Some think that every time anyone writes about Russia it means that the left is avoiding taking responsibility for losing the election and therefore won’t learn important lessons. Some think that every non-Clinton primary or general election voter on the left is afraid to admit they were wrong that they could savage or not support the candidate without consequence, and so they are petrified to admit that anything other than Clinton’s and the Democratic leadership’s failures can explain the catastrophe that has befallen our nation.
Let me put this debate in some context. Here’s a poll:
President Trump’s approval rating has tumbled 11 points since March, according to a new poll released Monday.
Thirty-four percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance in the latest Investor’s Business Daily (IBD)/TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) survey.
Fifty-six percent disprove of Trump’s showing instead, and Monday’s results mark an 11-point drop in Trump’s approval rating since the president’s 45 percent last month in the same poll.
I’m not cherrypicking an outlier poll here. While the TIPP survey has the lowest approval for Trump yet (34%), the overall downward trend and disapproval in the low-to-mid-fifties is consistent across all the polls that have come out recently. The president is tanking.
Now, the purpose of writing about Russia isn’t to hurt Trump’s poll numbers, but it certainly hasn’t been helping him. We can talk about agency, since obviously Trump is the most self-injurious politician we’ve seen since Anthony Weiner. How much is the Russia issue hurting him versus his horrible health care bill or his odious travel ban or his failure to get the Mexicans to pay for his wall? And isn’t he more responsible than anyone for keeping the Russia issue alive with all his unhinged tweeting about it being a witch hunt and fake news?
All I can say is that there’s no evidence that Trump is benefitting in any way from pretty much anything, and certainly not because liberal columnists and bloggers and television hosts won’t let up on Russia.
Everyone has their pet theory about how the Democrats should be different, and what you’ll notice before long is that all the people who are asking folks to shut up about Russia are really asking them to talk about their pet theory instead.
For them, admitting that money and media affect elections is easy when it’s the Koch Brothers exploiting Citizens United, but when it’s Russians manipulating their Facebook feed, that’s a threat to their worldview that all would be rosy if only Sanders had been nominated or Clinton had campaigned in Wisconsin or neoliberalism had been strangled in the crib.
These rearview battles are the real distraction. The president is bleeding like a stuck pig, and people want to run to his rescue because it’s all a big distraction from the thing they really care about.
Like I said, the Russia issue isn’t about hurting the president’s poll numbers. It’s about our foreign policy and the integrity of our elections and potential corruption and disloyalty in our public officials. But the polls do tell a story, and that story is that Trump isn’t winning this fight or this argument.
It’s just bizarre that people will freak out about voter suppression and lax campaign finance laws but shrug off an entire nation state throwing its weight into one side of an election.
The left needs to do some serious naval-gazing, no doubt, but talking about Russia isn’t going to prevent that from happening. And if we don’t prevent what happened last time from happening again, we’ll be fighting with both arms tied behind our backs no matter how good our platform and messaging turn out to be.
Ys! This! Absolutely! It’s frikkin amazing, the number of people who insist it’s impossible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
How do “we prevent what happened last time from happening again?” If history is guide, what happened last time won’t happen again. There’s still reasonable doubt about what happened last time, after all. Are the sockpuppet ops still up and running somewhere we can all go to and shut them down?
Hey, you know where a good place to start might be? How about the leadership of the Democratic Party actually run the party democratically and allow a range of candidates to run and share their ideas and not force their pre-selected candidate down our throats with limited debates and superdelegates? Would that help at all do you think?
Or just, you know, removing the planks from their eyes before telling the rest of us about the specks.
Booman: “Stop being idiots.”
Neal: No!
Marduk: “Stop being idiots.”
This from a kneejerk down-rater!!!???
AG: “Get a life.”
AG
QED, eh?
QE to the FD.
Well, the list of sockpuppets working for the Republicans is right here, as usual, the same trolls that reflexively downrate any comment that suggests the Democratic Party itself bears most of the responsibility for losing so many elections over the past 20 years. Who are they? Top of the list: nalbar, IL JimP, Beahmont, and marduk. How much are the Russian’s (or is it the Clintons? or WaMo’s own sockpuppet op?) paying you guys to troll this site?
And what about my comments scares you so much that you almost always, reflexively, slam them? Nusuth. BooMan himself voted for Sanders in the primary and calls for introspection. Unfortunately, bots like nalbar, IL JimP, Beahmont, and marduk are incapable of introspection.
I also supported Sanders in the primary. Maybe the multiple troll ratings should tell you something about your contributions?
