Welcome to the third presidential debate! Could this get any worse? Given what Trump has been saying on the campaign trail, it’s hard to imagine this thing being anything but worse than the second one.

Trump’s new thing is claiming that the election is rigged. This is, of course, what losers say. It’s also what children say. And that about sums up Trump. The main thing I remember from the second debate is Trump complaining that the moderators were going easy on Clinton and giving her more time. It turned out that he actually spoke for more time. He also interrupted her 13 times compared to her interrupting him once. And he spoke over the moderators twice as much as she did.

Trump’s Whining

If you haven’t see Obama talking about Trump’s claim that there will be a rigged election, you should. It is very thoughtful — very Obama. But it has some good lines, especially, “You start whining before the games even over?!” And: “I’d advise Mr Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.”

Under normal circumstances, I would think the third presidential debate would be changed because of this. Certainly I am known to get over excited about things. And when people say things like Obama did about Trump, I am ashamed. And Obama isn’t the only one. Elizabeth Warren is openly mocking him. She even clucked at him! But I don’t see this having any effect on Trump.

Trump in the Third Presidential Debate

Trump will do in the third presidential debate what he did in the second one: play to his base of supporters. And that seems to be all that Trump is interested in at this point. That is what all this “rigged election” whining is about. It gives Trump a way to maintain his delusion that he is still a winner even after he loses the election. What’s amazing is that his supporters believe all this nonsense and don’t see it as the face-saving maneuver that it is.

Of course, it isn’t hard for Trump to make this argument, given that Republicans have been pushing this whole voter fraud nonsense for at least the last seven plus years. So perhaps these pathetic angry white men can be forgiven. Of course, they bought the lie with ease at the beginning. They’re big on buying lies.

Trump TV?! Trump Vlog!

For months I’d been assuming that all this would end in Trump TV. But an article by Brian Beutler made me rethink that, Donald Trump’s Media Conglomerate Already Exists. People like Ryan Lizza and Josh Marshall are pouring cold water on it. The problem isn’t just that the market is saturated. Starting up something that would compete with Fox News would be unbelievably expensive. Trump doesn’t have the money to go toe-to-toe with Rupert Murdoch.

I like what Marshall said, “If there’s a post-campaign Trump media vehicle it’s far more likely to be a bargain-basement but perhaps high traffic website on the model of Breitbart.” And such a sad ending to Donald Trump would be perfect. It would give me a small bit of evidence that there is a just God. Or at least one with a sense of humor!

I’m not looking forward to the third presidential debate. It will probably be interesting. But it won’t be edifying.

But stop back by throughout the day and during the debate itself for my gloomy thoughts.

Live Blog

From Charlie Pierce I learned that The Omaha World-Herald broke with an 84 year run by endorsing the Democrat, Hillary Clinton Is Prudent Pick for President. But the endorsement is lukewarm at best. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense, to be honest.

The endorsement talks about how people don’t trust Clinton. There’s the email scandal and Benghazi! and (inexplicably) her support for single-payer healthcare. And then they lay on the good ol’ third-way line. “If Secretary Clinton is elected, Americans will need her to be a uniting president, working from the center, and not advancing an agenda that will further alienate moderates and conservatives.” I despair for our nation!

That’s where they leave the endorsement. But how exactly is Clinton moving to the center going to help? One reason people don’t trust her is that they think she talks populist to the people, but when alone with the banks, she’s her real plutocratic self. So if Clinton governs the way The Omaha World-Herald wants her to, it will prove that the people saying she’s duplicitous were right.

Omaha World-Herald Does Care About Trust

And that just shows that this conservative newspaper isn’t at all concerned about Clinton being trustworthy. They know that Clinton is as trustworthy or more than any other politician. This is just a way for them to call for Clinton to do what all the conservatives and third’way pseudo-moderates call on Democrats to do: move right!

Of course, I’m very used to this kind of nonsense. What most bugs me is this idea that somehow Clinton could be a “uniting president.” Obama tried very hard (and for far too long) to be a uniting president. And all that happened was that the Republicans rejected it. If Obama moved to the right one step, they moved to the right two. And the new, more extreme, conservative position was duly disseminated to the Republican base.

We Democrats have spent the last 35 years trying to find common ground with the Republicans. And all that has happened is that the country has gotten more and more conservative. Wages have stagnated, even while corporate profits have steadily increased. More people than ever are jailed, most effectively having their lives ruined. Aid to the poor has been savagely cut.

Just More Third-Way Nonsense

Yet Hillary Clinton is supposed to work “from the center.” And who exactly is this supposed to make happy anyway? The one remaining moderate Republican who is on life-support in an unnamed hospital in the great Omaha area? Certainly the Trump base (AKA: the Republican base) isn’t interested in some kind of third-way, corporate-friendly policy. Unless she starts calling Mexicans rapists, I don’t see her winning over this group.

Right now, FiveThirtyEight estimates that she will beat Donald Trump and Gary Johnson combined. And remember: Johnson is taking as many votes from Clinton as he is from Trump. So where exactly does The Omaha World-Herald get this idea that the onus is on her to reach out to conservatives? Nowhere.

