Today in Campaign 2016
- Michael Steele, the predecessor of Reince Priebus as chairman of the Republican National Committee, has announced that he’s not voting for Donald Trump, his party’s nominee. Buzzfeed reports:
“I will not be voting for Clinton,” Steele told a dinner in honor of the 40th anniversary of the progressive magazine Mother Jones in San Francisco Friday. “I will not be voting for Trump either.”
Steele, a former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, said that Trump has “captured that racist underbelly, that frustration, that angry underbelly of American life and gave voice to that.”
“I was damn near puking during the debates,” Steele said, adding that he believes Trump only represents 30% of the Republican Party.
- Three-managers-ago Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been paid $541,000 so far by the Trump campaign, new federal election commission filings reveal. That’s not counting the money Lewandowski has made as a hired commentator at CNN. Lewandowski, a police academy graduate, was a state-level political operative in New Hampshire before he jumped the Trump train. The Huffington Post points out that neither Lewandowski nor other highly paid Trump hires have given any cash to the effort actually to elect the candidate.
- The Clinton campaign has released a new ad featuring Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of slain Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in a suicide bombing attack in Iraq in 2004. One of the sharpest moments of widespread bipartisan revulsion at Donald Trump in the campaign came when Trump criticized the Khans for their appearance at the Democratic national convention to tell their son’s story. Khizr Khan offered Trump his pocket constitution, wondering whether he’d ever read it. Trump discounted their story and questioned why Ghazala Khan did not address the convention. The Khans are Muslim, as was their son.
At a rally in Cleveland this afternoon, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton began her remarks with a reprised joke from the previous night’s charity banquet.
“I have now spent 4.5 hours on stage with Donald proving once again I have the stamina to be president,” Clinton said, drawing laughs and cheers from the 1,600 supporters who gathered a college gymnasium in Cleveland.
Directly behind Clinton, a woman wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Nasty Woman”. The phrase has become something of a feminist rallying cry ever since Trump leaned into his mic during the third and final debate on Wednesday and spit the words, intended as an insult.
Clinton also attacked Trump for his brazen admission that he would keep Americans “in suspense” about whether the Republican nominee will concede the election should he lose in November. At a Thursday rally, Trump said he would accept the legitimacy of the election results – if he won.
“Make no mistake,” Clinton told the crowd, “by doing that he is threatening our democracy.”
“Look, if you lose an election – I have lost an election – you don’t feel very good the next day,” Clinton continued. “But we know in our country the difference between leadership and dictatorship.”
Prior to the rally, Clinton met with two high-profile activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement: Brittany Packnett and DeRay McKesson. Over the past 18 months on the trail, Clinton has been confronted by activists challenging her past support for drug policies that wrecked black communities.
Today, Clinton credited these honest and at turns frank conversations with activists and young leaders for helping to inform her policy agenda to reform the criminal justice system and improve relationships between the police and communities of color.
“All the advocates and activists who have challenged us to think about these issues of race and justice and equality and opportunity in new and powerful ways really deserve our appreciation,” Clinton said.
“I am going to do everything I can to lift these issues up because one of my hopes for my presidency will be to root out systemic racism and bigotry and discrimination in whatever form it takes.”
Report: Hillary Clinton making a play for Utah
As if we needed more evidence that the political world has been turned upside-down, Buzzfeed News is reporting that Hillary Clinton is making a late-game play for Utah - a state so red that it hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than half a century.
Seizing Donald Trump’s anemic support among the state’s largely Mormon population - Trump’s coarse rhetoric has never played well with Latter-Day Saints, nor has his pledge to ban followers of politically unpopular religions from entering the United States - the Clinton campaign is reportedly adding five paid staffers to the state’s office in Salt Lake City, and is adding financing to fund in-state advertisements and organization efforts.
