Paul Chisholm
Farmers face a growing dilemma. Specifically, a food-growing dilemma.
This election is extremely important to the potential of black voters moving towards a Republican agenda. It’s dangerous because many of them will not study the deeper roots of the party’s idealogy, but focus only on a charismatic black voice ostensibly standing behind them. That may suffice for a single race that puts a reasonably sincere politician in office, but it may signal to the broader black voting base, previously apathetic since Obama’s run, to mobilize for the wrong side, against their interests, the country’s, and the planet, for the long run.
NYTIMES, By Jeremy W. Peters
Nowhere on anyone’s handicapping lists of tossup Senate races will you find Michigan. And nowhere on the roster of A-list Republican challengers would you have found John James.
Until last week. With two tweets and his caps lock on, President Trump endorsed Mr. James in the Michigan Republican primary — “SPECTACULAR!” — giving the underdog campaign a jolt just before voters head to the polls on Tuesday.
…John is strong on crime and borders, loves our Military, our Vets and our Second Amendment. He will be a star. He has my full and total Endorsement!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2018
Now Mr. James hopes he will get the chance to pull off in the general election what he has done in the primary: turn a lopsided race into a very close contest.
It will be difficult — assuming he even makes it out of the primary. His opponent, Sandy Pensler, has been campaigning with the confidence of a front-runner. Mr. Pensler has more money and boasts credentials that include running his own private equity firm and teaching economics at Harvard and Yale.
Come November, the Republican nominee will have to face Senator Debbie Stabenow, a three-term incumbent who won her last re-election by 20 points.
But Mr. James, 37, is a standout. He is a West Point graduate who spent eight years in the Army, including service in Iraq. He is the president of his family-run business, a global provider of logistics support for Fortune 500 companies. He is also black, a rarity in his party today. The Senate has only one black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Mr. James, who now lives not far from where he grew up in the Detroit suburbs, says he doesn’t have “a black message, or a white message.” But there is little doubt he would be at a disadvantage competing in Detroit, Michigan’s largest city where the population is 80 percent black. Hillary Clinton carried most precincts in the city with more than 90 percent of the vote.
He talked to The New York Times about his chances of putting another crack in what was once reliably the Democrats’ “blue wall” of Midwestern states that had been a bulwark for the party in presidential elections until Mr. Trump came along.
The following is an edited and condensed version of the conversation.
Q: I grew up not far from you. What high school did you go to?
A: Brother Rice.
Shut up! So did I. What class were you in? (Long pause.) Hello?
Maybe I took that too literally. I graduated 1999.
I graduated in 1998.
How random is this?
(After reminiscing about English teachers, siblings that might know each other and drama class, the conversation moved on to politics.)
Donald Trump came to Michigan in 2016 and asked black voters to support him, saying “What the hell do you have to lose?” His reasoning was that decades of Democratic power in cities like Detroit left them with failing schools, high poverty and rampant crime. Is that the right pitch for Republicans to be making?
I actually went to the NAACP dinner this past spring, and I was pulled aside on two occasions that stick out to me. One lady said that she’d been a resident of Detroit for 45 years and feels neglected by the Democratic Party. Another lady pulled me aside and said that’s she’s never split a ticket in her entire life, and she’s finally looking forward to having a conservative to vote for. And I took that to kind of instruct me.
I was raised by people who, like my father, came out of the Jim Crow South because Michigan was the place that people immigrated to from all over the world to have economic opportunity. And now after marching from Selma to Detroit and rebelling from Watts to Baltimore, people don’t feel like anything has gotten better after 50 years. There’s still trees growing through houses and wild dogs running through the streets in black neighborhoods. And Debbie Stabenow keeps getting re-elected.
Have you spoken directly to the president?
I have not. I imagine he’s a pretty busy guy. But his endorsement did mean a lot.
Especially in a Republican primary. It can make or break races. I wonder, though, in the general election, are you going to want to broadcast that to voters, especially voters in Detroit?
I think that those who would prejudge me based on an affiliation are doing themselves a disservice. I believe that through our political process we have an opportunity for people to open their ears, their minds and their hearts to listen. I believe that I can be, should be and will be judged by the competence, credibility and character that I have and that I’m bringing to the race.
And there are going to be some people who are so blinded by their hatred of the president that they’ll miss the opportunity to have someone who will do everything he can to serve everyone in the state of Michigan. I’m looking forward to treating people like independent thinkers.
But would you want him to campaign for you in the general election?
Absolutely. In Michigan, it may not be very clear out on the coast to a lot of folks …
Come on, you can’t say that to me. I grew up there.
I said a lot of people. I didn’t say you. There’s a massive disconnect. People here in Michigan feel disenfranchised and disillusioned with the situations that are going on the coasts.
I actually heard on the trail somebody say Donald Trump is Rust Belt Robin Hood. And I took that to mean that we finally have a president that’s listening to the people in the Midwest.
Rust Belt Robin Hood? I hadn’t heard that one before.
The reason why he won in Michigan, despite what everybody said, is because people went to the polls in a secret ballot and voted for someone who they believed would take care of their personal economy, would help their economy grow, would help their job.
We were told that manufacturing was dead. That 2 percent G.D.P. growth was the new normal. And President Trump said no way. We can do better.
Is the “blue wall” permanently cracked? How do you prevent President Trump’s election from being a fluke?
Michigan voters have the opportunity to basically answer the question. We keep sending lawyers and career politicians to Washington and we wonder why we’re not get anything done.
People want somebody who understands how to run a business before they make regulations that will affect business. They want somebody who understands what it’s like to sign the front and the back of the check.
