Tag Archives: campaign

Quote of the Day: I Only Said NATO Was Obsolete Because I Didn’t Know Anything About NATO

by cctvdvrsystemreviews Posted on April 24, 2017

Mother Jones

From Donald Trump, explaining why he said NATO was obsolete during the campaign:

I was on Wolf Blitzer, very fair interview, the first time I was ever asked about NATO, because I wasn’t in government. People don’t go around asking about NATO if I’m building a building in Manhattan, right? So they asked me, Wolf … asked me about NATO, and I said two things. NATO’s obsolete — not knowing much about NATO, now I know a lot about NATO — NATO is obsolete, and I said, “And the reason it’s obsolete is because of the fact they don’t focus on terrorism.”

This is not the first time Trump has said something like this. I wonder if he even realizes that it sounds bad when he admits he was just blathering during the campaign because he didn’t know what he was talking about?

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Quote of the Day: I Only Said NATO Was Obsolete Because I Didn’t Know Anything About NATO

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How Bad Was Hillary Clinton’s Campaign?

by TaniaCce6752 Posted on April 23, 2017

Mother Jones

A couple of hours ago I tweeted this:

Shattered tells us in loving detail about every mistake the Clinton campaign made, but every losing campaign gets that treatment. Her campaign also did a lot of things right. My horseback guess is that when you put it all together, she was about average as a candidate and her campaign was about average as a campaign.

But that got me curious: how do Clinton and her campaign compare to past elections? There’s no way to measure this directly, but you can get an idea by comparing actual election outcomes to the predictions of a good fundamental model. So I hauled out Alan Abramowitz’s model, which has a good track record, and looked at how winning candidates performed compared to the baseline of what the model predicted for them. Here it is:

According to this, Hillary Clinton did way better than any winning candidate of the past three decades, outperforming her baseline by 2.4 percent. Without the Comey effect, she would have outperformed her baseline by a truly epic amount.

Now, was this because she ran a good campaign, or because she had an unusually bad opponent? There’s no way to tell, of course. Donald Trump was certainly a bad candidate, but then again, no one thinks that Dole or Gore or Kerry or McCain were terrific candidates either.

Bottom line: we don’t have any way of knowing for sure, and this is an inherently subjective question. But the evidence of the Abramowitz model certainly doesn’t suggest that Hillary Clinton ran an unusually poor campaign or that she was an unusually poor candidate. Maybe she was, but aside from cherry-picked anecdotes and free-floating Hillary animus, there’s not really a lot to support this view.

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How Bad Was Hillary Clinton’s Campaign?

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Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

by KitMowery0340 Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Is Donald Trump using his Twitter outbursts about the popular vote to distract us from this week’s real news: the vast conflicts of interest between his business empire and his upcoming presidency? This question is getting a lot of attention today.

The answer is no. I mean yes. But no, not really. On the other hand, maybe a little bit yes. I’m sorry, what was the question again?

The real answer is the same as it was during the campaign: Trump is dedicated to creating constant uproars all the time. Is this because it’s just who he is? Or is it part of an instinctive strategy to keep us from ever paying attention to anything for long, aside from the fact that Trump is in the limelight? I can’t say for sure, but I’d put money on the latter.

My belief in this comes mainly from an observation about the campaign: Trump, it turns out, is fully able to focus on something for months at a time if he wants to. And the thing he focused on was “Crooked Hillary” and her emails. That was a constant theme of his campaign, which he hammered on relentlessly for months. And the press assisted, covering every new email revelation—big or small, meaningful or trivial— in blazing headlines on the front page.

And it worked. Sure, he needed a lucky break at the end when James Comey released his letter, but he had set the stage to take advantage of it. This constant drumbeat on a single issue was spectacularly successful.

Trump engaged in a high-risk-high-reward strategy by creating a strong brand identity—for Hillary Clinton. And as any brand manager can tell you, this is crucial. The relentless focus on Hillary Clinton’s email hurt her badly by confirming the sense that she was at least mildly corrupt. Trump’s scandals were different. The press did cover them, but it was something new every week. This didn’t confirm any particular view of Trump aside from his being a bit of a loose cannon. And within a week, each previous scandal was barely remembered. By November, the whole Access Hollywood thing—which was only four weeks old—might as well have been ancient history. It had been practically forgotten.

Donald Trump knows how to focus and he knows how to throw up lots of chaff to keep himself front and center. Does he mean this stuff to be a distraction? Beats me. I suspect it’s all intuitive with him. The only good news is that he can wear out his welcome doing this. In his previous life, that wasn’t a big problem because the press didn’t want to cover him 24/7 anyway. Now they do. He is likely to find that after a few months of this, even his most fervent supporters are a little weary of it.

