"A Trump supporter who’s outraged by the verdict is not going to be moved for calm by any Democratic president or Republican president who does not back Donald Trump."

"Even if Biden were not his political opponent, if you’re so outraged by the verdict that you’re ready to take to the street, a Democratic president is not going to reach you. That’s the sad reality of being president today."

Said Jennifer Palmieri, "a former communications director for Hillary Clinton," quoted in "At a Moment of National Trauma, Biden Feels Compelled to Stay on the Sidelines/While presidents typically play a pastoral role after court cases that tear at the national fabric, the incumbent was effectively conflicted out" (NYT).

I think if Biden were at all presentable and capable of reassuring and calming the country, appropriate words could be written for him for him to step up and deliver.

Also, who's "ready to take to the street"? We're not seeing that. And if we were, it would be more important for the President of the United States to show some leadership.

"The white man’s path is a rut for the rest of us" — writes a privileged white woman...

.... Jennifer Palmieri, in a newspaper owned by a white man (The Washington Post, owned by mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos).

Where does Palmieri get the identitarian authority to speak for a group called "the rest of us" against "the white man"?

To her credit, she begins by showing her awareness that she really doesn't have the authority:

A few years ago, I would have dismissed as unhelpful the notion that I was a woman struggling to succeed in a man’s world. I thought I was doing great. I was working in Barack Obama’s White House. Hillary Clinton’s election as the first female president seemed to be on the horizon and....

Palmieri was Hillary's communications director.

But I no longer see it as self-defeating to call myself an outsider in a man’s world.

She'd have been an insider if Hillary had become President. But she's not saying she is an outsider, just that it's to her advantage — not "self-defeating" — to call herself an outsider.

Instead, I think the self-preservation of all marginalized people demands it.

All marginalized people need you — extremely privileged white woman — to call yourself an outsider. Their "self-preservation" depends on you claiming to be one of them?

Patiently waiting for things to improve has served only to sustain the very systems that keep women and people of color from obtaining real power.

Systems! You were communications director and your candidate lost. That's why you don't have power — and it would have been immense and real. Because your campaign fell short, you now posit "systems" that are holding you back in the same way they hold back women in general and "people of color." What were the "systems" that held back "people of color" when you were working in Barack Obama’s White House? Or do the "systems" come and go depending on whether Hillary Clinton blabbered about "deplorables" and didn't go to Michigan?

If you ask the question like that, out loud... "Can Democrats Follow #MeToo to Victory?"...

... I hope it's because you believe the answer is no. If this is your actual strategy, you better keep it to yourselves. If you can. Don't repeat the Jennifer Palmieri screwup. Remember, earlier this month?

The Center For American Progress (CAP) Action Fund circulated a memo... co-authored by former Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri...  “The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success..."...

"Can Democrats Follow #MeToo to Victory?" is a NYT column by Thomas B. Edsall. I haven't read it yet, but I suspect that he's posing the question to answer it in the negative. Let's see:

The issue has the potential to accelerate the growing discontent among well-educated white women with the Republican Party. But it could also intensify hostility to the liberal agenda among conservatives, particularly white men, many of whom view women’s complaints of discrimination as “an attempt to gain advantage” in the workplace....

Edsall goes on to quote a lot of academics and pollsters in a way that should inspire caution about using this issue too much. He mostly lets data and experts do the talking for him, and the closest he gets to answering the question in the column title is "what looks like a favorable climate now for Democrats is in fact highly volatile."

One of the pollsters — Alex Castellanos — says something so interesting that I'm going to make it a separate post. So if that's what you're inclined to talk about, please save your comment for a post that will come up next and very soon.

3 more things from "Shattered."

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm reading "Shattered/Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign." Listening to the audio version on my walk along the lake today...



