"Click"

The Windblown Hare is not one of the great Looney Tunes -- McKimson and Foster were never on the studio's A-team -- but at 5:20 you will find one of my favorite cartoon gags. It is also one of the most fertile for metaphor. I'll let you fill in the details.




Bugs Bunny - The Windblown Hare by bugs-bunny1

Prehistory of the TED talk

At least he's not using PowerPoint.

Post-election pondering

This is Joseph

I had been thinking of writing something like this piece by Matt Yglesias, but he seems to have bounced back faster and said it better.  It is true that Democrats do work in mid-term elections, the house appears to be very effectively gerrymandered, and the senate tends to be in defense for the Democrats in the mid-term years (as they have to defend gains made at a presidential cycle). 

It's also not good to hear that:

The GOP now controls historical record number of governors’ mansions, including a majority of New England governorships.

So what next?  I think Democrats should consider trying to compete at all levels.  After all, states are where the gerrymander is executed and there is no reason not to start thinking about how to win some of them.  The 2020 census is closer than it may look.  The presidency is important, but it may have left the party complacent about the rest of the political process. 

More post-apolitical posts

Admittedly, a television producer supporting a Democrat is not particularly surprising, but, as mentioned before, the Donald Trump campaign has changed the social norms around when and where and how it is appropriate to express that support.

From Ken Levine's blog today [emphasis in the original]:

This is the man you want controlling nuclear weapons?  His aides don't feel he's responsible enough to have his Twitter account. This is the man you want at the helm during major international crises? It’s just terrifying. Yes, I’m a Democrat, and I’ve had this blog for eleven years. You never saw me write a post like this about Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or even George Bush. But this is different. This is life-threatening.

It's important to remember the good moments as well

Joe Tone writing for the Washington Post:

But Vega and other voters said that at least in this swath of suburban Dallas – in the dense and diverse neighborhoods where they live and work – things didn’t feel especially different. “We all want to live in peace,” he said, walking out of a bustling community college here.

A couple miles away, a Pakistani immigrant, who asked not to be identified, told a similar story. She’d driven in her minivan to her neighborhood’s Islamic community center, which happened to double as her polling place. “We just want peace,” she said. Asked about the effects of Trump’s candidacy – and a potential Trump presidency – on her neighborhood and the local Muslim community, she stiffened and said it made no difference, for better or worse. “We just wanted to be treated fairly, no matter what we worship.”

She didn’t want to say for whom she cast her ballot. Still, she was giddy about having cast it. With her 5-year-old, Texas-native son in tow, she described how she’d walked into the mosque’s near-empty gym, clad in an ornate tunic and hijab, and handed her ID to the elderly white poll workers. When she told them it was her first time voting, she said, they burst into applause and cheers.

An important cultural literacy note

Listening to various experts over the past few months, the phrase "super-genius" has often come to mind. For those readers who have not had the benefits of a classical education, I thought I would share the source.




Bugs Bunny Operation - Rabbit by playeden

Going out like he went in...

… classy

From Tim Mak writing for the Daily Beast

The parting jab occurred on Saturday evening, when Republican Nevada chairman Michael McDonald darkly hinted at a Trump rally that there was wrongdoing by election officials in the state to advantage a “certain group.” It was clear that he was referring to Latino voters.

“They kept a poll open ‘til 10 o'clock at night so a certain group could vote,” said McDonald, referring to Clark County, which is 30 percent Hispanic. “You feel free right now? You think this is a free or easy election?”

Trump echoed this sentiment, alleging, without evidence, some form of misconduct at “certain key Democratic polling locations in Clark County.”

“Folks, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged system. And we’re going to beat it,” Trump said.

Organizations that have spent years encouraging this “certain group” to vote immediately cried foul, accusing Trump of suggesting that the citizenship of Hispanic American matter less than others.

“Donald Trump’s campaign has been one defined by its dog-whistle statements of communities of color, and this is no exception,” said Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino. “Donald Trump has continually tried to make Latinos feel less than American with his insistent attacks against our community… Party officials like Chairman McDonald are again showing just how out-of-touch the GOP is about welcoming new voters into its party by discouraging people from casting their ballot.”

Just to review a couple points we've made before:

1. The damage Trump has done to the GOP with respect to the Latino vote is twofold. He has tarnished the Republican brand for years to come and he has greatly increased the community's political awareness and participation. Remember back in 2013 when everyone agreed that the GOP absolutely had to improve its standing with the Latino electorate in order to remain viable? This would be the opposite.

