During every presidential election season, people look eagerly to see the effects of each party’s convention on the polls. Since the conventions are highly choreographed to show the candidate in the best light, that party candidate’s poll numbers usually rise in the immediate wake of the convention by about 3-4%.
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It has long been well-established that the New York Times, castigated as liberal by American conservatives, is actually a solidly pro-establishment institution and even at times conservative, neoconservative, and war mongering in its reporting and editorial stances. In particular, it has long had an anti-Palestinian slant.
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At a time when the Donald Trump camp should be telling all its surrogates to just stop talking about the Khans so that media attention shifts away from this damaging issue, his supporter Ben Carson emerges from hibernation to suggest that all this spectacle could be ended if both Trump and the Khans apologized to each other, though he admitted that this was unlikely to happen. When asked what exactly the Khans should apologize for, Carson was typically vague saying that they had said things about Trump that were not true.
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The Democratic party’s strategy against Donald Trump has become clear. We have seen that Trump lacks self-control and feels the need to respond to every slight and attack, however trivial the charge and however unknown the attacker. He feels a compulsion to show that he is the best at everything and reacts strongly to any challenge to his dominance. If you say something nice about him, he likes you but if you say something even slightly negative, he turns on you viciously. He cannot admit to making a mistake, however small, and apologizing is unthinkable because both those things (in his mind) denote weakness and he has a compulsion to portray himself as invulnerable and strong.
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As expected, we are seeing the beginning of an exodus of members of the Democratic National Committee leadership associated with disgraced chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who were revealed in the email leaks as tilting the primary process in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders, rather than remaining neutral.
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Much has been made of the fact that Hillary Clinton is the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major political party in the US and if elected would be the first woman US president. This is undoubtedly an important step and I can see why so many Americans are savoring the moment. For me personally, my reaction is “What took America so long?” since Sri Lanka elected the first woman head of state back in 1960 and many, many other nations have done so since.
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It is the custom for presidential nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties to get security briefings from members of the intelligence agencies, presumably so that they have a better awareness of foreign policy issues and are better prepared when one of them eventually takes office. They do not have to get security clearances for this purpose. This briefing process is not required by law but has evolved over time and has been uncontroversial.
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It is clear that Donald Trump is anxious to not follow the tradition now extending back many decades of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns. The practice began in 1963 with candidate George Romney (father of Mitt) who released 12 years of returns. Since then, almost all presidential candidates and every eventual Democratic and Republican nominee has done so.
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I am finally back home in Cleveland after being away for about ten days to deal with some personal matters and am now catching up with a lot of the political news that I could only superficially skim while away.
Following the two conventions much commentary has been devoted to contrasting ‘the sky is falling rhetoric’ of the Republican convention with the more sunny vision of the Democratic one, which challenged Donald Trump’s claim that he will make America great again by saying that America is already great.
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A huge amount of media attention has been given to the short speech by Khizr Khan, with his wife Ghazal Khan by his side, on the last night of the Democratic convention.
Khan, whose son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, 27, died from a suicide bombing in Baghdad 12 years ago, said Trump’s shifting proposals to ban Muslims from entering the country would have prevented his late son from serving in the military. The Khans, originally from Pakistan, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s from the United Arab Emirates.