If the Democrats nominate Michelle Obama, I might vote for her

    This Substack newsletter showed up on my email this morning, and I took the bait:

     Very Serious

Of Course Biden Should Attack Trump for Being a Convicted Felon…

JOSH BARRO

People are overthinking this one.

Dear readers,

If we’re going to debate whether — or how —Joe Biden should use to his advantage his opponent’s conviction on 34 felony counts, I think it’s worth starting from a greater level of abstraction: In general, in a political campaign, how should one react to one’s opponent being convicted of crimes? The answer to this question is obvious. “My opponent is a convicted criminal, a literal felon” is a great talking point and a clean, factual hit; you should push that message as hard as you can.

So I’ve been surprised by the hand-wringing among Democrats about how Biden should handle the issue of Trump’s conviction in a New York court. It’s possible that these specific circumstances call for a different approach, but I start from the obvious point: a criminal conviction is both fair game and a powerful political argument. I would need to be convinced of why this situation is different, and I don’t think the arguments are convincing.

Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters gathered in front of Trump Tower in Manhattan as the former president held a news conference on the hush money verdict in Manhattan on May 31. Anti-Trump protesters chanted slogans such as 'Trump is guilty' and Trump supporters chanted slogans such as 'Not guilty.’ (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

I’ll lay out the arguments I’ve seen for why Biden should pull his punches, and why I don’t buy them.

A focus on Trump’s convictions will backfire because it will create a sympathy vote for Trump among voters who think the convictions are unfair.

Who are these voters who were supposedly waiting for Trump to actually be convicted before they decided they would vote for him? As I noted in a conversation with The New York Times last week, after the verdict, the Republican polling firm Echelon Insights contacted voters they’d already previously surveyed about the election, and 6% said the conviction would change their votes. But among those who claimed the conviction was causing them to switch to vote forTrump, 100% had already told Echelon, before the trial, that they were voting for Trump.1 In the Republican primary, it may have been true that a focus on Trump’s legal travails was consolidating voters in Trump’s favor. But in the general election, the people who are motivated by Trump’s “persecution” are his core base voters. The thing about his base is it’s already voting for him no matter what — that’s what makes the base the base — and Biden does not need to fear they will vote for Trump even harder if he talks about the conviction too much. As for persuadable voters — well, they tend to be younger, less politically engaged, and less ideologically extreme than base voters. They do not have a strong emotional investment in the idea that Trump is being persecuted — if they did, they wouldn’t be disengaged and persuadable. And there is some evidence that information about Trump’s conviction is somewhat persuasive to them not to vote for him. This cuts in favor of talking about the conviction, not against it.

Talking about the conviction is improper because it promotes the idea that this was a politicized prosecution.

Biden shouldn’t comment on ongoing DOJ prosecutions, and I think it’s probably for the best that he not talk about ongoing state prosecutions, lest he appear to be creating pressure around them. But this is a completed trial in a state court, resulting from a prosecution he had no role in bringing and over which he had no control. I don’t see what institutional concern is served by him not talking about it.

Biden shouldn’t talk about the conviction because the prosecution was kind of BS, brought using a novel legal theory that would have been unlikely to be used against a less notable defendant.

Sorry for being formalistic here, but I think whether the DA’s legal theory was valid is a question for New York’s appellate courts, and also a fair question for voters to consider if they want, but it is not Joe Biden’s problem or responsibility. Trump has been duly tried and convicted, in a process over which Biden did not have control or influence.2 A campaign is not a court of law, and voters can judge for themselves the actions that led to Trump’s conviction: First, he cheated on his wife (who gave birth to his son Barron just four months prior) with a porn star. He sent a goon to threaten that porn star against talking about their sexual encounter. He paid her hush money so voters wouldn’t learn about the affair before the 2016 election. And he created false business records to conceal the hush payment’s purpose — an act that was clearly a New York misdemeanor, even though appellate courts will scrutinize the aggressive theory that turned it into a felony. While it’s probably true Trump wouldn’t have been charged if he weren’t Trump, he also wouldn’t have been charged if he hadn’t done that specific set of gross things. Voters are even free to decide that Trump is generally a crook and therefore it’s fair for him to be convicted of a crime, like OJ Simpson and his theft of memorabilia — it’s not the way courts work (and for good reason), but it’s a perfectly good way for ordinary citizens to decide who we should feel sorry for. And, it’s perfectly fair for his opponent in the general election to point out that he keeps getting in legal trouble because he commits crimes — the technicalities can be left to the courts.

