John Cassidy's Blog, page 20

Why a Brexit Shocker Is Unlikely Here

If you listen to Donald Trump or Sean Hannity, the United States is heading for a Brexit-style surprise on Election Day, in which the pollsters and pundits who have largely written off the Republican Presidential candidate get humiliated. “There’s going to be a lot of Brexit happening in about two weeks,” Trump said in Florida on Tuesday. “Remember that? Everyone went to bed. They said, ‘Oh, gee, I think it’s not going to happen,’ and I said it’s going to happen.”

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Published on October 27, 2016 16:45

Three Ways to Fix Obamacare

It has long been clear that many of the health-insurance companies offering policies through the public exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act of 2010 were losing money. Some big operators, including Aetna, Humana, and United Health Care, have withdrawn from a number of the exchanges, and those insurers that remain have been indicating their intention to raise prices sharply for 2017. “The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable,” Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, said earlier this month. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when the Obama Administration this week formally acknowledged that prices will go up for plans purchased on the exchanges.

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Published on October 26, 2016 07:07

Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Squeeze the Ultra-Rich

With all the attention given to whether Donald Trump would accept the results of the election, one major claim made by Hillary Clinton at last week’s Presidential debate was all but overlooked by the general public. Three times during the proceedings, Clinton asserted that her economic proposals—which call for about $1.65 trillion in additional spending over the next ten years on infrastructure, health care, education, and other items in the federal budget—wouldn’t “add a penny” to the national debt.

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Published on October 24, 2016 15:14

The Real Message of Trump’s Election Comments: I’m Going to Lose

If there was any suspense left about which way this election was heading—and I don’t think there was much—the last of it disappeared about two-thirds of the way through this year’s final Presidential debate, in Las Vegas on Wednesday, when the moderator, Chris Wallace, of Fox News, asked Donald Trump whether he would accept the result of the election.

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Published on October 20, 2016 00:31

Debate Preview: Trump Looks Set to Rant to the Bitter End

It’s fitting that this year’s third and final Presidential debate will be held in Las Vegas. For Donald Trump, who during the nineteen-eighties and nineties built a short-lived casino empire in Atlantic City, Vegas has long represented the big time that he couldn’t quite crack. Although he currently co-owns a high-rise hotel on the northern end of the famous Strip, he has never had any gaming interests in Nevada. Now it looks like Trump’s Presidential ambitions, or, at least, the most widely watched manifestation of them, will come to an end in Sin City.

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Published on October 19, 2016 09:52

Will Donald Trump Cost Republicans the Senate? A State-by-State Guide

With Donald Trump trailing badly in the polls and Election Day approaching, a key question is whether his presence at the top of the Republican ticket will cost the party its majorities in the Senate or the House. If either were to happen, it would transform the prospects for a Hillary Clinton Presidency—and it would also cement Trump’s position as the biggest party wrecker in recent history.

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Published on October 18, 2016 16:41

The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting

Is the Presidential election done? On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, facing new sexual-assault accusations, cancelled an interview with one of his most stalwart supporters, Sean Hannity, of Fox News. Other news networks reported that they were having a hard time finding guests willing to defend Trump on air. Some commentators went as far as suggesting that Trump might skip the third Presidential debate, which is scheduled for Wednesday, or maybe even drop out of the race entirely.

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Published on October 13, 2016 17:14

The Illuminating but Unsurprising Content of Clinton’s Paid Speeches

Since last Friday, WikiLeaks has been posting online e-mails and documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her campaign. On Wednesday alone, the organization released about nineteen hundred e-mails in two batches. The materials appear to have been obtained when someone hacked the e-mail account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Clinton campaign is blaming the Russian government and alleging that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are in cahoots with the Kremlin to help elect Donald Trump. WikiLeaks, as usual, isn’t saying where it got its material.

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Published on October 12, 2016 14:10

The Nastiest Presidential Debate of All Time

Shortly before the second Presidential debate began, on Sunday night, John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a New York Post columnist, remarked on Twitter that this was “the weirdest single moment in modern American political history.” Some people who lived through Watergate, or the farcical impeachment of Bill Clinton, might argue with that statement, but one thing can be said without fear of contradiction: this was the darkest and nastiest Presidential debate in modern history.

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Published on October 10, 2016 01:36

A Sexual Predator in the Republican Party’s Midst

What should a national political party do if it discovers, four weeks before an election, that its candidate for President is a man who once described his behavior in terms that fit a sexual predator? That was the unprecedented dilemma that the Republican Party was dealing with on a remarkable Friday night, and as Saturday arrived the outcome of its deliberations wasn’t entirely clear.

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Published on October 08, 2016 07:04