Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Debagging the D-Bag Donald

by |6:26 am|1 Comment

Kinda long for reading over coffee, but so full of delightful nuggets. NYMag‘s Gabriel Sherman takes a break from poking Roger Ailes with a stick to pants another perennial NYC pest in “Operation Trump”:

… Hardly any of Trump’s staffers arrived at their positions with high-level political experience. The last time Lewandowski ran a campaign was in 2002, when he managed a losing Senate reelection bid in New Hampshire. Hicks and Scavino spent zero time in politics before this. Hicks did PR for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line and promoted Trump resorts. Scavino graduated from caddying to serve as general manager at Trump National Golf Club; he spent his free time as an unpaid disc jockey at a local radio station. Trump’s national spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, is a onetime Obama supporter turned tea-party activist who once was arrested for shoplifting. His foreign-policy advisers include a former banker who writes a foreign-policy blog that quotes Kanye West and Oprah, and an energy consultant whose LinkedIn page cites as a foreign-policy credential being one of five finalists for a model-U.N. summit…

As early as 1987, Trump talked publicly about his desire to run for president. He toyed with mounting a campaign in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket, and again in 2012 as a Republican (this was at the height of his Obama birtherism). Two years later, Trump briefly explored running for governor of New York as a springboard to the White House. “I have much bigger plans in mind — stay tuned,” he tweeted in March 2014.

Trump taped another season of The Apprentice that year, but he kept a political organization intact. His team at the time consisted of three advisers: Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Sam Nunberg. Stone is a veteran operative, known for his gleeful use of dirty tricks and for ending Eliot Spitzer’s political career by leaking his patronage of prostitutes to the FBI. Cohen is Trump’s longtime in-house attorney. And Nunberg is a lawyer wired into right-wing politics who has long looked up to “Mr. Trump,” as he calls him. “I first met him at Wrestle­Mania when I was like 5 years old,” Nunberg told me.

Throughout 2014, the three fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence. “I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

Meanwhile, Trump used his wealth as a strategic tool to gather his own intelligence. When Citizens United president David Bossie or GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump for contributions, Trump used the conversations as opportunities to talk about 2016. “Reince called Trump thinking they were talking about donations, but Trump was asking him hard questions,” recalled Nunberg. From his conversations with Priebus, Trump learned that the 2016 field was likely to be crowded. “We knew it was going to be like a parliamentary election,” Nunberg said.

Which is how Trump’s scorched-earth strategy coalesced. To break out of the pack, he made what appears to be a deliberate decision to be provocative, even outrageous. “If I were totally presidential, I’d be one of the many people who are already out of the race,” Trump told me. And so, Trump openly stoked racial tensions and appealed to the latent misogyny of a base that thinks of Hillary as the world’s most horrible ballbuster…

If Trump makes it to the nomination, he will face other challenges for which he seems right now completely unprepared. He’ll have to rally at least some of the GOP Establishment, which he’s spent the last year vilifying… He will also have to figure out how to raise money. Trump won’t fund a general election himself, and he has no national fund-raising apparatus in place. During my tour of Trump’s campaign office, I overheard Glassner on the phone discussing the nascent state of their finance efforts. “I have to find a place for these rich guys to go to,” he said. “Dinners, receptions, events. We need everything, because we don’t have a finance committee.” It will be a hard sell for Trump, one of the hardest of his career, to persuade GOP donors to pony up, especially after his attacks on the donor class. Groups like the Club for Growth have been committed to stopping Trump. And the Koch brothers have also been unhappy; the assumption is that they will sit this election cycle out…

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Apart from schadenfreude — and the Wisconsin primary, if you can bear the idea — what’s on the agenda for the day?



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Late Night Cheap Entertainment Open Thread: Southern Shade Is Thrown

by |2:27 am|59 Comments

Well, that was… counterproductive, would be my judgement. In case the comparison is as opaque for you as it was for me, the Washington Post explains “Tim Robbins’ Very Bad Take”:

… “After the Southern primaries,” he said, “you had called the election” — apparently referring to the media. “And who’s fooling who? Winning South Carolina in the Democratic primary is about as significant as winning Guam. No Democrat is going to win in the general election. Why do these victories have so much significance?”

