Friday, April 22, 2016

TRUMP CAMPAIGN DUPES MAINSTREAM MEDIA, WITH AN ASSIST FROM THE #NEVERTRUMPERS

See the bait. See the mainstream media rising to the bait.

Associated Press:
Donald Trump's chief lieutenants told skeptical Republican leaders Thursday that the GOP front-runner has been "projecting an image" so far in the 2016 primary season and "the part that he's been playing is now evolving" in a way that will improve his standing among general election voters.

The message, delivered behind closed doors in a private briefing, is part of the campaign's intensifying effort to convince party leaders Trump will moderate his tone in the coming months to help deliver big electoral gains this fall....
New York Times:
Donald J. Trump’s newly installed campaign chief sought to assure members of the Republican National Committee on Thursday night that Mr. Trump recognized the need to reshape his persona and that his campaign would begin working with the political establishment that he has scorned to great effect.
Washington Post:
Trump’s chief strategist Paul Manafort told members of the Republican National Committee in a closed-door briefing here Thursday afternoon that his candidate has been playing a “part” on the campaign trail, but is starting to pivot toward presenting a more businesslike and presidential “persona.”

“He gets it,” Manafort told RNC members.
Bloomberg:
Outsider candidate Donald Trump sent emissaries to soothe tensions with the GOP's pre-eminent insiders Thursday, and tried to convince them that his bombastic demeanor is merely stagecraft, that his high negatives in the polls can be overcome, and that if he’s the nominee, he’ll raise money for the party and help the Republicans locally and nationally to win elections.
And how did we find this out?
The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange.
And:
Mr. Manafort’s comments ... were made behind closed doors, which were guarded by security. But a person in attendance taped the speech and shared the recording with The New York Times.
Oh, I'm sure this was a totally unauthorized leak.

There's some skepticism in these reports, but the message is that everything will be fine and dandy and just be politics as usual if Trump is the nominee, so the press doesn't haven't to do hand-wringing coverage about the hijacking of the Republican Party by a dangerous barbarian. (Even after all these months of Trump, much of the press still hasn't been able to bring itself to say that the rot is within the GOP and conservative movement, but never mind.)

The #NeverTrump movement, oddly, is playing right along with this, telling fellow conservatives who've fallen for Trump that Trump has never really been the guy they've cheered on for months. Erick Erickson:
... this is an admission against interest that Trump has been lying to the American people and his supporters.
Legal Insurrection's William Jacobson:
Trump is playing his core supporters, knows he can’t win a national election with his current message, and is planning to change characters mid-play to soothe the GOP elites he rails against to get you worked up....

Those of us who are not blinded by the light have tried to warn you.
The mainstream media started selling us the New Trump line after he was reasonably civil in his victory speech after the New York primary -- never mind the fact that the next day he was praising torture. Charlie Pierce wasn't fooled:
This will now be the pattern. He, Trump will campaign thuggishly. It will work. Then he will accept victory less thuggishly, and he will be congratulated for it. Then it all will start again, over and over, all the way to November.
Nor was Digby:
Since his victory speech didn’t include any crude epithets or mentions of his manly member, [the media] seemed to be under the impression that he’s a restrained and dignified statesman worthy of the presidency....

But the big rally in Indiana yesterday showed no changes in Trump’s usual meandering lunacy punctuated by cries of “build that wall” and “get ’em out!” He was back to “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” and rambling bizarrely about General Patton getting rid of ISIS in three days. At times he was completely unhinged, going on about how he “loves” waterboarding and wants to kill oil truck drivers in Iraq. Everyone can rest easy.

... In other words, Trump is still Trump.
But they're exceptions. They're not really mainstream. They'll notice that this is still going on, and Trump is making no effort to stop it, but it doesn't fit the new narrative, so much of the rest of the press will say it has nothing to do with the nice presumptive nominee:
First it was an email warning Steve House, the Colorado GOP chairman, to hide his family members and “pray you make it to Cleveland.” Then there was the angry man who called his cell phone and told him to put a gun down his throat.

“He said, ‘I’ll call back in two minutes and if you’re still there, I’ll come over and help you’,” House recalled.

... In hotel hallways and across dinner tables, many party leaders attending this week’s meetings shared similar stories. One party chair says a Trump supporter recently got in his face and promised “bloodshed” if he didn’t win the GOP nomination. An Indiana delegate who criticized Trump received a note warning against “traditional burial” that ended with, “We are watching you.”
A political insider in an expensive suit is conveying the message that Trump is domesticated now. So that's what the mainstream press wants you to hear. The more you fall for this, the closer the race gets in November.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:09 AM 7 comments

Thursday, April 21, 2016

IF TED CRUZ WANTS THE NOMINATION, HE SHOULD RUN AN ALL-BATHROOM CAMPAIGN FROM NOW ON (update)

(I was just finishing with this post when I learned about the death of Prince. It feels odd to post this now -- Prince's best work could pull your spirit out of the muck, and what follows is all about the muck. But here's what I wrote anyway.)

As we've all learned through painful experience, it's rarely a good idea to predict that Donald Trump is going to suffer because of some controversial thing he's said or done. To his Republican base, at least, he can do no wrong.

Or can he?
Transgender people should be able to use whatever bathroom they want, Donald Trump said Thursday.

"Oh, I had a feeling that question was going to come up, I will tell you. North Carolina did something that was very strong. And they're paying a big price. There's a lot of problems," the Republican presidential candidate said during a town hall event on NBC's "Today."

... "There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go. They use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate," Trump said. "There has been so little trouble. And the problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic -- I mean, the economic punishment that they're taking."

Matt Lauer then asked whether Trump has any transgender people working for his company.

"I really don't know. I probably do. I really don't know," Trump said, answering that he would allow, say, transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner to use whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower.
Kevin Drum wonders how this will go over in Trump Nation:
At a guess, Trump's supporters are mostly people who think the North Carolina law is a good idea. Or at least, they used to. But now that Trump has come out against it, will the rights of transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice become the latest rallying cry of the angry working class? Perhaps we're about to find out just how much influence Trump really has with his supporters.
Let's go to the Trump-friendly confines of Free Republic and see how this is playing:
Donald, you have lost your mind.

Thanks for messing over an awful lot of your supporters.

****

It should be no surprise when liberals say liberal things.

****

And the veil comes off. He’s not a conservative and will not advance conservatism....

****

I’m out of here. This really hacks me off. It is absolutely indefensible.

****

People are going to start wearing Depends when they are out in public for long periods. They will stop using restrooms.

The public restroom will cease to be.

****

Civil unions > gay marriage > bathroom perverts > Marxist utopia.
Ted Cruz pounced:



During a Thursday interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Cruz expressed support for the North Carolina law, arguing that the provision regarding bathrooms makes sense.

"My five-year-old knows the difference between boys and girls. You’ve got the Obama education department suing to try to force junior highs to let teenage boys shower with teenage girls," Cruz told Beck. "That’s crazy. That’s not a reasonable position, and it is simply crazy."
But if Cruz wants to salvage his campaign, he should do more than pounce -- he should make this the #1 issue he talks about from now on.

Cruz doesn't do very well in the East, where Republicans are far less likely to be evangelical Christians, and so he's looking at defeats in five Eastern states this coming Tuesday. But it's my sense from watching the right that rank-and-file conservatives, secular as well as religious, have worked themselves up into a frenzy over transgendered bathroom rights. They are as certain that accommodating trans people in public restrooms leads to rape as they are that massive voter fraud is taking place -- i.e., they don't care what the facts say because it just feels true.

