Oppo 2018

 In  Defying the Odds, we discuss opposition research.

At New York, Gabriel Debenedetti writes about American Bridge, America Rising, and the changing world of oppo:

In the old days, the group’s trackers — junior staffers with cameras who follow Republicans around, waiting for a gaffe — were instructed to identify themselves as American Bridge operatives when they got to an event, and they were told to remain passive, not asking questions or trying to trick their targets. Rule eliminated. (It took just until May 2017 for the group to post unflattering footage of a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate grabbing a tracker’s camera and then angrily pushing him away.) In the pre-Trump era, the group stopped short of snooping for dirt beyond publicly available documents or clips. The no-digging-and-no-working-the-phones-and-no-sniffing-around-in-person guideline is now gone, fully thrown out the window by the time American Bridge dispatched staff to Alabama to look into Roy Moore last winter. And, after consulting local campaign finance and consent laws, Brock convinced some of his funders to set up a small fund that trackers can now tap into if they want to pay their way into GOP candidates’ private events where that’s legal. That move opened up a massive new stream of potentially damaging material for Republicans who think they’re speaking behind closed doors to friends and supporters. The tactic didn’t take long to pay off, either: it’s how the group caught Ed Gillespie, 2017’s Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, calling the northern part of his state “enemy territory” in a private fundraiser last September.

American Bridge’s bet is that most of the old laws of politics remain intact, but that it takes a new kind of alert system to call out violations. At a time that Missouri’s Republican governor is hanging onto his seat while he fights a handful of scandalous charges — including an explicit accusation of sexual assault — a Montana GOP congressman was elected one day after body-slamming a reporter (and is now favored for reelection), and, of course, Trump remains firmly ensconced in the Oval Office, it’s not clear that politicians around the country are so confident in the old rules’ stability.

Roy Moore and Shame

 In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character.   In Alabama, accused child molester Roy Moore ran for the Senate with the support of sexual harasser Donald Trump.

Tom Nichols at WP:

The Alabama election, in particular, should suggest to Republicans that there’s still a role for shame and, more important, that there might yet be a reservoir of virtue left in their party. Yes, turnout in the African American community helped defeat Moore. But the other side of the turnout equation was vitally important, as thousands of conservative voters echoed the moral revulsion of famous Alabamians such as Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R) and basketball great Charles Barkley by staying home or submitting a write-in ballot. Had all those write-in votes been cast for Moore instead, he’d be on his way to Washington.

Also noteworthy was the failure of former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon to turn the Moore campaign into some kind of experiment in the politics of working-class resentment. Bannon — inexplicably touting his Ivy League credentials in Alabama — was sent packing even as Moore was invoking God’s will in refusing to concede. Conservatives should take heart that Bannon’s incoherent stew of white nationalism and wacky economic populism did nothing to help Alabama conservatives overcome their misgivings about Moore.

Shaming and scolding, obviously, are not the only answer to our dysfunctional politics. Conservatives who oppose the politics of people such as Moore and Bannon will have to make a better case than disgust. Nonetheless, if sensible conservatives want to reclaim the GOP, they need to stop responding to small-minded, un-American resentments that have nothing to do with politics or government and everything to do with crackpot notions of social revenge. They can begin by returning three important words to our national lexicon: Shame on you.

Trump, Bannon, and the GOP After Alabama

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   In Alabama, accused child molester Roy Moore ran for the Senate with the support of party-destroyer Steve Bannon and sexual harasser Donald Trump.

Lloyd Green at The Hill:

After Trump slut-shamed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday for having the temerity to call for his resignation over allegations of sexual harassment, early Wednesday morning Trump was busy disassociating himself from the stench of Moore’s humiliating defeat in a haze of deflection. To be precise, at 6:22 a.m. Eastern time, our commander-in-chief tweeted, “The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!”

