Presumptuous Politics

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Trump sees fundraising surge, amid scramble to close ground game gap

With the political conventions behind them, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are scrambling to close their ground game gap with Hillary Clinton – boosting fundraising and concentrating on vital battlegrounds, even as some sources suggest they have a long way to go.
The campaign notoriously has lagged Clinton's in organizational strength, but faces the unavoidable reality that a ticket to the White House requires victory in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
In a sign they're taking the task seriously, the campaign on Wednesday announced $80 million in donations for the campaign and the GOP in July, money that can be used to target their message at these voters. The haul marks a big fundraising surge for the GOP nominee, and comes close to the combined $90 million raked in by Clinton and the Democrats last month.
"The campaign is in good shape. We are organized. We are moving forward," campaign manager Paul Manafort told Fox News' "Happening Now" on Wednesday, saying they've now hired 50 state directors.
The fundraising comes despite a rocky post-convention period for Trump that has included dealing with backlash over the candidate’s feud with Muslim parents whose son was killed in Iraq.
Sources say behind-the-scenes, though, concerns continue to surface that Trump’s ground game isn’t yet strong enough to compete with the Clinton machine.
“It hasn’t been the smoothest ride,” one source with knowledge of Trump’s field operations in the South told FoxNews.com.
Another described the operation as “all over the place.”
But Karen Giorno, a senior Trump adviser and Florida chief strategist, maintains the campaign has a plan in play that includes a coordinated multi-state Trump-RNC push that will challenge Democrats in key states.
She vowed a visible acceleration in the battlegrounds but added it’s “not a one-size-fits-all” plan.
“This is a non-traditional campaign in a non-traditional year,” she told FoxNews.com. “As you look at Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio – each effort is different.”
Florida, which has 29 electoral votes up for grabs, has emerged in the past two decades as one of the most important battleground states in the country. Giorno said Team Trump has “amassed a large army of volunteers and supporters” in Florida, boasting it’s “a well-oiled machine” that is growing.
Soon, she’ll put another 10 people on the payroll – mostly in leadership positions.
Both the Trump and Clinton campaigns are working with their respective national committees -- where Democrats likewise have a staffing edge in some places.
In Florida alone, Democrats maintain a paid team more than twice the size of the Republicans'. The goal of the Clinton camp is to have 100 operational field offices in the Sunshine State.
Last month, it set up shop in Miami.
“Miami — and South Florida in general — are going to be a large part of our strategy for success,” Simone Ward, Clinton’s Florida director, told The Miami Herald. “It is a major [get out the vote] universe for any presidential campaign, and in particular ours.”
In Pennsylvania, Democrats have a field staff of more than 100 while Republicans have 54. In Ohio, Democrats have 70 on staff as of June 11; Republicans have 53.
“Ninety-plus days before a totally winnable election and I’m stunned,” Gary Nordlinger, president of a political consulting firm and adjunct professor at George Washington University’s school of political management, told FoxNews.com, regarding the on-the-ground organizing. “I’m just shocked that Republicans did not learn from their mistakes in 2012.”
Despite campaign promises going into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to step up their operations this month, staffing on the ground may still be spotty. FoxNews.com called Trump headquarters in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina -- but only in Florida's office in Sarasota did a person answer the phone.
Calls on Aug. 1 -- and again 24 hours later -- to the other three offices either were not answered or not returned when voicemail messages could be left.
An 11:06 a.m. ET call on Aug. 1 to the Pennsylvania branch led to this message: “The person you’ve called has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet.”
To Giorno, the comparisons of staffing numbers are not the best way to size up the rival teams.
“[Clinton’s] playbook is so last century,” she said. “We’re lean and mean and we get to adjust … they have this clunky, old school apparatus.”
Despite the data, Nordlinger says the New York businessman isn’t to blame.
“I’m not laying this at Trump’s feet,” he said. “[The RNC] has had four years to prepare for this.”
But the RNC, too, pushes back on any suggestion their ground game is lacking.
“The RNC has built the most efficient and effective ground game in the party’s history,” RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters told FoxNews.com. “We are focused on the entire ticket, working to get all Republicans on the ballot elected to office.”
Walters said the RNC has had staff on the ground in key states since 2011. Currently, there are 489 paid staffers, 4,100 trained organizers and thousands of volunteers in the field.
“In total, we have over 775 total staff dedicated to beating Hillary Clinton,” Walters said. “No other campaign, committee, or organization has been doing this for as long as we have. We are the infrastructure for the entire GOP ticket. And the Trump campaign has embraced that.”

