Next Friday (and the Friday after that), we're going to have a special "in memoriam" edition of our year-end "McLaughlin Awards." For the uninitiated, this means handing out basketfuls of prizes, in a myriad of categories.

So, today, rather than write a column we can all cheerfully bicker over, instead I am throwing the doors open to nominations from all and sundry.

Here are the award categories, to jog your memory. You can also check out last year's awards (Part 1 and Part 2) to see who won in 2015.

I'm open to suggestion on just about all of these, although the list for "Sorry To See You Go" will absolutely be topped by John McLaughlin himself, the creator of this list, these awards, and a free-for-all political chatfest, The McLaughlin Group. But other than that, the field is wide open. So who would you pick for any of the following?

Here are the categories for Part 1:

Biggest Winner of 2016

Biggest Loser of 2016

Best Politician

Worst Politician

Most Defining Political Moment

Turncoat Of The Year

Most Boring

Most Charismatic

Bummest Rap

Fairest Rap

Best Comeback

Most Original Thinker

Most Stagnant Thinker

Best Photo Op

Worst Photo Op

Enough Already!

Worst Lie

Capitalist Of The Year

Honorable Mention

Person Of The Year

And here is the list of categories for Part 2:

Destined For Political Stardom

Destined For Political Oblivion

Best Political Theater

Worst Political Theater

Worst Political Scandal

Most Underreported Story

Most Overreported Story

Biggest Government Waste

Best Government Dollar Spent

Boldest Political Tactic

Best Idea

Worst Idea

Sorry To See You Go

15 Minutes Of Fame

Best Spin

Most Honest Person

Most Overrated

Most Underrated

The final category is not an award, but rather a chance to make predictions about the year to come. What do you think will happen in 2017? Here's your chance to predict it in advance!

So take a moment or two to review the whole year (not just the past few months), and see who you can come up with for any or all of these categories. And then join us next Friday to see who gets the nod....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

The Democratic Party is in pretty dire straights at the moment. Republicans not only control the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House, but when you take a look down at the state level, things are even more depressing. Republicans have full control (both statehouses and the governor's office) in 25 states. Democrats only have complete control in five. Two-thirds of all the individual statehouses (state senates and state assemblies or houses) are Republican-controlled. Democrats have lost over 900 of the total seats in the statehouses since Barack Obama took office. By some levels, the Democrats are worse off than they've been since the 1920s.

Democrats face headwinds in the 2018 elections, but what's even more concerning than that is what happens after the 2020 Census. The U.S. House will be redistricted, and if Democrats haven't staged a pretty significant comeback by then, Republican governors and statehouses will gerrymander their way into locking up the House for another decade. They successfully did so after the 2010 Census, which is why the House has remained out of reach for Democrats since then.

That's all pretty grim for Democrats to consider. But the only way to fix it is to face the facts and decide to do something about the problems. The first test of this will be who gets elected to head the Democratic National Committee, but there are other things that need to happen if Democrats are going to turn things around. So here's my take on what needs to be done in the next six months or so if Democrats want to successfully rebuild their political machine.

Continue Reading »

I wrote a few weeks ago about the dilemma Mitt Romney would face if Donald Trump offered him the secretary of State position. That dilemma did not actually happen, and it now seems like Trump was just yanking Mitt's chain for the fun of it. How presidential! One of Trump's close advisors just admitted as much, saying Trump really just wanted Romney to publicly apologize for all the mean and nasty things he said about Trump during the election. Romney reportedly refused to do so, which was probably smart because it seems to have been the whole point of the exercise. Trump probably wasn't ever going to appoint Romney anyway, but wanted to see how low Mitt would grovel if he thought he could get the job.

The entire episode would have made for a great installment of The Apprentice -- Cabinet Edition, in fact. Anyone who's ever watched Trump's show knows this is how Trump operates (at least, while on camera). Pit contestants against each other, let the fur fly, and then fire one of them at the end, while everyone hangs on Trump's every word.

Continue Reading »

Will Donald Trump be the second-best "bully" president we've had? I realize that that question can be read two ways, but I'm using "bully" in the older political sense of the word rather than in the "already ripped into 289 people on Twitter" sense. So while a strong case could be made for Trump-as-bully, what I'm referring to instead is the Teddy Roosevelt "Bully for you!" sense of the word. And, more importantly, the "bully pulpit." Because, much as Democrats might hate to admit it, Trump may be the most adroit user of the bully pulpit to change American politics in a very long time.

