Tag Archives: hillary

Hillary Clinton vs. the Press, Part 5,348

by EdisonWdzxyp Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton has an icy relationship with much of the press. Here’s why:

Clinton’s icy relationship with the press corps is really no surprise. What’s surprising is that she’s managed to refrain from smacking them silly. Isn’t it long, long past time for national reporters to cut the crap and stop enabling Donald Trump’s idiot tweets? I know he’s entertaining. But this is a presidential campaign, not Access Hollywood.

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Hillary Clinton vs. the Press, Part 5,348

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The Case for Calm

by VedaGLWCow Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

A couple of worried Democrats are coming over for dinner tomorrow. Since I’m the voice of calm, my job is to explain why they probably shouldn’t be panicking over polls showing that Hillary Clinton’s lead is shrinking. This is pretty easy to do, but first this year’s standard disclaimer:

This is the weirdest presidential campaign in my lifetime. Everything I know might be worthless. Caveat emptor.

OK, so why am I still feeling pretty calm? I could show you the pretty picture from Pollster, which really doesn’t show much change over the past year, but I’ve already done that—and anyway, haven’t I said that Sam Wang is my preferred pollster? Indeed I have. So here is Sam Wang:

Roughly speaking, Hillary Clinton has had a steady 3.5 percent lead over Trump all year. Then she got a boost from the Democratic convention and a few bad weeks for Trump. That wore off and she dropped back to a little below where she’s been all along. In the last few days, Clinton has started rising again, and my guess is that over the next few weeks she’ll meander back to her longtime lead of 3.5 percent. Pollwise, the single most remarkable thing about the Clinton vs. Trump race is how stable it’s been ever since the day Trump took his famous escalator ride down to the ground floor of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy.

To the extent that Democrats are panicking, I think it’s because a few weeks ago Clinton was ahead by 7 percent or so, and everyone was licking their chops and wondering if a landslide was possible. It was deflating when that turned out to be a mirage. I got caught up in that a bit too, and it was probably foolish. In reality, it was just a temporary bump and was never likely to last.

Still, even if Clinton has a fairly reliable 3.5 percent lead, isn’t that pretty disappointing? I mean, she’s running against a clown like Trump. This isn’t some normal Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney. She should be ahead by 6 or 7 points. What the hell is wrong with America?

I’m not sure about that. But keep in mind that election fundamentals—Democrats have held the White House for eight years; the economy is in adequate but not great shape; Obama’s approval level has been only fair until very recently—suggest that this should be a Republican year. Alan Abromowitz, whose forecasting model has had reasonable success, figures that Trump should win the popular vote by 3 percent. If, instead, Clinton wins by 3-4 percent, it means she’s outperformed the fundamentals by 6-7 percent. That’s not bad.

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The Case for Calm

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We Talked to New Yorkers on the Block That Was Bombed About Who Will Make America Safe Again

by DarwinDiederich Posted on September 19, 2016

Mother Jones

New Yorkers are practical. “It would have been awesome to see a dumpster go flying across the street. I would have paid to see that,” Chelsea office worker Matthew Swope told me, deadpan, as we stood near to where a bomb detonated on Saturday night, injuring 29 people and triggering a manhunt across two states. “What else are you going to do?”

Residents and workers along 23rd Street near 7th Avenue were getting on with life Monday afternoon, as police oversaw a complicated crime scene nearby. Meanwhile, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump engaged in a war of words over terrorism, and over who would make Americans feel safer. “They are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists,” Clinton said about potential terrorists attacking America. “The kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.”

Trump, on the other hand, blamed immigration: “These attacks, and many others, were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system.”

Residents and workers in Chelsea, however, completely rejected Trump’s hardline immigration policy as a solution to future terrorist attacks. “Of course, Clinton—I feel that she can do a better job of protecting us,” Swope said. “She has a much more level-headed personality.”

Jane Nelson, who was visiting a friend in Chelsea, was even blunter: “He knows nothing.”*

Correction: A previous version of this post misidentified the person who said “He knows nothing.”

