No wonder Germany, Britain and America are all going female! Listening is a good thing.
Although I think she should attempt more poetry in stump speeches. She delivers the penultimate draft. The final draft should be poetry.
And the media is its own beast. Hire a team to deal with it. Use social media more. Videos of her listening can be released on YouTube so others may listen in and skip mainstream media altogether.
In this day and age, you become your own media.
ABP News Opinion Poll: BSP to win 185 seats if UP polls are held now
The BJP had the same problem in Bihar. Nobody was running for Chief Minister.
In 2014 Modi was the only one running to be Prime Minister.
If the BJP loses UP and Gujarat, it has to figure out a way to work without a majority in the upper house.
Anti-incumbency worked against Mayawati last time. This time it might work against Akhilesh.
But 2019 will be about Modi’s performance. If the growth rate has hit 10% he should see victories again in both Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, not to say Gujarat.
Angela Eagle launches leader bid 'to heal Labour'
One of the pleasant surprises of the Brexit vote was not the guy with Donald Trump hair and temper but a woman is going to be Prime Minister. Now looks like the opposition might also go to a woman. Men have created enough mess.
A More Personal Hillary Clinton Tries to Erase a Trust Deficit
There is the truth to the person. Hillary the person as people who have known her a long time would know, like family and friends, people who might have known her even she had never become a public figure.
The Republican surgeon that Trump defeated a few months earlier, his colleagues at John Hopkins said, "We don't recognize the person portrayed by the media."
That gap between the real person and that person's public image does not seem to go away even if tens of books might have been written about them, and the Internet is full of articles about them, and there is saturation coverage, and now there is social media. You can cut through old media and go straight to the people via social media and that image deficit is still there.
So there is the public private gap.
Being Bill Clinton's wife doesn't help. Bill Clinton said not long after he launched his career: "People either love me or they hate me, there is nothing in between."
Both ways you get exaggerated, inaccurate pictures. With Hillary people not only get a Dem, you also get a woman, and the culture's sexism takes wings. Besides, before Bill Clinton even Democratic presidents were all born with silver spoons. Bill Clinton faced regional as well as class biases. The power structure did not take too kindly to him.
So there's all that partisan mythologizing.
How do you handle this?
The Clinton campaign should go all over the country and all over the world and talk to everyone who ever spent more than 10 minutes with Hillary Clinton and record it all and put it all out on YouTube in one grand release of 10,000 hours.
Let people who have met her in person talk about her. Americans might be utterly surprised what people around the world say about her. She starts looking like an angel.
Like some Canadians said about Barack Obama years ago: "Send him over here!"
Cancer is not one disease. It is many diseases. Poverty is not just lack of cash. If it were only lack of cash, it could be solved in a heartbeat.
Narcissism is a disease. It approaches the complexity of cancer and poverty.
I am going to argue Donald Trump is not a racist or a sexist or an anti semite or a xenophobe. He is all of the above by the textbook. But those are but symptoms.
The disease is narcissism. This guy needs help. Just like guns should be kept away from the mentally unstable, the mightiest political office on the planet needs to be kept away from a suffering person.
The comic part is a narcissist is completely unaware of his situation.
Narcissism is not a character problem. If Trump were just a liar, you could say he has a character problem. But narcissism is a condition, kind of like alcoholism. Psychiatrists will attest to it. Only this one patient is in full public view. He keeps giving evidence every step of the way.
His racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti semitism all stem out of the affliction. Does an alcoholic love his family? Does he at least want to? What if he is not able to? Does it matter that he wants to?
When he talks hate speech, he attracts attention, and that feeds his narcissism. He feeds on that. It is a vicious loop. This guy needs help.
Is he a racist? Racist is that racist does. Racist is that racist speaks. So yes. He is. His hate speech is designed to defend structural racism and sexism.
But that is not his primary concern.
If you can not stay away from your smartphone for 24 hours straight without feeling withdrawal symptoms, you have a problem. If you have become dependent on your smartphone notifications so much that they feel like indispensable emotional nourishment to you, you are in the early stages of narcissism yourself, and you should be able to relate to Donald Trump.
And if guns don't kill people, why manufacture defective guns?
The strategy of those who would control guns has been in fundamental error. It has been about whipping up the outrage.
There's plenty of outrage. The outrage is in clear plurality.
Gun laws are in a political monopoly situation. The NRA needs to be sued out of existence.
This has been done before. Big Tobacco was successfully sued.
Families of gun victims need to come together and sue the NRA out of existence. After that the democratic process can decide on sensible gun laws.
Sensible means a constitutional amendment. No more right to bear arms. What are you? An animal?
A national 911 on a location aware smartphone with a camera with a response time of three minutes or less (keep helicopters at the ready in rural areas) will protect you better than a handgun.
Hunting can apply to be recognized as a sport. Who goes hunting with AK-47s? Cannibals. That's who.
Donald Trump Defending The Defenseless
There are tens of millions of black men on the planet (and women) who have, objectively speaking, higher IQs than the Donald, but who are janitors. The only reason Donald Trump is not a janitor is because he is a white male. One is allowed to be lucky. One is allowed to be in the right place at the right time.
But this is not a guy appreciating his luck. This is a guy rubbing it in. If his hate speech were only free speech, I'd be glad for it. It would be puss coming out. But his hate speech is not just free speech. His hate speech is a diehard defense of structural racism. This is not a guy who got lucky. This is a guy who has benefitted from structural racism every step of the way and has hated the mere symbolism of a black guy in the White House. Where do black people go after that? To the polling booth, again and again.
