Archive for 2016
Rockefeller Republicans
Fifty years ago Barry Goldwater defeated the Republican Establishment to become the Republican nominee then ran head-on into Lyndon Johnson – but Goldwater’s defeat wasn’t the end of the story; in the fullness of time the ‘true believers’ who elected Goldwater found a Knight on a White Horse and in 1980 Ronald Reagan won then…
Read MoreClick Factories
The other morning I went on the Internet searching for eyeglasses and after an hour I gave up and clicked on the New York Times website – and up popped an ad for eyeglasses. I ignored the ad and clicked on an article about Hillary Clinton – and up popped another ad for eyeglasses. Whether…
Read MoreHillary will win the debates
The debates are Donald Trump’s last chance to turn the race around. No chance. Trump can’t even win a debate with himself. This week he was on two sides of the Mexican border – and on two sides of the issue. Clinton will cut him to pieces on national TV. The New York Times had…
Read MoreDonald Trump Illness
Rudy Giuliani said we should Google “Hillary Clinton Illness” and see what comes up. Well, let’s Google “Donald Trump Illness” and see what comes up. Aha! Terms like “psychopath,” “Narcissistic Personality Disorder (an exaggerated sense of self-importance)” and – thanks to a TAPster – “sociopathic projection…in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses…
Read MoreFrozen
Sean is Irish and Catholic and decades ago his great-grandfather was an immigrant; after he (Sean) graduated from Fordham and married and worked a stint in White Plains, New York, he moved to Raleigh where he now lives and earns $175,000 a year. Sean doesn’t have one ideological bone in his body and partisan politics…
Read More(Mis)reading polls
A reporter recently sent me a long list of detailed questions about how to tell if a political poll is reliable. Things like margin of error, sample size, live vs. robocalls, question wording, question order, the pollsters’ track record, partisan affiliation, past performance, etc. All good stuff. But face it, you’re not going to that…
Read MoreLook What It’s Led To
The Washington Post was roaring Trump’s ‘Mean, Scary and Hurtful’ and Fox News was crowing on its website the ‘Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan’ has endorsed Hillary. Another website was claiming ‘Hillary is Saul Alinsky’s Daughter’ (Conservative Review) and another was saying ‘Hillary’s mentor was a former Klan leader’ (they were talking about…
Read MoreFrozen
Ten weeks out, the presidential election appears frozen in place. Absent an act of God or an incredibly boneheaded play by the Hillary Clinton campaign, she is going to win and Donald Trump is going to lose. Big. Then things will really get interesting. More in a bit. Trump is losing because of how he…
Read MoreThe wave
Democrats who are nervously hoping for a good 2016 but afraid to believe it need to read “The Wave” from Stanley Greenberg at Democracy Corps. His analysis: “America is about to experience a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake of an election, but progressives do not seem to trust the new American majority and its ascendant values and thus,…
Read MoreCrooked but Predictable
Last summer the Insiders looking on figured Donald Trump was going to crash and burn – but after Trump started winning primaries they moved in and after the first round of knife fighting Corey Lewbanowski was out and Paul Manafort was in charge. Which should have been the end of the story; once an Insider…
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