Today in Campaign 2016
With both your bloggers on the road with different candidates - Tom McCarthy in Hartford, Connecticut, with Hillary Clinton and myself in Media, Pennsylvania, with John Kasich - the Guardian’s politics liveblog put an emphasis on the “live” today.
But beyond the basketball courts of rural Pennsylvania and the meeting halls of central New England, a slew of major national political stories percolated throughout the day. Here are some of the biggest moments from today’s campaign trail:
- Billionaire frontrunner Donald Trump shocked both supporters and detractors on the Today Show this morning when he said that he would have no problem with Caitlyn Jenner using the women’s bathroom at Trump Tower:
- Trump came out against a North Carolina law that criminalizes transgender people using bathrooms that comport with their stated gender identity, arguing that states should “Leave it the way it is.”
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Conservative firebrand Ted Cruz, who just today released an ad that portrays Trump as a liberal sympathizer, shot back on Twitter, and in his campaign’s swag store:
We shouldn't be facilitating putting little girls alone in a bathroom w/ grown men. That's just a bad, bad, bad idea https://t.co/fpj3vUjKuF
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 21, 2016
- Seated one hour from the Connecticut school where 20 children and six staff members were massacred a little more than three years ago, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton struck an emotional, reflective and urgent tone in appealing to voters to rally against the scourge of gun violence. “That is 33,000 people a year. A year,” Clinton said. “If anything else were killing 33,000 Americans a year, you can bet we would be fully mobilized doing everything we possibly could to save lives.”
- With a national debt clock ticking beside him, Ohio governor John Kasich told a crowd of roughly 500 students, employees and locals at Penn State’s Brandywine campus in remote Media, Pennsylvania, that if they have a problem, he’s not planning on fixing it. “You think I’m gonna fix your drug problem?” Kasich asked the crowd. “Come on folks. You wanna fix your drug problem, you fix it right here. Where do you fix it? You fix it in the schools. You unhappy with your schools? Fix ‘em!” Kasich continued.
- The Trump campaign outlined its general election strategy to the Republican establishment this evening in a closed-door briefing to members of the Republican National Committee, insisting that once voters get to know the real Trump as opposed to the public face he has presented while campaigning and while hosting the NBC reality show The Apprentice, they will warm to him.
That’s it from the campaign trail today - tune in tomorrow for more up-to-the-second news from the 2016 presidential campaign!
Bernie Sanders quotes Joe Biden's compliments at Philadelphia speech
In a speech in suburban Philadelphia, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders highlighted comments from vice president Joe Biden in which he lauded Sanders’ “aspirational approach” over opponent Hillary Clinton’s “caution.”
“I don’t think any Democrat’s ever won saying, ‘We can’t think that big - we ought to really downsize here because it’s not realistic,’” Biden told the New York Times. “C’mon man, this is the Democratic party! I’m not part of the party that says, ‘Well, we can’t do it.’”
“The vice president is exactly right,” Sanders told a crowd at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center outside of Philadelphia tonight, after reading the comments aloud. “This is what this campaign is about: It is about having the courage to face the reality of American life today, understanding that it is not always a pleasant, but having the courage to take on the special interests.”
“What it means is having the courage to envision a nation in which we fulfill the potential we know we have. It means we end a corrupt campaign finance system that allows billionaires to buy elections.”
We forgot to mention: Donald Trump, impatient with the introductions, decided to introduce himself at tonight’s speech in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“So, I’m supposed to wait a half an hour because there are thousands of people outside trying to get in,” Trump said. “I can’t do that to you, so we are going to come on right now.”
“I’ve never done that before!” he continued, with apparent delight. “I’ve never introduced myself! They didn’t quite say it right the first time. We have thousands of people outside! They’re going to pour in, they’re filling up the floor. Let’s start a little bit early.”
“To hell with this!”
Donald Trump took a page from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’ book at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, tonight, telling the crowd that he didn’t think that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton was qualified to serve as president.
“He [Sanders] said she suffers from bad judgement and she said – now I don’t know, I think she’s qualified, I guess,” Trump said. “But that doesn’t mean she’s good. He said she’s not qualified to be president. Now what he meant is because her judgement is so bad – so Bernie Sanders, not me, said she’s not qualified. So now I’m going to say: She’s not qualified, okay?”
Trump continued, saying that “we have all of the mistakes Hillary made as secretary of state” as evidence of her ineptitude.
“We have a mess: The War in Iraq has been devastating, we have probably spent $4 trillion in the Middle East.”
Still, Trump said, he’s more excited to run against Clinton than her opponent.
“I don’t want to run against Bernie,” he said. “I want to run against crooked Hillary Clinton. We are going to beat her so badly. Is there anyone more crooked than this woman?”
Donald Trump's campaign says his persona is all an act
The Trump campaign outlined their general election strategy to the Republican establishment this evening in a closed-door briefing to members of the Republican National Committee.
