NO, YOU'RE NOT GOING TO GET ME TO SHED TEARS FOR JEB BUSH

Sorry, but no:




I refuse to feel bad about Jeb Bush's demise. Seth Stevenson's Slate cover story is nicely written and Stevenson is well-meaning, but I don't care. I don't care about the fact that a rally Stevenson attended

sure felt like a last stand. Not just for Jeb Bush’s campaign, but maybe for Jeb Bush’s basic dignity as a human being. For the tattered legacy of the Bush family. For the remnants of an embattled GOP faction. Even, one might argue, for the quaint notion of civility in public life.

I don't want to hear this because few families have done more to destroy "the quaint notion of civility in public life" than the Bushes. In 1988, George H.W. Bush's campaign took on a moderately liberal technocrat named Michael Dukakis and turned him into an American pariah, someone who'd allow scary dark-skinned career criminals like Willie Horton to rape and kill at will. (The Bush team blamed then-Governor Dukakis for a Massachusetts furlough program that was started by a Republican predecessor and was similar to programs in a majority of American states.) The campaign circulated a completely unfounded rumor that Dukakis's wife had once burned an American flag, while the candidate piously toured flag factories. And on and on.

George W. Bush's people conducted a whispering campaign during the 2000 South Carolina primaries suggesting that John McCain's adopted Bangladeshi child was a secret black love child. Four years later, Bush allies spread the lie that John Kerry faked the Vietnam War heroism that won him three Purple Hearts. (Jeb, in 2005, wrote a letter praising the work of the liars who helped bring down Kerry's campaign.)

It doesn't upset me that Jeb was brought down by the viciousness of modern Republican campaigning because his family helped invent vicious modern campaigning. Jeb wouldn't even have been in a position to run for president if it hadn't been for his family's tactics. Stevenson quotes a South Carolina voter who speaks to Jeb after a campaign gathering:

“I loved your brother. Can you be in that category?” inquired an older man, rather doubtfully. “Can you be a sumbitch?”

Who created that thirst for blood? It was the Bushes. It was George the son and, as Stevenson notes, George the father:

... Jeb has never shown Poppy’s killer instinct. Former Slate editor Michael Kinsley once termed G.H.W. a “grandee with a switchblade.” You don’t get the sense Jeb is keen to shiv anyone.

Jeb wanted brownie points for not being his father or his brother. Stevenson sees a fellow nerd and feels a pang of empathy:

Watching Jeb on the debate stage, I could feel the prickly heat bloom across his nape whenever Trump attacked. Jeb would rock back and forth, his shoulders bobbing, an awkward rictus grin spreading across his face. I’m quite familiar with these involuntary responses. I, too, am a man deeply averse to conflict.

I spotted Jeb as a fellow introvert right from the start. Shy recognize shy. It must have been a singular torture to campaign for president with this personality suite. Jeb can’t saber-rattle like his brother. He can’t cornpone like Lindsey Graham. His battle with Trump was a classic clash of phlegmatic versus choleric -- never a winning matchup for the quiet guy.

Two points need to be made here.

First of all, it's not true that the enraged always defeat the even-tempered. Remember this?



If you're dealing with angry people and your inclination is to keep your temper under control, you have to radiate a quiet strength. You have to be like Barack Obama. He did it in response to John McCain. He did it in response to Mitt Romney -- and while Romney isn't a wild-tempered man, he's always seething with a rage that's just under the surface. Jeb could never manage to convey quiet strength. Even lightweights like Ben Carson and Marco Rubio seem to have greater reserves of inner dignity than Jeb.

But here's the thing: If you can't be a brawler and you can't summon a sense of quiet dignity, what you need to do is have the self-respect to leave an arena that demands shows of strength and find an area where you feel capable and confident and at ease with yourself. That's hard for some introverts -- but Jeb is a Bush, for crissake, so he ought to be able to spend his life doing only what he's best suited for.

Running for president in the post-Willie Horton, post-Swift Boat era is something Jeb wasn't suited for, and he never had the self-respect to walk away. It was impossible to avoid the sense that this man, in his sixties, still felt he had to take on this task in order to please his parents. He could have avoided the race altogether -- Mitt Romney was willing to be the gray eminence in the race. He could have dropped out early, like Scott Walker or Rick Perry -- there were already plenty of candidates in the race, several of them representing his own positions on the issues.

Jeb volunteered for this. He wasn't filling a need that would have been otherwise unmet. So his fall leaves me dry-eyed. If he couldn't (or wouldn't) learn to be a back alley fighter like his father and brother, and he wasn't strong enough to face down a thug like Trump, he needed to just go away.

ALL FOUR FRONT-RUNNERS ARE UNELECTABLE -- NOW WHAT?

Does it really make sense for me to resume blogging? While I was gone over the weekend, this blog became so much better. Tom, Yastreblyansky, Aimai, Tom, Crank -- you all raised the quality level.

But I don't agree with everything that was written here. For instance, I don't share Tom's impulse to single out Bernie Sanders as unelectable. I see Tom's point, and the email to Josh Marshall that's quoted by Tom describes what I've been fearing: that if likely GOP lines of attack are deployed against Sanders, many people who are now open to him will turn firmly against him. Also, when you include super PAC money deployed against him, he'll be overwhelmingly outspent. And many members of the Democratic Establishment will probably abandon him, dishonorably, the way they abandoned Ned Lamont. So, yes, he'd have serious trouble in a general election.

But so would everyone else who's won a primary or caucus this year. In fact, the four primary/caucus winners all seem unelectable to me. And the billionaire who wants to take advantage of the chaos in this race, Mike Bloomberg, seems unelectable as well. I don't know what happens when you have a general election with two (or maybe three) unelectable candidates. I think we're going to find out.

I don't have to explain why Donald Trump seems unelectable. Last month, Gallup registered a 60% unfavorable rating from Trump among all voters, compared to a 33% favorable rating. That's awful -- but Hillary's Clinton's unfavorable rating in the same poll is 52%, worse than the 45% registered by the woebegone Jeb Bush. And as I noted last week, a USA Today poll depicts Trump and Clinton as equally "scary" to voters:

... for Trump, 38% of likely voters would be scared if the real-estate mogul won the GOP nomination -- including not only 62% of Democrats but also 17% of Republicans. A third of independents, 33%, feel that way.

... And for Clinton, a former secretary of State, 33% would be scared -- including 60% of Republicans and also 8% of Democrats. Just over a third of independents, 35%, agree.

Also, both inspire bad feelings overall:

For Trump, a majority of likely voters, 56%, have a negative response to his prospective nomination, including 18% who would be dissatisfied. Just under four in 10 have a positive reaction: 15% enthusiastic and 24% satisfied.

Clinton fares only a bit better: 54% have a negative response to her nomination, including 21% who would be dissatisfied. Just over four in 10 have a positive reaction: 16% enthusiastic and 26% satisfied.

The GOP and the mainstream media agree that Hillary Clinton is an ugly old lying monster, a fairytale evil witch. Clinton hasn't figured out a way to counteract that message. Beyond that, she's just the sort of candidate who loses presidential elections -- Walter Mondale in 1984 or Bob Dole in 1996, a former primary-season loser who gets the nomination on the basis of being the next in line, but who still reeks of defeat and datedness. There's no way she'd win against a reasonably strong traditional Republican candidate.

Fortunately for her, if she's the nominee (as now seems almost certain), there's an excellent chance that she'll run against either Trump or Ted Cruz. I think Cruz could theoretically win a general election, but if he's the nominee, he's going to run a failed campaign, because he has a failed theory of what it takes to win.