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Donald Trump and the Shiny Object Strategy

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California county bans fracking, even though big oil spent big money to stop it.

by musclebuildingsupplements43 Posted on November 10, 2016

Protestors with forest advocacy group Stand erected a giant, cardinal-red coffee cup in Seattle’s Westlake Center on Thursday, pressuring Starbucks to make its holiday cups recyclable.

Starbucks has struggled with reinventing its disposable products for years. It aimed to make all of its cups reusable or recyclable by 2015, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The night before, Westlake Center had been the site of a large protest against Donald Trump, who promises to gut existing measures to fight climate change.

So why focus on cups? Stand’s U.S. Campaign Director Ross Hammond told us: “Where we can make change is forcing companies to do things they should be doing but don’t want to do.”

Patrons of the original Starbucks store in Pike Place Market — a few blocks from the protest — had a different take:

“I don’t know how we can go from the [Trump] protests last night … to protesting red cups,” said Steph K., 28, of Los Angeles. We have a national identity crisis, she said, and “this is what we’re talking about?”

Starbucks told Grist that it is “committed to reducing the impact of waste generated in our stores,” and that its cups are recyclable in some places, like Seattle, already.

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California county bans fracking, even though big oil spent big money to stop it.

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Staring at Defeat, Donald Trump Is Sleepless and Vengeful

by BradHeanearesg Posted on November 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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The New York Times has a truly remarkable piece this morning about the final days of the Trump campaign:

Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.

….Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a jarring split screen: the choreographed show of calm and confidence orchestrated by his staff, and the neediness and vulnerability of a once-boastful candidate now uncertain of victory.

….Aides to Mr. Trump have finally wrested away the Twitter account that he used to colorfully — and often counterproductively — savage his rivals. But offline, Mr. Trump still privately muses about all of the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day, including a threat to fund a “super PAC” with vengeance as its core mission.

His polished older daughter, Ivanka, sat for a commercial intended to appeal to suburban women who have recoiled from her father’s incendiary language. But she discouraged the campaign from promoting the ad in news releases, fearing that her high-profile association with the campaign would damage the businesses that bear her name.

How…Nixonian. Yikes.

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Staring at Defeat, Donald Trump Is Sleepless and Vengeful

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Hillary Clinton Is an Open Book

by MiaOddo02554 Posted on November 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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With a mere 6 days left in Campaign 2016, Ezra Klein points out that Hillary Clinton is perhaps the most transparent presidential candidate in history:

We have Hillary Clinton’s full tax returns going back to the year 1977…public schedules…her campaign’s donors and her foundation’s donors…tens of thousands of emails from her time at the State Department…thousands of her campaign chair’s emails…investigative reports, congressional testimony, and documentary evidence from the inquiries into Whitewater, Benghazi, and Travelgate….so many independent biographies that I couldn’t come up with an accurate count.

….The story with Trump is quite different. We have the three pages from his 1995 tax return…books Trump has written about himself…financial disclosures to the Federal Election Commission, in which he claims, in all capital letters, to have “10 BILLION DOLLARS,” but no one believes that document…Digging beyond that image is difficult because Trump has forced his former associates, and even his former romantic partners, to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Despite all this, Clinton has a reputation for opacity while Trump has a reputation for being open about everything. The reason is deceptively simple: it’s what both candidates want. Clinton very clearly does her best to reveal as little as possible. Trump, by contrast, will talk about anything, loudly and volubly. It’s true that when he talks, he lies constantly and says next to nothing when he’s not lying, but the impression he gives is of somebody with nothing to hide.

Clinton’s reputation is not unfair. Most of her openness has been forced on her, after all. Trump’s reputation, by contrast, is ridiculous. He hides everything and lies about what he can’t. And since he runs a private company and has never served in government, he can get away with it. He’s not subject to FOIA requests or WikiLeaks dumps or random judges deciding that all his emails should be made public.

This isn’t going to change, and at this point it no longer matters whether it’s fair. It just is. But it’s what produces such bizarre levels of CDS1 among conservatives. They’ve forced so much openness on Clinton in an effort to destroy her, and it drives them crazy that it’s done nothing except paint a portrait of a pretty normal politician. Over 25 years, they’ve managed to uncover only three “scandals” that are even marginally troubling,2 and every dry well does nothing but convince them that Clinton is even more devious than they thought. By this time, we’ve tracked practically every hour of every day of Clinton’s life for the past decade, and there’s almost literally no unexamined time left. But it doesn’t matter. The next one will get her for sure!

The truth is different, of course. Hillary Clinton dislikes the press and has learned to be very careful in her public utterances. She has done a few dumb things in her life, and pushed the envelope further than she should a couple of times. If you dislike her, that’s fine. But basically she’s a fairly ordinary politico—ironically, an unusually honest one. When she makes a deal, her word is good. When she talks about policy, she’s careful not to overpromise. On the honesty front, she is Mother Teresa compared to Donald Trump.