... I made a mental note of 3 words — "-splain-," "clutch," and "construction" — so I could find 3 passages in the Kindle version and quote them for you here:

1. 18% of the way into the book, we encounter the delightful word "campaign-splained": "[I]n early September 2015... the New York Times had just published a story about a coming Clinton campaign strategy shift. Hillary would 'show more humor and heart,' the headline declared.... Clinton supporters across the country read it [as] a pure what-the-fuck moment... [Susie Tompkins Buell, a big donor] scolded [Clinton campaign manager Robby] Mook...  The campaign’s inability to reveal Hillary’s authenticity— and its ham-fisted effort to manufacture a false version of it — was infuriating.... Trying to placate Buell, Mook offered up [communications director Jennifer] Palmieri as a sacrifice. The large, domineering communications team was pretty much a separate shop within the operation, he campaign-splained."

2. 29% of the way in, we see this contrast between Bill Clinton and Robby Mook that makes Mook sound modern, even as we know — having watched the Sanders and Trump campaigns — it is probably even more passé than what Bill wanted to do: "[Bill] liked to go to small towns in northern New Hampshire, Appalachia, and rural Florida because he believed, from experience, that going to them and acknowledging he knew how they lived their lives, and the way they made decisions, put points on the board. Mook wanted Bill in places where the most Hillary-inclined voters would see him. That meant talking to white liberals and minorities in cities and their close-in suburbs. That was one fault line of a massive generational divide between Bill and Mook that separated old-time political hustling from modern data-driven vote collecting. Bill was like the old manager putting in a pinch hitter he believed would come through in the clutch while the eggheaded general manager in the owner’s box furiously dialed the dugout phone to let him know there was an 82 percent chance that the batter would make an out this time."

3. At 30%: "[T]he one aspect of her campaign that [Hillary Clinton] was most confident about was that none of the tribes" — The Mook Mafia, The State [Department] Crew, The Consultants, and The Communications Shop — "separately or in collaboration, had any idea how to construct a winning message for her. In her view, it was up to the people she paid to find the right message for her — a construction deeply at odds with the way Sanders and Trump built their campaigns around their own gut feelings about where to lead the country."

"Franken fell asleep at 2 a.m. on the night of the election and woke up with a migraine."

"For days, it was hard to think about anything besides Trump in the White House. 'There was a week or so when sleeping literally was a great thing,' Franken said. 'You go through a process of internalizing it.' In addition to the political shock, there was a broader despair over the cultural disconnect that the election laid bare. I kept thinking of an Onion headline that ran a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks: 'A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid [Expletive] Again.' How long does it take a culture to forge a new sensibility, whether comedic or political? Franken seemed to be struggling with this a bit. There was similar confusion in the various liberal bubbles of Washington, New York and Hollywood, whose inhabitants were the supposed keepers of the American zeitgeist — the geniuses who so spectacularly dismissed the zeitgeist that elected Donald Trump."

From the NYT article "Al Franken Faces Donald Trump and the Next Four Years/The two-term Democratic senator, who once made a living satirizing politicians, envisions an unfunny future," by Mark Leibovich. I picked that quote out of the center of the long article, but you should know that the article begins with Al Franken's observation that Trump never laughs.

I was looking to see what else Mark Leibovich has written. He inserted himself into that Al Franken article — I kept thinking of an Onion headline — right into the paragraph about Franken's headache. That seemed unusually egoistic for a NYT writer.

I looked back at my own Mark Leibovich tag and found 2 things:

Hillary's communications director Jen Palmieri sounded utterly terrified facing questions from George Stephanopoulos.

Palmieri should have been perfectly prepared. She's the communications director so she should be an ace at communications. She knew the precise issue she would be asked to address: Hillary's statement, in the previous night's debate, that Donald Trump is "ISIS's best recruiter" and that ISIS is "going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." Palmieri knew everyone was demanding to know whether there were actual videos. All she needed was a packaged answer, the best answer under the circumstances, and to deliver that answer with confidence. Here's the video. Here's the transcript.

Why did she fumble, look scared, and speak in a trembling voice?! 

Palmieri's segment followed a phone interview with Donald Trump, Donald Trump had just totally overwhelmed Stephanopoulos, and Stephanopoulos's first question to Palmieri incorporated the formidible Trump: "Your response to Donald Trump?" Maybe she was prepared, but Donald Trump unnerved her. She began:

"The USA Today opinion page scored a nice little coup yesterday, getting an op-ed by a donor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign who argues that 'there has been no evidence of criminal conduct' by the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee."