Over heaping piles of seafood, plates of cheese and an open bar, newly hired Trump campaign staffers Paul Manafort and Rick Wiley as well as former presidential rival Ben Carson at the Diplomat Resort and Spa in Hollywood, Florida, tried to sell longtime party activists on their candidate’s ability to beat Hillary Clinton in November.
This comes as part of a new charm offensive by Trump to become more of a traditional candidate that will include a foreign policy speech Wednesday at the National Press Club. The major and controversial shift in campaign strategy comes as Manafort has worked to sideline campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who has urged the necessity of continuing to let “Trump be Trump” and maintaining an unconventional outsider campaign.
Brushing past any concern that Trump might not be the nominee, Manafort and Wiley set out a general election argument where they insisted that Trump’s high negatives could be overcome. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 65% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Republican frontrunner.
They insisted, however, that once voters got to know the real Trump as opposed to the public face he has presented while campaigning and while hosting the NBC reality show The Apprentice, they will warm to him. He said that persona was just an act.
Manafort told reporters after the meeting: “We just have to present him in a way that shows all sides of Donald Trump.” They insisted to attendees that Clinton’s negatives were far harder to overcome and based on personality as well. Clinton is currently viewed negatively by 56% of voters according to the same poll. Notably, Manafort referred to Clinton as Crooked Hillary within the briefing, using the nickname that Trump bestowed upon her.
The two staffers also laid out a state-by-state general election path for Trump. The Trump officials had two tiers of targets. The first group consisted of states George W Bush won in 2004 and that Barack Obama won in 2008. These include perennial swing states such as Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Nevada.
The second group was what they described as “steel states”, which have not gone Republican since 1988: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Connecticut. There, they believed that Trump could win over former Democrats and edge out Clinton. However, they relied on public polling data that, in some cases, was months old to make this argument and Trump was not winning in a single one of those states.
Manafort and Wiley also took pains to reassure Republican party officials that they would work with state parties to raise money and support downballot candidates in November. As Manafort noted to reporters afterwards, the conversation was not just about expanding the map but how the campaign would “work with state parties to change the map”.
This was meant to reassure longtime party officials inside the room that the Trump campaign had turned the page. As Matt Moore, the chair of the South Carolina Republican party described it, “it was a peace offering” that they would raise money and help state parties after the frontrunner had spent much of the campaign railing against party elders.
Steve Duprey, a national committeeman from New Hampshire, told reporters: “They did more to reassure us that the Trump campaign is building out their infrastructure and understands the financial challenges of the general election.”
Speaking about the shakeup in the campaign, he added: “I think all of us who have been at this a long time are more reassured that they are doing this with folks who done this before.”
Updated
There are some lines that even a politician won’t cross:
Ted Cruz won't answer the question "is Joe Flacco elite?" Sad!https://t.co/SLQ4unN0KY
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) April 21, 2016
Donald Trump will change Republican party rules to make the nomination process more uniform if he becomes the GOP presidential candidate, Ben Carson said on Thursday.
In response to a question from the Guardian, Carson – once a rival to Trump in the Republican race and now one of the billionaire’s most high-profile backers – said that he thought Trump was committed to changing the rules of the Republican Party so that they would be “consistent across the country and not this way here and that way there”.
He added: “The only reason [for the current system] is if you wanted to manipulate the system.”
A source inside the briefing confirmed to the Guardian that Carson made similar remarks inside the room.
Carson, who was appearing as a surrogate for Trump at the RNC’s spring meeting in Hollywood, Florida, condemned the current system of nominating a Republican nominee as “corrupt”.
In an email to campaign supporters, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is using a major strike at Verizon Wireless as an example of the kinds of economic excesses he has built his campaign railing against - and as an opportunity to raise money.
“The CEO of Verizon makes almost $20 million a year in compensation. He leads one of the most profitable companies in the country,” Sanders writes. “Yet Verizon wants to take away employees’ health benefits. Verizon wants to outsource decent-paying jobs. Verizon wants to avoid paying federal income tax. And right now, Verizon is refusing to sit down and negotiate a fair contract with its employees.”
“In other words, Verizon is just another major American corporation trying to destroy the lives of working Americans,” he continues. “But this time, Verizon’s employees are fighting back. Thousands of very brave employees of Verizon and Verizon Wireless are on strike until they can get a fair contract. They made a very difficult decision that puts their families at risk - but it’s a choice they made to stand up for justice against corporate greed.”
“I’m asking you today to stand up and tell the CEO of Verizon that you think Verizon employees deserve a fair contract that protects health benefits, guarantees fair pay, and stops outsourcing,” he concludes.
Earlier this month, Sanders walked the picket line with Verizon protesters in New York, telling the roaring crowd that “You have chosen to stand up for dignity.” Nearly 40,000 Verizon Communications workers walked off the job two weeks ago in in one of the largest US strikes in recent years after contract talks hit an impasse.
