Josh Marshall
This is a fast moving situation. I’m not a military expert. Watch the military experts for military updates. But some thoughts come to mind. First, it seems unimaginable that Israel won’t retaliate in force directly against Iran. That’s just a fait accompli. It was frankly surprising that the response in April was so limited. But there’s a difference between a show a strength to reestablish deterrence on the one hand and actual strategic gains on the other. It seems to me that the big strategic gain is the one that Israel is in the midst of and what prompted Iran’s missile attack today in the first place. That is, in essence: dismantling or at least seriously degrading the capacity of the Hezbollah militia and rocket capacity. Hezbollah is not solely creature of Iran. But that’s what makes it such a military force. It’s there to be a forward arm of Iran, a source of deterrence vis a vis Israel as well as being part of a longer term strategy of encircling Israel and killing it through a death of a thousand cuts. The biggest gains seem possible against Hezbollah more than in Iran. The exception is Iran’s nuclear plants. Those are of course heavily reinforced. And attacking them in force directly would be a further escalation. But Michael Oren, the former Knesset member and former Israeli Ambassador to U.S., was on CNN this afternoon and he focused on the fact that the killing of Hassan Nasrallah shows Israel has the ability to cut through multiple layers of reinforced concrete. Oren isn’t currently in government. But that message seemed very clear.
Over recent weeks I’ve tried to share with you a series of questions about the campaign or features of the campaign that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Most of these aren’t cases where you say “this campaign has to do this” or “this campaign has to do that.” They’re mysteries to me at least at a deeper level. The one I’d like to discuss today I’ve mentioned a few times in earlier posts.
Remember back in the spring the Trump campaign and really the Trump family did a sort of forced takeover of the RNC and as part of that move they closed down the RNC’s Get Out The Vote or field operations and decided to outsource that work to a series of super PACs of which Elon Musk’s America PAC and the Turning Point USA’s PAC are the biggest? This wasn’t totally out of the blue or not totally without some rationale behind it. The FEC recently made a ruling that gave campaigns and parties greater ability to coordinate with super PACs on GOTV work. So there’s some logic to that. But it’s not obvious on that basis why you’d shut down the RNC’s GOTV operations. So questions about that move have hovered over this. Was this just dumb? Is there some financial interest at work? Is it just part of asserting total control over the party apparatus? Or is it actually just a good idea, allowing the unlimited dollars of these PACs to up the party’s game? The weight of logic and some evidence points to some mix of the first few answers. But it’s been hard to totally rule out the last one.
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Israel’s Thrust into South Lebanon 
Wars are not only bloody and murderous endeavors, they are also unpredictable. The specter of former forays into Lebanon looms over Israel’s current one: easy to get in, harder to get out. After the stunning assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as most of the secondary leadership of the organization over the last three weeks, we’re hearing voices in Israel and the U.S. talking predictably about a “new Middle East.” Meanwhile others in the international community and the U.S. talk about these new developments as an “escalation” out of nowhere — Israel looking for a new war, basically.
This is complicated stuff, like everything which happens in this region and especially everything tied to Israel, the Palestinians, and the states surrounding both. But I wanted to share some thoughts on why this escalation and Israel’s fight with Hezbollah are qualitatively different from anything that is happening in Gaza.
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Dems’ Pivot to Texas and Florida
After days of hints at it, Democrats are now making a serious foray into Florida and Texas in a last-ditch effort to hold on to their Senate majority. Before calling it “last-ditch,” I wondered what to call it. Is that too pessimistic? Too optimistic? I’m really not sure. You know the background. Democrats went into this cycle with an almost historically bad map. One seat in West Virginia was, by universal agreement, hopeless. Beyond that preordained loss, Democrats had incumbents up in a several of the swing states and new candidates trying to hold existing seats in other swing states. On the other side of the ledger there were no obvious pick-up opportunities. Starting from those inauspicious beginnings, the Democrats’ map has held up remarkably well. In all but one case, Senate Democratic candidates go into the last month of the campaign either favorites or strong contenders. That one exception is Montana, where Jon Tester is now a decided underdog. Which brings us to Florida and Texas.
Are these races really plausible?
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Trump Camp Says State Menstrual Surveillance Programs are A-OK
One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.
It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term.
Read MoreFrom TPM Reader LS …
Read MoreI had a different response to Trump’s words. At first it was visceral disgust mixed with fear. Then the memories kicked in. This is the kind of talk the man who raped me said. It was some version of that I was going to like the experience, which was deeply untrue. And that I wouldn’t tell anyone if I knew what was best for me.
Managing Your Polling Habit, or Getting the Monkey Off Your Back
Our friend Rick Perlstein had a good piece in The American Prospect yesterday about polling and its pitfalls — both its pitfalls as a practice, with its evolving, imperfect methodologies, but also as something we political junkies obsess over. The gist of his argument is contained in the subhed: “Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?” I don’t think Rick quite sustains that claim fully. I’m not sure he’s actually trying to. But as is the case with many articles, its interesting enough for the points and the bits of history he shares along the way. The gist is that new methodologies keep working great until they suddenly don’t, and then it’s on to some new methodology. Then there’s the fact that for decades pollsters always seemed to stop polling too soon and miss big shifts at the ends of campaigns.
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Adams Indicted; Gotham Yawns
When New York Mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021, I told a number of people that I thought he’d either be a great mayor or end up getting indicted for something. A baseball player who bats .500 is a god. So I’m feeling reasonably good about this prediction. I tried to see whether I’d written this down somewhere. Back in December 2021 I wrote on Twitter that “I think there’s a lot about Adams that is really what the city needs. Most of the things. But also concerned that he’ll get indicted for something.” A month later I explained the basis of my largely misguided bullishness on Adams. “For clarity, I’m not cheering anything from the last three days. I think a mayor rooted in the politics of the city’s black middle class (which is Adams’ base) is better for the city today than rooted in the politics of liberals in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”
This general point I still believe.
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Words as Argument, Words as Aggression—Annals of the Semantics of Trumpism
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared … You will be protected, and I will be your protector … Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free …You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” You’ve probably heard some combination of these lines and others more than once by now. Donald Trump first posted them on social media sites and then added them to the scripted part of his speech at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night. They’ve been greeted with a mix of consternation and mockery. I don’t want to speak for women. But I think it’s safe to say that any woman who has some meaningful investment in abortion rights and reproductive rights generally would find these words some mix of chilling, infuriating, bizarre and absurd. As I read them they essentially say, Only I can be and I will be your total protector. In fact, you will be so totally protected that you will cease to be who you are. Especially coming from a man known to be a serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist — “rape” being the ordinary word, according to the judge in the case, for the acts Trump was found to have committed — these words seem to describe less being protected than engulfed.
Perhaps most simply the words are, as a number of observers have put it, creepy.
Read MoreA quick update on the Nebraska electoral vote situation. As I noted yesterday, the key hold out in the state legislature, Mike McDonnell (R), said he was a definitive no. That pretty much signaled the end of the effort. Since they need his vote. Since then Sen. Deb Fischer also said it was over. And now Gov. Jim Pillen (R) has said he will no longer call a special legislative session to make the change. Given the nature of Trumpism, I don’t think anything is ever truly done. In Trumpism, an election result amounts to no more than an advisory opinion. But this looks as close as one gets to done. Done enough to take it off the front burner of concerns.