"The piece, by lawyer Anne Tompkins, appears to be part of a didactic operation the Clinton campaign undertook in the last weeks of August. In an interview with the Puffington Host’s Sam Stein, published Aug. 21, communications director Jennifer Palmieri promised, in Stein’s paraphrase, 'an end-of-summer effort to educate the public on the classification process for national security material.'" That would be the process that... Mrs. Clinton’s staffers and other defenders insist is too complicated for anyone, much less Mrs. Clinton, to understand. So when they say they’re going to 'educate the public,' it’s a safe bet they mean 'try to confuse the public.'"

From "The ‘Experts’ Spin/Mrs. Clinton faces no legal jeopardy, they say vacuously," by James Taranto. (Google some text if that link doesn't get you there.)

Try to confuse the public can be an effective strategy, and I think it may work for the email thing. The process is: 1. People realize they're supposed to be concerned about something, 2. They start to pay attention, to fulfill their civic duty to understand something that's supposed to be important, 3. They experience difficulty, confusion, and shame, 4. Now, we're ready for the lifeline to save our time and our pride: The problem has been looked at by experts, and they've said it's not a problem anymore. 5. You want to believe those other people who are still pressuring you to understand this business, or do you want to be free to move on to other things, like maybe, ha ha, did you know the sprinkler system went off at hoity-toity Hillary fundraiser in Southampton and lots of well-dressed, fancy richies like Anna Wintour and Martha Stewart got all wet? Oh, that Hillary! It's just one absurd screw-up after another, but the old dame rolls with the punches.

"When he gets back to the White House on Thursday, [Obama] will reinforce that theme of youth engagement when he sits for his interviews with three YouTube stars..."

"... [Bethany] Mota, the anti-bullying fashionista, who is Hispanic and has a homeschooling background; Hank Green, a video engagement entrepreneur who also does educational programming and has a friendly nerd-next-door persona; and GloZell, a pioneering 52-year-old comedian with a big audience...."

From a Bloomberg column by Margaret Talev titled "Obama's Social State of the Union/In the age of new media, the president and his team are trying to innovate to keep one of the country's oldest traditions relevant." I'm not going to embed any videos from the links above, but I strongly encourage you to go check them out to see the route these characters took to achieve YouTube popularity so you can form an accurate opinion of what it means for the President of the United States to be using them to boost his own popularity.

“The mainstream media still matters a great deal, but you can’t just do that anymore,” said White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri. “You have to work harder to reach a larger audience. It’s so disaggregated that you have to put more effort into it. The good news is there’s ways to reach people who really care about a particular issue.”

Discussions about how to reach a broader and deeper audience this year through non-traditional and social media began six months ago, Palmieri said. “We’re trying to make sure as many Americans know about his proposals as possible,” she said. “And you have to make sure that people who really care about a particular issue know what his proposals are and what he’s done."...

Palmieri summed up their collective appeal to the president... “These people have a huge following.”

One of the great lessons of the blogosphere: never Palmieri on an Yglesias.

"Maybe it’s just me, but this post is kind of creepy." That's the first of nearly 500 comments on a post at Matt Yglesias's blog -- a post that is not written by Matt Yglegias. Here's the post:

A Special Note Re: Third Way

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

If "the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own," then what the hell is this? Lady, you are on Matt's blog! How did you get there? Did you just barge in like some burglar in the night? Do you know the first thing about blogging and a blogger's relationship with his readers?

I'd never heard of "Third Way" until I read this post. Now, I think it sucks. Not because of something Matt once wrote about it -- which I hadn't noticed -- but because of this completely creepy intrusion into Matt's space. Why didn't Palmieri email Matt and ask him to quote a statement from the Center for American Progress Action Fund? Maybe she did and he refused. But either way, the invasion of a man's blog is unjustified, wrong, and also stupid. It's stupid, because even if you don't mind pushing around a respected blogger, you're doing it where everyone can see.

