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Tonight we saw the NBC pre-debate. The non-debate debate. Officially a "candidate forum," both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appeared on the same stage -- but not at the same time. The stage was an impressive one, or at least the exterior shots were, since it was held on an aircraft carrier in New York City. This was to highlight the subject of the event: foreign policy and the military.
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.
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.
It's still only August, but already the predictions that this would be an exceedingly banal presidential election campaign look like they've already come true. This week's campaign news might be summed up as an elementary school playground shouting match: "You're a bigot!" "No, you're a bigot!" Sigh. We've still got over two months of this to get through, folks. And nobody sane expects things are going to get any better any time soon -- quite the opposite, in fact.
Welcome back to the Electoral Math series, where we try to predict the outcome of the presidential race using the smartest metric: Electoral Votes (EV) charted over time. The first of this year's column series ran two weeks ago, and we've seen a lot of polling data since. A whopping 14 states moved around within the categories, but this much volatility is normal this early in the process.
Some weeks, it's tough coming up with a subtitle for these columns. Some weeks, not so much. This is one of the latter, because the juxtaposition of a colorful (to say the least) description of Donald Trump with a soap opera's title just naturally presented itself.
It's one of those days where you can freely pick your favorite movie metaphor to describe the news from the campaign of Donald Trump. "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," perhaps? Ben Shapiro, a former editor of none other than Breitbart News, was being interviewed on CNN where he came up with "a turd tornado." When asked, Shapiro helpfully defined the term: "Well, it's like a sharknado -- except with poop." I'm personally going to go with a favorite West Wing reference, one Trump himself actually seems comfortable with: Trump's campaign is now going to fully commit to "letting Trump be Trump." Because, obviously, the problem all along has been that Trump wasn't being Trump enough. Obviously.
It's Monday, so Donald Trump just stood up in front of the cameras and read another speech off a TelePrompTer. For the second week in a row, this is supposed to present Trump as being a serious-minded candidate who can manage to "be presidential" when required. But if the past is any prologue, by the end of the week nobody's going to even remember this speech, because by then Trump will have had at least two or three blowups out on the campaign trail -- which will become the story, instead.
This column has always loved a good rant. Most of the time, we provide our own rant at the end of the column, on a subject too big to be contained in talking points. This week, we provide a number of rants from Republicans about their very own party's presidential nominee. Yes, it's only August and the Republican Party is coming apart at the seams. Which, of course, makes for great summertime reading for all!
It's been a long few weeks covering the two national political conventions, and aside from last Friday, this is really the first day I have had with an open column -- one not predetermined by events or the calendar. And a whole lot has been going on in the meantime. I'm not even going to pretend to cover it all today, instead I'm going to offer up a few random vignettes in the form of brief and disconnected paragraphs. As always when I'm in this kind of mood, I will be doing so in homage to the late, great Herb Caen, master of "three-dot" journalism in San Francisco.