So Cruz should probably run an all-toilet campaign from now on. No, it won't endear him to the business-oriented Republican muckamucks he'll need at the convention, but he can tell them he doesn't really mean what he's saying -- remember, he's the guy who's out there promising to deal with the "crisis" of gay marriage while hitting up rich gay businessmen for cash and quietly telling other wealthy donors that fighting marriage equality wouldn't be"a top-three priority" in a Cruz administration.

So go for it, Ted. Trump is out-hating you on so many issues. This is your chance to out-hate him for once. I think this could really drive Trump's poll numbers down, even in the East, unless he walks it back.

****

UPDATE, FRIDAY: I think Cruz is taking my advice.



Also:

Posted by Steve M. at 1:46 PM 10 comments

HE'S SAID THIS BEFORE, I DON'T BELIEVE IT, AND IT DOESN'T MATTER

We're being told that Bernie Sanders is not going to become an independent again:
On “With All Due Respect,” Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, discusses the New York primary, superdelegates and the future of the Vermont senator’s presidential run. Asked by host Mark Halperin if Sanders now will be a member of the Democratic Party “for life,” Weaver responded, “Yes he is, yes he is.”
This despite the fact that, as Politico notes,
Sanders’ Senate office has identified him as an independent as recently as April 1.
Well, typing "(I-VT)" is probably a reflex for his office staff. I don't care. In any case, his declaration of Democratic loyalty isn't new. This is from a November article in The Boston Globe:
When a reporter asked Sanders his party allegiance after he filed, Sanders responded, “I’m a Democrat.”

He then called on [Raymond] Buckley, the [New Hampshire] Democratic chairman, who confirmed the senator’s party allegiance. Sanders added that he would run as a Democrat in any future elections.
Do I believe this? No. Sanders is up for reelection to the Senate in 2018. If Democrats are in trouble that year -- as is usually the case in midterm cycles when there's a Democratic president -- I assume Sanders will do what's worked for him in the past: He'll call himself an independent again and run that way. And so what? I'm sure he'll still caucus with the Democrats if he's reelected. He'll continue to be a progressive senator. Where's the harm?

I don't care what he calls himself now. I just don't want this campaign to do net harm to Hillary Clinton (we're still not sure she's going to face a beatable Donald Trump) and the Democratic Party, regardless of how deeply flawed Clinton and the party are. They're all we're going to have in November standing between us and the infinitely worse Republicans. If Sanders can help beat back the Republicans in a way that doesn't require loyalty to the Democrats, fine, go for it. I'm all for that. But I don't see a wave of progressive indie candidates out there, so we're stuck with the Dems, and trashing Clinton and the party isn't helping. Sanders should critique them, but do it with an eye on the near-term electoral goal as well as his longer-term goal of moving American politics to the left. That's what matters.Apart from that, as far as I'm concerned, he can call himself whatever he wants.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:53 AM 5 comments

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

MY NARRATIVE! MY PRECIOUS TRUMP NARRATIVE!

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza is here with the new accepted media narrative about Donald Trump:
Gone was "Lyin' Ted." In its place was "Senator Cruz." Gone was the long-winded speech that went nowhere. In its place was a succinct recitation of states and delegates won. Gone was the two-day vacation as a reward for winning. In its place was an early morning trip to Indiana followed by another planned stop in Maryland.

Donald Trump 2.0 made his official debut Tuesday night following his sweeping victory in New York, a win that looks to net him 90 delegates and reestablishes him as the man to beat in the Republican presidential race.

That version of Trump was markedly more disciplined, gentler and more appealing than the version of Trump we've seen for much of the last year.
The same narrative shows up in a New York Times story titled "Donald Trump, After Difficult Stretch, Shows a Softer Side":
In a lengthy interview in his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower on Tuesday, shortly after casting a ballot for himself and hours before the polls closed, the usually boastful Mr. Trump seemed a bit more humbled as he reflected on his “evolving” campaign and looked to the challenges ahead.
Trump is mellowing! Trump is becoming dignified and presidential as he pivots to the general election!

Or, y'know, maybe not:
Donald Trump professed his love for waterboarding during a campaign rally in Indianapolis, Indiana on Wednesday calling it “great.”

... After slamming Ted Cruz for his “weak, pathetic answer” at a debate regarding waterboarding, Trump said, “They asked me, What do you think about waterboarding, Mr. Trump?’ I said I love it. I love it, I think it’s great. And I said the only thing is, we should make it much tougher than waterboarding, and if you don’t think it works folks, you’re wrong...."
Yeah, he's "evolving" all right. Oh, and he called Cruz "Lyin' Ted" again, too. No, he's never going to be "presidential" for more than a few hours.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:00 PM 3 comments

HOW YOUR RIGHT-WING UNCLE IS GOING TO REACT TO HARRIET TUBMAN ON THE $20 BILL

You've probably heard the news:
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Wednesday will announce plans to both keep Alexander Hamilton on the front of the $10 bill and to knock Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 in favor of Harriet Tubman, sources tell POLITICO.

... Jackson isn’t getting completely booted off the $20 bill. He’s likely to remain on the back.
I'm sorry Jackson is staying on the bill at all, especially if he's sharing it with Tubman -- he was a slave trader who set a Native American genocide in motion. But the addition of Tubman is good news.

Now, how is your right-wing uncle going to react? Well, it's complicated. He might actually claim solidarity with Tubman, along these lines:



In fact, some right-wingers are probably going to demand that Tubman be depicted on the bill with a firearm:



But most are probably going to react pretty much the way you'd expect:



But will they respond exclusively with racist bile? Oh, no -- some of them will pretend that their objections are fact-based.

I went to the white supremacist site VDARE.com, certain that I'd find something terrible about Tubman. I wasn't disappointed. Relying on a James McPherson essay in The New York Review of Books, VDARE's James Fulford writes:
Tubman remained illiterate her whole life. Her 1869 “biography,” Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, was actually written by a white friend named Sarah Bradford, who also wrote Harriet—The Moses of Her People, in 1886. There are only four letters of Tubman’s in existence, and they were dictated.
(Yeah, and so?)
* Tubman was said to have led 300 slaves to freedom -- McPherson makes it between 57 and 70.

*Many of the fugitives Tubman conducted north were her relatives. That would make her the Moses of her family, rather than of her people.

* Tubman was said to have had a reward of $10, 000, $12, 000, or even $40, 000 for her recapture—the last figure would be equivalent to more than a million dollars today. The largest reward actually posted was $100.
in a 2013 Washington Post article, Krissah Thompson acknowledges all that -- though I'm struggling to see how any of it significantly diminishes Tubman's accomplishments. What's wrong with leading dozens of slaves to freedom? And a $100 reward may not seem like much, but there are many ways to measure inflation, and by one measure -- based on wages of unskilled workers -- $100 in 1849 money is the equivalent to $22,600 today. By other measures, it's far more.

Fulford continues:
* Tubman suffered from some “temporal lobe epilepsy” or “narcolepsy” or possibly “cataplexy” as a result of a head injury. Symptoms, as described by McPherson: “[F]or the rest of her life Harriet would periodically lose consciousness and appear to fall asleep, sometimes for only a few seconds, sometimes for several minutes, and then awaken to carry on as if nothing had happened.” This really terrified the people she was supposed be rescuing -- and raises questions about how much she could really have done.
I read this as a triumph over a serious brain injury, but your mileage may vary.