This is a not-uncommon argument among supporters of Sanders. Yes, Hillary Clinton is winning. But she’s winning largely because she ran up big margins in Southern states. That, the argument goes, bodes poorly for the general, since those Southern states usually vote Republican.

This is a bad argument that borders on insulting.

First of all, South Carolina has a lot more people than Guam. Among the other bits of data one can point out about the 2016 Democratic primary is that Clinton has received far more votes than Sanders — 2.5 million more. Among those is a margin of about 175,000 more votes in the state of South Carolina, a margin that by itself is larger than the population of Guam…

As for the general election: Those of us who were paying attention in 2008 will remember that the same red-state critique was leveled at Barack Obama then. He was only really winning Southern states, Clinton’s supporters noted, which spelled doom for the general election… Read more →



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Open Thread: Another Bill Kristol Projection!

by |9:45 pm|148 Comments

Ted Cruz weeps softly into his bier…

Some people say that Cruz is embracing Fiorina so he’ll have a woman to hide behind when the DC Madam’s black book gets released, but I think it’s a natural meeting of the sociopathic minds.



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Monday Evening Open Thread: Respite

by |5:38 pm|207 Comments

Many thanks to commentor Schrodinger’s Cat! I don’t have any expertise to judge Indian cinema, but per Wikipedia, Haider is a retelling of Hamlet and this clip is ‘the play within the play.’ (And a demonstration that you can do impressive political protest with giant puppets, as long as they’re being handled by military reservists.) It impressed my dance-knowledgeable Spousal Unit he’s now scouring the net for a version of the film with English subtitles.

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Apart from enjoying the finer arts, what’s on the agenda for the evening?



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Blue eyes holding back the tears

by |3:27 pm|218 Comments

Serious Republicans are having a sad about Trump, and the only prescription is more Paul Ryan.

I don’t think Ryan’s chiseled pecs have quite the same effect on reg’lar Applebee’s going Americans as they do on David Brooks, but I fear that if Ol’ Blue Eyes gets the nomination, the force of the collective Beltway orgasm will tear the fabric of the space-time continuum.

Can you imagine what the propaganda would be like from July to November?



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Get that Bullshit Out of My Face

by |12:40 pm|184 Comments

When I was in the army, I had a Sergeant Major, who when displeased, would bellow “unass my AO (area of operations).” That’s basically what the Supreme Court did today:

The Supreme Court handed conservative challengers a loss Monday in a key voting rights case.

In a unanimous result, the court said a state can draw legislative districts based on total population. At issue in the case was the “one person, one vote” principle dating back to the 1960s, when the court held that state legislative districts must be drawn so they are equal in population.

Here’s a good background on what the shitters wanted to do:

But on December 8, the Supreme Court will hear a new challenge to “One person, one vote” in Evenwel v. Abbott, brought by the same conservative organization, the Project on Fair Representation, responsible for the gutting of the VRA in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder. The obscure Evenwel case, which challenges the drawing of State Senate districts in Texas, will have major ramifications for political representation in the United States.

The plaintiffs want legislative lines to be drawn based on eligible or registered voters instead of total population as measured by the US Census Bureau, thus not counting children, immigrants (documented and undocumented), prisoners, and other nonvoters. They claim the current system, by including nonvoters, denies “eligible voters their fundamental right to an equal vote.” Edward Blum, founder of the Project on Fair Representation, calls it “the principle of ‘electoral equality.’”

Long story short, this was nothing more than a transparent attempt to dilute the vote of minorities in urban areas by not counting people, but counting registered voters. Combined with conservative purges of voter roles, this would shift power to more rural areas. In other words, while the population of a city might have 1 million people, if only 200k were voters, the district would be apportioned to the voter rolls. This would shift power to more rural districts, and thus give conservatives an advantage, much like how the Senate inflates power in the hands low population states.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion, and it read a little bit like this:

ginsberg

So that was some good news today.



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Exciting Site Maintenance Plans!

by |12:03 pm|25 Comments

The Road Forward

Folks,

Just a quick update and then open thread.