2. A big part of the anger within the GOP that allowed Trump to get the nomination came from the feeling that the two previous elections had been stolen. This notion did not occur spontaneously. It was planted and carefully cultivated by Fox News and talk radio and countless other right-wing media outlets. Telling the base this story one more time and at a much higher volume is highly risky for the party. It will almost inevitably make these voters more angry and ideologically extreme and there's a real danger that a large number of them will simply give up on the system and stop voting.

Even the hitchhiker with the axe... *

Strange days, indeed.

* for those just joining us.

"How to Rig an Election"

After Josh Marshall (who has dominated the field for the past year), Paul Krugman may have done the most to enhance his reputation as a political observer this election season. Today, he posted the best concise summary of the campaign I've come across so far. Even if you already know the story, you should take a moment to read this, just to see it clearly and forcefully laid out in under 800 words.

Entrenchment versus democracy

[I am currently in a mad rush to try to get as much down as possible before the election. I am, as a result, relying heavily on my phone's dictation app which frankly is not that good. Be on the lookout for homonyms and I would appreciate it if you would cut me some slack on the prose.]

I'll come back and fill in some of the details later, but just as a quick outline...

Imagine that, Without loss of generality, you are a Randian conservative in 1980. (There are other Republican-affiliated persuasions that would work here, but let's just stick with this one for now.) You have recently had some awfully good political breaks -- favorable demographic trends, bad news for the Democrats on the foreign and domestic fronts, a major rift in their party a few years earlier, and a fantastically charismatic GOP leader -- but you are not at all optimistic about the popularity of your positions in the long term. For example, you suspect that once people have tried a generous social safety net, they will not do you want to go back.

To put it bluntly, you do not believe in a democratic process where the best ideas, after a period of open and vigorous debate, will win over the majority of the population. How do you take advantage of your current position of dominance and popularity to subvert that process?

Here's a brief an incomplete list of the measures you might take:

Campaign funding
1. Maximize your present and long-term funding advantage. (See the K Street Project.)
2. Remove rules limiting the impact of money on campaigns.

Voter suppression
Make it more and more difficult for people who are likely to vote for the opposing party to exercise their constitutional rights.

Focus on strategically important offices and elections, such as controlling the state houses in years divisible by 10.

Make big plays for single issue voters

Defund and delegitimize established sources of trustworthy, high-quality information and analysis (see "the war on data").

Co-opt and intimidate the mainstream press.

Create a media bubble for the party's base.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I am inclined to believe that we are coming to the end of this social engineering experiment, but it is worth noting that it worked disturbingly well for decades.

If Donald Trump is somehow elected president tomorrow...

... it will be partially because the mainstream press largely ignored a massive effort by the Republican Party to disenfranchise voters based on race.

More excellent work from Talking Points Memo's Tierney Sneed:

NC GOP Brags About Low Black Turnout–After Lobbying To Limit Early Voting

A state GOP press release on the state's early voting numbers highlighted that African American early voting turnout was down by 8.5 percent from 2012.

Back in August, the News and Observer reported on an email sent by North Carolina GOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse to local elections officials urging them to limit early voting opportunities, including Sundays, which are used disproportionately by African Americans, and particularly those participating in black churches' "soul to poll" voter drives.

“Our Republican Board members should feel empowered to make legal changes to early voting plans, that are supported by Republicans,” Woodhouse wrote. “Republicans can and should make party line changes to early voting.”

Since then, more emails from GOP operatives making similar arguments to elections officials emerged. The county elections boards -- which are made up two-to-one of GOP appointees -- were debating their early voting plans for the extra week of voting effectively restored by an appeals court decision over the summer. More than a few of those officials took the state party's advice and proposed plans that would have severely limited early voting opportunities, particularly for black and student voters. Civil rights groups challenged many of those plans, and the state elections board ameliorated some, but not all, of the cutbacks to early voting.

While other Southern states have seen a uptick in black early turnout this cycle, North Carolina's is down, with University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald, noting that "it seems like something went awry in North Carolina.”

    Something went very wrong for African-Americans' voting in North Carolina pic.twitter.com/ZpwjyEavmd

    — Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) November 6, 2016

"Worth making" does not begin to cover it

From another essential post from Josh Marshall:

One meta-point is worth making here. We've heard a lot about both candidates being unlikeable, the election being ugly and so forth and how that means people are going to be turned off and a lot of people just won't vote at all. We don't know the total numbers yet. But all the indications from the early vote are that that is not going to be true. This should have been obvious. Everything we've seen over the last generation tells us that hard fought elections where a lot is on the line turn out a lot of people. That makes total sense. Why people stick to this other assumption is a mystery.

