Here’s a nice article at The LA Times with lots of tweets and photos of Debbie and Carrie: Stars on social media react to death of Debbie Reynolds so soon after Carrie Fisher’s passing.‘

Today’s Political News

Bill Sher at Politico: No, Obama Probably Wouldn’t Have Beaten Trump. And it’s bad for the Democratic Party for him to say so.

As a liberal, it pains me to say the following: President Barack Obama believes he would have beaten Donald Trump, but he’s probably wrong.

Many Democrats have reason to resist accepting such a horrifying hypothetical. Obama’s favorable rating trumps Trump’s. Obama has a proven track record of winning Rust Belt white working-class votes, while also sparking record rates of African-American turnout.

But to lean on those arguments risks overlooking the boiling political, economic and cultural forces that bubbled up in reaction to eight years of Obama, and splattered red all over the electoral map.

At minimum, Obama’s own case for why he would have won—made in a podcast interview by his former aide David Axelrod—is weak. Asked “what happened” to his 2004 and 2008 calls to “overcome these differences” among the races once he became president, Obama responded, “A lot of people suggested that somehow, it really was a fantasy. What I would argue is, is that the culture actually did shift, that the majority does buy into the notion of a one America that is tolerant and diverse and open. … I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.”

The comments clearly got under Trump’s thin skin. “President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! – jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.” he predictably tweeted on Monday. Refusing to let go, he popped off again the following day, “President Obama campaigned hard (and personally) in the very important swing states, and lost. The voters wanted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

So who is right? Obama is only correct so long as you are talking about a majority of voters, who gave Hillary Clinton and her “Stronger Together” message a ringing endorsement. However, the Electoral College majority recoiled not only from her, but also from Obama’s implementation of his multicultural vision. Trump was able to flip six states Obama won in 2012, driving up white turnout while many of the minorities Clinton needed stayed home.

Read the rest at Politico.

Mediaite: HuffPost’s Sam Stein: Barack Obama Oversaw ‘The Destruction of the Democratic Party.’

Huffington Post senior politics editor Sam Stein argued on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday morning that President Barack Obama shoulders much of the blame for his party’s historic losses during his eight years in the White House.

Stein suggested that Democrats may be overanalyzing the 2016 election loss. “They ended up with 2.8 million more votes for their candidate. It was 80,000 votes in three states that really cost her,” he said.

“But then on the other hand, you look at the destruction of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama’s leadership and you have to wonder; what was the political — what were the electoral benefits that he gave to the party?” he argued.

“He leaves them in a much worse position,” Stein noted. “The states are decimated, they lost control of the House and Senate, the governorships are decimated.”

Too bad Obama got rid of Howard Dean and his fifty-state strategy shortly after Dean helped him take away enough votes from Hillary to win the 2008 nomination.

Matthew Gertz at Media Matters: Post-Mortem: How 2016 Broke Political Journalism.

After a presidential campaign season that seemed unprecedented in its length and ferocity, on Election Day 2016 there were two contenders vying to become the most powerful person in the world.

One was a conventional politician who had spent decades in public service. Her positions, philosophy, and actions were well within the norm for an American presidential candidate.

The other was a racist misogynist who ran a campaign based on hatred and vitriol and was described by leading conservatives as a proto-fascist whose rise was “perilous to the republic.” He openly undermined press freedoms, threatened the nation’s decades-long alliances, lifted up white nationalist elements to new prominence, lied constantly and brazenly, mocked the disability of a reporter, attacked a Gold Star family, was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women and was accused of doing so by several, showed a frightening lack of familiarity with public policy, promised to imprison his opponent, and drew support from Russian intelligence services. He represented a fundamental break with virtually every norm in American public life.

The press plays an essential agenda-setting role in American politics. Every day of the campaign, news executives, editors, TV newscasters and bookers, reporters, and pundits made thousands of independent decisions which, collectively, determined both the stories included in the nation’s papers, websites, and broadcasts, and how those stories were covered. Those journalists could, through the volume and tone of coverage, turn a story into a major scandal for a politician, treat it as a witch hunt against that politician, or let it languish and be forgotten as new stories replace it in the public consciousness. Over and over during the 2016 campaign, the political press chose wrong.

