There, Clinton leads by only 1.7 percentage points in our adjusted polling average, as several recent polls show Trump tied or slightly ahead, along with others that still give Clinton the lead. Thus, Clinton’s doing a little bit worse in the tipping-point state than she is overall ”” a sign that she might win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.
In case you’re unaware of what happened in New Hampshire, Clinton won—47.62% to Trump’s 47.25%, a margin of 2687 votes out of a total of 694,307 cast. So the polls in New Hampshire seem to have been pretty good; they predicted both a very close race (true) and the eventual winner in that state.
I was very impressed with Nate Silver’s predictions in 2012, and I remain impressed. And the polls weren’t so shabby, either.
The still point of the turning world
I’d never heard of ballet dancer Zenaida Yanowsky before. But I idly clicked on a video while procrastinating about something-or-other, and what I saw puzzled me.
It was the “Black Swan” pas de deux, and I didn’t love her dancing. Her line didn’t seem particularly beautiful to me. Her body, though flexible, didn’t seem pliant; something about her seemed too rigid and unyielding.
But something was wonderful there, too, and for a few seconds I couldn’t quite figure it out. But then I decided it was two things. The first was her calm, unruffled and unhurried manner, the fact that she took time to show you what the movements meant and what they were there for (the musical tempo is slow here, too). But even more, it was her extraordinarily centered quality.
All dancers must have a center, a plumb line that runs straight down and around which everything moves and swirls, whether the dance is fast or slow. Some of my teachers used to tell us that we needed to imagine that a string ran right through the center of our heads down through the middle of our bodies, and that we were suspended from it like puppets on strings. Or that we had a headlight on each hip, and those headlights had to shine straight ahead of us at all times (unless a hip-twisted movement was required, which it rarely was in ballet).
Watch, and you’ll see it:
I immediately was reminded of Cynthia Gregory, an American Ballet Theater dancer I saw in person countless times during the 70s. She also was tall, and was known for her calm center and rock-solid balances. You’ll see the similarity I think, but also the differences, particularly in Gregory’s more expressive arms, and the sharpness of her movements in this particular interpretation of the role. A couple of times towards the end of the passage I got a little shiver while I watched; something about her evil calculation and swanlike arms, mimicking Odette (the White Swan she is pretending to be, in order to convince Prince Siegfried to betray Odette—the section I’m talking about starts at 4:10 and ends around 5:42). Her partner Bujones was a rare dancer, too, although sadly he died relatively young:
And here’s Gregory now, talking about “Swan Lake”:
Rothbard and the alt-right
[NOTE: This is a post in which I continue to explore the more extremist wing of the alt-right, because I think it bears watching and comprehending. That doesn’t mean I think it’s an enormous group. Nor do I think Donald Trump or even Steve Bannon are members of it. However, this group exists, and it is a big mistake to dismiss them out of hand.]
I had never heard of Murray Rothbard before his name came up in the comments here a while ago in connection with the alt-right. Commenter “J.J.” had mentioned a libertarian strain within the alt-right, and I expressed skepticism about the alt-right’s devotion to libertarian principles.
J.J. responded by citing Wiki:
Matthew Sheffield, writing in the Washington Post, said the alt-right has also been influenced by anarcho-capitalist and paleolibertarian theorist Murray Rothbard, specifically in regards to his theorizing on race and democracy, and had previously rallied behind Ron Paul in 2008.
Those are two terms I’d never come across before, in addition to the name Rothbard: anarcho-capitalist and paleolibertarian. Sounded like some sort of especially extreme form of libertarianism.
So I got curious. And there was quite a motherlode of information on Rothbard (whom I always seem to want to refer to as “Rothbart,” as in the evil wizard/magician in “Swan Lake” named “von Rothbart”):
Michael O’Malley, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University, characterizes Rothbard’s “overall tone regard[ing]” the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s suffrage movement to be “contemptuous and hostile”. Rothbard vilified women’s rights activists, attributing the growth of the welfare state to politically active spinsters “whose busybody inclinations were not fettered by the responsibilities of health and heart”. Rothbard had pointed out in his ”˜Origins of the Welfare State’ that progressives had evolved from elitist Gilded Age pietist Protestants that wanted to bring a secularized version of millennialism under a welfare state, which was spearheaded by a “shock troop of Yankee protestant and Jewish women and lesbian spinsters.”
Rothbard called for the elimination of “the entire ”˜civil rights’ structure” stating that it “tramples on the property rights of every American.” He consistently favored repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including Title VII regarded employment discrimination and called for overturning the Brown v. Board of Education decision on the grounds that forced integration of schools was aggressive.
