Zion loses its Virginity ( finally) to backstabbing Uncle Sambama : United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 a step away for the Cause of Peace.

0
 

 In four respects, UNSCR 2334 undermines the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian peace and threatens what little regional stability is left. First, it could force Israel to fall back on its powerful legal position as the only existing legal inheritor of the British Mandate. Second, it compounds the error made by Obama's transition team even before he came to power of ignoring a written commitment of a US president. Third, it has placed Sisi's government in Egypt – a keystone of regional stability – in an untenable position. Fourth and most painfully, it will make it far more complicated – if not impossible – for the Palestinian leadership, enticed by the prospect of international coercion, to accept a reasonable compromise. The New Zealanders, do-gooders with a very dim understanding of what they have wrought, can be forgiven such folly. The Obama administration has no such excuses.

"Be careful what you wish for; you might get it" says the old adage, and sober elements among the Palestinian leadership may yet rue the day they managed to secure an American abstention leading to the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334. The resolution condemns “settlement activity” anywhere, including East Jerusalem, and calls upon all members to distinguish in practice between Jews who live on one side of the Armistice Line of 1949 and those who live beyond it. It presumes to speak in the name of international law and to create the conditions for further progress towards peace in the interests of both Palestinians and "legitimate" Israelis. In fact, this poorly designed and atrociously timed diplomatic tool seems set to harm, if not entirely destroy, the very purposes it was designed to serve.

It is bound to do damage to Israeli interests (and those of Palestinian employees in Jewish-owned businesses) through the encouragement of practices already promoted by the EU (labelling, differential tariffs, etc.) and by giving momentum to the BDS movement, which aims at the ultimate delegitimization of Israel and the entire Zionist project. But these effects can be effectively countered by energetic action by Israel and its friends, not least in the US Congress. As in the (non-comparable) case of terrorism, they must not be allowed to dictate life and death decisions to Israel that need to be taken strictly according to the national interest.

Much greater harm has been done to the prospects for peace and regional stability.  There are several sad aspects to this, all pointing to the short-sighted and perhaps vindictive mindset behind the Obama administration's decision to let it happen when it could easily have been avoided. In line with several of the administration’s past decisions, it speaks the language of high morality but fails to attend to basic facts or possible consequences.

To begin with, the entire disquisition rests upon President Jimmy Carter's costly mistake of allowing a similar text, UNSCR 465, to slip through in March 1980. The passage of that resolution had serious consequences both to Carter’s political standing (Obama, preferring to act in his lame duck period, took no such risks) and to the advancement of the process initiated at Camp David. When Israeli leaders are confronted with a UN and US endorsement of the Arab narrative, which ignores the circumstances of both 1949 and 1967, they are unlikely to feel comfortable enough to work for an equitable compromise, and certainly not when there is no partner for compromise on the other side.

Moreover, by using litigious language (which may lead to trouble at the ICC, if the Prosecutor's office is not careful in the use of criteria such as gravitas and complementarity), UNSCR 2334 may leave Israel no choice but to stand on its own interpretation of international law. That interpretation stands on very firm ground, as suggested by the late Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy. The so-called "Palestinian Occupied Territories" were never Palestinian at any point for these reasons: first, the Palestinian leadership rejected UNGAR 181 (November 1947) in all its aspects and launched a war of annihilation; and second, the territories were held between 1949 and 1967 by an occupying power that gained the recognition of only two states (Britain and Pakistan) to their annexation to Jordan. They are therefore, as the late Prime Minister Begin was fond of reminding his listeners, res nullius. Israel is thus the only existing inheritor of the League of Nations mandate, which called upon the mandatory power to secure the "close settlement of Jews on the land."

Israel never chose to turn the political effort to reach a compromise into a legal wrangle, but that choice may now have been thrust upon it. The Israeli government has sidestepped even elementary legal arguments, such as the obvious meaning of the phrase in UNSCR 242 calling for withdrawal from "territories," not "the territories." The assumption was that a narrow legal approach would bind Israel’s hands when the day came to offer significant concessions. But now that Israel has been essentially put in the dock by 2334, it has ample legal tools at its disposal with which to counter the assault – at the expense, sadly, of a coherent discussion of practical compromises.

A second unfortunate aspect is that the Obama administration, secure in the presumption that it was "saving Israel from itself," drew no lessons from its own past errors of judgment. This goes all the way back to the decision, taken by Obama’s transition team before the 2009 inauguration, to annul a written commitment by President George W. Bush in an exchange of letters with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004 that implied that the terms of reference for negotiations should reflect the demographic realities on the ground. This abandonment, which shook Israeli professionals and politicians, was unprecedented, and did much to undermine the prospect of peace from day one. Indeed, Obama's efforts to create "daylight" between US and Israeli positions led to the one of the longest barren periods in the history of the peace process. Now the mistake has been repeated and worsened. A tragedy replayed as a farce is still a tragedy.

