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Since we're smack in the middle of a Supreme Court judicial nomination fight, and since her own religion has come up, I thought it would be a good time to re-run the following column. I wrote it back in 2014, so a few things have changed.
It's Monday, so it is time once again to take a look at the state-level polling for the presidential race. I have to point out as a reminder, right up front, that no matter what the national-level polling shows, it simply does not matter to how we actually elect our presidents, as both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton can easily attest to. This is why I never even mention these numbers in this column series.
It seems that it is now time to ask a very strange question: Is Donald Trump actually trying to lose the election?
As astounding a question that is, there are really only two answers to it: yes or no. Either Trump is intentionally torpedoing his chances of re-election, or he is just trying to re-run his 2016 playbook in the hopes that it'll produce the same miraculous victory for him. But either way, what is becoming more and move evident is that President Donald Trump is currently losing. Bigly.
Today, I'd like to step back from the fray of the current political campaign season. I know, I should be racking my brains for "fly in the ointment" or "waiter, there's a fly in my soupy Vice President" jokes right now, but today I will leave that sort of thing to others. Because instead I'd like to pull back to 30,000 feet and take a much wider and longer view of the shifting political landscape in this country. Because there seems to be some slow-moving tectonic shifts at work which might influence our politics long beyond this November's election.
Two down, two to go.
Continuing my "I watch them so you don't have to" commitment, tonight I watched the vice-presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris in full. Boiled down to one thought, my main takeaway was that I seriously doubt that tonight changed any voter's mind out there.
I thought both candidates did OK -- not great, not bad, just OK. I thought that they both had a gameplan and pretty much stuck to it, and I thought both had weak moments as well as strong. All in all, I'd largely call it a draw, although my personal bias would have to give Kamala Harris the edge, in the end.
Last night, Joe Biden gave the debate performance we all wished we had seen last week. Now, that statement isn't strictly accurate, since the event Biden appeared at last night was a townhall meeting with undecided voters and not an actual presidential debate. Also, the reason we didn't see this performance last week was because the incessant noise and bluster from Donald Trump made it all but impossible to hear what Biden was actually saying. Nevertheless, last night's performance was indeed what most voters should have watched instead of last Tuesday's debate.
Late last night, the political world began reeling from what could be the biggest October surprise in a generation (at the very least), as the White House announced that President Donald Trump and his wife First Lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19.
This was greeted in some quarters as not so much an October surprise as (to coin a term) an October schadenfreudefest. If there is any one individual who richly deserves to contract the coronavirus, after all, it is Donald Trump. Trump has pooh-poohed the virus from the very first, insisting that it will magically go away ("by April, when the weather warms up"), that it isn't that big a deal ("it's like the flu"), that testing is unnecessary, that it affects "almost no one," that most people get a mild case and recover, that many don't even know they've got it, that children "get the sniffles" (no big deal), that we've already defeated it ("we've turned the corner"), that it's all in the past, that getting the economy going again and getting kids back to school is more important than any imagined risk, and -- worst of all -- that wearing masks and social distancing and all that stuff is for sissies and definitely not for real macho men like him. Or to put it another way, the karma wasn't instant, but it caught up to Trump in the end.
Well, that was downright stunning. And definitely not in a good way ("You look simply stunning tonight!"). More in the literal sense of getting brutally smacked upside your head by a blunt object. In fact, when I sat down to think up a title for this article, the only thing that popped into my mind was the line from the classic Monty Python "Argument" sketch: "It's 'being hit on the head' lessons, in here." Because that's exactly what watching the entire 100 minutes was like, at least to me.
American democracy is on fire. Or on its deathbed, at the very least. Choose any dire metaphor you wish, but the red flags and warning signals are everywhere you look. The president of the United States of America made news this week when he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, should he lose the upcoming election. Later, watching the reaction on the news, President Donald Trump reportedly laughed about all the fuss he had caused:
Yesterday, I took a look at several Democratic reform efforts directed at both the legislative and executive branches. In the second part of examining how potent the issue of reforming government has become, we're going to focus on the Supreme Court, which is now at the center of the political world due to the untimely death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.