The Republican party wants my liberal vote. This was the most shocking wave to wash over my brain last week as I sat in the convention center in Cleveland. It was more startling in its way than the storm of hate that I saw descend on former GOP hero Ted Cruz, stranger than the absence of almost all the party’s recent standard-bearers, weirder than the police-state atmosphere that hovered over the streets of the city. The Republicans were trying to win the support of people…
On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders reiterated his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party nominee. On Tuesday, it was made official during the roll call vote, when Sanders himself stood among his Vermont delegation and moved that Clinton be nominated by acclamation. But on Wednesday, some delegates in the Sanders camp complained that Democratic Party officials who manage the convention had treated them as something less than their Clinton-pledged counterparts. Michael Wilson, a Sanders-pledged delegate from California, told me that floor officials attempted to confiscate…
On Monday night, Bernie Sanders, at times, struggled to calm his most ardent supporters, as TV cameras highlighted delegates in tears as he urged them to support Clinton. “Not for sale,” some delegates screamed. Sanders received the warmest applause of the night, basking in prolonged cheers as he took the stage, some of his delegates chanting “It’s not over.” But Democrats ended the night more optimistic than they began it — when failed and frantic attempts by Clinton and Sanders aides to quiet rebellious pro-Sanders…
Gary Johnson’s fondness for savaging Republicans gives way to a strange delicacy when Democrats are up for discussion. In a word-association exercise at a CNN town hall, Johnson labeled Clinton a “great public servant” and declined to elaborate. Sure, Johnson’s libertarianism puts him at loggerheads with orthodox conservatives on social and foreign policy. But it should also bring biting reproach of liberals and socialists, who reject constraints on government (like the Constitution) when these stand in the way of a desired result. Johnson, to win…
In Walt Whitman’s famous poem “Song of Myself,” the unnamed gestalt narrator boasts that he “contains multitudes.” There are few actual people about whom that can be said other than Donald Trump. The billionaire real estate developer has encouraged some of the worst racial and religious characteristics of the American Right but he is also the first truly 21st-century Republican presidential candidate. He made it official in the speech he delivered accepting the GOP’s nomination Thursday night in Cleveland. That dual identity was on display…
Leading up to this year’s Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, many worried that protests would be large, unruly and violent. […] But chaos hasn’t arrived. In fact, the protests at this year’s RNC are considerably smaller than we’ve seen at recent conventions. Why? The answer is not a newfound love of Donald Trump among social activists. The story is about organization — or rather, the lack of it. The groups interested in protest failed to forge a broad, unifying coalition that could bring together protesters…
Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. Who would have believed that when we started this journey on June 16, last year, we — I say we because we are a team — would have received almost 14 million votes, the most in the history of the Republican party? And that the Republican Party would get 60 percent more votes than it received eight years ago. Who would have believed it? The Democrats…
But if Trump’s working-class supporters were voting as much for the man as for his message, they were also clearly voting against a party leadership that pays them lip service while ignoring their concerns. Some of these concerns are rooted in racial anxiety, and an older generation’s inevitable fear of change. But many of them are rooted in basic human vulnerability — a very personal exposure to stagnant wages, family breakdown, military quagmires (America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America) and…
The evangelical divide over Trump has been widening for months, but it was only in recent weeks that the pro- and anti-Trump camps definitively split, with an increasing number of conservative evangelicals coming out forcefully against the candidate whom GOP consultant Rick Wilson once called “Cheeto Jesus.” The breaking point came on June 21, when Trump—ironically in an effort to appease the religious right—met with nearly a thousand evangelical leaders and announced a 25-person “evangelical advisory board” to help him reach conservative Christian voters. Almost…
When populism exploded again with the 2008 financial collapse and TARP bailout, the next generation of Republican leaders — led by Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan, the self-named Young Guns — took the Gingrich playbook and ran with it, exploiting and fueling populist anger at the political establishment and the new black president to take back power. The theory was that a deliberate strategy to make all government action in Washington look disastrous, whether by stopping legislation or delegitimizing the process and its…