The country is abloom with more crackpots than ever. The world follows. More are born. And the future looks worse for it.
Via NPR
As the cameras rolled on President Trump’s campaign rally for GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis in Florida on Tuesday night, a peculiar sign appeared in view.
“We are Q.”
Journalists at the event noted multiple attendees carrying signs and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the name “QAnon.”
The shirts and signs are references to a conspiracy theory growing increasingly popular among those on the far-right — and a conspiracy theory about which the White House fielded a question from the media on Wednesday.
What is QAnon?
The conspiracy theory centers on a mysterious and anonymous online figure — “Q.” According to The Daily Beast, “Q” began posting on anonymous Internet message boards in October 2017. The person or persons behind the “Q” persona claim to possess a top-level security clearance and evidence of a worldwide criminal conspiracy.
Anyone involved in, or running a political campaign, especially a non Republican/Conservative, from here on, probably forever more, who doesn’t, at very minimum, use two-factor authentication, plus demonstrate extreme vigilance over their operation and people, is almost guaranteed to suffer the consequences. Perhaps deservedly so.
When Russian hackers targeted the staff of Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., they took aim at maybe the most vulnerable sector of U.S. elections: campaigns.
McCaskill’s Senate staff received fake emails, as first reported by The Daily Beast, in an apparent attempt by Russia’s GRU intelligence agency to gain access to passwords. McCaskill released a statement confirming the attack but said there is no indication the attack was successful.
“Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy. I will continue to speak out and press to hold them accountable,” McCaskill said. “I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully.”
Really good.
Are Democratic power brokers and lead pols smart enough to see this now? If not, check back here and see how accurate this forecast was. The idea of Trump getting re-elected is not far fetched. Without impeachment or clearly damning evidence, his base isn’t going to stray. Far more importantly, the stoic, apathetic, disengaged non voters in this country, won’t be swayed either. Their inaction is as much responsible, if not more, for the rise of Donald Trump than his misguided supporters. This non voting group is where I direct most of my contempt.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
• July 26, 2018
In the end, a bitterly fought election came down to the old political aphorism, popularized during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 run against George H.W. Bush: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This time, however, it was the Republican incumbent, not his Democratic challenger, who benefited from that truism.
Donald J. Trump has been decisively re-elected as president of the United States, winning every state he carried in 2016 and adding Nevada, even as he once again failed, albeit narrowly, to gain a majority of the popular vote. Extraordinary turnout in California, New York, Illinois and other Democratic bastions could not compensate for the president’s abiding popularity in the states that still decide who gets to live in the White House: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Yet, unlike 2016, last night’s outcome came neither as a political upset nor as a global shock. Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have consistently polled ahead of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her running mate, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, since July. The New York Times correctly predicted the outcome of the race in every state, another marked change from 2016.
Senators Warren and Brown never seemed to find a compelling answer to that question, despite an economy that continues to struggle with painfully slow wage growth, spiraling budget deficits and multiplying trade wars that have hurt businesses as diverse as Ohio soybean farmers and California chipmakers.
Yet both Democrats are also skeptics of trade agreements such as Nafta, which served to mute their differences with the president. And their signature proposals — Medicare for all and free college tuition for most American families — would have been expensive and would require tax increases on families making more than $200,000. Mr. Trump and other Republicans charged they would “bankrupt you and bankrupt the country.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the last quarter, the third consecutive quarter in which growth has exceeded 3 percent. Unemployment remains low at 4.1 percent.
With neither a recession nor a major war to run against, Democrats sought instead to cast the election in starkly moral terms. Yet by Election Day, the charge that Mr. Trump is morally or intellectually unfit for office had been made so often that it had lost most of its former edge among swing voters.
“I don’t care if he lies or exaggerates in his tweets or breaks his vows to his wife, so long as he keeps his promises to me,” Leah Rownan, a self-described social conservative from Henderson, Nev., told The Times, citing the economy and Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominations as decisive for her vote. “And he has.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters also said they felt vindicated by the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While the former F.B.I. director painted a damning portrait of a campaign that was riddled with Kremlin sympathizers and a candidate whose real-estate ventures were beholden to Russian investors, no clear evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump and Moscow ever emerged and the president was never indicted.
“It was always a red herring, just like Trump said,” said Bernard Schwartz, a gun store owner from Houston, Tex. “Democrats wasted a lot of ammo on that one.”
Democrats also failed to capitalize on, and may have been damaged by, winning back control of the House of Representatives, but not the Senate, in the 2018 midterms. Mr. Trump proved effective, if characteristically vitriolic, in making a foil of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Efforts to impeach the president mainly served to energize his base. Polling surveys suggested that wavering voters saw a Democratic Party more invested in humiliating the president than in helping them.
As is often the case in losing presidential campaigns, it did not take long for campaign aides to Senator Warren to offer damning appraisals of her performance as a candidate. Historical references abounded: The Children’s Crusade; Pickett’s Charge; the McGovern campaign of 1972. The common thread was that the campaign’s moral fervor repeatedly got the better of its message focus.
“Trump succeeded,” lamented one moderate former Democratic lawmaker who asked to speak on background. “He got my party to lose its marbles.” The lawmaker cited calls by party activists to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — calls the Warren campaign did not formally endorse but did little to refute — as emblematic of the party’s broader problems.
“What do Democrats stand for?” he asked. “Lawlessness or liberality? Policymaking or virtue signaling? Gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms or good jobs and higher wages?”
As is his way, Mr. Trump wasted little time rubbing salt into Democratic wounds. “Democrats used to stand with the Working Man,” he tweeted Wednesday morning. “Now it’s the party of Abortion and Amnesty. All that’s missing is Acid. Sad!”