Numbers went up mightily? Decked stacked him? Trump may as well have said that he was for the Iraq War before he was against it. Apparently, Trump forgot, no one forced him to back Moore. In the run-up to Tuesday, Richard Shelby, Alabama’s senior senator, announced that he would not vote for Moore, while Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former senator, refused to say for whom he cast his ballot. The fact is that in a single cycle in a single state, Trump backed two losing candidates.
...
If Trump is the face of the Republican Party then Bannon is its soul, and therein lies the Republicans’ dilemma. In these polarized and polarizing times, the Republican base grows ever angrier, making the GOP primary playbook ever more likely morph into a roadmap for driving over a cliff come November. Whether the Republicans can do anything about that remains to be seen.

 Jones’s win is a reminder that running statewide is not the same thing as running for Congress but with more money and a louder megaphone. Rather, it is about speaking to a larger population with varied concerns. Nuance still matters, and being normal counts.

During the Obama years, the Democrats forgot these rules and saw their party get hollowed out, losing control of both houses of Congress as well as governorships and state legislatures aplenty. Hopefully, the Republicans will get a grip soon enough. Just don’t bet on it.

Philip Bump at WP:

 Using data from Pew Research and the Census Bureau, we put together this look in 2015 at how the country will change by 2050.

Older — but less white and, importantly, less religious. In other words, it will in significant ways look much less like the voters who supported Roy Moore than those who supported the Democrat, Doug Jones. Two-thirds of Jones’s support was nonwhite. Six-in-10 Jones voters were women. In fact, about a third of Jones’s support came from black women alone.

...

 Many Republican leaders have seen this demographic problem coming for a long time. They probably didn’t expect it to emerge so soon, and in Alabama. It’s not their party’s fault that it happened where and when it did, but it’s a reminder that it may start happening more and in more places.

One more word of warning for the GOP. Moore’s electorate was much less diverse than Trump’s — and even with that slightly-more-diverse electorate, Trump lost the national popular vote by millions of votes.

Child Molester Loses Alabama Race

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   In Alabama, accused child molester Roy Moore ran for the Senate with the support of sexual harasser Donald Trump.

Steven Shepard at Politico:

In becoming the first Democrat to win a statewide federal election in Alabama since 1992, Jones proved that Democratic fears of low turnout among African-American voters — a reliable Democratic constituency in the racially polarized state — were unfounded. According to exit polls conducted by the National Election Pool, blacks made up about 29 percent of the electorate on Tuesday and voted for Jones almost unanimously, 96 percent to 4 percent — results that match turnout patterns showing greater than expected vote counts in many of the Black Belt counties and the state’s urban centers.

Jones also made some inroads among white voters — particularly women and those with college degrees. While Moore still won white voters by a more-than-2-to-1 margin, 68 percent to 30 percent, that is closer than other recent elections in which Republicans won nearly 4 out of 5 white voters.

Moore posted those kinds of margins among whites without a college degree, but he only carried white voters with college degrees by 17 points, 57 percent to 40 percent for Jones. And Jones successfully siphoned away 34 percent of white women, including 45 percent of white women with college degrees.

Among female voters as a whole, Jones won by 16 points, 57 percent to 41 percent, swamping Moore’s 14-point win among male voters.

Washington Post:

 
Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at NYT:

Voters in Alabama’s cities and most affluent suburbs overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Moore’s candidacy, an ominous sign for Republicans on the ballot next year in upscale districts. In Jefferson County, which includes Birmingham and some of the state’s wealthiest enclaves, Mr. Jones, the Democratic candidate, captured more than 68 percent of the vote. And in Madison County, home to Huntsville and a large NASA facility, Mr. Jones won 57 percent of the vote.

While these Alabamians, many of them women, may have been appalled by the claims of sexual misconduct against Mr. Moore, results like these were not isolated to this race. They mirrored returns in last month’s statewide and legislative races in Virginia, a state filled with well-heeled suburbanites.

Roy Moore on Slavery, Putin, and Evolution

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   In Alabama, accused child molester Roy Moore is running for the Senate with the support of sexual harasser Donald Trump.

