Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton
The 10 Big Decisions Of The 2016 Presidential Race

APTOPIX Campaign 2016 DebateThe consequences of the presidential election on national policy are becoming clearer each day, as Trump appoints deeply anti-government people to run major agencies, from education to labor to the EPA.  Progressive groups will likely be on defense for the next four or more years, putting our country’s ability to remain an international leader on issues like the environment in jeopardy.

With that in mind, it’s worth looking back at the campaign that put the country in this situation.  Politico has a fascinating piece on the 10 big decision points that shaped the race, culled from interviews with key players over the 18-month campaign.  The points range Clinton and Trump’s decisions to run, to some of the big moments, like Sanders not attacking Clinton on emails and the FBI director’s last-minute letter on Clinton’s emails.

It’s a long piece, but here is probably the key passage:

But, in the end, Brooklyn [Clinton campaign headquarters] simply failed to predict the tidal wave that swamped Clinton—a pro-Trump uprising in rural and exurban white America that wasn’t reflected in the polls—and his candidate failed to generate enough enthusiasm to compensate with big turnouts in Detroit, Milwaukee and the Philadelphia suburbs.

Either way, there was something missing that technocrats couldn’t fix: The candidate herself was deeply unappealing to the most fired-up, unpredictable and angry segment of the electorate—middle-income whites in the Middle West—and she couldn’t inspire Obama-like passion among her own supporters to compensate for the surge.

The piece also goes through Trump’s relationship with the media and how he honed his strategy, with rallies that allowed him to test his messaging and develop material like a stand-up comedian on the road.

I was particularly struck at how a demagogue-style, populist message of darkness resonated in this country, even in his post-convention attack on a Gold Star family (the Khans):

“If he loses,” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, told me at the time, “his attack on Khans was the turning point.”

But here’s the thing: At that very moment, Mook’s own internal data was showing that Trump’s negative message overall—his “diagnosis of the problem” as Brooklyn called it—was resonating.

Clinton’s team laughed off Trump’s nomination speech. Yet her pollster John Anzalone and his team were stunned to find out that dial groups of swing state voters monitored during the speech “spiked” the darker the GOP nominee got, according to a staffer privy to the data.

The article also criticizes Clinton’s decision to essentially take time off in August and let Trump come back, as well as her decision not to campaign more in the rust belt, which was always touted as Trump’s only path to victory:

Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s policy director—a brainy and nervous former State Department aide who took on an increasingly important political role as the campaign ground on—was the only one in Clinton’s inner circle who kept saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling, according to his friends. He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton’s daily scheduling call who kept on asking if it wasn’t a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing states in the closing days of the campaign.

His suggestion wasn’t rejected; it never got that far because nobody else on the call thought it was a good idea. They spent far more time debating whether or not Clinton should visit Texas and Arizona, two states they knew she had little chance of winning, in order to get good press.

There are other good post-mortems on the election out there, particularly David Roberts’ recent piece at Vox, and political junkies could spend hours reading and debating.

But as the analysis settles, we’ll have to address the consequences of this election on national policy. And given the direction so far (to say nothing of the campaign trail rhetoric), they’re likely to be massive.

Energy Policy In The Ugly Presidential Debate — A Busy Night For Fact-Checkers

APTOPIX Campaign 2016 DebateLast night’s presidential debate was a real low for American democracy, with the audience cheering Donald Trump’s threat to jail his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, once he’s elected.  Members of the media seemed to highlight the shocking claim almost in passing, perhaps because they don’t quite realize that they’d be next in jail.

But aside from these chilling words, there was actually a bit of substantive discussion in the debate, too.  The second-to-last question on energy policy in particular caught my attention.  Trump answered first, and Grist helpfully broke down the amazing amount of falsehoods in his reply:

• Trump: “[E]nergy is under siege by the Obama administration. … We are killing, absolutely killing, our energy business in this country.”

In fact: Total U.S. energy production has increased for the last six years in a row. The oil and gas sector has been booming during the Obama presidency, as have the solar and wind industries. Coal companies have been struggling — but that is largely not the fault of President Obama, just as the oil boom is largely not something he can take credit for.

• Trump: “I will bring our energy companies back. … They will make money. They will pay off our national debt. They will pay off our tremendous budget deficits.”

In fact: There is no remotely credible economic analysis to suggest that Trump’s proposals for expanded domestic fossil fuel extraction would generate enough additional tax revenue to close the budget deficit, much less pay off the existing national debt. It’s particularly implausible when you consider Trump’s massive tax-cut plans that would make both the deficit and debt considerably larger.

• Trump: “I’m all for alternative forms of energy, including wind, including solar, etc.”

In fact: Trump’s energy plan offers nothing to increase solar or wind energy production, but instead focuses on boosting fossil fuels.

• Trump: “There is a thing called clean coal.”

In fact: The hope that coal plants’ carbon emissions can be drastically reduced — either through technology that captures and sequesters the emissions or that converts coal to synthetic gas — burns eternal for the coal industry’s cheerleaders. But no one has actually significantly cut emissions at an economically viable coal plant. The promises of “clean coal” projects have not been fulfilled.

• Trump: “Foreign companies are now coming in and buying so many of our different plants, and then rejiggering the plant so they can take care of their oil.”

In fact: What is Trump trying to say with this gibberish? We have no idea.

But lest we automatically assume Clinton’s answer pleased the environmental community, she made two comments that raised some hackles. First, she described natural gas as a “bridge” to cleaner fuels, which many environmentalists dispute due to the methane and other emissions involved. Second, she described the United States as “energy independent” when we’re still a net importer of crude oil and petroleum.

Still, the candidates are miles apart on this issue, as my colleague Dan Farber describes on Legal Planet, with Clinton the only real choice for those who care about the environment.

This is not a typical election with the usual policy disagreements among the candidates.  Instead, it’s a race between two major party candidates with vastly different levels of respect for our American democracy and values.  We shouldn’t overlook that fundamental difference, but we should also still use the occasion to talk about important issues like energy — and note the stark differences among the candidates’ views.