And part of a larger one. For more than a year now, the meta-journalism story has been one of intelligent, respected professionals, often claiming to be data-driven, clinging to theories and assumptions despite the overwhelming force of both evidence and common sense.

A post-apolitical era(?)

I suspect I could come up with more counterexamples if I were a better student of history, but, at least in recent memory, there has generally been a reluctance for certain writers, artists, directors, etc. to explicitly endorse candidates through their work. That's not to say that these people did not take partisan positions, but that they often maintained something of a firewall between what they said on their own and what they said"on the job ."

For example, Randall Munroe of XKCD was an Obama supporter, but he chose to keep politics out of the cartoon he posted the day before the 2008 election
.

You can put it down to Paul Krugman's line about Trump as clarifying shock or mine about Trump as stressor, but either way, the stark contrast in this election has caused a lot of people to abandon (at least temporarily) a number of long-held conventions.

Here's today's cartoon:

Trump didn't start Trumpism

[Quick caveat: I haven't had a chance to read Chait's longer piece in the recent issue of New York Magazine which could very well undercut some of my criticisms.]

Jonathan Chait is one of the very few journalists to emerge from this campaign with his reputation enhanced and there are a lot of real insights in this post from earlier in the week (How Donald Trump Outsmarted George Will), but his central is wrong in a subtle but fundamental way.

The point is not at all to gloat at the failure of anti-Trump conservatives, but to explain the source of their error. You can’t heal an illness you’ve diagnosed improperly. Anti-Trump conservatives deluded themselves about the source of conservatism’s electoral appeal. Trump’s long list of deviations from party orthodoxy — on health care, abortion, support for the Clintons — would have destroyed a normal candidacy, the way Rick Perry’s support for humane treatment of undocumented immigrants killed his candidacy in 2012.

…

The most important analytical failure of the anti-Trump conservatives is their blindness to the centrality of white racial backlash. They simply cannot imagine how movement conservatism could result in bigoted authoritarianism, and their confusion produces absurdity. Erick Erickson, the conservative pundit who has fiercely opposed Trump, today defends Rush Limbaugh, even though Limbaugh is defending the candidate. Erickson argues that Limbaugh’s brand of conservatism is exactly what the party needed all along. “If Republicans lamenting Trump and hating on Rush had only listened to Rush and taken his counsel that he gives for free three hours a day, five days a week, the GOP would not be in this mess,” he reasons. Yes – Trump’s popularity clearly demonstrates that a racist, misogynist, conspiracy-mongering bully-entertainer has had too little influence.

...

The conservative intelligentsia is right about one thing. Trump is not a committed ideologue but a grifter who decided to use their voters for his own ends. Trump grasped from the outset that the birther issue gave him a connection to the Republican electorate. The conservative intelligentsia ignored the birthers, the freaks, and the transparent racists because they were embarrassing. It was far more flattering and heroic to imagine the whole thing was about the Constitution. The con artist swindled the perfect mark.

The anti-Trump conservatives weren't blindsided by the rise of these angry, bigoted voters; they were blindsided by their sudden inability to control those voters. The conservative movement went to great lengths to cultivate this segment of the electorate, feeding it a steady diet of misinformation, dog whistles and astroturf. The assumption (which proved sound for a long time) was that the more anger and fear you could stoke in this segment, the more you could count on their money and their votes.

This segment was not "ignored" because they were "embarrassing." They were kept at a distance in order to maintain plausible deniability. For example, by pursuing the endorsement of Donald Trump, Mitt Romney was able to court the birthers without actually associating himself with them. As for misreading the appeal of their agenda, Chait himself has often pointed out that the leaders of the conservative movement have rather openly admitted that their ideas do not have broad electoral appeal. Think of Romney's 47% comment or of any conversation you've had with an Ayn Rand acolyte.

For the record, Chait gets more right here then he does wrong, so why should we make a big deal out of this?

For starters, this narrative lets a lot of the anti-Trump conservatives off the hook far too easily. When proto-Trumpism was in a controllable and politically expedient form, very few of the conservative intelligentsia had any trouble with them. There's a fairly direct line from the redmeat, "real America" anti-intellectualism of Sarah Palin and the rise of Trump, but Bill Kristol was crazy about Palin. Even more to the point, Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump are virtually interchangeable, but anti-Trump conservatives remarkably willing to work with Limbaugh.