Media trumpeting Trump implosion, but is it real?

This is what a full-fledged feeding frenzy looks like.
With Donald Trump facing the roughest stretch of his candidacy, the media have moved from questioning his sanity to depicting a campaign in disarray and top Republicans still wondering whether they can dump the nominee.
That won’t happen, of course, but it’s an indication of the toxic nature of the coverage and the flood of anti-Trump leaks now washing across the media landscape.
There’s a natural piling-on effect when campaigns go off the rails: The polls dip, the critics step up their rhetoric, staffers start pointing fingers, and the press keeps the vicious cycle going.
But I’ve never seen anything like this.
Things reached the point yesterday morning that CNBC’s John Harwood tweeted: “Longtime ally of Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager: 'Manafort not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal.'"
And there was this from CNN: “A source tells @DanaBashCNN that some Trump campaign staff are frustrated w/ candidate lately, ‘feel like they are wasting their time.’"
I am told by knowledgeable campaign sources that Manafort is not going anywhere and believes that Trump will be getting back on message.
I am further told that reports of a planned “intervention” with the candidate, led by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, are false.
And the sources also say that, contrary to media reports, party chairman Reince Priebus is not furious with Trump, though he is disappointed with the nominee’s refusal to endorse Paul Ryan.
Trump and the House speaker appear to have an increasingly tenuous relationship. Trump is also refusing to back John McCain, one of several Republicans who ripped him for his handling of the Khizr Khan controversy.
Manafort told Fox’s Jon Scott that the campaign is “in good shape.”
Asked about reports that outside allies were plotting an “intervention” with the candidate, Manafort said: "This is the first I'm hearing about it," adding that some in the media are “saying untrue things.

Much of this grows out the Khan debacle, which the media seized upon after his Democratic convention speech about his son’s death in Iraq but which Trump then fueled by criticizing a Gold Star family.
That, in turn, revived fears among Republicans that Trump is too busy picking fights with everyone who insults him to run a disciplined campaign. I’m told there is frustration within his campaign that he keeps diverting to side issues, often in response to cable news chatter, rather than staying focused on attacking Hillary Clinton.
Even Gingrich, a close adviser and VP finalist, is criticizing his friend (while also lambasting media bias). “He has not made the transition to being the potential president of the United States, which is a much tougher league,” Gingrich told Maria Bartiromo. He added that “some of what Trump has done is just very self-destructive.”
Along comes ABC’s Jonathan Karl, reporting that “senior party officials are so frustrated — and confused — by Donald Trump’s erratic behavior that they are exploring how to replace him on the ballot if he drops out.”
Good luck with that.
MSNBC ran headlines all day about the Trump "intervention," but there were no signs it would materialize.
All of this has mushroomed into a tsunami of negative media coverage, with very little scrutiny of Clinton, at least right now.
Trump has been at war with the press from the day he got in the race, even as he drew enormous amounts of ink and airtime. But he can't expand his base simply by bashing the media, as satisfying as that may be.
The pundits, especially the ones on the left and right who detest him, are enjoying this latest chance to write him off.
But that has proven dangerous in the past. And campaign narratives, even the most relentlessly negative, have a way of changing at a moment's notice.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

