“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Dean Baker: Is The Trans-Pacific Partnership Obama’s Vietnam?
The prospects for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are not looking very good right now. Both parties’ presidential candidates have come out against the deal. Donald Trump has placed it at the top of his list of bad trade deals that he wants to stop or reverse. Hillary Clinton had been a supporter as Secretary of State, but has since joined the opposition in response to overwhelming pressure from the Democratic base.
As a concession to President Obama, the Democratic platform does not explicitly oppose the TPP. However it does include unambiguous language opposing investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms – the extra-judicial tribunals that are an integral part of the TPP.
If the political prospects look bleak there also is not much that can be said for the economic merits of the pact. The classic story of gaining from free trade by removing trade barriers doesn’t really apply to the TPP primarily because we have already removed most of the barriers between the countries in the pact.
Richard Wolffe: Trump’s sad trolling of Democrats was laid to rest by Bernie Sanders
The thumbs of Donald Trump were poised to tweet his sense of moral outrage as Bernie Sanders walked on stage in Philadelphia.
Trump wants you to know that he is deeply concerned about Sanders and his treatment by the Democratic national convention and Hillary Clinton. His empathy for Bernie and his bros knows no bounds. The system is rigged against socialists, and Trump feels as bad about that as the Russians feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Or he could just be faking it, in a naked attempt to hoodwink Sanders supporters into thinking that he cares about the 99%. [..]
It would be a strange Sanders supporter who ignores the Sanders policies and switches to Trump. And by the end of the speech, even Trump seemed to understand that. “All of that work, energy and money, and nothing to show for it! Waste of time,” he tweeted.
He was talking about the Sanders campaign, but he may as well have been talking about his own trolling of the Democratic party. As the orange one puts it so eloquently, so often, on Twitter: sad!
Trevor Timm: The rush to blame Russia for the DNC email hack is premature
Since WikiLeaks published the DNC’s hacked emails on Sunday, there has been a flurry of accusations – including from the Hillary Clinton campaign – that Russian president Vladimir Putin orchestrated both the hack and the leak, in an attempt to help Donald Trump win the presidency.
First, it would certainly be disturbing if Russia is trying to affect our democratic process, but maybe we should wait until we see actual evidence before deciding, as some have, that Putin ordered hackers to help swing the US election on the eve of the Democratic convention?
It’s amazing how quickly the media are willing to forgo any skepticism and jump to conspiracy-tinged conclusions where Putin is involved. He has been linked to everything from Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Greece and Spain. People treat him like an omnipotent mastermind who secretly and effortlessly controls world events. Here’s an idea: maybe we should stop giving him so much credit?
Richard North Patterson: A Tale Of Two Conventions: Hillary Versus The Man On Horseback
Seldom have our national conventions provided such enlightenment.
Usually these quadrennial talkfests are mounds of verbal tapioca, as riveting as a four-hour walking tour of your own living room. Their ostensible purpose is to unify the party and burnish the candidate, launching the campaign with a burst of enthusiasm which swells the hearts of voters. But this year’s conventions sharpened our divisions and exposed one candidate’s craving for adoration and submissiveness, provoking waves of uncertainty and fear.
The Republican convention was notable for its emptiness — of vision, ideas, or even hope. Its singular aim was to frighten us into entrusting our future to a demagogue with a barren soul.
The strategists for Donald Trump have concluded that stoking anger and division is their only way to win. An opening night dedicated to the theme “make America safe again” became a hymn of hatred against Hillary Clinton. The second night was more venomous yet, its centerpiece Chris Christie’s indictment of Clinton as delegates shouted “lock her up”.
Indeed Clinton, not Trump, was the central figure of both nights. Bereft of credible reasons that Trump should be our president, the party resorted to hysterical reiterations of why Clinton should not.
A grieving mother of a son lost at Benghazi essentially accused Clinton of murder. A state representative from New Hampshire said she should be “shot for treason”. And the inimitable Ben Carson revealed that Clinton is the handmaiden of Satan himself.
Robert Reich: Does Hillary Get It?
Does Hillary Clinton understand that the biggest divide in American politics is no longer between the right and the left, but between the anti-establishment and the establishment?
I worry she doesn’t — at least not yet.
A Democratic operative I’ve known since the Bill Clinton administration told me “now that she’s won the nomination, Hillary is moving to the middle. She’s going after moderate swing voters.”
Presumably that’s why she tapped Tim Kaine to be her vice president. Kaine is as vanilla middle as you can get.
In fairness, Hillary is only doing what she knows best. Moving to the putative center is what Bill Clinton did after the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 — signing legislation on welfare reform, crime, trade, and financial deregulation that enabled him to win reelection in 1996 and declare “the era of big government” over.
In those days a general election was like a competition between two hot-dog vendors on a boardwalk extending from right to left. Each had to move to the middle to maximize sales. (If one strayed too far left or right, the other would move beside him and take all sales on rest of the boardwalk.)
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