2020 Presidential Election 3: We're Down To Old White Men...And Fucking Kanye.

[GreyhoundFan]

Dems have historically been "nice". That's not going to defeat Twitler.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"We need to prepare for the possibility of Trump rejecting election results"

Spoiler

Since 2017, so many events in U.S. politics that were previously unthinkable have come to pass. Don’t believe me? A few days ago, the president of the United States baselessly accused a cable television host of murder and it barely made a blip in the news cycle. The shocking has become unsurprising — almost routine — under Donald Trump’s unhinged presidency.

We don’t know whether Trump will be reelected. But, as we head toward November, you have to ask yourself: If he loses, would it be more surprising if Trump graciously accepts defeat and congratulates his opponent or if he claimed to be the victim of a rigged election and a “deep state” plot?

The answer seems clear.

I’ve studied genuinely rigged elections across the globe. The tactics, context and strategies vary enormously from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe. But one trait they have in common is this: The winner doesn’t claim they were rigged.

Not so with Trump. In 2016, when he narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton despite losing the popular vote by a historic margin, he claimed that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally. That is a lie. But it raised an obvious question: If Trump claimed that an election he won was rigged, what will he do with an election he loses?

Already, he has insinuated that Democratic victories are the result of rigged elections. It’s part of a deliberate strategy to discredit the legitimacy of his political opponents, but it also endangers the peaceful transfer of power, which is a cornerstone of democratic government.

It’s worth reiterating that Trump’s claims are lies. The evidence is clear. Voter fraud is an minuscule problem in the United States. One comprehensive study found 31 cases of voter fraud of more than 1 billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, a rate of 0.0000031 percent of all votes. And lest you think that study was somehow biased against Republican claims, George W. Bush’s Justice Department went looking for voter fraud and basically came up empty. Indeed, as Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Rutgers University has noted, in 2005, more people were charged with violating migratory-bird statutes than voter fraud. And that was while Bush’s administration was actively seeking fraud cases to prosecute.

Even the logic is absurd. Trump falsely claims that fraud is largely carried out by undocumented immigrants in California. To believe that, you have to believe that undocumented immigrants (who generally go to extreme lengths to avoid interaction with a government that could deport them) eagerly waltz into polling locations. You have to also believe that they eagerly risk going to jail or being deported to cast a ballot for a candidate that they already know will carry the state by a wide margin. As Minnite put it: “It’s like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome.”

With any president, an attempt to delegitimize elections that your side loses can be destabilizing. But with Trump, it’s dangerous. For years, Trump has pumped out a Twitter stream of endless victimhood complexes, bogus accusations against a mythical “deep state” lurking in the shadows and the mainstreaming of lunatic conspiracy theories. Those messages are aimed at a group of people that is also disproportionately armed.

Consider his now-infamous “liberate” tweets, in which he called on his supporters to rise up against state governments that were following the official public health guidance given by the White House. In one tweet, he twinned that message with a message about the Second Amendment. Was that an accident? Or was it a not-so-coded signal to pair displays of weaponry with MAGA-driven political intimidation? The photos of heavily armed militias who heeded his call — including one man who took a break from protesting to order a Subway sandwich while carrying an antitank rocket launcher — provide the answer.

What will happen if Trump loses and then takes to Twitter to say he actually won? It’s not hard to see how deadly that could become, particularly given that Fox News personalities are already absurdly throwing around the word “coup” to describe lawful investigations and oversight of the president’s conduct. When people in positions of authority and influence invoke the language of political violence and then lose power, violence often ensues. It would be a mistake to assume the United States is somehow immune from that possibility.

Republicans who care about the republic must act now: They need to call out the president when he spreads lies and stokes fears about voter fraud that are rooted only in conservative mythology. Otherwise, we can pretend to be shocked, but nobody should be surprised if Trump tries to discredit the 2020 election — no matter the consequences — if he loses.

 

[JMarie]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/biden-says-he-would-not-pardon-trump/ar-BB146KzA?ocid=spartanntp

Quote

Former Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that he would not pardon President Donald Trump if elected and insisted any prosecutorial decisions would be left to a more independent Justice Department.

Answering questions in a virtual town hall-style event on MSNBC Thursday, the Democratic presidential hopeful was asked by a voter about whether he'd follow the lead of former President Gerald Ford, who pardoned Richard Nixon in large part to help the nation move beyond the Watergate scandal.

 

[fraurosena]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Republicans who care about the republic must act now: They need to call out the president when he spreads lies and stokes fears about voter fraud that are rooted only in conservative mythology. Otherwise, we can pretend to be shocked, but nobody should be surprised if Trump tries to discredit the 2020 election — no matter the consequences — if he loses.

The Republicans don't care about the republic at all. All they care about is holding on to their positions, whatever it takes. And Trump discrediting the elections and calling them rigged? That's not a question. That's a given. 