1Clinton Derangement Syndrome, in case you’ve forgotten.

2The cattle futures thing remains intriguingly dodgy. Travelgate didn’t involve anything illegal, but definitely shows Clinton in a bad light. And Emailgate may not have produced any evidence of wrongdoing, but it did uncover a case of poor judgment.

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Hillary Clinton Is an Open Book

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McDonald’s Asked Teachers to Serve Fries for Free. Now the Teachers Are Fighting Back.

by ArielleRosales Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Ah, McTeacher’s Night—the occasion for kids to watch their teachers peddle burgers, fries, and sugary drinks. In these tie-ups between schools and the fast-food giant, teachers encourage their students and their families to visit a McDonald’s outlet on a particular evening, and then work behind the counter (uncompensated) in McDonald’s t-shirts. A portion of the night’s sales are donated to the school. The above video depicts one such event held for an Illinois high school in 2012.

Sound like an edifying spectacle for youth? A labor union called United Teachers Los Angeles thinks not. In a blistering letter recently published in its union newspaper, UTLA vice president Cecily Myart-Cruz lays out the case against McTeacher’s Night. She claims that the events amount to “predatory marketing of fast food to children,” “exploits the trust between teachers and students to promote its junk food,” and “often raise as little as $1 per student, a ridiculously small amount compared to the time teachers must spend participating and recruiting their students to attend.”

In an emailed statement, a McDonald’s spokesperson defended the program:

McTeacher’s Night is an optional community-based program that supports schools seeking financial support for initiatives like sports equipment, band uniforms, iPads for the classroom, field trips and other programs. It is not a corporate mandated program, but a way our company-owned and franchised restaurants support the communities they serve at the request of and in partnership with local schools.

Like the sweet sauce that tops a soft-serve sundae, the LA teachers union critique comes after a campaign launched last year to kibosh McTeacher’s Nights, led by advocacy groups Corporate Accountability International and Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and and supported by 50 national, state and local teachers unions.

A spokesperson for Corporate Accountability International pointed out to me in an email that McTeacher’s Night events contradict sponsorship guidelines (downloadable here) issued by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in 2011. The guidelines state: “Keep in mind we may not accept donations from or promote organizations that market, sell or produce products that may be harmful to children including but not limited to, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, gambling, or high fat and calorie foods and drinks.”

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, Corporate Accountability International and Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood have documented more than 120 McTeacher nights in greater LA since the start of 2013, including four this year. Their research suggests that the funds these events raise tend to be paltry. They obtained fundraising totals for around 30 LA-area McTeacher nights, for which the cash haul ranged from $67 to $1,000. Nationwide, the groups have counted more than 600 McTeacher Nights since 2013.

On Monday, the UTLA announced a formal policy “calling on McDonald’s to end these disrespectful marketing gimmicks once and for all,” Myart-Cruz said in a statement.

Like a class clown who doesn’t know when to stop, Ronald McDonald would appear to be no longer welcome as a fixture in LA public schools.

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McDonald’s Asked Teachers to Serve Fries for Free. Now the Teachers Are Fighting Back.

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Donald Trump Files Legal Action Against Former Aide for Allegedly Leaking Campaign Info

by EarleneJansen Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has accused a former aide of violating a nondisclosure agreement by spilling to reporters stories of internal strife within the campaign, and the Trump campaign is demanding $10 million from the former aide, Sam Nunberg. Nondisclosure agreements are becoming increasingly common in the political world, but this is the first time one has led to a high-profile legal battle, and news of this legal action—which is pushing campaign dirty laundry into public view—comes just days before Trump is to be crowned the GOP’s presidential nominee at its convention in Cleveland. Meanwhile, Nunberg, who was fired last August for supposedly publishing a racist Facebook post years earlier, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Trump campaign that seeks to shut down the arbitration case Trump initiated and that asks for $10 million from the campaign for breach of contract.

The dispute has apparently been going on behind the scenes since May but was made public when Nunberg filed his lawsuit in New York. The Associated Press reports that Nunberg says he was targeted by the campaign because Trump’s inner circle believes he was the source for a New York Post article that reported that former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks had a noisy and emotional fight on the street outside of Trump’s New York City headquarters. Nunberg denies that he was the source, but in the court filings his attorneys threw fuel on the fire by referring “to the quarrel as being part of an ‘apparent affair.'”

The AP reports that Nunberg’s filing claims the campaign is stifling his First Amendment right to free speech to talk about the campaign, and he asserts that his contract was with a Trump exploratory committee that is not officially or legally connected to Trump’s current presidential campaign.