I just sent out a notice to our group of testers to take one final look at the test site.  The test concludes tomorrow, and I’ll then review and act upon their feedback. The goal is to launch on the live site Tuesday about 9 pm Eastern. The new stuff will all launch in an instant, but I will still need to do a bunch of back-end settings adjustments, so I expect the site will be fully ready by about 10 pm.

The big news that many might not yet know: we are not adding the new comment system; it had too many negatives for our testers. So I tightened up the existing system a bit. We experimented with reply-to-post/reply-to-comment notifications, but it was too quirky and had limited appeal, as it turned out.  We experimented with enhanced text/link/media buttons for comments, but there was too much to work through, so we’re sticking with the existing Bold/Italic/Link buttons.

I’ve re-organized the menu system and sidebar and rebuilt the site from the “stock” theme and plugin files. This gets rid of the “page controls” issue at the bottom of the page. Note – this won’t work until Tuesday night.

Some other highlights: the “back” function has returned to comments, the sidebar ad isn’t getting chopped off, improved fonts – style, size, font, etc. for many things, altered Blogroll and Contact so that iOS users and those blocking popups won’t have issues, and much more.

That should (finally!) wrap up this stuff for  me. I know that Mistermix had planned to do some magic to improved performance by combining and editing a number of site files. He had also planned to get our caching and CDN setup running smoothly. So this should make for a lightning-fast site, when he gets a chance to make those enhancements.

I’ll make an announcement Tuesday once the final test concludes to remind folks that there will be some major maintenance in the 9-10 pm Eastern hour.

Besides that, Open Thread!



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Modelling The Republican Party Response To Its Remaining Candidates

by |10:07 am|63 Comments

Someone in a thread or two below requested pet pix.  I guess the hope is to ameliorate the Heart of Darkness up-the-river vibe roiling the late-stage Republican primary.  A little relief from the ragegasms currently pulsating through (I hope, only) the most voluble of the Democratic and sporadically Democratic passionistas.

I share that hope, along with some of the my-party rage and plenty of horrified fascination with the their-party Totentanz. And so, as a kindness to myself and all of y’all, here’s Tikka, in the position I imagine Reince Priebus ends up in at the end of each Oh-My-Sweet-FSM-This-Can’t-Still-Be-Happening day.

Tikka dignified crop

This one I caption “At Leest I Haz Mah Dignatee!”

And, for a slightly more elegant glimpse of the cat who would be the Donald’s hair’s most fearsome predator, were he only able to schedule the hunt between his naps:

Tikka modem

Master of all Data at your service.

And with that — back to imagining Zombie Jefferson and Zombie Adams trying to find a snack at the Republican Convention this summer.  Can’t help thinking about how such a gathering would be a diet camp for obligate-neuron-feeders.



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Refereeing as a Bayesian exercise

by |8:01 am|17 Comments

Good referees want to get the call and the game “right”.  We’re also human so we have to deal with decision overload, incomplete information and players actively trying to game our judgement.  So what do good referees do?

They go Bayesian.

Or at least that is what an interesting baseball sabrmetrics article argues:

Researchers confirmed that the effective size of the strike zone at 0-2 is only about two-thirds as large as in a 3-0 count.

A careful review of all the relevant data reveals a valid—and much simpler—explanation for umpires’ shifting zone: They are just trying to make as many correct calls as possible…

at a 1-2 count umpires call 96 percent of OZ pitches right, but correctly call only 66 percent of IZ pitches… Umpires can pick their poison—reducing the risk of a mistake favoring the hitter or the chance of making a pro-pitcher call—but only at the price of a rise in the other error rate….

Umpires are changing their decision rule on close calls—“lean ball” vs. “lean strike”—based on the likelihood that the pitch will actually be a strike. … By adjusting their decision rule at each count to reflect their prior knowledge of the true distribution of pitches, they make better guesses and fewer mistakes. In short, umpires are Bayesian, not compassionate…..

Overall, umpires’ shifting decision rules appear to lift their accuracy rate by almost 2 percentage points (87.5 percent vs. 85.8 percent), preventing thousands of additional wrong calls each season. Moreover, the accuracy gain is particularly large in several key high-leverage counts.

