“I was U.S. attorney and assistant to the U.S. attorney for too many years to laugh at Mrs. Clinton. When I see her, I see her in an orange jumpsuit, I’m sorry, or at least a striped one.”
— Rudy Giuliani, quoted by CNN.
“I was U.S. attorney and assistant to the U.S. attorney for too many years to laugh at Mrs. Clinton. When I see her, I see her in an orange jumpsuit, I’m sorry, or at least a striped one.”
— Rudy Giuliani, quoted by CNN.
Donald Trump told Reuters that Hillary Clinton’s plan for Syria would “lead to World War Three,” because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia.
Said Trump: “What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria. You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.”
He added: “You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk.”
Rick Klein: “You can’t force a mandate. But Hillary Clinton is now in the enviable position of having some control over what this election will say to both her supporters and opponents. Should she continue on her current trajectory, she’s in line for a major victory, bordering on a blowout by modern standards. ABC News’ new tracking poll has Clinton crushing Donald Trump by 20 points among women nationally, and even up slightly among men. A win that broad, perhaps with an Arizona and/or a Georgia tipping blue, would signal a message that carried beyond expected demographic and geographical boundaries.”
“Fifty-six percent of Clinton supporters say they are mainly voting to support her rather than to oppose Trump; Trump’s similar number is only 41. If Clinton can convince the country that she is going to win by offering up herself – as opposed to being there solely as an alternative to Trump – it could have implications for governing in the not-so-distant future.”
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“Hillary Clinton entered the final phase of her campaign on Friday, working to ensure a victory that is decisive enough to earn a mandate for her presidency and a surge of voters to help Democrats win congressional races,” the New York Times reports.
“Emerging from a nine-day absence from the trail, Mrs. Clinton seized on the momentum of her performance in the final presidential debate, choosing Ohio — a battleground state where she has struggled the most against Donald J. Trump — as her first stop on a four-day swing. With new polls showing Mrs. Clinton closing in on Mr. Trump in the state, her campaign is glimpsing the opportunity for a clean sweep of traditional swing states.”
“The secretive team tasked with preparing for a possible Hillary Clinton presidency is ramping up big time,” Politico reports.
“With polls pointing to the likelihood of a Clinton win, her transition team is hiring staff, culling through the resumés of possible Cabinet nominees and reaching out to key Democrats for input, according to people familiar with the process.”
Hillary Clinton just released an incredibly powerful ad featuring Khizr Khan, the father of slain U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan.
“It was horrifying what he said on the debate stage tonight. Our country has been around for 240 years and we are a country based on laws and we’ve had not contested elections going back to the very beginning. But one of our hallmarks has always been we accept the outcome of our elections.”
— Hillary Clinton, on her plane after last night’s debate.
The final presidential debate was actually a debate.
The main reason was that moderator Chris Wallace was excellent. He had near total control of the room. We had more substance out of this one debate than in all the previous debates combined.
The other reason it was a debate was that Donald Trump actually prepared for one. Trump was a completely different candidate for the first half of the debate. Had he acted like this over the last several months, this might be a closer presidential race.
On the substance, however, Hillary Clinton won most exchanges. She was more prepared and far more presidential. But she was not perfect and Trump exposed several of her weaknesses. Clinton had trouble on her support of “open borders,” on the Clinton Foundation’s conflicts of interest and on her ties to Wall Street.
But the third debate was really about comparing the two people who could be the next president.
Clinton started the evening cautiously, but as it went on she methodically started poking Trump. Her first dig was saying he “choked” in his meeting with the Mexican president.
Trump didn’t address the remark, which wasn’t like him at all.
Clinton next challenged Trump on his relationship with Russia and he nearly went ballistic. “You’re the puppet,” he yelled repeatedly. It’s worth noting that Trump refused to condemn Russia or Vladimir Putin. He even said he didn’t believe U.S. intelligence reports that Russia was behind hacking intended to influence the presidential election.
Trump’s reaction should scare every American. It’s not unreasonable to suspect that we have a presidential candidate who is beholden to a foreign power.
When Clinton repeated things Trump said about women who accused him of sexual assault and unwanted advances, Trump denied saying things we all heard him say.
When Clinton said Trump mocked a disabled reporter, he blurted out, “Wrong!” Of course, we’ve all seen the video many times.
Clinton was methodical in her approach, but she showed that Trump lies very easily and has major flaws as a person. He took her bait nearly every time. He even called Clinton “such a nasty woman.” By the end of the debate, Trump had collapsed into his basket of flaws.
But the scariest part of the night was Trump refusing to say he would abide by the election results, saying, “I will look at it at the time.”
Trump refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power following an election. It was appalling and a massive political mistake.
Donald Trump has called Hillary Clinton’s two terms as a U.S. Senator a “disaster” but in a 2008 interview Trump praised her and Bill Clinton for their time in elected office, CNN reports.
Said Trump: “Well, I think her history is far from being over. I’d like to answer that question in another 15 years from now. I think she is going to go down at a minimum as a great senator. I think she is a great wife to a president. And I think Bill Clinton was a great president.”