Can't make this up -- Roy Moore said in September that the last time America was great was when we had slavery. (h/t @reckonalabama)https://t.co/NMF4BCQ6ZS pic.twitter.com/XbpPtdifuS

— Eric Columbus (@EricColumbus) December 7, 2017

Moore, like Trump, seems to be a fan of Putin.

Video: Roy Moore: Putin may be right, America is the focus of modern evil in the world. pic.twitter.com/fOUZfygEgm

— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) December 8, 2017

Wanted to share a video of Roy Moore in 1997 arguing that kids commit drive-by shooting because they are taught evolution in school: "They're acting like animals because we've taught them they come from animals." pic.twitter.com/YoHZXKfpAl

— Christopher Massie (@chrismassie) December 7, 2017

Sexual Harasser Backs Child Molester

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character.

Trump bashes Doug Jones, doesn't mention Roy Moore by name. #ALSEN pic.twitter.com/cFu3rkLpuo

— Alexis Levinson (@alexis_levinson) November 26, 2017

Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, and Alexander Burns report at NYT:

What the president did not foresee was that the friction would reach inside his immediate family. He vented his annoyance when his daughter Ivanka castigated Mr. Moore by saying there was “a special place in hell for people who prey on children,” according to three staff members who heard his comments.

“Do you believe this?” Mr. Trump asked several aides in the Oval Office. Mr. Moore’s Democratic opponent in the Alabama race, Doug Jones, quickly turned her comments into a campaign ad.

But something deeper has been consuming Mr. Trump. He sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after. He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently. (In the hours after it was revealed in October 2016, Mr. Trump acknowledged that the voice was his, and he apologized.)
...


The Senate leader has told fellow Republicans in private that Mr. Moore’s nomination has endangered the party’s hold on the Senate, according to people who have spoken with him — his starkest acknowledgment so far that the political environment has turned sharply against his party since Mr. Trump’s election. Mr. McConnell has also reiterated his intention to move against Mr. Moore if he is elected, though Mr. McConnell has made clear that he thinks that the candidate is unlikely to win.

Otherwise loyal Senate Republicans have started putting some distance between themselves and the president, a breach that could grow wider in the event of expulsion proceedings.

“As much as people would like to assume that, as Louis XIV said, ‘I am the state,’ there is more than one person who represents the Republican Party, and the preponderance of the party has dissociated itself from Moore,” said Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

Doug Jones Ads

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.  In Alabama, Doug Jones -- former prosecutor of the KKK faces off against accused child molester Roy Moore.

Roy Moore and Teenage Girls: Do the Math

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

At AL.com Kyle Whitmire on accused child molester Roy Moore:

First, read his book. In it, Moore describes how he met his wife at a Christmas party hosted by friends. He would have been 37. She was 23.

"Many years before, I had attended a dance recital at Gadsden State Junior College,"

Moore wrote. "I remembered one of the special dances performed by a young woman whose first and last names began with the letter 'K.' It was something I had never forgotten. Could that young woman have been Kayla Kisor?"

Moore later determined that it was.

"Long afterward, I would learn that Kayla had, in fact, performed a special dance routine at Gadsden State years before," he wrote.

Take a second to think about what's being said here. Moore first took notice of Kayla at a dance recital?

Perhaps you're wondering what "many years" means, and I wondered that too. Luckily, Moore again has cleared that up for us.

In an interview Moore gave earlier this year, he gave a similar account, but for one detail.
"It was, oh gosh, eight years later, or something, I met her," Moore said. "And when she told me her name, I remembered 'K. K.,' and I said, 'Haven't I met you before?'"

It's a simple matter of subtraction. When Roy Moore first took notice of Kayla she would have been as young as 15.

 There's a little fuzziness, to be sure, in the timeline. There's the "or something" Moore fudges with in the interview. Eight years before could have been slightly too early to put Moore in Gadsden, he started work as an deputy district attorney there in 1977.

So maybe she was 15, or maybe she was 16. But still, here is a grown man at about 30 years old attending a girls' dance recital, and doing what exactly?

R Is for Rot

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character.