So far that seems to be describing a very extreme form of the sort of objection a few people on the far right have to what they consider federal overreach, although Rothbard adds some extra-snarky tones.
However, that’s just the beginning. Continue reading →
Trump Tower security challenge
I call the president-elect’s Trump Tower residence the Gold House.
And it’s quite the security challenge:
Other presidents have used retreats ”” the compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, or the ranch in Crawford, Texas, for the Bushes ”” but they were in easily protected locations.
Trump Tower, on the other hand, has hundreds of tenants in 263 apartments, according to its website. That’s on top of 26 floors of offices and a five-story public atrium with stores ranging from Starbucks to Gucci.
…SWAT teams, barricades and sand-filled trucks are already fixtures ”” along with protesters. The sky above it is a no-fly zone until the inauguration at least…
Law enforcement agencies are meeting this week to discuss plans for securing the skyscraper going forward. Possible scenarios include closing lanes on Fifth Avenue, home to Tiffany’s and other world-famous retailers, NBC New York reported.
New Yorkers can also expect to see restrictions on the side streets, bomb-sniffing dogs on the sidewalks and security booths popping up around the building…
Now, some of you may ask “who cares about New York?” Well, I do, for one. The Secret Service says it will meet the challenge, and I certainly hope that’s true. I also think that presidents should be allowed to retreat to their own homes at times, and this happens to be where Trump lives. But it’s just one interesting and mostly-unforeseen side effect of this whole crazy election that we have a president who lives in a place that is, shall we say, atypical and unusually difficult to protect.
I wonder how much time he actually will spend in each place.
The Trump mansion-apartment occupies three floors of the tower, and the scale of the thing and its Louis XIV style are unlikely to reassure those who fear an imperial presidency. Nor is the style one I particularly favor. But he’s not asking me, and I think the style is just Trump being the Trump he’s always been. I’m far more interested in Trump as president, which is uncharted waters. But so far I’ve approved of the majority of the things he’s actually done since winning the election (granted, it’s early).
Go here to see many photos of the inside of the Trump family’s living space. Here’s a sample:
Those who worry that Trump will put his signature over-the-top decorative stamp on the White House should be reassured by this, however:
[Trump] said he would not seek to leave his mark on a building which was designed by the Irish architect James Hoban in the 1790s and rebuilt after being burnt to the ground by the British in 1814.
The president-elect made his pledge on OBJECTified Donald Trump, a one hour documentary on Fox News…
“The White House is a special place, nothing will change at the White House,” Mr Trump said.
I assume he doesn’t literally mean “nothing,” since new presidents have traditionally made changes in the decoration of the living quarters portion of the White House.
A postmortem on the polls
Here’s an interesting article by Michael Barone that tries to say why the pollsters got it wrong.
First of all, I’d like to add that they didn’t get it quite as wrong as some people think. Many of the polls in the last week or so were well within the margin of error, and the election also ended up being close. Not as close as in 2000, but close enough that many states were won by small margins, and the loser won the popular vote, as in 2000. Here’s a post by Scott Alexander that says the same thing about the closeness of the polls—only he wrote it before the election.
But a win is a win is a win, and this particular win by Trump was predicted consistently only by the LA Times polling, which kept showing Trump ahead. But there’s no doubt that in general the poll averages (which have often been accurate in the past) got it wrong.
Barone mentions five elements that may have led to the error; please read the whole thing.
I’ll add that I’m very aware that some people think that polls are purposeful and strategic lies. I do not ascribe to that notion. As I’ve written many times before, however, polls are inherently flawed. There are too many things they must predict in order to predict the winner—such as, for example, turnout, which is one of the most changeable, difficult, and important to get right. However, pollsters would actually like to get it right, particularly in the weeks close to the election, which are the polls that matter most. Pollsters’ reputations are damaged by getting it so wrong, and they are running a business.
Turnout is always hard to predict, but it was especially hard to predict this year because the candidates (both of them) were so unusual. The Shy Tory effect may indeed have been in effect, as well. But purposeful skewing of polls in Hillary’s favor would have been a dangerous practice for the left anyway, as likely to depress Democratic turnout through cockiness as it would be to depress Republican turnout through despair.
So the polls were close enough at the end that, although they consistently predicted a Hillary win, there was no way to say that a Trump loss was an absolute certainty, and I don’t think many people were saying that. A Trump win was always a possibility, one I seem to recall as about 1 in 3 towards the end, and 1 in 3 aren’t such bad odds.
