WASHINGTON POST, DAILY TRAIL
June so far: Yesterday, Hillary Clinton called Trump a con artist. Today, she went with wild-eyed incompetent, basically.
"In an afternoon speech [in San Diego] in which she described Trump’s ideas as 'dangerously incoherent,' Clinton offered a sharply worded preview of a general election argument that will frame her as a well-prepared commander in chief and Trump as unfit," reported Anne Gearan and Abby Phillip. "In her strongest terms yet, she made clear that her pivot to the fall contest is underway, even with a series of final primary contests against Sen. Bernie Sanders still ahead.
"Trump 'doesn’t understand America, or the world,' she said. 'They’re not really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.'
"Clinton called him 'temperamentally unfit' to lead the country, too cavalier about the history of American leadership and responsibility abroad and too admiring of dictators.
"'It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin,' she said.
"'I believe the person Republicans have nominated for president cannot do the job.'"
"What Clinton seemed to be signaling in the speech was less that she and Trump have very different visions of America's role in the world, which they do, and much more that she could fight fire with fire. That if Trump wants to call her 'Crooked Hillary,' she will call him 'no clue' Donald. That if he wants to turn this campaign into a war of (nasty) words, she's ready to go taunt for taunt." (Get excited, America! Five more months.)
Clinton's speech was a two-fer. "First, savaging Trump in unusually (at least for Clinton) blunt terms helps rally Democrats behind her. With the California primary looming and Bernie Sanders still lingering on Clinton's left flank, the best thing she can do is try to focus the lens on the common enemy: Trump. ...
"Second, Clinton seemed to go out of her way to needle Trump as aggressively as she could without venturing into Marco-Rubio-small-hands territory. It was all part of a strategic effort to get under the real estate mogul's skin, which, as the Republican primary revealed, isn't all that hard to do. (Clinton even hinted in the speech at what she was doing — noting that Trump has 'thin skin.') An angry Trump, the Clinton team believes, is a Trump that makes mistakes and a Trump that is less than appealing to a general electorate.
"...What the speech also did is serve as a reminder that Clinton is best as a candidate when she is on the attack. Part of the reason she has struggled to put away Sanders is that she can't, really, go after the senator for fear of alienating his liberal supporters ahead of the general election fight to come. When Clinton is able to go full bore at someone — as she did with Trump on Thursday — she clearly relishes it."
Hillary Clinton...delivered her best version yet of an argument that we're going to hear more and more of. The essence of the argument is simple. You may not agree with everything she says or everything she's done or will do, but you can at least be sure that a Clinton presidency won't lead to some enormous unforeseen cataclysm. With Trump, there's no such guarantee.
"There’s no risk of people losing their lives if you blow up a golf course deal," she said. "But it doesn’t work like that in world affairs. Just like being interviewed on the same episode of 60 Minutes as Putin is not the same as actually dealing with Putin."
Bottom line: "The stakes in global statecraft are infinitely higher and more complex than in the world of luxury hotels."
What she's offering is an argument that acknowledges, implicitly, that there are tens of millions of right-of-center Americans who've never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. Clinton is pitching an argument aimed at those people — one designed to offer little ideological or policy content in hopes of appealing to 70 percent of the population rather than 51 percent.
It's essentially the argument that Business Insider's Josh Barro made early this week — Trump carries too much tail risk:
It's clear he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. So we can't be certain which of these things he would do. But we can be certain that he's capable of doing any or all of them. Letting ISIS run wild. Launching a nuclear attack. Starting a ground war. These are all distinct possibilities with Donald Trump in charge.
Trump calls for a huge risk premium because, while he probably wouldn't be a disastrous president, the low-probability disasters that he might cause would be immensely costly. Some of them involve nuclear weapons and global mass deaths. Pricing those risks in properly should push his share price comfortably below Clinton's, even if you think she is very bad.
In other words, ask yourself: What's the worst that could happen? Conservative-minded people aren't going to be thrilled with a Clinton presidency, but they've already lived through eight years of Bill Clinton and eight years of Barack Obama. The country is still standing. With Trump, by contrast, we really have no idea what we're going to get.
Running a country isn't gambling on real estate. If you make a big mistake, you can't just go to court and have the slate wiped clean. A casino bankruptcy hurts the bottom line of a few banks. A sovereign default of the United States — something Trump has floated — would destroy the global economy.
Some progressives fear that this kind of campaign means Clinton won't build a mandate for progressive policy if she wins the election.
The reality, however, is that the biggest objective determinant of how a Clinton administration governs is what happens in November's congressional elections. Clinton is aiming for a landslide, and if she can deliver one, [see below] it will set the stage for a lot of progressive policy — whether or not she talks about it on the campaign trail.
David Frum, writing in the Atlantic from the point of view of a center-right Republican dissident, says Clinton faces a "danger that neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon had to face" in 1964 or 1972 — the danger of a divided party that will tempt her to hew to the left to keep Bernie Sanders's supporters on board.
But the reality the 1964 election ought to carry is the lesson that this is fundamentally a false choice. Johnson tried as hard as possible to run an anodyne campaign focused on the idea that Barry Goldwater was an unacceptable outlier whom even lifelong Republicans should reject.
Now ask yourself: What happened in 1965? Well, not only did Johnson win in a landslide but Democrats found themselves possessing historic majorities in the House and Senate. And they proceeded to enact a burst of progressive legislation in 1965-'66 that stands alongside 1933-'34 and 1861-'62 as the biggest legislative leaps forward in American history.
Clinton doesn't have a realistic chance of securing large Democratic majorities. The House districts are sufficiently tilted that even securing a narrow one would be a very steep uphill fight, and any Democratic majority would depend heavily on relatively moderate members holding Republican-leaning districts. But it's still the case that even a small Democratic majority reliant on moderate legislators would pass more progressive legislation — hiking the minimum wage, raising taxes, expanding Medicaid funding, etc. — than a Republican one.
Given the way House districts have been drawn, Democrats' hopes of securing such a majority depends on either swinging Republicans over to their side or else demoralizing Republicans and getting them to stay home altogether. Either way, it suggests that the basic LBJ pattern remains as valid in 2016 as it was in 1964: