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The moment we’ve been preparing for all year finally arrived this week: Donald J. Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee for President of The United States. With the help of the Washington Post’s ace political reporter Bob Costa, we break down the whole week, from the family member speeches, Ted Cruz’s speech, Trump’s own speech (and Peter Robinson’s brush with the Trump campaign), as well as some thoughts on the changes going on this week at Fox News. We are your voice.
Music from this week’s podcast:
Imperial Death March (Vader theme) by John Williams and the London Philharmonic Orchestra
The brand new opening sequence for the Ricochet Podcast was composed and produced by James Lileks.
Yes, you should absolutely subscribe to this podcast. It helps!
Cleveland’s own, EJHill.
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Bearer or barer?
Good points all around.
2016: We’ll See
Loved James’ rant toward the end. Go, James!!
James. Your air conditioner cools the air, and dehumidifies. If you turn it off in the afternoon, what happens is the entire contents of the conditioned space begin to heat up (because the air conditioner is off), including the moisture in the air in the space (which is not being removed because the air conditioner is off).
This is called a latent heat load, which the air conditioner (provided it’s working) then has to labor to remove before returning the conditioned space to wherever you have set the thermostat. Ditch the switch.
Excellent advice.
Nixon beat Jerry Voorhis in the California 12th in 1946. Helen Douglas and the color pink he beat in the 1950 Senate race. “Ambulatory psychotic” is a keeper. Right next to my medical brother’s ” ‘Crazy’ is problematic. Mostly it’s a question of functioning.”
I note that no one had any comments on their guest, Robert Costas. For those that don’t know, before he worked for the Washington Post, he was the head Washington correspondent for National Review.
I met Bob on my first National Review cruise and a few subsequent ones before he moved to the Post. At one cruise, he invited members of his family, including his (fraternal, not identical) twin brother. I sat next to his brother at one of the dinners, and like Bob, he’s very likable. Bob’s father, who’s a successful high level executive at a Fortune 500 company, also stopped by the table
Bob managed to move over from National Review to the Washington Post at a young age.
But here’s what I notice about Bob after meeting him, and listening to him on podcasts. He does his very best not to be controversial. Note that when Rob Long made the observation that the convention had been shabbily run that Bob did not specifically address that.
One reason could be that he doesn’t want to lose his inside access to Trump’s organization.
Bob is still a young man, and may choose to change his style on podcasts. But presently, he’s very vanilla. Recently, I heard someone say that vanilla is everyone’s second favorite flavor, which fits Bob.
That means that if he continues his present style, he’ll be the guy who’s very competent, but who won’t take risks with his career. In other words, he’ll mostly be forgettable, but he’ll never lack for a job. Contrast that with someone like Robert Novak, who did take a few risks with his career, and was himself interesting but not likable.
Probably, if I hadn’t have said anything, no one would have commented on him on this thread. I wouldn’t have either, if I hadn’t of met him, his brother and his father, and had been taking a mild interest in his doings.
Peter asked if Trump’s nomination represents a sea change in American politics. It shouldn’t be considered in isolation. When Obama was elected a President, many said it was a fluke — just Americans wanting to elect a black president, regardless of political ideals. Then Obama was reelected. And now we have Trump versus Clinton. Three flukes in a row? Not likely.
In politics, as in the stock market, perception becomes reality. We can all disagree on which factions within or beyond the political parties stand to gain or lose by Trump’s nomination. But what’s clear is that many — including Trump — see this time as an opportunity for dissolving old commitments, standards, and strategies to form new ones. So they will. Whether or not this is indeed an ideal situation for those groups, they will be driven by those hopes and fears to act as they would not have under different circumstances.
Inspired closing music choice. The Commission on Presidential Debates needs to have that ready as the opener to all three.
Tell me about it. That’s why I don’t turn it off, but let it set a constant temp that’s a bit higher so I can back it off in the evening. The switch was only supposed to shut it off for 15 minutes every hour or so, but something fried the capacitor – either coming on after a power outage, or waking up when the switch said GO. I finally got it fixed by a dour Russian, and even though it’s been running for five hours Wife wonders why the house isn’t meat-locker cold. I explained that the entire house had been heated to 88 degrees, and it’s going to take a while.
So, sorry for the distractions during the podcast. It was a highly annoying and uncomfortable day.
He’s a journalist working for a (purportedly) non-ideological (cough) newspaper, so I understand and respect his desire to stick to the facts. I think it’s wise, and will give him a reputation for fairness. And despite my passive-aggressive asides in the first sentence, kudos to the Post for hiring someone other papers might have regarded as obviously ideological, given his previous employer.
Thanks! It would have been better and tighter if I’d more than 5 1/2 hours of sleep.
I stand thoroughly corrected. Thanks!
Very well put.
As others commented, James Lileks rant starting at around 56 minutes is perfect. Also, Peter Robinson’s point about Trump’s non-disclosure agreements seems to me to illustrate a larger issue. You can’t be a casual, conditional ally of Trump. You have to go all in. Now I’m hearing that Trump wants to raise money to make sure Cruz and Kasich won’t get re-elected (good luck with stopping Cruz in Texas, Don).
Thank you, and Ted Cruz, for reassuring me that I’m not crazy.
