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“Are You Kidding Me?”: No, It’s Not Just A Nightmare; Trump Officially Clinches Nomination!

You can take the “presumptive” nominee tag off Donald Trump and substitute “putative.” According to the most widely accepted scorekeeper, the Associated Press, the mogul has quietly passed the much-discussed threshold of 1,237 delegate commitments needed to win a majority in Cleveland.

The New York businessman sealed the majority by claiming a small number of the party’s unbound delegates who told the AP they would support him at the national convention in July. Among them was Oklahoma GOP chairwoman Pam Pollard.

“I think he has touched a part of our electorate that doesn’t like where our country is,” Pollard said. “I have no problem supporting Mr. Trump.”

It takes 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination. Trump has reached 1,239 and will easily pad his total in primary elections on June 7.

While the Republican National Committee has bent the knee to Trump from practically the moment Ted Cruz and John Kasich gave up their challenges to him, there may be other Republicans who have held out as long as there was a theoretical possibility that the Donald could finally figure out something to say or do that was so heinous his nomination would become impossible.

So this could hasten the pace of accommodation to Trump among Republican elites. A bigger question is whether Trump himself will realize the time to attack Republican office holders has passed, or if he just cannot help himself. If he somehow fears voters will forget he’s a “different kind of Republican,” he can probably take care of that once and for all with the type of cheesy reality-TV-style convention he seems inclined to hold anyway.

Outside the fever swamps of political obsessives, there are probably some Americans who have ignored the nominating process and may soon wake up and say: Donald Trump is the Republican candidate for president? Are you kidding me?  

Now we must officially say: It’s no joke at all.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 26, 2016

May 28, 2016 Posted by | Donald Trump, Establishment Republicans, Republican National Convention | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Delivering Remarks On All Four Nights”: Trump Is Going To Make The GOP Convention A Big, Stupid Reality-TV Show

Earlier this week I made the case for abolishing national political party conventions on the grounds that they serve no real function and follow entirely archaic patterns that no longer make much sense.

Well, it’s obviously too late to kill off these quadrennial snoozers this year, but leave it to Donald J. Trump to undertake the next best thing: transforming the Republican convention into a cheesy four-day TV special featuring maximum exposure of his own self. If by necessity it’s going to be an empty spectacle, it doesn’t have to be a boring empty spectacle, does it? Nosiree, according to a report from Politico:

“This is the part of politics he would naturally enjoy, and he wants to control it 100 percent,” said a high-level Trump campaign source. “This is a massive television production and he is a television star.”

And the star isn’t about to be confined to a single Thursday night acceptance speech.

Whereas the vice presidential nominee has generally spoken on the third night of the convention and the presidential candidate has taken the stage on the fourth and final night, Trump is considering a scenario that puts him on stage, delivering remarks on all four nights, reaching millions of potential voters, and driving ratings, according to one source.

Recall that presidential nominees did not even appear at conventions until FDR broke that taboo in 1936. As for appearing prior to the acceptance speech, there are only two precedents I can think of: Ronald Reagan showing up in 1980 to announce George H.W. Bush as his running mate (or, to be more precise, to preempt out-of-control speculation that former president Gerald Ford would join the ticket and perhaps create a “co-presidency”), and Bill Clinton’s brief live remarks each evening from a train hurtling toward the Chicago convention site in 1996.

Framing the whole event around the maximum number of prime-time speeches by the nominee simply pushes the devolution of conventions to a logical end — an event that’s entirely about the nominee and not at all about the party. And the good thing about nominating a candidate the entire party Establishment opposed is that he’s probably not going to let the traditional courtesies afforded to other politicians of his party get in the way of the convention’s show-business potential. It’s not like any of these birds lifted a finger to help Trump win the nomination, right?

Once you get rid of all the precedents, there are plenty of ways to exploit the convention for drama and high ratings:

And Trump plans to create news events too, not just line up speeches by up-and-coming members of the GOP. He’s toying with unveiling a running mate at the convention rather than before. He’s even considering whether to announce his would-be Cabinet.

Ah yes. One could imagine the darkened arena, and then the dramatic voice-of-God PA announcer intoning: At attorney general, 5-foot-11, 300 pounds, out of Mendham, New Jersey — Chriiiiiiiis CHRISTIE! as flares shoot up from the arena floor and the New Jersey governor trots onto the floor wearing a warm-up suit with TRUMP emblazoned across the front and back.