Now, here's what really sticks in Fulford's craw:
A final point: how did the modern Harriet Tubmania get started? McPherson explains:
For decades after her death in 1913 at the probable age of ninety (her exact birth date is unknown), Tubman languished in obscurity. The only African-Americans who enjoyed historical fame in those years were George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington. In the 1930s the labor activist Earl Conrad (Earl Cohen) decided to write a biography of Tubman.
Milton Sennett’s 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History, says that while mainstream publishers “ignored Harriet Tubman, interest in her was being cultivated by left-wing organizations, specifically ones connected with the radical labor movement.”

The “radical labor movement” and “labor activist Earl Conrad” both mean “Communist”, by the way. The Russian-controlled Communist Party of the USA was active in “civil rights” in the old days, for reasons of its own. That’s where the modern Tubman boom started.
The title of Fulford's piece is "Harriet Tubman -- Gun-Toting Republican, Delusional Narcoleptic, and/or Creation of Communist Propaganda?"

Which of these lines of attack is your uncle going to choose? Probably all of them at various times -- recall that Martin Luther King, to the right, is both a commie sex addict and a conservative Republican who would hate any modern movement for racial justice. So steel yourself for this nonsense.

****

And on the subject of Andrew Jackson, there's this, from a couple of dayt ago:



BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Why don't we just create another bill for a woman? Create like a --

[HEATHER] NAUERT: Like a $2 bill. No, a $4 bill.

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): No, more than that.

KILMEADE: Make it a $25 or something because Andrew Jackson at 13 was a courier in the Revolutionary War.

NAUERT: Right.

KILMEADE: He was a congressman, a senator. Certainly one of best generals we ever had.

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): You know, well here's the thing that really got me about what she just said is they're going to keep Hamilton on because of a Broadway show.

NAUERT: That's crazy.

DOOCY: If that is the standard, next thing you know, folks, we're going to have cats on money.
Yikes.

UPDATE: Ben Carson apparently watched that segment:

Posted by Steve M. at 2:17 PM 8 comments

I THINK SANDERS JUST TURNED INTO RICK LAZIO

I'm encountering a lot of theories about Hillary Clinton's big win over Bernie Sanders in New York. Politico's Gabriel Debenedetti sees the Sanders campaign in New York as a series of gaffes. I agree with Debenedetti that the Daily News interview in which Sanders seemed uninformed was a real stumble, but I disagree with him on the importance of the trip to the Vatican -- I'd need to see numbers, but I question whether most New York voters had an opinion about the trip one way or another, and I imagine quite a few were barely aware that it happened.

(By the way, only losers' gaffes ever make their way into analyses like this. Why doesn't Debenedetti mention Bill Clinton's embarrassing defense of the 1994 crime bill? Because Bill's wife won. If she'd lost, that would have been cited as a key factor, whether or not that was true.)

My feeling is that it just came down to tone. As the campaign went on, Sanders increasingly seemed to despise Clinton. His anger seemed personal. I wonder how many voters felt as if they were watching a rerun of every attack on Hillary Clinton since the 1990s. You can say what you want about her policy preferences and the choices she's made in her career, you can argue that she's too conservative and too compromised, but when someone pounds on her, she seems human and vulnerable -- and unless you loathe her, it's hard not to feel something in response to that kind of pounding.

The race seems divisive, but polls show that the vast majority of Democrats would vote for either of the candidates in November -- yet the Sanders message seemed to be that Clinton is history's greatest monster. If you were an older voter who'd ever felt solidarity with Hillary Clinton at any time in the past quarter century, Sanders was asking you to repudiate yourself. If you'd ever been inspired by the thought of Hillary breaking through the glass ceiling, you were being told that you were a dupe and a Wall Street pawn, so snap out of it. Sanders has a vision of a better America, but anger was pushed into the foreground. That might work with Republicans. It didn't work with New York Democrats.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:20 AM 9 comments

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

NEW YORK VOTING PROBLEMS AREN'T ABOUT YOU, BERNIE FANS, BUT YOU'RE RIGHT: VOTING SUCKS HERE

A lot of Bernie Sanders supporters can't vote for him here in New York because of our jump-through-hoops voting laws:
The Empire State has no early voting and no same-day registration. Party primaries are open only to registered Democrats or Republicans, and new voters must register at least 25 days in advance in order to participate. What if you were already registered but wanted to change your party registration to vote in a particular primary? Unless you did so by October 9 of last year -- more than six months before the April 19 primary -- you’re out of luck.
If you're a Sanders supporter and you think all of this was an evil plot by Hillary Clinton to suppress your vote, you should understand that these restrictions have been in place for decades. On the other hand, you're absolutely right: These laws are awful.

But they're not aimed at you:
... while Governor Andrew Cuomo has embraced certain proposals for reform, like limited early voting and automatic registration through the DMV, major changes face little chance of passage in the state legislature. “Elected officials don’t want to change something they’ve gotten elected by, and they like that status quo,” Bartoletti said.

Republicans in the state Senate are particularly hesitant to embrace changes that might threaten their narrow majority. But Jackie Salit, the president of IndependentVoting.org, said Democrats are equally to blame for antiquated laws aimed at preserving the two-party system. “The political parties in New York have the state on lockdown, and they’re very committed to protecting that,” Salit said.
Yup, that's it. Republicans have controlled the state Senate forever, and Democrats have controlled the state Assembly. Nobody, including the Democratic governor, genuinely wants to upset the balance of power.

This is not like GOP vote suppression. It's not aimed at the voters of one party. You're not required to devote significant amounts of time and money to tracking down birth certificates and showing up with them at government offices that are frequently closed. It's not that you can't register and vote at all. But, yes, it's still bad.

And, obviously, so is this:
... the city’s Board of Elections was pummeled with questions Monday about how 54,000 Democratic voters vanished from the rolls in Brooklyn.

The voter rolls on April 1 showed the borough had 853,687 registered Democrats who are considered “active” because they voted at least once in the last four years.

But in November, there were 917,508, or 63,558 more.

The board said the numbers changed because many once-active voters were moved to the inactive list.

But that list grew by only 9,154 voters -- from 82,807 to 91,961 -- leaving 54,404 Brooklyn voters missing.
I don't know if it's good or bad that this actually might be the explanation:
Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan said the mystery is easily explained: Because of retirements and staff illness, the voting list was not properly maintained in Brooklyn for six to eight months.

When staffers caught up with the backlog, he said, they purged voters who should have been removed earlier last year.
Hey, it's not vote suppression! It just looks like a huge purge because when we're short-staffed we just gave up on getting our work done in a timely fashion!

If you're reading "Brooklyn" and thinking "Brooklyn hipsters" and therefore "Bernie territory" and therefore "Hillary and her pal the mayor are deliberately suppressing the vote," I'm looking at this New York Post story and, yes, I'm seeing a video of a group of white voters waiting to vote at a polling place that's experiencing problems -- but there are non-white residents in another video about voting problems. Brooklyn is extremely diverse. The Post story cites problems in Bushwick (increasingly hipster but still mostly non-white) and Brownsville (less than 3% white). If Hillary Clinton had evil minions suppressing the vote in either of these places, it would be more likely to hurt her than help her. So that's not what's happening. It's just the system breaking down.

A problem here is that Americans, for understandable reasons, associate the Democratic Party with the Northeast, with big cities, and thus, obviously, with Northeastern big cities and industrial states -- and when those cities and states fail to deliver services, it tars the party as a whole, nationwide. In the past, the people pointing fingers would be Fox-obsessed right-wingers. Now some of them will be Bernie backers -- and you can't blame them.