The truth is that the editors at The Omaha World-Herald are endorsing Clinton but they want the world to know that they expect her to be a Republican. Anything else will be her fault. Damn all the liberals who support her. The Omaha World-Herald’ editors must be mollified! It’s too embarrassing to support the nominee who is a perfect reflection of the party they’ve supported these last 84 years. But you can expect more editorials over the next few years where they complain about how Clinton has failed because she didn’t united the country. And what they will mean by that is: didn’t do what they wanted.

I happened upon an article from earlier this year by Helaine Olen, Buying Coffee Every Day Isn’t Why You’re in Debt. It’s actually from her 2013 book, Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry. And it gives me an opportunity to discuss this issue, which I think is very important. I am sick to death of this idea that if the poor were only thrifty (No latte for you!) all their problems would be solved.

It’s hard enough being poor. But most places outside this country where you run into poor people, you notice something: they don’t reek of shame. But here in the United States they do. (We do, since I’ve been a fellow sufferer a couple of times.) Being poor is mostly a matter of bad luck. But here it is portrayed as justice. “If only the poor acted more like the rich!” In fact, this is exactly the argument made by prominent rich people like David Brooks and Charles Murray. But note: neither of them are racists. It’s just that their Great Brains lead them inextricably to the racist conclusions they draw.

The Latte Lie

You probably know the old saying, “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.” Well, no one much uses it anymore because it is so obviously false. But Olen noted that today, you will hear the same advice. She focused on the Starbucks latte. Many personal finance gurus explain that you aren’t poor because you’re out of work or making minimum wage. No: you are poor because you splurge on Starbucks lattes! And they justify it with highly distorted mathematics:

Note the many problems here. The $5 per day is actually not $2,000, but $1,825. That matters a lot when you are compounding interest. And it isn’t just the latte but also a biscotti. Otherwise, you couldn’t make it to $5. Who these people are who have lattes every single day of their lives I can’t say. But then he adds that this is all going to be invested and make 11 percent a year! Amazing.

Olen reported on a more reasonable analysis that assumed $3 per latte and took into account things like taxes and inflation. The result? After 30 years of Starbucks deprivation, $50,000 would be saved. Time to retire in Grand Cayman, am I right?!

Shame the Poor!

The truth is that the power elite love this kind of lie. It works on two levels. First, it gives them an excuse to not pay workers more. After all: just cut out those lattes and you’ll retire a millionaire! Second, it gives them an excuse to not pay workers more. Because the reason they are rich is because they are frugal. Or they are when it comes to paying workers. When it comes to little things like a daily latte to make life bearable, they don’t deprive themselves. After all: they know that this business about the latte is just a useful lie.

The whole thing reminds me of Randy Newman’s “God’s Song.” In it, all the religious people of the world get together and they ask God, “If you will not take care of us, won’t you please, please let us be?” And that’s the thing here. The rich are lucky to be so and the poor are unlucky to be so. (If you want to think of this in terms of genes, be my guest; but that’s not what I mean.) As a result, the rich should count their blessings. And they shouldn’t come up with stupid theories like the latte lie to make the lives of the poor harder than they already are.

The other day, I was reading something where Nate Silver wrote (roughly), “Clinton has ‘only’ an 80 percent chance of winning the presidency.” His point with the scare quotes was that 80 percent is huge. Still, most people find the idea that Donald Trump has a 20 percent chance of winning the presidency absurd. After all, if you look at the polls, Clinton is winning everywhere. And there are only 24 days until the election. Surely, Clinton has more like a 95 percent chance of winning. Right? Wrong.

There are two major reasons why Donald Trump will never manage to get down even to a 10 percent chance of winning. Let’s start with the more obvious one: the polls could be wrong.

Polling is a science. And the people who do it professionally are really good. If you want to know how many adults support Clinton vs Trump, they can tell with with a high degree of accuracy. But no one cares how many adults support Clinton. We care about how many registered voters will actually go to the polls and vote for her. And figuring that out is really hard. As Sasha Issenberg explained of one pollster regarding the 2008 election:

How Much Are Polls Off?

Is it likely that the polls are off by that much? No. But with fundamental unknowns about who will actually vote, we have to say that Trump has some chance.

The bigger reason that Trump will always have what seems like a bigger chance than seems reasonable is just that something might happen. The Trump campaign has pushed hard on Clinton’s recent illness. If she fainted on stage a week before the election, it could propel Trump into the presidency. Stranger things have happened.

Random Acts of Voting

Matt Yglesias wrote a very interesting article yesterday, This Is the Best Book to Help You Understand the Wild 2016 Campaign. The book in question is Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels. And what it shows is just how dependent voting patterns are to totally unrelated things.

An old example of this is how shark attacks affected the 1916 presidential election in a New Jersey coastal community. But a new example is how NFL games affect voting. So if the Pittsburgh Steelers win the Sunday before the election, it might give Clinton an extra percentage point of the vote in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, if they lose, it will likely help Trump.

And you know: that is crazy.

Things Are as Good as They Could Be

But that is the nature of elections. I believe in democracy, but only because I don’t know of any system that is even as good, much less better. What’s important to know is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen. And that is terrifying. Donald Trump even having a one percent chance of becoming president is terrifying.

What’s important to remember is that Hillary Clinton is doing as well in this election as could possibly be expected. She almost certainly will be our next president. But there are so many things that could happen that we just can’t say. I’ll be worrying until the votes are counted.