Clinton, who in August published an op-ed in the Deseret News emphasizing the importance of religious freedom, likely sees an opportunity in the form of insurgent third-party candidate Evan McMullin. McMullin, a former CIA officer, a devout Mormon and longtime Republican, has outpolled both Clinton and Trump in recent days, turning what would normally be a walk for Republican candidates into a three-way race for the state’s six electoral votes:
UTAH Topline@Evan_McMullin 31%@realDonaldTrump 27%@HillaryClinton 24%@GovGaryJohnson 5%
— ECPS (@EmersonPolling) October 19, 2016
Undecided 12%
Results at https://t.co/ARVMZmGvHd
Mitt Romney won Utah by 50 points in 2012.
“Through the looking glass we go, where the front is always back, and what’s left is right, and sometimes wrong is right, night is day and white is black...”
Updated
In a 2000 visit to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, then-tycoon and future presidential nominee Donald Trump waxed about how “brilliantly” Adolf Hitler came to power in 1930s Germany, according to comments unearthed by Buzzfeed News:
In the 1930s, everyone thought that Adolf Hitler was a fringe element who could never come to power. And the Center shows this and how he came to power so brilliantly, but people thought, if you read history from the Twenties, you would say, ‘this could never have happened.’ And it did happen.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a Holocaust remembrance museum named after Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
Sean Hannity, 2016:
In 10 yrs @wikileaks has gotten nothing wrong & no one's been killed bc of the info released. #freejulianassange #freeinternet for all.
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 21, 2016
Sean Hannity, 2010:
Former Arizona governor Jan Brewer isn’t worried about the increasing signs that the long-red state may turn for Hillary Clinton in the upcoming general election, telling the Boston Globe that increased Latino turnout won’t affect the final results.
“Nah,” Brewer said, when asked about increased Latino turnout in response to Donald Trump’s candidacy. “They don’t get out and vote.’’
Alrighty then.
In a radio segment that aired this afternoon, actress Salma Hayek told a Spanish-language radio station that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump attempted to date her while she was in a relationship and, after she rejected his advances, planted a story in the National Enquirer tabloid that she was too short for him to be interested in romantically.
“When I met that man, I had a boyfriend, and he tried to become his friend to get my home telephone number,” Hayek said, according to a Buzzfeed News translation of the conversation. “He got my number and he would call me to invite me out.”
When she told Trump that she wouldn’t go out with him even if she were single, “someone told the National Enquirer,” Hayek said.
“I’m not going to say who, because you know that whatever he wants to come out comes out in the National Enquirer,” Hayek, who has endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, continued. “It said that he wouldn’t go out with me because I was too short.”
“Later, he called and left me a message,” Hayek said. “‘Can you believe this? Who would say this? I don’t want people to think this about you.’ He thought that I would try to go out with him so people wouldn’t think that’s why he wouldn’t go out with me.”
Facebook employees reportedly pushed to remove Donald Trump posts as 'hate speech'
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s positions on Muslim immigration - that it should be halted until “our country’s representatives can figure out what’s going on” - prompted some Facebook employees to advocate that some of his postings on the social network should be deleted as hate speech, a report claims.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the matter eventually hit the desk of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who declared internally that it would be “inappropriate” for Facebook to censor the posts, even if they did meet the criteria for hate speech:
Issues around Mr. Trump’s posts emerged when he posted on Facebook a link to a Dec. 7 campaign statement “on preventing Muslim immigration.” The statement called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
“When we review reports of content that may violate our policies, we take context into consideration,” a Facebook spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal’s report. “That context can include the value of political discourse. Many people are voicing opinions about this particular content and it has become an important part of the conversation around who the next US president will be. For those reasons, we are carefully reviewing each report and surrounding context relating to this content on a case by case basis.”
The Trump campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment on the matter.
Updated
Poll: Half of Republicans would reject election result if Clinton wins
Only half of likely Republican voters say that they will accept Hillary Clinton as their president if the former secretary of state wins in the upcoming general election, a new poll from Reuters/Ipsos showed, indicating that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s continued baseless attacks on the election as “rigged” has permeated his voters base.
Nearly 70% of Republican voters said that if Clinton wins, it will be due to illegal voting or vote rigging. The same percentage of Democrats, meanwhile, said that they would accept a Trump victory.