So yes, America needs to prepare for that occurrence. Things could get real ugly, real fast. If I were the Democrats, I'd be in talks with the military, right now, because they need to be prepared to act quickly, efficiently and most of all, decisively.

2 hours ago, JMarie said:

Answering questions in a virtual town hall-style event on MSNBC Thursday, the Democratic presidential hopeful was asked by a voter about whether he'd follow the lead of former President Gerald Ford, who pardoned Richard Nixon in large part to help the nation move beyond the Watergate scandal.

There is a glaring difference between Ford and Biden though. Ford wasn't elected president, he became president by default because he was Nixon's Vice President, and a Republican -- just like Nixon. Ford pardoning Nixon is just like if Pence were to pardon Trump. (By the way, is it really definitively known how involved Ford was in the Nixon shenanigans?)

Biden on the other hand, will be a duly elected president. 

[GreyhoundFan]

An excellent read:

 

[Rachel333]

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/15/joe-biden-i-wouldnt-vote-for-me-if-i-believed-tara-reade-260146

Quote

“I think they should vote their heart. And if they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldn’t vote for me. I wouldn’t vote for me if I believed Tara Reade,” Biden responded.

I think that's a pretty good answer, actually.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting op-ed that argues the case for Elizabeth Warren to be Biden's running mate: "Elizabeth Warren Knows What Joe Biden Needs in a Vice President"

Spoiler

Joe Biden built his political career as the New Deal order came to an end, one of a generation of Democrats who sought to reconcile the Democratic Party to the Reagan revolution by placing distance between the party and the racial and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. His was a politics attuned to the worries and fears of suburban white voters, from busing and crime to guns and drugs.

Now, of course, those politics are outdated. The Democratic Party has, in the decades since Biden first won office in 1972, come to rely on the groups that fueled those upheavals. The insurgents are the establishment, and Biden — after eight years as vice president to a man who embodied the liberal, cosmopolitan shift in the Democratic Party — has reconciled himself to the new reality. He is still a centrist, but that center is well to the left of where it was even a decade ago.

The coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic crisis have done even more to enlarge the scope of possibility, and Biden, always attuned to changing political winds, has adjusted himself accordingly. Instead of an Obama restoration, Gabriel Debenetti writes in New York magazine, the former vice president is planning a New Deal-esque effort to save American society.

“I think it’s probably the biggest challenge in modern history, quite frankly. I think it may not dwarf but eclipse what F.D.R. faced,” Biden told Chris Cuomo of CNN last month.

“The blinders have been taken off because of this Covid crisis,” he said to a group of 68 donors who gathered on Zoom for a fund-raiser a few weeks later. “I think people are realizing, ‘My Lord, look at what is possible,’ looking at the institutional changes we can make, without us becoming a ‘socialist country’ or any of that malarkey.”

There is good reason to be skeptical of Biden. He is a creature of the Senate. He’s a lifelong moderate. He’s a deal-maker. He prefers compromise.

But let’s say that Biden is serious, that he wants to bring the full weight of the federal government to bear on the crisis before us, that he wants to expand and revitalize the safety net for the next generation — and that he wants to be a transformative president. If that’s true, then he’ll have to do more than talk about his goals; he’ll have to build his administration with that task in mind. And if the first step in that process is choosing a vice president, then there’s one contender who has thought (and thought creatively) about government in a way that will aid and enhance an F.D.R.-style presidency: Elizabeth Warren.

The case for Warren is straightforward. There are at least two major obstacles to broad, ambitious progressive reform. The first is political. You need a president who wants it, a Congress that wants it and a federal judiciary that won’t stand in the way of it. If you can overcome these hurdles — which, as you can imagine, would be incredibly difficult — then you’re left with the next obstacle: implementation. It simply isn’t enough to write and pass a bill. You need experienced officials and agency heads, a fully staffed and well-seasoned federal bureaucracy and skilled political leadership to manage the entire operation. You need a Congress ready to adjust programs as needed and lawmakers skilled in oversight.

You need, in other words, state capacity — the ability to actually deliver on plans and mandates. And if there’s anyone in the Democratic Party who has thought deeply about the challenges of state capacity, administration and personnel, it’s Warren.

Exhibit A is her work as head of the congressional oversight panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, from which she was an aggressive critic of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, demonstrating her detailed knowledge of the federal bureaucracy while scrutinizing the Obama administration’s handling of the bank bailouts.

Exhibit B is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Proposed by Warren in 2007, it was part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. She took a lead role in building the powerful new agency, staffing it with motivated and capable public servants. Under its first director, Richard Cordray, the former attorney general of Ohio, the bureau recovered nearly $12 billion dollars for consumers from financial firms, including $3.8 billion in direct compensation.