You see, he'd be the first GOP presidential nominee who grew up not as a producer of bamboozling Fox/talk radio talking points, but as a consumer of them -- he actually believes the BS. One line in particular that he believes is that Republicans win elections when they run as True Conservatives. We've seen this disproved in recent Senate campaigns -- Todd Akin got trounced after we heard him say things that would have been cheered on talk radio, while wingnuts such as Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner hid their extremism under a bushel and won. But Cruz simply won't tack to the center if he's the nominee. He doesn't think he has to. Therefore, he'll be beatable.

So what happens when two unelectable candidates compete? I think the Democrats' recent strength in the Electoral College will kick in at that point, but only because a weak Democratic nominee will draw a weak Republican opponent. Even a moderately popular, not terribly off-putting Republican opponent could win this year. But it looks as if Republicans probably won't luck out.

If they do -- if Marco Rubio wins the nomination -- I think the GOP will win handily. I respectfully disagree with Yastreblyansky:

When pandits say Marco Rubio is electable, I think they mostly mean he's a revolting little prig but nice-looking, and with a manner less directly offensive than Cruz's: "I don't like him but I bet everybody else does" the way Mrs. Cleaver thinks Eddie Haskell is really a nice boy. In fact they are merely making the mistake of thinking other people are even stupider than they are, which is not necessarily the case.

Stupider? Not necessarily. Less focused on policy specifics and more focused on affect? Absolutely. That's how a lot of people vote -- Marco Rubio is "mainstream" because the way he speaks feels mainstream to people who don't think a lot about politics. (That's also how a lot of journalists think -- and would it be really be arrogant of me to assume they're stupid?) And yet beyond that he's talking the way the white voters who still dominate our elections think: taxes are too high, the have-nots are too cosseted, our enemies think we're too lily-livered. He's too canned, but he knows where heartland white voters' sweet spot is.

Rubio has a pitchfork-shaker's positions, but he speaks as if he'd be shocked to find an angry mob following in his wake. If he has a genius, it's for the crafting of talking points that contain both dog whistles and wiggle room; if you don't like these convictions, wait till fall and he'll have others.

Beyond that, he's the slightly hip bro dad the mainstream media craves. As a result, he'll never get bad press for more than a few days. (Notice how he's bounced back from the robot moment.)

So he can win -- but I don't see him winning the nomination. One of two unelectable Republicans will get it instead, and then lose to one of two unelectable Democrats.

Death Before Dishonor, A Survivor's Problem

I found myself having an argument online about the Kissinger thing--that is: is Hillary history's greatest monster on her own, or is the fact that she socializes with Oscar de la Renta and the Kissingers proof that she is history's greatest monster because Kissinger's sins became hers the moment they shared a canape and a glass of bubbly on the beach? Let me hasten to add that I'm as shocked and horrified by the idea of socializing on a beach front estate in wherever caribbean place with other 90 year olds as I am with the fact that Kissinger is an unindicted war criminal. I've thought about this quite a bit, actually. I'm old enough to hate Kissinger, and Nixon's ghost, with a white hot fury.  Not only for what Kissinger did in Cambodia and Vietnam but also for East Pakistan and a number of other places. But does that mean that, if I were ever to be First Lady, or President, or Secretary of State that I wouldn't consult with him if I thought it would benefit the country? Or that I would refuse to break bread with him--well, I probably would, actually--but I wouldn't expect other people to take such a hard line.  I don't expect Obama to piss on Nixon's grave. Or refuse to permit George Bush to pose in a picture with him.  Or behave rudely to Mrs. Bush on the grounds that Bush is responsible for millions of displaced and murdered Iraqis.  You can't run a country on grudges and recriminations. You can't run a country--and HRC and Bill Clinton have been in the top slot already--and not be willing to compromise, a lot, to get things done.  I said this over at Balloon Juice and I think it bears repeating here.   "No one runs a country like the US without blood on their hands. Sins of omission or sins of comission. That has been true since the founding. Ask the native americans. Ask our African American citizens. If Sanders is pure now, right this moment, he won’t be five minutes after he takes the oath of office. He will end up being responsible for avoidable deaths somewhere, somehow, inevitably. And he will break bread with, and confide in, and socialize with people who have done so. That’s the job."

Electability or Eluctability?

Three cardinal virtues—fortitude, prudence, temperantia—in the Stanze della Signatura, Vatican. by Rafaello Sanzio. Image via Rembrandt's Room.

Well, that was a fun Saturday! Marco Rubio won by coming in second instead of winning, as originally planned, by coming in third, and Hillary Clinton didn't lose by coming in first, even though Sanders won by coming in second, because her campaign had cleverly crafted the message that she'd win if she won, just as happened with Trump, who won because he was a winner, though he sometimes wins by coming in second too. Cruz lost, crushingly, with a vote that is statistically indistinguishable from that of the winner Rubio, whereas JEB! was forced to quit with his terrible 7.8%, conceding to the better prepared and more electable Kasich, who won spectacularly with 7.6%.

JEB! won the contest of who really wants to spend more time with his family, though it is not clear whether he means his wife and children in Florida or his brother in Texas and his mom in Maine. And these people all like to make fun of us ordinary folk with our Little Leagues and chess clubs where everybody gets a trophy.

Here's a great piece by Tom Hilton, on the question of whether Bernie Sanders is electable, where I agree with more or less every single point but I'm not sure I agree with the whole argument. My disagreement is that where he says Bernie's not electable I say he is, but I just don't see how.

In 1964, 16 states had Republican primary or caucus contests, in contrast to 50-odd states and territories today, and Barry Goldwater won five of them (Illinois, Texas, Indiana, Nebraska, California). The states he won included some of the biggest, California's two million votes making up a third of the total, but he went to the convention with 38.33% of the vote—49% of the delegates, because of his people's work in the good old smoke-filled rooms in the other 34 states. He'd have been well behind that point, too, if the second Mrs. Rockefeller had not had a baby three days before the California primary, reminding the voters of that deeply moral state that Governor Rockefeller was a known adulterer and causing a large number of them to change their minds at the last minute (winning Goldwater just under 52% of the vote but all of the state's delegates).

It was a different time! Now a known adulterer comes in 20 points ahead of his nearest and smarmiest, most creepily Jesusy rivals in deeply moral South Carolina, people! Where people identify as 74% evangelical.

Anyway, the Republicans did not get their most electable candidate that year, as we now know, and they also didn't get a candidate they particularly wanted. They didn't see a candidate they particularly wanted, between doctrinaire Goldwater, establishment Lodge (grandson, great-great grandson, and great-great-great grandson of four senators), and celebrity Rockefeller, and ended up with perhaps the least electable. Or maybe they didn't have an electable candidate, against Johnson wrapped in the mantle of the martyred JFK.

In 1972, 28 states had Democratic primary or caucus contests, in a new system designed after the catastrophe of 1968 to decide the candidate before the convention, by a certain McGovern-Fraser Commission—yes, that McGovern, and no, I did not know that. McGovern used the new system very well and ended up with an overwhelming majority of delegates, though a smaller percentage of the popular vote than his closest rival, Hubert Humphrey (25.34% to 25.77%) and hardly more than the unregenerate racist George Wallace (23.48%), who had been paralyzed after an assassination attempt during the campaign. It's possible that there was an electable candidate that year, Edmund Muskie, undone by Republican ratfucking. It's possible that the whole thing was thrown off by the failure of Edward Kennedy to join the circus. It's possible that McGovern really was the most electable candidate and lost not because of the people but because of the enraged and deeply corrupted Democratic establishment (which really did fail to fund him) or the criminal Nixon campaign (which really was criminal) or both.

