This isn’t to say that Trump can’t get laughs. It’s simply that when he gets them, he’s humiliating people—whether “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, “Lyin” Ted Cruz or “Little” Marco Rubio. Humor borne out of cruelty happens to be the easiest and therefore lowest form of comedy: It is cheap stuff and it does not elevate the candidate, nor make him a more fundamentally sympathetic character. And when Trump does manage to grab laughs, his smile is a forced, flat line—a concess
.. The electorate opts for serious leaders, but almost always men who are able to poke fun at themselves—and the gravitas of their position. Nobody has proved quite as adept as laughing at himself as former President George W. Bush, who willingly conceded to being a class clown, even as a candidate in 1999.
.. Bush, no policy expert, sought laughs for his intellectual and rhetorical shortcomings. At the 2001 White House Correspondents Dinner, he conceded, “Now ladies and gentlemen, you have to admit that in my sentences, I go where no man has gone before.”
Trump’s New Solicitor General Could Fire Russia Investigator Robert Mueller
Francisco was a partner at Jones Day, which Bloomberg Businessweek has called“Trump’s favorite law firm.” The outlet reported in March that at least 14 lawyers from the firm had joined the Trump administration or had been nominated to do so, including Don McGahn, the White House counsel.
.. lawyers from “Trump’s favorite” firm contributed only $7,422 to Trump’s campaign, compared to $267,899 to Hillary Clinton’s.
.. Francisco also is an expert at the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarians in the legal world. The executive vice president, Leonard Leo, is said to have secured the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. Gorsuch and FBI Director Christopher Wray also are listed as experts there. Francisco has donated thousands of dollars to federal election candidates, all Republicans, though not to Trump.
.. Ted Cruz, who once worked with Francisco at the law firm Cooper & Kirk. “He’s a brilliant lawyer & a principled conservative.”
David Axelrod Interviews Jeff Roe (Episode 177)
(29:50 min)
Running negative ads that have enough of a kernel that you can keep a straight face, though others might say you were taking liberties
Ran ads arguing that an opponent sold ads for Penthouse (a scientific journal owned by Omni magazine, which owned Penthouse).
I “own” my ads. Every candidate signs off on the ads.
Defense: It was a very tough year, you can’t let opponent “hang around” after Labor day.
Implied that an opponent was drunk when accident occurred (knew had a few DUIs, but not necessarily then).
Are there any boundaries? Have you ever written a script that goes too far?
The voters set the limit. You can’t run ads that don’t work, that are not believable. Candidate have a brand. You can’t run ads contrary to their brand.
An opponent committed suicide.
Rush Limbaugh is my hero (42 min)
I would be to the right side of the Freedom Caucus.
Litmus Test: abortion, guns
Republican Base
- very conservatives: 20-50%
- somewhat conservative: 25%
- establishment: 25%
- 80% approval rating
- 1/3 of the party would leave with Trump
Are Politicians Responsible for Their ‘Base,’ or Is It the Other Way Around?
Political caricatures don’t come much broader than these. Strange was the establishment incarnate; Moore was the Republican electorate’s id made ruddy flesh, an avatar of the latent nativism and conspiracism that Donald Trump’s detractors inside and outside the Republican Party blamed for his rise.
.. This was a “Jurassic Park” vision of the Republican base, in which party leaders, after fecklessly creating and nurturing a monster, find themselves powerless to stop it once the electric fences go out on the island.
.. Reagan’s 1980 campaign won seven percent more of the labor-union vote than Gerald Ford did in 1976, but he won just 10 percent of the nonwhite vote, significantly less than Ford.
.. Many of the major contenders for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination ran explicitly on the idea of bringing nonwhite constituencies into the party — none more enthusiastically than Representative Jack Kemp of New York.
.. Kemp believed that his vision of racial outreach could bring the party control of Washington.
.. Kemp lost to George Bush — himself a self-identified base-broadener, but one whose candidacy was marred by the race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad
.. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, vowed — and later apologized for vowing — that “by the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”
.. It was a testament to the party’s cynicism, naïveté or both that Atwater, in taking the helm of the Republican National Committee after Bush’s victory, was tasked with improving outreach to black and Hispanic voters.
.. The base had, in Gingrich’s formulation, become something new: not a coalition to be expanded but a force to be propitiated or crossed at Bush’s peril. It was not there to be molded by politicians like Jack Kemp. It was there to give orders to them, through mediums like Gingrich
.. When Bob Dole — who had campaigned for the 1988 nomination on, as his spokeswoman put it, the “need to broaden the base of the Republican Party” — said he had no “litmus test” for the abortion views of his running mate in 1996, he drew harsh words from James Dobson
.. It implies that the Republican Party is not a coalition of interests but the tribune of an essentially unified tribe.
.. Conservatives often point out, correctly, that today’s Democratic base is, if anything, more monolithic in its policy views than its Republican counterpart, with more uniform positions on issues like abortion, immigration and taxes.
.. Republican voters, meanwhile, passed over candidates with actual fiscal-conservative and evangelical bona fides, like Ted Cruz, in favor of one whose only sustained and consistent point of contact with past Republican practice was the winking subtext of the party’s white identity politics, delivered without the wink. One party’s base knew what it believed; the other’s knew who it was.