Biden shouldn’t talk about the conviction because nobody cares about this stuff — this election is about things directly affecting people’s everyday lives, like immigration, inflation and abortion.

People obviously do care about (gestures broadly) this stuff — leaders all over the world are unpopular due to inflation, Biden’s approval rating is terrible, and yet this election is close anyway due to Trump’s unpopularity. A key root of that unpopularity is his reputation for immoral and criminous behavior. A better question than do people care about this stuff is can they be made to care any more — do Trump’s conviction and messaging about the conviction actually move votes? I have an open mind about how much mileage can be gotten out of messaging about the conviction — and certainly, I don’t think the Biden campaign should talk about Trump’s conviction instead of attacking his plans to restrict abortion rights, cut taxes on rich people and corporations, and raise the cost of living by imposing tariffs that make all the goods we buy more expensive. But a recent New York Timessurvey (which, like the Echelon Insights survey, contacted voters previously surveyed by the Times) found that the margin of support among the recontacted voters had shifted to Biden by 2 percentage points after the guilty verdict, with the shift especially concentrated among “young, non-white and disengaged Democratic-leaning voters” — that is, exactly the sort of demographics we often talk about as uninterested in Trump’s trials and falling away from Biden over the cost of living.

More broadly, I think some Democrats have over-learned a lesson from Hillary Clinton overdoing it on the character attacks in 2016. Her campaign focused too much on how Trump was different from other Republicans and not enough on the usual reasons voters might reject Republicans; partly as a result, voters perceived Trump as more moderate than Clinton by Election Day, and he won.

But there are now signs of a bit of amnesia about Trump’s personal defects among less-engaged voters. The youngest voters in this upcoming election were 10 years old when the “Access Hollywood” tape came out, and 5 years old when Trump rocketed himself to relevance in conservative politics with his promotion of the theory that America’s first black president was secretly foreign-born. As the Times poll suggests, some reminders about exactly what’s so bad about Donald Trump The Person really could help convince some of those voters that Trump is unacceptable and bring them (back) into the Biden fold. Biden shouldn’t pass up any opportunity to send those reminders.

Very seriously,

Josh

Sloan’s Newsletter

This here old white fossil clerked for a US District Judge who presided over every federal criminal prosecution in north Alabama. I closely follow and shoot off my mouth in the great American legal, political and religious shit show that not even the most demented lawyer in Alabama could have imagined when I practiced law in Birmingham during and after the George Wallace era.
I suppose by now every American who has access to a TV or a smartphone knows Donald Trump is a convicted felon, and they don’t need President Biden’s help knowing Trump is a convicted felon. Maybe President Biden should tell Americans what he did for America that helped Americans and their country since he got elected in 2020. While at that, he tells Americans that he accepts his son Hunter’s felony conviction, and he announced he will not pardon Hunter or commute his sentence if he is given prison time, and in that way slyly remind Americans of how Trump behaved like a whiny spoiled rich white brat after he got caught red-handed and convicted by a jury of his peers in his hometown. 
As for the impact of Trump being convicted, his lemmings threw a lot more money at him after he was convicted, and it seems his poll ratings improved, and maybe an appeals court will reverse his conviction. If not, and  he wins in November, he can still be president, even if he is in a New York state prison. 
Based on my frequent dealings with MAGAs in Alabama, a jail bird Trump won’t matter to them, because they are convinced every federal and state criminal and civil prosecution of Trump is fake commie democrat witch hunt, and whatever Trump says is the God’s gospel, and there is no convincing them otherwise. 

Please understand, Josh, that I think Joe Biden is a lousy candidate, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a lousy candidate, and Nikki Haley is a lousy candidate, and the Devil is yanking their strings, too, and I don’t even attend church :-). 

Meanwhile, in my Apple newsfeed this morning is a kinda interesting Huff Post article, here’s the lead: 

 

Almost 9 In 10 House Republicans Voted To Put A Confederate Memorial Back At Arlington

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries asked which tradition those lawmakers wanted to uphold: “Slavery? Rape? Kidnap?” 