For journalists and others who have to cover politics extensively, a Trump convention is like a consolation prize for the loss of the contested convention we were all so happily anticipating. The big difference is that to prepare you’d probably best watch some old XFL broadcasts instead of immersing yourselves in convention rules and procedures. Brainwork will be strictly optional.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 18, 2016

May 20, 2016 Posted by | Donald Trump, GOP, Republican National Convention | , , , , | 1 Comment

“The Republicans’ Commie Convention Hotel”: How The Hotel Came To Exist In The First Place Should Offend Republicans

When Republicans gather in Cleveland to formally nominate Donald Trump for president in July, their headquarters will be a brand new hotel whose very existence contradicts party orthodoxy on private enterprise, less government, and lower taxes.

Were the Hilton Cleveland Downtown located in Havana, or in Moscow during the Soviet era, Republicans in a diplomatic mode would call it “state-owned.” Those favoring Trump’s aggressively plain English would call it a communist hotel.

That’s because Cuyahoga County taxpayers own the hotel—not that they had any say in the matter.

The Cuyahoga County Commissars—er, sorry, Commissioners—forced taxpayers three years ago to pay for the $276 million hotel, which is scheduled to open June 1 and connects directly to the Cleveland Convention Center, where the party will nominate its presidential standard bearer.

The taxpayers own everything in the hotel, including the signs that say “Hilton.”

How did this come to pass? The county spent years trying to attract private investors to take on this project. After none did, it forced taxpayers into underwriting it. The hotel got built through a convoluted series of transactions involving the city, the county and others so the land would be tax-exempt. The city and county will collect no property taxes, but the schools will be made whole, said Jeffrey Appelbaum, the lawyer on the project and a construction expert.

The hotel is being paid for with an increase in the county sales tax that is expected to raise $20 million per year for 20 years. In addition, the county added a 1 percent excise tax on hotel rooms. The excise tax from the Hilton will be cycled back to cover the bond payments, meaning guests will be hit for a small part of the cost.

Appelbaum said the hotel was built for much less than a private developer would have spent, which appears to be true. Still, that efficiency is hardly an argument Republicans would buy into just as they reject national single-payer health care even though it would be much cheaper than our disorganized nonsystem system of sick care, and it would remove a huge burden from small-business owners.

Republicans also wouldn’t be crazy about the origins of a lot of the hotel inventory, which run directly counter to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, under which he assumes a president possesses dictatorial powers. Trump says if elected he will order companies like Carrier, Ford, and Nabisco to build factories only in America and slap punitive tariffs on foreign-made goods, powers not granted the president under the Constitution.

The flatware and furniture offend the Trump creed. While extolling the private enterprise system after dinner, Republican delegates will put Spada brand cake forks into their desserts. The 5,400 forks, made in Indonesia, cost local taxpayers $10,314, or $1.91 each. The hotel could have bought flatware from the only American maker, Liberty Tabletop in suburban Syracuse, N.Y.

The top-floor bar, with views of Lake Erie, features sofas, bar stools, and other furniture from Astoria Imports, a Florida firm that has factories and warehouses in Mexico and Asia, as well as some domestic operations.

Trump may be more comfortable with the sourcing of the banquet napkins, table cloths, and table skirts, which cost Cleveland taxpayers $92,526.48. They came from a division of Mount Vernon Mills, which made clothing for the Confederate Army, though the company says its work for the 19th-century traitors was performed “under protest.” It also notes that the mill owner concealed this work for the Confederacy from Union General William T. Sherman, who decided against burning it to the ground after an evening of hospitality from the owners.

But it’s how the hotel came to exist in the first place that should offend Republicans. It required more government, not less. And what if the hotel does not generate enough revenue to pay the bondholders? On the surface the bonds are called revenue bonds, not general obligations of Cuyahoga County. But that’s a clever deceit. If revenue falls short the county must appropriate money to make up the difference, even if that means raising taxes, to ensure that the bondholders get fully paid.

A few years back, local boosters made a promise of “300,000 visitors and $330 million in spending” if they could just get a taxpayer-owned convention center for medical conferences and a hotel, as reported by Roldo Bartimole, an 83-year-old self-employed journalist who has offered independent and critical assessment of Cleveland area government for a half-century.

Bartimole said the whole idea was just another way to pick the pockets of taxpayers for the benefit of the local oligarchs. He also railed against a tax increase to subsidize, forever, the Cleveland Browns football team, Cavaliers basketball team, and the Indians baseball team, all owned by out-of-town billionaires.