Fox News Poll: Voters trust Trump on economy, Clinton on nukes

Voters say the top issues facing the country are the economy and terrorism. They think Donald Trump will handle one of them better than Hillary Clinton, while the candidates tie on the other.
A new Fox News Poll on the 2016 election finds more voters trust Trump than Clinton on the economy (+5 points). He also bests Clinton on handling the federal deficit (+5 points). Those are the only issues where he comes out on top.
It’s a draw on “terrorism and national security,” as the candidates receive 47 percent apiece. In May, Trump led Clinton by 12 points on doing a better job on “terrorism” (52-40 percent).
Equal numbers of voters say the economy and terrorism are the most important issues facing the country today (22 percent each). Education is the only other one to receive double-digit mentions (11 percent). Here’s the rest of the list: race relations (9 percent), the federal deficit (5 percent), health care (5 percent), climate change (4 percent), immigration (3 percent), foreign policy (3 percent), and drug addiction (2 percent).
Clinton beats Trump by wide margins on education (+23 points), and on the lower priority concerns: climate change (+31 points), race relations (+28 points), drug addiction (+19 points), foreign policy (+16 points), and health care (+11 points). She also has the advantage on one of Trump’s signature issues -- immigration (+7 points).
Who would do better picking the next Supreme Court justice? That’s a hot topic this election. Voters trust Clinton over Trump by eight points. They also think she’s more likely to “preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution” (+7 points).
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POLL RESULTS
By a 22-point margin, voters trust Clinton over Trump when it comes to using nuclear weapons (56-34 percent). That’s twice the advantage she held in May (49-38 percent).

Yet voters are more likely to trust Trump to destroy terrorist groups like ISIS (+9 points).
The candidates now tie on restoring trust in government (43-43). That’s a shift since May when Trump had an eight-point advantage (46-38 percent).
Despite Trump’s claim that he understands the concerns of everyday Americans, Clinton bests him on empathy. By a 51-40 percent margin, voters say she’ll do a better job looking out for their family during tough economic times. In June 2012, Barack Obama topped Mitt Romney on this measure by 47-36 percent.
Poll-pourri
How do voters feel about Trump’s praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin? Fifty-two percent of voters say it’s no big deal. For 44 percent, it’s bothersome.
Most Republicans say it’s no big deal (72 percent), while two-thirds of Democrats say it bothers them (66 percent).
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,022 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from July 31-August 2, 2016. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Obama Iran Cartoons

Criticize Donald Trump? Sure. Question his sanity? That's nuts.

It has come to this: Critics are calling Donald Trump crazy, and he’s calling Hillary Clinton the devil.
Most. Bizarre. Campaign. Ever.
Now Trump didn’t directly call his opponent Satan, although a Google search brings up images of HRC with horns or a pitchfork. He said at a rally in Pennsylvania that Bernie Sanders, in endorsing his rival, “made a deal with the devil. She’s the devil.” A pretty common phrase, but one that should be avoided in a presidential campaign. How do you escalate from the gates of hell?
But the latest media assault on Trump isn’t just colloquial, as in, hey, the guy is acting nuts lately. Some pundits are flat-out questioning his sanity.
This new effort to put Trump on the couch follows his war of words with Khizr Khan, the Muslim father whose son was killed in Iraq and who denounced the nominee at the Democratic convention.
Now it’s fair to question whether Trump overreacted to Khan’s speech, whether he should have brushed it off, whether he fueled the story, whether it makes sense for a presidential candidate to be debating sacrifice with a couple who lost their son in wartime.
But Trump’s detractors don’t stop there.
Gene Robinson, the liberal Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor, felt compelled to declare:
“I am increasingly convinced that he’s just plain crazy.”
Leaving aside Trump’s policies, Robinson writes, “at this point, it would be irresponsible to ignore the fact that Trump’s grasp on reality appears to be tenuous at best.” He adds: “What kind of man has so little empathy for a grieving mother’s loss? Is that normal? Is it healthy?”
Robinson appeared yesterday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and Joe Scarborough—who had a friendly relationship with Trump during the primaries—went off on him:
“I’ve known him for a decade. I’ve never seen him act like this before,” the former GOP congressman said. “It’s unhinged, it’s not the Donald Trump I’ve known for over a decade.”
Scarborough said he has been talking to plenty of Republicans and conservatives, “and everybody was asking me about his mental health.”
There are others. Foreign policy expert Robert Kagan, also writing in the Post, says: “One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realize that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality.”
So: A businessman who beat 16 other GOP candidates, including governors, senators and a Bush, to win the nomination, is off his rocker?
A guy who built a successful business and global brand based on his last name is a nutjob?
A performer who created a reality TV show that was a hit for NBC for 14 years is a loony tune?
And how is this screwball running a competitive race with a former first lady, senator and secretary of State? Post-convention polls are giving Clinton a lead of 6 to 9 points, but Trump is still within striking distance, especially in key swing states.
Trump, for his part, has been assailing the “dishonest people” of the press, saying at a rally:
“We are going to punch through the media. We have to! The New York Times is totally dishonest. Totally dishonest. The Washington Post has been a little bit better lately but not good….
“And CNN. CNN is like all Trump all the time. All Trump all the time. You walk out of an interview and you say, 'that was a good interview' and then you get killed for the rest of the weekend. So they are so biased toward Crooked Hillary.”
Some of this has been bubbling up for awhile, on the right as well as the left. The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes wrote this in late July:
“Yes, Donald Trump is crazy. And, yes, the Republican party owns his insanity.” Hayes was writing about Trump linking Ted Cruz’s father to Lee Harvey Oswald, saying, “This isn't the behavior of a rational, stable individual.”
And Salon carried this headline: “Maybe Donald Trump has really lost his mind: What if the GOP frontrunner isn’t crazy, but simply not well?” That was back in April. But now it’s growing louder.
The Democrats have intensified their effort to marginalize Trump as a dangerous and dangerously unfit candidate, as we saw in Philadelphia. And now we’re in mental health territory.
The price of running for president is opening your entire life to fierce scrutiny: your judgment, your policies, your background, your temperament. All that serves as a test of how you’d handle the pressures of the presidency.
But arguing that Donald Trump doesn’t have all his mental faculties? That’s crazy.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