At first I thought his star of David tweet was merely anti semitism. Now he is out to prove it was also gross political incompetence that would not even fly at the City Council level.
I have never seen a more racist, sexist, xenophobic person in any presidential race, ever.
To swat a mosquito and call it Hillary! Those are concentrated sulphuric acid levels of sexism. Women of this country regardless of political party should take note. Where do you go after this? You go to the voting booth.
If you were to gather 100 of the most trustworthy human beings on the planet, from the spiritual leaders to the scientists and the fortune tellers, Hillary would be in that room. At a personal level she is quite an exceptional character. It is astounding that she is even in politics. There are quite a few slimey types in politics.
But her untrustworthy ratings are only a few points behind that of Trump. How do you explain that? Partisan politics. People who will never vote for her have woven this elaborate false mythology around her, absolutely baseless, but politically real and potent. At least she does not have eating disorders. A lot of young women succumb to similarly sexist attacks coming through the media and end up with eating disorders. Which is sad and wrong.
Political tussles are allowed but sexism is sin. Political competition is healthy, but you are supposed to fight with ideas.
I hope women will see through it and vote for her in large numbers. Hillary is not untrustworthy. She is female.
Politicians go sailing. They don't have the privilege of stating one position and sticking to it like an academic. In a democracy public opinion of course matters. Public opinion is the wind that a politician has to sail with. Sometimes you go a little to the left, sometimes a little to the right. That is the democratic way. A politician is supposed to listen to the people even as they stake out their positions. Hillary has been sailing for decades. Her positions have evolved. They are supposed to. She has been listening. To you the people. That is a good thing. Don't tell me you miss Saddam. He did not sail. He ruled.
Looks like Hillary went from leading Trump by 12 points to 5 points. How come?
It is one of Clinton's laws of politics. When you get hit, you hit back. Otherwise the public believes the lies.
Donald Trump gave a pretty agitated speech full of lies, full of tabloid "research" and it worked because there was no counter punch.
The women of America don't need to see a woman take the punches. Heck, that much they do on their own most days of the week. The women of America need to see someone who fights back and wins.
Trump is not running on policy. He is running on misguided mumbo jumbo identity, KKK nationalism, and hot air. And "political correctness" grievances. Which basically means white guys should be allowed to say mean sexist things to women and mean racist things to blacks and Mexicans.
Looks like Hillary needs Warren who goes sucker punch for sucker punch against Donald.
That will give Hillary the luxury to keep to the high ground.
As Mitch McConnell does the racist thing and puts the US constitution into the acid tank, democracy's resiliency is that Hillary will win both the White House and the Senate and a more liberal appointee than the one Obama has proposed will end up on the Supreme Court. Hillary is also on schedule to make two more appointments during her eight years, which clears the deck to 2050.
The White House part of the race is over. The Senate part of the race is over. And Hillary is set to also take the House. Right now the numbers are not officially there yet, but the momentum is unmistakable. I see a tsunami building up.
I have watched elections all my life in many different countries all over the world. I don't watch sports except for the World Cup.
I have never seen anything like this. Hillary just might win all 50 states. The battleground states are no more battling. The focus can now move to the South. And the South is caving in. Tennessee dollar numbers are in and Trump is getting beat by everyone who ran in either party this year.
Hillary is yet to get the Warren bump. And the Obama bump. And Bill Clinton is busy like a bee behind the scenes. This just might be the purest political work he ever got to do. All the craft, none of the tabloid nonsense.
Four is a team. And what a team. This is without precedent in American politics.
So what do you do in the aftermath? How do you run a one party state?
To quote a sentence from Bill Clinton's autobiography, one word: arithmetic.
Don't overplay your hand and lose the majority two years later. Stay in conversation with the grassroots. Stay focused on the future. Celebrate diversity in public ways. For one, that doesn't cost money. If you think diversity is America's past, you have not seen the future.
We are at the cusp of The Age Of Abundance. America (and the world) is about to get so rich that Donald Trump is right, America is Third World today.
But it won't happen automatically. There is some serious steering to do.
There is a world government to hatch. Barack Obama is George Washington. There is a global warming fire to douse, almost all of it through innovation. God gave you a brain.
The same effort that turns the tide on global warming and steers the ship away from the iceberg unleashes technological forces that gives America a Universal Basic Income in 10-12 years. Bernie's asks will be proven small.
His attempt to get 100% of his ideas onto the party platform is sexist, in that he is refusing to face the fact that he lost.
Sanders is itching for a convention fight
On the other hand, this pressure makes sure Elizabeth Warren makes it to the ticket. Warren was the first choice for people who rallied to Bernie and Bernie knows it.
If Bernie wants as much of his ideas to see the light of day as possible, he should do the opposite of what he is doing. He should get 200% behind Hillary and Warren.
How Tim Kaine went from 'wild card' vice presidential pick to shortlist favorite for Hillary Clinton
Right now Hillary is leading in all battleground states, is the only one with a ground game, and could put the South into play.
With Warren Hillary gets a unified convention, 300 million in grassroots money, a disappeared Bernie, and a chunk of Republican women. Without Warren she is looking at a fractured convention.
Deliver the House to Hillary Warren to effectively fight global warming.
Forget Terrorism, Republicans Are America’s Greatest Existential Threat. Americans face greater threats of extreme weather, seal level rise, water scarcity, heat waves, and wildfires, and biological systems disturbance.
