Acting Like Republicans Isn't How You Beat Republicans

Conventional wisdom from the corporate media and from #NeverTrump Republicans who saw their party taken over by a carnival barker and 2 bit charlatan, is constant and unwavering: Democrats need to be more like "moderate" conservative Republicans-- you, know, like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Marco Rubio... all the clowns the carnival barker and 2 bit charlatan turned to mincemeat. MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times and-- most of all-- the DCCC, DNC and DSCC all agree: the Democratic Party needs to be your father's GOP. And since Bill Clinton was elected they have been pulling it inexorably intuit direction-- the ONE AND ONLY reason Trump is occupying the White House.

John Harris is a former Washington Post reporter and one of the guys who founded Politico so you might reasonably expect to find him expounding exactly that kind of turgid, fear-based centrism. But... his lead-up article for the debates yesterday, took a very different posture: Democrats Are Veering Left, It Just Might Work. He certainly doesn't like it; he terms it "a prevailing Washington media and political class narrative," "going off the rails" and "saddling themselves with unrealistic positions"-- but he does recognize that it may be the formula to beating Trump. "[A]s Democratic contenders gather on the stage again this week," he wrote, "a competing analysis is gaining power: Going a bit off the rails may be an entirely reasonable track to victory." Don't expect Status Quo Joe, let alone Frackenlooper, to start appearing at events dressed as a sans-culotte, but...

“Candidates who look like they are cautious, modulating, have their foot on the brake are missing the moment,” said veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who is coming out later this summer with a book on how both parties have been refashioned in the Trump era.

The moment, according to Greenberg’s polling and focus-group work, has left voters of all stripes clamoring for disruption. Cultural and ideological currents in society-- more profound than any given day’s Trump uproars-- are giving progressives a better opportunity than they have had in decades to play offense.

This interpretation is notable for the source. Greenberg first drew wide notice a generation ago, with landmark work about how Ronald Reagan captured many working-class Democrats who believed their party’s liberalism was out of step with their lives. He is a veteran of the 1992 “war room” of Bill Clinton-- who won two elections precisely by practicing a brand of defensive politics that required regular reassurance to voters that his activism didn’t mean he liked big government, disliked free enterprise or was sympathetic to 1960s-style radicalism.

Notable also are Greenberg‘s friends who disagree with him. Perhaps no one has been more outspoken in warning that Democrats might be blowing their chance to beat President Donald Trump by swerving too gratuitously to the left than former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. In the latest of a series of commentaries and interviews, he complained in a Medium post that he was part of group “shaking our heads” after the Miami debates as candidates “succumbed to chasing plaudits on Twitter” with strident positions on health care and immigration which risk offending “swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

Emanuel, too, is a veteran of Clinton’s war room and White House, and won four House elections and two mayoral elections with his own version of centrism. When he was in Congress, he lived in a basement apartment of a Capitol Hill town house-- owned by Greenberg and his spouse, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT).

“The country is so far away from where it was under Bill Clinton,” Greenberg said in an interview. “People are desperate for government to show it can do big things.”

Greenberg’s and Emanuel’s worldviews are more in tension than outright opposition. Both are alert to the danger that Democrats project that they are more interested in identity politics than representing a unified national interest. Even Emanuel, who draws scorn from the left, supports robust expansion of government’s role to improve health care and education.

Where they differ-- in ways that echo with a broader intraparty debate Democrats are confronting-- is on how they calibrate risks.

One thing that hasn’t changed from the Clinton years, Emanuel believes, is that Democrats must loudly make the case of who they are (pragmatists obsessed with concrete improvements in voters’ lives) and implicitly make the case who they are not (smug and impractical ideologues who live in a leftist echo chamber). That’s why he cringed at seeing candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders call for the abolition of private health insurance, and even several avowed moderates call for decriminalizing illegal border crossings and providing health insurance for undocumented workers.

Greenberg, by contrast, believes that the urgency voters feel for shaking up the status quo means there’s less risk for candidates and the party in going too far than in not going far enough.

He believes the 2020 election will be decided by a couple big questions which favor Democrats: Do you support or oppose America’s accelerating change toward a more diverse and culturally tolerant society that gives more opportunities to historically excluded groups? Do you believe in the power of government to challenge entrenched financial power, and make average people better off?

His belief that Republicans are placing themselves on the electorally losing side of these questions is the foundation of a forthcoming book, R.I.P G.O.P. It is also why he is generally not joining the bed-wetting of many Democratic operatives over the rhetorical and substantive positioning of many Democrats trying to challenge former Vice President Joe Biden’s frontrunner status (Biden for the most part has avoided these extremes, offering himself as a seasoned incrementalist who can beat Trump).

For one thing, Greenberg said, voters properly see most of the Democratic positioning as about making broad statements of values and ideals-- not millstone-around-the-neck commitments that eliminate their ability to maneuver as general election nominee or president.

What’s more, he said, recent focus groups conducted for the American Federation of Teachers by the Greenberg-linked Democracy Corps suggest that a historically damaging charge-- that Democrats’ plans to expand government amount to “socialism”-- is losing some of its potency.

The focus groups with white working class voters outside metropolitan areas in Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin show that Trump uses partisan insults so promiscuously that his rhetoric may be devalued-- participants didn’t find the socialism allegation compelling.

To be sure, wearing a socialism label from Republicans is not an experiment that most Democrats are ready to run. But if the focus groups are correct it may reflect a broader truth about the cycles of American politics: When the ideological tides are moving in their favor, presidential candidates may not have to worry so much about their language, or pay an especially high cost for laying it on too thick.

The best illustration may come from an earlier swing of the cycle, when Ronald Reagan in 1980 dethroned a half-century of New Deal and Great Society dominance of American politics with a brand of free-market, pro-military conservatism that seemed radical at the time. Reagan, many analysts thought, would be doomed by such provocations as launching his general election campaign in Mississippi with favorable references to “states rights,” doubts about his commitment to Social Security, or disparaging environmental laws by saying trees and the Mt. Saint Helens volcano were causing more pollution than anything man-made. Instead, Reagan was seen as right on big questions about realigning the role of government and won 44 states against incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Even a Democratic candidate this year who by temperament is among the least inclined to rhetorical bombast, South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, recently suggested there’s a lesson in this history-- that successful candidates need to both listen to the electorate and push it beyond present boundaries.