A large proportion of regular contributors to this blog – and I would suspect quite a few lurkers as well – supported Sanders in the primary. Many of us have been very vocal about doing so. I was one of them. Sanders was very clear that tRump was a major threat to our democratic institutions, and once Clinton sealed the nomination, it was obvious where the focus needed to be: defeating Trump. Period. Much of the trolling (i.e., posting needlessly provocative and abusive material) here since the nomination and the ensuing events during and after the election is occurring from those who either could never let go from a primary loss and/or those who for all we know may have more ulterior purposes in mind. Personally I don’t claim to know who is who in that latter sense, nor do I particularly care. But the behavior is duly noted and will continue to get the disrespect it deserves.
marduk: It’s the same four or so posters here, over and over and over again that reflexively downrate comments they merely disagree with or dislike the “tone” of. You especially. You’ve been called on it repeatedly since you appeared here in the run-up to the primaries last year, lurking for months without showing up in a post, but reflexively downrating anyone with a negative post about the Dem establishment and their pre-selected nominee, the primary and nomination process, and Hillary Clinton. I guess you don’t know what the word introspection means, but go back and look at the hundreds of downrates you’ve made here over the past year or so and you can’t deny that you’re the definition of troll. The rating system here is designed to be abused by folks like you, as I’ve said many times, but you’ve taken it to extreme lengths since you’ve arrived. I expect you’re proud of it, so good for you. But please consider (and your friends nalbar, IL JimP, Beahmont, and the others) giving it a break. Stop being an ass.
There’s somebody being an ass here, that’s for sure.
How about just downrating with a 2 not a 1 as, I believe, BooMan requested days/weeks ago?
That request replies to everybody, not you alone.
The sock puppet stuff is still going on, but not where we can get to them.
90-or-so million eligible voters don’t vote. Maybe Democrats could get to some of them if we weren’t wasting so much time and energy chasing sockpuppets.
Seth Abramson suggests calling it Mayflowergate
not to worry, everyone is distracted by Susan Rice now – T administration has another Black woman to kick around, they’re ecstatic
I’m still getting my head around the basic statistical reality of the Trump era: anything he claims (in a tweet or whatever) is going to have something like 15-20% of the public believing it, no matter how ridiculous.
I still don’t quite understand how we got here. It’s going to look awfully silly to future historians.
Anybody who claims to have THE answer on why Secretary Clinton lost is simply full of it. There was a host of factors and we need to look at all of them. Those factors include
The good news is there has been some introspection by Ds on what can be improved. EVERY candidate who ran for chairperson made the 50 state strategy a cornerstone of their platform. Perez also stressed fighting voter disenfranchisement at every turn.
I would add one important factor:
Obama’s head-scratching decision to reappoint James-fucking-Comey to head the FBI.
I suggest that an eleventh commandment be tattooed to the scalp of all dem. presidents :
NEVER AGAIN appoint republican daddies to important positions in a dem. government.
I give you July, 2013: https:/www.thenation.com/article/comeys-crickets
He’s clean as a whistle.* A regular pillar of the community. But even if he were a republican Gandhi (is that an oxymoron?) I would still apply my 11th commandment with extreme prejudice.
*for a Republican hack
I agree with this completely.
It reminds me of when people blame Nader for Gore’s defeat and are told, “Gore should have transcended that!” (Meaning, it was Gore’s fault…just like Clinton’s defeat can’t be anything but Clinton’s fault.)
Martin’s right. We need to think through how to do this better. There are lots of lessons, some of them can lead to doing elections better, others — like Russia mucking with us, one hopes is a black swan, kinda like Bush v Gore.
I happen to agree that there are lots of reasons Hillary lost, some unique to her, I hope. She should have released the transcripts of the Goldman Sachs speeches. When Putin started bleeding out Podesta’s emails, she should have dumped all of them, right away. Mrs. Clinton usually manages to create the appearance that she’s hiding something. We don’t know what, so it’s left to opponents to define her.
The campaign could have known from primary results in Michigan that she had a problem of some kind. Did they try to shore up known weak spots?
My bottom line is that there were many ways this was a winnable election, and the campaign and its candidate didn’t exercise enough of those ways. I think there’s a lesson to be learned in this and effectively acted upon in the future.
Blaming Nader for Gore’s defeat is idiotic when over 100,000,000 eligible voters didn’t vote that year. Not sure it was Gore’s responsibility to “transcend” that, but his loss sure wasn’t the fault of less than three million than voted for Nader in 2000.
