MONDAY, JULY 25, 2016
Today’s Good News And Bad News
From Our Local Political Junkie We’ll Call “Cincy Dave”
IT’S ANOTHER BIG DAY IN POLITICS: The Democrat Convention starts today, with the same or worse level of chaos that the Republican Convention started with. The DNC email scandal is still fresh, and will be on everyone’s mind even though Bernie has reaffirmed his support for Hillary. Because of the scandal, Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned her post as the Chairperson of the DNC but it isn’t effective until after the convention is over, so she will still be there to gavel it to begin, possibly every day, and to end it on Thursday, thus reminding everyone of the controversy. She should have gone immediately and let someone else – anyone else, do the job.
The convention should feature lots of biographical stuff about VP candidate Tim Kaine, who nobody outside of Virginia ever heard of before, and of course, Hillary, who everyone has heard of, one way or another. They will try to make both of them look really likeable, which will be easy with Kaine, who is apparently very well liked in his home state. He has never lost an election, including for mayor of Richmond, for Governor or for Senator. The job will be more difficult with Hillary, who has suffered under almost 25 years of criticism from political opponents, starting with her failed attempt to create a national health care plan and continuing throughout her career. Opponents correctly guessed that she would one day run for president and have consequently been relentless. She has made many mistakes along the way to help them. So we will see how well they do. Any changes in polling after the convention will give us a clue as to how successful they are.
Trump bashing will be on full display but probably not as over-the-top as the Hillary bashing was last week. No calling Trump “Lucifer” or calls to “lock him up” (at least not without a trial), no fake prosecutions, and probably no calling him evil. Maybe just greedy, unethical and dishonest, with possibly some immorality and megalomania, but that’s a lot nicer. We will see what the Trump University Alumni say, along with other self-proclaimed victims who have worked for him or done business with him.
One good thing for Hillary though, will be that she will have plenty of A-list speakers, because no important party members are boycotting. Hillary has only one child, Chelsea, who will speak, so we won’t have to suffer through a multitude of family members who have little to add except to say that she is a great mom. Of course, the Big Dog himself will also add his remarks.
GOOD NEWS FOR TRUMP: Today, we have dueling national polls again. A new CNN poll shows that Trump got a 6 point bounce from his convention and now leads Hillary by 44 to 39 percent. However, a CBS poll shows only a 2 point bounce and Trump now leading 42 to 41 percent. Although Trump got a bounce, Hillary remained the same in this poll, so all the Hillary bashing doesn’t really seem to have accomplished its goal. According to CNN, Trump’s bounce comes mostly from white people without a college education, whereas Clinton actually gained among those whites who do have a college degree. The non-white voters, of course, regardless of education, are not going to ever vote for Trump.
There are a few problems with polling, especially at this point. First, it is way too early for any polls to have any real predictive value as to the ultimate result. After all, the serious Trump bashing won’t even start until tonight. Second, polls in general are more suspect than ever this year because they are usually conducted by phone, but that does not include cell phones, so what you get is the opinions of a lot of stodgy old land-line users, and none of the younger and supposedly tech-savvy people who keep up with things. The biggest problem with polls may be that national polls never mean much because it is not a national election in the strictest sense – it is really 50 separate, mostly winner-take-all elections. So the only polls to mean anything are the individual swing-state polls. After this week, they will start making those kinds of polls and things will become more clear.
TRUMP BEING TRUMP: The Donald has released an ad on Twitter about his acceptance speech, which has only 3 lines:
75 minutes total speech time
24 minutes total applause
33% time applauding
Besides being not exactly true (he is counting applause at the end, which is not included in the 75 minutes, to get to 33%) it really doesn’t look good to blow your own horn that much. Also, there is nothing unusual about a nominee getting a lot of applause during and at the end of their acceptance speech.
GOOD NEWS FOR HILLARY: Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg will endorse Clinton at the convention. Bloomberg is a sometimes Republican, sometimes Democrat and sometimes Independent. He is also very, very rich; he makes Trump’s wealth look modest. Whether he will dump any of his fortune into the campaign is unknown but he had contemplated running for president himself for a while and said that he would be willing to put 1 billion of his own money into it. Needless to say, any sizeable chunk of that would go a long way for Hillary. His support also could help with middle of the road Republicans/Independents like himself, who aren’t enamored with Trump.
BAD NEWS FOR TRUMP: Trump’s selection of Mike Pence is getting more scrutiny now and it may affect his plans to go after the votes of Rust Belt union members, who were severely hurt by the Great Recession and still haven’t recovered.
It seems that Pence has been strongly anti-union his whole life, and on every issue.
He always fights against the minimum wage, rights to organize and anything else that unions want.
The Unions’ management will have no trouble deciding on who to support, so Trump will be left with trying to convince individual union members to vote for him against the advice of their leaders.
That’s possible but a tough sell.
This could affect a lot of swing states, including Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
More Good News And Bad News Tomorrow