I don't like electability arguments in principle, because when you go backward historically to test your hypothesis you have to deal with counterfactuals upon counterfactuals. Was William Jennings Bryan electable? Probably not, given that the experiment was replicated twice with the same results. If Robert Kennedy had lived to run in 1968 could he have won? Certainly. Would he? Who can say? The professionals would like every election to be about electability, and sometimes they succeed in making it that way—McKinley in 1896, Eisenhower in 1952—but only with the cooperation of the other party focusing on something else, and it's usually a stupid election. And trying to project your hypothesis forward in time is worse; you end up with one of those n-body problems, intrinsically insoluble.

When pandits say Marco Rubio is electable, I think they mostly mean he's a revolting little prig but nice-looking, and with a manner less directly offensive than Cruz's: "I don't like him but I bet everybody else does" the way Mrs. Cleaver thinks Eddie Haskell is really a nice boy. In fact they are merely making the mistake of thinking other people are even stupider than they are, which is not necessarily the case. It's a pretty conservative way of looking at things, though.

When people say Bernie Sanders is electable, I think they mostly mean something more liberal; that he's a lovely old guy and no decent person could fail to recognize this. They are making the assumption that other people are as decent as they are, which is also not necessarily the case, but on the whole easier to work with.

I'd rather we focus on the questions of who the candidates are, what are their programs, and how are they running their campaigns. If Sanders is really electable he'll be showing it by winning a lot more primaries in the next couple of weeks, and if not it really doesn't matter.

Bernie and Hillary both come, for me, out of my own Boomer world of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and though they have taken different paths getting from there to here, I'm not interested in debates over which of them is most loyal to the ideals of 1968 or something like that. I don't care that Hillary can talk to Henry Kissinger without trembling and vomiting and accept his flattery without a blush; presidents have to talk to blood-soaked monsters all the time. And it's totally OK with me if Bernie wants to parade Cornel West around the country, too, not that he's a blood-soaked monster—I love West giving "Brother Jeb" a hug the other day and telling him to "stay strong", that's pretty classy. I just hope he's not expecting West to be his key to getting the African-American vote.

On programs, my feeling is that Clinton's may seem timid, but I understand what she is trying to accomplish, consolidating the gains made in the Obama administration. Why $12 instead of $15? Maybe the places that really need a federal minimum wage, like Arkansas or West Virginia, truly can't afford $15 and the places that can afford it, like Washington or California or New York or Connecticut, will do it without federal pushing. What she says about the importance of financial trade regulation as opposed to reinstating Glass-Steagall is true. There's a huge amount of stuff that can be done to bring the Affordable Care Act closer to providing universal care (on a better and more sustainable model, like those of the Netherlands or Germany, than the strict single-payer concept of the other camp). Making two-year college free in the many healthy state institutions is an almost immediately achievable goal, making four-year college free for all is hard to imagine where literally tens of thousands of little four-year residential colleges are in imminent danger of closing because they can't get by on the outrageous tuition payments they're charging. I'm not happy with the things she's saying about Iran and Syria, but I think she's saying them in the understanding that they'll be irrelevant by a year from now (as with her rejection of the TPP, sorry folks with TPP nightmares). Etc. etc.

With Bernie, on the other hand, the program makes less and less sense the more it's examined, and I'm not certain he understands the foreign policy issues at all well. Though he's very clear on what was going on in 1954 and he's right, it was terrible. But I can't help thinking he's mainly running against Obama, just as much as Rubio and Cruz are. Hence West, who has called Obama a "Rockefeller Republican in blackface".

Also, I understand Sanders can't be held responsible for the obscenity that occurred in Las Vegas yesterday, where one of the best human beings in the world, Dolores Huerta, was attempting to help out Spanish speakers in the caucus at Harrah's Casino, and was stopped by Sanders supporters screaming "English only", but I am really disturbed by the thought that his campaign is attracting people like that, and the erstwhile Rand Paul supporter H.A. Goodman. Berniebros or no Berniebros.

The Obama political revolution, as I was saying a while back, was the one I signed up for, and the way to get my vote is to stick up for it, slow and uncertain as it is. Make it work better! I can't speak for anybody else, but I can speak to that, and I'm happy to let the electability issue take care of itself.

Aargh, enough. While I was working on this Aimai came out with a piece that ended up where I wanted to end up, only more concise and more generous, as you'd expect. So read that if you haven't already.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Nazis, political smears from The Oxford Club, and Bernie Sanders

Some years ago I began subscribing to a couple of publications from an organization called The Oxford Club. Their subscription mailings were terrific at massaging whatever organ it is that generates intensely overwhelming feelings of greed.

What their publications generally do is recommend stocks to invest in. I’m dredging up the numbers they touted from a faulty memory, but essentially their solicitation mailings were saying things like, “Earn profits of 200 percent, 300 percent, four hundred and eighty-seven percent!” 

Yes, yes, ye-e-e-essss! I thought, as my greed gland went orgasmic and my signature spurted across a check for my subscription.

“Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement,” declared Dr. Samuel Johnson back in the 19th Century. And this was nearly two centuries before the Oxford Club began promising me, without regularly delivering, humongous multiples of my money.

Well, for a while, The Oxford Club did reasonably well by me. No, they never generated 200 percent, much less six hundred and eighty-seven percent in profits. At least not for me. But a couple of their recommendations have increased significantly in value since I bought them, and the stocks recommend in their retirement income letter did, as promised, generate some income.

Of course, that was when the market was going up. Recently, the Oxford Club has been closing out quite a few positions, sometimes at a loss. I have still more beefs with their stock picks and their methods, but that’s for another day. What I’m here to tell you about is the not-so-subliminal message lurking just below the surface — or sometimes right on the surface — of the onslaught of e-mails they send me every week, in addition to my monthly newsletter subscriptions.

Turns out The Oxford Club is a right wing organization with right wing “friends” who spread political opinions, and sometimes considerable misinformation and paranoia among its subscribers. (Sample from a recent mailing that led off with the presidential election, "Your Bank Accounts Will Soon Be Confiscated Whoever Wins!")

I have no way of knowing whether issuing a screed against anything that doesn’t favor the one percent, tax cuts and hatred of government is required writing if you want to keep your job at the Oxford Club. But it seems that, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, nearly all their writers who regularly send me messages have at one time or another bashed the notion that the one percent are anything but God-dispatched saviors of our national economy. And that  — if I may continue a rather racy metaphor that I began some paragraphs back — taxes are the ejaculate of the devil.

But the Oxford Club went more than a few paces two far last week when Alexander Green, the Oxford Club’s “Chief Investment Strategist” painted Bernie Sanders as the world’s biggest Nazi since Adolph and Eva romped joyfully at Berchtesgaden while Buchenwald gassed Europe’s Jews.

“How a Vote for Sanders Is Like a Vote for Hitler,” declared the headline on an e-mail from The Oxford Club written by Green. And the Oxford Club’s Green Slime ran downhill from there. Here’s what appears to be the nub of this disgusting argument, complete with Green's stereotyping:

Hitler convinced his people that Germany's troubles were caused by just 1% of the population: the Jews. 

In reality, of course, German Jews were a tremendous asset. They were hardworking and successful, particularly in business and finance. They were more highly educated, more affluent and more law-abiding than most, committing few crimes in relation to their numbers. 

Yet Hitler projected every fear, anxiety and frustration onto them. He scapegoated them so successfully, in fact, that ordinary Germans began to detest them, even those who had never met a Jew….

Hitler was a monster. But his fundamental flaw was that he was a deluded and unrepentant bigot. 

So is Bernie Sanders. 

Sanders does not scapegoat an ethnic or religious minority, however. He scapegoats a financial one. He dislikes rich people. 

Listen to a Sanders stump speech, and you'll discover
that folks with money are the bane of our existence. They
have "fixed" the economy, corrupted politics, denied
healthcare to millions, cheated the working class, shirked taxes, created shocking inequality and hoarded the wealth for themselves. 

