Tag: campaign

Pelosi: ‘I was asking for a campaign that would win’ in talks with Biden

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Nancy Pelosi didn’t want President Joe Biden to step down, the former speaker told ABC News Monday morning. What she wanted, she explained, was “a campaign that would win.”
The California Democrat was instrumental in the behind-the-scenes pressure campaign within her party pushing Biden to end his campaign last month, though she has denied in recent days calling members as the list of Democratic defectors grew.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/05/pelosi-campaign-biden-gma-00172648

Trump, Vance, and The Republican Anti-Worker Playbook | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart

Posted on by Lone Candle

Republicans like Vance and Trump use populist and pro-worker rhetoric, but their policy is pro-business and helps the wealthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJgWsj7Qhw

J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Former President Donald Trump has lately been trying to distance himself from Project 2025, claiming it was cooked up by the “severe right” and that he doesn’t know anything about it.
But it turns out the severe right is coming from inside the house.

Kevin Roberts, the self-proclaimed “head” of Project 2025, has a book coming out in September — and the book’s foreword is written by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who lavishly praises its ideas.

“Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism,” Vance writes, according to the book’s Amazon page. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

What ideas? Like Vance, Roberts is obsessed with the idea that the left controls major American institutions — he lists Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education and even the Boy Scouts of America. The book argues that “conservatives need to burn down” these institutions if “we’re to preserve the American way of life.” (Vox has requested a copy of the book, but has not yet received one at the time of this writing.)

Obviously, this poses a problem for Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the virally unpopular Project 2025 and its lengthy agenda for what he should do if he wins, which includes proposals to restrict abortion access and centralize executive power in the presidency.

And it’s one more indication that Trump’s pick of Vance might be politically problematic for him. Vance has a fascination with provocative and extreme far-right thinkers, and a history of praising their ideas. He is not a running mate tailored to win over swing voters who are concerned Trump might be too extreme — quite the opposite.

The book was written and announced before Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate. But there’s some indication that people involved had some late second thoughts about it. It was originally announced as “Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” with a cover image showing a match over the word “Washington.”

More recently, though, the subtitle has been changed to “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match has vanished from the cover.”

…

“Project 2025 contains a multitude of proposals in its 922-page plan, not all of which J.D. Vance necessarily supports.

But he’s on record backing ideas similar to those put forth in two of Project 2025’s most controversial issue areas.

The first is abortion. Project 2025 lays out a sweeping agenda by which the next president could use federal power to prevent abortions, including using an old law called the Comstock Act to prosecute people who mail abortion pills, and working to prevent women from abortion-banning states from traveling out of state to get abortions.

Vance is on record supporting these ideas. Last year, he signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department prosecute physicians and pharmacists “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws.” In 2022, he said he was “sympathetic” to the idea that the federal government should stop efforts to help women traveling out of their states to get abortions. That year, he also said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”

At other points, Vance has struck a different tone. ““We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans,” he said last December. And this month he said he supported a Supreme Court decision that allowed the abortion bill mifepristone to remain available. Here, Vance is trying to align with Trump, who — fearing political blowback — argues he merely wants abortion to be a state issue, despite his long alliance with the religious right. But Vance’s record implies his true agenda might be otherwise.

The second controversial area where Vance is sympatico with Project 2025 is centralizing presidential power over the executive branch. The project lays out various proposals to rein in what conservatives view as an out-of-control “deep state” bureaucracy — mainly, by firing far more career civil servants and installing far more political appointees throughout the government.

Vance, as I wrote last week, has backed a maximalist version of this agenda. In 2021, Vance said that in Trump’s second term, Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” The courts would try to stop this, Vance continued, and Trump should then “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

So it’s no big surprise that Vance would write the foreword for a book by Project 2025’s architect. They fundamentally agree on how they see the world, and in much of what they want out of politics: a battle against the left for control of institutions, and expanded government power to stop abortions.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/362917/jd-vance-project-2025-book-kevin-roberts-trump

The crime wave is over but Republicans can’t let go

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The theme of the Republican National Convention’s second night was “Make America Safe Again,” and the roster of speakers repeatedly criticized Biden’s record on crime and immigration: Randy Sutton, a retired police officer, said there was a “war on cops.” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said that Biden treats “police like criminals, and criminals like victims.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz declared that “your family is less safe, your children are less safe, the country is less safe,” as a result of Biden’s presidency.
But the Republican speakers’ rhetoric on crime spiraling out of control was out of touch with reality.