I've been thinking about this while wondering what the clash between Trump and the rest of Washington is going to look like. Trump has already set himself on a collision course with his own party over several major issues (not gutting Social Security, to name just one), at least if you believe anything he said while campaigning (which is still a very open question, to say the least). But it's not too hard to envisage a showdown of wills between Trump and, say, Paul Ryan. Ryan, of course, isn't the only one Trump might get into confrontation with -- on an almost daily basis, Trump is annoying large segments of the federal government (the C.I.A. is only the latest group Trump has seriously annoyed or terrified). So the clash could come from lots of places, but it's easiest to use Ryan as an example, since any necessary legislation is going to involve some dealmaking between the House Republicans and the White House.

Continue Reading »

OK, that's a rather unusual title, but you'll have to wait until the talking points part of the program for us to address it. Call it "the lesson to be learned from the Carrier jobs and Donald Trump," or the silver lining that just might be an effective tool for Democrats in the near future. First, though, we've got to get through the news of the week and handing out our weekly awards.

President-Elect Donald Trump continues to assemble his Cabinet of Deplorables (to coin a phrase), nominating people who are either actively hostile to each department's basic purpose in life, or laughably unqualified for any such important position.

Continue Reading »

Donald Trump's impending presidency is cause for a lot of concern among many, including both his political opponents and members of his own party. This can all be boiled down to the basic question of what, exactly, Trump is going to do as president. At this point, it's almost impossible to know whether he'll try to follow through on even the strongest of his campaign promises, or whether he'll decide to chart a completely different course once in office. That's what is worrying so many -- people both against Trump and for Trump alike.

Trump has been and continues to be incredibly malleable on his core politics. It's an open question if he even has any core politics, in fact. Was everything he said on the campaign trail just crowd-pleasing hype designed to get him elected? Does he really believe any of it? How much, and which parts? Again, all open questions.

Continue Reading »

The Lame-Duck Honeymoon

President Obama is on track to end his second term in office with higher job approval than he began it, back in January of 2013. Call it the third (or lame-duck) honeymoon, if you will. Obama saw record job approval in November, measured both monthly and daily, and tied his daily low for job disapproval (previously set February 24, 2013). After a very strong October, Obama charted an even stronger November in public opinion polls. Let's take a look at the new chart for this month to see all of this.

[Click on graph to see larger-scale version.]

November, 2016

Continue Reading »

Sorry, no new column today. Holiday preparations took too much of my time, so I won't be able to complete November's Obama Poll Watch column -- which will have to run tomorrow. My apologies for the delay.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

This article was written in response to a Huffington Post article by Max Weiss, which was in turn written as a response to a Slate article. The original Slate article was titled: "So We're Still Blaming Jill Stein And James Comey, Huh?" and the Weiss response was titled: "Things I Blame For Hillary Clinton's Loss, Ranked." But the Weiss list was so far removed from my own feelings about the Clinton loss that I felt it was time to respond with my own blame list. It's been a month since the election, so hopefully enough time has passed that Democrats can discuss what went so wrong. So here is my own list of the things I blame for the 2016 election loss, ranked. And I have to quote Weiss in saying (while he was blaming Bernie Sanders): "I know this is going to piss a lot of people off, but so be it."

1-15. HILLARY CLINTON AND HER CAMPAIGN

Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate for this election. She might have won in a different year, against a different opponent. Her strongest point, oddly enough, was the one thing the Democratic National Committee seemed scared to highlight -- she is a great debater, and whether facing Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump did an excellent job on the debate stage. But it just wasn't enough. So here it is, broken down.

Continue Reading »

So, has everyone had their fill of turkey leftovers? Well, taking a quick look at Donald Trump's cabinet choices should suffice anyone who still craves some leftover turkeys, if you know what we mean.

The most amusing headline we've seen so far came from Trump's consideration of David Petraeus for secretary of State: "Hillary Clinton wasn't charged with mishandling classified information. Trump might appoint someone convicted of it." Heh.

Trump's big photo op this week was at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis, where he announced he had only saved half the jobs which had been planned to move to Mexico. A thousand Carrier workers will still soon be out of a job, but Trump played it as a total victory. He only had to get Mike Pence to give up $7,000,000 in tax breaks from Indiana (Pence had refused the same deal earlier, a detail that also got lost in all the breathless reporting). Which, as Bernie Sanders quickly pointed out, is going to encourage all sorts of companies to threaten to move their workforce unless the government gives them some fat corporate welfare as well. Hey, Carrier got $7,000 per job, maybe we can hold out for $10,000 each!

Continue Reading »