To justify making taxpayers build a hotel a local group ordered up a study from PKF Consulting in Philadelphia. With lots of tables and charts showing that the hotel would not just succeed, it would rent out so many rooms at rising prices that over the next five years it should expect that 17 cents out of every dollar of revenue would become net profit. This being a government-owned hotel technically it’s a net surplus, but the idea remains the same.

Experience suggests this was a paid-for fantasy report. Around the country there are now at least 33 taxpayer-owned hotels. Like communism in practice, they have not done well. The one in St. Louis was an utter failure, sold off for about 32 cents on the dollar.

Other big convention hotels, both those owned outright by taxpayers and those with heavily subsidized private owners, have “a checkered past,” said Heywood T. Sanders, a University of Texas-San Antonio professor and author of the book Convention Center Follies.

He notes that the trend toward taxpayer-subsidized hotels traces back to the late 1970s with Urban Development Block Grants or UDAGs. “We say the H in UDAG is for hotel, but it’s a silent H,” Sanders joked.

From 1978 to 1989 a quarter of all UDAG money went for hotel projects, in all 60,000 rooms added at 236 hotels that were new or renovated, political scientist Richard D. Bingham wrote in his 1998 book Industrial Policy American Style.

The new trend is toward not subsidizing hotels, but having taxpayers own them. A study in December, published in the journal Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, concluded from analyzing 21 of these hotels that they are bad for private enterprise.

Proponents claim taxpayer-owned hotels will increase business and thus benefit existing hotels. But the study found that taxpayer-owned hotels “tend to erode the key performance metrics of competitive hotels in the market.”

So just remember the next time you are told that Republicans are the party of free enterprise, less government, and lower taxes that they chose as their national party convention headquarters what they would call a communist hotel built here in America.

 

By: David Cay Johnston, The Daily Beast, May 19, 2016

May 20, 2016 Posted by | Communism, GOP, Republican National Convention | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Very Different Level Of Self-Confidence”: Democrats Consider Opening, While GOP Closing, Primaries To Independents

If you have been following the very public discussions of the Sandernistas about what to demand at and after the Democratic National Convention in exchange for enthusiastic support of the party nominee, you’ve probably noticed that “open primaries” are on most lists. In some respects that’s just a contemporaneous impulse based on Sanders’s unquestioned appeal to Democratic-leaning independents in this year’s primaries. To the magical thinker, some sort of party gesture in favor of banning closed primaries retroactively shows Bernie should have won after all. But the discussion also reflects a long-standing argument — which, ironically, party “centrists” used to regularly make — that encouraging independents to participate in Democratic primaries is a good way to grow the party base and to prepare Democratic candidates for general elections.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the talk at both the grassroots and elite levels about primary rules is very different:

Conservatives, still reeling over the looming nomination of Donald Trump, are pushing new Republican primary rules that might have prevented the mogul’s victory in the first place: shutting out independents and Democrats from helping to pick the GOP nominee

The advocates are finding a sympathetic ear at the very top of the party. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has long supported closed primaries, but has never had a constituency to back him on it.

Now you could say these opposite impulses have in common a “sore loser” motive. Still, they represent a very different level of self-confidence about the appeal of the two parties’ core ideologies: the Democratic Left, which used to call itself the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” thinks a broader party base would be more progressive, while the Republican Right wants as small a tent as possible.

Having said all that, it’s unlikely either party will immediately change the system. For one thing, primary access rules are generally set by state governments and (when allowed by state laws) state parties; only some cumbersome and politically perilous carrot-and-stick process is available to the national parties to influence these rules. It will be particularly troublesome for state governments to set up primaries that comply with both parties’ rules if they are tugging in opposite directions. Additionally, implementing a uniform closed-primary system like so many Republicans want would be problematic in states that do not and have never had party registration. Beyond that, there are other ways to skin the cat and make it easier or harder for independents to participate in primaries, such as manipulating re-registration deadlines (opportunities to easily change party affiliation at the polls or caucus-site make the open-closed distinction largely irrelevant).