But there is far more at stake here than simply assigning blame. We have recently seen an appalling level of racism and sexism and every other type of bigotry imaginable. Obviously, there are social, economic, and demographic factors at play, but they have been greatly exacerbated by a massive amount of propaganda. I would argue, if you had to pick a single cause for how bad things have gotten, that would be it.

The Republican base believes things like this...

... because this is what they've been told repeatedly through endless channels.

The media is filled with people willing to condemn the anger and the bigotry that Trump has brought to the surface, but if we're serious about these condemnations, we need to be looking at the people who have been cultivating Trumpism for decades.

When different interpretations become different realities

Trump's target audience (and, to a degree, Trump himself) receive virtually all of their information in a highly filtered form and the biases of these filters are endlessly reinforced through social media. The result is that the same event will be depicted in such different ways inside and outside of the bubble that the two versions cannot be reconciled.

For example, here's how TPM described an incident at a recent Clinton rally featuring President Obama (an account supported by a video of the event).

For a couple minutes, Obama attempted in vain to gain back control of the crowd as chants of "Hillary!" drowned out the protestor.

While the protester's identity and motives weren't clear, from Obama's remarks after he finally gained control of the crowd back, the protester appeared to be an older war veteran.

"This is what I mean about folks not being focused," Obama said. "Hold up. Hold up. First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military and we have to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we have had to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don't boo, vote!"

And here's how Donald Trump described the incident at one of his rallies.

“You saw it today on television, right? He was talking to the protester, screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say, 'He became unhinged! He became – ' … And he spent so much time screaming at this protester, and frankly, it was a disgrace.”

Along similar lines (also from TPM), read how a protester trying to pull out a sign morphed into Teddy Roosevelt shrugging off an assassin’s bullet. 

The essential details are these. Not long after Trump claimed that a surge in Latino voting in Nevada was evidence of voter fraud, a man named Austyn Crites (later self-identified as a registered Republican who opposes Donald Trump) was in the arena, relatively near the front of the audience. There was some commotion. Trump noticed the commotion, accused Crites of "being from the Hillary Clinton campaign."

From the stage he asked Crites, "How much are you being paid? Fifteen hundred dollars?" and then called for security to "take him out."

(The idea that the Clinton campaign sends people to Trump rallies to instigate violent disruptions is an urban legend growing out of the latest James O'Keefe tape dump. There is zero evidence to support this. It is a sort of mass psychology version of projection.)

At this point Crites was apparently in the process of pulling out a sign of some sort which someone nearby thought was a gun. That person yelled "gun!" This tripped off a melee in which Trump supporters beat Crites fairly severely. Secret Service agents, seeing the melee and possibly hearing the cry of "gun", rushed Trump off the stage and took Crites into custody.


...


 It made perfect sense for the Secret Service to escort Trump off the stage until they were confident there was no threat and that the area was secure. We should also bear that history in mind if we find ourselves chiding people for jumping to conclusions in the heat of the moment.

In any case, it was clear very quickly that there was no gun and that there was no threat. How do we know that? Because they allowed Trump to return to the stage very quickly. If there had been a gun or if they were not close to certain there hadn't been one, that would not have happened. The presence of a gun would have meant security had been breached and that likely would have been the end of the event. One gun can mean another gun. There are many examples of assassinations and assassination attempts were an initial commotion is used to distract from a subsequent attack etc. Letting Trump back on the stage only a few minutes later essential confirms the Secret Service knew very quickly that there had been no threat.

…

As I said, it was determined very quickly that nothing had happened. No attempt. No nothing. But this didn't stop the campaign from pushing out a storyline about an "assassination attempt"  and a tale of Trump's bravery in immediately returning to the stage.

Next a CNN journalist went out from the press pen into the area where the incident had occurred to find out what happened. He was promptly verbally abused and physically assaulted, though seemingly to no great physical harm, mainly just shoved around.

…

Things got darker still when Trump arrived a short time later in Colorado. In Denver, Trump was introduced by Father Andre Y-Sebastian Mahanna, a Maronite Catholic priest who said Trump had just survived "an attempt of murder against Mr Trump."

He then blamed the press for incitement the non-existent assassination attempt.

The Trump campaign allowed this to happen and made no effort to correct the record. This was followed by another warm up speaker who joked about Clinton being a 'bitch.'

Normally the challenge for a political party is to craft messages that resonate with the general public and the party faithful. Over the next few cycles, the challenge for the Republicans will be to come up with messages that make any sense at all both inside and outside the bubble.