Nearly 80% of Republicans told Reuters that they are concerned about “the accuracy of the final vote count,” and only six in ten are confident that their votes will be tabulated accurately.
Trump counts himself as one of those who isn’t necessarily sure to support Clinton if she is indeed elected, winkingly telling viewers of the third presidential debate that “I will keep you in suspense” on whether he would concede the election to Clinton.
Curt Schilling, now officially running for the US Senate in Massachusetts:
Curt Schilling: You're Jewish. Why are Jews Democrats? Dems hate Israel.
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) October 21, 2016
Jake Tapper: Well, I don't speak for Jews, but social welfare pic.twitter.com/4CejNNskDO
Hillary Clinton campaigns in Cleveland
Watch it live here:
Speaking in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump wrapped up his speech by making numerous promises to those attending the rally:
“We are going to have the biggest tax cut since Ronald Reagan, and even actually a little bit bigger,” Trump said. “We’re going to eliminate every unnecessary job-killing regulation. We are going to defend religious liberty. We’ll be providing school choice - so important - to every low-income child in America, and we’re going to be ending Common Core and bringing education local. We’re going to support the men and women of law enforcement. We’re going to save our second amendment, which is totally under siege, and we will be appointing justices to the United States supreme court who will uphold and defend the constitution of the United States.”
“Imagine what our country could accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one god, saluting one American flag?”
Trump was greeted with a “U-S-A!” chant.
Donald Trump, on journalists: "They don’t even want to look at you, folks ... I think they consider you deplorable and irredeemable."
— Scott Bixby (@scottbix) October 21, 2016
Donald Trump, on Hillary Clinton:
Hillary is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the presidency.
Speaking in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that “the world hates our president” and that “the world hates us,” proof of poor leadership from President Barack Obama.
“All of this will require a truly national effort,” Trump said.
Today in history:
Front page of NYT, year ago today. pic.twitter.com/Fk0emAnn8S
— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) October 21, 2016
Speaking in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that despite the fact that he was once a registered Democrat and beneficiary of “crooked” trade policies, he has now seen the light and will fight on behalf of the little guy.
“Generations of failure and neglect are going to be coming to an end when we win this election,” Trump vowed. “Now, I’m on your side, and I’m here to fight for you and we’re going to win.”
“Hillary Clinton is a corrupt globalist,” Trump said, renewing language that the Anti-Defamation League has decried as anti-Semitic.
Donald Trump campaigns in Pennsylvania
Watch it live here:
Hey, you don’t become a billionaire by spending money on a cup of lemonade...
this is a photo of my homey grant with trumps kid at in-n-out & trumps kid is drinking lemonade outta the free water cup... pic.twitter.com/Npuqte5e2b
— Kush Vonnegut (@xwnklmnx) October 20, 2016
Donald Trump took a swipe at first lady Michelle Obama during his rally in North Carolina this afternoon, a dangerous proposition considering her approval ratings.
Trump goes after Michelle Obama, says "all she wants to do is campaign" pic.twitter.com/ARPN2925lv
— Colin Jones (@colinjones) October 21, 2016
“His wife - all she wants to do is campaign,” Trump said. “And I see how much his wife likes Hillary, but wasn’t she the one that originally started the statement, ‘if you can’t take care of your home,’ right? ‘You can’t take care of the White House and the country’?”
“Where is that? I don’t hear that. I don’t hear that,” Trump continued. “She’s the one that started that. I said, ‘We can’t say that, it’s too vicious.’ Can you believe it? I said that. ‘We can’t say that.’ They said, ‘No, Michelle Obama said that.’ I said, ‘She did?’ She said that but we don’t hear about that.”
Trump is apparently referring to a comment Obama made in 2008, when she discussed the dueling roles of a campaign spouse and of a mother.
