Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[kenberg]

It appears to me as if Donald Trump doesn't care what he means - he is viewing this campaign like a t.v. ratings contest. As long as the tv cameras and lights are pointed at him, he is satisfied.

 

Yes, it seems crazy but yes. Even Sarah Palin had some sort of consistency to her zaniness. Trump is like a guy on a bar stool. From a drunk it is boring, from someone wishing to be president it is seriously scary.

[Al_U_Card]

So, is Hil sick (medically) or what?

[kenberg]

So, is Hil sick (medically) or what?

 

I guess the entire world knows the answer bt now, although I had no idea what you were talking about until this morning. This will be, and should be, a very large problem.

 

We who are older have some direct experiences.

 

I was visiting a friend in the hospital yesterday, his situation is serious. He can be stubborn about not following doctors orders. A few days ago he was readmitted and, talking on the phone, he explained he was going to check himself out of the hospital the next day. I can be blunt at times and this is one of the times that I was. For whatever the reason, he did not check himself out.

 

How does this apply to HC?

 

Here is the statement from her doctor.

 

 

“Secretary Clinton has been experiencing a cough related to allergies,” Lisa R. Bardack, Clinton’s physician, said Sunday in the statement. “On Friday, during follow up evaluation of her prolonged cough, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. She was put on antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule. While at this morning’s event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have just examined her and she is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely.”

 

 

If I get pneumonia and the doc tells me to cut back on my schedule and get some rest, I cut back on my schedule and get some rest. And I explain why I am doing it. It's not only her health here, it is her judgment. It took a while for Becky to calm me down after my friend started talking about checking himself out of the hospital.. The word "stupid" came up more than once.

 

We shall see how this goes, I of course wish her luck, but I am not happy.

[billw55]

I guess the entire world knows the answer bt now, although I had no idea what you were talking about until this morning. This will be, and should be, a very large problem.

 

...

 

We shall see how this goes, I of course wish her luck, but I am not happy.

You have said the decent thing to say, I expect no less.

 

From a strictly practical (and admittedly coldhearted) perspective, this is a hint of a chance at ending up with a better president than either current candidate.

 

 

[Winstonm]

Interesting psychological study on the worldviews of concervatives and liberals, and on Trump supporters in particular: https://jerclifton.com/2016/08/17/what-reality-are-trump-people-living-in/

 

Basically, conservatives see the World as fair, as getting worse, and they see dichtomies as largely good-vs-bad while liberals tend to see dichotomies as more often equally good/bad.

 

Trump supporters are not that different from typical conservatives, actually Cruz supporters are less typical.

 

That is an interesting article. IMO, the information that liberals find more amusement in situations than do conservatives leads to a boatload of possibilities. I think the conservative mind sees himself as most important individually, while liberals find that idea quaintly funny as it is obvious that on a macro scale we have a commonality with bees hives and ant colonies. When you don't take yourself so seriously and view yourself as equally important as the least beggar in Somalia, it is quite easy to find humor in human gaffes and human absurdities.

 

At the same time, there is need at times for a more somber disposition. Some things are serious.

 

The Donald Trump campaign train should have been laughed off the rails before he ever set one foot aboard the engine. It's crazy and zany and, wow, isn't he a nut case, and haven't we all been nut cases some time in our life?

 

It's funny, all right, but Presidential elections need to be more serious than that.

[kenberg]

You have said the decent thing to say, I expect no less.

 

From a strictly practical (and admittedly coldhearted) perspective, this is a hint of a chance at ending up with a better president than either current candidate.

 

That last sentence was almost my first thought! I am not exactly proud of that, but she is running for president and so different standards apply.

 

I just spent the whole day on a jury (and will be on for a while) so I am not totally up on what has come from this. I think, at the least, her health will now become a key issue. I had not really paid all that much attention to it, other than noting that she is not young. I regard myself as healthy, but honestly there is something of a caveat, healthy for my age. Many of my friends of the same age are healthy, but we find that we now ask about each other's health now. This would only rarely occur to a person in his/her forties. We all now can list things that are, at the least, harder to do. For whatever the reason, I now find it very difficult to be at high altitudes. That's new. Clinton gets blood clots. She takes meds for it. There was a time not very long ago when I took no meds. That's no longer the case. We get older. But I am not running for president, she is. So the effects of getting older are of greater interest with regard to her.