In a recent interview with Democratic operative David Axelrod’s Axe Files podcast, Buttgieg said ideas about cutting tax rates and shrinking government in the 1970s were considered “preposterous” but conservatives were so successful in “tugging” the country toward them that by the 1990s that even many Democrats agreed. “It’s time for us to work a little harder to tug the country back.“

This year, he told Axelrod, Democrats can’t project that they are simply the party “promising a return to normal” before Trump when this version of normal “wasn’t working” for many voters.

Like Greenberg, Buttigieg said the risks of being a disrupter shouldn’t be exaggerated: “I do think it’s OK to get a little bit ahead of where the American people are on an issue if we really do believe it.”

Just a teensy weensy bit ahead, like they taught Mayo Pete at McKinsey. Just a teensy weensy bit... and incrementally. Medicare is 54 years old. As Paul Waldman opined yesterday, conservatives didn't like it 54 years ago any more than they back Medicare-For-All today.




And as long as we're on the subject... A newly-released poll from HuffPo by YouGov shows that "Democrats are increasingly unified on everything from a preference for stricter gun laws to opposition to the Hyde Amendment to a belief in man-made global warming. The change has been especially stark on topics revolving around immigration and race. In the past six years, the percentage of Democrats who said that immigrants strengthen the U.S. rose from 58% to 83%. Between 2011 and 2016, the share of white Democrats saying that “over the past few years, black people have gotten less than they deserve” roughly doubled, from 27% to 55%... What does the American public think? Some of the progressive policies being championed poll a whole lot better than others: taxing the wealthy, for instance, is consistently popular, while ideas like abolishing the death penalty or providing reparations for slavery remain a much harder sell. Framing also matters a great deal: support for Medicare for All looks a lot skimpier when Americans are told the plan wouldn’t provide for people to stay on their current private insurance" (idiotic framing that confuses people and makes them think they are losing something instead of gaining something).

But beyond the political viability of specific policies, there’s also a broader question: whether Democrats’ growing liberalism, or their increasingly visible debate over progressive issues, has actually redefined Americans’ image of the Democratic Party or their perceptions about how well the party’s values align with the mainstream.

So far, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds, the answer is no. Views of the Democratic Party, in fact, haven’t really budged in more than four years. The share of Americans calling the Democrats “too extreme,” which stood at 41% in November 2014, now stands at an identical 41%, with only minimal fluctuation in the interim.

The Smart Thing Or The Right Thing?

Bipartisanship by Nancy Ohanian

-by RedStateBlueWorld

Once again the Powers That Be in the Democratic Party advise doing the smart thing-- be cautious-- this time on impeachment. How many times in my 48 years as a member of the party FDR built have I heard that we have to be smart? In five minutes I came up with over 50. Here are five.

• We can compromise on this Supreme Court nominee, we’ll catch up next time we have the presidency.
• The DNC consultants and their algorithms are exactly what we need to win.
• Trump is a pushover, Hilary will bury him; Why worry about Rust Belt states, they’re in the bag!
• Hey, that 50 State Strategy, it’s too hard and a waste of effort, let’s just focus on key swing states.
• Let’s vote unlimited war powers without end to Bush/Cheney… what could go wrong?

As the Brits say Democrats are “too clever by half.” Beltway Dems play the “safe” bet, the “smart” bet. That’s why voters see them as weak. No one ever accused Republicans of playing it safe. Whatever you may think of their beliefs, they have prosecuted them with fervor. How’d that work out over the last 35 years?

Democrats always think they’re smarter than Republicans. Three decades of results would suggest a radically different conclusion. Who controls the Supreme Court, who redistricted who out of Congress and the state legislatures, who lost to a serial bankrupt adulterous sex offending clown? To quote Aaron Sorkin (as painful as that may be), “If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?”

On to impeachment. The smart play is political. Beltway scuttlebutt says: Game the implications. Impeachment riles up the Republican base. Failure to convict in the Senate gives Trump an electoral advantage. It distracts from Democratic policy messaging. These are certainly possible outcomes. Other possibilities include burying Trump in an avalanche of testimony, exposing grotesque illegal and unconstitutional behavior, driving his re-elect score even lower. The hearings demoralize the Republican base, suppressing turnout in critical Senate and state elections. Hearings just might guarantee a landslide. To hell with the Clinton example, who remembers Nixon? By ’75 you couldn’t find 5 people who admitted voting for a guy who got 520 electoral votes.

The right play is impeachment hearings. You can’t call Trump a criminal and unfit for office and be too chicken shit to start the process (Nancy!). Hearings demonstrate strength, commitment to good government, the courage to do the right thing even when it may be risky, and belief in the history and promise of our Constitutional form of government. Americans respect courage and principle.

The right thing is the smart thing. Impeachment hearings now. Anything less is craven, small minded bullshit. And bad politics.

Right-wingers Invent Self-Serving Narratives Which Their Media Turns Into Conventional Wisdom-- Take Venezuela And Medicare-For-All

The war against dumb conventional wisdom, often bolstered by self-serving propaganda, will never end. Francisco Toro gave it a try at the Washington Post a couple days ago in regard to the agony in Venezuela, No, Venezuela Doesn't Prove That Socialism Will Bring About A Zombie Apocalypse, later prudently retitled "No, Venezuela Doesn't Prove Anything About Socialism." Toro, raised in Caracas and schooled in the U.S. is a journalist, political scientist and blogger. "Venezuela is clearly having its moment in the American conservative mediasphere," he wrote. "The country’s catastrophic collapse is, we’re told, all we need to know about the terrifying dangers of socialism." He recognizes a convenient right-wing narrative when he sees one.

First there was Meghan McCain turning Venezuela into Exhibit A in her screed against socialism on ABC’s The View. On Fox Business Network, Stuart Varney used Venezuela’s latest bout of instability as a “teaching moment” for Americans tempted by “pie-in-the-sky” socialism.

Off on the fringes, it’s a popular theme, too: Remember that the priceless Infowars gotcha video with the world’s most unflappable sailor girl turned on the killer line: “You know Venezuela? The majority of the country is now eating rats.”