A third and highly damaging, if indirect, result of the vote is the potential discrediting of Egyptian President Sisi as a useful influence in the region. Approached by President-elect Trump, with whom he has established a warm relationship, Sisi was willing to pull the Egyptian draft. Instead of honoring Trump’s wish to let the incoming administration take its own stock of the situation, Obama dismissed the effort as irrelevant. With the proclamation “we are still here,” he went ahead with the resolution, cooperating with the likes of Venezuela and Malaysia, putting Sisi in the untenable position of being less loyal than they are to the Arab cause. Obama’s ill-judged action has reduced Sisi’s vital role as a cornerstone of regional stability, and rapid action will be required to undo the damage.

Finally and most tragically, the resolution greatly reduces the likelihood that the Palestinian leadership will have what it takes to strike a workable compromise at the negotiating table. It is weak and divided (notwithstanding President Abbas’s success at the Seventh Fatah Conference, where he isolated and even criminalized his rival, Muhammad Dahlan), and has not been marked hitherto by the courage necessary to make an implementable outcome possible.

Abbas did offer a conciliatory note after the UN vote, calling for coexistence and implying that he is aware that the future still depends on the Israeli electorate. But he is less able now than ever before to offer a vision that departs from the template of expectations he and his colleagues have generated. A "solution" tailored to satisfy the hopes fostered by the UNSCR text – i.e., the delegitimization and ultimate removal of each and every Jew living beyond the 1949 armistice lines, absurdly including East Jerusalem – simply cannot be implemented. Anyone who encourages the Palestinians to believe that the forced removal of hundreds of thousands is preferable to a convoluted but practical compromise that would involve human dislocation on a much smaller scale – and that leaves Jerusalem a living, united city – is abetting a pipe dream.

Venezuela and Malaysia, virulent anti-Israel players, did this for their own reasons. Senegal tagged along. New Zealand may have failed to comprehend what the initiative entails, and in Europe the settlements have been an obsessive preoccupation for years. But the Obama administration was well positioned to know that this resolution would do little but harm. Its decision to let it happen anyway, when Egypt offered a legitimate and honorable way out, raises troubling questions about Obama’s motives. Still, there is a silver lining. Given the Obama administration’s own practice of annulling its predecessor's position, it is now their position that can legitimately be undone – by practical and symbolic acts – come January 21.

#RIPUSA Obama shows his colours ( finally) Israel and Zion .... Two Presidents Two Policies

 

#RIPUSA Obama shows his colours ( finally) Israel and Zion .... Two Presidents Two Policies . . On just about everything else.... LBGTQ rights, Abortion Right, Privacy, Freedom of the Press, Donald Trump spells disaster .....back to 60 and 70's but on Israel, Zion and Judaism he may edge Truman as the post pro Israel President yet.

So what happens when the most powerful country in the world effectively has two presidents at once? Its policy regarding one of the most complex conflicts on the planet collapses into a muddled mess.

Or, more precisely, you have what unfolded over the last 48 hours: The Egyptian government submits to the UN Security Council a resolution against Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This raises the possibility that the Obama administration could express its opposition to Israeli settlement policy by abstaining from the vote, rather than vetoing the resolution as it had with a similar one in 2011. Enraged Israeli officials call up Donald Trump, who tweets that the United States should veto. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the president of Egypt, abruptly calls off the vote. At some point during all this, Trump has a phone conversation with Sisi where they chat about jointly solving various issues in the Middle East. Anonymous Israeli officials, essentially siding with the incoming Trump administration, criticize Obama in unusually harsh terms for plotting with the Palestinians to abandon Israel at the United Nations. A day later, Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal, and Venezuela reintroduce the resolution, which comes to a vote and is adopted by the Security Council, including Egypt, with the United States abstaining. Barack Obama delivers a powerful parting message to Israel’s leaders that is powerfully undercut by Donald Trump’s opening message. “As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th,” Trump tweets shortly after the vote.

Still with me?

Transitions of power are always awkward, uncertain moments in the life of a nation and its relations with the world. Richard Nixon’s campaign aides, for example, allegedly interfered with Vietnam War peace talks organized by Lyndon Johnson. But Donald Trump has involved himself in international affairs like no U.S. president-elect in recent memory. NBC News reviews some of the history:


President Bill Clinton told the press after his 1992 victory that he would “reaffirm the essential continuity of American foreign policy” and recognized “that America has only one president at a time.”

President George W. Bush declined questions on topics like North Korea and Israel until he took the oath of office in early 2001. “We have one president, and we’ll have one president, and the current president is President Clinton, and our nation must speak with one voice,” Bush said at a press conference.

In 2008-2009, Barack Obama’s transition team repeatedly invoked the norm that the United States has “only one president at a time” to explain why Obama was staying silent on issues like the Gaza War. That “constitutional principle,” Obama’s incoming press secretary said at the time, is “extremely important in the arena of foreign policy,” where it must be “clear who is speaking on behalf of the United States.” Noting the “delicate negotiations” that were occurring at the time between Israelis and Palestinians, Obama argued that “we can’t have two voices coming out of the United States when you have so much at stake.”