The same goes for those voting laws, which are also going to be hung around the necks of Democrats. Let me quote Robert Cruickshank again:









Democrats should be the party of effective government and effective voting even if that means lighting a fire under the butts of party hacks who do an indifferent job at boards of elections. Democrats should fight for democracy with fewer hurdles to jump even if entrenched incumbent hack politicians in state legislatures think that threatens them. Do a better job, folks.
Posted by Steve M. at 3:46 PM 2 comments

MICHAEL LIND, YOU'RE FORGETTING ONE THING: RICH PEOPLE

I keep thinking about the op-ed Michael Lind published a couple of days ago, in which he offered a hot take on the future of the two parties:
No matter who wins the New York primaries on Tuesday or which candidates end up as the presidential nominees of the two major parties, one thing is already clear: Trumpism represents the future of the Republicans and Clintonism the future of the Democrats.

Those who see the nationalist populism of Mr. Trump as an aberration in a party that will soon return to free-market, limited government orthodoxy are mistaken. So are those who believe that the appeal of Senator Bernie Sanders to the young represents a repudiation of the center-left synthesis shared by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In one form or another, Trumpism and Clintonism will define conservatism and progressivism in America.
Sanders isn't the future of the Democratic Party, Lind says; he thinks the young people who now like Sanders will mature into adulthood, get better jobs, and become less enamored of seriously redistributive economics, just the way their 1960s counterparts became more moderate as they aged. (I'm not sure how that's going to happen when big companies believe they never have to create good jobs again in America, expecting us to suck it up and accept that as the new normal.) Lind also thinks that Hillary Clinton actually has already moved significantly to the left of her husband, to a spot where she's in sync with the Democrats of the future:
[The] realignment within the Democratic Party requires Hillary Clinton to distance herself from many of the policies of her husband’s administration and to adopt policies favored by her party’s core constituencies. On issues from criminal justice to immigration enforcement, that is precisely what she has done. Even if she had not been challenged by Mr. Sanders, she probably would have done this anyway, because with the departure of the Reagan Democrats, the Democratic coalition has shifted to the left.
In fact, Lind thinks Clinton has driven Sanders to the left on some issues:
At the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Sanders the democratic socialist focused in the manner of a single issue candidate almost exclusively on themes of class, inequality and political corruption. But because he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, he has had to put greater emphasis on other issues, including racial disparity in policing and sentencing and the environment and immigration.

Having told Ezra Klein of Vox last July that open borders is “a Koch brothers proposal” that “would make everybody in America poorer,” Mr. Sanders recently criticized Mrs. Clinton for opposing drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants in 2007.
Well, that's ... an interesting way of looking at it. I think Sandersism probably isn't the future of the Democratic Party because the party never sustains its progressive movements, though I think some of what Sanders is talking about will filter down, especially if progressives have some success in fighting for change from outside electoral politics.

But the really dubious part of Lind's theory involves the Republicans. Lind -- and he's not alone in this -- believes that the Republican Party simply can't remain as corporatist as it's been:
Long before Mr. Trump threw his hat into the ring in 2015, the economic libertarians who are overrepresented in the donor class and Republican think tanks and magazines were losing to the populists. Opposition to illegal immigration went from being a fringe issue associated with Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s to a central test of whether one was a “true conservative” or a Republican in Name Only. In 2007 and again in 2013, the opposition of populist Republicans thwarted so-called comprehensive immigration reform in Congress.

Similarly, opposition from their own voters forced the Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress to squelch George W. Bush’s proposed partial privatization of Social Security. The Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit, enacted in 2003, had the support of aging white Republican voters even as it appalled and infuriated free-marketers and deficit hawks on the right.

Whatever becomes of his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump exposed the gap between what orthodox conservative Republicans offer and what today’s dominant Republican voters actually want -- middle-class entitlements plus crackdowns on illegal immigrants, Muslims, foreign trade rivals and free-riding allies. Other candidates less flawed than Mr. Trump and more acceptable to the Republican establishment, like Ted Cruz, are likely to bring Republican policy positions and Republican voter preferences more closely into alignment, by moving somewhat to the left on middle-class entitlements and somewhat to the right on immigration and trade.
Here's the problem with this: Where are the obscenely rich going to go? Lind writes about "[t]he Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism" -- but that's not going to be good enough for the Koch brothers and their friends. They're not going content themselves with lite corporatism. They want it all and they want it now. They want government budgets slashed. They want the tax burden shifted to the poor. They want government regulations eviscerated. They want America to evolve into the kind of Third World country to which they export manufacturing. Clintonism is pro-business, but it's not that pro-business.

So the filthy rich aren't going to give up the Republican Party without a fight. And, really, they won't have to. In the same way that every left-wing candidate-based "revolution" peters out when the campaign is over, Trumpism will lose focus as soon as he loses. The GOP will largely go back to being the Koch brothers' party -- in fact, it still is the Koch brothers' party all over the country, in races where there's no Trump to upset the status quo, which is the overwhelming majority of downballot contests. (Go here, for instance, to read about the massive amounts of money the Koch network is deploying in order to keep Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson in office.)

The sans-culottes might fight the rich to a standoff on immigration, but they're not going to beat the rich on shifting the tax burden, and they're not even going to try to fight them on deregulation. (To blue-collar right-wingers, less government sounds good!) So there will always be a party of the obscenely rich, and for the foreseeable future it's going to be the GOP.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:48 AM 3 comments

Monday, April 18, 2016

TED CRUZ: STATES SHOULD BE ABLE TO BAN INTERRACIAL MARRIAGES

On Good Morning America today, a married gay Republican name Todd Calogne addressed Ted Cruz and, citing so-called religious freedom laws, asked, "What would you as president do to protect me and my husband from that institutionalized discrimination?" Cruz danced around the question for a while, and eventually George Stephanopoulos asked him about his support for a constitutional amendment allowing states to ban same-sex marriage. Stephanopoulos's question: “What would that mean for couples like Todd and his husband who already are married?”

Cruz gave what a RedState diarist calls a "perfect response":
“I am a constitutionalist and under the Constitution, marriage is a question for the states. That has been the case from the very beginning of this country -- that it’s been up to the states. And so if someone wants to change the marriage laws, I don’t think it should be five unelected lawyers down in Washington dictating that. And even if you happen to agree with that particular decision, why would you want to hand over every important public policy issue to five unelected lawyers who aren’t accountable to you, who don’t work for you -- instead if you want to change the marriage laws, convince your fellow citizens to change the laws. And by the way, it may end up that -- we’ve got 50 states -- that the laws in one state may be different than another state and we would expect that. We would expect the people of New York to adopt different laws than perhaps the people of Texas or California and that’s the great thing about a big, diverse country is that we can have different laws that respect different values.”
Cruz isn't just saying that states should be able to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. He's also saying, by implication, that Loving v. Virginia was wrongly decided in 1967. If Cruz believes without qualification that "marriage is a question for the states," then he believes a state ought to be able to restrict marriage to couples of the same race, as did Mildred and Richard Loving's home state of Virginia, along with fifteen other states, until the High Court unanimously declared miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the Loving decision.

Will Ted Cruz be asked whether he believes that the Loving decision was a mistake? I doubt it. If he is, I assume he'll dance around that question, too, until he find some convoluted way to say that that federal ruling on marriage was okay, but the Supreme Court doesn't have a right to rule on same-sex marriage. Or he'll say it's a moot point because no state today would ever want to ban interracial marriages. (I wouldn't be so sure. A 2011 Public Policy Polling survey found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans believed interracial marriage should be illegal.)