I’ve spent two decades chronicling every agonizing twist and turn in the decay of Venezuela’s democracy, economy and society. You’d think I’d be on board with these takes. Think again. I’m revulsed. It’s appalling to see my country’s suffering leveraged for cheap partisan point-scoring.

It bothers me because it’s lazy. But it bothers me more because it’s wrong.

...Look, I get it. When U.S. conservatives bring up "Venezuela," they're not talking about the place I grew up in. They're using the word as a rhetorical club, a verbal firebomb you throw at the the opposing ideological barricade. Their goal isn't to enlighten; it's to delegitimize vast sectors of the left. After all, if you convince people that every left-wing government is on a slippery slope to Venezuela, the entire left becomes toxic. Which is very much the point.

Don't be fooled. All Venezuela demonstrates is that if you leave implementation to the very worst, most anti-intellectual, callous, authoritarian and criminal people in society, socialism can have genuinely horrendous consequences. But couldn't the same be said of every ideology?

Is the Trump Regime proving that capitalism is a zombie apocalypse? Not necessarily. But currently, both the U.S. and Venezuela are-- pure and simple-- kakistocracies. Funny, when you google the phrase a photo of Trump, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Betsy DeVos and Dr. Ben comes up. Wikipedia defines kakistocracy as "a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens." The page ends with this suggestion:

Writing for This Week, Ryan Cooper also took on a major right wing narrative been pushed so strongly to the lazy corporate media that it's becoming more false conventional wisdom-- that Medicare-For-All costs more than the current system. It doesn't. But that doesn't stop right-wing media to endlessly parrot the bullshit. Cooper wrote that the question of what Medicare-for-All would cost is "tying fact checkers in knots." Maybe they should follow Ro Khanna on Twitter:

A recent study by the libertarian Mercatus Center unwittingly answered that Medicare-For-All would save America money-- $2 TRILLION over a 10 year period. Imagine that-- everybody gets healthcare and we save that kind of money. I can imagine it but fact checkers at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and CNN can't and "have absolutely beclowned themselves trying to dispute the study's clear finding."

Here's the background. Bernie Sanders has a Medicare-for-all bill that he put out last year. It would fold all Americans into an upgraded Medicare system over four years, which would now cover dental, vision, and hearing with no cost-sharing. Prescription drugs would be covered with small cost-sharing, capped at $250 per year. It would be paid for with new taxes, but offset by zeroing out insurance premiums and almost all cost-sharing.

When it comes to overall spending, this would have three effects pulling in different directions. First, there would be higher utilization and thus more spending, as people who were prevented from seeking treatment due to cost could now go to the doctor. But second, medical providers would be paid somewhat less, because Medicare reimbursement rates are 40 percent lower than those of private insurance-- though they are higher than Medicaid (the largest insurer in the country) and much higher than that of uninsured people who simply can't pay for the emergency treatment that hospitals are legally required to provide.

Third, because they would now only have to deal with one billing system, providers would be able to dramatically streamline their administrative apparatus. A Health Affairs study of eight rich countries, for instance, found U.S. hospitals spent by far the highest faction of their budgets on administration, at 25.3 percent-- while those of the Netherlands spent 19.8 percent, the U.K. spent 15.5 percent, and Canada spent 12.4 percent.

Therefore, figuring out what Sanders' Medicare-for-all bill might cost overall depends on two estimates and one fact: 1. how much utilization will increase, 2. how much can be saved on administration, and 3. what the provider reimbursement rates are. The first two are necessarily uncertain, but the third is simply whatever is stipulated in the Medicare-for-all legislation.

Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center did an elementary study of Sanders' Medicare bill whose main purpose was pretty obviously to find a really big number for new public spending, and then get that headline figure blasted out in the media.

But buried in the tables there was also an estimate of total national health expenditures (that is, all public and private spending) of the status quo compared to the Sanders plan. Here is the table-- look at "Currently projected national health expenditures (NHE)" versus "NHE under M4A," which I have underlined:

Mysteriously, Blahous chose not to display the summed total figures for those rows, but if you do the arithmetic, you find he estimates status quo NHE at $59.7 trillion over 10 years, while he estimates NHE under the Sanders plan at $57.6 trillion over the same time frame-- for a savings of $2.1 trillion.

Perhaps not satisfied with this result, Blahous then put forward an alternative plan of his own in which provider payments would not be cut as much, with total NHE spending somewhat higher. Importantly, this plan has nothing at all to do with the Sanders bill. It's just something he made up.

He also heavily emphasized that Medicare reimbursement rates are 40 percent lower than private insurance, but did not outline how much the Sanders plan specifically would cut. However, if you go into his tables and reverse-engineer the figures, it must be something like 11 percent.

That brings me to the epic fact checker faceplant. Sanders trumpeted the Mercatus finding, because it was hilarious and a good demonstration of how America could be getting universal Medicare while spending less overall-- even given no doubt slanted libertarian assumptions. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post was first on the attack, giving Sanders 3 out for 4 "Pinocchios" for a supposedly "cherry-picked" $2 trillion figure. He asserted that Blahous' alternative Medicare plan was more realistic, as did Robert Farley of FactCheck.org and AP's Ricardo Alonso-Zalvidar. PolitiFact rated Sanders' claim as "half true" because he didn't mention the Blahous plan. CNN's Jake Tapper put out a video chiding him and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for relying on the $2 trillion figure. "A reminder to all you politicians out there, you're perfectly entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts," tut-tutted Tapper.

This point is wildly misleading, and indeed has nothing to do with facts as such at all. The fact checker brigade is saying that provider payments will be hard to cut, and therefore Sanders might end up passing something different than his Medicare bill. Therefore he is a liar. But Blahous's study absolutely, positively does say that the Sanders plan as written will save the American people $2 trillion. Sanders didn't mention the more expensive Mercatus plan because it is not his plan. Vague speculation about future political negotiations has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of the Sanders proposal, nor the empirical contents of the Mercatus study.

But that's not even the worst part.

As part of its PR rollout of the paper, Mercatus bought buying ads for Facebook in D.C. promoting a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Blahous baldly misrepresents his own paper, writing that the Sanders bill would "immediately and dramatically cut provider payment rates by roughly 40 percent."

As noted above, this is absolutely false, because only about half of people are on private insurance. Medicare payments would stay the same, while Medicaid and uninsured payments would go up. But Kessler, after talking to Blahous, initially swallowed this characterization, writing in his first article that providers "would face an immediate cut of 40 percent in their payments."