But can you say that Trump isn’t benefiting from bloggers and TV hosts not letting up on Russia?
Latest Q Poll (a larger sample size than the IBD poll).
Why isn’t Trump down there with the GOP Congress at a net negative of 49? (The wretched GWB only managed to get down to 28 – 67; so, Trump has room to sink further into yuuge unpopularity territory.)
which regular Trib commenter(s) boo has in mind in this and the previous post with observations like this:
If it was clear what BooMan meant in that paragraph besides who he “had in mind” when he wrote it, it’d be easier to find it funny, I guess. But truly, what does “they were wrong that they could savage or not support the candidate” mean? How is a voter savaging anything by expressing an opinion or casting a vote? That’s a core tenet of democracy, isn’t it? Freedom of speech and voting? And what to make of the assertion that a voter would be “petrified” to admit such a mistake? Voters frequently switch sides and vote for the other guy next time. It’s happened an awful lot since Democrats have lost so many seats in local, state, and national elections. Millions of voters in formerly Democratic constituencies have fearlessly admitted their mistake in voting for Democrats and switched to voting for Republicans over the past 50 years. We disagree with them and their motives, but they weren’t “petrified” of anything. They looked at what they perceived in the Democratic Party as not in their interest, and switched. Lots of former Republicans now vote for Democrats; I doubt “admitting a mistake” has much to do with it.
No, we don’t believe the election was ‘stolen’ by forces that nullify the validity of the election. Those forces have always been in effect in American elections, one way or another, and they always will be. I suppose it’s frightening, a little, but to suggest any voter would be “petrified” that his or her vote led to Trump is bizarre. Whether he represents a “catastrophe that has befallen the nation” or not, in a democracy, Trump is a symptom, not the cause.
Clinton was a terrible candidate. Millions of us tried to tell you about it, you too, Longman, and you didn’t listen. You’re the ones that need to account for Clinton’s loss and the “catastrophe (you believe) has befallen the nation”. I voted for the loser in the end; I only regret I didn’t savage her more effectively to prevent her nomination in the first place.
Largely agree. From what I’ve seen it’s the Clinton/Obama groups that are terrified to admit they fucked up from a position of such supposed strength.
Remember when the president using Blackwater to conduct war was enough for the left to give somewhat of a shit, but now the president is using the same Erik Prince for a form of secret, 007 bond movie diplomacy with Russia and the response is…nothing? “Nothing to this Russia stuff!”
Maybe if Hillary had won…
Oh, God, if she’d won, every appointment she made would have been mercilessly torn down as unworthy, every decision she made would have been second-guessed to a fare-thee-well, every action she took would have been denounced as neolibcon betrayal, every word she uttered would have been derided, deconstructed to the worst possible interpretation, rejected….
The usual crew would have flooded BT with vicious, relentless attacks. From day one. Remember how, for a certain segment, Obama could never do anything right, or well enough, or soon enough? Woulda been that on steroids.
And yet, I’d have been right there criticizing her choices, particularly if Mike Allen’s list had actual weight behind it. But I have actual political goals beyond throwing pity parties — and recognize who is in power right now. But don’t worry, I’m sure there will be a new Hill article about what Chelsea Clinton tweeted about tomorrow that we can obsess about.
I’m not — as I’m sure you know — talking about you, of course; I’ve read enough of your posts here to know you have well-thought-out reasons for what you say, and can and do give credit where due. But the knee-jerk haters would have run riot.
We have a President who is incapable of performing the job required of the office. That is the situation. He is delegating tasks that he would otherwise do himself to his son-in-law, reputably to Erik Prince, the brother of his Secretary of Education, and to others who have little competence in foreign affairs and in the case of Prince less loyalty to the interests of the United States.
That is the situation that must be dealt with. Whatever is going on with respect to relations with Russia at the moment is merely symptomatic of Trump’s failure to grasp the duties of office.
Those who are focused on Russia need to answer what should the US do with respect to Russia if their explanation of the election turns out to be verified by an independent investigation. And what should be done with a Republican Party that has shown to be lacking any principle at all besides partisan-victory-at-all-cost?
Because we know where the tactics of the GOP in 1946 lead–to a politician who without evidence accuses career government employees of treason claiming that he has a list of 75 (or whatever number he thought of) names of traitors in the State Department in his pocket. And wound up accusing the US Army of collaboration in treason.
