Joan C. Williams/Atlantic with an interesting but flawed piece:
All told, I’ve spent a good deal of the past two years talking with progressives about the broken relationship between elite white people and the white working class. (I use the term working class to refer to Americans with household incomes between the 30th and 80th percentiles. This group, which has median earnings of about $75,000, is also commonly referred to as the “middle class.”) Democrats presently have a unique opportunity to appeal to the working class, because their base is newly open to a populist message: Income inequality has gotten so bad that people across the political spectrum, college-educated and non-college-educated alike, are feeling a serious pinch. Bernie Sanders got 72 percent of the votes from Democrats under 30 in the 2016 primaries in part by decrying the rigged economy. In the past three decades, education costs have nearly tripled at public universities and doubled at private ones; at the same time, too many people with a college degree are settling for jobs that don’t require one. Unemployment may be low, but the median real wage has remained flat since Trump’s election. Housing costs, meanwhile, continue to rise. In 2014, the General Social Survey found that only 35 percent of Millennials described themselves as middle-class, down from 46 percent of similarly aged people in 2002.
All of this should add up to explosive potential for Democrats. But many appear to be taking the wrong lessons from recent political turmoil. As of this writing, the results of the midterm elections are unknown, but one thing is clear: Democrats have banked a lot on the prospect that their voters’ anger can outmatch the anger of the voters who propelled Trump to office. Whether or not this strategy wins a given election, writing off an ocean of rural and Rust Belt red is a terrible strategy in the long term. If the Democrats want to win and keep winning, with a mandate to put their policies into effect, they need to face four hard truths.
Our gains were in the Midwest, and not just in the suburbs. Our anger did outmatch theirs. And our focus was on health care, not race. We won. But there are some interesting points in there.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Democrats must hold Trump accountable on Saudi Arabia. Adam Schiff explains how
But as Schiff pointed out to me, congressional scrutiny of this matter will attempt to flesh out in greater detail what, in particular, the intelligence community has concluded and how firm the basis is for that conclusion. Members of Congress will then have a clearer sense of whether Trump is deliberately misrepresenting that conclusion to protect the crown prince, and if so, how audaciously.
“We’ll look at what the intelligence community assessments are at any given time,” Schiff said, while stressing that he was not characterizing the CIA’s conclusions on the Khashoggi killing one way or the other. “Then it will be quite clear whether the president is relying on the intelligence community and our best source of information or whether the president is representing something very different.”
John Kirby/CNN:
After his politicized Thanksgiving call, maybe Trump should not visit the troops
Let me be blunt. The United States military is not a voting bloc. It's not a MAGA rally crowd. It's not a plaything, and it's most certainly not an arm of the Republican Party. Our troops, of course, must obey the orders of the commander in chief. They execute the military policy he sets forth. But their loyalty belongs to the American people and to the Constitution.
Emily Bell/CJR:
Facebook and The Innovator’s Dilemma
Anyone who worked in newspaper publishing over the past twenty years will at some point have found themselves metaphorically beaten about the head with the 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail, by Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen. The book’s premise, wrapped up in plenty of talk about value creation and S curves, is that companies with big businesses cannot change the basic, successful core functions of those businesses quickly enough to innovate against their coming obsolescence. Newspapers, too, were becoming obsolete, but the grand publishing houses that produced them would not be able to meet the speed required by new technologies (the internet and social media) to adapt.
Now, the innovations that upended creaking legacy media businesses are facing the same dilemma of how to set aside growth and re-engineer for long-term survival. To do that, they’ll need to insert safety and civic values into the core of a culturally insensitive product. For ten years the only innovations Facebook was prepared to tolerate were innovations that directly contributed to the company’s success, combining scale and speed with commercial targeting. Its looming challenges lurked beneath diminishing phrases like users and content; calling supposedly neutral content propaganda, threats, or abuse would force the company to organize in a totally different way. If they had paid more attention to how their own developing role as a publisher would reshape their business—as well as the newspaper business—rather than stubbornly insisting they bore no responsibility for cultural and political disruption, they would not be in this catastrophic mess. To use Silicon Valley parlance, you could say that they lacked vision about what they were becoming, and now do not have adequate skills to innovate their way into that space.
