Politico: Democratic ad makers think they’ve discovered Trump’s soft spot

It’s a reflection of a growing consensus among Democrats about what kind of hits on Trump are most likely to persuade swing voters — and which ones won’t. As in 2016, ad makers are focusing on Trump’s character. But unlike four years ago, they are no longer focusing on his character in isolation — rather they are pouring tens of millions of dollars into ads yoking his behavior to substantive policy issues surrounding the coronavirus, the economy and the civil unrest since the death of George Floyd. [...]

Until recently, it wasn’t entirely clear what, if anything, worked against Trump. From the moment he announced his presidential campaign five years ago, not even the most incendiary material seemed to cause significant damage. Not calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” not “blood coming out of her wherever,” not “grab them by the p---y” — all of which were featured by Democrats in character-based ads attacking Trump. [...]

“One thing we saw in polling a lot before the coronavirus outbreak is that people didn’t think he was a strong leader or a good leader, they complained about his Twitter,” said Nick Ahamed, analytics director at Priorities USA. “But they had a hard time connecting those character flaws they saw in him with their day-to-day experience.” [...]

“What we’ve learned form a lot of previous experience … is that quite honestly, people who work in politics can be bad prognosticators in terms of which ad will work,” said Patrick McHugh, Priorities’ executive director. “You see a lot of times the videos that go viral on Twitter … you test those ads, and more often than not they backlash … they can move voters toward Trump.”

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CNN: Cracks in the Trump-Europe relationship are turning into a chasm

EU officials insist that the decision was not political and based entirely on epidemiological evidence, in the hope this would pacify US President Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the bloc on several occasions.

However, others privately concede that had Brussels wanted to make the pill more palatable for an American audience, they could have added a sugar coating. "In the past, I can see that we might have not included China in order to keep the US happy," says an EU diplomat not authorized to speak on record about how the decision was made. [...]

In the past few years, Brussels has stuck to its guns on big, international matters as Trump tore everything up. Think of the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Nuclear deal, 5G, and you start to see a pattern of behavior in which the EU could be perceived to have sided with China over its oldest ally. Sure, it might be a ungenerous read of the situation, given the deep, established bond between Europe and the US, but in this context, any perceived friendliness to Beijing punches a very real bruise. [...]

One Brussels official who works on EU foreign policy but is not authorized to speak on the record said the shift away from Europe as a geopolitical priority began under former US president Barack Obama. [...]

However, a potential Biden victory would provide no quick fix for the transatlantic partnership. "The question is not really if you can get the relationship back to where it was, but if we can persuade the US to re-join the Western order," says the EU diplomat.

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French Press: American Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go

Today let’s dive into one of the toughest questions of our religious, cultural, and political lives. While we write and print millions of words about race in America, why is it still so hard to have a truly respectful, decent, and humble dialogue about perhaps the most complicated and contentious issue in American life? It’s a huge topic, but let’s start with what I believe is a true principle of human nature, a maxim called Miles’s law: Where you stand depends on where you sit. [...]

Yet millions of Americans read the accusation that America is beset with “systemic racism” and hear a simpler and more direct meaning of the term—you’re saying our systems (and by implication the people in them) are racist. But that’s completely contrary to their experience. They think, “How can it be that ‘the system is racist’ when I just left a corporate diversity training seminar, I work at an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, my son’s college professors are constantly telling him to ‘check his privilege,’ and no one I know is a bigot? It seems to me that the most powerful actors in ‘the system’ are saying the same things—don’t be racist.” [...]

For example, if you’re a conservative, you’re likely quite aware that the Obama Department of Justice decisively debunked the “hands-up, don’t-shoot” narrative of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. You’re less likely to remember that there was a second Ferguson report, one that found Ferguson’s police department was focused on raising revenue more than increasing public safety, and it used its poor, disproportionately black citizens as virtual ATMs, raising money through traffic stops, citations, and even arrest warrants. It painted a shocking picture of abuse of power.

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Social Europe: Rekindled north-south stereotypes are harmful for the European project

Alarmingly, north-south stereotypes have been rekindled in terms of how the pandemic has been handled by various European countries, resonating with the noxious discourse of austerity during the eurozone crisis. The dominant political rhetoric in the European north and the EU institutions has been one of moral tales contrasting the ‘frugal north’ with the ‘imprudent, reckless south’. [...]

In southern-European member states, the media have meanwhile been aflame with indignation and Euroscepticism is rapidly increasing among their 130 million citizens, fuelling populist narratives, for instance in Italy. Such anger stems not so much from the EU’s (expected) slow response—the usual cacophony, the lack of agreement, the limits to sanitary aid and the refusal to mutualise the debt and approve eurobonds—but the disdainful declarations on the part of several member-state leaders. [...]

Creditors or debtors, we all need each other to keep the European economy afloat in an increasingly competitive global context. There is no future based on destructive derision and disrespect. Humiliating southern citizens threatens the viability of the union, on top of the nationalistic tensions already generated by ‘Brexit’.

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Social Europe: Seven ‘surprising’ facts about the Italian economy

A country lives beyond its means if it imports significantly more goods and services than it exports over the long term. A country that exports as much as it imports is not however living beyond its means, as production and consumption are in line. Indeed, Italy has been recording export surpluses since 2012. Italy’s export surpluses are by no means only due to tourism, as the country exports more industrial goods than it imports. The Italian economy therefore consumes less than it produces—it lives below its means.

If the Italian economy as a whole has not been living beyond its means, the problem of debt must be confined to the public sector. This is indeed the case: Italy’s private-sector debt relative to gross domestic product is relatively low by the standards of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This also illustrates that high debt-to-GDP ratios are not a problem across all sectors of the Italian economy. [...]

Italy overtook the United Kingdom in 1969 and France in 1979 in per capita purchasing power. In 2000, Italy’s average standard of living was virtually equal to that of Germany (98.6 per cent of its GDP per head). But after the introduction of the euro in 1999, the country fell behind the UK (in 2002) and France (in 2005) once more. By 2019, Italian per capita income was more than 20 per cent below that of Germany. [...]

‘Structural reforms’ from the market-liberal playbook not only reduced inflation in the 1990s. They may also have contributed to reducing unemployment, as the rate in Italy was lower than in Germany and France when the financial crisis hit in 2008. But cheap labour also diminished incentives for Italian companies to make labour-saving investments, key to the productivity improvements which are the basis for long-term growth and rising incomes. Both austerity and market-liberal reforms have inhibited Italy’s productivity growth and, on balance, may have brought more macroeconomic damage than benefits.

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