Exhibit C is Warren’s aggressive effort to mold and shape a would-be Hillary Clinton administration, beginning in 2014 and stretching into the 2016 election season itself, according to Politico magazine:

As the Clinton transition team fielded ideas from senators in the final months of the campaign, Warren was treated as a “first among equals,” according to a Clinton transition official. Warren’s chief of staff, Dan Geldon, and Clinton senior staffer Jake Sullivan were in close contact and met repeatedly in the final months of the campaign. Warren was deep in the weeds on personnel and pushed the Clinton transition team to hire her allies like Rohit Chopra, a veteran of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren personally lobbied the Clinton transition team, spoke with the Clinton policy team ahead of her endorsement in June 2016, and had placed several allies among those responsible for staffing a second Clinton White House. Had Clinton won the election, Warren would have been among the most influential Democrats in the federal government, on account of her relentless focus on personnel.

Warren has never served in executive office. But she has a powerful grasp on the power of the bureaucracy, of the influence of federal agencies and the reach of their authority, of what you can do by organizing and wielding that power effectively. If empowered (much as Biden was under President Barack Obama) a Vice President Warren would be an invaluable asset in directing and implementing a New Deal-style program.

Of course, before Warren can become vice president, Biden has to win the presidency. And the case for other vice-presidential contenders — like Senator Kamala Harris of California or Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 — is that they will assist the ticket with African-Americans and other groups in ways Warren cannot. But the research falls firmly against the idea that running mates play any substantial role in helping or harming the top of the ticket.

“In order for a running mate to help a candidate on a national scale, he or she must be exceedingly popular,” the political scientists Kyle C. Kopko and Christopher J. Devine wrote in 2016. “In order to hurt, the VP must be tremendously unpopular. By and large, neither happens.” When it does, the effect isn’t all that large. The most maligned vice-presidential nominee in recent history, Sarah Palin, cost John McCain a modest 1.6 percentage points in his campaign against Obama. A better running mate might have left him five points behind, instead of around seven.

At most, the right running mate can build partisan enthusiasm for a less-than-thrilling nominee. That’s what Mike Pence did for the president’s campaign in 2016, giving Donald Trump the conservative and evangelical bona fides he needed to unify the Republican Party. Not only is Warren more popular among Democratic primary voters than her competitors for the vice-presidential nomination, she’s just as popular and well-liked as Biden, with a 77 percent favorability rating to his 76 percent.

More important, Warren would help unify the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party; Bernie Sanders supporters, in particular, would be 61 percent more likely to back Biden for president against Trump if Warren were on the ticket, according to the left-leaning group Data for Progress. Overall, 53 percent of Democrats — as well as more than half of African-Americans — would be more likely to support Biden if Warren were his running mate, compared with 45 percent for Harris, 37 percent for Amy Klobuchar and 29 percent for Abrams.

The November election will be a referendum on Trump, and Biden does not necessarily need any particular running mate to win. But Biden will need one to help him govern according to the terms he has set for himself. And if he intends to push a New Deal-esque program, then he’ll need a partner who can bring those plans to fruition. He’ll need someone who, on day one, is ready to rebuild the state’s capacity to act on behalf of the public, after four years of atrophy, neglect and attrition. Every vice-presidential contender has her virtues, but for this task, there’s no choice but Elizabeth Warren.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I was glad to read this. I was becoming concerned that he might siphon away voters who don't want Twitler, but wouldn't vote for Biden: "Rep. Justin Amash says he won’t run for president"

Spoiler

Rep. Justin Amash, the Michigan congressman who left the Republican Party last year, said on Twitter that he will not run for president this year after saying last month that he would seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination.

“After much reflection, I’ve concluded that circumstances don’t lend themselves to my success as a candidate for president this year, and therefore I will not be a candidate,” he tweeted.

Amash said that the polarization in the country, as well as the challenges to campaigning posed by the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing, meant it was not the right year for a successful third-party bid.

Amash, 40, was elected in the 2010 tea party wave and grew increasingly distant from Republicans as the decade went on, fending off a primary challenge from a business-backed conservative in 2014. He was deeply critical of Trump’s 2016 campaign, and even more critical of what the GOP did with control of the legislative and executive branches.

 

[nausicaa]

So it looks like Amash was smart enough to realize his presidential campaign wasn't a good idea and he has closed his exploratory committee and isn't running. So there's that at least. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Frank Bruni: "I’ll Take Biden’s Confusion Over Trump’s Corruption"

Quote

Please tell me why I should care whether Joe Biden is declining mentally when Donald Trump bottomed out morally long ago.

I’m serious. I’d rather drink milk past its expiration date than arsenic.

In case you’ve missed it, Trump and his minions are getting more and more aggressive — shameless is the better adjective — in their portrayal of Biden as a demented wreck.

This peaked last week with an interview that President Trump gave to Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner. He not only told Zito that Biden “has absolutely no idea what’s happening.” Trump also said: “He doesn’t know he’s alive.”

This wasn’t some off-the-cuff dig. This is Trump’s re-election strategy — well, much of it — in one nasty quip. “I’m rubber, you’re glue” becomes “I’m egomaniacal, you’re incoherent.” Which is rich, coming from the kook who mused about ingesting household bleach.