Yet in the waning days of 2016, two conflicting voices on high-stakes international issues is exactly what we have. Barack Obama is vowing to retaliate against the Russian government’s interference in the U.S. election; Donald Trump is questioning whether Russia interfered and thanking Vladimir Putin for his “very nice” Christmas card. Obama’s Pentagon demanded that China return a U.S. underwater drone seized in the South China Sea; Trump elevated the incident to an “unprecedented act” and then suddenly reversed course, suggesting the Chinese just “keep” the darn thing. Obama is dismantling a registration system for visitors from many Muslim-majority countries; Trump might soon revive it.

These contradictions have created such confusion in recent weeks that Jared Huffman, a Democratic congressman from California, has introduced legislation to amend the 1799 Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized private citizens from conducting U.S. foreign policy. Huffman wants to clarify that the law applies to presidents-elect, since “only the president, not the president-elect who is fresh off the campaign trail and not yet in office, has the authority to make critical foreign-policy decisions that impact America’s safety, economy, and global standing.” The legislation is still pending, with weeks to go before inauguration.

Terms of Estrangement US - Israeli Relationship during the Obama Administration

By Russel Crandall and Matt W. Gore ( Republished with permission of the Authors and The American Interest in which the article first appeared) 

Russell Crandall is a professor of U.S. foreign policy at Davidson College and a contributing writer at TAI. His latest book is The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977-1992 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Matt W. Gore graduated from Davidson in May, where he wrote his political science honors thesis on terrorist innovation.

An insider’s account of the Obama Administration’s rocky relationship with Israel gives pointers on how the relationship might be conducted in the future.

When Barack Obama’s chances of re-election looked uncertain in May 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu came to the White House to lecture its occupant. In front of “astonished” journalists and “furious” White House aides, Netanyahu publicly rejected the framework for peace the President had endorsed the day before.

Bibi wasn’t done. Over the coming months, Netanyahu seemed to be actively intervening in favor of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, an old friend from the Boston Consulting Group. The Prime Minister was campaigning against the sitting Democratic President of the United States, Israel’s most important ally and most faithful friend. Although his motivation was part personal and part political, Netanyahu’s brazen interference in U.S. politics also reveals a new and growing tension in the U.S.-Israeli alliance.Mapping this growing divide, and suggesting a possible “grand bargain” to mend it, is the project of seasoned policy scholars Dana Allin and Steven Simon in their timely and well-considered book, Our Separate Ways: The Struggle for the U.S.-Israel Alliance. Allin is a fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and the editor of the Institute’s leading journal, Survival. (Disclosure: Russell Crandall is a contributing editor at Survival.) Simon is a longtime Israel watcher and diplomat who recently served on Obama’s National Security Council as Senior Director for the Middle East and North African Affairs—and thus played a key role in the precarious fishbowl that is the U.S.-Israeli bilateral relationship.

Especially in the latter section on contemporary U.S.-Israeli relations, Our Separate Ways benefits from Simon’s just-out-of-government view of Middle East policymaking. This of course involves Washington-Tel Aviv relations, but the authors also effectively incorporate Obama’s policies toward Iran, Syria, and the Arab Spring—all with an eye toward how they impacted the U.S.-Israeli bilateral relationship.

Allin and Simon trace the traditional strength of the U.S.-Israeli relationship to two sources: a moral connection and a strategic alignment. Americans have always seen something of themselves in Israel.Americans have always seen something of themselves in Israel. American liberals, Republican and Democrat, supported the first half-century of the Zionist project due to their commitment to civil rights and aspiration to extend the “American covenant” to oppressed peoples everywhere.

At least through the George W. Bush Administration, the affinity Democratic administrations have felt toward Israel, as a general rule, has been based on a shared liberalism. Israeli democracy, the ascendance of Labor in early Israeli politics, and horror at the Holocaust created a strong foundation for relations with American liberals. On the other side of the aisle, religion has played an important role in fostering Republican support for Israel. Evangelical Christians, who vote Republican in overwhelming numbers, continue to back Israel strongly for reasons related to their faith. Indeed, certain popular conservative Protestant eschatologies require the return of Jews to Palestine. Pastor and perennial Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s hardline stance against a two-state solution, for example, can be traced back to his theology. But as Allin and Simon aptly note, apocalyptic eschatology is no foundation for an alliance.