This makes a lot of operational sense for me as a soccer referee. The first building block of a young soccer referee is to recognize the obvious fouls. A good referee will see the cleat to the knee, she will see the shirt pull, he will see the charge through the back of the scapula as the attacker is trying to turn the corner after a long flank run. That is just the first step.

And those are the easy calls to make. We’re in the open, we have a good angle, and there are not too many players in proximity to play.

Calls get more difficult in the mixers off of set piece plays (corner kicks, free kicks heading into the box) where there are fifteen to eighteen players within 150 square meters. People are jumping, leaping, holding, screening, whacking, kicking and creating space for themselves. What the hell is happening?

Reading the mixer is one of the first intermediate refereeing skills that needs to develop on advancement.  Referees need to pick up the obvious fouls such as the drag downs but we’re also trying to play the odds by checking to see if there is an attacker posted in front of the keeper and if the keeper has his forearms prepped for a backside shove.  We need to read which attackers are being used to set the pick to free the leaper and which defenders are going to try to break the pick line by running through the gaps versus running through the players.  We need to read how the roll defenders will follow their man and if they are going to avoid getting beat by grabbing a shirt.

As soccer referees advance, we are taught to “read” play.  That is simply using our experience, our study, our scouting to anticipate what the players are going to do next.  If the ball should be played in a 15 yard triangle on a break-out through the central midfield, I’ll want to get wider.  If the team is overwhelmingly right footed, I might want to adjust my position.  If the ball really should be sent long, I should be able to read the play and steal two or three steps on my sprint before the ball is actually sent long.  Being able to read play makes reffing advanced games straightforward as the players are predictable because they do what they should be doing.

The best referees are the ones who can read play really well and then act upon their internal predictive model of the immediate future to make fast and correct decisions.  The really good refs are seeing the game and predicting the game to produce a better game.

Good officials have to be Bayesians with frequently recaliberated and updated priors that feed into an evolving model of the game.



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Monday Morning Open Thread: Dark Doings in the Silver State

by |6:06 am|215 Comments

One of our regular commentors went to their local county convention over the weekend, and reported back:

… I spent the day with a huuuuge gang of Bernistas and Hillary-ites, and I’ve gotta tell you, after the first 2 hours, I changed from a casual “yeah, I support Hillary” to a “I will call, go door-to-door, whatever is necessary to beat Sanders” die-hard fan. His supporters, by and large, were *that* awful at the convention. They booed Hillary’s name always, they drowned out any speaker who asked that we all support whoever gets nominated with unending “Bernie,Bernie” chanting, they regularly paraded around the convention center, also chanting, several individuals walked through the seats spouting really hateful, dishonest crap about Hillary, they had long, loud conversations about how the committee counting the delegates was “obviously” trying to cheat for Hillary. Also, the debacle at the Arizona primary? ALL Hillary’s fault. She, personally, decided to cut the number of polling places. It was as close as I ever want to get to being at a Trump rally. Things were that uncomfortable & out-of-whack.

And then, the chair threw out for a voice vote “Should we seat all elected alternates and unelected alternates as delegates?” It was seconded & passed. Turns out part of the Bernie campaign’s tactics was to get as many people as possible to just show up as “unelected alternates”, get them counted & essentially steal the county. Hillary won here by (I believe) 8-9 points in the popular vote. Bernie won the convention, technically by the rules, but unethically as hell.

In a WTF conversation about it with a fellow Hillary delegate, I was told by a Bernista that it was only fair, because his supporters are so much more enthusiastic, their votes should count for more. She was entirely serious.

I found out today that the convention chair, who was a Sanders supporter, was removed early yesterday morning, after sharing information with just the Sanders campaign & not the Clinton campaign. There is also talk about how delegates were checked in, an email that was sent to Hillary supporters who were told that if they pre-registered they didn’t have to show up at the convention, and more. The whole experience, from caucus to convention, is so tremendously fucked-up and undemocratic that it makes me nuts…

ETA: and the scheduling makes zero sense. The county convention was scheduled for all day Saturday on Final Four weekend, guaranteeing that Culinary Union & most service-industry people will be working. The state delegate convention is scheduled for May 14 & 15, which is also the date for UNLV and UNR’s graduation. Planning, WTF?

