But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic, perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it? Though those on both the right and the left moan about “woman cards,” it would be impossible, and dishonest, to not recognize gender as a central, defining, complicated, and often invisible force in this election. It is one of the factors that shaped Hillary Clinton, and it is one of the factors that shapes how we respond to her. Whatever your feelings about Clinton herself, this election raises important questions about how we define leadership in this country, how we feel about women who try to claim it, flawed though they may be.
A wonderful, analytical outtake from Rebecca Traister’s thoughtful and detailed New York Magazine profile of Hillary Clinton. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
The sister of the former White House aide to President Bill Clinton called Trump's recent remarks "beyond contempt" regarding her brother's death.
Vince Foster’s sister on Thursday condemned Donald Trump for bringing up a discredited conspiracy theory regarding her brother’s suicide, calling the GOP nominee’s remarks “beyond contempt.”
Trump in a recent interview with The Washington Post referenced the widely debunked theory that Foster, a former White House aide to President Bill Clinton, was actually murdered. Trump called circumstances of Foster’s 1993 death “very fishy.”
“In this interview, Trump cynically, crassly and recklessly insinuated that my brother, Vincent W. Foster Jr., may have been murdered because ‘he had intimate knowledge of what was going on’ and that Hillary Clinton may have somehow played a role in Vince’s death,” Foster’s sister, Sheila Foster Anthony, said in an op-ed published in The Post Thursday.
“How wrong. How irresponsible. How cruel,” she wrote.
Five investigations — by the FBI, the Department of Justice, Congress, the U.S. Park Police and two independent investigators — concluded that Foster took his own life after a struggle with clinical depression.
Anthony said in the op-ed that her brother called her a few days before he died and said he was battling depression. She gave him the names of three psychiatrists; a list that was later found in his wallet.
“I did not see a suicide coming, yet when I was told that Vince was dead I knew that he had killed himself,” Anthony said in the op-ed. “Never for a minute have I doubted that was what happened.”
She denounced Trump for giving legitimacy to conspiracy theories about Foster’s death by calling the theories “very serious” — even if Trump claimed he was just repeating the questions of others.
“This is scurrilous enough coming from right-wing political operatives who have peddled conspiracy theories about Vince’s death for more than two decades,” Anthony wrote. “How could this be coming from the presumptive Republican nominee for president?”
Anthony said she wrote the op-ed because The Post sought her reaction. She said she has donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but has not had contact with anyone at the campaign about the decision to speak out.
“For Trump to raise these theories again for political advantage is wrong. I cannot let such craven behavior pass without a response,” she wrote.
Vince Foster’s sister takes Lyin’ Donald to the woodshed for repeating falsehoods about his death.
The popularity of the GOP front-runner can be explained by the Dunning-Kruger Effect. By DAVID DUNNING
Many commentators have argued that Donald Trump’s dominance in the GOP presidential race can be largely explained by ignorance; his candidacy, after all, is most popular among Republican voters without college degrees. Their expertise about current affairs is too fractured and full of holes to spot that only 9 percent of Trump’s statements are “true” or “mostly” true, according to PolitiFact, whereas 57 percent are “false” or “mostly false”—the remainder being “pants on fire” untruths. Trump himself has memorably declared: “I love the poorly educated.”
But as a psychologist who has studied human behavior—including voter behavior—for decades, I think there is something deeper going on. The problem isn’t that voters are too uninformed. It is that they don’t know just how uninformed they are.
As presumptive nominee takes first steps on transition, GOP policy veterans say they're not interested. By DARREN SAMUELSOHN and BEN WHITE
op Republican political leaders aren’t the only ones shunning their party’s presidential nominee — a vast number of highly skilled managers and policy experts, veterans of recent GOP administrations who would normally be expected to fill key positions for a new White House, are also vowing to sit out a Donald Trump presidency.
And while the failure of the two Presidents Bush or House Speaker Paul Ryan to endorse the presumptive nominee carries political consequences, the absence of policy veterans in a new administration would have a substantive effect on the running of government.
Politico interviewed nearly five dozen Republicans over the past two weeks — people with experience working in government and who understand how Congress can enact, or shred, a new president’s agenda — and heard the same sentiment expressed repeatedly. If Trump doesn’t change his tune or extend much longer olive branches, many of these government veterans say they intend to cede highly coveted administration posts to less-experienced competitors.
A speech aimed at boosting his credibility got low marks from across the spectrum. By MICHAEL CROWLEY
In his address to an elite, invitation-only Washington foreign policy audience Wednesday, Donald Trump promised that, as president, he would restore a “coherent” vision to America’s role in the world.
But across the ideological spectrum, and even among natural allies, Trump’s speech received a failing grade for coherence and drew snickering and scorn from foreign policy insiders who remain unconvinced that Trump is up to the job.
“It struck me as a very odd mishmash,” said Doug Bandow, a foreign policy scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, who shares many of Trump’s beliefs about scaling back America’s role abroad. “He called for a new foreign policy strategy, but you don’t really get the sense he gave one.”
Trump’s speech was “lacking in policy prescriptions,” and its “strident rhetoric masked a lack of depth,” said Robert “Bud” McFarlane, a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan who attended the speech.
A third of mayors fear that they have jeopardized lives to cut infrastructure costs.
By Ben Wofford
Nearly 1 in 3 American mayors think they may already have hurt their own citizens by making cost-saving decisions on critical infrastructure—a startling admission of fearfulness and accountability from the nation’s top urban executives on the heels of the Flint water crisis.
With criminal charges filed against three government officials in Michigan last week, the decaying state of urban infrastructure is emerging as a singular preoccupation of mayors, according to a survey by POLITICO magazine that found nearly half of America’s mayors believe their roads, bridges and water pipes have deteriorated critically over the past 10 years.
Mayors of all political stripes say they’ve been placed in an untenable financial bind because of severely limited infrastructure dollars that once flowed freely from state and federal coffers. More than a third of mayors said the next occupant of the White House should make infrastructure the top urban issue, ahead of even economic inequality (18 percent) and education (14 percent), otherwise high-profile priorities for this overwhelmingly Democratic bunch.
The revelations come from POLITICO Magazine’s fifth national Mayors Survey, part of the award-winning What Works series. The survey of 55 mayors—from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, Honolulu to Philadelphia, San Antonio to Tampa—is not scientific and four-fifths of respondents identify as Democratic, reflecting the left-leaning realities of city politics.
Their dream of spurring a blue-collar revival by gutting trade deals and raising tariffs is a fantasy, economists insist. By BEN WHITE
DANE, Wis. – Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are barnstorming Wisconsin with at least one promise in common: by taking apart trade deals and imposing tariffs, they will bring back the highly paid blue-collar jobs of the industrial past.
But many economists say that’s little more than an appealing fantasy. And the reasons are on display at this small metal fabrication shop tucked into rural Wisconsin farm country.
Dane Manufacturing offers a mini-trip through labor market history. At one end, partially automated machines stamp out metal parts with the help of several workers. At the other end, a giant, laser-guided robot silently cranks out products with virtually no human intervention. Before long, more of Dane’s machines will be fully automated.
So executives at Dane think Trump and Sanders have it all wrong on manufacturing. Many, if not all, of the low-skilled, assembly-line jobs the two leading populist candidates talk about bringing back are gone for good, they say, a view shared by many trade economists.
But the picture is not as grim as Sanders and Trump make it seem. There are still many manufacturing openings — 13,000 across Wisconsin — for workers with slightly higher levels of technical skill or who are willing to learn how to operate newly automated factories and move short distances for new openings.