The debate over whether to give the citizens of Washington, DC the right to representation in Congress has always had an undercurrent of partisanship: The heavily Democratic city would almost certainly add two hard-left Democrats into the mix in the US Senate, plus a deep blue representative in the House of Representatives.
Most Republicans typically distance themselves from endorsing the District’s disenfranchisement for purely political reasons - it doesn’t look good to declare that a federal district with a population larger than three states should be deprived of congressional representation because that population leans left. Ohio governor John Kasich, however, was readily honest about the issue during a meeting with the Washington Post’s editorial board.
“What it really gets down to if you want to be honest is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party,” Kasich told the board about the movement to give congressional representation to Washingtonians. (The US constitution does not allow the federal district representation, as it is not a state.)
Kasich had voted against a measure that would give DC statehood while he served in the House of Representatives, and told the board that “Yes, I would it say probably is” still his position on the matter.
When asked if it was true that “if there were Republicans in the District, you would have a different position?” Kasich demurred.
“It’s kind of hard for me to argue against it. I’d have to hear what the argument is.”
Hillary Clinton on gun violence:
That is 33,000 people a year. A year. If anything else were killing 33,000 Americans a year, you can bet we would be fully mobilized doing everything we possibly could to save lives. It is just too easy for people to reach for a gun to solve their problems. It makes no sense.
A man who piloted a one-person gyrocopter through some of the most restricted US airspace and landed on the lawn of the Capitol in Washington has been sentenced to 120 days behind bars, according to the Associated Press.
Florida resident Douglas Hughes has said his April 2015 flight in the bare-bones aircraft, which began in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was a way to call attention to the influence of big money in politics. Hughes pleaded guilty in November to a felony for operating a gyrocopter without a license.
Prosecutors asked he be sentenced to 10 months in prison, arguing that the former mail carrier from Ruskin, Florida, put countless lives at risk. Hughes’ attorneys argued he should be allowed to remain out of jail.
Hughes was carrying letters for each member of Congress on the topic of campaign finance and the tail of his aircraft had a postal service logo.
In a court document they filed ahead of the sentencing hearing, prosecutors argued Hughes’ flight “put unsuspecting people in real danger, disrupted operations at the United States Capitol, and demonstrated a profound disrespect for the law and the legitimate rights of others”. Hughes “craved attention” and “violated important public safety laws because he wanted people to pay attention to his political views”, they wrote.
As we liveblog from the back of a bus on the outskirts of Philadelphia, we can say with confidence that we may have gone to the wrong campaign event today:
OMG. There's an alpaca show going on at the same venue as the Trump rally in Harrisburg. So happy right now. pic.twitter.com/EARrkmx0Ll
— Ashley Killough (@KilloughCNN) April 21, 2016
Texas senator Ted Cruz is raising money off of Donald Trump’s comments this morning in favor of allowing transgender Americans to use public restrooms that comport with their stated gender identity, offering supporters the chance to pre-order a Trump-style red cap with the phrase “MAKE PC GREAT AGAIN” emblazoned above the brim.
Trump surprised many voters this morning when he told NBC’s Today Show that he opposed so-called “bathroom bills” like the one recently passed in North Carolina that criminalize using public restrooms that don’t match the gender stated on a person’s birth certificate.
“North Carolina did something that was very strong and they’re paying a big price. And there’s a lot of problems,” Trump said. “Leave it the way it is. North Carolina, what they’re going through, with all of the business and all of the strife - and that’s on both sides - you leave it the way it is. There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble.”
Cruz, whose social conservatism has prompted frequent critiques of Trump’s “New York values,” hit back with the hat and a tweet that characterized Trump’s comments as “facilitating putting little girls alone in a bathroom” with grown men.
We shouldn't be facilitating putting little girls alone in a bathroom w/ grown men. That's just a bad, bad, bad idea https://t.co/fpj3vUjKuF
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 21, 2016
Buzzfeed News has obtained archival footage of billionaire Republican frontruner Donald Trump telling NBC Nightly News that a woman who accused boxer Mike Tyson of rape - of which he was later convicted - had only herself to blame.
Uncovered footage of Trump in the Mike Tyson rape case blaming the victim, saying Tyson was "railroaded" in the case https://t.co/xlCevjswTb
— andrew kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) April 21, 2016
“You have a young woman that was in his hotel room late in the evening at her own will,” Trump in the video, which originally aired in February 1992. “You have a young woman seen dancing for the beauty contest - dancing with a big smile on her face, looked happy as can be.”
“It’s my opinion that to a large extent, Mike Tyson was railroaded in this case,” Trump said later in the video.
In 1992, an Indiana jury found Tyson, who has endorsed Trump’s presidential bid, guilty of raping an 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant. Desiree Washington, who held the title of Miss Black Rhode Island at the time, testified that sexually assaulted her in an Indianapolis hotel room. Facing a maximum of 60 years in prison, Tyson was sentenced to six and served three.
