In one sign of the organizational gap between the two campaigns, the Clinton campaign says it has put in place 50 state directors who will stay through the election -- while Trump struggles to stand up a much more limited campaign infrastructure.

One reason Trump may be finding the general election season tougher is that -- unlike Clinton -- he doesn't have a roster of supporters with the political stature to seize the media oxygen. In the Trump campaign, the candidate is the star.

But on the Democratic side, Clinton has powerful allies. Obama grabbed at a chance to excoriate Trump over his response to the Orlando terror attack, portraying him as un-American and upbraiding him for "loose talk and sloppiness."

Clinton's own subsequent critique of Trump's hawkish reaction to the gun rampage at an LGBT nightclub was clearly coordinated with the White House. Biden followed up in a speech saying Trump would lead America in the world with the "insecurity of a bully."

In Trump, we’ve got a xenophobic, impulsive, sexist, racist, unqualified con man with a soft spot for fascism. At best, his election would give future historians a definitive consensus moment to cite as the beginning of the end of the great American Republic (Napoleon in Russia; the Visigoths sack Rome). At worst, a President Trump might just kill us all by jamming that red button with his very small fingers after Vladimir Putin hurts his feelings on Twitter.

And in Clinton? We’ve got a candidate that some of us just don’t like very much.

Yeah, exactly. There’s only one choice in this election, and that’s Hillary Clinton for president.

This is the first time the editors of Philadelphia magazine have endorsed a presidential candidate. We’ve weighed in before on mayors, but the White House is out of our coverage area. Not this time, though. Not with the Democratic National Convention coming to town, and not with Donald Trump on the ballot.

Hillary Clinton beamed with pride on Monday as she walked alongside daughter Chelsea who was leaving with the newest member of the political family.

Chelsea and her husband Marc Mezvinsky welcomed Aidan Clinton Mezvinsky to the family on Saturday.

The Republican, Donald Trump, proved himself an empty suit with a loud mouth, a set of dangerously shallow ideas, and an ego enormous enough to mistake them for wisdom. Hillary Clinton delivered a very different sort of speech. She was measured and thoughtful, unifying in places and aggressive in others, scrupulous about getting the analysis and the action right. You might call it a “presidential” address.
...
More recently, in her speech in Cleveland on June 13, the day after the Orlando shootings, Clinton first noted that not all the facts were yet known about the shooter, Omar Mateen (was he inspired by ISIS or a troubled, violent homophobe who used jihadist social media as an excuse to vent his self-hatred?), and she invoked the fundamental unity and tolerance of American society. Then she laid out her plan for defeating ISIS. It involved “ramping up the air campaign” in Syria and Iraq, “accelerating support” for Arab and Kurdish soldiers on the ground, pressing ahead with the diplomatic efforts to settle sectarian political divisions, and “pushing our partners in the region to do even more,” not least pressuring the Saudis, Qataris, and Kuwaitis to stop funding extremist organizations. At home, she called for an “intelligence surge,” upping the budgets of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, improving their coordination on a local and federal level, working with Silicon Valley to track and analyze jihadist recruiters on social media networks, and working with responsible leaders in Muslim neighborhoods (rather than alienating them by suggesting—as Trump did, in his speech on the same day—that all American Muslims are somehow complicit in the actions of extremists).
...
Which leads to a larger point—that, in their basic policies and outlook on the world, the differences between Obama and Clinton are relatively minor. Even Mark Landler, whose book chronicles their competing views on military power, acknowledges in his first chapter that, during her time as secretary of state, she and Obama “agreed more than they disagreed. Both preferred diplomacy to brute force. Both shunned the unilateralism of the Bush years. Both are lawyers committed to preserving the rules-based order that the United States put in place after 1945.” Their disputes, he writes, stemmed mainly from their “very different instincts for how to save” this post-WWII order as it has fractured in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Their common ground is highlighted by their common, stark contrast with Donald Trump. The “rules-based order” that Clinton and Obama both cherish holds no interest for Trump; nor does he seem to know anything about its history, its institutions, or its value to American security.

In 2012, national polls in October suggested the presidential race was a virtual tie. The Real Clear Politics polling average gave Barack Obama a slight 0.7 point lead over Mitt Romney, but he actually won by almost 4 points. Of the final 11 national polls released in 2012, as reported on Real Clear Politics, 7 were a tie or had Romney ahead, while only 4 had Obama ahead.

Why were so many of the polls wrong? In part, because they failed to capture how minorities would vote. Unfortunately, some pollsters may be making the same mistakes in 2016 — and thereby underestimating Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls.

In 2012, many polls underestimated how many minorities would vote and how many would vote for Obama. For example, a Politico poll released the morning of Election Day said the race was tied at 47 percent each for Obama and Romney. The poll said that 62 percent of Latinos supported Obama, while the exit polls reported 71 percent, and Latino Decisions reported 75 percent. Among the “another race” category, which is mostly comprised of Asian Americans, Politico reported that 47 percent supported Obama, while the exit polls reported 73 percent, and an Asian American Decisions exit poll reported 72 percent.

One of President Obama's economic advisers will join Hillary Clinton's campaign, in another sign of close coordination between the White House and the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Jacob Leibenluft, deputy director of the National Economic Council, will become a senior policy adviser as Clinton prepares to fill out her economic agenda for the general election.

On Tuesday she plans to deliver a speech in Columbus, Ohio, that will contrast her proposals to lift middle-class incomes with Donald Trump's business record, which she will argue is characterized by self-interest at the expense of others.

Leibenluft has served on Obama's economic team from the beginning of the president's first term. Among his areas of focus have been policies on job training, apprenticeships and the minimum wage.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign will maintain staff in all 50 states during the general election with an eye toward overwhelming Republicans in the fall and rebuilding the Democratic Party’s infrastructure thereafter.

The strategy, described to The Huffington Post by Clinton campaign aides, is a continuation of the Ramp Up Grassroots Organizing program that the campaign applied to the Democratic primary. But unlike that approach — which had the immediate objective of competing with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in each state contest — the current one carries risk.

Many states in which Clinton will be employing staff and spending resources will almost assuredly vote against her anyway. She could end up wasting money that is needed to win swing states. But her staffers say the investment is well worth it.
...
Clinton has a different mindset on these matters than the man she’s hoping to succeed. It is, in some respects, an extension of her lengthy history in the party, from her time in state government (as first lady of Arkansas) to her role at the White House and her tenure in the Senate. Aides say she recognizes how much thinner the Democratic bench has become over the last seven years — having seen longtime allies lose their seats — and wants the trend reversed.

A single chart from a study at Harvard reveals the depth and degree of the media’s bias against Hillary Clinton and promotion of Donald Trump.

A study by Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, at Harvard University, showed that while Donald Trump received nearly universally positive coverage in the year leading up to the primaries, media coverage of Hillary Clinton was more negative than that of any other candidate.

Here is a chart that every mainstream journalist should answer for:

On 19 July 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton stood behind a wooden podium outside Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. In a trembling voice that eventually steadied, she demanded that women have “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States”.

Stanton read from the Declaration of Sentiments, now remembered as the foundational women’s rights document. Echoing the Declaration of Independence, the document stated: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

More than a century and a half after the first women’s rights convention was held, Hillary Clinton walked on to the stage at a Brooklyn warehouse, and, hands clasped at her heart, shattered a 240-year-old glass ceiling. Draping herself in the mantle of the women’s rights movement, Clinton credited the work of Stanton and the suffragists for starting the fight that made possible her historic ascent to presumptive nominee of the Democratic party.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” Clinton told the crowd assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, many of them women and girls wiping tears from their eyes. “It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls.”