“Our view was that, if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House,” Obama said at the time. “So we’ve adjusted our schedules to make sure that our girls are first, so while he’s traveling around, I do day trips. That means I get up in the morning, I get the girls ready, I get them off, I go and do trips, I’m home before bedtime. So the girls know that I was gone somewhere, but they don’t care. They just know that I was at home to tuck them in at night, and it keeps them grounded, and, and children, the children in our country have to know that they come first. And our girls do and that’s why we’re doing this. We’re in this race for not just our children, but all of our children.”
The comment was interpreted by some at the time as a swipe at Hillary Clinton’s marriage, but the Obama campaign responded that Obama had been discussing her own marriage, not that of the Clintons.
Donald Trump is being advised on business policy by executives who suffered multimillion-dollar bankruptcies, were sued by authorities for not paying large tax bills, and were accused of failing to act against sexual assault in the workplace.
A review of court filings, tax records and other documents found some members of Trump’s new Small Business Advisory Council had made serious corporate missteps while others were not, in fact, small business owners at all.
According to a briefing document released by the campaign, the panel is advising the Republican presidential nominee on issues such as regulation and tax. “For the first time in a long time Small Businesses are concerned enough that they will be a very strong coalition for the Trump Pence in 2016 [sic],” the document said.
At least two members of the council have endured bankruptcy after becoming unable to pay debts. Trump, a property developer and television host, has put six companies into bankruptcy since 1991. His campaign did not respond to requests for comment about the advisers.
A mail-order furniture company in North Carolina owned by Ed Broyhill, one of the Trump advisers, entered bankruptcy in 1995 with reported liabilities of $7.5m. A reported 4,800 people, many ordinary customers who had paid deposits for pieces of furniture, were owed money by Broyhill’s company, according to a list of creditors. Some were still trying to recoup a few hundred dollars of losses more than 15 years after proceedings began, according to federal court filings.
Broyhill, a 62-year-old former finance chairman of the North CarolinaRepublicans, now leads a property development company and an investment firm. He ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2004. In an interview, Broyhill said every creditor who made an effort to recover their money was repaid.
“There was not one instance of any loss that was not negotiated to the satisfaction of everybody,” he said. According to a 2004 letter from the bankruptcy trustee, Broyhill contributed $3m toward paying off the company’s debts.
Vice-president Joe Biden is campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, today, in the heart of former coal and manufacturing country that Republicans hoped might elevate Donald Trump to victory in the state this year.
Trump does not appear to be close in Pennsylvania (Barack Obama won the state by five points in 2012; polling averages have Trump trailing Clinton this year by six points), but Trump has found deep support in Wilkes-Barre’s Luzerne County and southwestern counties likewise packed with working-class voters.
Biden, a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania (in case you hadn’t heard), is not ready to concede those voters this year – or in future elections, reports Paul Kane, writing in the Washington Post under the headline Joe Biden wants to make sure Democrats don’t give up on Trump voters:
But for Biden, this last campaign is about more than just Senate control: A year ago Friday he gave up his own presidential ambition, announcing that his son’s death had made a bid for the highest office emotionally impossible. Instead, after months of introspection, he is pouring his energy into a fight that he thinks will help Democrats this year but also continuing his effort to convince them not to give up on white working-class voters who were once the party’s core, and whose support has fueled the insurgent candidacy of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“I just think we have a very strong argument on the substance, and I think that we should be pounding away,” Biden said in a recent interview, explaining how he wants Democrats to talk to these voters about job training and the new economy. “Once you actually make that case and you go into places like southeast Ohio and the northeast [Ohio] . . . these are places that should be — like Youngstown — they should be Democratic areas.”
But Biden worries that Democrats are turning into a party controlled by intellectual elites who don’t know how to relate to people like those from his hometown of Scranton, Pa., where Trump held a raucous rally in July just a few blocks from the vice president’s childhood home. “Tell you what, my antenna went up,” Biden said in a recent interview in his West Wing office.
Read the full piece here.
Video: resisting Alabama's voter ID law
Since 2014, Alabama citizens have been required to present a state-approved photo ID at the polls. The state acknowledges that up to 250,000 voters don’t have the required ID, often due to lack of accessibility. Alabama election officials insist that the law is intended to curb voter fraud. With only one known case of modern-day voter fraud in the state, Alabama citizens and politicians alike question the underlying motive of the law:
Twitter fight.