He was forced to correct that article (for that and several other factual errors)-- though a video which is still up on the Washington Post at the time of writing contains the same false claim, asserting the plan "generously assumes providers would be paid roughly 40 percent less than they are now." Unbelievably, even after correcting his first article, Kessler wrote another article making the false claim again, writing "the Sanders plan would slash payments to providers by 40 percent." That one is still uncorrected at the time of writing.

This 40 percent talking point is not just wrong, it is preposterous. One way of seeing why is by looking at how much Blahous estimates Sanders will save with provider cuts in the table above. On the right-hand column, we find the sum total of "Applying Medicare payment rates" from 2022-31 is $5.3 trillion in spending cuts. If that is a 40 percent cut, then that implies that the total volume of provider payments in the Sanders plan must be only about $8.0 trillion ((5.3/0.4)*0.6 = 7.96)-- over a period in which national health expenditures are $57.6 trillion. Less than a seventh of medical spending going to providers in a Medicare system doesn't pass the laugh test-- in 2015 existing Medicare provider payments accounted for at least 77 percent of spending, with another 14 percent going to prescription drugs-- and again, the true cut to providers in the paper itself must be about 11 percent.

Finally, this study should be seen as the absolute worst-case scenario for universal Medicare, not a fair estimate of what it might cost. The fact that even the Mercatus Center couldn't make it look that bad is a very good sign. Fact checkers need to get a grip.

And you know that "witch hunt: narrative Trump has been propagating? Republicans for the Rule of Law-- a group of Never Trumpers-- is running this ad today and tomorrow on Fox and Friends and Morning Joe in selected markets (including in D.C., so Señor Trumpanzee will see it in real time).

The Sludge Known As Conventional Wisdom-- From Bulgaria To The Cook Report

After college, I spent a couple years on the "Hippie Trail," the overland route from London to New Delhi and Kathmandu. There were places, primarily in western Turkey and eastern Iran where the idea of "road" was theoretical. But overall, a few hundred of us made it through every year from the late '50s into the mid '70s. Someone's coming over either this weekend or next weekend or soon-- I forgot to write it in my calendar-- to film me for a documentary biopic. I think this Hippie Trail stuff is mostly what the producer is interested in. So I've been thinking about it lately. The 2 years were fundamental to everything that has happened to me in the ensuing 5 decades. One lesson I learned early on-- first in Bulgaria and quickly confirmed in Turkey-- was about conventional wisdom. Forget it. It's not ever where you want to start.

One of my traveling companions was a hitchhiker, Joël, I picked up outside of Niš, then the biggest town in eastern Yugoslavia on the road to Sofia, now the third largest city in Serbia. Joël was following his older brother-- who had been back and forth a couple of times and was now in Kathmandu. So Joël had a lot of useful info about what was before us. But he also had, as it turned out a lot of useless conventional wisdom. Just because it was hippie convention wisdom, it wasn't any more accurate. "Let's just skip Bulgaria," was his advise. "Take the A1 straight to Svilengrad on to Edirne and into Istanbul... There's nothing in Bulgaria."

I thought that was strange. But it was absolutely conventional wisdom for the Hippie Trail: there's nothing in Bulgaria. I didn't come all the way from New York to not see places. It was my VW van and anyone was free to offer their advice, but I was the captain of the ship. A few miles outside of Plovdiv, the A1 offers you a choice, the southeast A1 goes to Turkey and the northeast A1 goes Burgas on the Black Sea. A lot of grumbling from the peanut gallery when I headed off to the Black Sea. I spent a couple fantastic weeks between Burgas and Varna with some kids my age I met in Burgas. We were a novelty and everyone wanted to meet us. There were no tourists back then. Everyone was on their way to Istanbul. But this was a beautiful, friendly area and we stayed at communal farms and in small towns and it was a great trip. The fruits and vegetables we were given by farmers lasted us through Turley, Iran and into Afghanistan. Conventional wisdom was wrong, wrong, wrong. But I didn't know it yet.

A couple of days ago I was having an endless kerfuffle with Google's advertising department. You know how hard Google makes it to speak to an actual human being on the phone? And when you finally break through it's invariably someone in India who can't help unless they can put you in a predetermined box. However... eventually I wound up with someone in Boulder. He solved the problem and it only took 3 days. He was 25 and his grandmother had once taken the family on a Mediterranean cruise that had included Istanbul, which he loved. Something we had in common. Istanbul in 1969, my first time there, and 2012, when he went is pretty different, But we were both attracted to the same part of town, Sultanahmet-- which includes the Grand Bazaar, the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sohia and Topkapi Palace. I told him to watch Midnight Express, a film made in 1978 about what happened in 1969. I was there-- in the Pudding Shop-- when it happened.



Part of conventional wisdom was that the Sultanahmet area of Turkey was fabulous and cool but that the rest of Turkey was horrible and should be gotten through as fast as Bulgaria. As usual-- ass-backwards. Imagine you're from Europe and you go to America... but never get beyond, say Times Square. And then say "America sucks." Like Times Square at the time, Sultanahmet-- and the Pudding Shop in particular-- was a place where hippies came to buy hash, where crooks came to rip off hippies and where the cops came to extort or arrest everyone.

That's when it finally added up to me. I realized how Sultanahmet was the worst place in Turkey to be-- it's gentrified and fine now-- and how every other place in Turkey was way better. I loved Turkey. I've been back a dozen times-- sans conventional wisdom.

I could write about Turkey for hours but I've done that for my travel blog and when I started writing today it was supposed to be about political conventional wisdom. So... let me get into that. Political conventional wisdom is created by the party committees-- like the NRCC and the DCCC-- feeding their versions of reality to David Wasserman at Cook. It gets worse from there, especially when the mainstream media starts regurgitating it as wisdom handed down from on high. The DCCC and David Wasserman are why Alexandria Ocasio's race came as such a surprise to everyone-- even to lunkheads like Joe Crowley, Ben Ray Lujan, Ann Kuster and Nancy Pelosi. Those 4 were charged with keeping Crowley in his seat but now of them knew this young woman who wasn't born when he first started "winning" elections had already eviscerated him. And if they didn't know-- believe me, David Wasserman didn't know. Didn't know, as in "never heard of." Is the Bronx north of Queens or is Queens on Long Island. NY-14, why I we never heard of that before?