While there was indeed a rise in crime during the pandemic, recent data has shown that crime is declining nationwide. According to the FBI, murder is down 26 percent and robberies have declined by 18 percent in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same time last year. That didn’t stop Republican speakers throughout the night from singling out incidents of heinous crimes and drug overdoses to conjure up an image of lawlessness and disorder.

So why are Republicans plowing ahead with their “Make America Safe Again” messaging despite data that shows America is already getting safer? The answer is simple: Most Americans believe that crime is getting worse, so it’s not a particularly tough message to sell.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/361165/rnc-2024-make-america-safe-again-trump-gop-false-crime-wave

How to think about the attacks on Tim Walz’s military record

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The claims that Republicans have made about Walz focus on three issues: his decision to retire from the Army National Guard in 2005, his rank upon retirement, and a comment he made about carrying weapons “in war.””

…

“Walz retired in May 2005, two months prior to his unit receiving an official deployment order to Iraq. He stated in 2009 that his reasons for retiring were to pursue a run for the House of Representatives, which he won the following year, and to avoid conflicts under the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from engaging in certain political activities.
Walz filed for his run for office before the National Guard had notified his unit of the possibility of a deployment to Iraq. It’s unclear if, at the time, he already knew that a deployment could be a possibility.”

…

“Walz did, in fact, attain the position of Command Sergeant Major. However, after he retired, his title was changed to Master Sergeant, because he did not finish the coursework required to retire under the promoted title.

As a result, it’s accurate to say that he was once a Command Sergeant Major, but not that he was a “retired Command Sergeant Major.””

…

““We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at,” Walz said in remarks about an assault weapons ban in 2018.”

…

“Walz was deployed as part of the National Guard to Vicenza, Italy, in August 2003 as part of Operation Enduring Freedom but was not in a combat zone.
The phrasing of the statement in his gun control remarks, suggesting that he carried the weapons “in war,” was imprecise. While technically correct given the operation he was part of, it appears to suggest an experience he didn’t have. Walz has openly acknowledged in other interviews that he hadn’t seen combat while deployed.

The Harris campaign has stressed Walz’s training with firearms in response. “In his 24 years of service, the Governor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times,” the Harris campaign told Vox in a statement.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/366195/jd-vance-tim-vance-military-record-national-guard

Harris isn’t her party’s best candidate. Biden was still right to endorse her.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Democratic delegates are largely volunteers who speak for no one beyond the primary voters in their areas. In this context, a contested convention could be chaotic, and its nominee lacking in democratic legitimacy.
To be sure, anointing Harris is not especially democratic either. She was not elected by primary voters, any more than any other non-Biden Democrat. But the US electorate did vote to make her the president’s heir apparent, and this gives her a source of legitimacy that any other selection would lack.

Second, and more importantly, failing to coalesce behind a nominee today would have left Democrats without a standard-bearer for a month. This would inhibit fundraising, at a time when the Trump-Vance ticket is taking in serious cash. And it would mean ceding swing-state airwaves to the Republican message — or else, running exclusively negative advertising — for the next four weeks. This is especially risky in a context where Democrats face the challenge of introducing a new nominee to the country.

As Biden’s default replacement, having been elected to fill in for him in the event of his death or disability, Harris was uniquely capable of becoming her party’s consensus nominee in the absence of a protracted process.

Finally, Harris would have been highly likely to win an open convention, anyway. Before Biden dropped out, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn — a highly influential member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) — let it be known that he would favor Harris were Biden to drop out.”

…

“although Harris has weaknesses, she is not devoid of political gifts. At 59, she is young by the standards of American politics. She is an able speaker, whose recent appearances have brimmed with more vitality and coherence than either Biden or Trump have mustered in years. Her recent remarks debunking the GOP’s claims of being the party of “unity” were especially effective.

Harris does have a negative approval rating. But it is nevertheless better than Biden’s. And the public’s disapproval of her is less strongly held. As the political consultant Sarah Longwell has reported, voters in focus groups tend to have a negative impression of Harris — but it is just that, an impression, rather than a deep-seated evaluation. They do not know much about her and are aware of that fact.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/362033/biden-drop-out-endorse-harris-open-convention