Ahead of the so-called “Acela primaries” next week, Texas senator Ted Cruz has released three new advertisements as part of a statewide buy in Pennsylvania, in the hopes that the Keystone State will get reacquainted with him after his blistering loss in the New York Republican primary earlier this week.
The first ad, titled Right, is a 19-second spot that aims to contrast Cruz’s plan for the nation with that of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Obama was a failure,” the announcer declares. “Hillary could be worse. We have to get this right. Ted Cruz will. Repeal ObamaCare. Grow jobs. Destroy ISIS.”
“Jobs, freedom, security: Cruz.”
The second advertisement, Solutions, is a 30-second spot that lauds the Texas senator as caring more about America’s future than “bickering” with his opponents like schoolchildren.
“I don’t think the people of America are interested in a bunch of bickering schoolchildren,” Cruz says in the ad. “They’re interested in solutions, not slogans. This is the single moms, the truck-drivers and the steelworkers and the mechanics with callouses on their hands. This is all the young people coming out of school that aren’t able to find a job.”
“As president, I will repeal Obamacare, pull back the EPA and all the regulators that are killing small businesses and manufacturing. We’re going to see wages going up, we’re going to see opportunity. We need a president who stands with the American people.”
In Not Easy, Cruz’s third ad, Cruz’s campaign lumps Clinton together with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump as a pair of wealthy elites who “just don’t get it.”
Quoting Clinton, who told Diane Sawyer that she took immense speaking fees because “we came out of the White House not only dead-broke but in debt,” and Trump, who told a debate audience that “It has not been easy for me... My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars,” an announcer intones:
“They just don’t get it. Ted Cruz does. That’s why he’ll cut taxes for working families. Roll back regulations. And repeal ObamaCare. Jobs, freedom, security for you. For a change.”
John Kasich to Pennsylvania voters: 'Citizen, govern thyself'
With a national debt clock ticking beside him, Ohio governor John Kasich told a crowd of roughly 500 students, employees and locals at Penn State’s Brandywine campus in remote Media, Pennsylvania, that if they have a problem, he’s not planning on fixing it.
“You think I’m gonna fix your drug problem?” Kasich asked the crowd. “Come on folks. You wanna fix your drug problem, you fix it right here. Where do you fix it? You fix it in the schools.”
“You unhappy with your schools? Fix ‘em!” Katich continued. “Why don’t you just do it - why don’t you just fix it? What are we waiting on?”
“You worried about poverty? Welfare? That’s not a hard one to fix either, really,” Kasich told the crowd. (According to US census data, about 6.1% of families and 7.9% of the population of Media live below the poverty line, including 9.7% of those under age 18 and 11.2% of those age 65 or over.)
“Why don’t we start fixing things? Why don’t we believe in ourselves?”
The largely working-class crowd was muted for most of his speech, with the largest bout of applause reserved for a line that seemed to run counter to his narrative of community-based self sufficiency: “Your job, if you’re a public official, is to raise peoples’ lives. If you’re not doing that, then get out - plain and simple.”
The Ohio governor highlighted his connection to Pennsylvania and its Rust Belt citizens, describing a hardscrabble childhood as the son of a coal miner in a town where “if the wind blew the wrong way, people found themselves out of work.”
Pointing to a counter that ticked away the amount of American national debt, Kasich attempted to explain the connection between sovereign debt and the local economy in Media.
“When this number goes up, the number of jobs for our graduates goes down. And when that number goes down, the number of job opportunities for our families goes up,” Kasich said.
But despite the ticker and the opening monologue about local political change as the engine for economic growth, Kasich spent most of his time in Media attempting to distance himself both from his “radical” primary opponents and the Republican establishment. Describing the Republican Party as “my vehicle, and not my master,” Kasich told the chuckling audience that “the only person that tells me what to do is my wife.”
“The anxieties are real, people feel really ripped off in many cases, and I think it;s being fed in a lot of cases by talk radio, and talk television,” Kasich said, of the reason that the Republican Party appears so divided in this election cycle.His opponents’ argument is “that they’re throwing all the pieces off the chess board so they can start the game over again.”
“Anger sells. Strife sells,” Kasich said. “But that’s not where we wanna live, is it?”
Kasich left after speaking and answering questions for roughly 45 minutes. When he began, the national debt clock was at $19,252,130,990,144,000 and change. When he left, the national debt clock had risen by more than $48 billion, to $19,252,179,093,543,000 and change.
John Kasich, apparently an action-movie buff, used the example of a James Bond chase scene to describe how the US can fight international terrorism.
In a town hall here at the Brandywine campus of Penn State in Media, Pennsylvania, the father of a 9/11 survivor asked Kasich whether he would use “all of America’s tools and power - military, economic, moral - to keep our country safe?”
First off, Kasich said, he would streamline the military and its attendant contractors. “We have more people working in bureaucratic functions than we have people actually serving in the military,” Kasich said. “The United States is gonna have to be involved in heaping the world to come together in two areas: intelligence gathering and policing.”
