Bill Weld: Let Me Tell You How Great Hillary Clinton Is . . .

November 02, 2016

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson's had a disappointing year. Yes, some of the mistakes are self-inflicted. The question "What are you going to do about Aleppo?" came out of the blue, with no context. Not having any favorite foreign leader — or a willingness to even name one he liked — was a fairer hit. But how many candidates have had their running mate basically switch sides during the race?

Libertarian vice presidential nominee Bill Weld defended Hillary Clinton Tuesday night, acknowledging an explicit split with his running mate Gary Johnson.

Weld, in an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, said he disagreed with FBI Director James Comey's decision to announce publicly the agency was looking into more Clinton emails just days before the election and defended the Democratic presidential nominee whom he has known for decades.

"I'm here vouching for Mrs. Clinton, and I think it's high time somebody did," Weld said.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Sadly, Weld's willingness to help out Clinton was predictable. Back on May 25, right here on NRO:

Three years later, (Weld) was hired to work on the U.S. House of Representatives Impeachment Inquiry into Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal.

"If I was the first staffer, Hillary Rodham from Yale Law School was the second staffer," Weld told the Nixon Library Oral History Program. "She's just a very decent person, and if I recall correctly, on the occasion when I got in the middle and [special counsel to the Judiciary Committee] John Doar himself got frowny-faced with me — which he should not have, by the way, I was doing my duty — I think Hillary intervened and defended me on that and I've never forgotten that."

(Weld isn't kidding: Earlier this year, he dismissed the scandal surrounding Clinton's private e-mail server as much ado about nothing. "I've never bought that e-mail thing," he told Boston Herald radio on February 29. "I don't think anything was classified when she did it, it got classified later. . . . I don't think she would lay a lot of stuff on the table that she thought would compromise our national security.")

Forget Talk of Conservative Purges; Begin Talks About Conservative Trust

You're already hearing talk about the need for the conservative movement to have a "purge" after Election Day.

It's more fun to talk about a purge than to actually make one happen. How exactly do you cast someone out of the conservative movement? How do you get other people to stop thinking of them as members of the conservative movement? There's no conservative pope who can formally excommunicate them. You can only make your argument and hope that a majority of everyone else finds it compelling.

Presuming 2016 ends in a depressing defeat for conservative principles, instead of asking "Whom do we purge?" after Election Day, perhaps a better question is, "Whom do we trust?"

For example, if someone spent the spring assuring you that nominating Donald Trump would put California, New York, or New Jersey in play, you have good reason to be wary of their optimistic assessments in the future. Trump's averaging 30 percent in the three most recent polls in California, 30 percent in the two most recent polls in New York, and 29 percent in New Jersey. (No one has polled the Garden State since early September; an Emerson poll back then put Trump within four points.) Four years ago, Mitt Romney won 37 percent in California, 35 percent in New York, and 40 percent in New Jersey.

Everybody makes mistakes, but the evidence that Trump was going to put these very deep blue mega-states into play was always scarce. One of the great challenges in life is separating what you want to see from what you actually see.

Some people may want to see the Republican party thriving by remaining the party of older, whiter, religious, rural men and focusing primarily on the issues that stir those demographics the most.

Our Tim Alberta wrote a terrific piece about the country's changing demographics. It's far too simple to say that the increasing number of Latino, African-American, irreligious, and unmarried voters dooms conservatives or Republicans. But the GOP cannot just say "get lost" to voters in those demographics. It seems like a certain number of Republicans, concluding that they'll never win a majority in these groups of voters, don't want to bother trying at all.

Republican candidates are probably always going to lose the Latino vote nationally. But it makes a big difference if a Republican candidate loses the Latino vote with 40 percent the way Bush did in 2004, or 27 percent like Romney, or the 19 percent Trump is getting in the latest Pew poll of Latinos.

It was not that long ago that Republicans were winning decent chunks of the Latino vote in state after state. Greg Abbott won 44 percent of the Latino vote in Texas' gubernatorial election in 2014. It helps to marry a Latina and have your in-laws appear in ads for you, praising your values in Spanish! (Admittedly, it also helps to run against a complete disaster of a candidate like Wendy Davis.) In the Texas Senate race, the Latino vote was split between incumbent Republican John Cornyn (48 percent) and Democrat David Alameel (47 percent). In Georgia, Nathan Deal won 47 percent of the Latino vote in the gubernatorial race and Senator David Purdue won 42 percent of Latinos in the Senate race. Rick Scott won 38 percent of the Latino vote in Florida. We don't have exit poll data for Nevada or New Mexico, but Latino GOP governors Brian Sandoval in Nevada and Suzana Martinez won reelection, and while there weren't enough Latinos in the Colorado exit poll sample to measure, Cory Gardner reportedly did well among that demographic in that state's Senate race.