 

And of course the same applies to Trump, except that I find him so completely awful that I don't have to go to his health.

[The_Badger]

Here's a bit of 'light relief' (among the 106 pages of replies on here) for us statistically-minded bods courtesy of Columbia University.

 

And yes, I know, it's quite bizarre what university students study these days...

 

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/notrump_falk_gelman_icml.pdf

[barmar]

Someone posted that link on Bridge Winners a few months ago.

[barmar]

The campaign is starting to sound like a bad Kids Meal at KFC -- I'll take a basket of deplorables with a bag of skittles.

[Winstonm]

What an incredible embarrassment to the Republican Party as well as the entire U.S. that this buffoon, Donald Trump, is involved in a televised Presidential debate. Anyone above the age of 6 or an equivalent IQ should be ashamed to support this guy.

[cherdano]

Here is my theory. Right now there is a lot of coverage about Clinton emails and Clinton Foundation. It seems the election is a referendum on that, and since voters don't like Clinton, the polls are tightening.

 

Once the debates happen, voters will remember that this is a choice about whether Clinton or Trump will be president. After the debates, no matter who "won" them, Clinton's poll numbers will improve.

 

Let's see whether I was right.

[shyams]

This is what the largest betting company thought of the TV debate.

 

Last evening, the odds of a Trump victory stood at 2.64 (roughly 38% chance of winning). This morning the odds are 3.35 (roughly 30% chance of winning). If I recall, US nationals are not allowed to bet via British betting shops. If true, it means that an impartial, dispassionate, capitalistic*** group of gamblers collectively decided that Trump had damaged his chances during the debate.

 

PS: I haven't seen the debate yet, nor have I read any media reports on last night's events. I have TiVo'd the debate and plan to watch it later this evening.

 

*** The betting odds are almost entirely driven by money flows. When more money comes in to back Trump, his odds reduce -- and when money instead chases Clinton, Trump's odds drift higher. Any move in odds is "markets" driven, the kind of capitalism Americans respect!

[kenberg]

First, a chart that I have linked to earlier.There are many threads but they can be untangled by clicking on the tabs. This is pre-debate.

 

If we click on Registered/likely we can see that

Between Sept 8 and Sept22 Clinton's lead with registered voters has shrunk from 10 points to 0.

Between Sept 8 and Sept22 Clinton's lead with likely voters has shrunk from 5 points to 2.

 

I have been scanning over some of the supporting data but so far I have not figured out whether the principal ingredient here is that people have changed their preference from Clinton to Trump or whether it comes from previously undecideds now making their choice.

 

Clicking on the gender tab is interesting. In the 2 week period from Sept8 to 22 the lead with women went from 17 points to 15. A drop, but not a large drop. With men, the change was from a 3 point lead for Clinton to a 16 point lead for Trump. You would have to call that significant.

 

The debate itself would partially support Cherdano. The Foundation was not mentioned (or so briefly that I missed it) and the emails came and went in a moment.. That's over. But there is still this shift over the two weeks preceding the debate. That shift toward Trump did not occur because voters suddenly heard about the emails, so the withering of that issue will not undo that shift.

 

If I had to place a bet, I would bet that Clinton's numbers will go up a bit now. But I would not want to bet much on that. To me, Trump looked very bad. But that's not new. He always looks bad to me. Clinton looked sort of good, better than she sometimes does. Is that enough? Beats me. To me, Trump always looks like the guy on a bar stool who knows everything, just ask him, or don't even bother to ask him, he will tell you. It will be loud and it will be incoherent. Talk to Hannity. Talk to Hannity. I don't want to talk to Hannity.

 

We shall see.

 

Added remark on numbers: Suppose 100 people are to choose between A and B. Suppose 50 prefer A, 30 prefer B, and 15 have not made up their minds. So A has a 20 point lead. If 10 undecideds now declare for B, the lead is cut by 10 points from 20 to 10. If the undecideds remain undecided and but only 5 switch their preference from A to B, then the lead goes from 20=50-30 to 10= 45-35, also a drop of 10. I apologize if this is obvious to everyone, of course changing someone's mind is a bigger deal than winning over an undecided, but sometimes such things slide by . It would be interesting to know just how this 3 point lead for Clinton among men changed by 19 to an 16 point lead for Trump.I doubt that there were enough undecideds to account for all of it.