The results are in on the final debate and it is almost unanimous, I WON! Thank you, these are very exciting times.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2016
*checks watch. yawns*
Where was this kind of comedy last night? https://t.co/71JhLG55G5
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 21, 2016
*checks calendar. blinks*
On Sunday, Bill Murray will be recognized at the Kennedy Center with the Mark Twain prize for American humor.
Spotted at the White House: Bill Murray
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) October 21, 2016
Ex-aide says Christie knew about lane closures
Bridget Anne Kelly, the former deputy chief of staff to New Jersey governor Chris Christie who sent a notorious email announcing “time for traffic problems in Ft Lee” before lanes were closed on the George Washington bridge in 2013, has testified in federal court that Christie knew of the lane closure plan.
Christie has denied any knowledge of the plan. Prosecutors say the lanes were closed as political retribution against Ft Lee, New Jersey, mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, who had declined to endorse Christie in his reelection bid. The lane closures created traffic paralysis for days in the Ft Lee area, delaying emergency vehicles, school buses and other traffic.
Kelly’s testimony does not indicate that Christie planned the lane closures or viewed them as political retribution. Kelly testified that she told Christie that the closures were part of a traffic study.
WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein reports:
Bridgegate Defendant says Christie knew about the lane closures and gave his consent before she sent "Time for some traffic problems" email pic.twitter.com/M2rV20gf7j
— Andrea Bernstein (@AndreaWNYC) October 21, 2016
2/ Kelly said Christie’s response to info the @PANYNJ was doing a study” What’s our relationship with Mayor Sokolich?”
3/ Kelly says she discussed Mayor Sokolich’s public safety complaints with Christie on 9/11/13, while closures were on
4 Kelly, in tears sez Christie threw a water bottle at her and said “What do you think I am a fucking game show host?”
Clinton looks good in early voting – AP
Hillary Clinton appears to be displaying strength in the crucial battleground states of North Carolina and Florida among voters casting ballots before Election Day, and may also be building an early vote advantage in Arizona and Colorado, the AP reports:
Donald Trump, meanwhile, appears to be holding ground in Ohio, Iowa and Georgia, according to data compiled by The Associated Press. Those are important states for Trump, but not sufficient for him to win the presidency if he loses states like Florida or North Carolina.
“The Trump campaign should be concerned,” said Scott Tranter, co-founder of Optimus, a Republican data analytics firm. His firm’s analysis suggests a “strong final showing for the Clinton campaign” in early voting.
The Clinton campaign is looking to build an insurmountable lead in Florida and North Carolina during early voting. If she wins either of those states, she’ll probably be the next president.
Using 2012 as a guidepost, she appears to be in a strong position in early voting.
While Democrats tend to do better in early voting, Republicans usually post an initial lead with mail-in ballots before Democrats surpass them during in-person early voting in mid to late October.
Democrats so far have kept it close with mail-in ballots, giving Clinton a chance to run up the score with in-person early voting. To do that, she’ll need non-whites and young people to turn out near the high levels they did in 2012 for Barack Obama.
In North Carolina, Democrats have moved ahead of Republicans in early voting. Republicans had held a modest lead based on mail-in ballots returned, but that was at a much narrower margin than in 2012, when Mitt Romney narrowly won the state. After in-person voting began on Thursday, Democrats overtook Republicans in overall votes cast.
In Florida, a record 3.1 million people have requested ballots, more than one-third of the total voters in 2012. Democrats have requested almost as many ballots as Republicans: 39 percent vs. 40 percent.
By comparison, in 2008, Republicans held a lead of 49 percent to 32 percent in requests, according to an analysis for AP by Catalist, a Democratic analytical firm. Obama won in Florida in 2008 and 2012.
Democrats are also showing momentum in the 2nd congressional district of both Maine and Nebraska. The two states allocate electoral votes by congressional district.
There’s more where that came from. Read further here.
