| The Tuesday after Labor Day is the real New Year's Day. School begins, football is about to begin, the pumpkin spice will flow, the season is changing before our eyes. . . I can hear all the trees above my lawn starting to chuckle at how much raking I'm going to have to do in the coming months. A Genuinely Shocking Poll, One That Might Shift the Campaign Narrative If you're a Donald Trump fan, this should have you dancing: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton start the race to November 8 on essentially even ground, with Trump edging Clinton by a scant two points among likely voters, and the contest sparking sharp divisions along demographic lines in a new CNN/ORC Poll. Trump tops Clinton 45% to 43% in the new survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7% among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party's Jill Stein at just 2%. CNN's poll at the end of July had Clinton up, 45 percent to 37 percent. So this result runs counter to the easiest explanation, that she's had a rough couple of days because of the FBI report revelations. She's actually holding stable or only losing a little ground; Trump is jumping ahead. His hitting 45 percent in a four-way race here is really surprising and significant; in most previous polling he struggled to hit 40 percent. Maybe being reminded of Clinton's relentlessly dishonest and reckless ways of doing business is bringing skeptics on board with the GOP nominee. But wait, there's this weirdness, too, in the latest Washington Post poll that surveyed all 50 states separately: The Texas results, which are based on a sample of more than 5,000 people, show a dead heat, with Clinton ahead by one percentage point. Eh, no other poll has shown Clinton ahead in Texas. Also note that time is running out for the third-party candidates: Neither major third party candidate appears to be making the gains necessary to reach the 15% threshold set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, with just three weeks to go before the first debate on September 26. Johnson has hit 12 a few times, but is otherwise in the high single digits. It's Totally Not a Quid Pro Quo, Take the Clintons' Word for It! Oh, look, another case where one Clinton was paid a lot of money and the other Clinton offered valuable invitations a short time later, and everyone involved insists there was no quid pro quo: Nine months later, Laureate signed Bill Clinton to a lucrative deal as a consultant and "honorary chancellor," paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as Hillary Clinton launched her campaign for president. There is no evidence that Laureate received special favors from the State Department in direct exchange for hiring Bill Clinton, but the Baltimore-based company had much to gain from an association with a globally connected ex-president and, indirectly, the United States' chief diplomat. Being included at the 2009 [State Department-organized] dinner, shoulder to shoulder with leaders from internationally renowned universities for a discussion about the role of higher education in global diplomacy, provided an added level of credibility for the business as it pursued an aggressive expansion strategy overseas, occasionally tangling with foreign regulators. "A lot of these private-education guys, they're looking to get into events like this one," said Sam Pitroda, a higher-education expert who was representing a policy commission from India at the State Department dinner. "The discussion itself is irrelevant. . . . It gets you very high-level contacts, and it gets you to the right people." How many hours per year do you think Bill Clinton put in for his roughly $3 million annual salary? He's going to make those million-dollar-a-year special teams players look inexpensive by comparison. When you're a Clinton, people just happen to give you extremely lucrative jobs with very little time commitment, like Chelsea Clinton's $600,000-per-year part-time gig at NBC News. Chelsea assures us that her past workplaces were "incredibly, fiercely meritocratic." Sometimes in past interviews, the interviewer inadvertently expresses surprise at the seemingly high-level jobs Chelsea Clinton gets handed: So you currently work for NBC and you're studying for a PhD. Well, thankfully, I'm no longer studying. I'm slogging away on my dissertation. You're finishing your dissertation, and you're a provost at NYU? Well, I was never the provost. The provost is the head academic — Assistant provost? So NYU, like most universities —this is just for your own edification, I didn't know this either until I took a job at NYU — I took a job at NYU to fund my doctoral studies, which started there. But ultimately, the person that I really wanted to work most with was at Oxford, so I transferred back to Oxford. But in NYU, like most universities, the provost oversees all academic affairs, so everything relating to what classes get taught, and ensuring quality control there, to student life. [Editors' note: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times, Chelsea