On the night she formally clinched the Democratic nomination, John Podesta sent an email to Hillary Clinton with 39 names of possible running mates.
Said Podesta: “I have organized names in rough food groups.”
“I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.”
— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), quoted by CNN, saying Republicans will block any Supreme Court picks she might make.
James Hohmann: “Like a quarterback who is ahead by a few touchdowns at the start of the fourth quarter, she has been running down the clock with a cautious, front-porch-style campaign that leaves little room for unforced errors. The Boston Globe tabulated both candidates’ travels over past two-and-a-half months, and the numbers are stark: Clinton held 52 events compared with Trump’s 88 between Aug. 1 and Oct. 10. President Obama held 74 events and Mitt Romney 76 during the same period in 2012. And over the same period in 2008, Obama held 108 events and John McCain 100″
New York Times: “She enters the final stretch of the presidential campaign with cautious optimism about the outcome. Unlike most presidential candidates, who spend the last precious weeks before Election Day holding a succession of big rallies, Mrs. Clinton seems to see no reason to pack her public schedule. After Thursday, the Democratic nominee had no public appearances scheduled for the rest of the week, and her campaign has not announced additional events before next Wednesday’s face-off with Mr. Trump in Las Vegas.”
“Aides point to rallies in Florida, Colorado and Arizona this week and say Mrs. Clinton has spent her downtime preparing for the debates. They have criticized Mr. Trump for shunning debate preparation, to his detriment. But her relatively light schedule also signals a newfound confidence inside the campaign as Mrs. Clinton seeks to get out the vote among specific constituencies and avoid making any unforced errors.”
Politico: “Back in early September, tensions between Capitol Hill Democrats and Clinton’s Brooklyn-based campaign had been simmering for months — sometimes over money but more often about Clinton’s message and the fact that she insisted on defining Trump as separate from, rather than a creature of the modern Republican Party.”
“And three days after the Mook and Podesta meetings, when Clinton’s campaign unveiled a new ad, those tensions boiled over. The spot, which aired nationally on cable and in six battleground states, featured a half dozen sitting GOP lawmakers criticizing Trump. ‘Unfit. Dangerous. Even for Republicans,’ read the text on the closing screen.”
“Why was Clinton, congressional Democrats fumed, promoting current Republican lawmakers as paragons of good judgement — Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Reid Ribble, Richard Hanna — members of the same GOP Congress that Democrats had spent years painting as extremist?”
Said one House Democratic adviser: “You just don’t need to go there. It was a selfish strategy.”
Ryan Cooper: “Hillary Clinton is often portrayed as a legendary political brawler, but sometimes she seems to lack a really bloodthirsty partisan instinct. The object now, instead of cautiously sitting back with a prevent defense and letting Trump hang himself, should be to go in for the kill, especially down the ballot. Every Republican candidate should be walloped with the deranged nominee, every minute of every day, and every Republican base voter should be either applauding their local nominee’s support of bile and hatred, or hanging their head in despair at yet another RINO giving in to political correctness.”
“Anything less will mean a missed chance at total control of D.C.”
BuzzFeed: “As described by current and former staffers, Clinton is a candidate who insists on being ‘humongously prepared,’ who consumes research with ‘obsessive’ rigor — and who, perhaps more than most elected officials, delights in the art form known by political professionals as ‘oppo.'”
“The result is the ‘book,’ a catalog of every possible hit, both savory and not, on a political foe. It can number thousands of pages, and on most campaigns, the candidate doesn’t bother with more than the toplines. Clinton, meanwhile, has digested something closer to the book itself on nearly every one of her opponents, from O’Malley to Bernie Sanders to Trump.”
Said one oppo research who worked opposite Clinton: “Most consultants don’t read past the executive summary. It’s clear she reads the footnotes.”
Charlie Cook: “Let’s start with the caveats: A lot can happen in the 34 days before the election. The polls are not as reliable as they used to be. People act in unpredictable ways in the polling booth. All that said, this race has fallen into a fairly predictable pattern. When Donald Trump veers off message and Hillary Clinton performs well, her lead swells to 6, 7, or 8 points. When Trump sticks to his script and Clinton goes through a bumpy patch as she did with her bout of pneumonia, her edge drops down to 1 or 2 points, and sometimes she winds up dead even. Most of the time, Clinton is up by 3 to 5 points.”
“When presidential candidates are ahead by 3 points, they tend to lead by at least a little in a lot of states, and the Electoral College inflates their margin of victory. When the popular-vote gap gets to 4 or 5 points, more states fall in line and the race turns into an electoral rout. It’s only when a race is effectively even or within a point or so does the Electoral College become truly competitive.”
“Newly disclosed emails show top Obama administration officials were in close contact with Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign in early 2015 about the potential fallout from revelations that the former secretary of state used a private email server,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The previously unreported emails were obtained by the Republican National Committee as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records of Mrs. Clinton’s time in office. The RNC provided to The Wall Street Journal only some of the emails, leaving it unclear what was in the remaining documents. The RNC said it released only emails relevant to the communication between the White House and State Department.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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