But without question, if either or both parties want to send a big bold signal to independents by passing some sort of resolution or hortatory rules change at their conventions, they can do so. Among Democrats, more than enough Clinton Democrats from open-primary states would likely join Sanders delegates to create a comfortable majority for some “open the primaries” gesture in Philadelphia. And among Republicans, a close-the-primaries gesture is precisely the sort of measure that could provide an outlet for frustrated delegates bound to Donald Trump on the first ballot but free to disrespect the mogul on rules and platform votes. But Republicans should beware: All else being equal, closing doors is far less popular than opening them.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 13, 2016

May 16, 2016 Posted by | Democratic National Convention, Primaries, Republican National Convention | , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“Trump Is Performing A Kind Of Straddle-Pander”: Why Donald Trump Is Happily Uttering Conservative Heresies

Reince Priebus, the long-suffering chairman of the Republican National Committee, has now resorted to pleading with Donald Trump not to rewrite the party’s platform. “All that anxiety, just take it off the table,” Priebus said on a radio show Monday. “Tell people that, that you don’t want to rewrite, you appreciate and agree with the platform the way it is.” I’m sure Trump will oblige, since it’s not like he cares one way or another what’s contained in some document he’s never going to bother to read, let alone feel bound by. Meanwhile, Trump will continue to utter heresies against conservative dogma whenever the mood strikes him.

So it was that on Sunday, Trump not only said that taxes for the wealthy might go up when he’s president, but came out as minimum wage increase-curious. Don’t wait for him to actually advocate an increase in the federal minimum, though. Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump expressed both support and opposition to an increase. “I don’t know how people make it on $7.25 an hour,” he said. “I would like to see an increase of some magnitude. But I’d rather leave it to the states. Let the states decide.”

The fact that Trump didn’t actually advocate an increase will be little comfort to Republicans watching him trod all over their cherished beliefs. Because even if he didn’t say the federal minimum should be raised, he expressed support for the idea that $7.25 an hour isn’t enough to live on, even if you aren’t in the market for solid gold toilets and faux-Versailles furnishings. That cuts against the rhetorical underpinnings of Republican opposition to an increase, which include the ideas that minimum wage jobs are only held by teenagers anyway, and the government shouldn’t be saying what is and isn’t enough for anyone to live on. Worst of all, Trump expressed sympathy for the working poor and entertained the idea that government should help them.

Saying “Let the states decide” provides no ideological safe harbor — though Trump probably doesn’t understand this. The truth is that despite their rhetoric about federalism, Republicans — just like Democrats — are fans of federal power when the federal government is doing something they want, and fans of state power when the states are doing something they want. Republicans want states to be able to slash Medicaid benefits, but don’t like it when states legalize marijuana. They talk about how the best government is closest to the people, but when a local government passes a non-discrimination ordinance or increases its minimum wage, they’ll pass a preemption law forbidding any local government in the state from creating a more liberal environment than the Republican legislature wants.

So once again, because Trump didn’t rise up through the political system and because he just doesn’t care all that much about issues, he doesn’t have a firm grasp on the combination of moral and practical arguments that provide the foundation for the conservative position on the issue at hand. It isn’t just that he doesn’t get what he’s supposed to believe, it’s that he doesn’t get why he’s supposed to believe it.

And truth be told, Republicans would rather not talk about the minimum wage at all, since this is one of the most unpopular positions they hold. Polls regularly show 70 percent of the public supporting an increase. That’s the biggest reason Democrats always bring the topic up, but it’s also an economic policy that’s simple to understand, and one where government can have a direct and immediate effect on people’s lives.

Unlike other proposals candidates might make, a minimum wage isn’t something you’d have to wait for. It’s not like the tax cuts Republicans say will eventually trickle down to ordinary people, and it’s not like the infrastructure investments Democrats say will produce more sustained economic growth in the long run. Everyone knows what it means to get a raise.

So Trump is performing a kind of straddle-pander, trying to show he’s on the right side of the issue while not actually taking a position in opposition to his party. But this comes at a time when those favoring an increase in the minimum are on the offensive. California and New York have recently passed laws hiking the minimum to $15 an hour (phased in over a period of years), and multiple states will have increases on their ballots in November. Chances are most or all of those measures will succeed (minimum wage initiatives usually do), and Republicans will be even more eager to change the subject.

Conservatives will take Trump’s squishiness on this issue as yet more proof that he isn’t a true conservative, and they’ll be right. But he also seems to have an intuitive sense, at least some of the time, of what people want to hear. Despite all the voters he’s alienated by taking Republican ideas and cranking them up to 11, Trump has also rejected some of the most unpopular positions his party has, on things like cutting Social Security or defunding Planned Parenthood.

That doesn’t mean voters will buy that he’s some kind of man of the people. But by speaking favorably about a higher minimum wage, Trump is once again making the rest of his party look bad.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect;  Contributor, The Week, May 10, 2016

May 12, 2016 Posted by | Conservatives, Donald Trump, Reince Priebus, Republican National Convention | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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