* Rebecca Traister published two columns today. She calls it fretting and kvetching. In the first, she addresses the Nervous Nellies in the Democratic Party.
Perhaps those of us who are sitting around biting our nails right now are serving a kind of civic purpose. Perhaps our worry will keep the Clinton campaign on its toes, act as a nagging reminder that she needs to home in on a message that could appeal to voters no matter her opponent. More important, that aching anxiety that loss looms with every refresh of the FiveThirtyEight website is the antidote to electoral indolence, the one prophylactic we have against self-defeat.
In the second, she says, “Okay, electoral Eeyores, it is time to cheer up.”
Doesn’t the fact that Elizabeth Warren, a progressive firebrand who has led the party toward stronger economic policies before and since her election to the Senate in 2012, can feel so excited — can jump and dance and holler and clap and hug — about Clinton mean that maybe it’s time for the rest of her party to start expressing a little enthusiasm too?
* Remember when Rep. Chris Collins talked about Trump’s “virtual walls” and “rhetorical deportations?” Yeah, that’s happening.
Donald Trump may be finally gearing up to do what many Republican leaders have hoped: soften his rhetoric and pivot to the center.
He hasn’t done that yet. But there are growing signs that the presumptive Republican nominee is aiming to make his campaign more palatable to a general election audience.
His campaign is putting the finishing touches on a policy memo that would change his proposed ban on Muslim immigration to the United States. Instead of focusing the ban on Muslims, Trump would ban immigrants coming from countries with known terrorism links, training and equipment.
Meanwhile, he’s eased off his hardline language calling for deporting all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.
As I’ve been saying all along, why would anyone take anything that this man says seriously?
* Michelle Boorstein zeroes in on a quandary for some people on the religious right.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling tossing Texas abortion restrictions puts a massive spotlight on the new debate pressing evangelicals: Which is a worse sin, racism or abortion?
For decades, abortion has been the mother of all deciding issues for evangelicals, who make up about a quarter of the U.S. population and are strongly opposed. But in the 2016 race, with Donald Trump’s unusually incendiary comments about race, culture and religion, this second issue is becoming increasingly sacred.
This question of how to deal with Hillary Clinton’s robust support for abortion rights along with Trump’s challenging of the place of minorities is one of the most common at evangelicals’ dinner tables today, laying bare divisions between young and old and white and non-white. And it is a challenge to the evangelical-GOP alliance that has been sacrosanct for generations.
* Meanwhile, according to Stuart Rothenberg, strategists for Republican Congressional campaigns are beginning to plan for a “blank check” approach this election.
Long-time Republican strategists and campaign consultants privately acknowledge they are so certain of Hillary Clinton’s victory – and so worried about its impact on Senate races and GOP control of the Senate – that they are already considering a controversial tactic that explicitly acknowledges Donald Trump’s defeat.
The tactic, used by congressional Republicans two decades ago, late in the 1996 campaign, involves running television ads that urge voters to elect a Republican Congress so that Clinton won’t have “a blank check” as president.
It’s now official: Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has lost the support of his fellow Labour MPs. In a vote on Tuesday afternoon, Labour MPs approved a motion stating that they had lost confidence in Corbyn’s leadership by a margin of 172 to 40.
The ostensible reason for the mutiny against Corbyn is his tepid support for the Remain campaign in the June 23 referendum. But the more pressing concern is that it seems likely that a general election will be held at some point in the next year, and Labour MPs don’t believe he could lead the party to victory…
Despite all these attempts to push him out the door, Corbyn seems determined to stay put. After Tuesday afternoon’s vote, he declared: “I was democratically elected leader of our party for a new kind of politics by 60 percent of Labour members and supporters, and I will not betray them by resigning. Today’s vote by MPs has no constitutional legitimacy.”
What happens next? Who knows?
* We’re regularly reading stories about President Obama’s legacy these days. From the start, we’ve know that he plays the long game. This one will be decades in the making.
It is rare to go to a government event, especially where political leaders are speaking, in which you can stay awake or be truly inspired. Indeed, I had very low expectations of President Obama’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), which was held at Stanford University last week. I thought it would be nothing more than a publicity vehicle for the administration. But I left extremely impressed with the dynamism and energy that it generated and the positive impact it had on the entrepreneurs who were there from the United States and the developing world…
Government efforts to promote entrepreneurship always fail because they focus on building science parks and top-down clusters. Policy makers believe that by erecting fancy buildings and providing subsidies to select industries and venture capitalists, they can create innovation hubs. This is the wrong approach; what needs to be done instead is to remove the obstacles to entrepreneurship and change the culture so that failure is accepted and experimentation is encouraged. And then entrepreneurs need to be educated and provided with mentoring, inspiration and seed funding. This is exactly what the GES is doing — by design or by accident.
* Finally, here is my pick for Tweet-of-the-Day:
What Orwell failed to predict is that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.
— Keith Lowell Jensen (@keithlowell) June 20, 2013