Local political expert Jon Ralston reports:

Despite losing the state on Feb. 20 in the caucus, Bernie Sanders’ campaign swarmed the Clark County caucus and probably flipped two delegates from Hillary Clinton’s camp.

Clinton was presumed to have a 20-15 delegate edge after the caucus based on her 5 percentage point win in the caucuses. But because the caucus process allows some delegates to be unbound, 12 of those were up for grabs at the 17 county conventions Saturday. Sanders had 600 more delegates in Clark on Saturday despite losing the state’s most populous county by nearly 10 percentage points.

That is expected to switch two delegates to Sanders, giving Clinton an 18-17 lead in Nevada, but that is still pending the results of the state convention next month when those 12 slots could again change. (Sanders also dominated in Washoe and did well elsewhere.) Ah, the caucus process…

The horse-race touts at the Washington Post preferred to formulate it as “A scrappy Sanders campaign narrows the Nevada delegate count six weeks after the caucuses”.

Between the Wisconsin primary coming Tuesday and the media’s excitement over the New York primary on April 19, it looks like this contretemps will be seen as important only to those most immediately concerned. On the other hand, a large part of Bernie Sanders’ marketing appeal has been based on his reputation as The Last Pure Crusader — the only guy in politics who preferred ideals to low, nasty politicking. Eroding that elite image (and if even Jeff Weaver is whining, it’s hurting Sanders) damages Bernie’s most valuable political asset. When Nevada’s delegates are finally appointed in June, and when the DNC meets at the end of July, it’s the hardcore activists who’ll remember what happened in Clark County, and that won’t be good for Sandernistas.
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Apart from scrapping for every marginal advantage, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?



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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: “Don’t You Think He Looks… Tired?“

by |2:51 am|64 Comments

Because I’m in a bitchy mood tonight. Yes, Bernie Sanders will win Madison in the Wisconsin primaries on Tuesday, and quite possibly he’ll win Wisconsin as a whole, albeit by a proportional percentage. But the only thing Our Failed Media Overlords love more than a winner is a “horse race”, and I’m thinking Sen. Sanders may be the next horse they choose to whip.

Just for funzies, I googled ‘Bernie fatigue’ and this was one of the first entries. Ezra Klein, at Vox, in late February:

… Some of the most important decisions the president makes are about how to run the processes that translate vision into policy. Those decisions include whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas make sense, which strategies are likely to work. The presidency is one damn decision like that after another. Obama, famously, is so exhausted by the decision fatigue of the job that he wears the same color suit every day so he has one less thing to decide in the morning.

This is one way in which campaigns give us insight into presidencies. Presidential candidates also have to decide whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas are truly good ones, which strategies are likely to work. To make those decisions well, they need a sound philosophy, yes, but they also need to want to hear good advice, they need to want advisers who will tell them when they’re wrong, they need to have good instincts for when something they want to believe is true simply isn’t, and they need to be realistic about the strategies that are likely to work and the ones that aren’t.

My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn’t very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn’t surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn’t seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he’s attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president…

Going to be interesting to see how Bernie’s results this Tuesday are spun by the mainstream media!

(Quick video clip from Mr. Giordano here. If you can’t afford to subscribe to his newsletter, his twitter feed is an education!)



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Sunday Evening Open Thread: Rooting for Injuries

by |8:52 pm|230 Comments

gop rhetorical question sheneman

(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
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Lest we forget, at least us Dems aren’t faced with a choice between #1 candidate Gross Evil, #2 candidate Smarmy Evil & #3 candidate Bland Evil. From the Washington Post, “In chaotic GOP race, an intense battle for delegates plays out under the radar”:

FARGO, N.D. — For months, Bette Grande has tapped into her network of fellow conservative activists, pushing them to join her in supporting Ted Cruz for president. She has also laid the groundwork for a campaign of her own — to win a coveted spot as a delegate representing Cruz at this summer’s national party convention.

Grande’s work is coming to a head this weekend at a Ramada hotel and sports center, plastered with campaign merchandise, as North Dakota Republicans meet to choose the 25 delegates they will send to Cleveland in July. The priority for Grande, whether or not she wins a delegate ticket, is to make sure that those who do are committed backers of the senator from Texas.