I must live in an alternate universe.

Yes, Alexander, you very much must live in an alternate universe.

Hitler picked on people because of their ethnicity, arrested them, sent them to filthy concentration camps, turned them into slave laborers, starved them, and gassed them to death when they weren't forced to dig their own graves before being shot. Whereas Bernie Sanders is mostly proposing to somewhat increase the taxes on the topmost part of the income that very rich people earn. 

There is no comparison. There is no parallel. What there is, it seems to me, is The Oxford Club baiting a Jewish candidate for wanting to make sure that people who work for the one percent receive fair and proportionate compensation to their own contributions to the economy. Calling a Jew a Nazi because of his economic principles and belief in fairness is tantamount to what Dr. Goebbels did — inventing and broadcasting a big , slanderous lie.

In the same e-mail, Green accused Sanders of “preaching class hatred.” No, Mr, Green, it is you and The Oxford Club who are attempting to disseminate hatred. Bernie Sanders is preaching class fairness.

Shame on The Oxford Club for enabling you with a platform to broadcast your trash.

Note: If the Oxford Club hasn’t been embarrassed yet into taking down Green’s vile e-mail, you can find the full text posted here, along with some mostly furious replies by Oxford Club members, many of whom, I hope, will cancel or not renew their subscriptions.

Cross-posted at The New York Crank

Why I'm Voting For the Nominee

Before its too late I thought I'd get my licks in.

Why I'm voting for the Nominee. 

 I am avoiding watching any TV, or attending any rallies for any of our candidates, because I really don't care which of them gets the nomination. I will vote for the nominee, donate to the nominee, work my heart out for the nominee. I'm actually agnostic as to which I prefer because I don't think either of them is as good as they say, or as bad as their critics pretend they are. But having said that, because I'm voting for the nominee, I'm also, in essence, voting for the Democratic party as it is currently consistuted. Not as I wish it were consituted. Not as a perfect liberal dream of a Democratic Party, but also not as an obstacle to be overcome. 

 You go to an election with the party you have, not the party you wish you had. I need my future President to share my values and goals, and to promise to work hard for women's rights, minority rights, climate change, and a whole lot of things. But I also need a savvy infighter, someone who knows the ropes and knows where some of the bodies are buried. Because in the best case scenario, the one where we manage as a party to retake the House and Senate, or just the Senate, even a holding action is going to require some incredible negotiating skill, parliamentary maneuvering, and ability to lay off the slagging and trash talking. Is that too small bore? Too merely “liberal” and not progressive enough for you? Sorry to be so practical and down to earth. Sorry to talk in prose when some want poetry. Sorry to be an incrementalist. No doubt these are all dirty words. 

 But the reality of our political system is that no savior from outside of the party, no holy fool* with excited rallies but no tolerance for minutiae is going to be able to wring anything from the choked sewer that is our political system. You need a forensic plumber (hat tip Miles Vorkosigan) not a hand grenade. 

 I'm reminded of something some commenter said to Ralph Nader during his run for the Presidency. “Ralph,” she said (and I'm paraphrasing here) “You are like a great pair of shoes that I really want, but which are too expensive and I know they are going to pinch if I buy them. I want them, but I can't afford them.” If I imagine that the Presidency is like being King for four years, I'm excited for Bernie. When I remember that a far more skillful political actor, a deeper political thinker, and a younger and stronger person named Barack Obama just tried to run the actual office of President for 7 years, and what happened to his attempts, I despair for the Bernie victory. I think he can win. But I don't think we can afford him. I don't think he has the temperament or the skill to work with the party apparatus, state by state, congressional district by congressional district, to get anything done. Not a few limited things. Anything.

ETA to add paragraphs and break up the wall of text. And to add that I cross posted at my own blog I Spy With My Little Eye.

­

That Explains Everything

They’re serving free drinks to the press at the Rubio party, in case you wonder how he gets such good coverage.

— Molly Ball (@mollyesque) February 21, 2016

Tire Swing II: The Sequel.

No, Bernie Sanders Is Not Electable

As the Democratic primaries tighten (and as I write this, Nevada seems to be a toss-up), we're increasingly hearing Sanderistas argue that Bernie is more electable than Clinton--long an article of faith in the Sanders camp, now proclaimed louder and with greater confidence. And the first prong of these arguments, that Clinton has some electability concerns of her own, is valid up to a point (though they exaggerate it). Nobody who's paying attention is going to argue that she's a shoo-in. Where they go off the rails, though, is in arguing the affirmative case for Sanders.

The most extraordinary of these arguments comes from the Baghdad Bob of Sanderistas, the spectacularly deranged H. A. Goodman¹:

Bernie Sanders, unlike Clinton, defeats Donald Trump in a landslide of “epic proportions” in a general election and is the antithesis of a Republican. If you don’t believe me, then watch my friend Brian Hanley’s animated rap videos about Bernie Sanders demolishing Donald Trump.

Well if an animated rap video says so, it must be true.

More commonly, we see the electability argument made by Christopher Cook in a piece purporting to be The Pragmatic Case for Bernie Sanders. There's lots wrong with the rest of this piece (he elides the difference between change within electoral politics and change from social movements--and I'm not sure he really understands the dynamic of the latter), but for now let's focus on the electability argument:

On the pragmatics of electability, nearly every major national poll consistently shows Sanders equaling or bettering Clinton against all Republicans. Polls show Sanders nearly tied with Clinton nationally and rising. On electability, if anything, Sanders has the edge right now. There is nothing empirical to suggest Clinton’s superior electability—quite the contrary given her loss to Barack Obama in 2008 and her flagging campaign this year. While Clinton might gain more moderate Independents (particularly against a polarizing Republican nominee), Sanders can inspire massive Democratic and liberal Independent turnout and likely win over many white working-class swing voters.

This has the two basic elements: 1) current polling, and 2) expanding the electorate.

On the former point, obviously general-election polling at this stage is a pretty reliable guide to what happens on Election Day; just ask Presidents Dukakis and Kerry. (Remember Jimmy Carter's second term? Good times!)

But hey, he'll bring out a massive and unprecedented number of millennial voters, right? Well, maybe. Or maybe not. Democratic turnout was lower than 2008 in Iowa--171,000, down from 240,000--and New Hampshire--250,000 vs. 280,000 in 2008. The electability argument for Sanders assumes young voters turn out at Obama levels. So far, we haven't seen it.

But there's another, unstated, assumption the Sanders campaign is making: that besides bringing out record numbers of millennials, they'll maintain Obama's share/turnout among African-American and Latino voters. They don't say it, but it's built into their numbers. And that's a questionable assumption, given the palpable lack of enthusiasm for Sanders among African-American voters. He's been trying to win over African-Americans at least since July, and the numbers haven't really moved--due in part, maybe, to hilarious pratfalls like using Cornel West as a surrogate and saying Clinton's embrace of Obama is pandering to African-American voters. It's not a given that African-Americans would turn out in the same numbers for Sanders, especially if he wins the nomination without ever winning a majority of their votes--that is, if the Democratic nominee is effectively chosen by white voters.

Now that's all big picture stuff; Cook just sort of waves away the actual campaign. But it's a pretty crucial electability question: how would Sanders do when faced with the full fury of the GOP slime machine?

Here, too, Sanderistas have an answer:

I'm astounded that anyone who has been paying any attention to our toxic partisan politics in the last decade would think that the Republican attacks would be somehow less vehement for one candidate over the other. Eight years ago, I remember how Obama partisans would point out how "divisive" and "polarizing" Hillary Clinton would be as POTUS. Even then, the perpetual rage machine from right-wing talk radio and Fox News was completely disconnected from facts and logic, and I predicted pretty much what happened: If Obama was elected, the narrative and outrage from the right would be just as vigorous.