Then, he made a somewhat tortured reference to “the helicopter scene” in Spectre, the most recent James Bond film, which Kasich had watched on the campaign jet the night before. “Like him, we need to pull out of this, have confidence in ourselves, and have leaders who don’t promise what they can’t deliver.”
Updated
John Kasich takes the stage at Penn State
Opening with a monologue about the importance of small communities in solving their own problems, the Ohio governor pointed to the example of Harriet Tubman, the newly minted face of the $20 bill.
“She wasn’t some big shot - she became a big shot because of what she did,” Kasich said. “She started a movement - she drove change from the bottom up. She saw something that she thought was just patently unfair. This lady just put one foot in front of the other… and just changed the world.”
Updated
A trio of college students was mostly pleased that John Kasich had bothered to visit the far-flung campus at all.
“Not many of the candidates come to a smaller satellite campus - they go to the main campus, or they go to Penn in Philly,” said Rob Hale, a two-tour veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who studies business at Penn State. “If you take the time to come out to a smaller campus, it says something.”
“It’s a rare opportunity to take advantage of a real candidate out here,” agreed his friend Vince Scrocca, also a business major.
“I’m actually a Trump guy,” admitted Tom Clark, a business and finance major who sported a grey “Trump for President” T-shirt underneath his polar fleece. “I think they’re all pretty crooked.”
Hale, a former Marine who probably knew more about federal policy on opioids than most college students, told the Guardian that the issue that motivated him to hear Kasich speech was reform in the Department of Veteran Affairs and, conjointly, marijuana decriminalization.
“[Twenty-four] states have legalized its use, at least medically, but on the federal level it’s still a schedule-one drug,” Hale said passionately. “A candidate needs to be forward-thinking enough to look into new solutions for our health care problems. You know, our debt is increasing a lot because of the War on Drugs.”
“I was in the Marine Corps, fighting with the British SAS, and so many vets are hopped up on opioids because the VA can’t put money or research into anything else,” Hale continued. “Twenty-two vets a day kill themselves, and I’m sure if you added opioid abuse to that number, it’d be higher.”
Updated
I’m here at the Brandywine campus of Penn State in Media, Pennsylvania, where Ohio governor John Kasich is about to participate in a town hall event in front of this national debt ticker:
Updated
Ted Cruz is hunting hard for votes in Indiana, which holds its primary on 3 May:
.@tedcruz stopped by Shapiro's #IN meet a few peeps and grab a Reuben #CruzToVictory #CruzCrew #Cruz2016 pic.twitter.com/XOgtKieLgT
— bruce redden (@brucereddenjr) April 21, 2016
The anti-Trump Our Principles Pac has released a memo throwing water on the idea that the Trump campaign has gained new momentum of some sort after the real estate mogul’s resounding win in New York this week.
“Despite Trump’s victory in New York on Tuesday night, he still has a nearly impossible path to secure the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot,” the memo argues. It continues:
Looking ahead to the 5 primaries on April 26, our planning assumes Trump can win nearly all of the bound delegates without improving his very slim chances.
Yesterday morning, the Trump campaign apparently released a memo claiming a road ahead that is, quite frankly, detached from reality. There is no plausible scenario by which Trump can secure 1,400 bound delegates prior to the start of the convention. In order to secure 1,400 delegates, he would have to win 82% of all remaining delegates, a task simply not possible for him or any candidate at this stage in the process.
Scott Walker, Prince fan:
Dearly beloved. We are gathered here today. To get through this thing called life... pic.twitter.com/cwmZrN3C9N
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) April 21, 2016
(h/t @lgamgam)
Colorado governor John Hickenlooper: Prince fan.
Purple mountains majesty.#RIP @prince pic.twitter.com/y1gk9Nq0o5
— John Hickenlooper (@hickforco) April 21, 2016
(h/t @bencjacobs)
Updated
Trump and Cruz argue over North Carolina transgender law
Donald Trump would have no problem with Caitlyn Jenner using the women’s bathroom at Trump Tower, he said during a town hall event on NBC’s Today show.
Trump was asked his views on North Carolina’s controversial new law that requires transgender people to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
Noting the backlash against the law, Trump said the state should “leave it the way it is right now”.
“What they’re going through with all the business that’s leaving, all of the strife – and this is on both sides. Leave it the way it is,” Trump said, apparently referring to the number of businesses boycotting the state’s law.
Asked if he has any transgender people working for him, Trump said: “I really don’t know. I probably do. I really don’t know.” He said if transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner came to Trump Tower, she could use “whatever bathroom she wanted”.
Conservative firebrand Ted Cruz, who just today released an ad that portrays Trump as a liberal sympathizer, shot back on twitter.