Clinton was "assistant vice provost for the Global Network University at NYU."] Chelsea took that "Assistant Vice Provost" position in 2010, at age 30. Ted Cruz said it best: "Damn, it's good to be a Clinton," depicting Clinton staffers destroying office equipment. Hey, what are the odds of that, right? Phyllis Schlafly, R.I.P. Sad news. Yesterday afternoon, Eunie Smith of the Eagle Forum announced the passing of Phyllis Schlafly: Today, Phyllis Schlafly has gone home to be with her Lord after a long illness. America has lost a great stateswoman, and we at Eagle Forum and among the conservative movement have lost a beloved friend and mentor, who taught and inspired so many to fight the good fight in defense of American values. I have personally lost a dear friend of over forty years. Known as the "sweetheart of the silent majority," and the matriarch of the conservative movement, Phyllis Schlafly has been a visionary, a unifier, and a voice of conscience for more than six decades. Phyllis has been credited with doing the impossible, when she and the army of grassroots volunteers she led and trained defeated the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, which had passed both houses of Congress and seemed destined for certain ratification among the states. Also previously thought impossible, Phyllis not only brought together people of various faiths that historically worked separately, she brought these people of faith into the political process like never before, creating a crucial voting block of values voters. Following the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, many of the volunteers Phyllis trained became leaders in the organization that was named Eagle Forum. The name was inspired by Psalm 40:31, an encouragement to the battle weary that those who wait upon the Lord will "mount up with wings like eagles. Schlafly joined us on one of the National Review cruises a few years ago; I moderated a panel with her and she was as gracious as could be, mind still as sharp as a knife. Of course, in the past year or so, she hadn't seen eye-to-eye with National Review, enthusiastically jumping on the Donald Trump bandwagon. Back in January, Ed Martin, the president of Schlafly's Eagle Forum, predicted that "National Review will be defunct in the next year or so." See you in five months, Ed. Schlafly's idea of conservatism could move in unusual directions. She contended that Major League Baseball was being ruined by foreign players: More than a quarter of Major League Baseball players today are foreign-born, with whom our youth are less likely to identify. Some of these players cannot speak English, and they did not rise through the ranks of Little League. These foreign-born players enter on visas and take positions that should have gone to American players . . . Perhaps baseball owners think that foreign players are cheaper and easier to control. Er, cheaper? Has she looked at those multi-million dollar salaries that both native-born and foreign-born players are getting? In the arguments about whether the GOP should push for a smaller government or a big government that sought to enact policies of the Right, she clearly preferred the latter, urging Congress to hold hearings on fantasy football. She remained a fierce critic of legal gambling. Still, her instincts weren't always wrong; she pointed out the uncomfortable truth that American universities were starting to use Chinese foreign exchange students as a cash cow — with little thought about whether the new focus was actually helping the mission of educating Americans: While an American kid might drive a beat-up Toyota handed down from an older member of the family, Chinese students seem to have no problem affording a new Audi, BMW, or Lexus. In the Boston area, which has 44,000 foreign students attending dozens of colleges, the 12,000 Chinese students are often seen driving Maseratis, Lamborghinis, and Range Rovers. At Michigan State in East Lansing, where 4,400 Chinese students are enrolled, Chinese students accounted for 10 to 20 percent of a luxury car dealer's entire sales. Chinese students provided 8 percent of the sales of a luxury car dealership near the University of Oregon at Eugene, and 5 percent of sales by a luxury dealer near the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In case you're thinking that Chinese students must be some of "the best and the brightest" who provide the brain power needed by America's engineering schools, nothing could be further from the truth. Most Chinese students have no better than average ability, and many do not speak, write, or understand English well enough to contribute significantly to the academic community. R.I.P. ADDENDA: Today at 2 Eastern, I'll be chatting on Facebook Live, both on my work Facebook page and the National Review Facebook page. Early voting starts this month, which is ridiculous. Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of the pop-culture podcast. | 
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