So, from their perspective, we've already had a Marxist/Leninist/Maoist/Islamic/Fascist Kenyan in the White House these last 7 years. Sanders breaks no new ground there.

Well, okay, sure--up to a point. But the question isn't whether those attacks will be made; the question is whether they'll stick. Hey, they didn't hurt Obama--but Obama is the most talented politician of our time, and he had what may have been the most effective campaign apparatus in American history. Sanders isn't Obama, and his campaign isn't Obama's campaign.

And Americans hate socialists, so yeah, the Republicans will use that against any candidate. But there's a huge difference between an attack (Obama is a socialist!) that's at odds with observable reality, and an attack (Bernie is a socialist!) the veracity of which the candidate himself confirms.

Of course as Steve points out, "socialist" may not even be the most effective anti-Sanders attack. To pay for his single-payer plan, Sanders is proposing a 6.2% payroll tax (plus a 2.2% income-based premium)--in other words, a tax hike on middle-class families. In theory the tax is more than offset by reduced premiums, but that's nuance, and we all know how that plays.

And in fact Sanders is even more vulnerable on taxes than Steve suggests, because his single-payer plan is based on all kinds of magical assumptions that underestimate likely costs by a trillion dollars per year. So on that payroll tax,

Thorpe...estimates that you'd need a 14.3 percent payroll tax on employers for a national single-payer plan, and a 5.7 percent income-based premium, for a combined 20 percent tax — about what Vermont estimated.

In other words, the Republicans could eviscerate Sanders on his healthcare plan without even being particularly dishonest.

But I'm not sure taxes are even the most damaging attack on Sanders' plan. The other big (maybe bigger) factor is loss aversion. Loss aversion is the reason President Obama promised we could keep our insurance if we liked it, and it's the reason that became an effective attack when it turned out not to be true in every case. Sanders is promising voters that if his plan passes you are absolutely guaranteed to lose your health insurance whether you like it or not. That includes Medicare, by the way, and old people get very angry at even imaginary threats to Medicare, and it doesn't much matter if it's likely to be replaced by something better because loss aversion doesn't work that way.

And this reader email to Josh Marshall gives us a glimpse of how it would play out in the general:

I've seen results of a poll (and heard about another) done by a group here in DC that tested Sanders's support before and after likely lines of attack against him. The results are bad, real bad.

The attacks are pretty obvious (and it's telling that no one in the GOP is making them right now), and the effects are dramatic. Sanders does well at the beginning of the poll (like he does now in face-to-face polling), but by the end is significantly behind *every* GOP contender. Basically, in the words of one highly-placed, data-driven Democratic friend of mine, "the numbers are brutal in many demographics. There's just no math that gets Sanders to a victory."

And I say this as a mild Sanders supporter, or at least I was before seeing these numbers. I've known Bernie for years and like him a lot, but the prospect of a Bernie-Cruz race is terrifying to me now.

Obviously there's no way to verify the details of this, so take it with a grain of salt if you like. But as a scenario it is terrifyingly plausible.

One last point: in evaluating any other electability arguments for Sanders, the essential question is whether the author, like Mulder, wants to believe. When someone's argument is perfectly aligned with what they want to be true, it creates a rebuttable presumption that the argument is wishful thinking. I haven't seen any of these arguments where the presumption can be rebutted. I would love to believe we live in a country where someone with Sanders' politics (not Sanders himself, because he's temperamentally and intellectually unsuited to the job, but someone better with similar policies) could be elected President. But I believe wishful thinking is morally indefensible, and given the stakes here I'm not prepared either to indulge in it myself or tolerate it in others. Nor should you.


¹Who, a little over a year ago, was proclaiming his intention to vote for Rand Paul

Rear-window party

Shorter David Brooks, "A Little Reality on Immigration", New York Times, February 19 2016:

I'd like to express my dismay about the way Republican conservative orthodoxy seems to have taken on such a violently anti-immigrant stance which would have seemed extremely strange to conservatives throughout our country's history, from Reagan to George W. Bush. I will convey this by explaining carefully why immigration is a good thing and invoking the name of Donald Trump seven times without mentioning the names of any other Republican candidates.

The account of how immigration is a good thing looks like some unusually assiduous research on the part of our author and his assistants, until you look at it just a little closely:

The number of illegal immigrants flowing into this country is dropping, not rising. The flow of total immigrants peaked in 2005 and has been dropping since. The share of immigrants coming from Latin America is falling sharply. Since 2008, more immigrants have come from Asia than Latin America, and the disparity is growing.

There are more Mexicans leaving the United States than coming in. According to the Pew Research Center, there was a net outflow of 140,000 from 2009 to 2014. If Trump builds his wall, he’ll lock more Mexican immigrants in than he’ll keep out.

Look at all those links! But it turns out they're all to the same website (an excellent one!), the one he mentions for his last fact there, and the links are all wrong: the first is to a chart about unauthorized immigration (which peaked in 2007, not 2005), the second to a page with a chart not about annual immigration but total population, in which Asians will not overtake Latinos until 2055 under current projections, and another one with the information that should have been with the first link. The third link is to the correct page, but it's also the page he should have linked second. (On second look, I guess it's a simple, though peculiar, editorial error: the first link should have been in the first sentence, the second link where the first one is, and the third where the second is.)

It's all true, along with the other facts (two more Pew links, a nice Voxsplainer on the economic benefits for working people and a very decent Cato report on the totally non-criminal character of immigrant communities in the US) and it's a good thing to spread it around: relatively open immigration has always been a great thing for the country (if not for the First Nations), and still is.

I'm not quite sure what Brooks is trying to accomplish here. No Republican candidate, including Trump, is saying openly that immigrants are bad for America, far from it: they love immigrants, they tell us continually, they object only to those who don't follow the rules, the "illegals", those who cross the border without permission or overstay their visas and build lives here without ever getting a green card, and who could benefit from an "amnesty" while good immigrants languish, waiting for their paperwork to get done,

(That's bogus, by the way, and I am going to say straight out, as Clinton and Sanders will not, that an amnesty for those 11 million undocumented migrants, like that of the 1986 Reagan reform, is a good idea, and much the best way to remedy the current situation.)

It's the Republican voters, obviously, who are terrified of immigrants in general, and who think they hear Trump saying what they want to hear when he fulminates about "rapists" and fantasizes about his impermeable wall. Trump is, of course, angling for their support. But in focusing on Trump as if he were the entire party—

Donald Trump’s G.O.P. is a rear-window party pining for a white America that is never coming back

—Brooks seems to be trying to hide the fact that Cruz and Rubio in particular, each violently accusing the other of being too soft on those crooks, are trawling for them too.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

SEE YOU MONDAY

I have not-fun plans for the weekend, so I'll be gone until Monday. There'll be some fine guest blogging here, however, so stop by.

THERE'S SOMETHING HINKY ABOUT THAT FOX POLL WITH SANDERS IN THE LEAD

This seems like a big deal:

Bernie Sanders now tops Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination.

The latest Fox News national poll finds 47 percent of Democratic primary voters now back the Vermont senator, up from 37 percent in January. Clinton gets 44 percent, down from 49 percent a month ago.

Cue the headlines: "Bernie Sanders Just Surged Past Hillary Clinton in a National Poll for the First Time."

But is there something suspicious about this?

Fox posted the complete results of the poll. That means you can read the questions in the order they were asked.

Question #1 was straightforward: "Do you approve or disapprove of the job Barack Obama is doing as president?" Then there's question #2:

2. If you could send just one of the following two messages to the federal government right now, would it be “lend me a hand” or would it be “leave me alone”?