And we also know the background of the attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016 — twenty-four years of carefully constructed lying beginning with the Arkansas Project and continuing on every time Clinton became involved in public politics. More than Bill, it seems that the political career that the old guard in Arkansas wanted to kill was a glass-ceiling-breaker. Too fast and too uppity was the charge in the 1980s when Bill was a successful re-elected governor. Too uppity was the charge that swayed too many voters.
Unless you can show me some scared Republican members of Congress about the Russia issue, until there is the turn in hearing, court, or new and more definite information in national consciousness, the story has no traction.
Taibbi at least has been consistent on his election coverage. And more coherent about it than Hunter Thompson’s coverage of Nixon.
And Taibbi is correct to note that turning Russia into an enemy while the US and Russia are de facto collaborating in eliminating DAESH/ISIL/ISIS (remember them?) is likely to provoke dangerous incidents between US and Russian operations without agreement on the short-term status regarding Assad.
It has been going on in mostly establishment circles, and Washington Monthly circles are establishment circles and within the Beltway.
Out here in the boonies of North Carolina where we face real problems with a legislature and a governor who has to work his strategy carefully, the luxury of the illusion that Trump will be easy to bring down never has set in to begin with. It is changing the legislature and changing the Congress that is required and that means a more geographically dispersed understanding in the 100 counties of what is happening in Raleigh and in Washington.
For some this is a fascination with the shadowy world in which covert operations, information warfare, cybersecurity, organized crime, and partisan politics interact–a place in which reporters are as welcome as in Raqqa.
For others, it is a stage of grief at seeing Democrats loose 2010, 2014, and 2016, without a corresponding real conversation about why that happened. You know, the fact that people have been financially hammered for since 2000 does not reduce bigotry, sexism, or xenophobia (it did in the early 1970s) but seeks easy ways to edge out the competition from minorities, women, and immigrants in the labor market. The message today is “You’re on your own.” Unfortunately that message is coming from both established parties. As faithful Democrats go and vote for the yellow dog again, too many Americans reacted in anger or decided why bother. Simple answers, even if outright lies, won.
The center in American politics today is so up for grabs that the Republican caucus in the House is made up of three warring faction. The Democratic caucus is made up of at least two factions seeking to force conformity and not exactly in outright war.
Who now speaks authentically to the interests of the 90% of Americans who have not seen their prospects better in a generation? Who speaks to those who’ve been in the downward spiral for two generations?
For the moment, there is no one in Washington or in most of the state legislators who does. Might upset the lobbyists and major donors. No one cares to listen because of wanting to work their great partisan strategy with the bundling donors and DC law firms and the political arms of NGOs. Hell, members of Congress don’t answer the questions you ask but send out the policy talking points of something not quite the topic you were asking about. People are frustrated. That fact is being avoided as folks seek a new angle to make their way economically and improve their status.
My bottom line on this issue.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of local activity in scouting out local possible mitigating tactics if the social safety net totally disappears at the federal and state level in the next year or two.
There is a comfortable 10% who do not see the potential disaster coming if Republicans succeed with their budget or if they blow up the budgeting process. Worrying about the “good faith and credit of the United States” is more troubling to them than the fact that a lot of people will be stranded with no housing, no prospects of finding food, no income, and no one seeking to change that situation. The disabled will be first to get hit, and then the old in care facilities. And then the old who are discriminated in employment because of their age. (Which seems to start at 49 these days).
The fact of authoritarianism is that it must deliver the goods to survive; Franco and Salazar succeeded in their day by aligning with NATO and Europe. Russia is aligning with China’s infrastructure development. The US is doing none of those and lacking the economic engines it once had that could restore prosperity. And still preaching austerity to the world.
With respect, b/c you’re 100% right that there are a TON of bad things happening in America right now, we CANNOT avoid getting to the bottom of this Russian interference (and possible R complicity) story. Why? Because Putin has ALREADY declared war on the West. Look: UK (Brexit), Sweden, Netherlands, Hungary (already won — Orban), France (Le Pen), Germany (AfD in talks with Russian MPs) and the list goes on, I’m sure. He’s attacking on all fronts (heck, the guy leading the “Calexit” campaign is based in Moscow, and gets free office space from a Russian company). Our allies are all worried, and they should be. This is about the Western Alliance, and about the stability of the system that the United States constructed and spent blood and treasure to maintain since WWII.
So sure, we’ll have to work with Putin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get to the bottom of this. He decapitated his most powerful adversary for a trivial sum. And if we’re not careful, we’ll find out allies being peeled-off, one-by-one. Once we know, and we’ve removed the tumor in -our- body politic, we can decide how to address our adversary. But we have to first dig out that tumor.
