[ Posted Thursday, October 13th, 2016 – 16:41 UTC ]
When you spend as much time as I do paying attention to politics, you hear all sorts of far-fetched predictions. Most of these never come true. Some do (see: Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate). But some of these are interesting to speculate about, whether or not you think the chances that they'll come true are very high or not. Which leads me to today's subject: will the Republican Party survive, post-Trump, or will it splinter into two factions?
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[ Posted Thursday, October 6th, 2016 – 17:02 UTC ]
After August's spectacular improvement in job approval polling, Barack Obama saw his numbers fall in September -- what the stock market might call a "correction." Obama had the best August he's ever had in terms of improving his poll numbers, but it seems now that the whole month was the high end of a slow, two-month cycle which might indicate he's hitting a plateau. That's all a very polite way of saying Obama's numbers went down in September, although not as much as they had risen in August. Let's take a look at his new chart.
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[ Posted Friday, September 30th, 2016 – 15:57 UTC ]
Our subtitle today is not original, so we've got to start by giving credit where credit is due. David French, a writer for the ultraconservative National Review (and a man once so horrified by Donald Trump's candidacy that he considered running himself), had the funniest metaphor for Trump's performance in Monday's first presidential debate:
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[ Posted Thursday, September 29th, 2016 – 17:23 UTC ]
With only about four months left to go in his second term in office, President Barack Obama just had his first veto overturned by Congress. Considering Obama's rather aloof attitude towards Congress (including even members of his own party), what is extraordinary isn't so much that Obama just got overturned -- it's that it hasn't happened before now. The contentiousness between the White House and the Capitol has been pretty fierce during Obama's term, but up until this week none of his vetoes has been overturned.
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[ Posted Friday, September 16th, 2016 – 15:42 UTC ]
The media got played by Donald Trump this morning, once again. Picture Charlie Brown lying flat on his back, wondering why he keeps falling for the old kick-the-football bit. That was cable television, after they had carried -- live -- a full hour of an empty podium (Trump didn't start on time), then a full-on advertisement for Trump's new D.C. hotel, then some surrogates saying how wonderful Trump was. At the very end, Trump uttered the 30 seconds of soundbite the cable channels had been waiting for, and then even though it was billed as a press conference, Trump walked off and refused to answer any questions.
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[ Posted Friday, September 9th, 2016 – 17:29 UTC ]
Before we begin, we promise we'll get to that rather-provocative subtitle later, as we turn this week's talking points section over to an attempt at providing campaign advice for Team Clinton. We've been long wondering why Hillary hasn't made some sort of effort to put these two large issues behind her on the campaign trail, and our frustration has led us to offering up what she should say in order to achieve this goal.
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[ Posted Friday, September 2nd, 2016 – 17:19 UTC ]
Donald Trump going to Mexico could have had a certain "Nixon goes to China" flavor about it, and he actually was getting some good reviews for crossing the very low bar of "not totally embarrassing himself or his country" -- at least for the first few hours. Then he went to Phoenix, and Mr. Hyde came back out.
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[ Posted Thursday, September 1st, 2016 – 15:40 UTC ]
President Barack Obama's job approval polling numbers went sharply up in August, after falling slightly in July for the first time this year. Obama has now seen gains in seven of the eight months of 2016, and August was the third-biggest of these jumps. Obama's job approval is now higher than every other month in his second term except the first one (January, 2013), putting his legacy in pretty good position with the public. The bounce upward can clearly be seen even in the large-scale chart.
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[ Posted Tuesday, August 30th, 2016 – 16:54 UTC ]
Senator John McCain is, as I type this, awaiting the results of today's Arizona primary election. The outcome will likely be that he will once again obtain the Republican Party's nomination for his Senate seat. But the results will probably be a lot closer than any of McCain's other primary races, because he is facing a Tea Party (or perhaps "Trumpesque") challenger who actually has a chance to unseat McCain. Discontent with McCain (and Establishment Republicans in general) from the Republican base voters is palpable -- so much so that McCain has been forced to support Donald Trump's campaign, even after Trump personally insulted him (and all American prisoners of war, for good measure) in a very public manner. But even if McCain, as expected, wins tonight, he'll then go on to face a Democratic challenger in what could also be a very tight race for him.
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[ Posted Monday, August 29th, 2016 – 16:16 UTC ]
Republicans have now, by my count, missed two rather large opportunities to improve their general standing with Latino voters. Donald Trump's speech Wednesday (unless it is further postponed or even cancelled outright, of course) might just become the third big missed opportunity. This is a problem entirely of the Republicans' making, since they are caught in a spiral of trying to prove (to each other) how pure their opposition to immigration truly is. They keep redefining the ugly term they toss around (at each other) to describe apostates on the subject, and now will label anything short of deporting 11 million people as "amnesty." This is the trap Trump found himself in, all last week.
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