And question #3:

3. For you and your family, does it feel like the economy is getting better or getting worse?

There's nothing wrong with asking these questions -- but it's very bad form to ask questions like this early in a survey about an election, before any questions about the candidates in that election.

The conscientious folks at Pew explain:

Once the survey questions are developed, particular attention should be paid to how they are ordered in the questionnaire. The placement of a question can have a greater impact on the result than the particular choice of words used in the question.

When determining the order of questions within the questionnaire, surveyors must be attentive to how questions early in a questionnaire may have unintended effects on how respondents answer subsequent questions. Researchers have demonstrated that the order in which questions are asked can influence how people respond; earlier questions -- in particular those directly preceding other questions -- can provide context for the questions that follow (these effects are called “order effects”).

That's why, if you're trying to get an accurate read on an election, you ask respondents which candidate they're voting for early, without other questions that might influence their thinking. It's a basic rule of polling -- so basic that Fox's violation of it must have been deliberate. Any pollster would know that questions like #2 and #3 would risk skewing the results.

Question #4 asks which primary the respondent intends to vote in, and then question #5 asks whether the respondent is sure about that choice. And then, for Democratic voters, comes question #6: Sanders or Clinton? And Sanders wins.

Now, why might questions #2 and #3 skew the results? Across all party affiliations, as the results show, voters tend to want the government to leave them alone -- but more progressive voters presumably want the government to offer more assistance. And question #3 taps into a Sanders theme, that the recovery isn't helping a lot of ordinary people. So the pollsters are trying to get voters to think in a Bernie-esque way.

I don't know if you believe poll-question order affects results this way. But it's a standard belief in the polling world. So, yes, I think Fox was trying to manipulate this poll to favor the Democrat Fox thinks is more likely to lose in November.

*****

Republicans really do believe Sanders would be far easier to beat. They're so sure of this that in Nevada they're taking advantage of a quirk in election laws by openly urging Republican voters to caucus as Democrats.

College Republicans on board with voting in Dem caucus. Uh oh. It's mischief time. pic.twitter.com/Z4dtjXAHKp

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 18, 2016

Here's the email sent by a GOP activist trying to encourage Republicans to switch and vote in Dem caucus.https://t.co/htYd3pr0kb

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 18, 2016

Will anyone do this? Could it work? And are they right about the weakness of Sanders in a general election? On all three, hard to know. But pumping up Sanders seems to be a key Republican dirty trick. Make of that what you will.

IF FOX NEWS CAN ATTACK THE POPE, WHY NOT TRUMP?

A lot of people think Donald Trump has finally gone too far:

Pope Francis suggested Thursday that Donald Trump is "not Christian" because he wants to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump fired back with his own statement, suggesting to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church that the Islamic State would love to have the Vatican as its "ultimate trophy."

"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," Francis told reporters aboard the papal plane in response to a specific question about the presidential candidate, according to Reuters' account. "This is not in the gospel."

... At a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump fired back, remarking that "if and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS," the pope will wish he was president.

Trump's campaign issued a full statement moments later, in which he called the pope's questioning of his faith "disgraceful."

"If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians," he said in the statement.

Sure, Trump can attack Megyn Kelly and John McCain. But the pope? Doesn't the right regard that as part of the war on Christianity? Isn't Catholicism very much in favor on the right these days, because of its opposition to abortion and homosexuality? Isn't Catholicism so cool among right-wingers that Republican politicians from the heartland of Protestantism, like Kansas governor Sam Brownback, have converted, with no damage to their careers?

Well, yes -- right-wingers like the right-wing parts of Catholicism. They don't like the empathetic part, or any other part that conflicts with the conservative agenda. And they're not shy about saying so.

Before the Trump campaign started, Fox News defined the acceptable limits of conservatism, and Fox has gone after the pope on more than one occasion. Here's a FoxNews.com op-ed from 2013 titled "Pope Francis is the Catholic Church’s Obama -- God Help Us":

... Francis is beating a retreat for the Catholic Church, and making sure its controversial doctrines are whispered, not yelled -- no wonder the New York Times is in love.

Just like President Obama loved apologizing for America, Pope Francis likes to apologize for the Catholic Church....

In his interviews with those in the left-wing media he seeks to impress, Francis has said that the Church needs to stop being ‘obsessed’ with abortion and gay marriage, and instead of seeking to convert people, “we need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.”

... On world matters, Francis’ statements are embarrassing. About communism, a destructive ideology that slaughtered millions of Catholics, he said:

“Learning about it through a courageous and honest person was helpful. I realized…an aspect of the social, which I then found in the social doctrine of the Church."

Not such kind words for the free market, however. In his recent apostolic exhortation he slammed unfettered capitalism, calling it ‘a new tyranny.’

... there is more real tyranny in socialist cesspools like Francis’ home of Argentina than in places where capitalism is predominant.

Last summer, Fox's Greg Gutfeld attacked Francis on the air:

Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld accused Pope Francis of being “the most dangerous person on the planet” because he is seeking “strange new respect” from adversaries on climate change.

On Tuesday night’s episode of The Five, the panel discussed the pontiff’s leaked encyclical that warns of “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem” unless drastic changes to lifestyle and energy consumption are made globally. Gutfeld accused the pope of having a “Marxist” background and Malthusian belief system.

“And that is what the Pope is doing. He doesn’t want to be your grandfather’s pope. He wants to be a modern pope. All he needs is dreadlocks and a dog with a bandanna and he could be on Occupy Wall Street,” Gutfeld ranted....

A few months later, shortly before Francis's speech to the U.S. Congress, Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote in a FoxNews.com op-ed that Francis is a "false prophet," citing a list of offenses:

Now, here comes Pope Francis to use moral relativism to take the Church in two dangerous directions. The first is an assault on the family, and the second is an assault on the free market -- two favorite political targets of the left.

In the past month, without consulting his fellow bishops, the pope has weakened the sacrament of matrimony by making annulments easier to obtain....
It gets worse.

The Church has taught for 400 years that abortion is murder. Because the victim of an abortion is always innocent, helpless and uniquely under the control of the mother, abortion removes the participants from access to the sacraments. Until now. Last week, Pope Francis, without consulting his fellow bishops, ordered that any priest may return those who have killed a baby in a womb to the communion of the faithful. He said he did this because he was moved by the anguished cries of mothers contemplating the murder of their babies.

I doubt he will defend these decisions before Congress. He will, instead, assault the free market, which he blames for poverty, pollution and the mass migrations into Europe away from worn-torn areas in the Middle East.

It's not just Fox. I don't see much anger directed at Breitbart for its current story on the pope, written by Ben Shapiro and titled "Pope Francis Rips Capitalism, American Immigration Policy at Mexican Border." The comments are very Trump-y:



Shapiro has felt free to attack Francis at Breitbart. His piece after the pope's speech before Congress was titled "Pope Francis Slams Capitalism, Death Penalty, Immigration Law; No Real Mention of Abortion, Gay Marriage." No one's accused him of hating Christianity, as far as I know.

You have to remember that right-wing Catholics have been attacking Francis for some time now, and not being shy about it, as an AP story noted in December:

While Francis remains enormously popular among most rank-and-file Catholics, a small but vocal group of conservatives who have never much cared for his radical agenda have grown increasingly strident in criticizing the pope now that there is little doubt left about his priorities.

They have taken aim at the just-concluded synod on family issues, where the divisive issue of Communion for the civilly remarried took center stage. They have raised alarm at Francis' call for a more decentralized church and his loosening of the Vatican's marriage annulment process. They have winced at his environmental alarmism, wondered what's in store for Catholic orthodoxy in this Holy Year of Mercy and blasted as sacrilege the recent screening of nature shots on St. Peter's Basilica.