Allin and Simon argue that the U.S.-Israeli relationship is based on more than a moral connection; Israel also has a “real but limited” strategic value to the United States. Despite their self-acknowledged desire to see the alliance strengthened, the authors admirably deflate many of the overdone arguments of both yesterday and today for Israel’s strategic import. During the Cold War, to cite a historical example, American identification with the Zionist project gave the Soviets an advantage in the Arab world. More recently, the authors dismiss Israeli military and intelligence capabilities as largely irrelevant to the U.S. fight to maintain its position in the Middle East. Israel could provide a useful base of operations in the Eastern Mediterranean, but “the realities of Arab politics preclude using Israeli airfields” even to fly missions against ISIS. Allin and Simon could have also mentioned that U.S. support for Israel has become a recurring trope in terrorist justifications of their violence. Bin Laden was particularly fond of citing the “American/Israeli coalition.” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears, since the beginning, to have burned through more U.S. political capital that it justifies on purely strategic grounds.

In the end, Allin and Simon don’t completely reject the idea of Israel as a strategic partner, but they nonetheless fall back on the more compelling moral connection:

Protecting Israel is in fact a solemn obligation of American power. It is a moral obligation that derives from the two countries’ long association, from their shared democratic heritage, from their common cultures, including religious cultures and, above all, from the circumstances of Israel’s birth in the Nazi Holocaust—an event of vast scale in the history of human suffering and evil. The Jewish people warrant the protection of their own state, because history taught them in the vilest terms that there is no other sure protection.

But as the authors note, a moral connection, especially one so complicated by “harm” to “stateless Palestinians,” is a tenuous foundation for an alliance.Barack Obama came to the White House seeing Israel as a “flawed miracle.” In the Administration’s view, Israel’s increasingly hardline stance on Palestine had injured its own long-term strategic interests. Obama wanted to engage, even in the face of Israeli skepticism. Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party swept into office just two months after Obama’s inauguration. In their uncomfortable first bilateral meeting, Obama asked Netanyahu to freeze settlement activity as a way of demonstrating good faith to the Palestinians. This took Netanyahu entirely by surprise; Joe Biden had to try to calm Bibi as he paced back and forth in the Vice President’s West Wing office, the blood drained from his face.Joe Biden had to try to calm Bibi as he paced back and forth in the Vice President’s West Wing office, the blood drained from his face.

In May 2009, when Obama and Netanyahu first met as heads of state, the settler population was already “over 478,000.” Ultra-Orthodox Jews “constituted 30 percent of the population” by 2011 and, with their staggering fertility rate of 7.7 children per woman, were busily “creating facts on the ground,” as the saying goes. Any resolution of the conflict, it seemed, had to deal with these settlements.

Obama’s settlement-freeze attempt proved to be a failure. The Israelis dragged their feet negotiating, all the while unleashing “a blizzard of building permits, tenders, and contracts” to bolster settlement growth before the freeze set in. On the Palestinian side, things were little better. The Obama Administration was forced to lean on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to drop another U.N. gambit, which he did at great political cost. The episode left him in no position to engage in the tough, unpopular horse-trading necessary to close a peace deal. He cited Israel’s half-hearted freeze as a reason not to resume talks.

While Biden was visiting Israel, he received a “nearly incomprehensible” insult when the Israeli interior ministry announced that 1,600 new housing units would be built in a contested area. Netanyahu then backpedaled and extended the building freeze. After significant U.S. handholding the Palestinians came back to the negotiating table, but only as the latest freeze was close to expiring.

Obama was in a bind. The Israelis held a relatively strong position; they had unilaterally extended the freeze while the Palestinians had spurned direct talks. That same freeze, meanwhile, was the only solid achievement the Obama Administration could point to in its signature peace initiative. The young, untested U.S. President needed the talks more than Netanyahu did. This sent the Administration on a search for the right cocktail of “political and military inducements” to keep the settlement freeze in place and the talks alive. The eventual recipe—the release of Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli spy, and the sale of a squadron of F-35s—was a stiff price to pay for a two-month extension of a building freeze. Obama’s initiative was alive, but barely.

Then what was heralded as a “spring” swept across the Arab world. Obama wanted to show domestic and international audiences that he “stood on the right side of history” by making a major speech. Such a speech could not avoid mentioning Israel, and so an internal debate ensued. Ultimately, Obama embraced what staffers called the “full Rabinowitz” in his May 2011 speech to a global audience: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” Although this was largely in line with the policies of previous administrations, it set off a partisan firestorm in both countries that cast doubt on the willingness of Netanyahu and his U.S. allies to make the sacrifices necessary for peace. As Allin and Simon write, “The entire episode had been nothing less than a fiasco.”

Despite Netanyahu backing the wrong horse in 2012, the Obama Administration made a bid to “reset” the peace process after his electoral victory. Secretary of State John Kerry led the U.S. effort. Progress was fitful and contentious. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly wished that Kerry would win “his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly wished that Kerry would win “his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.” In the end, mutual reticence on the part of the Israelis and Palestinians, and an accurate if undiplomatic outburst from Susan Rice—“You Palestinians can never see the fucking big picture”—scuttled the negotiations. Netanyahu moved right and won a new round of elections. Peace looked, and continues to look, farther away than ever.