Team Trump has been at this for months. I happened to be watching a lot of Fox News in early March — it’s necessary research, though it feels more like flogging oneself — and barely an hour went by without a host or guest asserting that the Democratic Party had rallied around Biden precisely because they detected a cognitive void where a vice president once existed.

In other words: Because Biden is out to lunch, unprincipled Democratic power brokers can put whatever they want on his plate. He’ll docilely sup on it and then ask for more.

The Fox News regular Brit Hume said flat-out that Biden was “getting senile.” Rudy Giuliani, throwing stones from his glass house, sputtered that Biden was exhibiting “obvious signs of dementia.”

And that message is now a fixture of the Trump campaign’s social-media efforts. As Nick Corasaniti and Maggie Haberman wrote in The Times on Friday, “The campaign’s ads on Facebook have taken their own dark turn. Its videos on the platform declare ‘Geriatric Health is No Laughing Matter’ or ‘Joe Biden: Old and Out of It,’ then use selective edits of Mr. Biden’s verbal stumbles and meandering soliloquies to make less-than-subtle suggestions about his mental acuity.”

It’s an ugly tack, but familiar. As the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen observed, media coverage of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign included references to his apparent confusion, questions about his mental alertness and mentions of the prevalence of dementia and senility among people in their mid-to-late 70s. Reagan was then 73.

Biden is 77, but would be 78 at his inauguration. If he’s elected, Thiessen wrote, “He’ll be older on the day he takes office than Reagan was on the day he left office. So, yes, his mental fitness is a legitimate issue.”

I agree. There have been moments aplenty when Biden’s stumbles have made me wince — particularly a doozy from a few days ago, when he seemingly confused lost jobs with lost lives and upped the Covid-19 death toll to “millions of people.”

But Biden’s bumbling isn’t the defining issue, not even close, and we shouldn’t let Trump use it to do in 2020 what he did in 2016, which was to portray his opponent — then, Hillary Clinton — as so enormously unappealing and recklessly unacceptable that, to many Americans, Trump looked ever so marginally better in comparison, which is to say that he looked endurable.

There’s negative campaigning and then there’s what Trump engineers and allows, which is in another grotesque league altogether. On Saturday, the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to Instagram to insinuate — without a whiff of substantiation — that Biden was a pedophile.

Last time around, the Trump operation’s scorched-earth approach encompassed Russia, Wikileaks, the parading of Bill Clintons’ accusers, the fanning of ludicrous conspiracy theories, chants of “lock her up!” and the suggestion that somebody might someday need to take a shot at Hillary. This is what I mean about a moral bottom.

In anticipation of November, he has already tried to extort political help from the president of Ukraine. Remember impeachment? I sometimes get the sense that it has faded from consciousness. (A pandemic can have that effect.) Don’t forget Trump’s “perfect” phone call, because it’s not history. It’s harbinger. There are surely dirtier tricks to come.

To hold on to power, this president will do whatever it takes. And in the middle of all of this dying and impoverishment, it’s going to take a lot.

It’s going to take the transformation of China into the most nefarious global menace ever, of Gretchen Whitmer into a communist dominatrix, of the Obama administration and the F.B.I. into a deep-state cabal and of Biden into a doddering, drooling imbecile who’d be tucked away in some attic if he hadn’t already taken refuge in the basement.

Put another way, Trump has to make himself just slightly less awful than everyone and everything else. He has to get a crucial number of voters who are either genuinely wavering, considering a third-party candidate or looking for an excuse to vote for him to say what many of them did four years ago: “The Democrats haven’t given me any real choice. There are no good options.”

It was a false equivalence then and it’s an even falser one now that we know what a Trump presidency looks like, now that we’ve been subjected to the endless lying and the baseless bragging and the self-pity and the self-dealing and the grandiosity and the corruption and the incompetence and Jared and Ivanka and the whole wretched crew of delusional opportunists.

Two flawed candidates don’t add up to a jump ball.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Biden has lost a few steps. Let’s posit that while he was always a font of gaffes, he’s now a geyser of them. Let’s assume that his herky-jerky conversational gait betrays a herky-jerky intellectual one.

It nonetheless remains true that he got through a two-person, two-hour debate with Bernie Sanders in mid-March without embarrassing himself in the slightest. Besides, the precise agility of his mind has nothing to do with the fundamental decency of his values. At the end of the day, Biden can be trusted to do what Trump didn’t and won’t: stock his administration with qualified professionals. He could compensate for any supposed cognitive deficit with a surplus of talent.

Trump can’t fill his moral vacuum. By its nature, it prevents him from recognizing or caring about it. Confused is fixable. Rotten isn’t.

So let Trump tweet and bleat to his heart’s content about Biden as some blithering idiot. It’s not just over the top; it’s irrelevant.

At least Biden’s not poison.

 

[Marmion]

8 hours ago, nausicaa said:

So it looks like Amash was smart enough to realize his presidential campaign wasn't a good idea and he has closed his exploratory committee and isn't running. So there's that at least. 