Terror-weary Germans turn on Merkel over refugee policy


Germany on high alert after series of terror attacks

Five violent terror-related attacks in a two-week span are prompting Germans to turn on longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has continued to embrace a liberal refugee policy some say has compromised safety.
Although Germany has so far been spared the kind of atrocities that shook Brussels, Paris and Nice in the last year, there have been 15 deaths and dozens injured in attacks in Germany since July 18. Two of the attacks have been linked to ISIS, and many suspect the others bore hallmarks of terrorism. Politicians from both the left and the right have assailed the once-enormously popular chancellor’s plan to integrate more than a million refugees from war zones in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
The sharpest criticism comes from Bavaria, which has been the entry point for most of the refugees. Leaders of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavaria-based sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are demanding tighter border controls and an annual upper limit on the number of migrants.
The left-wing opposition party, Die Linke, has also voiced criticism. Its co-leader, Sahra Wagenknecht, as quoted by Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, said the violence shows that the task of integrating the huge number of refugees “is harder than Merkel with her frivolous ‘we can do it’ slogan of last autumn would have us believe.”
Merkel’s government denies that the terrorist attacks reveal flaws in the immigration program that began a year ago, in August 2015. But most Germans do not share Merkel’s optimism.
A recent survey conducted July 26-29 by the pollster You Gov finds that only a little more than a quarter of the 1,017 persons polled have confidence in Merkel’s promise. The number of people who share Merkel’s optimism is the lowest it has been since the influx began. Another poll, conducted in April and May, finds that 73 percent of Germans fear terrorism.
On July 28 Merkel again asserted that the migrants would be integrated and democracy defended. She also announced that the Bundeswehr, for the first time ever, is preparing joint exercises with the police to address potential terrorist scenarios. And Interior Minister Thomas De Maiziere reportedly will soon announce new security measures following the attacks.
Officials have long been warning that terrorists may have slipped into Germany with the refugees. At the peak of the influx, there were some 10,000 arriving each day. Authorities are investigating 59 cases with possible terrorist links.
Approximately 100,000 of the refugees are unaccompanied minors. These children and young people are especially vulnerable to recruitment by Islamic extremists, including ISIS.
There are also hundreds of thousands of traumatized and disaffected refugees, largely young men. They lack the language and work skills to get jobs, said Deidre Berger, Director of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office.
“These young people have been uprooted and have been cast adrift,” she said. “They are traumatized, and they have no structure in their daily lives.”
According to Berger, some of these young men are sent to shelters in small towns, which only accentuates their sense of isolation. Some flee to Germany’s big cities, thereby avoiding any official scrutiny.
Most of these boys experienced horrible human rights violations in the Middle East and during their escape to Europe,” said Karl Kopp, Director of Pro Asyl, a refugee advocacy non-profit organization, in a telephone interview.
According to Kopp, some of these minors have journeyed for as long as three years before reaching Germany, where they now face long waits before receiving asylum status. “They often end up in places where there is no tradition of caring for young people,” he said.
“Keep in mind that many of these teenagers don’t share Western democratic values and face identity problems in a new land,” said Duzen Tekkal, a freelance journalist and a candidate for Parliament in next year’s national elections. “Then the Salafists provide them with easy answers to recruit them,” said Tekkal who is a Yazidi, one of Iraq’s oldest ethnic and religious minorities.
The populist far-right party, Alternative for Germany, which achieved stunning success in state elections last spring, citing the recent terrorist attacks, charges that Merkel’s policy poses an increasing threat to Germany’s internal order and security. The party calls Merkel’s policy the greatest threat to Germany and Europe since the end of the Cold War.
When the refugees started coming to Germany last year, Merkel was hailed as a humanitarian. Germans greeted the refugees at train stations with cake and warm welcomes. Now many are having second thoughts.