[PassedOut]

I thought it very useful to see them together, unfiltered. It seemed to me that both candidates debated to the best of their abilities and showed themselves to best advantage. For those undecided voters -- those just starting to focus on the election -- the contrast should be helpful.

 

I do think Trump was right to say, "I think my strongest asset by far is my temperament." I don't like his temperament, but many folks do. In any case, his qualifications drop off pretty quickly after that. The big question will be whether or not Donald's temperament outweighs Hillary's competence in most voters' minds.

[barmar]

To me, Trump always looks like the guy on a bar stool who knows everything, just ask him, or don't even bother to ask him, he will tell you. It will be loud and it will be incoherent.

So there's a significant number of voters who want Cliff Claven (from "Cheers") as their President?

[Phil]

Random observations:

 

1. Trump blew a massive opportunity when asked about cybersecurity and not discussing the email server. He also let her off too easy when she just apologized. It will be hard to recapitalize on that again.

 

2. Hill looks like a SNL skit when she laughs. I can't help but think of Jan Hooks. She is utterly unlikable.

 

3. She could have taken him to task on the unpreparedness thing - if he can't prep for a debate, how will he prep for policy discussions or trade talks?

 

4. I was concerned that she was going to come out looking ashen or sick. I think she fielded the 'stamina' attack well with her response about long senate hearings and visiting 112 countries.

 

Hillary evidently won. More importantly, I don't think DT converted many fence-sitters. I will be especially interested in what the undecideds in Florida, Colorado and Nevada thought.

[kenberg]

So there's a significant number of voters who want Cliff Claven (from "Cheers") as their President?

 

I have been thinking and, while it may sound crazy, I think it's a big part of Trump's appeal. I don't want the guy who sounds like Cliff Claven. I don't

even want the guy who sounds like me. I would not vote for me. I want someone who knows foreign policy better than I do, who knows more about economics than I do, and, importantly, has spent more time engaged in such matters than I have. Of course a president must choose advisers that s/he can rely on. But it helps if you first know something about the issues.

 

A sample from the debate. Trump spoke of Law and Order. Well, I can favor Law and Order, depending on what it means. But go into a bar and you can easily find some guy who will explain that, back when he was a child, if his teacher hit him in school and he told his father about it, his father would hit him twice as hard. It's an old canard.

But I would come at this differently. We start by acknowledging that the mother of a young black man wants her son to come home alive and, very importantly, the family of a police officer wants that person to come home alive. And the community wants the drug dealers off the corner. This seems to me to be a solid basis for working together to solve a problem. Law and Order is involved, but we don't get there just by whacking people. I want someone who has some ideas beyond whacking.

 

But there are plenty of people out there to listen to the guy talk about how being whacked as a child made him what he is today. And maybe it did.

[helene_t]

So there's a significant number of voters who want Cliff Claven (from "Cheers") as their President?

I don't think so.

 

Cliff Claven is an obvious loser. Not a billionaire, and not psychopathic enough to be able to pass a a billionaire.

[PassedOut]

2. Hill looks like a SNL skit when she laughs. I can't help but think of Jan Hooks. She is utterly unlikable.

How would you characterize Donald's facial expressions during the debate? I'm guessing that SNL will have a field day with this debate. :D

[Phil]

How would you characterize Donald's facial expressions during the debate? I'm guessing that SNL will have a field day with this debate. :D

 

Will Ferrell would be credible. So would Darrell Hammond.

 

Phil Hartman RIP would have nailed it.

[cherdano]

Phil, I find it hard to understand why so many find Hillary unlikeable.

3. She could have taken him to task on the unpreparedness thing - if he can't prep for a debate, how will he prep for policy discussions or trade talks?

I thought she did:

Clinton: I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that's a good thing.

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/26/13065174/first-presidential-debate-live-transcript-clinton-trump

I don't think she needs to say more than that.