 

Yet the Libertarian party is still in operation .  And it will still be nominating a candidate for President .  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Libertarian_Party_presidential_primaries  Whether or not this helps , hurts , or has no subsequential , consequential impact on the reelection of Trump remains to be seen . 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Faced with a Trumpian barrage of attacks, Joe Biden chooses to look the other way"

Spoiler

In a return to his old fighting form last week, President Trump suggested that his electoral rival, Joe Biden, should go to prison for an unspecified offense he labeled the “greatest political crime in the history of our country.”

In response, Biden did nothing, holding back in silence for hours after Trump’s interview aired Thursday on Fox Business Network, until the presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign finally sent out a tweet.

“There’s nothing that the American people cannot accomplish when we stand together — one nation, united in purpose,” it read.

The cheery non sequitur underscored a core presumption of Biden’s senior team as it enters a new phase of the presidential campaign, one marked by hourly offensives from one of the most accomplished political pugilists in American history, who now enjoys the largest electoral cash advantage of the modern era.

Biden’s advisers, aware of what Trump is preparing to fire at him, describe themselves as dead set against being triggered by his provocations or engaging with him on his terms. Voters will decide the election, they believe, in response to the crisis now engulfing the nation, not the spectacle of Trump’s Twitter feed.

The most explosive Trump volleys have been dismissed by them as distractions — so far at least — even as Trump’s attacks on the former vice president’s competence and economic record stir more concern and response.

“The context of this race is different than anything anyone has experienced since probably 1932,” said Anita Dunn, a senior strategist for the Biden campaign. “The question that the American people are going to be posed in 2020 will be: Who do you trust as we enter this new phase of this nation’s history?”

Some of Biden’s top advisers have gone even further, predicting that Trump’s tactics of embracing false conspiracy theories and stirring up hurricanes of controversy could backfire, given an unemployment rate approaching 20 percent and a viral pandemic that has already killed nearly 90,000.

“The public is really focused on what matters in this election. And they’re not being dragged into side issues and they are not being dragged into manufactured issues,” said Mike Donilon, the Biden campaign’s senior strategist. “It’s just too serious. So I think Trump is risking a real problem in trying to push the conversation to a place where the country knows that’s not what’s at stake.”

It’s a wager the Trump campaign’s top advisers are happy to take. After more than two months of mixed messages and inconsistent strategy, Trump chose the second week of May to finally launch his campaign at its full power against Biden, attacking his record, his integrity and his mental acuity with a media blitz anchored by about $10 million in television ads in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Arizona, Iowa and North Carolina. Trump has focused extensively on Pennsylvania and Florida in recent conversations with political advisers, who met with him in the Oval Office last week.

Pro-Trump ads in the electoral battlegrounds now outnumber Democratic ads for the first time this year, by a margin of about 2 to 1 since the beginning of the month, according to Democratic advertising tracking data provided to The Washington Post. And that is just part of the effort Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale calls “omnichannel,” a reference to the scope of its delivery systems, which include online advertising, social media posts, phone banking and an extensive surrogate operation.

On Facebook, the Trump campaign debuted new ads calling Biden a “corrupt BIG GOVERNMENT SOCIALIST,” and others attacking his record on guns and immigration. One set of digital ads casts the former vice president as a puppet in the hand of Chinese President Xi Jingping, and another photoshops Biden as a spoon-fed invalid in a nursing home with the caption “Too Old?”

Trump allies and advisers are likely to slam Biden with other manufactured accusations, such as allegations about being mentally disabled. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., posted an image Saturday on Instagram that showed an alligator calling Biden a pedophile, an allegation with no foundation. In emojis, the younger Trump indicated he found the image to be funny.

Among the other messages the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have tested in polling: Biden’s support for the Iran nuclear deal, his boast of wanting to get rid of fossil fuels, his vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement and his support for access to health insurance for undocumented immigrants. They have also tested attacks about members of Biden’s family making money while he held public office, his vote for the Iraq War, his personal wealth and his tendency to stumble over his words.

Among the attacks that have polled better, advisers say: Hitting him on China, NAFTA, support for the Green New Deal and Iran.

Parscale and his team have tested positive messages about Trump and did not get the same results, according to people familiar with the campaign tests. But there are some limits to how well some of the attacks might work. After voters in the 17-state RNC survey were provided an onslaught of negative statements about Biden, the Democrat still won by 1 percent over Trump, compared with 3 percent before they heard the statements, an official familiar with the poll said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the findings.

One adviser said of Trump: “We are testing if he still has the amazing ability to get people to vote for him who say they can’t stand him.”

The sheer volume of attacks is part of the strategy, an effort to overwhelm a Biden campaign that is still finding its footing after a near standing start at the end of the Democratic primaries.

“They don’t have a choice but to just take it on some of these things. They don’t have the war chest or the structural organization to fight a multi-front battle,” said Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director. “If they say their strategy is to take gut punch after gut punch and that’s their plan, I’m not sure who’s buying that.”