Trump calls Obama 'worst president', 'a disaster' after 'unfit to serve' slam

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Tuesday that President Barack Obama was "the worst president, maybe in the history of our country" after Obama called Trump "unfit to serve" and "woefully unprepared to do this job" earlier in the day.
"I think he's been a disaster. He's been weak, he's been ineffective," Trump said on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor." "I believe I know far more about foreign policy than he knows. Look at Ukraine. He talks about Ukraine [and] how tough he is with Russia, in the meantime they took over Crimea."
Earlier Tuesday, Trump said that Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have “single-handedly destabilized the Middle East” while putting the “country at risk” with Clinton’s use of a private email server.
"She is reckless with her emails, reckless with regime change, and reckless with American lives,” Trump said.
The real estate mogul also restated his concern that the November election would be "rigged". He told host Bill O'Reilly that recent court rulings striking down voter ID laws in Wisconsin and North Carolina meant that people would "vote 10 times, maybe. Who knows?"
"I am very concerned and I hope the Republicans are going to be very watchful," Trump said.
Obama delivered his broadside against Trump while fielding a question at the top of a White House press conference with the visiting prime minister of Singapore. Obama diverted from the central topic of that visit – moving along the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, which Trump opposes – to fundamentally question whether the federal government could function properly if Trump wins.
“I think the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president,” Obama said, adding, “He keeps on proving it.”
The president questioned whether Trump has “basic knowledge” on key issues. He went on to say that with past Republican nominees – including his former rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney – he never had doubts about their ability to do the job of president even though they disagreed on policy.
“Had they won I would have been disappointed, but I would have said to all Americans, this is our president,” Obama said, noting he was confident they would abide by certain rules and observe “basic decency.”
Obama added: “But that’s not the situation here ... There has to come a point at which you say, 'Enough.'"

Report: US airlifted $400 million to Iran as detained Americans were released

Report: Obama admin organized $400 million payoff to Iran

The U.S. government airlifted the equivalent of $400 million to Iran this past January, which occurred as four detained Americans were released by Tehran, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The cash transfer was the first installment paid in a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a failed 1979 arms deal dating from just before the Iranian Revolution.
State Department spokesman John Kirby denied the cash transfer was done to secure the release of the four Americans.
The negotiations over the [arms deal] settlement ... were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home," Kirby said in a statement. "Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side."
"The funds that were transferred to Iran were related solely to the settlement of a long-standing claim at the U.S.-Iran Claims Tribunal at The Hague," Kirby's statement concluded.
However, the Journal says U.S. officials acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.
The Journal also reported that President Barack Obama did not disclose the $400 million cash payment when he announced Jan. 17 that the arms deal dispute had been resolved. The administration has not disclosed how the $1.7 billion was paid, except to say it was not paid in dollars.
The cash flown to Iran consisted of euros, Swiss francs, and other currencies because U.S. law forbids transacting American dollars with Iran.
Since the cash was airlifted, Iran's Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Iranian-Americans. Tehran has also detained dual-nationals from France, Canada and the U.K. in recent months.
"Paying ransom to kidnappers puts Americans even more at risk," Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., said ina statement. "While Americans were relieved by Iran’s overdue release of illegally imprisoned American hostages, the White House’s policy of appeasement has led Iran to illegally seize more American hostages."

Thursday, August 4, 2016

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Wednesday, August 3, 2016