"I would pay a lot of money to sit down with that 51 percent of respondents and ask them to tell me five things Trump accomplished in office."

"I’d even spot them the first four: a tax cut; the appointment of three SCOTUS judges; the killing of Qasem Soleimani; Operation Warp Speed."

Writes Jonathan Last, reacting to a Wall Street Journal poll asking whether Trump or Biden had a better record of accomplishments — 51% said Trump, 40% said Biden — in "America’s Authoritarian Exceptionalism/Demagogues usually arise in times of chaos and privation. In America, our demagogues have become powerful during a period of peace and prosperity" (Bulwark).

So Last is offering "a lot of money" to name one more Trump accomplishment. I'm sure he'll want the power to deny that any particular thing deserves the designation "accomplishment" — e.g., Trump's efforts to secure the southern border.

ADDED: I'll name one that liberals are practically compelled to view as an accomplishment: the First Step Act.

"The general sense seems to be that Republicans and conservatives in Congress and think tanks and the media are just going to Don Draper the last four years."

Writes Jonathan Last in "Break-Ups Are Hard To Do" (The Bulwark), embedding this:

This is the more apt clip:

Is the Kamala Harris logo "the worst political graphic design job in a generation"?

Jonathan Last says it just might be.



So... is there anything worse? Or... what's so awful about it?

The question whether "For the People" is a good slogan is separate. Feel free to talk about that. But I'd like to encourage the discussion of the visual — the shape and placement of the letters, the colors, etc.

Last says:

It could be that Harris’s design team looked at the AOC poster and saw the earth-tones, heavy-text, and adjacent colors and thought that that was the secret of their success. And about those earth tones—they’re straight out of the 1970s and they’re a bad idea.

Pantone describes the ’70s palette consisting of “Harvest Gold” and “Rust.” In the 1970s, designers used these colors because they wanted to take viewers “back down to earth—solid, earthy colors to ground us during shakey economic times.”

Here's the AOC poster he's referring to (alongside another poster he compares it to):



ADDED: On the Kamala Harris logo, vertically down the center, it says "LIE."

I'm resisting the prodding to feel "shocked" that Scott Walker is already out of the race.

"It’s hard to exaggerate how shocking it is that Scott Walker is out of the 2016 race on September 21," writes Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard. It's "shocking" because:

On April 1, he led the field with 17 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. On August 1, he was in second place, behind Donald Trump, with 13 percent. And in the seven weeks since then, his support has collapsed to the point where he is in tenth place, with 1.8 percent—putting him just above Rick Perry, who has 1.0 percent support despite having dropped out ten days ago. The last three polls have Walker at 0, 2, and 2 percent support.

It was actually more shocking that Walker had ever leaped to the front of the group, and that wasn't really that amazing. The facts are:

1. Most Americans didn't know him and they were suddenly amazed by his one good speech.

2. That was his one good speech, his stump speech, used to fight the recall and then to get elected to a new term, here in Wisconsin. It was well-honed, but it only sounds new and amazing once.

3. 17% isn't really such a high number. It only reaches the top in a big field when people are still shifting around looking for somebody, anybody to favor. Walker's Real Clear Politics average topped out transitorily at 8 points above the next guy. Others — including Rubio and Christie and Huckabee — have enjoyed a stint at the top.
 
4. Walker, grabbing for a defining issue in the last couple weeks, went big on attacking public unions. It's no surprise that Americans — are we always hot to get angry about something? — didn't see fit to suddenly see unions as our biggest problem. Trump was able to suddenly forefront illegal immigration, so maybe Walker thought it could work to whip out a big new issue, but Walker didn't figure out how to make an equivalent move. Walker's not Trump, and unions aren't illegal immigration. For one thing, unions aren't illegal, and people don't reflexively think there's something wrong that needs immediate fixing. In Wisconsin, Walker got elected, along with his party's majority in both houses of the legislature, and then they revealed the legislation. They had the votes to pass their bill, and, from that position, they spent months trying to educate us about why public unions were a special problem, different from unions in general. It wasn't easy to understand. And they got a lot of pushback. How could Walker have thought he could do anything like that from the position of candidate? Even if he hadn't had to fight to be heard in a crowded field, Americans were in no position to learn the details of a new issue they hadn't been thinking about.

5. Walker had to do something impressive at the big debate last week. What he chose to do was to be the first person to butt in and interrupt when it wasn't his turn. He had nothing really to say at that point. Paul had been attacking Trump and Trump had just delivered a comic line — "I never attacked him on his look, and believe me, there’s plenty of subject matter right there." And Walker starts up: "But Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake…" Jake — the moderator Jake Tapper — pushed him back, because it was totally Trump's turn to speak. There was a rule that when you were attacked, you got a chance to reply. Walker insisted that somehow — absurdly — it was his turn: "But Jake, this — this is — this…" This is what? Important? No, it wasn't. Trump, in fact, got his turn. The next question went to Jeb Bush: "Governor Bush, would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear codes?" In the middle of Bush's answer, Walker started up again, saying: "Jake, this is — this is — this is…." This time, he got a chance to finish his "This is" sentence: "This is what’s wrong with this debate. We’re not talking about real issues." But then, instead of raising a "real issue," he took a shot at Trump: "And Mr. Trump, we don’t need an apprentice in the White House.... We have one right now. He told us all the things we wanted to hear back in 2008. We don’t know who you are or where you’re going. We need someone who can actually get the job done." That, of course, just gave Trump another chance to respond to an attack, and Trump being Trump, nobody even remembered Walker's line — "We don’t need an apprentice in the White House.... we have one right now" — which, I assume, his people prepared and coached him to deliver. Behind the scenes, I bet they believed they'd set up the take-away quote of the evening, the quote that would leverage Walker as the Trump slayer. But Walker got absolutely nothing out of that.