Promises Made, Promises Broken-- Trump's Reputation Is In A Trashcan

Megan Henney of Fox Business reported that economies in 4 key states could held determine whether Trump wins of loses in 2020. So which states? Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa, 4 battleground states that Trump won in 2016? On Fox? Are you kidding. The economies in those 4 states are tanking-- and so is Trump's favorability ratings. Those 4 Midwestern states, representing 52 electoral votes, are suffering from Trump's economic policies. And, according to the latest Morning Consult Trump Tracker, a victory for Trump in any of them is, to say the least, dubious. This is where Trump stands now in these states and how much he's fallen in approval since being inaugurated.

• Michigan- minus 13 (down 21 points)
• Pennsylvania- minus 9 (down 19 points)
• Wisconsin- minus 17 (down 23 points)
• Iowa- minus 12 (down 21 points)

But Henney was looking elsewhere. Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group, reminded her that Trump "understands better than most that when the average American goes to the polls, no matter what they think of him personally, they're going to evaluate their station in life and ask themselves: 'Am I going to be better off with the new candidate?'"

Across the country, unemployment is hovering at 3.6 percent, near a five-decade low; the labor market is humming, with an average monthly creation of 167,000 so far; and Trump seems poised to strike a deal with China, ending a 16-month-long trade dispute that's rattled global financial markets.

Even as the record-long economic expansion continues to chug along in its 11th year, Democratic presidential candidates are traveling across the U.S., painting a starkly different version of the country's financial well-being, seizing onto issues like income inequality, lack of health care and Wall Street cronyism.

...[T]he economies in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina-- the first states in the country to hold their 2020 primaries-- could serve as evidence that Trump's policies are working.

She gets kind of delusional about the whole thing. She claims that Iowans are doing well. They're not-- and they know exactly who's fault it is. Here's the Fox News version: "Despite the state's huge exposure to the trade war-- it's the biggest exporter of corn and pork, and the second-largest soybean exporter, all of which were targeted by Beijing-- Iowa's economy has remained steady. Since Trump took office, the state has regained most of the manufacturing jobs lost in the financial crisis, according to data published by the Department of Labor. In September, the unemployment rate in Iowa was at 2.5 percent, well below the national average. The median household income was $68,718 in 2018, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Iowa's economy expanded at a 1.1 percent annualized rate in the second quarter of 2019, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis." So why is Trump's job approval underwater by 12 points? And was has his approval dropped by 21 points since he won with 51.2% of the vote?

She makes similar claims about New Hampshire. Trump is underwater by 20 there and his approval has dropped 21 points since inauguration day. Even in South Carolina-- where Trump has a net approval of +7-- he's fallen 17 points from where he was when he got started with the job. And Nevada? He has a net approval of minus 14 and has dropped 24 points.

Let's turn to Jonathan Martin's New York Times piece about how a series of Democratic ads are spotlighting disillusioned Trump voters in states he won last time but is doing poorly in since then. Yesterday, American Bridge started spending around $3 million featuring people who supported Trump in 2016 but explain why they regret having done so and will not do again. Like this one running in Michigan (and the one above that started running in Wisconsin):

“We want to create a permission structure in these communities,” said Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge. “We want them to know, ‘It wasn’t just me.’ But you have to create space for people to defect.”

The voters featured in the commercials all focus on Mr. Trump’s record, and what they say is his self-focus and lack of accomplishments in their communities, while avoiding issues that often consume Washington, like impeachment or Mr. Trump’s inflammatory language. Speaking in personal terms, they acknowledge that they supported the president because they thought that, as a political outsider, he would be a more effective change agent than the elected officials who won the White House every four years, until him.

One participant, Lori Malburg from Romeo, Michigan, was blunt about her feelings of regret.

“I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I voted for Donald Trump at this point,” Ms. Malburg says in the spot that features her and her hometown, which is part of a storied swing county, Macomb, that flipped from Democrat to Republican three years ago.

The advertising campaign, which will include broadcast television, radio and online spots, comes at a moment when many Democrats have been expressing alarm that Mr. Trump’s heavy campaign spending on digital ads has been all but uncontested. But now, as the Democratic presidential primary appears as uncertain as ever, a handful of liberal groups are working to match the president's reelection efforts.

American Bridge plans to eventually spend about $50 million in the coming year as part of this effort and hopes to feature new, local voices in each wave of ads. While the initial focus will be on Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania-- each of which supported Mr. Trump by less than a single point-- the group may add Florida to the lineup next year.

