2016 July 28^th

The Democrats are having an excellent convention; the high profile speakers, from Vice President Biden, to President Obama, to Secretary Panetta, and on and on, have all given great presentations. But these fine speakers have been outshone by the Democrat’s not so secret weapon, Donald J. Trump.

Trump played to a raucous and adoring crowd in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the same time the Democrats were holding forth in Philadelphia. The President presented a much more up-beat picture of the country than Donald Trump has given us. Trump claimed that the President was “out of touch” because, as Trump pointed out, 70 percent of those recently surveyed  thought we were going in the wrong direction.

The survey question, “country going in the right/wrong direction” goes back to the seventies. While 70 percent of the people now believe the country is going in the wrong direction, when President Obama was running for his first election in October of 2008 that number was 91 percent. There was a time when the country’s citizens thought the country was going in the right direction. On February 26, 1999 just after President Clinton was acquitted in his famous impeachment trial, only about 30 percent thought we were going in the wrong direction.

The whole issue of polling citizens to ask them if the country is going in the “right “ direction lumps together those who believe it is going in the wrong direction because social programs are hopelessly inadequate with those who believe it is going in the wrong direction because we are subsidizing welfare queens who are taking advantage of the system. The result is that there will always be a substantial group who believe the country is “going in the wrong direction.” The answer to that question really tells us very little about the mood of the electorate.

Then we have those WikiLeaks emails: There is some evidence that Russia had penetrated the DNC computer system and that their IT folks were responsible for these emails appearing at just the right time to throw a “spanner in the works” of the DNC’s convention. The emails detail the stupid bias the DNC had when they clearly favored Clinton during the primaries.

The bromance between Trump and Putin is an established fact. Putin wants the disintegration of NATO and Trump does not favor our continuing to support our treaty obligations there, It’s all about the money you see. NATO countries that don’t pay what Trump believes they should might not be defended. Putin loves that idea and will do what he can to see Trump elected, including a little email hacking. Trump has encouraged Putin’s efforts suggesting that Russia should jump right in there and get more of those emails. But then there was a lot of blowback and Trump let it be known that he was just being “sarcastic.” That fooled no one with the possible exception of Bill O’Reilly and other Fox News types. (Fox showed Leon Panetta being booed but didn’t get around to showing Panetta’s smashing assault on Trump’s Russian connection. So much for “fair and balanced.”)