Allin and Simon’s ringside view of the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy is a central strength of the book. The authors give deserved attention to what Kissinger called “the history of things that didn’t happen.” When discussing Obama’s decisions, whether in regard to Israeli negotiations, Syrian red lines, Egyptian protests, or Libyan strongmen, Allin and Simon examine the realistic alternative courses of action and judge the Administration’s moves in light of those alternatives. If, as Machiavelli said, prudence consists of recognizing the least-bad option as the good, then Obama’s Middle East policy deserves respect. Of course, that is the conclusion that the authors would like the readers to come to. Simon played a vital role in shaping many of the policies he defends in the book, so a dose of partiality is expected. But even if Simon is too close to the action to be fully objective, readers certainly benefit from reading this early effort at a history of Obama’s Middle East policy.

In the last part of their book, Allin and Simon map the new threats to the moral foundation of the U.S.-Israeli alliance. Gone is the bipartisan consistency of prior Democratic and Republican administrations, replaced by the “ideological rancor” of contemporary U.S. politics.

The authors warily note the decline in support for Israel on the American Left and among American Jews. Younger American Jews are less willing to confer an “asterisk” on Israel and overlook the conflict with the Palestinians. As Peter Beinart noted in Crisis of Zionism, “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding than many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

A break between the two countries is already being considered. In 2011 Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Liberman, argued that Israel could replace its U.S. alliance with a framework built around Russia, China, and India. These countries could provide many of the strategic benefits of the U.S. partnership “with no strings attached.” This is more than talk; Israel was notably absent from the U.N. vote condemning the Russian annexation of Crimea, despite the longstanding and costly U.S. defense of Israel in the United Nations.

Allin and Simon conclude by proposing a “grand bargain” to alter the troubling trajectory of the two nations and save the future of the alliance. The centerpiece of the proposed deal is an American carrot: Washington would ratify a defense treaty with and formally extend its nuclear umbrella to Israel.The centerpiece of the proposed deal is an American carrot: Washington would ratify a defense treaty with and formally extend its nuclear umbrella to Israel. A permanent deployment of U.S. troops to Israel would act as a “tripwire” and strengthen the security guarantee. Any attack on Israel would necessarily threaten U.S. troops and justify a strong U.S. response.

In return, Israel would freeze settlement activity and open negotiations with the Palestinians, acknowledging that a successful agreement would entail dismantling many existing settlements. Whether or not the Palestinians agreed to a deal, the U.S. treaty would be conditioned on a clear Israeli demonstration of its willingness to be a genuine partner in peace. The 1967 borders would be restored with mutually agreed-upon land swaps, and some refugee resettlement and compensation. Allin and Simon finish their proposal with what they call the “weasel words” of “shared sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem” and a “special status for the Holy Basin.” They acknowledge that the proposal is incomplete and difficult, but they believe it is the best hope of preserving the U.S. alliance with Israel.

However, it is unclear how much the United States would benefit from this agreement. It is not predicated on the actual signing of an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord; Israel just has to offer certain conditions. The United States could find itself giving Israel a nuclear guarantee without resolving Israel’s central liability, the continued conflict with the Palestinians. The treaty could embolden Israel to take more aggressive unilateral action against, for example, Iran. Allin and Simon’s grand bargain may offer a way to preserve the U.S.-Israeli alliance, but by increasing the danger to U.S. interests without the guarantee of a counterbalancing benefit.

In the end, the reader might ask whose core interests are being served by the deal. Could it be that Allin and Simon, who describe themselves as part of a postwar generation “viscerally committed to Zionism,” simply and almost inescapably overestimate the moral and strategic importance of Israel? A related question may ultimately be one of values: Do the historical and moral ties emphasized by Allin and Simon in their pitch for renewed bilateral commitment matter more than the cold-blooded calculations of realism that might suggest the United States would be better off reconsidering its approach entirely? This outstanding book is an excellent place to start answering these wrenching questions.

The "Idiot" is causing White Suburbanites to Flee.El Duce Dunce Donald Trump’s death spiral. The Question is does he even know?. Does he even care?

Donald Trump’s North Carolina death spiral: Even white suburbanites flee the “idiot”
Only strong anti-Clinton sentiment is keeping Trump afloat in North Carolina's heavily Republican suburbs

Republished with permission of the Author Simon Maloy and Salon Magazine in which the Article first appeared.



North Carolina should be a hotly contested swing state. In 2008, Barack Obama turned North Carolina into the leading edge of the Democratic resurgence in the South, narrowly snatching the state from John McCain thanks to a surge in black voter turnout. Mitt Romney managed to claw the state back into the Republican column in 2012 by juicing rural and suburban turnout enough to overcome the Democratic advantage in the cities. At the start of the 2016 election cycle, the state was expected to be one of the most hard-fought battlegrounds.


And up until a few weeks ago, the Tar Heel State was indeed a toss-up: depending on which polling model and aggregator you choose to believe, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were running about even in mid-September in North Carolina, with Trump probably enjoying a slight edge. But after two bad debate performances, the release of the “grab them by the pussy” tape, and an ever-growing number of sexual assault allegations, Trump looks to be fading. All the recent North Carolina polling puts Hillary Clinton up by low- to mid-single digits. As of this writing, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump less than a 3-in-10 shot of winning the state.

