In this interview, Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff about Barack Obama’s childhood, his legacy, and how he ultimately connected with the American people. “This white family loving him deeply, and him being black, that is incredibly unique,” says Coates about Obama’s welcoming family in Hawaii. “I’ve never come across that in my life.” Read more in Coates’s article in the January issue of The Atlantic, “My President Was Black.”
GOP plots early wake-up call for Clinton
Looking past Election Day, Republicans sketch plan to stymie a President Hillary Clinton agenda.
If elected, Clinton would likely become the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to enter office without control of both houses of Congress.
.. Clinton would likely enjoy the shortest honeymoon period of any incoming commander in chief in recent history
.. “What that would leave her with is an absolute imperative to govern from the center,”
.. “A lot of us would like to hold her accountable for the failures, but we are holding our fire,” Schake said. “It’s because all of us are afraid of Trump. If she wants to maintain our support after, she’s going to have to address our policy concerns about the economy and America’s role in the world.”
.. Hillary Clinton, being a multi-decade partisan who fought tooth and nail with Republicans and called them her enemy, is uniquely ill-suited to having a honeymoon period if she wins.”
.. the focus will be on her domestic agenda, “which is not in any way bipartisan.”
.. Republican operatives on the Hill, for instance, are already planning to block Clinton’s agenda by strategically targeting individual Democratic senators who will be up for reelection in 2018. “Take Joe Manchin in West Virginia,” explained one GOP operative of the strategy. “If Hillary puts up an anti-coal, pro-EPA judge for the Supreme Court, the smart play is to start pressuring him with an advocacy campaign to vote no.”
.. the left will be pushing Clinton to begin her administration by “daring Republicans to oppose her” on big-ticket items like expanding Social Security and instituting debt-free college.
Introducing the Trump News Channel—Coming in 2017?
If Trump loses, his consolation prize may be a whole new right wing media juggernaut.
.. There is so much about the Trump campaign that doesn’t make sense so long as one assumes that its purpose is to propel the candidate to victory at the ballot box. But what if those involved now perceive a more attractive––or at least plausible–– endgame?
.. Trump and associates will be proved failures at electoral politics. But even if that proves so, I wouldn’t bet against a right-wing media behemoth that brought together Trump, Roger Ailes, Stephen Bannon, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, and Sarah Palin, especially if they had some help:
.. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren all might exit the network if parent company 21st Century Fox gets rid of Ailes in the wake of a sexual harassment lawsuit
.. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.”
.. For that reason, GOP officials and movement conservatives ought to be preparing for worst case scenarios. And a Donald Trump Network is perhaps the worst case possible.
.. A Trump campaign expecting to lose and then launch an effort of that sort would have every incentive to hoard campaign donations to pay back debt incurred by Trump himself; to be maximally inflammatory, polarizing the electorate while further cultivating a core of true believers; to aggressively blame Fox News, National Review, Glenn Beck, and all other potential competitors in order to alienate them from their audiences; even to sabotage the GOP down ballot, depending on just how cynical the folks running things are. After all, what could be better for business, if you’re a new media conglomerate to the right of Fox News, than a Hillary Clinton presidency supercharged by a Democratic House and Senate?
.. Since the Bush Administration, I’ve been warning the right that its media demagogues were doing great harm to the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and the country. A Trump News Network, while a ludicrous and absurd satirist’s gold mine, would do even greater harm
How Change Happens
Yet his achievements have depended at every stage on accepting half loaves as being better than none: health reform that leaves the system largely private, financial reform that seriously restricts Wall Street’s abuses without fully breaking its power, higher taxes on the rich but no full-scale assault on inequality.
.. Could Mr. Obama have been more transformational? Maybe he could have done more at the margins. But the truth is that he was elected under the most favorable circumstances possible, a financial crisis that utterly discredited his predecessor — and still faced scorched-earth opposition from Day 1.