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We Talked to New Yorkers on the Block That Was Bombed About Who Will Make America Safe Again

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Why Are There Any Liberals Supporting Gary Johnson?

by BeatrizMackenzi Posted on September 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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According to the latest New York Times poll, Gary Johnson is supported by 26 percent of young voters.1 Of these Johnson supporters, how many are liberal former supporters of Bernie Sanders who would normally be expected to switch to Hillary Clinton? No one seems to have explicitly polled about this, but various pieces of evidence suggest that it’s around half. If you make some reasonable assumptions and do a bit of arithmetic, this suggests that somewhere around a fifth of young liberal voters are casting their lot with Johnson.

In one sense, this is easy to understand. Johnson favors legalization of marijuana. He’s good on civil liberties and wants to cut way back on overseas military interventions. He’s moderate on immigration. He’s pro-choice and supports gay rights. There are plenty of things for Bernie supporters to like about him.

On the other hand, Johnson is a libertarian. Here’s a smattering of what else he believes:

He supports TPP.
He supports fracking.
He opposes any federal policies that would make college more affordable or reduce student debt. In fact, he wants to abolish student loans entirely.
He thinks Citizens United is great.
He doesn’t want to raise the minimum wage. At all.
He favors a balanced-budget amendment and has previously suggested that he would slash federal spending 43 percent in order to balance the budget. This would require massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and social welfare programs of all kinds.
He opposes net neutrality.
He wants to increase the Social Security retirement age to 75 and he’s open to privatization.
He opposes any kind of national health care and wants to repeal Obamacare.
He opposes practically all forms of gun control.
He opposes any kind of paid maternity or medical leave.
He supported the Keystone XL pipeline.
He opposes any government action to address climate change.
He wants to cut the corporate tax rate to zero.
He appears to believe that we should reduce financial regulation. All we need to do is allow big banks to fail and everything will be OK.
He wants to remove the Fed’s mandate to maximize employment and has spoken favorably of returning to the gold standard.
He wants to block-grant Medicare and turn it over to the states.
He wants to repeal the 16th Amendment and eliminate the income tax, the payroll tax, and the estate tax. He would replace it with a 28 percent FairTax that exempts the poor. This is equivalent to a 39 percent sales tax, and it would almost certainly represent a large tax cut for the rich.

Some of her weirder beliefs aside, it’s easy to see why former Bernie supporters might turn to Jill Stein. But Gary Johnson? He makes Hillary Clinton look like the second coming of FDR. Unless you’re basically a single-issue voter on civil liberties and military force, it’s hard to see why any lefty of any stripe would even think of supporting Johnson. What’s the deal here?

1Oddly enough, the story that originally reported this has been silently purged of this statistic, but let’s go with it anyway.

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Why Are There Any Liberals Supporting Gary Johnson?

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Donald Trump Announces Something, Press Goes Wild

by ChanaWhelan445 Posted on September 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton announced a plan to rein in excessive price increases by pharmaceutical companies. It was a hot topic at the time thanks to outrage over the 6x price increase of the EpiPen. However, if my sleuthing is accurate, Clinton’s plan wasn’t covered at all in the print editions of the New York Times and Washington Post, and got only a short blurb in the Wall Street Journal.

Today Donald Trump announced a modest child-care and maternity leave plan that was almost comically underfunded. The New York Times produced a long front-page story. The Washington Post ran a long story in the A section and added a second analysis piece online. The Wall Street Journal provided Ivanka Trump with prime op-ed real estate to tout her father’s plan. That’s some great coverage! And all of these pieces barely mentioned that Trump offered no remotely plausible way to pay for his proposal.

I suppose you can argue that Trump’s child-care plan is more important than Clinton’s drug pricing plan. Or that an actual policy proposal from Trump is so rare that it’s big news no matter what. Or that Republicans don’t normally propose spending money on people in need.

Sure, I guess. I mean, I realize that the marvel of the dancing bear is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all. Even so, it sure seems like the press really doesn’t care about Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals—oh God, another boring white paper from Hillz—but swoons every time Donald Trump blurps out one of his laughably ill-thought-out ideas—he’s using Ivanka to appeal to suburban women, we gotta get on this! But that’s editorial judgment for you. I’m sure the pros know what they’re doing.

