After getting off to a rocky start Monday, the GOP managed to put together a Tuesday program that looked like an actual political convention run by a major party. The key moments:
In short, anyone who was hoping for more craziness was disappointed on Tuesday. We shall see what happens on Wednesday, though. Three of Trump's former rivals—Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)—will all be speaking, and it will be interesting to see how they balance being team players against their desire to keep Trump at arm's length. Mike Pence is up, too—his job will be trying not to put everyone to sleep. And Newt Gingrich will take his turn, and he's been known to shoot from the hip on occasion. After all, there is none so dangerous as one who has nothing to lose. If William Hill and Paddy Power were smart, they would be taking bets on how many times he utters the word "sharia." (Z)
The first day of the Republican National Convention was front-page news worldwide. Here is what some newspapers' headlines read:
In short, this was not the kind of coverage the Trump campaign was hoping for. But day 2 went better and there are hopes that the last two days will be better still. (V)
Monday, Melania Trump gave a speech at the Republican National Convention highlighting her domesticity and praising her husband, Donald Trump. This kind of speech is fairly standard for a candidate's spouse, although we might get a different one from the candidate's spouse next week. The problem with Melania's speech is that one paragraph was pretty much directly plagiarized from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech. Now the hunt is on for the speechwriter. Did Melania write it herself and not realize that copying a very high-profile speech from only eight years ago was not going to remain a secret for very long? Do newbie unpaid interns do the speechwriting for the Trump campaign? The question of who wrote the speech has now completely overshadowed everything she said in it.
Paul Manafort, one of Trump's top staffers, blamed Melania's plagiarism on Hillary Clinton. He also sent out a memo to other members of the campaign telling them to say the same thing. Chris Christie, who is out of the running for Veep but still in the running for Attorney General, didn't stick to the script and came up with a different defense: 93% of the speech wasn't plagiarized. The same is true of RNC official Sean Spicer, who said that Melania's words were "common" sentiments that one would hear on an episode of My Little Pony, or in a Kid Rock song. Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said it doesn't matter which staffer or intern wrote the speech, it was Manafort's job to do the final vetting and so he should be held accountable, even if he didn't copy the words personally. Reince Priebus came the closest to admitting that maybe something was wrong with the speech when he said yesterday: "All campaigns go through growing pains." But most don't go through them on live national television a year into the campaign.
In case anyone was wondering if Melania's speech could just have accidentally used the same words as Michelle Obama's 2008 speech, Turnitin, a company whose product is software that helps schoolteachers and college professors detect when students have turned in term papers that contain material plagiarized from the Internet calculated that the chances of this similarity just being a coincidence are one in a trillion.
Hillary Clinton laid low and didn't get involved in the controversy. She understands that one of the basic rules of politics is that when your opponent is busy shooting himself in the foot, you don't interfere. So far, the real culprit has not been identified.
In any event, the real damage is not so much the plagiarism itself, but that the main news stories from day 1 of the convention were: (1) The GOP is far from united and (2) Nobody seems to know who writes the campaign's speeches.
The plagiarism story also is a missed opportunity for Trump. His catchphrase on his reality show was "You're fired." He could have handled this by finding out who cribbed the offending words, calling up him or her and saying: "You're fired," then announcing this to the media. That would have ended the story with a bang and shown him to be a decisive leader. It didn't happen. (V)
One of the concessions Hillary Clinton had to make to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a plank in the Democratic platform calling for a revival of the Glass-Steagall Act, separating retail banking from investment banking and from insurance. Wall Street doesn't like this one bit, and the inclusion of it might have driven some bankers who know and otherwise like Hillary Clinton to support Donald Trump. Now that the Republicans have suddenly adopted the same plank, the two platforms cancel each other and many pragmatically-oriented bankers may choose the known devil over the unknown (and unpredictable) devil, and support Clinton after all. Tony Fratto, a former Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration who now is a bank lobbyist, summed the situation up by saying:
They are not buying a ticket on the crazy train. Banks and the financial sector do not like volatility. He is the volatile candidate, and under those circumstances, supporting Hillary Clinton looks like the flight to safety.
Even before the Republicans suddenly discovered they love Glass-Steagall after fighting for years to have it repealed, there were signs of problems. Major banks that sponsored the GOP convention in 2012 are absent this year. Even worse, the contributions from employees of the financial sector to the Trump campaign this year totaled a paltry $127,000 as of the end of May. Now, Trump's $51 million haul in June may contain some contributions from people in the financial sector, but we don't know yet. Nevertheless, there are relatively few events this week in Cleveland sponsored by the financial sector, a common occurrence at previous conventions. (V)
A new poll of people who live in close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border reveals that they don't want a wall there. The poll showed that 86% of Mexicans living near the border and 72% of Americans living near the border were against building a wall between the two countries. They aren't the only ones close to the border who are anti-wall. Gov. Susana Martinez (R-NM), the nation's only Latina governor and a rising star in the Republican party, is solidly against the wall and has said it would hurt trade and economic development in the border region. (V)
The Democratic convention is next week, which means that Hillary Clinton's announcement of her VP pick is imminent. In fact, the odds are it will be Saturday—timed to push the RNC out of any remaining headlines it might be getting. And as the race nears the finish line, Agriculture Secretary and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack is making a late push.
It's fairly clear, at this point, that Clinton wants to make a play for moderate Republicans and independents. That means a boring white guy in the #2 slot, and Vilsack certainly fits that bill. In addition, he and Clinton go way back, well before the four years they served together in Barack Obama's cabinet, so Hillary knows she can work with him. Unlike Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Vilsack would have no impact on the Democrats' chances of holding or losing the Senate. Plus, Vilsack is a Midwesterner, and so a nice counter-move to Hoosier Mike Pence. Boring white guy Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is still the favorite, but if Clinton and her advisers decide having someone from the Midwest is essential, then it could be Tom instead of Tim. (Z)
Roger Ailes now not only has to deal with allegations from Gretchen Carlson that he sexually harassed her, but also claims from Fox News superstar Megyn Kelly that Ailes harassed her too, when she was younger. Rumors about Ailes' future have been swirling ever since Carlson came forward. Supposedly, Rupert Murdoch's two sons, who now run Murdoch's media empire including Fox News, have decided this is the moment to dump Ailes. The political implications of such a move could be enormous, especially if Ailes' successor is given instructions to maximize company profits, possibly by ceasing to be an arm of the Republican Party in order to increase viewership and thus make more money. (V)
While Donald Trump talks a lot about keeping jobs in America, his wife is apparently not so concerned about that. The dress she wore for her convention speech was designed by a London-based Serbian woman, Roksanda Ilinic. Melania apparently bought it online at the Net-a-Porter Website, where it lists for $2,190. Mrs. Trump is not the only spouse who prefers foreign clothing. Both Ann Romney in 2012 and Cindy McCain in 2008 wore dresses designed by a foreign-born designer for their respective convention speeches. In contrast, the dresses Michelle Obama wore in 2008 and 2012 were both from American designers. (V)
Hosting a presidential debate gives great exposure to universities that are not necessarily in the upper-tier with the Harvards and the Stanfords of the world. But that exposure comes with a price, both in terms of money and risk, and it's a price that Wright State University President David Hopkins is no longer willing to pay. Citing security concerns, following the recent wave of shootings and terrorist attacks, along with the $8 million in costs that the university would incur, Hopkins bailed out on the commitment on Tuesday. Replacing Wright State, which is in Ohio, will be Hofstra University in New York. Hofstra hosted a debate in 2012, so presumably its president knows what he is getting into. (Z)