“I don’t see a whole lot of 2016 in this election. I see a whole lot of 1972.”
— Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), quoted by the Charleston Post & Courier, comparing Bernie Sanders to George McGovern.
“I don’t see a whole lot of 2016 in this election. I see a whole lot of 1972.”
— Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), quoted by the Charleston Post & Courier, comparing Bernie Sanders to George McGovern.
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Just Security: “What will the future think of President Trump and two historic votes senators must take on his impeachment? The obituaries of the Republicans who voted in favor and against the articles of impeachment for President Richard Nixon could provide some insight. How these GOP members of Congress voted in 1974 featured prominently in all of their obituaries.”
As the question period begins in President Trump’s impeachment trial later today, the New York Times has an interesting look back at how President Clinton’s legal team communicated with Senate Democrats during that trial 21 years ago.
“During the question-and-answer period of the trial, for instance, the White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff worked out a secret signal with Mr. Daschle’s Democratic staff whenever he needed an opportunity to speak.”
“When Mr. Ruff laid his pen down on the table in front of him, the Democratic staff members submitted an open-ended question on a notecard for Chief Justice Rehnquist to read asking if the White House legal team wanted to respond to anything the House managers had said. Even Mr. Ruff’s fellow White House lawyers did not know what the secret signal was.”
Jeff Greenfield: “What happens when a party nominates a candidate who triumphs because of familiarity, or because ‘it’s her turn,’ or because he’s steadily ascended the party ranks despite no defining passion or cause? The track record of these “default” nominees, at least in modern political history, is bleak.”
“Hillary Clinton is the latest and, for the Democrats, still most painful example. The combination of her experience, her family ties and the sense that (in the words of a proposed campaign slogan) it was ‘her turn’ drove every potentially serious rival out of the 2016 race. Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong primary challenge was a foreshadowing of her vulnerabilities, even if the signal was mostly dismissed until about 9 p.m. on election night in November.”
“Four years before Hillary Clinton was defeated, the Republicans trotted out the reliable, central-casting Mitt Romney to lose to President Barack Obama, a campaign that seemed to rhyme with the time the Dems unenthusiastically fell in line for John Kerry against President George W. Bush in 2004. Keep going back, and you see candidates like these over and over, marching under flags of pale pastel, all going down to defeat in November: Al Gore, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Gerald Ford, Hubert Humphrey and even Richard Nixon, in his first run, in 1960.”
Ron Reagan, the son of former President Ronald Reagan, told the Daily Beast that his father would have been “embarrassed and ashamed” of the current Republican president.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told CNN its impossible to compare President Trump to past holders of the office.
Said Brinkley: “We always are trying to compare presidents to each other, but we haven’t had an outlaw president before, and that’s what you have with Donald Trump.”
This looks interesting: Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War by Steve Inskeep.
NPR has an interview with the author.
Steve Inskeep: “Can any past presidential campaign help us understand the election year now beginning? There never was a sitting president like Donald Trump. But if we widen our lens, we find timely echoes in an era when America was rapidly changing, the old political order was coming apart, and it seemed like the country was about to split at the seams.”
“An early version of modern-day America was already visible in June 1856. At a music hall in Philadelphia, delegates of the recently founded Republican Party gathered for their convention and chose their first-ever presidential nominee. Supporters unfurled an American flag onstage that bore his name: John C. Frémont.”
Key takeaway: “What are lessons for 2020? Expect a terrifying year.”
”He just got impeached. He’ll be impeached forever. No matter what the Senate does. He’s impeached forever because he violated our Constitution.”
— Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in an interview with the Associated Press.
“Go after your enemies. I mean, they’re after you. Go after your enemies. I think that Clinton probably is too nice a guy in a certain respect. I don’t think he’s going after people the way he should and I really believe his thing is to be liked and I don’t think that’s a very good position to be in right now.”
— Donald Trump, on Hardball in September 1998, advising President Bill Clinton on how to fight impeachment.
Michael Lewis interviewed by The Guardian:
“It could be that. But my gut says don’t bet against the country. It has this incredible capacity for self-reinvention. If it was Britain and this was happening I would say yes, it might be a one-way ticket to decline. But in the States I think something will come along that will finally induce the requisite state of terror – and it will regenerate the place.”
It was published a year ago but this is a really good book: Impeachment: An American History by Jon Meacham, Peter Baker, Timothy Naftali and Jeffrey Engel.
“Four experts on the American presidency examine the three times impeachment has been invoked—against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton—and explain what it means today.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who helped draft an article of impeachment against Nixon as a congressional staffer and served on the House Judiciary Committee during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, told CNN that she thinks that President Trump’s actions involving Ukraine are “far more serious” than Watergate.
Said Lofgren: “President Nixon’s misconduct related to trying to use the levers of government to hide the Watergate burglary… His misconduct had to do with trying to throw the election but at least it didn’t involve involving other foreign nations. If you take a look at the — what the founding fathers were concerned about, it was the interference by foreign governments in our political system that was one of the gravest concerns. Nixon’s behavior didn’t fall into that range. So in that way, this conduct is more serious.”
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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