C'mon, news media -- surprise me. Ask Cruz about this.


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Posted by Steve M. at 2:19 PM 14 comments

IT WOULD TAKE A LOT MORE THAN THAT TO GET TRUMP IMPEACHED

Apparently desperate for content, Politico ponders the likelihood of an instant-impeachment for President Donald Trump:
“Impeachment” is already on the lips of pundits, newspaper editorials, constitutional scholars, and even a few members of Congress. From the right, Washington attorney Bruce Fein puts the odds at 50/50 that a President Trump commits impeachable offenses as president. Liberal Florida Rep. Alan Grayson says Trump’s insistence on building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, if concrete was poured despite Congress’s opposition, could lead down a path toward impeachment. Even the mainstream Republican head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently tossed out the I-word when discussing the civilian backlash if Trump’s trade war with China led to higher prices on everyday items sold at WalMart and Target. On his radio show last month, Rush Limbaugh even put a very brisk timeline on it: “They’ll be talking impeachment on day two, after the first Trump executive order,” he said.
We're asked to imagine impeachment fever building mere months after a Trump inauguration, in the summer of 2017, under these circumstances:
He has ordered federal contractors to start building the wall between the United States and Mexico, though neither Mexico nor the U.S. Congress will pay for it. Trump has directed the National Guard to patrol Detroit, Chicago, New York and other neighborhoods with large Muslim populations, and accusations are swirling that he is illegally rounding up suspected Islamic extremists and shipping them off to special detention centers, including the recently reopened Alcatraz Island and to several of the World War II-era internment camps the U.S. government used for Japanese-Americans. Despite the counsel of his foreign policy and military advisers, Trump has commanded the CIA to resume waterboarding and other forms of torture to obtain information about imminent attacks. Inside the intelligence and defense communities, a full-blown internal war has broken out as some interrogators and high-ranking officials follow Trump’s orders, while others refuse to cooperate. Some resign their posts and begin leaking details to the media and Congress. Trump has also ordered airstrikes on the family members of known terrorists from Afghanistan to Libya. CNN airs live coverage of the bombings and protests sweep across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe as the death toll rises for the parents, siblings, spouses and children of ISIL and Al Qaeda fighters. At the United Nations, a resolution is passed, calling for Trump to be tried on war crimes.

... the polls have turned against Trump. He still has his most passionate supporters, but the honeymoon in the Oval Office is clearly over.
Are you kidding me? If Trump did all that, he'd be at 70 or 80 percent approval in the polls -- maybe more. Non-whites and dyed-in-the-wool progressives would be appalled, but heartland white America would be dancing in the streets with joy. It wouldn't matter whether any of it was succeeding. It wouldn't matter if it was making Americans' lives better. This would be Trump being resolute. Americans love that. They'd love it the way they love presidents at the outset of a war.

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this scenario is the notion that torture would lead to calls for impeachment on the part of the mass public. Didn't we all see last month's poll on torture?
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe torture can be justified to extract information from suspected terrorists, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll....

The March 22-28 online poll asked respondents if torture can be justified "against suspected terrorists to obtain information about terrorism." About 25 percent said it is "often" justified while another 38 percent it is "sometimes" justified. Only 15 percent said torture should never be used.

Republicans were more accepting of torture to elicit information than Democrats: 82 percent of Republicans said torture is "often" or "sometimes" justified, compared with 53 percent of Democrats.
Wall-building over the objections of Congress and Mexicans? War crimes objected to by the UN? Under those circumstances, Republican voters would be telling us that Trump was already a greater president than Saint Reagan. More generally, a mood of aggressive patriotism would take over America. The press would start by tut-tutting, then assess the zeitgeist and back away from skepticism. Swing voters would fall in line because, hey, everybody else at the weekend barbecue thought Trump was doing a great job.

What upsets Americans is when they think resolute action has failed -- see George H.W. Bush when the Gulf War ended with a whimper, or his son when it became clear that the Iraq War had been botched a dozen different ways. Early on, a President Trump would be seen as a flop only if he failed to do all the things he promised, not if he did them. If he were to make good on his promises, he'd be acclaimed for it -- until difficulties arose. But that would take years.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:03 AM 5 comments

Sunday, April 17, 2016

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE SUSTAINED, AT LEAST AT THE BALLOT BOX

There are plenty of reasons a voter might want to choose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, but, as Jonathan Capehart notes, the likelihood of a sustained political "revolution" shouldn't be one of them:
A familiar and self-defeating pattern among Democrats is emerging for a fourth consecutive presidential election cycle. It goes something like this: The favored establishment candidate faces a challenge from the left fueled by grass-roots fervor, money and media attention. Whether that challenger wins the nomination (Barack Obama in 2008) or loses (Howard Dean in 2004), there is always talk about how their following is the start of a movement that can no longer be ignored.

That is, until the presidential election is over. After that great day at the polls, despite all the heady talk of political revolution, those fired-up folks go home -- and stay there for the next four years. The campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) swears this time will be different. Sorry to be the skunk at the garden party, but it won’t.

... “We’ve heard that song before,” [Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times] writes. “In 2004, insurgent candidate Howard Dean tried to turn his campaign into a progressive movement, Democracy for America, with negligible results. In 2008, President Obama’s campaign staff tried to remake their grass-roots network into something called Organizing for America, but that effort failed completely.”

Democrats always forget that political revolutions are not quadrennial affairs....
Capehart's point is that Democrats don't vote in off-years. Part of the problem is that the leaders of presidential-year "revolutions" (I'd include Ralph Nader in 2000) tend not to win, except for Obama, and he won at a time when just putting America on a timetable for termination of the Iraq War and other within-the-pale proposals seemed to constitute serious change.

Is the problem that Democratic and progressive voters are just too lazy to vote in non-presidential years? Or is it that the party's candidates aren't particularly inspiring to those voters? I think it's a little of both. Run-of-the-mill Democratic congressional candidates rarely promise big changes from the status quo. On the other hand, voters don't seem to grasp the fact that just keeping power out of the hands of ever-more-extreme Republicans is a worthwhile end in itself.

A lot of the energy that goes into would-be progressive revolutions in presidential election years seems to gravitate in other years to non-electoral political activity -- Occupy Wall Street for a brief moment, but also LGBT activism, the fight to increase the minimum wage, the pro-immigrant movement, and Black Lives Matter. Some of the energy is dissipated because most downballot Democrats don't seem particularly connected to progressive movements. The Tea Party movement very rapidly fielded a large number of candidates in congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races who sounded jut like Tea Party activists; if you were an angry right-wing ideologue, it wasn't hard to find a candidate who was worked up about the same issues you were. Progressive voters rarely have that luxury.

There need to be more genuinely progressive candidates, especially in off years -- and maybe that's just impossible, given the realities of campaign finance in America. (Genuinely progressive candidates want things rich donors don't.) The alternative is a focus on political movements rather than elections -- which is unfortunate, because elections also matter. Even disappointing Democratic candidates are better than increasingly awful Republicans. They're still needed to hold the line while non-electoral activists fight for real change in other ways.
Posted by Steve M. at 4:22 PM 6 comments

TRUMP SUPPORTERS: STILL NOT RIOTING

I saw this Breitbart headline and decided to read the story, looking for signs that Trump Nation has gone beyond mere griping about lost delegates:
Trump Supporters Walk Out of Georgia Delegate Fight After Party Picks Cruz Supporter...'Uproar in the Hall’
No, they're still not fighting back:
Donald Trump supporters walked out of a delegate election in Georgia Saturday to protest a vote that robbed Trump of all of his slated delegates from a district that he won in the primary.