Common sense: grown men shouldn't be in bathrooms w/ little girls. @realDonaldTrump told us he could be PC, but wow. https://t.co/WB93ATZYy4
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 21, 2016
Trump meanwhile wasn’t as jazzed at the news that abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman will replace the slaveholding seventh president, Andrew Jackson, on the front of the $20 bill. Trump said he would prefer that Tubman’s face grace the rare $2 bill.
“I think Harriet Tubman is fantastic,” Trump said. “I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if we can maybe come up with another denomination. Maybe we do a $2 bill.”
Politicians are reacting on Twitter to the reported death of pop god Prince:
Heartbroken to hear Prince has died. Hope he's found his world of never ending happiness/You can always see the sun, day or night. #RIP
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) April 21, 2016
Today not only doves are crying. #RIPPrince #Prince
— Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) April 21, 2016
If were in the #Senate still, I'd commander the floor and filibuster the session by singing every #Prince song ever recorded. On a loop.
— Mo Cowan (@mocowan) April 21, 2016
Updated
New York has voted, but it’s never too late for Mark Ruffalo and Bernie Sanders to take a stroll through Brooklyn?
.@MarkRuffalo and Bernie took a walk through Brooklyn, New York and talked about what it was like growing up there.https://t.co/sI83mUGFoa
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 21, 2016
A man who identifies himself as an OB/GYN from neighboring Windsor stands up and praises Clinton for not being a robot.
“I also want to say that you are very human,” the man says. “I don’t care what they say but you are very human.”
Clinton has a winsome reply:
“Well, I hope somebody got that on film, doctor!”
Then she says they have to wrap it up.
Clinton calls on “that gentleman over there against the wall with that very attractive portrait of me on it.”
He identifies himself as a “30-year-old, Latino, gay physician” and says that he’s touched by the link between the need for better mental health care and gun violence. He says caregivers feel “strain” to fill the holes in social services and mental health care gaps.
Clinton thanks him for his work and for his perspective.
Clinton is asked about targeting illiteracy. She says that “among the frustrations that people face is the feeling that they have not been successful academically.”
“I think we have to have a set of interventions and opportunities,” Clinton says.
“Those first five years of life are critical at getting children to succeed,” she says. She says that families must be the first educators of children, and describes an adult literacy program for parents that she brought to Arkansas.
“In the schools, I’m saying something that’s so obvious, our public schools are being starved of resources... if we don’t pay attention to everything that goes on in schools.. and then we need constant, continuing learning.”
Clinton has a lot of enthusiasm for talking about schools.
Another question from the audience. “My heart is so with you and everyone else in the room.” She says 20 years before Sandy Hook, a friend’s son was killed at a college at 22 years old. She says the whole thing happened because legislators loosened ammunition sales laws.
“I’m so happy that you are running because your experience, your network” – the questioner says president Obama was elected too soon and does not have Clinton’s network.
“You are the only person that has the capability out of everybody that’s running to change our nation,” the questioner says.
Clinton says “it has to be a continuing commitment. I will say this. In political terms, the gun lobby never rests, and they only have one issue they care about. All the rest of us... we care about a lot of things. The other side cares about one thing.”
Clinton appeals to the audience to, in addition to everything else they care about, “please, please make comprehensive gun safety reform at the top of your list.”
A member of the audience at the Clinton event who identifies himself as a pastor stands to tell his personal story. “My prayer is that you get elected, because you seem to want to hear the pain,” he tells Clinton.
“Welcome to the 06120, the poorest zip code in the state of Connecticut,” he begins. He says his son was shot dead in the back in October 2012 as a 20-year-old by a 20-year-old. “It ripped a hole in my life,” he says. “Death beat me like this? Death does this to me, and God doesn’t answer? I’ve never been able to go back home again.
“We’ll never be able as a country to go back home again.... America’s narrative has been changed because of gun culture in this county.
“I felt guilty about the loss of my son.”
CLinton replies: “Let the congregation say, Amen.”
Clinton:
“I want to be the president for the struggling and the striving. I want to be the president who finally figures out how we do provide more resources, starting with early childhood education...
“And I want to say a very special word about the foster care system. When children are removed from a home, and put in a foster care system, I believe they become all our children.
“I want to make sure that these children do not get lost. That they don’t have a worse situation.”
Governor Dannel Malloy speaks from the audience. Too many states have failed to respond to the threat of gun violence, he says.
“If this industry was treated like every other industry in America, we wouldn’t have problems like we have today,” Malloy says. He says that Connecticut is home to big pharmaceutical companies that are heavily regulated and it makes them safer and better. The same should be in place for guns, he says.
Hartford mayor Luke Bronin then thanks Clinton for coming and visiting “Hartford, especially north Hartford, Alabany Avenue.” He’s applauded.
Clinton says that people on the terrorist watch list should not be able to buy guns as a matter of law. Then she says that immunity from liability for gun manufacturers should be repealed - she mentions that Sanders voted in favor of such immunity.