 

If I were President Biden, what I would do plenty as we approach Juneteenth, is say, in every photo and film clip I saw of the Charlottesville Confederate monument removal protest, and of every MAGA rally, and of the January 6 2020 coup attempt inside the national Capitol, I saw oceans of white people, and when Trump says the 2020 election was stolen, his adoring white lemmings understand he means, “stolen by blacks”.
I know for a fact that Alabama MAGAs were furious with Alabama Crimson Tide football coach leading his team and a mixed races Black Lives Matter march across the university campus to where George Wallace once stood blocking black students from going to classes, until he was removed by the Alabama National Guard, which President John F. Kennedy had federalized.

If I were president Biden, I would be reminding Americans that, when Donald was married to Ivana, as she told Vanity Fair, he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed and sometimes he read it at night. And, when asked about that, Trump said, if he ever had such a book, he did not read it. The English title of the book is, My New Order. It don’t take much smarts to see how much Trump and his MAGAs resemble Hitler and his lemmings leading up to World War II.

If the Dems nominate Michelle Obama, I might vote for her. 

 

Huff Post

Almost 9 In 10 House Republicans Voted To Put A Confederate Memorial Back At Arlington National Cemetery
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries asked which tradition those lawmakers wanted to uphold: “Slavery? Rape? Kidnap?”
The overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted to have a memorial to Confederate soldiers reinstalled at Arlington National Cemetery, drawing a sharp rebuke from Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Congress’ highest-ranking Black lawmaker.
The vote Thursday was on an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that’s seen as a must-pass piece of legislation. It would have required the secretary of the Army to reinstall the memorial in its original location in the nation’s most celebrated military veteran graveyard and not designate it as anything other than a “reconciliation” memorial or monument.
The amendment, though, failed to get a majority, as Democrats voted unanimously against it and were joined by 24 GOP House members. But 192 Republicans, or about 87% of the party in the House, voted in favor, drawing fire Friday morning from Jeffries.
“What is the rationale?” he asked, dismissing arguments proponents had made about the historical role of the monument.
“What Confederate tradition are you upholding? Is it slavery? Rape? Kidnap? Jim Crow? Lynching? Racial oppression? Or all of the above? What exactly is the Confederate tradition that extreme [Make America Great Again] Republicans in 2024 are upholding?”
A defense policy bill that passed over then-President Donald Trump’s veto in the waning days of his administration required the monument’s removal.
The art piece was unveiled in 1914 and sculpted by a Confederate veteran, Moses Jacob Ezekiel. Made of bronze and resting on a 32-foot granite pedestal, it featured a woman symbolizing the South holding a laurel wreath, a plow handle and a pruning hook, a reference to the biblical promise of a time when swords would be turned into plowshares.
Below her was a frieze of 32 figures, which “depict mythical gods alongside Southern soldiers and civilians,” according to the cemetery’s website. Among those figures are a Confederate soldier handing off his infant to an enslaved African American woman for caretaking and an enslaved man in uniform following his owner into battle.
In December 2023, the bronze elements making up most of the memorial were removed while the now-empty granite pedestal was left intact to avoid disturbing graves nearby.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), the amendment’s sponsor, said on the House floor that the memorial had been intended to help bring Americans together and had historical significance.
“Let us unite against the destruction of our history. Let us fight for the principles of healing and unity, which is exactly what this memorial was created to accomplish,” he said.
Asked about Jeffries’ criticism Friday, Clyde said calling the sculpture a Confederate memorial was unfair.
“If you go back and you look at the speeches when that monument was dedicated, you will see it was all about unity, healing,” he said. “That’s what it was about. And to say anything else is disingenuous. And honestly, a flat-out lie.”
Arlington National Cemetery, however, begs to differ, calling the monument simply a “Confederate Memorial” on its website and noting its “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
In the debate on the amendment, Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) said the memorial’s dedication in 1914, well after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and its subject matter show it was not meant to be unifying.
“When this monument was placed, the gentleman said it was for reconciliation, but for who? Not for the Black Americans who saw that monument then, and even today, and see the images of a mammy and a loyal slave following his master into battle. They know what that means,” she said.
“It conjures up the stereotypes that were used to help build the lie of white supremacy, and the stereotypes that were used to help convince Black people to stay in their place,” McClellan said.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) agreed.

“It is very difficult to see how the humiliating portrayal of a slave woman and a slave man represents reconciliation,” he said. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com