I went down to North Carolina this past weekend to see Trump speak to his supporters and break a malfunctioning teleprompter at a rally in Charlotte. Then I headed southeast to the wealthy suburbs of Union County to chat up some voters and get their impressions of the 2016 race and the Trump candidacy. What I found was a mix of voters who are either having a lot of difficulty backing the Republican nominee or are voting Trump primarily because they can’t abide by the idea of another Clinton presidency.

Union County is an area of North Carolina where Republican presidential candidates should expect to do well. It’s a populous county (the state’s ninth-largest, per themost recent estimates), and it’s whiter, wealthier and more highly educated than the state as a whole. In 2012, Mitt Romney put up one of his biggest statewide victories in Union County, beating Barack Obama by more than 28,000 votes. Walking through the Union County suburbs of Indian Trail and Weddington, however, I ran into a number of voters who would have been open to voting Republican this cycle, but are having a lot of trouble convincing themselves to vote for Trump.

“I’m actually considering a third-party candidate,” said Keith Garbrick, a 36-year-old civil engineer who has voted Republican his entire life but is now leaning strongly towards Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. “It’s difficult to see a leader that’s as careless with his words and with his actions,” he said in explaining his resistance to Trump. “It just seems to be the complete opposite of what I would expect out of the Republican Party.” When I asked if he would have been more amenable to voting for Trump before all the allegations of sexual assault starting coming out, Garbrick said yes. “It wasn’t the best candidate we could have put forward, but I think it was one that was tolerable,” he said.

The sexual assault allegations against Trump also influenced Tommy Crawford, a 57-year-old transportation worker I spoke to at a coffee shop in Indian Trail. A self-identified independent who voted for Obama twice, Crawford said he is still undecided but lately has begun leaning towards Clinton. I asked him why, and he said that while he had once been open to the idea of backing Trump, “the accusations towards women, and the bus — the video with the bus, I think that was it.” That sentiment, Crawford added, was common among his friends and associates. “The people I know are more and more now leaning towards Hillary because of the last few weeks,” he said.

“I just think Trump — he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he’s an idiot,” said Eric Schafer, a 26-year-old nonprofit employee who voted Republican in the last two presidential elections and supported John Kasich in the Republican primaries. “I feel like if he’s elected, we’re going to have some sort of war.” Still, Schafer said he was open to giving Trump a chance to make his case, and for him the question would ultimately come down to economics versus morality. “I don’t know if Trump’s going to be best for the world, but I think he’s going to be best economically for some people that I hang out with and myself,” he explained. “But I don’t know if his morality is going to be aligned with what I want.”

For a Republican trying to win North Carolina in 2016, voter reactions like these are not at all what you want to hear. After eight years of Democratic rule in the White House, a GOP candidate should, in theory, have a good shot at pulling together solid Republicans and persuadable independents into a pretty strong coalition. But few of the Union County Trump voters I talked to had much enthusiasm for the nominee. They were more animated by a desire to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

“She is crooked, she is a criminal, she is just not a good person, she’s a mean, mean person, whereas he’ll make some change,” Terry McDonald, a 45-year-old hospitality industry employee told me when I asked him why he supported Trump. “He may not be the best candidate, but he’s all we got.” Jori, a Trump-supporting supermarket employee in Weddington, told me that Trump “doesn’t really try to cover up the fact that he’s an idiot, as far as the remarks he makes about women.” But she added, “Hillary, she’s no better, she’s just as bad.”

Kerry Scialabba, a 45-year-old stay-at-home mom, also planned to vote Trump, but with reservations. “I don’t know that I’m totally in for Trump, but I am totally opposed to Hillary Clinton,” she said. Her concerns were Trump’s “quick mouth” and the sexual assault allegations. “I’m hoping that if he did that, he’ll learn from this and move forward and make amends for what he’s done,” she said. “It wouldn’t change my vote in the election because I feel like we’re looking at the country as a whole and where we need to go, and he’s going to be the right person between the two of them.”

I had many variations of this same conversation with lots of voters in a county that should be fertile ground for a Republican presidential nominee. They either can’t quite come around to backing Trump, or they’re convincing themselves that he’s the lesser evil. Right now, it seems like the best thing Trump has going for him in North Carolina is the fact that he’s running against Hillary Clinton.

The "Idiot" is causing White Suburbanites to Flee.El duce Dunce Donald Trump’s death spiral

Donald Trump’s North Carolina death spiral: Even white suburbanites flee the “idiot”
Only strong anti-Clinton sentiment is keeping Trump afloat in North Carolina's heavily Republican suburbs

Republished with permission of the Author Simon Maloy and Salon Magazine in which the Article first appeared.



