Skip to main content

In a Leona Helmsley Moment, Trump Goes Afoul of Sasso's Analytic Device

To measure last night’s presidential debate, let’s grab the John Sasso Gauge from the political toolbox.

Sasso, a chief of staff to former Governor Michael Dukakis and a high-ranking field officer in two Democrat presidential campaigns, wrote a piece in The Boston Globe this past spring on how and why voters make a choice in the final election of a president.  It was headlined, “The values battle in the general election.”
“…deep and emotional judgments about candidates ultimately drive Americans’ choice of a president,” Sasso declared.

“The most salient variables,” he wrote, “are voter perceptions of three characteristics”:
One, “a candidate’s personal political strength,”

Two, “voters’ trust in the depth and sincerity of the candidate’s convictions,” and
Three, “most importantly, whether the voters think that the candidate ‘cares’ about people like them.”

There were several points in the debate where I thought Hillary Clinton was clearly better than Donald Trump in showing caring-ness for the average voter.  She was particularly effective on that score when speculating on Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns for public scrutiny.
“Maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is,” she told the 80 million or so persons watching the debate, “…maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be.  Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes,” at which point Trump interjected, “That makes me smart.”  (Immediately, I thought of the late Leona Helmsley's famous put-down of the working class: “We don’t pay taxes.  Only the little people pay taxes.”) Then Clinton expertly twisted the knife, “So, if he’s paid zero,” she said, “that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health.”

Soon after, when Trump excoriated “know-nothing politicians like Clinton and President Obama” for squandering trillions of taxpayer dollars, Clinton seized the moment to reinsert her blade.   “We have a country that needs new roads, new tunnels, new bridges, new airports, new schools, new hospitals,” said Trump.  “And we don’t have the money because it’s been squandered on so many of your (Clinton’s) ideas.”  Said Clinton, “And maybe because you haven’t paid any federal income tax for a lot of years.”

Trump tells America he’s smart not to pay taxes and implies the rest of us are chumps.
Four months ago in the Globe, Sasso predicted Clinton would win.  I’m sure that, watching the debate last night, he had no sudden qualms about his prognosticative powers.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Historical Significance Had Little Heft on the Scale of Progress in Booming Malden

The First Church in Malden, Congregational, a once-cherished emblem of the history of Malden, Massachusetts, was wiped out a few weeks ago for the sake of a new downtown development. The site of the church was contiguous to the Malden Government Center complex (city hall and police headquarters), which had been built in the mid-1970s in the middle of Pleasant Street in an attempt to create a pedestrian shopping mall from that point down to where Pleasant Street spills in to Main Street.   It turned out to be an ill-conceived and ridiculously hopeful project: no mall ever materialized.   For years, the people of Malden yearned to correct that colossal mistake by demolishing the Government Center and reopening the entire length of Pleasant Street to the smooth flow of vehicular traffic.   Enter the Jefferson Apartment Group of Virginia in 2015.   It proposed spending $100 million to demolish the Government Center; replace it with apartments, offices and hundreds of par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ethics Chief Gets Permanent Appointment; Case Overview Shows Agency's Vital Role

A week ago today, on Feb. 17, the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission announced the appointment of David A. Wilson as its executive director, where he’s responsible for administering and enforcing the state’s conflict of interest and financial disclosure laws. A graduate of Columbia University School of Law and Brandeis University in Waltham, Wilson is kind of a fixture of Massachusetts government, having been an attorney on the Ethics Commission staff for three decades.   For the past eight months, he’d been serving as the commission’s acting executive director.   He needs no warm-up for this big role. The commission is composed of five members, three appointed by the governor and one each appointed by the secretary of state and attorney general.   All of the current commissioners are attorneys, and three of them are retired judges: Barbara Dortch-Okara, Regina Quinlan and David Mills. (The non-judge lawyer-members are Thomas Sartory and Maria Krokidas. Wilson’s appoin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Boston Municipal Research Bureau 'Update' Has Me Thinking Thoughts of PILOTS

I always thought that hospitals and universities owned most of the tax-exempt land in the City of Boston.   Boy was I mistaken. The total area of Boston consists of 47.84 square miles.   Of that total, 49 percent, or 23.44 square miles is tax-exempt.   And of those 23.44 tax-exempt square miles, only 4.98 square miles are owned by institutions devoted to medicine and health care, higher education, cultural pursuits and worship (churches, synagogues, mosques), etc.   The rest is mainly owned by the government. I got this information from the latest (10-3-17) “Bureau Update” from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, an independent organization that’s been keeping tabs on Boston’s finances since 1932.   Thank you, BMRB. Here are some other things I gleaned: The state government owns 48.5% of all the tax-exempt land in the city. The city and federal governments own, respectively, 28.6%  and 1.6% of all the tax-exempt land. The total assessed value of al...
Post a Comment
Read more