Or we won’t have a democracy left.
Oh, and sure, there are lots of other ways that Dampnut and Bannonazi want to destroy our democracy. So there’s lots of work. But this is also one of those ways. As Sen. Burr said (and I gotta give him props for this): “next time it could be a different party that is attacked or supported”.
Of course we can avoid getting to the bottom of this Russian interference. And that avoidance plays into a very dangerous situation that we should deal with directly.
(1) The intelligence community will not lay chapter and verse of exactly what happened on the table.
(2) Democrats lack the power in Congress to get an independent thorough-going investigation.
(3) The media can’t seem to do much investigative reporting that comes up with anything solid; it’s in the same realm as most white-collar crime.
(4) The public has been propagandized that the Russia issue is just Democratic sour grapes at losing the election.
(5) Using this tactic to amputate the left from American politics further weakens the Democratic Party. The broad spectrum of people from Limbaugh to the establishment Democrats are trying to associate the left with Putin instead of the right-wing of the Republican Party.
(6) The left has a political style of being critical of what is within its realm of actual political control; that in the US is US policy.
(7) US policy toward Russia, China, and North Korea is now brinksmanship. Having no effective public brake toward sanity means that bad situations will likely escalate quickly. We will see whether that is the case with regard to North Korea while Xi Jinping is in Washington. It would be a Trump-like move to be talking with Xi Jinping while carrying out a shock and awe military attack on North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities (if US intelligence can locate them). What are the repercussions of that? Hyping Russian intervention and US nationalism has the effect of building public support for brinksmanship.
(8) Finally, Burr doesn’t get credit for anything. He campaigned for Trump and saw the accusations during the election. He did not raise his concerns then. Any shifting is political because of shifting opinion in North Carolina. We need to stop enabling this duplicitous Republican behavior.
“The Left” does not support Russian interference in US elections. Investigating Russian interference in the election does nothing to amputate “The Left” from the Democratic Party.
There’s a lot of people out there right now who are freaking out because they got straight played by the Russians and they should have known better. But for them it seems to be about the anger first and issues second. I know my personal fb feed was awash in Hillary Hate, and it strangely persisted far beyond the nomination. These people aren’t bots, they’re very smart, passionate people I know personally. But they got played. And now some people can’t let it go because frankly, they have a gnawing sense of guilt.
I’m not saying HRC was a good candidate, and certainly there seem to be plenty of people within the party proper who couldn’t learn not to walk out in front of traffic if they were hit by a Mack truck.
The bottom line is that there needs to be some real admission of culpability on both sides of the debate within the party. The Establishment types need to wake up and smell the masses (and the very real critique of 21st c. corporate America) and the anti-corporate wing needs to chill on the anger and indignation.
The other bottom line is that that anger was intentionally stoked by Russian propaganda artists.
It’s hard when multiple things that are in tension with each other are true at the same time, but here we are. I guess we need to deal with it, or we’re going to keep getting our assess handed to us.
It would be a bit easier to chill if the establishment wing didn’t spend all it’s time either crushing the anti-corporate wing (DNC election) or talking only about how we are all wrong for criticizing their chosen one.
“The left needs to do some serious naval-gazing, no doubt, but talking about Russia isn’t going to prevent that from happening.”
Of course I agree with this. I guess you’re saying something important here and throughout this piece, but it’s a little hard for me to understand, since none of these supposed contradictions are really contradictions. Evidently a lot of people think they are but that’s just stupid. Why people on the left are so protective of a right-wing racist regime like Russia is beyond me, especially when the right-wing racist regime we now have here is beholden to the Russians. They call this position “McCarthyism” when Donald Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohen. Drop the forced analogies, folks and look at reality.
I think everybody here knows I supported Bernie Sanders. But Bernie Sanders famously said, “Trump is the Most Dangerous Presidential Candidate in the Modern History of This Country.”
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/07/30/bernie-sanders-trump-most-dangerous-presidential-candida
te-modern-history-country
Loyalty is now an issue as much as any other. The people in the WH can no longer be trusted. Lies fill the air, no one takes responsibility. I feel like our nation is up for sale to the highest bidder. And it’s all yuk yuk listen to me I am the king. I never would have believed our intelligence and foreign policy would have been handed over to the likes of Ivanka and Jared. The Russian intrusion into our national interests and elections needs to be stopped. The Orange Chetto can find no end of the people to blame for every problem he finds and never will.