The Remnant, a small, traditionalist U.S. newspaper, last week penned an open letter begging Francis to change course or resign, arguing that his papacy was "causing grave harm to the church." ...

"You have given many indications of an alarming hostility to the church's traditional teaching, discipline and customs, and the faithful who try to defend them, while being preoccupied with social and political questions beyond the competence of the Roman Pontiff," the newspaper said. "This appalling situation has no parallel in church history."

So, yeah, Trump will be fine -- as usual.

TODAY IN "BOTH SIDES DO IT": SUPREME COURT EDITION

If you're an ordinary person, you might think the Supreme Court fight is a battle between an obstructionist party and a non-obstructionist party. Maybe you think the two parties have swapped roles, although Democrats in living memory have never refused to allow a Supreme Court vacancy to be filled -- even when they voted down Robert Bork three decades ago, they ultimately approved Anthony Kennedy.

But according to Michael Shear of The New York Times, this isn't a battle between obstructionist Republicans and non-obstructionist Democrats -- it's a battle between two camps full of connivers. And, in fact, the Democratic camp's conniving deserves more of the attention:

Supreme Court Vacancy Has Left and Right Ready to Pounce

Could there be a more "both sides do it" headline?

President Obama’s senior adviser and his top lawyer were blunt with liberal activists on a strategy call as they jumped into what political professionals in Washington expect to be one of the hardest-fought Supreme Court battles in a generation.

In what one participant described as part pep rally and part planning session, Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, and Neil Eggleston, the White House chief counsel, urged dozens of the president’s allies who were on the phone not to hold back in their condemnation of Republicans for refusing to hold hearings to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last week.

The White House hardly needed to prod the interest groups during the Tuesday call. The outcome of this battle could determine the fate of a vast array of contentious issues for decades to come: immigration, climate change, gun rights, campaign finance, health care, affirmative action, gay rights and abortion.

So in record time, the liberal and conservative Washington lobbying and advocacy machines have roared to life as both sides prepare for a fight on a battlefield that includes the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. Advocacy groups are vowing to spend millions of dollars.

So the headline tells us that the conniving is being done by the "left and right," but the right doesn't show up until Paragraph 4 -- and then not very often after that.

We're eventually told that conservative groups are also gearing up for battle, but because the Democrats and liberals get the lead, the impression conveyed is that conservatives are just reacting to Dem/left skulduggery:

... Like their liberal counterparts, the leaders of conservative groups have jumped to reorder their priorities as they begin dividing up the tasks: raising money, lobbying senators, firing up constituents, planning radio and television ads, writing letters to editors and creating talking points for television appearances.

Moments after Justice Scalia’s death became public, the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative organization, organized a team of five lawyers to scour the backgrounds of potential nominees, and another team to research the Senate’s procedural rules. The group has so far sent out a million emails to its members and is preparing videos to post on its Facebook page early next week.

“The stakes are as high as anything we have dealt with in Washington in a decade,” said Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel for the law center. “This is not even the beginning of what this fight will be. It’s full-media, full-legal research, full-government affairs, full-throttle on this.”

Curt Levey, the executive director of the conservative group FreedomWorks and a veteran of six Supreme Court fights, said the struggle over this vacancy could be the first to rival the intensity of the fight over President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.

“Scalia was only dead a couple of hours when the rhetoric was already heated,” Mr. Levey said Wednesday. “I don’t see how we avoid a Borkian experience.”

(I love the blame-shifting in that last quote. Hours after Scalia's death, "the rhetoric was already heated"? Whose rhetoric, Mr. Levey? I realize thatmemory dims after, oh, a few days, but it was your side announcing that no successor would be approved, even before Scalia's body was cold.)

Shear shows us the battle lines being drawn, and now he's introduced the conservative combatants -- but the liberals get most of the attention:

... The players are familiar: On the left, the court campaign will be run by groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Alliance for Justice, American Bridge, Americans United for Change, People for the American Way and labor unions. On the right, FreedomWorks, the Judicial Crisis Network, the Family Research Council and the American Center for Law and Justice have begun to take up the fight.

The law center posted a petition on its website over the weekend calling for “No Scotus Nomination Before Election.” By Wednesday morning, more than 13,000 people had signed it. A competing petition by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and other liberal groups claims 500,000 signatures urging senators to confirm a nominee to the court.

The struggle to shape the court’s future is also drawing combatants from groups that have not typically played central roles in Supreme Court fights. The League of Conservation Voters, for example, which sees the court’s outlook on environmental issues as critical, has begun calling and emailing its 1.5 million members, asking them to reach out to their senators and urge them to confirm Mr. Obama’s nominee this year.

“It’s hugely important that the president nominate someone and the Senate acts,” said Gene Karpinski, the president of the league. “We will be more engaged in this effort than we ever have before in a Supreme Court nomination. We’ll urge our members to create pressure on the Senate. We want to make sure that message is heard loudly and clearly.”

And this continues. We get half a paragraph about Republican plan, followed by a paragraph and a half about Democratic plans:

... Republicans, led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and supported by the outside groups, will make the case that a nomination should be made by the next president, not Mr. Obama. The president’s coalition will argue that the process should move forward this year.

A three-page document of talking points distributed to the progressive groups after the White House call on Tuesday suggested lines like “in America, we have one president at a time” and “there is plenty of time for Congress to fulfill its responsibility to give the president’s nominee a fair hearing and timely vote.”

And then we get three more paragraphs suggesting that conservation groups are so darn liberal they might oppose an Obama nominee from the left:

On the conference call, the liberal groups were urged to stick together once a nominee is announced, to defer to the president and to coalesce behind his pick. But there is already some evidence that not all groups will view Mr. Obama’s nominee through the same lens.

Some environmental organizations are expressing concerns about one possible candidate, Sri Srinivasan, an appeals court judge who cleared the Senate with a 97-to-0 vote. As a corporate lawyer, he defended Jeffrey Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron, the energy company that went bankrupt after an accounting and fraud scandal. He also represented Exxon Mobil after a human rights group sued the company, accusing it of complicity in human rights abuses committed by state security forces that protect a large natural gas field in Indonesia.

“We think that any potential Supreme Court nominee that has clear ties to big oil and clear ties to two of the worst companies -- Enron and Exxon -- given the issues of climate change and other environmental safety issues that are percolating would be one of the worst picks,” said Jane Kleeb, the head of Bold Nebraska, a group that has lobbied against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

So to sum up: Both sides are battling, but the pro-pick battle is being led from the White House. Left-wing groups abound, some of them to the left of the president.

Conservative groups fade into the background.

In other words: Both sides do it -- but Democrats do it more.

Just another day in the Beltway press corps.

WHY ARE WE SO CONFIDENT?

Predictwise says the Democrats have this in this bag, Hillary in particular:



So do the Iowa Electronic Markets:



And yet Democrats lose seven out of eight matchups in the new USA Today poll:

In hypothetical matchups in the general election:

• Clinton loses by 2 points to Trump (43%-45%), 1 point to Cruz (44%-45%), 6 points to Rubio (42%-48%) and 11 points to Kasich (38%-49%). That's a weaker standing than the former secretary of State showed in December's survey, when she narrowly led Trump and Cruz and trailed Rubio by just 2 points.

• Sanders loses by 1 point to Trump (43%-44%), 3 points to Kasich (41%-44%) and 4 points to Rubio (42%-46%) -- each of them a slightly stronger showing than Clinton -- and he leads Cruz by 2 points (44%-42%).

Clinton and Sanders both lose to Rubio, Trump, and Kasich, and Clinton loses to Cruz. Yes, the margins are tight, but why are they even tight if this is a Democratic lock?