Michael Gerson on the Russia investigation:

In all of this, there is a spectacular accumulation of lies. Lies on disclosure forms. Lies at confirmation hearings. Lies on Twitter. Lies in the White House briefing room. Lies to the FBI. Self-protective lies by the attorney general. Blocking and tackling lies by Vice President Pence. This is, with a few exceptions, a group of people for whom truth, political honor, ethics and integrity mean nothing.

Jennifer Rubin:

Republicans will tell your they support Moore and Trump as vehicles to policy goals. That assumes (falsely) that their policy goals are noble when they are actually unrealistic, unpopular, inconsistent and unconservative. Run up the debt, say the fiscal hawks. Take away health-care coverage, say the GOP “reformers.” Ban Muslims, round up Dreamers and slash legal immigration say the “Constitutional conservatives” and “market capitalists.” Worst of all: Vote for “values,” say the charlatans who backed Trump.

In truth, the goals these Republicans care about, if they ever did, have long ago been sublimated (they certainly changed them entirely) to the goal of holding power, of winning. When that is the highest calling they’ll vote for alleged child predators, racists and just about anyone else with an “R” next to his or her name. The result is moral haos, political malfeasance and gross incompetence. And a President Trump.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

Brett Talley, the Alabama lawyer Donald Trump has nominated to be a federal district judge, is a 36-year-old ghosthunter who has never tried a case and who failed to disclose to the Senate that he is married to the chief of staff to the White House counsel. He also seems to have written 16,381 posts—more than 3½ per day—on the University of Alabama fan message board TideFans.com. As BuzzFeed has reported, a user who is almost certainly Talley posted for years under the handle BamainBoston. (BuzzFeed managed to identify him because BamainBoston wrote a message headlined “Washington Post Did A Feature On Me,” linking to a 2014 Ben Terris profile of Talley. BuzzFeedreported that a “Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on Talley's behalf.”)

A search of TideFans.com reveals that BamainBoston often opined on controversial issues, including race, abortion, perceived federal overreach, and Southern heritage. In one post from February 2011, he defended the honor of the early Ku Klux Klan.

Using Fake Tocqueville to Defend Accused Child Molester

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.





At a rally for accused child molester Roy Moore, homeschooler Jennifer Case (at about 12:40 in the video) said: "He is the closest thing that any of us have observed to a founding father in our times. DeTocqueville said: `America is great because she is good.  If she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.'"

Tocqueville said no such thing. This quotation is fake. As I have been pointing out for 22 years, Tocqueville never wrote any such thing. Many politicians -- including Bill Clinton and Ben Carson -- have used the fake quotation. Hillary Clinton alluded to it in her acceptance speech.

h/t Carl

Trump's Vulnerability

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character..


Trump is sidestepping the Roy Moore story. He has good reason, given photos, videos, and stories involving Trump and minors.

A picture of Donald Trump, with his daughter Ivanka, perched atop two concrete parrots having sex. pic.twitter.com/TFse8gM1An

— Tim Ireland (@bloggerheads) January 31, 2016

German Lopez at CBS:

Donald Trump has said a lot of horrific things about adult women in the past year. But in a video unearthed by CBS News, Trump is seen targeting a different kind of victim: a young child.

In the 1992 video, Trump, who was 46 at the time, can be heard talking to a little girl, asking her if she’s going to go up an escalator. After she says she is, Trump turns to the camera and says, "I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?"

 Kendall Taggart, Jessica Garrison, Jessica Testa at Buzzfeed:

Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant said Donald Trump walked into the dressing room while contestants — some as young as 15 — were changing.

“I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here,’” said Mariah Billado, the former Miss Vermont Teen USA.

Trump, she recalled, said something like, “Don’t worry, ladies, I’ve seen it all before.”

Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair:

In a normal Republican administration, an allegation that Senator Al Franken, a Democrat, had groped a woman as she slept, accompanied by a damning photo, would be a political gift to the White House. When its occupant is Donald Trump, however, the story is altogether different—late in his presidential campaign, Trump was faced with accusations of sexual misconduct and assault from more than 16 women, which many believed would spell his political doom.