Here is a particularly interesting point by Barone about the geographic breakdown of voters these days:
The fact that Democratic voters are so clustered, concentrated heavily in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns, has helped its presidential candidates in past elections (this one, not so much) but hurt them in congressional and legislative elections conducted in equal population districts.
Clustering, to oversimplify a bit, means that Democrats tend to be concentrated in a few 80 percent Democratic areas, while Republicans are spread more evenly around the country in districts that average somewhere between 55 and 60 percent Republican. To see the effect, consider the number of Republicans and Democrats elected to the lower houses of state legislatures in what turned out to be the 2016 target states. I cite the lower house, because some such states elected only half or none of their state senators this year; Virginia elected no state legislators except to a couple of vacant seats.
The states are ranked in the order of their percentage margins, starting with the most Republican:
Iowa 59-41
Texas 94-55
Ohio 66-33
Georgia 116-62
Arizona 32-26
North Carolina 72-45
Florida 78-39
Pennsylvania 118-81
Wisconsin 64-35
Michigan 63-38
New Hampshire 201-161
Minnesota 75-57
Maine 72-76
Colorado 28-36
New Mexico 31-37There was lots of straight-ticket voting this year, which accounts for the Democratic edges in the more Democratic states at the bottom of the list. But the bottom line is pretty astonishing, particularly considering that these are states which were, like the nation as a whole, roughly equally divided between the parties at the presidential level.
It does seem as though polls have been less accurate in recent years, but one reason may be that the electorate has grown more evenly divided. Close races are harder to call, because small variations matter more. Pollsters also have had to scramble to keep up with changes such as the proliferation of cell phones. But the poll response rate still goes down (I never answer polls myself, for example) and that’s hard to correct for. And even exit polls—which after all, don’t have to predict anything, because everyone in an exit poll actually voted—still have the problem of low response rate as well as the complication of the increasing prevalence of early voters, a whole bloc that is missed by exit polls.
A pas de deux
Commenter “IGotBupkis” recommended the following “dance” video, and I was flabbergasted and charmed when I saw it, because this is a genre of pas de deux that had somehow heretofore escaped my notice:
It turns out there’s an entire world of dogdancing competition. Who knew? You can find tons of videos on YouTube, but that’s one of the best. I’m especially impressed with how the dog in that video is not in constant contact with the trainer and can’t even see her at many points in the routine, and yet still hits her marks and makes her moves what looks like perfectly.
Also, dogdancing seems to be good exercise, because they’re all thin. The people, that is; not the dogs.
If you want to learn a little bit about it, here’s some information.
Another thing I didn’t know is that a dancing dog act had won “Britain’s Got Talent” back in 2012, and this made both the dog Pudsey and his teenage trainer Ashleigh celebrities. Here’s Ashleigh speaking:
”˜But there’s going to be a point where Pudsey can’t do what he’s doing and I do worry and think, “Oh, what am I going to do when Pudsey can’t dance any more?” I know this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience so I’ve just got to enjoy it as much as possible. At the end of the day I’m not a fashion icon or a singer.
”˜I’m a girl with a dog ”” and most people look at the dog.’
Most people look at the dog. Twas ever thus. Interesting article, actually. Ashleigh’s mother trains dogs and early on she realized Pudsey was something special. Ashleigh was a shy girl, not doing well in school, but tenacious when it came to training her dog, as one might imagine.
The National Republican Congressional Committee has an endorsement to make
The National Republican Congressional Committee is a group of GOP members of the House who are dedicated to increasing the number of Republicans in that body. Even though the House actually lost six GOP members, that was considerably less than predicted and the GOP still has a strong majority
So the group is feeling its oats, as evidenced by this endorsement it made yesterday:
With Nancy Pelosi facing a challenge within her own party after House Democrats’ disastrous election results, the NRCC would like to offer its full support to the embattled former Speaker of the House.
Under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, House Democrats squandered their majority by forcing through unpopular legislation like Obamacare, of which Pelosi famously told us, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” After her party’s devastating 63 seat loss in the ensuing 2010 election, Pelosi miraculously maintained her spot as Democratic leader, which, predictably, led to the largest Republican majority since the 1920s.
Former Speaker Pelosi has also established herself as the world’s worst election prognosticator. Since her relegation to the minority, Pelosi has repeatedly assured reporters, cycle after cycle, that a Democrat majority is right around the corner, only to be soundly defeated each time.
“No single person deserves more credit for House Republicans’ historic majority than Nancy Pelosi,” said NRCC Communications Director Katie Martin. “Under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, House Democrats have become completely irrelevant, and there is no better way to ensure that remains the case than by keeping her as Minority Leader. The NRCC offers its full support to Nancy Pelosi as she attempts to fend off this challenge to her failed leadership from within the ranks of her own party.”