A Cruz-Rubio alliance at the district convention in Buford, Georgia helped to knock Trump supporters out of the district’s national delegation altogether. Cruz supporters implied that Trump’s people would “embarrass” the district at the convention in Cleveland. Then things got heated.
But not too heated. The lone Trump supporter was denied a delegate slot and ... no riots ensued:
“There was an immediate uproar in the hall, and all the Trump delegates walked out in protest. The Trump County campaign manager had conveniently brought the American flag on display in the hall and took it with him after this undercutting of democracy,” [Trump backer Ronnie] Kurtz said.
Ooooh, the local campaign manager took the flag! Wow, that must have put the fear of God into the anti-Trump forces!



No, I guess not. Most of the people remaining in the hall seems to be smiling.

Things went disastrously for Trump >throughout Georgia, a state he won:
On March 1, Donald Trump finished first in Georgia’s Republican presidential primary with 39 percent of the vote.

On Saturday, at gatherings of Republican activists meeting by congressional district, the billionaire may have lost most of the delegates that were supposed to come with that March 7 victory....

In the 11th District, which stretches from Buckhead into northwest Georgia, backers of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz swept up most of the delegate slots. Trump loyalists were skunked.

At the Sixth District gathering in Alpharetta, the Trump campaign salvaged one of the three delegate slots, but lost the rest. Two supporters of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who garnered less than 6 percent of the primary vote, were named alternate delegates.
And on and on.

Look, I know Team Trump went into the presidential contest knowing jack about this aspect of running for president. But it doesn't require a working knowledge of the political process to organize a riot. Maybe just a "Brooks Brothers riot" -- recall that Roger Stone, the Trump advocate who's now nominally unconnected to the campaign, was one of the organizers of the demonstration that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Miami.

It's clear now that the Trump people can't finagle at this level, but if they also can't intimidate, what have they got? All the blue-collar rage I keep hearing about hasn't motivated his fans to show up spontaneously at these gatherings to make their displeasure felt, and demonstrations that could be organized by an energetic intern aren't taking place, and Trump's backers aren't even driving by party headquarters and shooting out a window or two in reaction to these outcomes, so why should we think they can get it together to scare people at the convention? I continue to believe Trump's going to go down relatively quietly there. But we'll see.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:49 AM 7 comments

Saturday, April 16, 2016

CONFIRMATION BIAS: IT ISN'T JUST FOR THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT

I'm not surprised to learn that, as he ages, Bill Clinton wants all those awful kids to get off his lawn -- but you'd think a guy who's spent his life immersed in politics would be too aware of the public mood to say something as tin-eared as this in 2016:
Former President Bill Clinton mused Friday that supporters of Bernie Sanders believe shooting people who work on Wall Street would help cure the economic imbalances that have animated the Vermont senator's presidential campaign.

"I think it's fine that all these young students have been so enthusiastic for her opponent and say, 'It's all good, just shoot every third person on Wall Street and everything will be fine,'" Clinton told a small afternoon audience in Washington Heights.
Shoot every third person on Wall Street? I think a lot of Americans these days believe that might be a pretty good idea. And not just on the left -- as Dave Weigel wrote in January, that anger shows up on the right as well:
At the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition convention, the name “Barack Obama” drew immediate grimaces and groans. Only two other words came close to matching that reaction.

Wall Street.

“If we go someplace and order dinner for $15, and we don’t pay, we get a criminal record,” said Sarah Pawlikowski, a tea party activist from Columbia. “Why is Wall Street treated any different?”

“I think a lot of people should have gone to jail,” said Cooper Wellons, a local land developer. “If I’d have done some of the things they did on Wall Street, I’d have gone to jail.”

Eight years after the start of the Great Recession, and seven years since the Troubled Asset Relief Program was implemented, the anger at major financial institutions has only grown -- in both parties....

In 2013, a Reuters-Ipsos poll of more than 1,400 Americans found that just 22 percent approved of TARP -- years after the banks had been stabilized. Last year, when Lake Research Partners polled on behalf of the progressive Americans for Financial Reform, it found 70 percent agreeing with the statement that “most people on Wall Street would be willing to break the law if they believed they could make a lot of money and get away with it.”
Of course, conservatives tend to see Wall Street as being in a liberal conspiracy with a big-government Establishment; the solutions proposed by Wall Street-bashing politicians on the right tend to involve, like conservative solutions to everything, less government.

But the anger is there. It's across the political spectrum. So forget what Bill Clinton personally believes -- why does he think sticking up for Wall Street is smart politics at this moment in time?

It's often said that left and right partisans are doing a really terrible thing these days by gravitating toward media sources that reinforce their political beliefs. Confirmation bias, we're told, leads liberals and conservatives to believe reporting and commentary that affirms their beliefs.

But why wouldn't this also apply to someone like Bill Clinton, who's centrist with a hint of liberalism? He formed his belief system a long time ago: On economics, don't be a passionate defender of old-fashioned New Deal/Great Society liberalism. Leaven that tradition with a lot of support for corporatism without abandoning it altogether -- do that and you'll win back moderate whites while retaining the loyalties of liberals and non-whites. This worked for him in the '90s. His wife is running on a modified version of it now.

Hillary's platform, as a result, is pragmatic, but it's dispiriting. And it completely overlooks a rage that's become utterly mainstream.

I assume Bill Clinton is still a voracious consumer of the news -- but I strongly suspect that he limits himself to a narrow spectrum of sources that are right down the middle. I bet, in his news world, the economy is recovering nicely, people have it pretty good right now, and significant discontent is limited to "angry voices on the left and right." All that anger, in his view, is stirred up up by mirror-image ideological media outlets at the extremes.

If I'm right about this, Bill Clinton's media diet tells him what he wants to believe. He completely misses rising anger at Wall Street. He's stuck in the same idea bubble he's been in for decades.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:44 AM 3 comments

Friday, April 15, 2016

IT'S HARD TO PLAY 11-DIMENSIONAL CHESS WHEN YOUR OPPONENT KEEPS KICKING OVER THE BOARD

Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress thinks Hillary Clinton was very clever last night:
Late in Thursday night’s debate ... Clinton was asked if she would ask the president to withdraw Chief Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court -- presumably so that she could select her own nominee -- if she wins the presidential election. Clinton rather explicitly refused to answer the question. “I am not going to contradict the president’s strategy on this,” she began. Then, after briefly supporting President Obama’s right to name a justice and calling upon the Senate to consider Garland’s nomination, Clinton offered what may be the single most significant sentence she said last night:

“When I am president, I will take stock of where we are and move from there.”

It’s a noncommittal statement that hardly comes off as a robust endorsement of the Garland nomination. Nevertheless, both Garland and the White House should be thrilled that Clinton took this approach. Her non-commitment to Garland is the judge’s best chance at confirmation.
Garland is a centrist, and at 63 is older than most recent Supreme Court nominees, which means he's likely to spend twenty fewer years on the Court than a fortysomething nominee if confirmed. So if Clinton is saying she might pick someone else, surely the GOP is thinking: Maybe we should confirm Garland now -- otherwise, we risk a younger, more liberal nominee in a Clinton presidency. Right?