Clinton to meet with Black Lives Matter activists
In advance of her rally in Cleveland, Ohio, this afternoon, Hillary Clinton will meet with Movement for Black Lives activists Brittany Packnett and DeRay Mckesson, her campaign reports. She last met with the activists a year ago.
I'm looking forward to the conversation w/ @HillaryClinton today, following up on the previous in-person meeting. https://t.co/9qhWDw0P1F
— deray mckesson (@deray) October 21, 2016
Apologies for the outage
Hello, we’re back after an outage which we believe to have been related to this:
So, we’ve missed Trump’s speech in North Carolina. We’ll update you on any important news lines. The Guardian’s Ben Jacobs is watching:
Trump proclaims that the country is run by losers and babies
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) October 21, 2016
Here’s a photo from the event:
Venue is about half full. Trump comes out in about 10 mins. pic.twitter.com/ruVB5mFvHt
— Emma Loop (@LoopEmma) October 21, 2016
Updated
New Clinton ad features Khan family
The Clinton campaign has released a new ad featuring Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of slain Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in a suicide bombing attack in Iraq in 2004.
One of the sharpest moments of widespread bipartisan revulsion at Donald Trump in the campaign came when Trump criticized the Khans for their appearance at the Democratic national convention to tell their son’s story. Khizr Khan offered Trump his pocket constitution, wondering whether he’d ever read it. Trump discounted their story and questioned why Ghazala Khan did not address the convention.
The Khans are Muslim, as was their son.
Ghazala Khan does not speak in the ad, either, but she is pictured with her husband, who asks at the end of the ad, “Would my son have a place in your America?”
The campaign says the ad will air as part of an already existing ad buy in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Here’s the Khan’s appearance at the convention:
Updated
As we wait for Donald Trump to pop up in North Carolina, Mike Pence, his running mate, is headed for New Hampshire, for rallies in Nashua and Exeter. Here’s a nice snap from his press secretary:
TrumpForce2 is loaded up and heading to New Hampshire. Join Gov @mike_pence today https://t.co/44XdX099OY pic.twitter.com/iS4u5WM2K5
— Marc Lotter (@marc_lotter) October 21, 2016
An Ivanka Trump clothing boycott appears to be gaining steam, writes Joanna Walters for the Guardian:
Shannon Coulter, a technology and media marketing specialist based in the Bay Area, is going after Ivanka Trump, calling for the boycott on the clothing, jewelry, shoes, handbags and perfume that are branded as part of the widely sold Ivanka Trump Collection. She is also calling on the retailers that carry them – including Macy’s, Nordstrom, Amazon, Lord & Taylor, Marshalls and Zappos – to stop selling them. ...
On 11 October, Coulter created the hashtag #GrabYourWallet on Twitter – a call for shoppers to vote with their wallet, as well as a pointed echo of Donald Trump’s bragging on tape about being able to approach women uninvited and “grab them by the pussy”, which he subsequently apologized for but also sought to dismiss as “locker room talk”.
More than a million people have viewed her posts in the last 10 days and she is receiving 200 direct replies on Twitter per day and hundreds of retweets, according to a review of the relevant social media activity.
Coulter estimated that more than 50,000 respondents have expressed support for her campaign and at least 2,000 have said they will participate.
Read further:
Congressman: 'sometimes a lady needs to be told when she's being nasty'
Texas Representative Brian Babin, a Republican, got into a discussion on the conservative Alan Colmes talk show yesterday about whether it was appropriate for Donald Trump to call Hillary Clinton “such a nasty lady” at the debate Wednesday evening.
Babin tried to demur as a “southern gentleman” but then shared his opinion that “I think sometimes a lady needs to be told when she’s being nasty.”
Here’s a transcript via Fox:
COLMES: He called her a nasty woman, is that appropriate?
REP. BABIN: You know what? She’s saying some nasty things.
COLMES: You think it’s appropriate to call her a nasty woman?
REP. BABIN: Well I’m a genteel Southern gentleman, Alan.
COLMES: So does that mean no?
REP. BABIN: No, I think sometimes a lady needs to be told when she’s being nasty.