“We ned a very big tent... I am absolutely determined to make this into an issue that cannot be ignored,” Clinton says.
Clinton: 'too many guns in this country'
Clinton says she wishes to summarize “the various aspects of the epidemic we are facing.”
Some are rooted in the mental health system, she says. “You see someone suffering from untreated mental health, people back off.”
But another problem is victim blaming she says – or blaming the vicim’s family, or neighborhood.
It’s wrong, Clinton says, to “try to find somebody to blame instead of saying, you know what, we just have too many guns in this country, in the wrong hands and we need to address it.”
“I find it absolutely indefensible, the arguments that are made by people who will not accept responsibility for what is happening in our country,” Clinton says, following a rounsing talk by Melba Marquez-Greene, who lost her 6-year-old daughter Ana Grace in the Sandy Hook shooting.
Clinton says Marquez-Greene gave Clinton the book she and her daughter had been reading the night before the daughter was killed, for Clinton to read to her daughter (or perhaps granddaughter).
“When you take a stand against the gun lobby, you are subject to some of the most vile harassment on the internet,” Clinton says. “Erica found that out when she decided” to speak out.
“This is not some kind of free opportunity for any of the panelists. They’ve put themselves in the public, some for the first time on the national level, and it’s important that those of us who want to support them stand up for them.”
Kimberly Washington, founder of the New Haven-based anti-gun violence group Mothers Demand Action, said she got involved in the issue because “I can’t just watch young people, our children, killing each other every single day.”
“Like Erica said, New Haven? We got Sandy Hook every day,” Washington says.
“For all the people who came out today, you need to think about, it could be someone in your family that this could happen to.”
Updated
Iran Nazario, director of community outreach at Compass peacebuilders youth collaborative in Hartford, is telling the story of his youthful gang involvement, which culminated in a prison sentence for him and the murder of his brother.
“There are kids out there whose souls are trapped, and they need us, and they need these laws and they need this control,” Nazario says.
Clinton insert an explanation that Nazario ended up in foster care with his brothers and sisters. She says she wants to expand on the gangs issue.
“Joining a gang is like having a family,” Clinton says... “So we’re either gonna have gangs that murder and rob.. or we’re gonna have positive gangs, we’re gonna have positive alternatives for young people.”
She says most gun violence deaths affect young African American and Latino men, and that the leading cause of death for young African American men – more than the next nine causes combined – is gun violence.
Erica Smegielski is the first to speak. “Prior to that day, I was one of those people who didn’t have gun violence on my radar,” she says of the Sandy Hook shooting.
The reality is, my mom was murdered, and she is not coming back no matter how hard I fight... what I can do is stand up and use my voice, and use my story, in order to motivate other people to use their voice and share their story, and come together on this issue.
I’m asking each of you to get involved, before you find out the hard way.
Smelgieski says the problem goes beyond Sandy Hook.
Mass shootings are the minority. What we have to focus on is the everyday gun violence that plagues our cities, that plagues our streets that plagues our towns.
Clinton sketches a few of her leading policy prescriptions on guns: comprehensive background checks and closing the so-called gun show loophole and the Charleston loophole, by which gun purchases are allowed to go forward without background checks if the checks take more than three days. The shooter in the June 2015 church massacre in Charleston, SC, obtained a gun through such a loophole.
“I am not here to make promises we can’t keep,” Clinton says. “I am here to tell you I will use every minute of every single day if I’m fortunate enough to become president ... to change gun culture. It is just too easy for people to reach for a gun to solve their problems. It makes no sense.”
Clinton says that sensible gun control reform is possible within the guidelines of the second amendment.
Clinton takes stage at gun violence event
Hillary Clinton has taken the stage in the Hartford YMCA gym, and is introduced by Erica Smegielski, daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung. Smegielski calls Clinton “my partner in this fight.”
The issue of gun violence is “personal for Connecticut,” Smegielski says, “and not just because of Sandy Hook, which we all lived, you lived that with me,” but because of daily gun violence.
Clinton begins: “If anything else were killing 33,000 Americans a year, you can bet we’d be fully mobilized, doing anything we possibly could to save lives.”
Clinton recalls her withdrawal from 2008 race
Asked in an appearance on morning TV about her prospects for attracting Bernie Sanders supporters should he – once he? – withdraws from the nominating race, Hillary Clinton drew on a convenient analogy: her own withdrawal from the 2008 nominating race.
“I know something about this,” she said, “because people remember that president Obama and I ran a really tough race for the entire primary season, and he ended up with more delegates, and I withdrew, I endorsed him and then I got to work.”
She continued:
And remember, when I withdrew in June of 2008, polls were showing that at least 40% of my supporters said that oh, they weren’t going to support Senator Obama. So I had to get to work, and I had to make the case, I nominated him at the convention, i went from group to group... convincing people who were my delegates to come together, to unify, because what then-senator Obama had in common was much greater than our differences.
I’m confident that we’ll all join together.