Trump and his ilk have vigorously denied the allegations, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently declaring from the podium that all of the president’s accusers are liars. But they’ve resurfaced in the wake of the Roy Moore scandal, which has left both Trump and the Republican Party metaphorically handcuffed to a Senate candidate accused of child molestation. Neither measure of hypocrisy seems to weigh on Trump, however, who gleefully ripped Franken Thursday night on Twitter.

 

The Case of the Alabama Child Molester

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Sean Sullivan and Elise Viebeck report at The Washington Post:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Monday that Republican nominee Roy Moore should end his Senate campaign in Alabama, following allegations that he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32.

“I think he should step aside,” McConnell said. His comments marked the most definitive position he has taken on Moore’s candidacy since The Washington Post reported the allegations on Thursday.

Asked by a reporter whether he believed the allegations, McConnell responded: “I believe the women, yes.”

Although it is too late to remove Moore’s name from the ballot before the Dec. 12 special election, McConnell said he is exploring the option of a write-in campaign by Sen. Luther Strange, whom Moore defeated in the primary, or another Republican.
The Post reported Thursday that Leigh Corfman alleged that Moore initiated a sexual encounter with her when she was 14 and Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. Moore has denied the allegations and has vowed to continue his campaign.

A 7/23/13 Trump Tweet (screenshot in case they take it down):

More Moore

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Paul Gattis at AL.com:

A new Alabama Senate poll, released Sunday morning, gives Democrat Doug Jones his first lead over Republican Roy Moore.

The race, though, remains close.

Louisiana-based JMC Analytics conducted the poll after allegations of sexual misconduct by Moore were reported by The Washington Post.

The poll had Jones received 46 percent support in the poll to Moore's 42 percent. With a margin of error of 4 percent, however, the race is essentially a statistical tie.

The poll also had 9 percent of participants declaring themselves undecided.

It's the second poll since the allegations came out that reveals a loss of support for Moore. A Decision Desk HQ/Opinion Savvy poll released Friday had the race tied 46-46.

Roy Moore

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites report at WP that, when he was in his 30s, Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore -- already a disgraced former judge -- sexually pursued several teenage girls.  He inappropriately touched one who was only 14 at the time.  The women went on the record.  "This account is based on interviews with more than 30 people who said they knew Moore between 1977 and 1982, when he served as an assistant district attorney for Etowah County in northern Alabama, where he grew up."

NRSC has withdrawn from a joint fundraising committee with Moore.

Axios: "Roy Moore, the GOP nominee for Alabama Senate, is tied with his Democratic opponent Doug Jones in the latest Opinion-Savvy/Decision Desk HQ poll after four women alleged Moore made sexual advances toward them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers. Moore led Jones by 5.7% in the previous survey and another had him up by double-digits."

Mike Cason reports at AL.com that it is too late to strike his name from the ballot in the December 12 special election. The deadline was October 11.

Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman. Her account is too serious to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) November 10, 2017

The Stars and Bars and Roy Moore

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Cameron Joseph at TPM:

Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore’s top supporter is a hardline Confederate sympathizer with longtime ties to a secessionist group.

Michael Anthony Peroutka (pictured on the right above, with Moore in 2011) has given Moore, his foundation and his campaigns well over a half-million dollars over the past decade-plus. He’s also expressed beliefs that make even Moore’s arguably theocratic anti-gay and anti-Muslim views look mainstream by comparison. Chief among them: He’s argued that the more Christian South needs to secede and form a new Biblical nation.

...

Peroutka, a 2004 Constitution Party presidential nominee who in 2014 won a seat as a Republican on the county commission in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, spent years on the board of the Alabama-based League of the South, a southern secessionist group which for years has called for a southern nation run by an “Anglo-Celtic” elite. The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the League of the South as a hate group (a designation Peroutka regularly jokes about). That organization, after Peroutka left, was one of the organizers of the Charlottesville protests last summer that ended in bloodshed.