North Carolina should be a hotly contested swing state. In 2008, Barack Obama turned North Carolina into the leading edge of the Democratic resurgence in the South, narrowly snatching the state from John McCain thanks to a surge in black voter turnout. Mitt Romney managed to claw the state back into the Republican column in 2012 by juicing rural and suburban turnout enough to overcome the Democratic advantage in the cities. At the start of the 2016 election cycle, the state was expected to be one of the most hard-fought battlegrounds.


And up until a few weeks ago, the Tar Heel State was indeed a toss-up: depending on which polling model and aggregator you choose to believe, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were running about even in mid-September in North Carolina, with Trump probably enjoying a slight edge. But after two bad debate performances, the release of the “grab them by the pussy” tape, and an ever-growing number of sexual assault allegations, Trump looks to be fading. All the recent North Carolina polling puts Hillary Clinton up by low- to mid-single digits. As of this writing, FiveThirtyEight gives Trump less than a 3-in-10 shot of winning the state.

I went down to North Carolina this past weekend to see Trump speak to his supporters and break a malfunctioning teleprompter at a rally in Charlotte. Then I headed southeast to the wealthy suburbs of Union County to chat up some voters and get their impressions of the 2016 race and the Trump candidacy. What I found was a mix of voters who are either having a lot of difficulty backing the Republican nominee or are voting Trump primarily because they can’t abide by the idea of another Clinton presidency.

Union County is an area of North Carolina where Republican presidential candidates should expect to do well. It’s a populous county (the state’s ninth-largest, per themost recent estimates), and it’s whiter, wealthier and more highly educated than the state as a whole. In 2012, Mitt Romney put up one of his biggest statewide victories in Union County, beating Barack Obama by more than 28,000 votes. Walking through the Union County suburbs of Indian Trail and Weddington, however, I ran into a number of voters who would have been open to voting Republican this cycle, but are having a lot of trouble convincing themselves to vote for Trump.

“I’m actually considering a third-party candidate,” said Keith Garbrick, a 36-year-old civil engineer who has voted Republican his entire life but is now leaning strongly towards Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. “It’s difficult to see a leader that’s as careless with his words and with his actions,” he said in explaining his resistance to Trump. “It just seems to be the complete opposite of what I would expect out of the Republican Party.” When I asked if he would have been more amenable to voting for Trump before all the allegations of sexual assault starting coming out, Garbrick said yes. “It wasn’t the best candidate we could have put forward, but I think it was one that was tolerable,” he said.

The sexual assault allegations against Trump also influenced Tommy Crawford, a 57-year-old transportation worker I spoke to at a coffee shop in Indian Trail. A self-identified independent who voted for Obama twice, Crawford said he is still undecided but lately has begun leaning towards Clinton. I asked him why, and he said that while he had once been open to the idea of backing Trump, “the accusations towards women, and the bus — the video with the bus, I think that was it.” That sentiment, Crawford added, was common among his friends and associates. “The people I know are more and more now leaning towards Hillary because of the last few weeks,” he said.

“I just think Trump — he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he’s an idiot,” said Eric Schafer, a 26-year-old nonprofit employee who voted Republican in the last two presidential elections and supported John Kasich in the Republican primaries. “I feel like if he’s elected, we’re going to have some sort of war.” Still, Schafer said he was open to giving Trump a chance to make his case, and for him the question would ultimately come down to economics versus morality. “I don’t know if Trump’s going to be best for the world, but I think he’s going to be best economically for some people that I hang out with and myself,” he explained. “But I don’t know if his morality is going to be aligned with what I want.”

For a Republican trying to win North Carolina in 2016, voter reactions like these are not at all what you want to hear. After eight years of Democratic rule in the White House, a GOP candidate should, in theory, have a good shot at pulling together solid Republicans and persuadable independents into a pretty strong coalition. But few of the Union County Trump voters I talked to had much enthusiasm for the nominee. They were more animated by a desire to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

“She is crooked, she is a criminal, she is just not a good person, she’s a mean, mean person, whereas he’ll make some change,” Terry McDonald, a 45-year-old hospitality industry employee told me when I asked him why he supported Trump. “He may not be the best candidate, but he’s all we got.” Jori, a Trump-supporting supermarket employee in Weddington, told me that Trump “doesn’t really try to cover up the fact that he’s an idiot, as far as the remarks he makes about women.” But she added, “Hillary, she’s no better, she’s just as bad.”

Kerry Scialabba, a 45-year-old stay-at-home mom, also planned to vote Trump, but with reservations. “I don’t know that I’m totally in for Trump, but I am totally opposed to Hillary Clinton,” she said. Her concerns were Trump’s “quick mouth” and the sexual assault allegations. “I’m hoping that if he did that, he’ll learn from this and move forward and make amends for what he’s done,” she said. “It wouldn’t change my vote in the election because I feel like we’re looking at the country as a whole and where we need to go, and he’s going to be the right person between the two of them.”