The fact that Trump has forced his advisers to sign nondisclosure agreements became an issue recently when CNN hired Lewandowski as a paid commentator. Critics of that move questioned whether Lewandowski was bound by the agreement to say nothing negative about his former employer.

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Donald Trump Files Legal Action Against Former Aide for Allegedly Leaking Campaign Info

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Campaign Finance Documents Show Donald Trump’s Campaign Is in Disarray

by TraceeCothran Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Maybe Corey Lewandowski got out at the right time. While reporters scrambled on Monday to figure out why Trump let his campaign manager go, the campaign was preparing to release its latest campaign finance filing that looks, at least at first glance, to be devastating. It doesn’t look much better on second glance.

The first glance: Hillary Clinton’s campaign has more than 35 times the cash Trump’s does.

Here’s the second glance: Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP primary on May 3, meaning that for the month of May, Trump was all but assured the nomination and the campaign should have been in prime fundraising mode. But it wasn’t. Even taking into account Trump’s long-stated claims that he had no interest in raising money from others (something he has reversed himself on)—filings the campaign made with the Federal Election Commission late Monday evening show that Trump simply couldn’t get any fundraising momentum going. He raised a grand total of $5.6 million from May 1 to May 31, $2.2 million of which was in the form of loans from Trump personally.

That’s very bad. It means Trump raised just $3.4 million from people other than himself. His vanquished opponent Cruz, whose campaign had melted away, raised $2.6 million over the same time period.

Trump’s fundraising has always been anemic and the campaign has always relied heavily on loans from the real estate magnate, but barely beating his defeated opponents isn’t a good look. Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised $26.3 million in May. It was only her third best fundraising month. But unlike the other top months, which came at the height of the primary against Bernie Sanders, Clinton wasn’t spending money as fast (or faster) than she could raise it. Clinton managed to bank the bulk of her May fundraising, which is how she now has $42.4 million on hand.

Trump, who spent more than he raised, has $1.2 million in cash on hand. True, Trump has always had very little cash on hand at the end of a reporting period. But this was because he was writing the checks and didn’t need to keep cash on hand. But now that Trump insists he won’t be self-financing, those low numbers are a problem. Even if Trump significantly increased his fundraising since May 31, he would have to be raising money at an almost unprecedented rate to catch up to Clinton.

It’s not just the low numbers that portend potential disaster for the GOP’s man. It’s the way he arrives at the low numbers that looks scary. There’s no real significant support from top donors—the bedrock of a strong monthly fundraising report. But the Trump campaign picked up just 133 donations that hit the maximum allowed amount of $2,700. Clinton had more donations of $2,700 on just May 17 (140) than Trump had all month, and almost 15 times as many for the entire month (1,981).

Elsewhere in Trump World things are looking just as bleak. While some of the super-PACs that have sprung up to back Trump have yet to file (and at least one major one won’t be filing any information at all until next month), the Great America PAC, which fashions itself as the only “real” Trump super-PAC, has just $501,000 in cash on hand. Compare that to the main pro-Clinton super-PAC, Priorities USA, which has nearly $52 million in cash on hand.

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Campaign Finance Documents Show Donald Trump’s Campaign Is in Disarray

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Donald Trump Is Broke

by HugoJosephson73 Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today’s big news is the overall implosion of the Donald Trump campaign. He’s repeatedly melted down on the stump over the past month. He’s trailing Hillary Clinton by a mile in the latest polls. He fired his campaign manager this morning. His ego apparently doesn’t allow him to beg other people for money, so he’s barely done any fundraising at all. The fight to stop him at the Republican convention now has the support of nearly 400 delegates. With the election only 20 weeks away, he still has virtually no staff. He’s being hammered by negative advertising on TV and isn’t doing anything to fight back. (So far he’s run exactly zero ads.)

Except for the personal meltdown stuff, all of this is basically a money problem. Trump doesn’t have any. In fact, pretty much everything you need to know about Trump’s campaign—and his underlying business acumen, though that’s a story for another time—is captured in FEC form 3P. As you can see, it shows that Trump ended the month of May with $1.28 million on hand. That’s disastrous. It’s unbelievable. It’s less than a tenth of what he should have. It’s less than a well-run congressional campaign should have. It’s $40 million less than Hillary Clinton’s campaign has. It’s Donald Trump in a nutshell.

So will he just finance the campaign out of his own wallet? Not a chance. Bluster aside, he doesn’t have the ready cash to do it. And he wouldn’t even if he could. After all, this is the guy who eagerly transferred the five-figure salary of his longtime bodyguard to his campaign at the first opportunity. Do you really think he’s ready to blow $500 million on a nearly certain losing cause?

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Donald Trump Is Broke

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