Yesterday, Wasserman defined the big anti-red wave that's headed to DC by prognosticating that "Democrats remain substantial favorites for House control." You think? "A"-- at least he was smart enough not to say "the"-- big reason: Republicans are defending 42 open or vacant seats, a record since at least 1930. The retirements of Speaker Paul Ryan (WI-01), as well as powerful committee chairs like Reps. Ed Royce (CA-39) and Rodney Frelinghuysen (NJ-11) and popular moderates like Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-27) and Frank LoBiondo (NJ-02), have given Democrats stellar pickup opportunities." No mention of why these gents and Ileans are retiring. Just a coincidence. Ryan's seat was already lost before he "decided." So was Royce's, LoBiondo's Ros Lehtinen's and, probably, Frelinghuysen's.

Wasserman would rather talk about hocus pocus-- like historical trends and fundraising. "Of Republicans' 42 incumbent-less seats, eight are in districts that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and an additional 13 are in districts where President Trump received less than 55 percent. History is working against the GOP in many of those seats: we found that since 1992, in situations when a president's party was stuck defending an open seat two years after the president failed to carry it, that party has batted zero for 23 keeping it in their column."

He's caught on to the Blue Wave-- just when smarter people have realized what's happening is more an anti-red wave than an actual blue wave. He'll get there... by January.

To some extent, the focus on a "blue wave" has overshadowed an equally important 2018 trend: the steady purge of Trump skeptics from the congressional GOP. Retirements are the single biggest factor, but so are GOP primaries. Not only did Rep. Mark Sanford (SC-01) lose his, but loyalty to the president has emerged as the dominant theme in primaries for dozens of safely GOP open seats. November losses promise to further thin the moderate herd.

Fundraising deficits are a growing GOP problem: in 20 of the 42 seats, the leading Democrat raised more than the leading Republican between April and June, including in seven of eight Clinton-carried districts (Rep. Dave Reichert's open WA-08 was the only exception) and 13 of 34 Trump-carried seats. That's especially problematic because the NRCC and Congressional Leadership Fund are already stuck defending dozens of vulnerable incumbents.

The most immediate open seat test is the August 7 special election in Ohio's 12th CD, north of Columbus. It's in the Toss Up column, and if Democrat Danny O'Connor defeats Republican Troy Balderson in a seat Trump carried by 11 points in 2016 (R+7 PVI), it would be another piece of evidence that Democrats are pushing the House battleground deeper into Trump territory.

Funniest lines in Wasserman's reports:

Unabashed

Talking about AZ-02 and carpetbagger Ann Kirkpatrick, one of the most far right Democrats running anywhere: "Kirkpatrick is an unabashed liberal, who proudly voted for Nancy Pelosi and Obamacare, and she's running with the support of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly." Only in DC would anyone define "unabashed liberal" as someone who "proudly voted for Nancy Pelosi." Certainly in 2002. But in 2018? Uh... no. Obamacare? Kirkpatrick broke ranks with the Democrats and voted with the GOP to kill it, which is why she lost her seat and then lost a Senate race. And support from Gabby Giffords? I'm sorry Gabby got shot but she was a right-of-center Blue Dog before that tragic incident and to this day always bends over backwards to support right-of-center Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, not progressives. Do "unabashed liberals" have A+ ratings from the NRA? How about being the only AZ-02 candidate to support ICE? Is that what Wasserman meant? Dave... today we use Medicare-For-All, Job Guarantee, free state universities, green energy transition, living wage... to define "unabashed liberals." It's 2018; you should give it a try. It won't hurt you.

His column is filled with DCCC/NRCC junk. Kansas-- Bernie and Alexandria were just in Wichita and Kansas City campaigning for James Thompson and Brent Welder, progressives who have caught fire. Wasserman instead sticks to the DCCC script, promoting the race with the DCCC's vomitous GOP-lite Blue Dog, Blue Dog instead. Wisconsin-01... maybe he was taking a crap and someone from the NRCC logged onto his computer and wrote that section of his post. Sure sounds like that. Anyway... warning about Wasserman: conventional wisdom is junk, whether if it's about Bulgaria or congressional politics.

Don't Assume Terrorism Will Win The Election For The Lying Demagogue

Convention wisdom predicted the Orlando terrorist attack would be "good" for Trump, who quickly moved into full demagogue mode-- not much of a change from his default button-- to exploit it. A tracking poll by Reuters showed Clinton's national lead over Trump down ever so slightly after he worked so hard to exploit the Orlando gun massacre and blame it on "immigrants" and "Muslims"-- she went from a 13 point lead to an 11.6% lead.

Our friend Sam Husseini asked me to consider how NPR botched their reporting by twisting conventional wisdom into reality when they talked about how a massive terrorist attack in Madrid impacted Spain's national elections. NPR got it all wrong.

Commenting on Orlando, NPR Terrorism Reporter Reverses Political Lesson of Madrid Blast
-By Sam Husseini

Shortly before noon on Sunday (6/12/16), during NPR’s national coverage of the horrific shooting in Orlando, NPR “counter-terrorism correspondent” Dina Temple-Raston made a critical false claim that deserves an on-air correction.

NPR’s hosts were talking about the Orlando shooting, terrorism and the US election. They asked Temple-Raston to chime in on the issue, and she drew a parallel with Spain, claiming that when the 2004 Madrid train attacks happened just before the Spanish election, “the more conservative candidate ended up winning.”

This is exactly backwards.

In fact, the incumbent government, led by the conservative People’s Party, had brought the country into the Iraq War a year before against public opposition, and feared that if the attack were shown to be Mideast-related, voters would be furious. The day of the attack, March 11, 2004, the Spanish government had the United Nations Security Council pass resolution 1530, which condemned in “the strongest terms the bomb attacks in Madrid, Spain, perpetrated by the terrorist group ETA.” Three days later, the day of the election, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.

Before the Madrid bombing, the People’s Party generally lead in the polls by 4 or 5 percentage points, but the Socialist Party ended up winning by 5 points. The victorious Socialists had called for the removal of Spanish troops from Iraq during the campaign.

Crucially, there were substantial protests in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, which included messages like “No to Terrorism-- No to War.”