Politico:
Warning signs mount for Trump reelection bid
‘They haven’t gotten his job approval over 50 percent, like Reagan,’ says one GOP pollster.
Unlike most of his predecessors, he’s been persistently unpopular, with approval ratings mired in the 40-percent range — so far, he’s the only president in the modern era whose job approval ratings have never been over 50 percent, according to Gallup.
Some of Democrats’ biggest gains came in the states that powered Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while a president’s base has stayed home in previous midterm elections, leading to losses, the record turnout in this year’s races suggests 2018 was more like a 2016 re-run than Trump voters standing on the sidelines.
Thus far, even Trump loyalists in the party haven’t seen the president expand his electoral base beyond core Republicans.
He’s not ever going to get above 50%. Basically, he had his shot and he blew it.
How it happened in WI, from WaPo:
Anti-Trump protests gave way to local fervor that helped turn Wisconsin back to blue
Since the eruption of nationwide anti-Trump protests in January 2017, a central question has been whether the energy would persist. The signs in Wisconsin so far have been positive for Democrats: They unexpectedly won a state Supreme Court race in April and flipped a reliably Republican state Senate seat in June. On Nov. 6, they defeated GOP Gov. Scott Walker for the first time in four tries. The statewide turnout percentage was among the highest in the country.
Matt Viser, now at WaPo:
Cindy Hyde-Smith has embraced Confederate history more than once in her political career
Starting her second year as a Mississippi state senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith arrived at the State Capitol in Jackson in 2001 to file one of her earliest pieces of legislation. Senate Bill 2604, as she proposed it, would have renamed a stretch of highway to the title it had in the 1930s: Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.
While the president of the Confederacy did have ties to the state — representing it in the Senate before resigning when Mississippi left the Union — he had no known ties to her district.
The bill died in committee.
It is one of several instances in which the now-U.S. senator would embrace a pride in the Confederacy and its aftermath that is coming under new scrutiny in the wake of her comments that she would sit with a supporter in the front row of a “public hanging” — remarks that she defended as an exaggerated gesture of friendship and that others said alluded to lynching.
William Douglas/McClatchy:
Hyde-Smith’s ‘public hanging’ comment hangs over Mississippi Senate race
Is incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith joking her way out of a U.S. Senate seat?
Democrats hope so and Republicans are seriously, increasingly concerned.
The Mississippi lawmaker’s recent remarks about public hangings and voter suppression in a state with a tortured legacy of both against African Americans has turned the Nov. 27 runoff between her and Mike Espy, a black Democrat, into a racially-charged, potentially close affair.
Big-name donors want their contributions back. Nationally known Democrats are coming in to stump for Espy. And President Donald Trump is scheduled to campaign for Hyde-Smith, R-Mississippi, in Biloxi and Tupelo Monday.
Alex Shepard/The New Republic:
The Truth Behind the Toothless Rebellion Against Nancy Pelosi
Conservative Democrats once threw their weight around in the House. Now they're reduced to howling from the sidelines.
The last time Pelosi was speaker, from 2007 to 2011, the conservative Blue Dog coalition was enormously influential. Today, even with gains in suburban districts, it’s a shadow of its former self. Pelosi’s previous tenure was defined, in part, by the split between liberals like herself and the Blue Dogs. In the 116th Congress, it will be defined by the tensions between Pelosi and her left flank.
During the last Democratic wave election, in 2006, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee claimed that it was focused on finding candidates who could win, regardless of ideology. “This is not a theoretical exercise,” Chris Van Hollen, a Pelosi lieutenant who has since moved to the Senate, said at the time. “The goal is to win this thing. In dealing with candidates, we don’t have an ideological purity test.” In practice, however, that meant that conservative-leaning Democrats were pushed in Republican-leaning districts. The move paid off, with Democrats winning control of Congress in a rout. By the time Barack Obama entered office in 2009, there were 54 Blue Dogs in the House…
Ironically, the Blue Dogs’ hedging didn’t help them at all. In the disastrous 2010 midterms, they were practically wiped out—less than two dozen members kept their seats. The trouble with representing purple and red districts, it turns out, is that they are very vulnerable in wave elections.
Hey you know what else Malinowski said?
The kids are alright. ~ Pete Townshend.
Will the energy persist? Hah.