Yes, as Kevin Kruse says, other recent polls show better Democratic results (though they're not much better, except in matchups with Trump or Jeb), and maybe Republicans are doing better in the polls because they're having a more interesting race and getting more attention.

But what if a sense of resistance to Clinton is just building and building, exactly the way it has in the GOP toward Jeb Bush? What if -- as seems to be the case with Jeb -- it's irreversible? And what if Sanders is struggling to make a positive first impression because he's being attacked by black activists as a Johnny-come-lately on civil rights, by Clinton supporters as the leader of an army of boorish simpletons, by the cocktails-with-hedge-funders punditocracy as a dangerous radical, and by everyone else as Grandpa Simpson? And let's not even talk about the massive money gap if Sanders somehow wins the nomination.

I think Joe Biden could at least have engendered broad-based goodwill this year -- and if you're going run a guy prone to embarrassing utterances, wouldn't the best year to run him be a year when Donald Trump is saying things that are much worse? But we didn't get Biden.

I continue to have a really bad feeling about this election. I don't see Sanders having the war chest to win and I don't see the public rallying around Clinton. The most optimistic scenario is that the Republicans really might be handing the election to the Democrats as a gift. Is that it? Is hat enough? Should I stop worrying?

WILL SCARY HILLARY BE THE NEW SCARY BERNIE? WILL BLOOMBERG BE THE NEW RUBIO?

Mainstream pundits always feel the need to proclaim that Both Sides Do it, so they're telling us these days that the scary Donald Trump phenomenon on the right has an exact analogue on the left, namely the scary Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Never mind the fact that Trump is a literal know-nothing who's flirting with fascism, while Sanders is a political veteran whose policies would be considered moderate in a Western European nation. They're both terrifying! In exactly the same way!

But maybe lazy pundits won't say that for much longer. Soon, perhaps, pundits will pair Scary Donald and Scary Hillary:

Americans aren't just for or against presidential candidates this year: Color them scared.

In a national USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, likely voters given the choice of four options -- enthusiastic, satisfied, dissatisfied or scared -- are most inclined to say the prospect of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination or Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic one would leave them fearful.

... for Trump, 38% of likely voters would be scared if the real-estate mogul won the GOP nomination -- including not only 62% of Democrats but also 17% of Republicans. A third of independents, 33%, feel that way.

... And for Clinton, a former secretary of State, 33% would be scared -- including 60% of Republicans and also 8% of Democrats. Just over a third of independents, 35%, agree.

The non-conservative press could depict Clinton as the safe, color-within-the-lines sort of politician she actually is. But no -- if she and Trump are the nominees, we won't be told that one party is offering to put a steady, seasoned hand in charge of the ship of state, while the other party has chosen a Putin wannabe with narcissistic personality disorder. Instead we'll be told that they're both frightening in disturbingly similar ways. The mainstream press, taking its cue from the right, has made her into a monster, so she'll go into the general election as Trump's twin.

And yes, I still think Clinton will be the nominee. I know -- Sanders is in a virtual tie with Clinton in Nevada according to a new CNN poll, and yes, the two are effectively tied nationally according to a new Quinnipiac poll. But Clinton leads in ten of twelve early primary states according to Public Policy Polling, mostly by double digits, in large part because of support from African-American voters. So I still think it's her race to lose.

Mike Bloomberg probably won't run if Clinton beats Sanders. But if he were to run, I think he'd be the overwhelming mainstream-media favorite, the candidate who looks good enough at closing time to go home with after the Beltway press's mancrushes -- Rubio, Christie, Kasich, Ryan -- have either withdrawn from the race or, in Ryan's case, chosen not to run. And Bloomberg will definitely be the Rubio of the general election if he runs against Trump and Sanders.

I suspect that won't be enough to enable him to overcome his disadvantages -- lack of charisma, strictly regional appeal, reputation as a gun-grabber and nanny-stater -- but he'll absolutely be the favorite of the chattering classes. Not that that's been much help to Rubio, Christie, Kasich, or, for that matter, Jeb Bush.

JEB BUSH FINALLY TRIES RUNNING AS A REPUBLICAN

I probably don't have to post this. I'm sure you've seen it already.

America. pic.twitter.com/TeduJkwQF3

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 16, 2016

The Bush campaign posted this after the candidate toured a gun-making facility and the candidate was given the monogrammed pistol shown in the tweet.

I know that Jeb has been mercilessly mocked on Twitter since he posted this -- but don't forget, he's being mocked for defending guns. Among GOP base voters, I think that's good. Those voters harbor a permanent sense of persecution. They think they're hated because they own guns. I think many of them like owning guns precisely because gun ownership enables them to feel persecuted.

Yes, the very idea of the tweet has been repeatedly mocked:

.@JebBush Tatooine. pic.twitter.com/xnQDE7bVGh

— John Joseph Adams (@JohnJosephAdams) February 16, 2016

And Jeb himself has been mocked:

.@JebBush America. pic.twitter.com/7LlXYsdvZd

— Mashable (@mashable) February 16, 2016

But I imagine that gun-loving Republicans feel a sense of self-righteous rage when they see responses like this:

This is basically a version of the self-posted picture that ended Anthony Weiner's political career... https://t.co/3P4QQIV2HP

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 16, 2016

And this:

America.

cc @JebBush pic.twitter.com/PvyRYWVX6v

— Radio Angie (@AngieCoiro) February 16, 2016

SoI'm guessing that they're on Jeb's side -- which tells me that Jeb might be getting the hang of this running-as-a-Republican thing, nearly a year too late.

Now, if he really knew what he was doing, he'd be posting graphics like this one, which appears regularly at Free Republic:



But he's trying, at least, even though it's probably too late for his floundering campaign. And this is an appropriately Republican follow-up:

Jeb Bush's campaign is calling on CBS News to apologize for a report that cited jokes about the Republican presidential hopeful committing suicide.

"The network should apologize," Kristy Campbell, Bush's press secretary, told CNNMoney after the segment aired on Tuesday night's broadcast of the CBS Evening News.

In the report, CBS News correspondent Major Garrett said that social media was "abuzz" over a photo Bush had tweeted on Tuesday showing a firearm emblazoned with a personalized insignia that read, "Gov. Jeb. Bush."

"There were some people who were supportive, but many said, 'Your campaign is dying. Please, Governor Bush, don't take your own life.' Only in jest, but it shows you how painful things have become for Bush in South Carolina," Garrett reported....

"In addition to the mainstream-media's total lack of understanding when it comes to gun rights and gun culture, it is absolutely inexcusable to make light of suicide," Campbell wrote.

The Bush campaign is complaining despite the fact that Garrett's report is accurate:

@JebBush We know you're losing Jeb but suicide isn't the answer. Go paint with Georgie.

— Wireless Puppet (@WirelessPuppet) February 16, 2016

@JebBush @twerkrobot is... is this your suicide note

— gabagool respecter (@jimpjorps) February 16, 2016

Complaining about the media? That's perfect. Republicans love that.

The Bushies still don't seem at ease doing this sort of thing, but they may have finally figured out what party they're running in. Jeb has been running as a meek, mild whiner, and it's slowly dawning on him that he should have run as an angry, self-righteous whiner. After all, that's what Republicans like.

*****

UPDATE: Well, they're not impressed at Free Republic. This is a typical response:

Has he noticed the safety on it and I bet he can’t even load a mag.

Desperation for the Mama’s boy

Oh, and this:



But a couple of Freepers offer faint praise:

Niiiice. But still not voting for ya.

****

Im very happy to see something he does that I approve of, because there are not that many.

It's the right direction, but it's way too late. There should have been much more of this, and much less of Jeb's real personality and campaign style.