After winning the election, the Socialist Party  withdrew troops a month earlier than promised. I can’t find a record of any Mideast-related attacks in Spain since.

It’s remarkable that NPR’s self-described “counterterrorism correspondent” would make such a false statement. This case seems to show an example of a country that may have reduced the danger of  terrorism by ending participation in an aggressive war. That’s something that should be regularly highlighted: Can we learn something from this?

Instead, the reporter who should be highlighting this story reversed the historical lesson.

Note: Dina Temple-Raston’s statement does not appear to be on NPR’s website or its transcripts on Nexis. (I tweeted about it twice at the time, using Temple-Raston’s Twitter handle.) The failure to put all of NPR’s broadcasts online lessens accountability for the powerful, publicly funded network.

Conventional wisdom are actual reality aren't identical. Don't assume Trump is going to win because of Orlando. He isn't.

One of the congressmen representing the Orlando area, Alan Grayson, had a very different kind of message than Trump's, a message that more than a few people are gravitating to-- and which is not going to push voters towards fascism.

Early Sunday, one person, firing one weapon, killed almost fifty people, in just a few minutes.

These people were sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. The parents of two of them, living outside the United States, contacted my office yesterday and asked if they could have visas to attend the funerals of their own children. How wrong is that-- parents attending the funerals of their slain children. So many; a slaughter of the innocents.

It’s much too easy to kill a lot of people very quickly.

The weapon that the killer used was an AR-15 assault weapon, derived from an M-16 military model. The main difference between the two is that you can pull and hold the M-16 trigger, making it spit out hundreds of rounds each minute, while the AR-15 trigger is one-pull-one-round, or “only” 100+ rounds per minute (subject to reloading). That’s automatic versus semi-automatic. But a legal modification to the AR-15 (a “replacement rifle stock”), costing around $300, essentially takes each recoil and make it a trigger pull. And that makes the AR-15 a machine gun.

Either way, it’s hard to imagine any legitimate use for a weapon like that. Does anyone really want to drill a deer with a few hundred rounds in a minute or two? That doesn’t seem very sporting.

For a decade, you couldn’t buy an assault weapon. The original legislation had a “sunset” provision that ended the ban after ten years. Thanks to the NRA and its GOP puppets, that ban was never extended.

We need to end this lunacy.

Seven states enacted bans (or heavy restrictions) on their own. Three of those seven states enacted their restrictions after 20 children were shot dead at Sandy Hook.

That’s where we are now.

Convicted felons can’t buy these weapons, in Florida and elsewhere. But pretty much anyone else can. In fact, until last August, anyone could buy them in WalMart. (Then WalMart imposed its own ban.)

Let me just ask you, straight up: Do you want virtually anyone to be able to buy weapons whose only practical purpose is to be able to kill hundreds of people in a matter of minutes?

No?

I’ll introduce the bill this week.

Let's elect more people to government like Alan Grayson... and fewer like Donald Trump. You can help by tapping on the thermometer below. All the candidates on the page it leads to are anti-fascist/anti-Trump progressives... yes, every single one of them.

Rubio's 19th Century Vision For America Isn't Going Anywhere

New York's Gabriel Sherman, writhing about what Team Clinton has in store for Biden: "The research effort started about a month ago and is being conducted by operatives at Correct the Record, the pro-Hillary superpac founded by David Brock, which is coordinating with the Clinton campaign. According to the source, the research has turned up material on Biden’s ties to Wall Street; his reluctance to support the raid that killed Osma bin Laden; and his role in the Anita Hill saga as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee." But with the Clinton opposition research team putting all its energy into readying the attack against Biden, who's preparing to go after whichever maniac the GOP finally nominates?

Yesterday's silly insider buzz was all about how that Republican would be... Rubio. The Real Clear Politics average GOP primary polling has him in 4th place, almost at double-digits and just behind Fiorina, just ahead of Jeb:

• Trump- 23.2%
• Carson- 17.2%
• Fiorina- 10.4%
• Rubio- 9.9%
• Bush- 8.4%
• Cruz- 6.2%
• Kasich- 3.2%
• Huckabee- 2.9%
• Christie- 2.6%
• Paul- 2.3%

Nate Cohn admits Rubio "hasn’t quite had his moment in the media spotlight, he hasn’t made big gains in the polls, and he hasn’t earned many endorsements. But," he wrote in yesterday's NYTimes, "the political landscape surrounding his candidacy could not have changed much more in his favor over the last six months." That means that after Walker was driven out of the race Rubio's all the mainstream conservative voters have left other than the pretty loathed and floundering Jeb Bush. In yesterday's PPP survey Rubio's favorables/unfavorables were a relatively robust 57/24% while poor Jeb's were a sorry, low-energy 34/49%. Rubio has picked up some Walker operatives, theoretically a good thing, and some Walker donors and bundlers.

The sense that Mr. Rubio’s position has improved is reflected in the betting markets, which show him rising steadily to a 29 percent chance of winning the nomination, more than twice the 13 percent he held before the last Republican debate. Mr. Bush is at 31 percent.

Mr. Rubio, however, will still need to capitalize on the voids created by Mr. Walker’s exit and Mr. Bush’s weakness. With well-received debate performances, he has been praised as the best communicator in his party and has strong favorability ratings. But he has not yet become the top choice of many party elites or voters; in fact, he holds about as much support in the polls as Mr. Bush, and far fewer endorsements.

Mr. Rubio’s biggest shortcoming is that he is not the natural favorite of any wing of the party, which is the easiest way for a candidate to become the first choice of a meaningful block of voters. He’s the opposite of candidates like Mr. Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul and John Kasich, who have messages and political identities that resonate with one of the party’s core constituencies, like the Tea Party, evangelicals, libertarians or moderates.

Mr. Rubio’s challenge could simply be a reflection of his greatest strength-- his wide appeal. The son-of-a-bartender message is so broadly attractive in part because it’s aimed at no one, except, perhaps, bartender households.

...But it’s also possible that Mr. Rubio’s problems run deeper than the factional politics of a severely divided party. Perhaps his vaunted communication skills haven’t turned into big polling gains because his personal traits-- he’s a young, Catholic, Latino lawyer from Miami-- don’t help him resonate among old, evangelical, white, less-educated and rural voters. His youthful appearance may not help assuage concerns about his preparedness for the presidency.