[Trump is 2 points underwater in Florida.]

“What we got wrong in 2016 is that we spent all our time compiling Trump’s record, saying look at how gross and despicable this man is, but we never turned the mirror around on the voters,” said Mr. Beychok. “So this is going to be about daily economic life in these communities-- not impeachment, Ukraine or his tweets.”

The commercials are plainly aimed at the white working-class voters who supported former President Barack Obama’s campaigns but shifted to Mr. Trump in 2016. It’s a constituency that is increasingly aligned with Republicans, leading some Democrats to question whether it’s worth the effort needed to win them back. But officials at American Bridge say they need to make only modest inroads with these voters to take back the Midwestern states they lost.

Could Obama Have Fought Harder For What He Says He Believes In?

Obama got kicked around pretty good over the weekend-- from the right and the left. Clark Judge is a right-wing propagandist and former speech writer for Reagan and one of the Bushs. Sunday his latest anti-Obama screed was published by a right-wing U.S. tabloid, The Mail in which the editors described him as "a top Washington insider." He may be-- but only in the circles Cheney and Bolton travel. "This weak and timid President," he insists, "talks big... and does nothing." This is followed by a few called-in right-wing talking points on the Ted Cruz/Ann Coulter-school of foreign policy.

Far more relevant was Thomas Frank's condemnation of the Obama presidency in Salon Sunday: Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: an ineffective and gutless presidency's legacy is failure. Despite the destructive insanity from the GOP/Confederate State of America, "we were promised hope and change on big issues. We got no vision and less action." Judge's critique is worthless except into a window into how the anti-American reactionary elites are reacting. Frank, on the other hand, is one of America's foremost political thinkers. If what he writes stings, it should. He channels future historians looking back to out time who see "a time when America should have changed but didn’t... an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over-- when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming 'seriousness' for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in-- and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless."

Cue... Hillary Clinton for 4 more years of this crap? Or... Ted Cruz? Why not try fascism, many are already thinking-- even if they don't call it that-- and see if that works this time? Elizabeth Warren seems determined not to run in 2016. She seems like the only plausible political leader who could prevent another 4 years of mediocrity or worse. She's busy fighting to keep the Senate from falling into the hands of fascism and, more than anything, she's fighting for the issues of progressivism she outlined at Netroots Nation last week.

The Obama team, as the president once announced to a delegation of investment bankers, was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” and in retrospect these words seem not only to have been a correct assessment of the situation at the moment but a credo for his entire term in office. For my money, they should be carved in stone over the entrance to his monument: Barack Obama as the one-man rescue squad for an economic order that had aroused the fury of the world. Better: Obama as the awesomely talented doctor who kept the corpse of a dead philosophy lumbering along despite it all.

Still channeling future historians-- and citizens trying to understand the failures of the 8 years of Obama's presidency, Frank asks why "did the president do so little about rising inequality, the subject on which he gave so many rousing speeches? Why did he do nothing, or next to nothing, about the crazy high price of a college education, the Great Good Thing that he has said, time and again, determines our personal as well as national success? Why didn’t he propose a proper healthcare program instead of the confusing jumble we got? Why not a proper stimulus package? Why didn’t he break up the banks? Or the agribusiness giants, for that matter?" And the response will be, of course, "the crazy right-wingers running wild in the land. He couldn’t reason with them-- their brains don’t work like ours! He couldn’t defeat them at the polls-- they’d gerrymandered so many states that they couldn’t be dislodged! What can a high-minded man of principle do when confronted with such a vast span of bigotry and close-mindedness?"

But Frank's not buying it; neither am I and it's why so many Americans who elected him are going through such severe disillusionment now. "In point of fact," he writes, "there were plenty of things Obama’s Democrats could have done that might have put the right out of business once and for all-- for example, by responding more aggressively to the Great Recession or by pounding relentlessly on the theme of middle-class economic distress. Acknowledging this possibility, however, has always been difficult for consensus-minded Democrats."

Disillusionment, by the way, not because Obama "failed to win the Grand Bargain, but because he wanted to get it in the first place--because he seemed to believe that shoring up the D.C. consensus was the rightful object of all political idealism." His electoral coalition got nothing... except the banksters-- and they have put $67,324,285 into his political career (more than they gave McCain and Hillary combined) and the LGBT community, whose issues weren't really something he even campaigned on in 2008 but who got more out of his 8 years than anyone else.