Nahh, I don't think so. And I'm not sure President Obama does, either.

The Obama administration is now talking about an era of permanent partisanship in the Supreme Court appointment process:
White House press secretary Josh Earnest raised eyebrows during today's press briefing by suggesting that Democrats would be “justified” to take revenge on the GOP blockade against Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland by blocking a possible GOP president’s nomination for the president's full term.

Earnest was recalling a suggestion President Obama made in an interview with Fox News Sunday in which he said if Republicans continued blocking Garland until he left office then “it is almost impossible to expect” that Democrats wouldn’t retaliate if given the opportunity.

"What's to stop Democrats who are in charge of the Senate when a Republican is in office, from saying, 'Well, we're just going to wait the four years to fill the vacancy.' There is no material difference in that argument. That would represent a breakdown of the process," Earnest said.

But Earnest went just a bit further, after a reporter asked, “Would they really do that?”

“They would be justified in doing it, based on what Republicans have done so far,” Earnest said, adding “Hopefully, they -- it won't come to that.”
The president has talked about this on more than one occasion. This was from last week:
President Barack Obama returned to the University of Chicago on a mission to encourage law students not to give up on government. But he ended up laying out a near apocalyptic vision of Washington's future if Republicans don’t confirm his Supreme Court nominee.

Imagine the Democratic payback when they get the chance, he said. And then, imagine what the GOP would do in response, predicting that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would kill the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees if a Republican wins the current presidential election.

And then, he said, whenever there’s a divided government, there will be a freeze on any judicial confirmations, piling up caseloads and destroying any remaining faith Americans have in the judicial system.

Vacancies could last for a president’s full term or more.

“We’ll wait four more years,” Obama predicted, and then it'll become “just a majoritarian exercise in the Senate of who controls the presidency and who controls the Senate.”
Either the president is consciously echoing this Jonathan Chait post from February, or he spotted the same storm clouds on the horizon that Chait sees:
Mere respect for the presidency isn’t going to make a Senate controlled by the opposing party confirm a Supreme Court justice any more than it’s going to make it pass a health-care bill. The era of parties letting the other side win -- on anything -- is over....

If Hillary Clinton wins in November and Republicans retain the Senate, they may feel shamed by their promises to let the voters decide the Court’s next nominee and give her a justice. Or maybe not -- maybe some dastardly Clinton campaign tactic, or reports of voter fraud on Fox News, will make them rescind their promise. The Supreme Court could remain deadlocked at 4-4 for the remainder of her term....

A world in which Supreme Court justices are appointed only when one party has both the White House and the needed votes in Congress would look very different from anything in modern history. Vacancies would be commonplace and potentially last for years. When a party does break the stalemate, it might have the chance to fill two, three, four seats at once.
I think that's the world we're entering. I think Mitch McConnell will switch from "Let the 2016 voters decide" to "Let the NRA decide" in the event of a Clinton victory (recall that he's said he doesn't even want to consider Garland in a lame-duck session because Garland is opposed by the NRA and the National Federation of Independent Business). I think the Democrats' only hope of filling that vacancy will come if the party also win the Senate and abolishes Supreme Court filibusters -- and even then I can imagine McConnell trying to flip a red-state Democrat or two if that would be enough to block Clinton's pick. (I want to believe that the Democrats will stand united, but if her pick upsets the NRA, or is the wrong color or sexual orientation, I'm not sure.)

I understand the Obama and Clinton chess moves, but Republicans simply aren't playing.
Posted by Steve M. at 2:18 PM 7 comments

HILLARY CLINTON STILL NOT LOATHED IN HER PARTY THE WAY TRUMP AND CRUZ ARE IN THEIRS

My habitual gloom was reinforced when I read this headline from Gallup:
Clinton's Image Among Democrats at New Low
But the news isn't that bad:
... Clinton's current net favorable rating of +36 among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents is based on 66% who give her a favorable rating and 30% who give her an unfavorable rating....

The degree of the depths to which Clinton has descended is evident when compared with her highest net favorable rating (+63, among Democrats) in early November. This means her current net favorable rating among her own partisans is about half of what it was at its peak last fall.
The chart looks bad:



But the Republicans are even less enthusiastic about their own candidates -- all of them:
Trump currently has a +9 net favorable rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, based on 52% favorable and 43% unfavorable ratings. Cruz is at +8, with 48% favorable and 40% unfavorable....

Kasich's current +26 is down from his all-time high of +35 in March....



Kasich is inching up, but even he has lower net favorables in his own party than Hillary Clinton does in hers. And Cruz! As you can see in the chart, his net favorable rating has plummeted from 48% to 8%. I've been thinking he's the likely nominee, but now he has the stink of the GOP establishment on him, and maybe that's why his party hates him. Or maybe it's just that he's challenging Trump, who's loved by every Republican except the ones who hate him.

Hard-fought primaries generally have this effect on voters. (Here's a Pew poll from May 2008 in which Barack Obama's favorables are slipping.) But I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that Republicans are angrier at their candidates than Democrats are at theirs. (The two Democratic candidates were pretty nasty to each other in the debate last night, and advocates on both sides are quite hostile, but Clinton's numbers are not bad and the numbers for Sanders are very good.)

I think this is because, for all the Sanders talk about revolution, most Democrats still see politics in conventional terms, while Republicans are now like a radical army that's seized quite a few provinces but can't quite take over the Presidential Palace, which is leading to vicious infighting among rebel leaders. Most Democrats think Clinton and Sanders are having a vigorous policy debate; Republicans think it might be time to start executing collaborators.

I still don't think this is going to result in a Republican crack-up -- once intraparty fighting ends, GOP voters tend to fall in line, which is why folks like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham still have jobs after surviving Tea Party primary challenges. But resentments linger -- even if Ted Cruz is the nominee, I don't think he's ever going to get back to 48% net favorables within his party. A guy who worked so hard not to be John McCain or Mitt Romney will run as a suspect candidate in his party anyway. A guy who took great pains not to have any enemies to his right is now suspect because he made one: Donald Trump. (I know I'm supposed to regard Trump as not really conservative, but if you're a voter who wants a Mexican-financed border wall, a Muslim ban, and terrorist torture, Trump is now the conservative reference standard.)

On the Democratic side, I think the most visible Sanders supporters have this revolutionary fervor, and will stay home or vote for Jill Stein in November, but maybe the stereotypical Berniestan isn't really the average Bernie voter. There might be less bad blood on this side than I thought. That would be nice.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:22 AM 6 comments

Thursday, April 14, 2016

WELL, EVERYTHING EVIL IS THE FAULT OF ONE OR THE OTHER, RIGHT?

At the end of the last post, I mentioned this Wonkette story:
... we ... learned that former Donald Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone is writing a book explaining that Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered JFK Jr. in 1999. Stone... casually mentioned his writing project on an internet radio show last month....

Stone explained he’s got two books in the works: one exposing New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker as a fraud who never actually accomplished anything, and then his really explosive work:
I have coming up next year a book which I make the case that John F. Kennedy Jr. was murdered. And he was murdered by the Clintons because he was in the way. Now I have extraordinary new evidence that nobody else has seen.
Last fall, Stone tweeted that he planned a book on Kennedy’s “murder” and also explained the motive: Hillary had him bumped off because she wanted to be elected to the Senate seat previously held by Daniel Moynihan, and since Kennedy was thinking of running for it too, he had to die....
What's odd about this is that there have long been rumors that JFK Jr. was murdered -- but the culprit was usually said to be Stone's other nemesis, the Bush family.