California is the biggest prize in the US presidential primary cycle – and, as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich will discover when they travel to the state later this month, the most complicated, demanding and expensive political battlefield, writes the Guardian’s Maria L La Ganga:
For decades, the state has been irrelevant to presidential nomination contests.
With its primaries on the tail end of the election cycle, the last time the Golden State mattered to Democrats was in 1972, and California has not been relevant to Republicans since 1964.
This year is different. If Trump is to either win the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination or get close enough to effectively seal victory, then the finish line will be marked in California.
For Cruz, Kasich and much of the Republican establishment, the contest is likely to be their last chance to stop the businessman. There are other important contests that will come first – particularly the one held in Indiana. [For more on the importance of Indiana click here.]
But none is expected to have a bigger impact on the outcome of the race than California. Trump hopes to perform well there in June off the back of his convincing victory in New York on Tuesday, which followed a string of losses.
Read the full piece here:
Actors in Ted Cruz ad depict Clinton, Abedin
As we wait for Clinton to take the stage, let’s take a quick look at what else is happening on the campaign landscape.
Here’s one that’s as hard to miss as it is to make sense of: Ted Cruz has produced a new video ad with actors portraying Hillary Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin detailing the opposition research file against Donald Trump.
It’s a fairly nasty, and let’s just go ahead and call it sexist, ad for its depiction of Clinton, whose stand-in wears deeply furrowed lines on her upper lip (is that a prosthesis?) to express age. This is Clinton-as-crone.
After the strategy team in the ad gets through slides detailing Trump’s misdeeds and weaknesses, which make them chortle, the Clinton character is handed a file which opens to reveal Ted Cruz and then she is advised that there would be no way to beat Cruz in a general election. When in fact airing this ad for the majority of Americans who don’t subscribe to insane Huma Abedin conspiracy theories would probably work pretty well as an illustration of some of Cruz’s potential flaws.
We’re inside the Wilson-Gray YMCA in Hartford, Connecticut, where Hillary Clinton is scheduled to hold a discussion with family members of gun violence victims.
Hundreds of people queued for hours outside, and many were still waiting to be admitted to the event, staged at one end of the Y gym (there are enough attendees to fill a basketball court, and enough media to field multiple teams).
The gym has been adapted for the occasion with three US flags of descending size, two Connecticut flags and a lot of folding chairs. Hanging next to the stage are four banners with pictures of happy kids reading “cool,” “super,” “wow” and “magic.”
In conjunction with this morning’s event, the Clinton campaign has released a video ad featuring Erica Smegielski, daughter of Dawn Hochsprung, the principal who was among the six educators killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary attack.
“My mom was murdered while trying to protect the children in her care from a gunman,” says Smegielski:
No one is fighting harder to reform our gun laws than Hillary Clinton. She is the only candidate who has what it takes to take on the gun lobby.
She reminds me of my mother. She isn’t afraid of anything.
Updated
Hello and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. We’re running the blog this morning from Hartford, Connecticut, where Hillary Clinton is about to convene a meeting with family members of victims of gun violence, including families of victims of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, about 50 miles west of here.
Later today the blog will jump to Philadelphia, to be typed from the scene of a rally for stalwart Republican hopeful John Kasich.
The Guardian’s Lois Beckett reported on Wednesday that families of Sandy Hook victims are suing the maker, distributor and dealer of the Bushmaster rifle used in the shooting:
The companies’ militaristic marketing of the AR-15 style rifles is at the center of the suit. From a legal perspective, experts say, the lawsuit has a remote chance of success. But it has gained political prominence in the Democratic presidential race, with Hillary Clinton using her support for the lawsuit as a rallying point on her way to victory in the New York state primary, and Bernie Sanders facing increasing criticism for his comments against it.
In the messy fight for the Republican nomination, meanwhile, the party’s national committee has convened its spring meeting at a luxury seaside resort in South Florida. Ted Cruz and Kasich are in attendance, while Donald Trump has dispatched top aides to make his case for the nomination.
While the distinguished party figures in attendance have the power to tailor rules for how the Republican nominee is selected at July’s national convention, RNC chairman Reince Priebus reportedly opposes taking such a step in the current round of meetings, out of (extremely well founded) concerns that any rules revision would be brandished by Trump as further evidence of a rigged system.
Senator Ted Cruz has been MATHEMATICALLY ELIMINATED from race. He said Kasich should get out for same reason. I think both should get out!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2016
Bernie Sanders shared good news late Wednesday, in the form of a Federal Elections Commission filing, with supporters disappointed with his loss in New York: in March his campaign raised nearly $46m, to only $29.3m for Clinton.
And yet:
Hillary Clinton can lose every remaining primary in coming weeks, still clinch Democratic presidential nomination: https://t.co/LKgq9ODDVU
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) April 21, 2016
Thanks for reading and as always join us in the comments. We’ll be blogging from inside the Hartford YMCA shortly.
Updated
