The one in trouble
Through the madness of the Republicans’ dysfunction and the Democrats’ new nervous breakdown, the most sterling political commentary of the season remains Steve Schmidt’s.
He was campaign manager for John McCain in 2008. Now he does piercing neutral analysis for MSNBC.
He says that, because the presidential race pits two historically disliked competitors, the candidate getting the most attention at a given time is the one most in trouble.
About 60 percent of the electorate can’t stand one or the other of the presidential options. About 47 percent can’t stand either.
The reliable attention-stealer until Friday was Donald Trump. He lacked the discipline to get himself out of the news, and Hillary Clinton benefited.
But then Clinton, through no apparent direct fault of her own, got somehow mixed up with a sex-messaging creep.
—————— It began with FBI director James Comey’s casual memorandum to House leaders on Friday. Essentially, Comey said as follows: We at the FBI appear to have come across emails in a separate investigation that might possibly be pertinent to the investigation of Hillary Clinton that we sort of closed without taking any action a couple of months ago. We wanted to advise you that we will be looking at these emails.
It turned out these were emails found on the laptop of the previously referenced creep, Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin.
Abedin’s emails on Weiner’s laptop could have been original to the laptop or backed up from other home-based devices.
At any rate, it appears that, through a home Wi-Fi router serving several devices, Weiner was allegedly sending personal crotch photography to a 15-year-old girl—the reason for the investigation—and Abedin might have been chatting digitally with or about the former secretary of state and current Democratic nominee for president.
Maybe these are new Clintonrelated emails. Maybe not. Maybe these emails include supposedly personal ones that Hillary deleted before surrendering her emails to the FBI. Maybe not.
Comey doesn’t know. He simply gave in to Republican pressure when his people told him about the emails. He had promised Congress he would keep it informed if something new came up.
But this information was not sufficiently developed under Justice Department policy for public dissemination, certainly considering the timing’s risk of influencing a presidential race.
The Justice Department could have forbidden Comey’s communication to Congress at this point. But he stressed he’d made a commitment in sworn testimony. The Justice Department relented grudgingly while encouraging him not to do what he was determined to do.
Comey chose a cryptically and enigmatically seismic statement devoid of any substance except for the stick of dynamite he enclosed.
Democrats are freaking out, calling each other repeatedly for assurance that Clinton will not lose the race over this odd and potentially hollow bombshell.
My sense is that Clinton will lose a point or two because of the Schmidt rule. Clinton is the one being talked about.
My sense also is that she holds a big enough lead in enough battleground states to withstand even a twopoint drop and still win with 278 electoral votes. Important to that premise is that early voting has been remarkably heavy in many background states. Clinton is believed from polling of actual early voters to have built big leads in those states.
Clinton probably wins if she takes North Carolina and Pennsylvania even if she loses the formerly decisive states, Florida and Ohio, as she well might.
A poll drawn from early voters in North Carolina shows Clinton with a 61-33 lead. That lead slips all the way to 47-41 when the sample of likely voters not yet casting votes is added. The point is that the early voting advantage holds up with a bit of a cushion to absorb a modest Comey-caused drop.
The state to watch is Pennsylvania, where Clinton leads by five or six points on average. It has a decisive number of electors, 20. But it has no early voting. Hillary thus has no head start there.
If Clinton plunged into a late freefall of more than a point or two, it would be most consequential in that electorally rich battleground state where voting takes place only on Election Day.
Here is a nightmare scenario for the nation: The race tightens to the point that the margin in Pennsylvania is razorthin on Election Day. Trump, trailing there by a minuscule sum, alleges that he was cheated in inner-city Philadelphia. Republicans always get huffy about poor black people voting heavily in inner cities. They file suit. The matter proceeds to the U.S. Supreme Court, which can’t decide because it is deadlocked 4-4 because Republicans stonewalled a pending nomination for a full year to await an election outcome that cannot be determined.
The irony would be rich. Our dysfunction would be complete.