POSTSCRIPT: Can I gripe about something else as long as we’re on the subject? Thanks. Here’s the New York Times:

But in selling his case, Mr. Trump stretched the truth, saying that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has no such plan of her own and “never will.”

The Washington Post doesn’t even mention this, and needless to say, neither does Ivanka Trump’s bit of puffery in the Journal. So props to the Times. But seriously: stretched the truth? As Trump knows perfectly well, Hillary Clinton has been pressing for better child-care and family leave policies for decades, and her current proposal has been on her website for months. It’s far more extensive, more generous, and better thought out than Trump’s.

This is why Trump feels like he can simply say anything he wants, no matter how ridiculous. The obvious way to describe Trump’s statement is to call it a lie. That’s what it is. Instead, it either goes unmentioned or, at best, gets tiptoed around inaccurately. In what way, after all, did Trump “stretch the truth”? That implies there’s some kernel of truth to what Trump said, but he exaggerated it. But that’s not what he did. He just lied.

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Donald Trump Announces Something, Press Goes Wild

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New York Times Public Editor Shrugs Off Charges of False Equivalency

by MilagrosRayner Posted on September 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Liz Spayd, the New York Times public editor, writes today about charges of “false equivalence.” She basically blows it off:

As we enter the final sprint of an extraordinary presidential campaign, the use of this term is accelerating, and it typically is used to attack news outlets accused of unfairly equating a minor failing of Hillary Clinton’s to a major failing of Donald Trump’s.

….The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates….I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates.

Spayd is getting plenty of flak for this on social media, and I think it’s partially deserved. There’s no question that charges of false equivalence are often partisan, but her job should be to figure out if they’re correct anyway. She doesn’t even really try to do that.

At the same time, Spayd also makes a valuable point that gets too little attention. Some of the Times’ reporting on the Clinton Foundation has been important, she says:

On the other hand, some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did. That’s not good journalism. But I suspect the explanation lies less with making matchy-matchy comparisons of the two candidates’ records than with journalists losing perspective on a line of reporting they’re heavily invested in.

Yep. I frequently read stories that should have been spiked because they don’t really say much of anything. The problem is that after spending days or weeks reporting something, no reporter wants to leave empty-handed. So they write something, even if it’s little more than narrative or innuendo. Editors should be more aggressive about killing stuff like this.

There’s an additional point that Spayd doesn’t make: some stories naturally lend themselves to continual coverage, while others don’t. The Clinton email story is an obvious example of the former. Donald Trump’s tax returns are an example of the latter. These are probably equally important stories, but the email story gets dozens of front-page hits simply because new information drips out steadily. Trump’s tax returns get only one or two because there’s nothing new to report once Trump has made it clear he has no plans to release them.

So editors need to ask themselves if a story is getting overcovered solely because of the nature of the information drip, rather than because of its intrinsic importance. I may be partisan, as Spayd says, but I’d say that both the email story and the Clinton Foundation story have been overcovered for this reason. I don’t quite know what the answer is—the whole point of news is to report stuff that’s new, after all—but at the very least political editors should probably retain more perspective about how much attention to give to individual drips in long-running stories.

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New York Times Public Editor Shrugs Off Charges of False Equivalency

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A state.gov Email Account Is Not a Secure Account

by HungPrins1652809 Posted on September 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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I had a conversation today on Twitter that suggests there’s something that perhaps a lot of people don’t quite understand. Hillary Clinton says that she trusted her staff to make sure they sent only unclassified information to her email account. That’s fine for her close aides, who knew what she was doing, but what about people who didn’t realize she was using an account on a private server? Perhaps they felt free to send her classified material because they assumed she was on a state.gov account?

No. First of all, they could see her email address when they sent her stuff. But that’s not the real explanation. The real reason they made sure not to send her classified material was because they themselves were using unclassified systems. Here’s a typical email:

Philip Crowley is sending this email from his state.gov account. Reines, Mills and Verveer also have state.gov accounts. But that doesn’t mean they’re secure accounts. They aren’t. They’re supposed to be used only for nonsensitive material. If you want to exchanged classified information, there’s a separate State Department system. (Or you can do it in person, or over a secure phone or fax.)

