“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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Paul Krugman: The Clinton Agenda
It ain’t over until the portly gentleman screams, but it is, as intelligence analysts say, highly likely that Hillary Clinton will win this election. Poll-based models put her chances at around 90 percent earlier this week — and that was before the campaign turned totally X-rated.
But what will our first female president actually be able to accomplish? That depends on how big a victory she achieves.
I’m not talking about the size of her “mandate,” which means nothing: If the Obama years are any indication, Republicans will oppose anything she proposes no matter how badly they lose. The question, instead, is what happens to Congress. [..]
In any case, the bottom line is that if you’re thinking of staying home on Election Day because the outcome is assured, don’t. Barring the political equivalent of a meteor strike, Hillary Clinton will be our next president, but the size of her victory will determine what kind of president she can be.
Eugene Robinson: Trump isn’t just a pig. He’s a predator.
Let’s begin with the People magazine writer who says that Donald Trump took her into a room at his Mar-a-Lago estate — while his pregnant wife was changing her clothes upstairs — and “within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.”
Natasha Stoynoff is an experienced journalist with multiple books to her credit, and her story is similar to those told by others. A second woman told the Palm Beach Post that she, too, was groped by Trump at the Florida estate. Two other women told the New York Times of being accosted by Trump, one of them groped and the other forcibly kissed. A former Miss Washington says Trump “continually grabbed my ass” at a beauty pageant. Another woman alleged in a lawsuit that Trump pushed her against a wall and tried to put his hands up her dress.
Trump denies it all. But there is reason to believe these stories of sexual assault — let’s call it what it is — because of Trump’s own words about the way he treats women.
Anne Perkins: Michelle Obama has dragged this US election out of the gutter
Michelle Obama may have done the seemingly impossible. She may just have rescued the US elections from the grotesque and demeaning mire into which they have descended. She did something even more remarkable, and just as badly needed. With the touch of a poet, her speech last night shamed the tat and the tawdry of populism and held out the possibility of something better. She lent her extraordinary ability to say what people are feeling to every English-speaking woman in the world.
Nominally, she spoke for Hillary Clinton at a run-of-the-mill political rally. In fact she made a passionate and clear-eyed appeal for decency and respect in public life. Clinton’s Republican rival Donald Trump did not get a single mention, but he was in every word of every sentence. It was one of the most sustained put-downs in modern democratic politics.
Lucia Graves: Trump assault allegations aren’t new. Why are we only listening now?
When I first reported the story of Jill Harth’s sexual assault accusation back in July, I didn’t get a single interview request to talk about it. The radio show I’d already been booked to go on engaged me only briefly, during an hour-long interview, on the matter of a woman accusing the Republican nominee of grabbing her crotch in a child’s bedroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate, before changing the subject.
Even Democratic opposition organizations had made a calculation early in the campaign that it wasn’t strategic to get into personal matters with Trump. Because he had said so many damning things out in the open, it hardly seemed necessary to skewer his personal life. [..]
As Shaun R Harper argued in the Washington Post recently, many men talk like Trump does in private, and only men can fix that. There’s a lot of truth in his argument – men have a vital role to play in stopping the perpetuation of rape culture. But there is also something disturbing in that message. We should not have to hear from men to recognize it’s a problem. We should be able to hear women when they first speak. And those women should not have to be Michelle Obama, married to the most powerful man in the world.
There’s a reason “That’s what she said” is the punchline to sex jokes told by men about women. As a society – one driven by men’s expectations – we rarely value what “she said” at all.
Amanda Marcotte; Are women people?
With the benefit of hours-old hindsight, it now seems inevitable that, with less than a month to go before the United States likely elects its first female president, the top trending topic on Twitter would be #repealthe19th. The hashtag was started by angry supporters of Republican candidate Donald Trump in response to a FiveThirtyEight analysis by Nate Silver showing that Trump would win in a landslide if women didn’t have the right to vote. That led to this demand, facetious or otherwise, that the United States end women’s suffrage.
For good reason, Trump’s rise has largely been attributed to the forces of white nationalism engaged in a backlash against the first black president and growing racial diversity. But the past couple of weeks have demonstrated that this election is also a referendum on the question: Are women people?
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