Ouch.
Let’s take a local look: the state legislatures
One of the most interesting things this election cycle is something other than Donald Trump. Yes, you heard me—there is actually something other than Donald Trump in politics.
I’ve been saying for quite some time that, whatever happened with the presidency in the 2016 election, the composition of the Senate would be all-important to either president. If it was a Hillary presidency and a Democratic Senate, there would be a repeat of the heady days when Obamacare first went through. If a Trump presidency and Republican Senate occurred (an eventuality I thought much less likely, but still possible), the Republicans had a decent chance of enacting their policy dreams, whatever they might be. But any mixture in which president and Congress differed would spell more gridlock and a difficulty for either president to get his/her agenda accomplished, and would present that president with more and more temptation to do things by executive order, going around the legislature.
Well, we all know what happened: Republicans control both the presidency and the legislature.
But the state elections are especially interesting, as well. More slowly (it’s been happening for quite some time), the Republicans have pretty much taken over on the local level:
Republicans will control 4,170 state legislative seats after last week’s elections, while Democrats will control 3,129 seats in the nation’s 98 partisan legislative chambers. Republicans picked up a net gain of 46 seats in Tuesday’s elections, while Democrats lost 46 seats, according to the latest vote counts from The Associated Press.
Independents and members of minor parties hold 71 seats, including the entire Nebraska Senate, which is nonpartisan. Nearly two weeks after Election Day, about a dozen seats remain too close to call.
“Republicans have been working for this moment for years, to have a federal government with Republican majorities and now at the state level,” said David Avella, who heads GOPAC, a group that grooms young legislative candidates. “We have to deliver on breaking down barriers to job creation, we have to deliver on putting more money in people’s pockets through tax cuts and through higher wages.”
Remember that, because I don’t think the Democrats did: you have to show results, and good ones, or people will reject you. Reality still overcomes imagology, at least for now.
Note the final sentence here:
Since Obama took office, Republicans have captured control of 27 state legislative chambers Democrats held after the 2008 elections. The GOP now controls the most legislative seats it has held since the founding of the party.
That’s astounding. I’ve noticed that, during the bulk of his presidency when Obama has talked about his legacy, he hasn’t seemed to acknowledge this particular aspect of it. If he did, I missed it. But it seems as though it will be the focus of his immediate post-presidency energies.
Not the UN, but this:
The Democratic Party, “in close consultation with the White House,” has launched a new political group “which will coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives and put together legal challenges to state redistricting maps,” Politico reported Monday [a month ago]. Former Attorney General Eric Holder will chair the new group, named the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. And Obama himself, as Politico writes, has “identified the group ”¦ as the main focus of his political activity once he leaves office.” The group will focus on the “gubernatorial, state legislative and House races” in 2018 and 2020 that will determine the design of the next congressional redistricting maps.
Why would Obama concern himself with such seemingly small-fry politics? One reason could be tradition: Ex-presidents like to give their successors room to breathe, so hieing off to state-level battles is one way for Obama to remain active without meddling in the day-to-day grind of national politics. The other, more important reason is that control of state legislatures is in no way small-fry politics. By throwing his name behind the effort, Obama is trying to fix the colossal infrastructural damage his party sustained under his tenure: the Republican state-level domination””and thus congressional domination””achieved first in the midterms of 2010 and iced in 2014.
The article goes on to describe Obama as attributing these losses at the state level to the artifact of gerrymandering rather than any actual failing by Democratic leadership. He also attributes it—as he does almost every problem he has encountered with public opinion during his presidency—as a problem with messaging and communication. The Slate article I’m quoting is definitely Obama-friendly, but even the author seems to recognize what Obama does not (or at least does not publicly acknowledge), which is that it wasn’t all about districting or messaging:
[Obama’s] explanation is a self-flattering one: We were just so busy implementing perfect policies that we forgot to communicate them properly. One doubts that a more cleverly crafted party message””nipping and tucking an adjective here or there in public speeches””would have overridden the factors that led to Democrats’ catastrophic 2010 losses. The flat economy, the party-line stretch to pass the Affordable Care Act, the gravitational pull that was bound to drag Democrats down to Earth after their big successes in the 2006 and 2008 congressional elections.
That’s hardly an exhaustive list, either.
I wonder if Obama is able to acknowledge his actual failures, and not just the “communication” and districting ones, even to himself. I tend to doubt it. It does seem, though, that unlike most ex-presidents, he plans to stay very active in party politics, although not in an elective office.