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President Barack Obama just hit a milestone in public job approval. At Real Clear Politics, his daily rolling average of public opinion polls just went over 50 percent. Unless they are edited late in the day (which sometimes happens), Obama currently merits 50.4 percent approval and only 45.7 percent disapproval from the polled public.
As I write this, there is a filibuster currently going on in the Senate. Senator Chris Murphy and other Democrats launched this filibuster to draw attention to the fact that suspected terrorists in America can still legally buy guns. Murphy represents Connecticut, where the Newtown massacre happened, and thus he feels very strongly about the issue of gun control.
Newt Gingrich is a smart guy, Washington insiders will tell you. He's certainly smarter than Donald Trump, based on nothing more than vocabulary and the complexity of ideas he is able to comprehend. Newt is currently on Trump's vice-presidential shortlist, which makes sense if you believe what Trump's been saying about his veep pick for months now -- he wants someone with experience dealing with Congress. Newt, being a former Speaker of the House, certainly fits that bill better than most.
Whither the fabled "Party of Lincoln"? That was the question on the minds of many Republicans this week, at least based on how often they used the phrase. Now, we're used to scathing attacks on character being hurled in the frenzy of a presidential campaign. Indeed, it's woven into the fabric of American politics. It's just that in normal years, these attacks are flung across the aisle, at the other party's nominee. It is extraordinary that all of the vicious attacks we're going to feature in our talking points section this week came from Republicans, all aimed squarely at their own party's presidential nominee. Seriously, when in the past have you ever heard the term "unendorse" used? We haven't checked, but we believe it just got coined and added to the political lexicon. It hasn't existed before because the concept hasn't ever existed before (again, in our own memory, at the very least). But we're going to get to all this in great detail later, so let's just move along for now.
California's relatively new primary system is unfair and needs to change back to the way it used to be. I say this not out of partisanship -- quite the opposite, in fact. The benefits of California's so-called "jungle primary" have all gone to the Democratic side, but basic fairness demands I stand up for the rights of California Republicans, third-party voters, and independents, because theirs are the rights which are being abridged.
Senator Bernie Sanders, barring extraordinary unforeseen circumstances, is not going to be president. He has fallen short of his goal of winning the nomination of the Democratic Party. No tricky delegate math is going to save him now. His campaign is now over, whether he wants to admit it or not quite yet. But I for one am thankful he ran, and thankful for what he did manage to accomplish. Because though his campaign is done, his political revolution should continue.
For the first time, I am writing a column which is designed to be updated, perhaps later tonight or perhaps even tomorrow. Because today is the end of the primary road for 2016, so while I'd like to take a nostalgic look back at the entire primary season, I'm also going to eventually update my stats to provide the final 2016 numbers on how well I picked all the primary races.
Welcome back to my final 2016 round of "call the primaries." Although tomorrow night won't actually be the last primary day (Washington D.C. votes next week), it will be the last day where both parties' nominees are not known. So it'll be the last time the game will even be worth playing.
Once again, we've got a rather long end section today, so we're going to present our wrap-up of the week's news in rather abbreviated fashion. This is because we are finally (only a few weeks late!) unveiling the finalists in our "come up with a playground taunt for Trump" contest (which initially ran back in FTP [391]), so there's that to look forward to, down in the talking points section.
Barack Obama's job approval polling in May stayed remarkably stable. His job approval rating improved slightly, and his job disapproval rating very slightly got worse. In other words, he stayed almost exactly where he was in April. Though boring (nothing is more boring on a graph than a flat line), this was important because it reinforced and solidified the large gains Obama made since the start of the year. His improvement was no blip, in other words. Take a look at the new chart to see this.