I had many variations of this same conversation with lots of voters in a county that should be fertile ground for a Republican presidential nominee. They either can’t quite come around to backing Trump, or they’re convincing themselves that he’s the lesser evil. Right now, it seems like the best thing Trump has going for him in North Carolina is the fact that he’s running against Hillary Clinton.

Frantic Finish Clinton Versus Trump to be the 45th President of the USA

50 days: Clinton, Trump plot paths for campaign's frantic finish




Only 50 days remain in the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, one of the most volatile and unpredictable political battles in U.S. history.

And there's just one week to go before the first, pivotal debate.


National polls show Clinton and Trump running neck and neck. Clinton begins with an advantage in the Electoral College, but Trump is closing fast in a number of battleground states, including Florida and Ohio.


The campaign has been unrelentingly negative and both Trump and Clinton are disliked by a number of voters, suggesting a nasty fight to the finish.



Clinton will have an advantage in money and ground game, but she is struggling mightily to energize the Democratic coalition that turned out for President Obama.



Trump’s supporters are enthused, but his favorability rating is even lower than Clinton’s. Vast swaths of the electorate don’t view him is presidential.

An unprecedented number of voters remain undecided, and third-party candidates are pulling more support than they have in decades.

Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein appear to be hurting Clinton, who polls suggest is struggling to win over young voters.

But neither Johnson nor Stein will make the stage at the first debate next Monday in Hempstead, N.Y. because both failed to meet polling criteria for inclusion.


The debate is the first of three that will take place over a 25-day period, with a vice presidential matchup also coming up on Oct. 4. It is widely expected to attract more viewers than any other debate in history.

Clinton, who is enduring one of the roughest patches of her campaign and who just returned to the campaign trail on Thursday from a dramatic illness, is raising the stakes for the next 50 days.


“The next 53 days will shape the next 50 years,” she said at a press conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday.



Clinton is looking to reclaim her standing after falling ill to pneumonia and a serious gaffe. She had to express regret for saying half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”

She has also had difficulty shaking controversies at the State Department and Clinton Foundation.


Democrats say that over final 50-day stretch, Clinton needs to focus on turning out the African-American, Hispanic and young voters that formed the core of the Obama coalition.



Polls show Democrats are not excited about voting for Clinton and there are worries those voters will stay home on Election Day.



Clinton has acknowledged that she needs to give voters a reason to cast a ballot for her and not just against Trump. But Democrats say she has struggled to make that case.



“It’s amazing to me that after all this time she hasn’t been able to come up with anything better than we’re ‘stronger together’ and don’t vote for him,” said Douglas Schoen, an adviser to former President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. “She simply doesn’t have a message that is catching on.”



Clinton will get an assist in that department from an all-star cast of surrogates.



President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, both hugely popular among black voters, hit the hustings for Clinton this week.



Progressive favorites Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are also campaigning for Clinton in Ohio, where polls show Trump has moved into the lead.



“Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders are as strong of allies as you can have,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, a veteran of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. “There’s nobody even remotely as connected to the millennial generation on the Republican side.”



Trump’s challenge is different.



The GOP nominee, famous for becoming entangled in unnecessary controversies, appeared to right the ship after bringing in a new campaign team over the summer. He uses teleprompters at rallies now and has cut back on press conferences and media interviews.



But Trump was blown off course once again this week, getting into a spat with the female pastor at a black church in Flint, Mich. He also reignited the “birther” controversy, ultimately holding a press conference at his new hotel in Washington, D.C. to acknowledge publicly for the first time that he believes Obama was born in the U.S.



“He needs to stay on message,” said Grover Norquist, the president of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform. “He needs to focus on the issues where he has the advantage, like the economy and how he would be the agent of change over Clinton, who is the status quo. He can’t become distracted when Hillary or the press throw shiny objects into the air.”



Trump also faces a stiff commander-in-chief test at the first debate, as polls show the public does not view him as presidential.



Trump must address that challenge in substance, in tone and in temperament, Republicans say.



“There is an acceptability threshold he has to pass,” said veteran GOP operative Charlie Black. “At the debate, he needs to gentlemanly and serious. We’ve seen more of that from him lately and he’s done good to shore this up with his policy proposals.”



There are any number of wildcards that could come into play in the final stretch.



Russian hackers and Wikileaks have already left their mark on the election, embarrassing former secretary of State Colin Powell and contributing to the ouster of the head of the Democratic National Committee. Both sides are bracing for further email dumps.



Then there’s the chance that Johnson or Stein could play spoiler to Clinton, a development that Democrats are starting to take seriously.



They vividly remember the 2000 election and still blame Ralph Nader for costing Al Gore the presidency in what turned out to be the closest presidential election in history.



“It’s entirely plausible to think that Johnson and Stein could tip one or two states to Trump,” said Democratic strategist Craig Varoga. “As disappointing as that outcome was in 2000, it pales in comparison with the prospect of an election accidentally in favor of a guy with an impulse-control disorder.”