COLMES: Oh, really?
REP. BABIN: I do.
Babin is a Baptist dentist from Texas’ 36th district, the Houston suburbs. He’s a freshman congressman, having replaced former Representative Steve Stockman, the guy who brought Ted Nugent to the state of the union.
.@RepBrianBabin #Texas #GOP congressman on #Clinton: 'A lady needs to be told when she's being #nasty' https://t.co/aJGQWfLSYh pic.twitter.com/QHiDi4RJH0
— Rob Shiveley (@RobShiveley) October 21, 2016
Updated
Axelrod: Michelle Obama will not run for office
David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former top political strategist, has told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he would bet everything he owns that Michelle Obama, who has been thrilling crowds with powerful speeches in support of Hillary Clinton, will not run for office. Because no matter what it may look like, politics is not her thing.
Here’s their conversation, transcribed by HotAir, where you can listen to it:
HH: You’ve known her a long time. I actually have, I know she’s given a few political speeches. I think of her primarily as non-political.
DA: Yes.
HH: And is there a risk to her in doing this? Or is this simply a complement to what she’s done?
DA: Not in the way, I don’t think in the way that she is campaigning, you know, Hugh. You know, she’s giving speeches that are very sort of value-laden and personal and to her. I don’t think she’s hurting herself. It is, it is, to me, it’s really interesting, because you know, she was a reluctant conscript to politics. I mean, when Michelle, you know, she had her own sort of professional life, and she was very committed, as she is now, to the kids. And so there was this understanding between them before he ran for president that you know, that was his career. She would be as supportive as she could, but she wasn’t really involved. You know, she wasn’t, she didn’t campaign terribly much for him in 2004 when he ran for the Senate, for example, a campaign that I was involved in. And that was just the understanding between them. But you know, obviously when you run for president, that’s a different, it’s a different deal.
So she, you know, she became, you know, she gave up a lot to help him and assist him, and then as First Lady. And, but she’s, you know, to say, people say to me all the time well, do you think she might run for office sometime? I would bet everything that I own against that prospect. She is not someone who loves politics or, at all. And I don’t think she’s really out there as a political figure. Now she’s out there because she feels passionately about the choice here.
Barry Blitt on the cover of the new New Yorker captures the unusual role of Russian president Vladimir Putin in American civic life these days. “Donald really is as healthy as a horse,” Clinton said at the Al Smith dinner last night. “You know the one that Vladimir Putin rides around on.”
An early look at next week's cover, “Significant Others,” by Barry Blitt: https://t.co/1GWkiibj1T pic.twitter.com/UGZnNlE33h
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) October 21, 2016
Trump’s media pool is in position for his first rally of the day, in Asheville, North Carolina. At least 75 minutes till showtime and they’re already marinating them in Rolling Stones. The pool reports:
There’s a flea market situation going on outside with various tractor parts et al for sale, some fall foliage and a crisp, strong wind. We’re being serenaded with Les Mis and The Rolling Stones as we wait for Trump to arrive. The event, which is inside a hangar, is due to kick off at noon.
Senate judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley is up for reelection from Iowa this year, and there are good signs for him: polling averages have him up 13 points, and Iowa Republicans appear even to be sticking by Trump at the top of the ticket (like, perhaps, their counterparts in Ohio and in contrast with voters in other purplish states such as Pennsylvania-Virginia-Colorado).
Grassley is not phoning it in, though – he’s just produced an ad featuring Ben Stein reprising his Ferris Bueller role:
Chuck Grassley goes negative on Patty Judge in a new ad featuring Ben Stein doing his schtick from Ferris Bueller https://t.co/2YQ40jNYbK
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) October 21, 2016
Fun ad... except is anyone else bothered by Judge coming before Grassley in the roll call?
Corey Lewandowski made half a million dollars on campaign
Why is this man smiling?
Three-managers-ago Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been paid $541,000 so far by the Trump campaign, new federal election commission filings reveal. That’s not counting the money Lewandowski has made as a hired commentator at CNN.