That’s why Clinton trusted her staff to follow proper procedures. It didn’t matter whether she had a state.gov address or not. Even if she did, it would have been limited to unclassified material, and everyone knew it. With one trivial exception, everybody followed this rule faithfully: no one in four years sent Clinton anything via email that they thought was sensitive. This remains true even if some classification authorities in the intelligence community—which tends to be far more hypersensitive than State—disagreed several years later.

Bottom line: Whatever else you think of Clinton’s reasons for using a personal server, she wasn’t endangering classified material by using it. Everyone else was also using unsecure email, and they knew not to use it to send classified documents.

However, what Clinton was doing was endangering proper storage and retention of her emails. Why did she do that? I’ll have more about this tomorrow.

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A state.gov Email Account Is Not a Secure Account

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Bears Are on the Loose in California. Here’s How Fox News Is Covering That.

by JadeGribble Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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At the moment, there are multiple bears on the loose in sunny Pasadena, California. Naturally, news networks have halted normal programming to broadcast a live-stream of the events, awful bear puns at the ready.

But Fox News’ Shep Smith wasn’t satisfied with just some lame wordplay. Sensing something else was missing from its coverage, the longtime news anchor managed to squeeze in the following jab at Hillary Clinton:

Slow clap for Fox News, reliably misogynistic 24/7.

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Bears Are on the Loose in California. Here’s How Fox News Is Covering That.

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Is the Clinton Foundation Corrupt? There’s a Way to Find Out For Anyone Who’s Seriously Interested.

by VenettaBastyan Posted on August 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Did corporations and foreign governments make donations to the Clinton Foundation as a way of cozying up to Hillary Clinton? Cherry picking the few occasions when they did so within a few months of some action by Hillary won’t tell us anything. There’s too little signal and too much noise. But there’s a way to attack this question. Since 2000, Hillary Clinton has had five phases in her career:

2001-06: Senator from New York
2007-08: Candidate for president with good chance of winning.
2009-12: Secretary of State in the Obama administration.
2013-14: Retired, giving speeches, no one knew what she would do next.
2015-16: Candidate for president with excellent chance of winning.

So here’s what someone needs to do: Take a look at donations to the Clinton Foundation and see if they seem to align with these career phases. For example, you’d expect foreign governments to be uninterested in gaining favors from Hillary while she was a New York senator, but very interested while she was Secretary of State. Conversely, you might expect, say, the financial industry to be generous while she was a New York senator but not so much while she was Secretary of State. During the periods when she was running for president, you’d expect activity to pick up from everybody, and during 2013-14 you’d expect interest to decline across the board.

You can probably think of other trends you’d expect to see if donations to the Clinton Foundation were widely viewed as a way of getting better access to Hillary. So what you need to do is write down these expectations first, and then crunch the data to see if the evidence supports your hypothesis.

This would be a lot of work. But if you really, truly think the Foundation was basically just a way of buying access to Hillary Clinton, this is a way of getting past anecdotes and looking for real trends. Is anyone willing to do this?

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Is the Clinton Foundation Corrupt? There’s a Way to Find Out For Anyone Who’s Seriously Interested.

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It’s the End of August and Hillary Clinton’s Lead Remains Clear and Steady

by DarinLeyva Posted on August 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Is the presidential race tightening up? Let’s take a look. Here’s Pollster:

No tightening evident here. Here’s Sam Wang:

No tightening here either. If anything, Clinton has improved her position. Here’s Real Clear Politics:

Some slight tightening here since early August, when the convention bumps settled down. Maybe a point or so. Here’s Nate Cohn:

No tightening here. Here’s 538:

This is a percentage chance of victory, not a projection of vote share. Clinton has dropped a few points since early August.

Bottom line: Since early August, there’s either been no tightening in the polls, or, at most, maybe a point or so. Hillary Clinton is ahead by 6-8 points in the national polls, and so far that’s staying pretty steady.

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It’s the End of August and Hillary Clinton’s Lead Remains Clear and Steady

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