“Until the slate of delegates is set, we’re calling or emailing everyone,” said Grande, who has juggled her work for Cruz with her duties picking up her grandson at day care.

In any ordinary year, this would be an obscure and suspense-free process, in which local party regulars are rewarded with tickets to the convention in order to focus on partying and casting a pro-forma vote for the presumptive GOP nominee.

But this is no ordinary year. The growing likelihood that front-runner Donald Trump will not secure the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination has forced the candidates to prepare for a once-unimaginable prospect: The nomination could be settled at a contested convention…

Most delegates who arrive in Cleveland will be pledged to certain candidates for the first round of voting, based primarily on the results of primaries and caucuses. But on a second ballot, many of the convention’s 2,472 delegates would be freed up to cast another vote.

The prospect of multiple ballots was an issue Saturday in Tennessee, where tensions flared as the state Republican Party finalized its list of delegates. Trump adviser Barry Bennett said he was “disappointed” that the state party did not follow through on what he thought was an agreement to pick Trump delegates that the campaign recommended. State GOP executive director Brent Leatherwood denied that there was any deal or that the party tried to harm Trump…

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Apart from sweet schadenfreude, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?



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Excellent Read: “At rallies, Hillary Clinton’s supporters are looking for logic, not passion”

by |7:20 pm|230 Comments

Stephanie McCrumman, at the Washington Post, reports on how grown-ups look for their next President:

They began arriving a full four hours early, ­hundreds of people stretching single file outside a Phoenix high school. It was a hot and cloudless day, but the people had come prepared to endure, preparation and endurance being hallmarks of a Hillary Clinton rally.

They slathered on sunscreen. They popped open umbrellas. They reached into purses and fanny packs for little baggies of trail mix, ignoring the yelling Donald Trump supporters across the street, and the carload of Bernie Sanders fans that kept whizzing by — “Bernieeeee!” they shouted through the window, their hair flying free. Their own hairlines glistened with sweat.

“She’s a serious candidate, and she doesn’t have to entertain me,” said Chris Haggerty, 58, a pastor in her third hour of waiting, of moving in small increments toward the high school doors.

Elsewhere in America, Sanders was thundering about a “political revolution.” The Republican front-runner Trump was promising to “bomb the sh–” out of the Islamic State. These were the emotionally cathartic rallies that had come to define this unorthodox political season so far — angry, raucous, anti-establishment and, in Trump’s case, ­occasionally violent…

… What happens at a rally for the presidential candidate who has gotten more votes than anyone else so far — nearly 9 million, which is roughly 2.5 million more than Sanders and 1 million more than Trump?…

Rose Smith, 55, took one and glanced over at the Trump yellers, which included a man with a Smith & Wesson 9mm strapped to his thigh shouting that Clinton should be “taken down a notch.” She did not yell back.

“Trump’s angry; Bernie’s angry all the time,” said Smith, a retired elementary schoolteacher who said she was not angry other than whatever frustration she felt toward the other candidates and their followers, which she sublimated. “Just realistically, I think it’s not a matter of pumping the team up, it’s a matter of playing the game. You can’t have that kind of demeanor. I can’t imagine these men being in the room when some crisis really happens. Is emotion going to rule them, or are they going to have a level head and make calm decisions?”…

To her and others baking in the sun, this was in fact the paradox of being a Clinton supporter at a Clinton rally, the thing that no one seemed to understand. They were excited by her lack of excitability; thrilled by her boring wonkiness; enthusiastic not about the prospect of some dramatic change but about Clinton’s promise of dogged, small-bore pragmatism, a result of decades of government experience they considered a qualification rather than a liability.

Theirs was the campaign that voters so often said they wanted — one of substance and detail, of practicality rather than dreamy idealism, of freedom through discipline…

“Oh, I’m very excited!” said Randall Clark, who owns a small delivery business and pressed the H onto his shirt.

By “excited,” he explained, he meant that he looked forward to “continued, incremental, small changes” on issues such as global warming, gun control and health care, for this was the worldview inside the Clinton camp. Progress was a thing achieved not in grand, sweeping gestures but rather by relentless, often unrecognized toil, not unlike their own here, now…



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