Which just proves the lie to the whole “Cruz should have just not attended” claptrap. Cruz chose to walk into the lion’s den and give a general call to principles, encourage people to vote Republican generally, but avoid a personal endorsement. He took the heat in what was clearly a setup to try and embarrass him. Kasich decided to show his protest through silence. He avoided the siren calls, while making sure his reasons were leaked to the press. Both are now being targeted equally for purging. Silence now makes one just as complicit as speaking one’s principles. It’s apparent that I’m going to be repeating this old Stalinist axiom quite a bit during this election cycle: “Love of the Soviet Union does not tolerate the slightest reservation.”
I haven’t listened to the entire episode yet, but I think you all have the wrong end of the stick, so to speak. The broad themes that emerged each night from the convention were – the importance of family, the importance of hard work, the importance of always making an effort to change things, and the importance of recognizing when things need to be changed. Those are universal themes, meant to speak to a large audience. Mr. Trump’s speech, while overly long, did a good job of unifying those themes and acknowledging government’s role in keeping us safe and getting out of the way of our prosperity.
This convention was not for the pundits or the intellectual class, it was designed to speak to middle class America and flyover country. Given the number of people who watched Thursday night’s speech, I’d say he has a lot of people listening. How can that be anything but good? What I’ve learned over the course of this election season is that the conservative movement is far too small to work on a national level. It works best at the local and state levels where putting the principles at work lead to measurable improvement. See Wisconsin and Indiana.
Now, I return to the podcast.
Splendid installment, fellas! Enjoyed hearing Bob Costa’s ground-level observations and really enjoyed each of your contributions. I listen weekly but liked this one especially.
Nice to hear Rob say he prefers Clinton to Trump and be honest about it. I don’t hold it against him, and I applaud his honest.
Can we have James offer more to the discussions than just long, elaborate segues into hawking mattresses and recruiting websites? He has a lot to offer. Let’s not reduce him to this.
I’m 46; my dad is 91. He owned an industrial-type business employing about 20 people. On his office wall for as long as I can remember he had a sign that read, “Sexual harassment will not be reported. However, it will be graded.” Thing was, he didn’t really mean it. He just thought it was funny. My mother’s office was upstairs in the same building; she was a tenant and ran her unrelated business.
In contrast, if even half of the stories about Roger Ailes and his quid pro quos are true, the man is/was a pig no matter the era.
I think James does fine, both as a hawker of mattresses (I bought one) and as a commenter. His comments on Paris’s modern architecture versus the old were pretty good.
Put off listening to this podcast as I’m rapidly losing interest in Ricochet in general.
First Ricochet podcast I slid left on was Need To Know.
Then Three Martini Lunch departed my phone.
So here’s the Flagship podcast and I get, what, a former NR/now Washington Post reporter who’s covered presidential politics by his own admission for precisely one administration — Obama — and added zero content.
I got Rob Long throwing in for the felonious Hillary Clinton and actually believing (talk about delusional fantasy) that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will stand in opposition to her, though both have folded meekly after fully funding an unstoppable (to cite McConnell) Obama.
Peter revealed the basic weakness of the Roman Catholic church — the unbiblical concept that a single man is authorized to speak for God and everyone is obligated to follow, inadvertently summing up why the United States was founded by Reformed Presbyterians.
James, amazingly, has A/C problems after giving control to Big Brother in a state that won’t generate enough electricity for its citizens for fear of offending Gaia.
My time is worth more than this.
But with Clinton, they will really do it this time. Just because they did not do it for 8 years under Obama, that is not the future. There is going to be a change. Really. Smart people have said so.
I wonder why they had to be reformed.
Presbyterians were from the Reformation, when Christians realized after finally reading the Bible for themselves (instead of through the Romanist filter/interpretation and Papal edicts) that Roman Catholicism was in grave error.
They “reformed” because they realized they were in error. A part of that fallout was the founding of our nation based on a Presbyterian form of self governance instead of the top-down tyranny common to this day in Banana Republics the world over. It’s a small step from kissing the ring of the Pope to bowing to powerful central government.
There’s a reason Obama is importing literally millions from failed Catholic countries (and failed Muslim countries, for that matter): they already know how to bow to tryants and make excellent Democrats, fully dependent on the government.
@jameslileks seemed perplexed at the prospect of electing Trump as “Democrat heavy” when we have long known “Democrat light” fails.
The problem has been that previous moderate candidates have also campaigned moderately. That is a recipe for failure. A moderate candidate has to campaign immoderately. Witness Chris Christie’s gubernatorial campaign.
Due to ethnopolitics and other peer pressure, the default position of the majority is to vote Democratic. If one campaigns as 90% of a Democrat, that 10% difference is normally not going to be enough to overcome the peer pressure. The candidate has to make that 10% difference critical. That requires aggressive campaigning, likely ad hominem. Trump potentially can do that.
Here’s a thought for the next podcast:
Would Donald Trump still have won the nomination if he had not gone with the “Lyen Ted” and “Little Marco” shtick?
But did the original Presbyterians of the Reformation fall into error and subsequently need to be straightened out by the Reformed Presbyterians?
Lileks’ mug sets the new Ricochet standard for incredulity.