Beyond his limited experience in national politics, he has big vulnerabilities on his failed immigration reform effort and his ties to a billionaire benefactor.

Paul Waldman and Jonathan Chait were both laughing. Waldman: "By any objective measure, Rubio isn’t doing much better than he was a month or a year ago... But that will probably change. Here’s how the prophecy of Rubio’s future success becomes self-fulfilling. Members of the media decide that Rubio has a good chance of winning the nomination. Then they begin writing more stories about him. Those stories tend to be very positive, not because of some personal pro-Rubio bias any reporter has, but because the stories’ basic frame-- Rubio is climbing, Rubio could be the nominee-- leads them to focus on his more appealing characteristics and the things he’s doing right, as a way of explaining what they say is happening (just as a story about Jeb Bush’s drop in the polls will naturally focus on mistakes that he’s made and things he’s doing wrong). Voters see all this positive coverage, and begin thinking, “Gee, that Rubio fellow is pretty appealing.” Donors see it and give him more money. Other Republican politicians see it and start thinking about whether it’s time to make their endorsement. Each tiny movement upward in the polls, no matter how small, reinforces the cycle and keeps propelling him upward."

Chait seems even more skeptical: "Rubio has carved out a valuable niche in the Republican field as the candidate who will carry out the agenda of the party’s donor base, but who has the identity and communication skills to sell that agenda more effectively... [A]sked if he disagrees with Bush or Romney on anything at all, Rubio does not directly offer any examples. Instead, he says he will “spend a tremendous amount of time talking about higher-education reform.” This is an interesting and perhaps accidentally blunt description of his political strategy. (Obviously Rubio wants to spend a lot of time talking about higher-education reform, and less time talking about less popular things he plans to do in office.) But it’s not true that other Republicans never talked about reforming higher education. Romney talked about it a lot... What’s stranger is Rubio’s claim that his issues-- actually, issue, singular, is completely novel to anything considered by Bush or Romney because “they were not part of the 20th century debate.” The gambit here is to wall off any association between Rubio and previous Republican failures by drawing a line at the century mark, after which all intellectual continuities stop." OK, but that's both silly and untrue.

Michael Tomasky seems about as worried as Rubio as I am-- i.e., not at all. Writing for the Daily Beast yesterday, he was also laughing at the expense of the insiders-- "not regular real people, but total political junkies, and, being on the side of the fence I’m on, mostly liberal total political junkies"-- who are calling it for Rubio already. He agrees with everyone else that Rubio-- for all his weaknesses-- may wind up as the "insider" or "mainstreamish" candidate: :"The logic is straightforward enough. It looks like the race will eventually whittle down to one outsider vs. one insider. The outsider could be Donald Trump or who knows maybe Ben Carson, with an outside shot at Carly Fiorina. As for the insider, not so long ago that was either Rubio or Jeb Bush or John Kasich, throw a dart. But Bush just keeps getting worse and worse, and Kasich looks increasingly goofy."

I think my little focus group is over-sweating this. So herewith, four reasons why Rubio might be formidable, and four corresponding reasons why he’s being overrated.

Reason One: This whole youth business. Let’s face it, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is the spring chicken. At least she’d be shy of 70 when inaugurated. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden probably couldn’t last two terms. So Rubio can lay it on thick with all that cloying rhetoric about the future and passing torches to a new generation. The media really fall for that. Oh, and speaking of…

Reason Two: It seems the media like him. They sure like him more than they like Hillary. If she’s the nominee, the default narrative in the media will be something like “fresh-faced new figure takes on tired old hag.”

Reason Three: The Latino vote. You’ll be reading a lot if he’s the nominee about how he won 55 percent of the Latino vote in his first Senate run in Florida in 2010. The press will be full of breathless stories about how if he can replicate that, the Democrats are doomed.

Reason Four: He seems reasonable and totally unthreatening, which may make it hard for Democrats to sell people on the idea that he’s a right-wing extremist. There’s an art for these wingers in knowing how to emphasize all the non-extreme stuff and really play down the extreme parts. Rubio is better at that than the others. A case in point is that woman-on-the-$10-bill business from the second debate. Three of them said Rosa Parks, but Rubio said it first. This was after Rand Paul said Susan B. Anthony, which isn’t bad, but Anthony doesn’t cover nearly as many reassure-mainstream-America bases as Parks does. Also keep in mind that he had that crackerjack answer about Black Lives Matter recently, which was likely the best response to the movement by a GOP candidate. If Rubio can keep doing things like that, the “No, you fools, he’s a true right winger!” counter-narrative might be very tough to advance.

All right. Now, here are the reasons why Rubio is eminently beatable in a general election.

Reason One: His youth story line can be very easily countered. Picture a Clinton-Rubio debate. Rubio prattles on about youth, the future, optimism, what have you. Mrs. Clinton? “Well, look, the Senator is undoubtedly younger than I am, that’s an objective fact. But if we’re talking about which one of us has the policies of the past, I’d say voters should look beyond mere age. Which one of us wants to keep fighting the Cold War in Cuba, and which one of us wants to move toward a new future there? Which one of us opposes gay people getting married, a policy of the past that large majorities of Americans no longer support? Which one of us would allow no abortions even in the case of rape and incest, which is literally kind of a 19th-century position? Which one of us not only opposes raising the minimum wage but opposes the existence of a federal minimum wage law, which would us all the way back to 1937, the last time this country had no federal minimum wage? That’s the candidate of the future?” Boom. If she said something like that and made two good commercials and Democrats in general hammered away at it, Rubio would shut up about the future pretty fast.

Reason Two: The women’s vote. Let’s go back to that abortion sentence above. It was at the first debate that Rubio said no rape or incest exceptions on abortion. Now, if he becomes the nominee, he’ll try to walk that back in some way, at least rhetorically, and he’s usually been clever and slippery in the way he’s worded it. No Republican nominee since abortion became a public issue has ever opposed exceptions for rape and incest. It’s an extreme position that should, if the Democrats hit it the right way, cost him a few points among suburban women in all the key swing states.

Reason Three: The Latino vote. He’s not getting close to 55 percent among Latinos. OK, some say, but what if he gets a mere 40, isn’t that enough? Well, maybe, maybe not, depending on other factors. But after being for immigration reform, he’s now basically against it and against a path to citizenship, although here too he is slippery. He says now that we should postpone the citizenship debate for 10 or 12 years, which means that if he serves eight, he won’t be the guy to be doing anything about it.