Talking points distributed Tuesday by the Trump campaign to surrogates asked them to hammer Biden on his support for China gaining entry to the World Trade Organization, opposing “strong trade actions” against China and the evidence-free charge that Biden’s son, Hunter, took $1.5 billion from China. (The younger Biden was involved in a Chinese investment effort during his father’s time as vice president, but there is no public evidence the fund ever attracted that much investment or that the younger Biden profited to that extent.)

Similar scripts were given to Trump’s army of grass-roots volunteers, who have been blitzing key states with phone calls and text messages, according to a campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.

Trump and his advisers see scorched-earth as the way to win. Campaign adviser Bill Stepien has recounted to others being in Trump Tower on Election Day 2016 and telling the president his approval rating was 38 percent — and Trump still believed he would win.

At the same time, Trump has personally taken the lead attacking Biden from the White House, even as he simultaneously denies that Biden is the focus of his campaign.

“I’m not running against Sleepy Joe Biden. He is not even a factor,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “I’m running against the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats & their partner, the real opposition party, the Lamestream Fake News Media!”

Over the past week he has questioned Biden’s ability to perform as a candidate and latched on to a recently declassified document showing that Biden was one of 16 officials who requested the unmasking of a person who turned out to be Trump’s first national security adviser, after his conversation with the Russian ambassador was captured in intercepts gathered as part of a foreign intelligence operation after the 2016 election.

The same document says standard procedures were followed during the unmasking, which occurs in every administration, including Trump’s, if top officials can show they need to know the name of Americans or legal residents interacting with foreigners targeted by spy agencies. But Trump has nonetheless alleged that Biden’s actions are part of a criminal conspiracy to undermine his incoming administration, which he has labeled “Obamagate.”

Many Democratic strategists, including those outside the Biden campaign, have warned that the attacks are tangential and should be ignored. “Vote,” tweeted former president Barack Obama in an apparent one-word rejoinder to the attack, which Biden echoed with the phrase, “What he said.”

“If I were them I would be as quiet as a church mouse,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster who has been working with independent groups to help defeat Trump. “Engaging with an arsonist will only light your house on fire.”

Inside the Biden campaign, the greatest concern is raised by Trump attacks that might erode Biden’s standing as a person better able than the president to help the country recover from the coronavirus pandemic. The campaign has hit back on Trump’s China attacks, using the president’s own words to argue in digital videos that it is Trump who is too cozy. And advisers have taken notice of the Trump campaign’s fixation on Biden’s mental competence.

Biden has also launched an economic policy attack on Trump’s coronavirus response, tapping into liberal economic populist arguments that Biden has embraced in past campaigns.

“Trump and his administration are carrying out what is now the largest corporate bailout in American history in a way that is systematically rigged in favor of big businesses, the wealthy, and the financial sector — and against the working people and middle class families,” advised a Biden campaign memo to surrogates on May 8.

The campaign has also focused on health care, a significant Trump weakness, according to internal and external polling.

The Biden campaign has also been playing its own branding game, seeking to build out an online brand identity with a “campaign code” of inclusion, empathy and kindness, words not associated with Trump’s more aggressive style. Campaign videos make jokes about the candidate’s love of ice cream and aviator sunglasses.

His advisers have also been cheered by internal and public polls that show Biden with advantages in key personal attributes and a far more favorable rating among voters than the last Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, had at this point in 2016.

A CNN poll released last week found that Biden had a 12-point advantage over Trump on the question of whether the candidate “cares about people like you,” a 15-point advantage on being “honest and trustworthy” and a 17-point advantage on uniting the country, not dividing it. Biden trailed Trump by three points in a question about who had the sharpness and stamina to be president. Internal Trump polling has shown similar numbers.

While there is no certainty that those numbers will hold up over the Trump blitz to come, Biden and those working to elect him believe they will be better off ignoring much of it.

“By the end of next week they will be done with this and they will go on to the next thing, which is Beijing Biden or whatever,” said Rick Wilson, a Trump foe and Republican consultant. “The Biden campaign needs to just keep one thing in mind: Every reelection is a referendum on the incumbent.”

 

[Audrey2]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Please tell me why I should care whether Joe Biden is declining mentally when Donald Trump bottomed out morally long ago.

I would argue that Trump is also declining mentally. If the Republicans want to push this, I think Biden needs to hit back with cofefe.

[Dandruff]

3 hours ago, Audrey2 said:

I would argue that Trump is also declining mentally. If the Republicans want to push this, I think Biden needs to hit back with cofefe.

And hamberders.

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, Dandruff said:

And hamberders.

And drinking bleach.

[Rachel333]

11 hours ago, Marmion said:

Yet the Libertarian party is still in operation .  And it will still be nominating a candidate for President .  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Libertarian_Party_presidential_primaries  Whether or not this helps , hurts , or has no subsequential , consequential impact on the reelection of Trump remains to be seen . 