The Republican candidate is probably always going to lose the women's vote, but it makes a big difference if that Republican gets 49 percent of the women's vote like Joni Ernst or 44 percent of the women's vote like Cory Gardner did in 2014 or if the gender gap is closer to 20 points, as it was in many polls of the presidential race in October.

(Interesting fact: Mitch McConnell won the women's vote against a female opponent in 2014, 50 percent to Alison Lundergan Grimes' 47 percent.)

Brace Yourselves . . . the Great Pundit Purge May Be Coming . . .

Speaking of purges, Jonah examines the ugly end of Donna Brazile's career at CNN and Jack Shafer's suggestion that it's time to purge the party-hacks-turned-talking heads from the cable news airwaves:

I don't think Shafer is right that they are all banal air-fillers. Evan Bayh? Sure. But Karl Rove and Joe Trippi provide real insight and substance. So does David Axelrod. Heck, William F. Buckley ran for mayor. Some former White House speechwriters are wildly overrated as analysts and pundits and some are wildly underrated. Anyway the point is, by all means have a purge. But let's be more selective and discerning about it — like they do in all the best purges.

Generally, the more an old campaign chief or White House aide is willing to reveal about how a campaign operates, and how previous campaigns tackled comparable problems to the news of the day, the more interesting they are.

Let's get something out of the way. It's extremely self-serving for someone like myself, a journalist/commentator who has never worked for a candidate or party, to argue that cable television news doesn't need as many compensated talking heads who are former officials, candidates, party apparatchiks, and/or part of the endless tide of "consultants," and what it really needs is . . . more compensated talking head slots * going to journalists/commentators who have never worked for a candidate or party.

But just because it's self-serving doesn't mean it's wrong!

You're the news consumer; you can decide for yourself. But I've been opposite left-of-center journalists and I've been opposite party hacks, and I've found the left-of-center journalists a lot more edifying, credible, and enjoyable. A big reason for this is that the journalists will occasionally concede a point or admit the faults on their own side. Admissions against interest build credibility! Because they don't begin their analysis of a topic with "the Democrat is always right," you're getting their genuine assessment, not a twisted pretzel of logic where yesterday's message (James Comey is the best!) is ditched for the ideological needs of today (James Comey is the worst!)

Echoing Jonah's point about green-room honesty and on-air dishonesty, I remember appearing on Fox News during the height of the Tea Party on Sean Hannity's "Great American Panel" with a Democratic consultant. (You notice the Great American Panel usually had three roles: the token Democrat, the attractive woman, and Somebody Else. Hannity liked to argue with the token Democrat and compliment the attractive woman, and the Somebody Else . . . was just kind of there.)

In the green room, this Democratic consultant told me that his Congressional clients drove him crazy with their refusal to disavow earmarks. He tried to tell them that whatever votes they won were offset by the perception of corruption and favor-trading, and that all the back-scratching and vote-trading over pork-barrel projects added to public cynicism and distrust of incumbents. He argued that because Democrats were the party that believed in government, they had to bend over backwards to make government work and avoid perceptions of corruption and fostering cynicism. I found this conversation pretty fascinating — here's a Democrat who saw the populist outrage against Washington coming, and who was trying to warn his clients before it was too late. (Judging by the 2010 midterms, they never listened to him.)

You can guess what happened next, right? Once we were on the panel, and the television cameras turned on, this consultant insisted there was nothing wrong with Democratic members of Congress' use of earmarks. His public position was completely different from what he was telling his clients and what he actually believed to be true.

This consultant was a nice enough guy, but he approached the role of television punditry in a fundamentally dishonest way. Stepping onto the set and telling viewers something you don't actually believe to be true is anti-news or anti-talk. A viewer walks away from that conversation less accurately informed than before.

Now, I may get things wrong, but I'm not dishonest. If I think Trump stinks, I'll tell you Trump stinks. If I think Pat Toomey might be the most important Republican to reelect this year, I'll tell you that, too. You may find my assessment completely idiotic, but no one is paying me to tell you that particular message. (Although now that I think of it, Senator Toomey did give me a "TOOMSDAY" t-shirt from his 2010 campaign.)

Look, we get it. Cable news networks love the "panel discussions" where a Republican talking head and a Democratic talking head turn into Rock-Em, Sock-Em Robots and yell at each other until it's time to go to commercial break.

* If you see someone called a Fox News/CNN/MSNBC contributor, they're being paid by the network for their appearance. If you see someone introduced by their day job affiliation, they're not being paid. They're getting treated nicely — a nice car picks you up and takes you back! — but they are doing it for the exposure, not financial compensation.

ADDENDA: Here's yesterday's CNN appearance, where former governor and presidential candidate Jim Gilmore slams John Kasich for not keeping his pledge to support the GOP nominee and not getting a lot of votes, and I desperately hope that the 2020 field gets some fresh blood.