So that’s a way of being against it without saying the words “I’m against it,” but people aren’t stupid. In one recent poll that looked especially closely at Latino preferences (PDF), Clinton led Rubio among Latinos 61 to 31 percent (statistically, no different from how she fared against Bush or Ted Cruz). I would bet you today that that’s about how it will end up if those two face each other. And that ain’t enough.

Reason Four: The Electoral College. My long-suffering readers know that I bang on about this a lot, but the Democrats have a big advantage here, and I see nothing about Rubio that will shake this up. Rand Paul could have beaten Clinton in Colorado and Nevada, maybe even Ohio. Not Rubio. And fine, let him win Florida. A Democrat can still get 300-plus electoral votes without Florida.

What, you say Comic-Connies aren't big spenders? Suddenly my regard for them has jumped!

NYT caption: "Comic-Con attendees lunching near the convention center. Spending by visitors to the five-day convention, San Diego’s largest by far, is about $603, a fraction of that of much smaller events."

by Ken

Hey, almost everything I know about Comic-Con comes from watching The Big Bang Theory -- and that hasn't made it seem any more like a gathering where I would want to, you know, gather. But now comes word that the Comic-Connies stand accused of one of the vilest crimes in Consumerist America: being cheapskates.

I'm not exactly free and easy when it comes to parceling out my free nytimes.com clicks, but I couldn't resist this listing on today's "Afternoon Edition" e-mail:



Awww!

I suppose this sticks out because we generally think of the Connies as among America's free-spendingest suckers consumers, don't we? Now here they are being portrayed as making their pilgrimage to San Diego and keeping their mitts in their pockets! I want to know more!

You want numbers? We got numbers, from Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes's report, "Large Crowds Spend Little at Comic-Con":

In a recent report from the San Diego Convention Center, where Comic-Con is held, the fantasy fans ranked first in terms of the convention center’s attendance, far outstripping the combined total of its next four largest conventions, expected to be about 62,500 people.

But the Comic-Con fans were expected to spend only about $603 each during a convention that began Wednesday night and ran through Sunday. And that was only a little more than a third of the per-capita spending by those who showed up for the American Association for Cancer Research gathering in April, and similarly lower than per-person spending at the next three largest conventions in San Diego.

A measly $603 for four days? Jeez, no wonder the cancer people have the Connies eating dust! The specifics are no cheerier:

At Comic-Con, dining out is apt to mean eating a sandwich while squatting on a city street. McCormick & Schmick’s, a high-end seafood restaurant across from the convention center, sold wraps from a cart, two for $10. At midday on Thursday, more than 150 people stood in line at a nearby Subway.

“For everything? I would say, like, $50,” said Arnold Duong, a fan who was dining on the sidewalk on Thursday, when asked how much he and each of his two friends had budgeted per day for their Comic-Con experience.

Some penny-pinching attendees may actually turn a profit on the cheap posters, hats, action figures and autographs handed out at the convention. As of 3 p.m. on Saturday, more than 4,000 listings were active on eBay under the title “Comic-Con 2014.”

So what if the Connies are a bunch of penny-pinching tightwads? Here's what (lotsa links onsite):

The Toronto International Film Festival has Bell, L’Oréal, and the RBC Royal Bank among its official sponsors. Sundance this year attracted Chase Sapphire, Acura, Hewlett-Packard and Sprint. At the Golden Globes, guests sip from promotional bottles of Moët & Chandon.

But at Comic-Con, a lower-rent affair, official convention sponsorships are largely confined to media companies or game companies, like NBC and Nintendo, and the giveaways — well, a visitor is lucky to snag some lime-flavored Red Bull or a pack of Stride chewing gum.

At this year’s convention, the Samsung Galaxy weighed in with both a convention sponsorship and backing for events related to a pair of upcoming films, Marvel’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1.”

Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s adult-themed programming block, also picked up corporate sponsorship for individual shows from the likes of Intel, Lexus and State Farm. But those products and their companies were kept pretty much in the background as the cartoons took center stage.

“We develop all this stuff with the idea of a sponsor in mind, but not for the sponsor,” said Amantha Walden, Adult Swim’s director of events.

In truth, companies that might flock to a Tribeca Film Festival, which for years was backed by American Express and now has AT&T as its lead sponsor, would do well to stick with the soft sell here, because nobody is buying much.

The Times team notes that "for media companies, which compete as much for eyeballs as for direct spending, a crowd this large can be irresistible, even when it does not have much cash."

“I absolutely feel like it’s a pop culture carnival, and there is an unspoken competition among networks to outdo each other,” said Michael Ouweleen, a senior vice president and group creative director at Cartoon Network.

But if you're looking to score some actual sales, you probably wish you had the cancer crowd rather than the Connies. The Times-ies report glum tidings for "the few consumer brands that took a chance on Comic-Con":

One of those was Chrysler, which sponsored a popular Dodge Challenger simulator attraction in a parking lot promotional spread for the Weinstein Company’s “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” Another car company, Hyundai, sponsored a display for “Legends,” a crime series from TNT. And there was a snappy, flame-orange Mini Cooper in the lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel, part of the campaign for “Pixels,” a 3-D action fantasy set for release by Sony Pictures next May.

Yet even the Elio Motors Tadpole, a three-wheeled vehicle priced at a modest $6,800, looked like a reach for some of the Comic-Con types who eyed it on Friday in the doorway of the Hotel Solamar, just a few blocks from the convention center.

“The federal government says it’s a motorcycle,” said a salesman, trying to make a glamour point of the two-passenger vehicle’s exceedingly compact nature. (A rider sits behind the driver.)

“Oh,” said one of three young women who were giving the Elio a look. Then they turned and headed back . . . to the convention.

Now that's a tough crowd, sales-wise.


"THE CAST OF THE BIG BANG THEORY
WAS INCREDIBLY NICE TO US"


What I was hoping for was the characters of The Big Bang Theory at Comic-Con. I guess we'll have to made do with the actors. Says TVFanatic Matt Richenthal: "The cast of The Big Bang Theory gathers here for a photo at Comic-Con. They were incredibly nice to us at the event."

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