I think the difference is that Amash, as a current member of Congress, has an air of legitimacy that the other possible nominees will not.

Their primary calendar summary is funny.

Quote

March 3;

• None of the above wins the North Carolina Libertarian presidential primary.
• Jacob Hornberger wins the California Libertarian presidential primary.
• Vermin Supreme wins the Massachusetts Libertarian presidential primary.
• Max Abramson announces his departure from the Libertarian Party, ending his bid for the party's presidential nomination.

March 4: John McAfee suspends his presidential campaign and announces his candidacy for the Libertarian vice-presidential nomination, endorsing Vermin Supreme for president.

March 5: McAfee resumes his presidential campaign.

 

[nausicaa]

15 hours ago, Marmion said:

Yet the Libertarian party is still in operation .  And it will still be nominating a candidate for President .  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Libertarian_Party_presidential_primaries  Whether or not this helps , hurts , or has no subsequential , consequential impact on the reelection of Trump remains to be seen . 

Well, they've been nominating candidates for president since 1972 (David Koch was the party's presidential candidate in 1980). Like Rachel said, this year's remaining candidates will get a lot less traction because of a lack of name recognition. And none has any popularity with a key electoral college demographic like Amash does in Michigan.

Johnson was a former New Mexico governor and Ron Paul a long-time congressman. This year's remaining candidates have neither high profile political positions nor much money (well there's McAfee, but I imagine his legal problems are a bit draining...) This year's candidate will probably only draw off a small number of disaffected Republicans, slightly hurting Trump if doing anything at all. 

Edited May 18, 2020 by nausicaa

[GreyhoundFan]

Another great and brutal ad from The Lincoln Project:

 

[AmericanRose]

I just had a possibly crazy thought.

We all know that after the election, if Trump loses, he won't just be no longer POTUS - he'll be looking at trials, and possibly jail, which gives him extra motivation to make up crazy stories to try and fool people into voting for him (though how anyone can believe what Trump says by now, I have no idea).

Is it possible Biden entered to be the sacrificial lamb? I have no doubt some insanity will happen over the next few months, and he's quite possibly the safest candidate ever.
He's also pretty old, so it's not as though he's risking his future career.

I was pretty pissed off when he decided to run last year - I wanted us to have a progressive, preferably non-male, presidential candidate. But now I don't know.

He also seems to be stepping up to the plate lately (though really, all you have to do is give Trump enough rope, and he'll hang himself).

[GreyhoundFan]

"Bernie Sanders, seeking peace with Joe Biden, asks his own delegates to turn down the volume"

Spoiler

Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose delegates staged a raucous rebellion against Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic convention, is trying to engineer a different outcome this year — by turning down the volume on his social media-driven army of 2020 delegates.

The Vermont senator’s campaign has told some supporters picked to represent him this year to sign agreements barring attacks on other candidates or party leaders, combative confrontations on social media or talking to reporters without approval.

The move, which carried a threat of being removed as a delegate, has the effect of blunting one of the most powerful if divisive tools of Sanders’s movement — its unrestrained online presence and tendency to stoke controversy through other media, which has at times spiraled into abuse of his opponents, perceived and real.

“Refrain from making negative statements about other candidates, party leaders, Campaigns, Campaign staffers, supporters, news organizations or journalists. This Campaign is about the issues and finding solutions to America’s problems,” said the social media policy sent to some delegates. “Our job is to differentiate the senator from his opponents on the issues — not through personal attacks.”

“Do your best to avoid online arguments or confrontations,” the policy said. “If engaging in an adversarial conversation, be respectful when addressing opposing viewpoints or commenting on the opposition.”

The agreements angered some Sanders delegates, and the campaign is now working with delegates to adjust its demands.

Chris Liquori, a Sanders delegate from New Hampshire, said he heard about the documents on a conference call this week that left him with the impression that delegates in multiple states had received them.

“I think the campaign is trying to avoid, you know, a walkout or some really bad optics a la 2016,” Liquori said.

The rules, which were obtained by The Washington Post and confirmed by the Sanders campaign, were sent to some delegates last week. It was not known how broadly the rules were dispersed or who ordered them, but they included a social media policy, a nondisclosure agreement and a delegate code of conduct. The campaign declined to say what revisions it was planning.

“When delegates attend the Democratic convention, they will be representing Sen. Sanders, the ideas he ran on and the millions of working people who supported his campaign,” Sanders campaign spokesman Mike Casca said in a statement. “That is a serious responsibility and we’re asking them to follow a basic code of conduct while carrying out that duty.”

The stipulations come as presumptive nominee Joe Biden and his allies are eager to head off a repeat of the revolts of four years ago that many Democrats felt undermined Clinton’s campaign against President Trump.

At the same time, the Sanders movement is grappling with its future now that its candidate has been eliminated and is supporting Biden. Sanders’s supporters are known for their blunt and impassioned advocacy for his left-wing political revolution, and many have expressed vehement disdain for Biden and the Democratic establishment.