Lewandowski, a police academy graduate, was a state-level political operative in New Hampshire before he jumped the Trump train.
The Huffington Post points out that neither Lewandowski nor other highly paid Trump hires have given any cash to the effort actually to elect the candidate:
Former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has made more than a half-million dollars from the GOP nominee’s run. Dan Scavino has made nearly $183,000 from it. Current campaign manager Kellyanne Conway’s polling firm has been paid nearly $382,000 in a single month.
(h/t @bencjacobs)
Former RNC chairman: 'I was damn near puking during the debates'
Michael Steele, the predecessor of Reince Priebus as chairman of the Republican National Committee, has announced that he’s not voting for Donald Trump, his party’s nominee. Buzzfeed reports:
“I will not be voting for Clinton,” Steele told a dinner in honor of the 40th anniversary of the progressive magazine Mother Jones in San Francisco Friday. “I will not be voting for Trump either.”
Steele, a former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, said that Trump has “captured that racist underbelly, that frustration, that angry underbelly of American life and gave voice to that.”
“I was damn near puking during the debates,” Steele said, adding that he believes Trump only represents 30% of the Republican Party.
Steele was criticized for mismanaging party funds and stepped down in January 2011. Current RNC chairman Reince Priebus has been a stalwart Trump-backer, seeking to enforce party discipline in support of the nominee with a warning in September that former presidential candidates who did not support Trump may not be allowed to run again.
Wow – Politics1.com points out that that’s six (6) former national party chairs who say they won’t vote Trump:
Update: SIX former RNC Chairs are not voting Trump: George HW Bush, Bill Brock, Marc Racicot, Mel Martinez, Ken Mehlman, Michael Steele.
— Politics1.com (@Politics1com) October 21, 2016
What’s going to happen to the Republican party after this election? Matthew Continetti has your long read on that right here in the Washington Free Beacon:
This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual. After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes, and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home. He finds the détente between conservatism and populism abrogated. His models—Buckley, Burnham, Will, Charles Murray, Yuval Levin—are forgotten, attacked, or ignored by a large part of the conservative infrastructure they helped to build. He finds the prospect of a reform conservatism that adds to our strengths while ameliorating our weaknesses to be remarkably dim. Such conservatism has exactly two spokesmen in the Senate. It has a handful of allies in the House and states.
From the Panama Canal to the Tea Party, from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin, the conservative intellectual has viewed the New Right as a sometimes annoying but ultimately worthy friend. New Right activists supplied the institutions, dollars and votes that helped the conservative intellectual reform tax, crime, welfare, and legal policy. But that is no longer the case. Donald Trump was the vehicle by which the New Right went from one part of the conservative coalition to the dominant ideological tendency of the Grand Old Party.
Updated
Hello, and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House.
Can we say we’re in the home stretch? Election day is three Tuesdays away. More than 4 million people have already voted, according to the Election Project. The debates are done. We’ve had more “October surprises” than we had a right to expect. Miley Cyrus is door-knocking in Virginia.
The election cycle passed another milestone last night with the Al Smith charity dinner, hosted by the archbishop of New York, where the candidates don formal attire and, traditionally, deliver self-deprecating humorous monologues, because in the end we’re all friends. Not this year, though, as Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton “corrupt” and she suggested that Vladimir Putin rides him like a horse. Here are those highlights:
Meanwhile on the trail ... Clinton campaigns in Cleveland today, while Trump has a North Carolina stop and two Pennsylvania stops planned. Trump running mate Mike Pence is in New Hampshire, Clinton running mate Tim Kaine is in Pennsylvania, and Vice-President Joe Biden also is in Pennsylvania. Bill Clinton is scheduled to speak twice in Florida.
Not speaking on behalf of Clinton today, that we know of, is the woman who has emerged as perhaps Trump’s most powerful critic: Michelle Obama. In a speech in Phoenix yesterday, Obama chastised Trump for refusing to say he would accept the election result. “You do not keep American democracy in suspense,” Obama said:
Thank you for reading and please join us in the comments.
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