Let me quote some more of the comments:

"Why did Matt leave The Atlantic? This ‘bullshit’ post reveals the limits how independent-minded one can be when associated with this website. (Not to say CAP doesn’t do a lot of good - it does) I think this really is a big deal - Matt needs to decide if he is a independent thinker or an activist. This post shows how hard it is to be both. Did he even approve this post - on his blog?"

"Think of all the posts that didn’t merit a ghostly materialization of the CEO! Perhaps CAP really does support all those other views of Matt’s. The CAP Action Fund hates turkey."

"Next post from Jennifer Palmieri: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia."

"VERY CREEPY. that being said, matt said he left the atlantic because he wanted some skin in the game. well, i think perhaps his indy days gave him some impolitic ticks that now coming back to bite him now that he’s part of The Movement."

"Fuck off Palmieri. If we were interested in what you thought, we’d read it on your own blog. Jeez."

"Sadly, after his workplace retreat in the Pine Barrens, Matt was never heard from again…"

"Dear Jennifer, Nice boneheaded move. Dear Matthew, You left The Atlantic for this? Take your fucking balls—er, blog—back man, and perhaps you won’t suffer a loss of readers. This is just embarrassing."

"Jennifer, fabulous job. In one short post, you managed to focus attention on Matt’s original post, convince folks Third Way is nothing but a bunch of lame frauds, alienate loyal readers, cast a pall on CAP’s credibility, and possibly shoot your job prospects in both feet. Heckuva job."

And Kos has posted on it too:

The Center for American Progress should not make a habit of doing this.

And for the record, the editors on the site can say whatever they want about whoever and I won't get all creepy and Big Brother on them.

p.s. And yes, the Third Way is a bunch of assholes who make the DLC look downright palatable.

Kos points us to the original Yglesias post:

I’m getting sort of tired of the endless discussion of whether Barack Obama is a wholesome liberal or an evil centrist, but I have to say something about one aspect of this story:

“Barack Obama has never made any bones about it: He is a moderate,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate public policy think tank. “People who ignored that did so at their peril.”

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit. But Barack Obama’s policy proposals aren’t like that. At all. Nor do personnel on his policy teams — including the more ideologically moderate members — stand for anything that’s remotely as weak a brew as the stuff Third Way puts out. And yet, Third Way loves Barack Obama and says he’s a moderate just like them. Which is great. But everyone needs to see that these things are moving in two directions simultaneously. At the very same time Obama is disappointing progressive supporters on a number of fronts, he’s also bringing moderates on board for things that are way more ambitious than anything they were endorsing two or three years ago.

The irony is: I'm the sort of person who actually likes the sort of thing Matt would call "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit." I voted for Barack Obama because I was betting that he really is a pragmatic moderate. And now Palmieri has made me hate the Third Way.

We have now learned one of the great lessons in the history of blogging: Never Palmieri on an Yglesias.

UPDATE: Yglesias now has several posts since Jennifer Palmieri dropped that turd on his blog. One obliquely refers to the stink:

As we’ve clarified, speaking as ever purely for myself and not as an institutional position of CAP/AF, Third Way’s First 100 Days agenda strikes me as pretty weak tea. For starter’s here’s their retirement security agenda [blah blah blah].

Sample comment:

“As we’ve clarified …” We?

More sympathetically:

What’s going on here is pretty obvious: Matt doesn’t like that Third Way demanded the editorial wrist-slap that appeared on his blog, but doesn’t want to directly criticize his boss. So, having covered CAP’s ass with the previous post, he is now going to make a project of picking on Third Way with special relish. What is it people want Matt to address here, exactly?

AND: Julian Sanchez says it well:

It’s like they made a list of the dozen ways they could’ve handled some minor internecine friction—including just ignoring it—and asked: “Which of these is really guaranteed to blow up in our face in the most self-defeating way possible?”...

So congratulations, Third Way, a whole lot of people who’d never heard of you now know exactly one thing about you: You’re thin-skinned whiners.

AND: Yglesias finally gets around to addressing the question directly, not that he says anything interesting.