The senator — who associates say is closer with Biden than he ever was with Clinton — is seeking to forge a unified front with the former vice president heading into the general election. The two have formed policy working groups and frequently compliment each other. The agreements distributed by the Sanders campaign represent some of the most aggressive attempts yet to achieve harmony.

Delegates were told they “are expected to follow” the guidelines and that “failure to do so may result in disciplinary action, including but not limited to your removal from the delegation.”

Representatives for Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Key parts of the five-page orders appeared designed to prevent unflattering news reports about disagreements in the party. “Social media postings have the potential to generate media coverage,” the document warned, before instructing delegates how to address a press inquiry. “If a member of the media contacts you about a posting of any kind: do not respond,” it said. Instead, it continues, contact the Sanders press office.

“Before tweeting or posting from your personal social media accounts, ask yourself these questions: If this appeared on the front page of The New York Times, would it compromise Bernie Sanders’s message, credibility, or reputation? Could it potentially risk your standing as a delegate? When re-tweeting or sharing information from others, are you applying necessary skepticism?” the social media policy said.

The nondisclosure agreement banning delegates from divulging confidential information said they may not “author or create a book, article, academic study, video, movie, or other content” without written approval from the Sanders campaign.

Delegates said they were put off by the measures.

“Some of the intent and some of the wording was really not agreeable to some of our Colorado delegation,” said Lori Boydston, a Sanders delegate from Colorado. She said that a committee discussed changes they proposed to the Sanders campaign, which the campaign accepted. “All is good,” she added.

But Boydston said she was unsure what the full scope of the changes would be. “Some of the wording was really stifling what to say,” she said, adding, “What we really want to do is make sure we’re still talking about issues.”

Delegate slates are still being formalized in many states, and not all confirmed Sanders delegates received the initial agreements. Heather Stockwell, a Sanders delegate from New Hampshire, said she had not seen or received the rules but had learned about them from associates.

“I did hear about it from other delegates in other states that they were trying to work with the campaign to change some of the wording because it was kind of offensive,” Stockwell said. “Some people were really upset.”

Zach Thomas, a Sanders delegate in Utah who received the documents, said he was not alarmed by them, but “I could definitely see how others could take it a different way if they are still supporting Senator Sanders and kind of more that movement instead of the party itself.”

The stipulations would stand to benefit Biden in stemming public disagreement with his campaign by liberal members of his own party and a repeat of the spectacle, if there is a physical gathering, of the convention disruptions Clinton faced from Sanders supporters in 2016 in Philadelphia.

Just as the last convention was about to start, Sanders addressed his delegates and urged them to get behind Clinton. Many disagreed, booing loudly as TV cameras captured the dissent, which continued on the convention floor and stoked anger inside Clinton’s campaign.

Amid concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus, it’s unclear whether Democrats will convene in Milwaukee as planned. Originally scheduled for July, the convention has been pushed back to mid-August in hopes that health conditions will improve by then. But Democrats also have begun changing their rules to accommodate a scaled-back or virtual meeting. (Republicans are still publicly planning an in-person convention at the end of August in Charlotte.)

If virtual conventions replace the traditional variety, interviews with reporters and postings on social media and other online platforms could emerge as the main venues for delegates to express themselves.

Sanders supporters have gained a reputation for attacking critics and rivals online more aggressively than backers of other politicians. In the past, the senator has faced pressure from Democrats who have felt he did not go far enough to compel his followers to ease hostilities, particularly in the online sphere. At times, Sanders simply has distanced himself from the attacks.

Sanders suspended his campaign on April 8 after concluding that he had no feasible path to victory against Biden and didn’t wish to extend his run in the midst of a pandemic. He soon endorsed Biden, but said he wished to remain on the ballots in the states yet to vote so that he could add to his delegate total at the convention. The point, Sanders and his supporters have said, is to gain leverage over the party platform and other important decisions.

While Sanders has lined up behind Biden more quickly than he backed Clinton, some of his supporters and former staffers have refused to fall in line and continue to criticize the former vice president.

The personal dynamic between Biden and Sanders, coupled with an urgency to defeat Trump, has given Democrats hope for smoother relations in the party as the November election draws near. One encouraging indicator they have pointed to was Biden’s adoption of policies that moved him closer to Sanders.

Sanders has voiced confidence about the prospect of unity, citing the imperative in the party to defeat Trump as a reason he thinks his supporters will rally behind Biden.

“I think at the end of the day, the vast majority of the people who voted for me, who supported me, will understand and do understand that Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country,” Sanders said in a recent interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “And I think, at the end of day, they will be voting for Joe Biden.”

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

After the Lincoln Project published the brutal ad about Brad Parscale, another scummy MAGAt got promoted in the Twitler campaign. She's a crook, so she'll fight right in.

 

[fraurosena]

 

[WiseGirl]

 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, WiseGirl said:

 

And of course Trump can't but help himself call attention to all those R's voting for Biden...