It’s amazing how quickly conventional wisdom can congeal. It’s even more amazing when it plays to Democrats’ habit of garment-rending and self-flagellation. This morning I read this in the lede of The Washington Post‘s Daily 202.
Seven takeaways from the failed Democratic government shutdown: The Resistance will struggle when it tries to replicate the tactics of the tea party movement. The left learned with its failed shutdown gambit that it cannot beat President Trump by copying the same playbook that the right used against Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
We are on genuinely untrodden territory with a faction of House Republicans working to discredit federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies because they are investigating the President and finding damning information about him and his 2016 campaign. As you’ve likely heard, Rep. Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House intel committee had his staff write this “memo” which allegedly presents evidence of intelligence and law enforcement wrongdoing during the 2016 presidential campaign – basically “deep state” plotting against candidate Donald Trump. Read More
Here’s what we’re hearing from inside the Senate Democrats meeting on the Hill.
We’re not in the predicting biz, but the signals this morning on the Hill suggest we may be close to an end to the shutdown. Here’s the latest.
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The Senate has adjourned for the night, pushing off the planned vote from 1 a.m. ET Monday until later in the day tomorrow. No deal has been announced, but the tone of Senate leaders tonight was muted, as if they were making space for a deal to come together. The deal, to be clear, still seems to be centered on resuming funding until Feb. 8, so not a long-term deal. Our latest report from the Hill.
Our politics begin to make sense when you realize that the GOP is two parties: Party A, a rightist, ethno-nationalist party similar to rightist parties in Europe and Party B, a center-right pro-business party that is distinct from but controlled by Party A. The Democrats, meanwhile, are a coalition of progressive and center-left factions.
A year ago, as most of the media struggled to make sense of the reality of the Trump presidency and the Russia probe moved from the fringes of political discussion to the center, Michael Wolff’s was a conspicuous discordant voice – and quite intentionally so. Among his media colleagues, Wolff is quite well-known and not terribly well-liked. This appears to be as he likes it. He’s a canny journalist and a masterful self-promoter. He’s written a number of successful books and never seems to have a shortage of outlets ready to run his columns. About this time a year ago, Wolff was sidling up to Trump’s inner circle and crapping on basically every other journalist covering Trump. They wanted opposition, resistance, to say ‘this isn’t normal’ till they were blue in the face, he claimed. He wanted the story. He was a real journalist, not an activist.
What was ‘the story’? That Trump had achieved the impossible, bent the political nation to his will. That was the story and Michael Wolff was going to get it. Read More
Cameron Joseph catching you up on the latest from the Hill.
The key vote just went down to defeat. The government is shutting down. In theory, there’s still 90 minutes to go before that happens. But there’s no plan for any other attempt to happen before midnight. We have a government shutdown.