 

I have seen a lot of takes how Trump did badly, and of course he did. But I don't think Clinton is getting enough credit, I thought on some level she was quite brilliant. She succeeded in getting under Trump's skin very quickly - you may think that's easy but none of the other 16 Republican candidates managed to do that on the debate stage. She managed to make much of the debate about Trump (which is what you want to do if both candidates are unpopular), without making it too obvious that she wanted the debate to be about Trump. She hit him quite hard, but all of her attacks were organically in context because she had provoked Trump to lose his temper before that.

 

Meanwhile, the Team Clinton really did exceptionally well - the perfect roll-out of Alicia Marchado (and I do think it's a testament to Clinton's personal skills that she is able to recruit people like Marchado or Khan to act as surrogates for her), a website that keeps working during the debate, obviously they anticipated many attacks, etc.

Obviously I wouldn't hire Clinton as an actor, others are better at reproducing canned lines without anyone noticing they might be canned lines; but other than that I thought she basically did as well as possible.

[PassedOut]

Good opinion piece in the Post today: How passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be good for America

 

For the past 50 years, the export of goods and services has trended higher and now accounts for about 13 percent of our GDP and supports 1 in 12 U.S. jobs. Equally important, workers in export-intensive manufacturing industries earn 18 percent more, on average, than those in other manufacturing sectors. The TPP would eliminate some 18,000 tariffs, making our exports less costly and more competitive. Removing those tariffs would translate directly into more exports abroad and sustain more good-paying jobs at home.

Crawling fearfully into a nationalistic hole, as the anti-trade movement demands, exemplifies short-term thinking perfectly. And even more ridiculous is relying on more tax cuts for the rich to build the economy. Hillary's switch on the TPP is, in my opinion, simply pandering to the ignorant for votes.

[shyams]

I have seen a lot of takes how Trump did badly, and of course he did. But I don't think Clinton is getting enough credit, I thought on some level she was quite brilliant. She succeeded in getting under Trump's skin very quickly - you may think that's easy but none of the other 16 Republican candidates managed to do that on the debate stage. She managed to make much of the debate about Trump (which is what you want to do if both candidates are unpopular), without making it too obvious that she wanted the debate to be about Trump. She hit him quite hard, but all of her attacks were organically in context because she had provoked Trump to lose his temper before that.

 

I agree with you that Clinton was excellent during the first debate.

 

In my personal view (and I'm certain many US posters will vehemently disagree), Hillary gets a raw deal because she's a woman.

[johnu]

So, is Hil sick (medically) or what?

 

Apparently completely cured from whatever medical problems she had a couple of weeks ago based on her debate appearance. On the other hand, Trump looked and sounded awful sniffling the entire debate. To be perfectly fair, one democratic pundit suggested Trump wasn't really sick and that the sniffling was due to cocaine use.

[PassedOut]

I agree with you that Clinton was excellent during the first debate.

 

In my personal view (and I'm certain many US posters will vehemently disagree), Hillary gets a raw deal because she's a woman.

I agree, not an easy task as a debater: How could sexism hurt Clinton in the debates? These female high school debaters know.

 

“I have to think about things in a way my male counterparts don’t, like toeing the line between passionate and hysterical,” Fanger says. “It’s harder for women to have the freedom to be emotional, like to tap into the anger that’s getting Trump and [bernie] Sanders votes. If [Clinton] gets up and waves her arms around and screams, people will feel like they’re being yelled at by their mom.” (Incidentally, this is exactly how then-CNN commentator Jack Cafferty described Clinton’s primary debate performance in 2008, saying that she had showed a “softer side” in one round against Barack Obama but later “morphed into a scolding mother.”)

 

“Clinton faces similar challenges in terms of trying to both confront stereotypes but at the same time being weirdly beholden to them, because she needs voters to vote for her in the same way I need a judge to vote for me,” Fanger says. “I don’t have full freedom to fight the patriarchy in the way I want to because it’s a competitive activity. I’m in that room to get the ballot.”

 

Which, come November, is exactly what another woman seeks to do. And whether or not these young debaters want Clinton to be president, they are hoping her candidacy helps change what it means to be a woman in debate — and what it means to be “presidential.”