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Tuesday, July 19, 2016

It's Been Two Quarters and GOP Has Moved the Ball 15 Yards

This was the apt way that Steve Schmidt summed up the GOP convention so far. Yesterday was a total disaster-and then there was the Melania plagiarizing issue.

Tonight, the convention is again behind schedule. It's not clear why if you can't run a coherent convention people should believe you have a prayer at coherent leadership in the White House.

Tonight Reince Priebus managed to take defeat out of the jaws of victory. After all, it was a fait accompli that Trump would win the nomination. Yet, Priebus tried to make Trump's win look a little more impressive and this proved to be, uh, counterproductive.

"Preibus's hamhanded attempt to make vote for Trump look larger, despite the fact that the votes were there for him, now blows up schedule"

https://twitter.com/NormOrnstein/status/755551733779161088

So far tonight's been the usual GOP boilerplate. In other words, sound and fury over Hilary's emails and Benghazi signifying nothing.

Yglesias:

"The Republican jobs plan is … to talk about Benghazi and emails?"

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/755566240001908736

I guess there is a whole world of rent seeking in this meaningless process story.

"Benghazi and email investigations can employ arbitrarily large numbers of people more or less indefinitely."

https://twitter.com/MrPABruno/status/755568657774686209

Sure, for talking heads at Fox News and CNN.

In the 1930s, the GOP would lecture people against the evils of the New Deal. Harry Enten and Clare Malone had an interesting post about this yesterday.

"Moments of historical change in the course of a party’s life can be difficult to spot. In “Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996,” political scientist John Gerring marks the beginning of the modern Republican Party as Herbert Hoover’s shifting campaign rhetoric in 1928 and 1932, when he talked more about the virtues of the American home and family than hard-tack economics. Hoover’s oratory about the progress of the individual being threatened by an overzealous government bureaucracy stuck around for the next eight decades, and the wisdom of generations has helped us discern that this was indeed the start of a new Republican era."

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-end-of-a-republican-party/

But the retort to the GOP was that folks couldn't eat the Constitution. Now the GOP thinks people can eat emails.

In other news, Mitch McConnell got booed. Now there's an unpopular man.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mitch-mcconnell-booed-at-gop-convention


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