The campaign broke political journalism. Despite the vast differences between the two candidates, the message media consumers heard from journalists was that to an equal extent, both candidates were flawed.

In fact, according to Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, which reviewed an analysis of news reports in major newspapers and cable and broadcast networks from January 1, 2015, through November 7, 2016, the conventional candidate actually received a higher proportion of negative coverage over the course of the campaign.

The study also reveals that during the general election, “on topics relating to the candidates’ fitness for office, Clinton and Trump’s coverage was virtually identical in terms of its negative tone” — 87 percent negative for both. “Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of magnitude as those surrounding Trump?” asks the study’s author, Professor Thomas Patterson. “It’s a question that political reporters made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign.”

Read the rest at Media Matters.

Reporters who weren’t white and male had their own problems during the long 2016 campaign. Here’s Sabrina Saddiqui on her experiences: Reporting while Muslim: how I covered the US presidential election. I hope you’ll read the whole thing, but here are a couple of excerpts:

“We should exterminate them.”

The words rolled off the voter’s tongue as though he was merely discussing a pest invasion in his home. He was talking about Muslims.

I froze as I became suddenly aware of my own Muslim identity, my long hair just barely covering my necklace that bears the name of Allah in Arabic scripture.

The conversation had begun just as any interaction with a voter does. The man had come to see Rand Paul speak at a luncheon in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and I approached him to gauge his thoughts on the Kentucky senator’s candidacy.

It was when the topic turned to national security, which he listed as his top priority, that he expressed his desire to purge Muslims from the United States.

When you say exterminate, do you mean we should kill Muslims living in America? I followed up, masking my incredulity as I’ve been trained to do as a journalist.

Yes, he confirmed. If they don’t leave, we start killing them.

A “somewhat humorous” incident in New Hampshire:

There were many more chilling conversations with those who, like the man in South Carolina, wished aloud for violence and concentration camps.

Others were somewhat humorous, like the sweet old lady who pulled me aside at a New Hampshire diner. She warned me that Isis was looking for brides and was genuinely concerned I might be kidnapped. Tell your editors to get you some security, she lectured.

The LA Review of books has an interesting essay on the relevance of Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the 2016 campaign. An excerpt:

Given the presence of Don Quixote in US culture from its beginnings to the present — both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were admirers, and kept prized copies of Cervantes’s novel — you probably know the basics even if you haven’t read the book. Quixote is a middling man leading a mundane life, from which he escapes by immersing himself in antiquated chivalric romance fiction, stories about knights rescuing princesses from giants and dragons. He becomes so enmeshed in these fictions that he believes his uninteresting reality is actually a romance plot, such that peasant women are princesses, donkeys are glistening white steeds, criminals are persecuted heroes, and windmills are fearsome giants.

In other words, because of the story Quixote tells himself about the significance of his own life, he witnesses the same events as everyone else, but comes away with a completely different set of facts. He reasons soundly from what he sees, but his perception is radically different from how everyone else perceives.

When, for example, a local man named Carrasco decides to dress up like a knight and challenge Quixote as part of plot to subdue him, Quixote gives him a severe beating, leaving Carrasco wondering whether he’s as mad as Quixote for attempting the trick. Indeed, as characters like Carrasco attempt to imitate the norms of chivalric romance, either to ridicule Quixote or to rein him in, this behavior only reinforces Quixote’s impression that he lives a romance plot.

This mismatch between Quixote’s perception and everyone else’s renders him something like delusional, but not quite. Those who witness his behavior regularly acknowledge his capacities for justice, rational thought, and reasoned speech. Thus, Quixote has a way of severing rationality from fact. He represents a failure of empiricism — an unreliability arising not from the absence of rationality, but from the stubborn complexity of perception.

This, I would argue, is precisely how the 2016 election went down. Due largely to Trump’s loose relationship with the truth, fact-checking held an outsized presence in the 2016 campaign season, reducing political discourse to arguments about whose facts were more factual. Meanwhile, our most trusted polls and poll aggregators were putting the chances of a Hillary Clinton victory at 70 percent or higher.

Much more at the link.

So . . . what stores are you following today?