This is from a site called The Forbidden Knowledge:
But why would anyone want to kill John Kennedy Jr.?

... he was the only Kennedy to ever acknowledge a conspiracy in his father’s death. He not only acknowledge it, he published an article by Oliver Stone, in his magazine, George, about assassination, conspiracies, and lying history books. Who would want to kill him? The people who killed his father had to kill him. Kennedy Jr. was going to go after them.

So, who killed his father? George Herbert Walker Bush....

Bush didn’t pull the trigger, but he supervised E. Howard Hunt, who did....

Kennedy’s plane went into the sea at 10:00 on Friday night, July 16, 1999. [George W.] Bush was involved in a heated campaign, which he was losing in New Hampshire. He was constantly in public and constantly surrounded by reporters, so it’s easy to figure out where he was. Right? Wrong! According to the Omaha World Herald (7/17/99), on July 16th Bush was flipping pancakes Friday morning in Des Moines, but he boarded a bus and disappeared for the entire weekend. On Saturday, July 18th, reporters looking for a comment from Bush confronted a fumbling spokesperson who was unable to say when Bush would be available for comment. (Newsday, 7/19/99, A19) Bush finally called a press conference on Monday, to offer condolences.

Do you think this evidence is too weak to accuse Bush of murder? As George would say, “We got more than enough here to hang a feller in Texas.” George, you’re our feller....

By involving himself in Kennedy’s murder, George W. Bush was living out the legacy of his father and his father’s father.
A few years back, a man named True Ott claimed he'd come into possession of "file #5" of the so-called Gemstone Files, which purport to outline all sorts of conspiracies. File #5, according to Ott, outlined "the FULL STORY of the CIA-planned and executed contract 'hit' of John Fitzgerald Kennedy." Ott said that "the key men who participated in the assassination, as well as the massive cover-up that followed ... were not all Jewish organized crime bosses, some were men linked to my LDS church authorities and some were nationally prominent politicians in my beloved Republican Party! The file was extremely damning towards George HW Bush." Ott said he gave the file to someone from JFK Jr.'s George magazine, then heard from Kennedy himself, who claimed that Poppy Bush was about to be indicted for JFK Sr.'s murder on the basis of the file. ("If George W. thinks he can run for dogcatcher after this grand jury convenes and his father indicted, he is sorely mistaken,” JFK Jr. said, according to Ott.)

And then JFK Jr.'s plane went down with the only copy of file #5. And W's political career was saved.

Well, it's about as plausible as Roger Stone's theory, right?

Hey, maybe the Bushes and the Clintons killed JFK Jr. together! With John-John dead, Hillary got to be senator! W got to be president! It was win-win!

C'mon, Roger, rewrite your book. This theory is much better.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:04 PM 6 comments

ROGER STONE STILL THINKS JEB MIGHT BE THE NOMINEE

So I was looking at the homepage of Stop the Steal, the group Roger Stone has set up to try to preserve the Republican nomination for Donald Trump, and I noticed an odd thing: the name Bush comes up more often than Kasich, Ryan, or Romney.

Bush's is the first person named in the chain-link list of alleged conspirators Stone is trying to fight:
The Big Steal from Donald J. Trump is on- and only you can stop it.

The Bush-Cruz-Rubio-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction has united and is moving into high gear to steal the nomination from Trump.
Ted Cruz's name comes up a lot, of course -- Stone worries about him, although he thinks the power brokers really want someone else at the top of the ticket. And while Stone doesn't think Jeb is the likely alternative to Trump and Cruz, he's not ruling him out:
The full convention must ratify the Rules and Committee plans to allow the big steal. This is when these hidden delegates will rob Trump. They will shove Mitt Romney, John Kasich or Paul Ryan down our throat. Jeb Bush has his way to get on a late ballot.
Oh, and Jeb's son is in on the conspiracy, too, if only on behalf of a possibly duped Cruz:
Rick Perry George P. Bush (the Texas Land Commissioner) and Ted Cruz have teamed up to pack the Texas delegation -- including the 40% delegates pledged to Trump who will be hard-core Trump opponents free to vote for rules that make the Big Steal from Trump possible or to unseat Trump delegates to help the big steal in Cleveland.
(Emphasis in original.)

And Trump is described this way:
He is an alternative to doing the bidding of Bush’s and Clintons and their ilk who have become richer and richer while the ordinary people have become poorer and poorer and America itself turned into a debt-ridden shadow of its once great self.
Bush also comes up in the post that currently tops Stone's StoneZone site:
The Bushs, Mitt Romney, Paul Singer, the Ricketts and Zuckerberg are driving the train for the Lobbyist/Insider Class committed to stopping Trump, led by my old partner Charlie Black, as shrewd and skilled a political operative as exists today.
(By the way, somebody needs to explain to Stone that the correct way to spell the plural of "Bush" is "Bushes.")

Is this just a backhanded way for Stone to plug his most recent book, Jeb! and the Bush Crime Family? Or does he really believe there's deep Bush involvement in the Never Trump movement? Or does he think his target market thinks so?

I feel as if Jeb just crawled off and never wants to show his face in public again. He's skipping the Republican convention. And much of the GOP hates him now. It's just odd how much real estate he still occupies in some people's heads.

****

More Stone craziness, from Wonkette: "Trump Buddy Roger Stone Says Clintons Murdered JFK Jr., Maybe For Kicks."
Posted by Steve M. at 2:31 PM 5 comments

CAN SMARM HELP CRUZ KEEP THE ELECTION CLOSE?

Most people on the left assume that Donald Trump's high negative ratings with the general public are etched in stone. I think that's probably correct. But most liberals probably also feel the same way about Ted Cruz. I'm not so sure.

As you read the following, keep in mind that it's from Mother Jones:
The CNN Town Hall with Ted Cruz and his family on Wednesday night began with host Anderson Cooper talking to the candidate about the usual political subjects....

When Heidi Cruz joined her husband on stage and audience members came to the mic, the questions moved from the political to the personal: What was their first date? (A dinner when the two were working on the Bush campaign in 2000). What did she think was his "most annoying" quality? (His iPhone). Cruz also told the audience that he loves movies, but his wife isn't interested in them....

But the real highlight of the evening came when Cruz's two young daughters, dressed in identical yellow dresses, were asked who they would first want to invite to visit the White House. Caroline, whose eighth birthday is on Thursday, and five-year-old Catherine, were shy about naming their favorite pop star, but their mother Heidi answered for them: "The girls would love to have their first guest be Taylor Swift," she said.

... The whole family exchange was pretty adorable.
Yup, a Mother Jones writer thinks that was just adorbs. I wouldn't bet the rent money that Ohio swing voters are going to be more resistant to the charms of the Cruz family.

And I noticed yesterday that Cruz got a lot of people on social media talking about his taste in pop culture:
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has taken many a controversial stand -- repealing Obamacare, deporting illegal immigrants. But he may have outdone himself Wednesday night at a CNN town hall meeting.

He mentioned “The Godfather, Part III” among his all-time favorite films.

Host Anderson Cooper asked Mr. Cruz to name some of his favorite films, besides his oft-repeated answer that his all-time favorite is “The Princess Bride.”

He gave a common response ... of the popular and iconic “Godfather” films.

But then the heresy struck: He specified “all three” films in Francis Coppola’s gangster trilogy. A disbelieving Mr. Cooper replied that “nobody” thinks that.

... Mr. Cruz apparently goes even beyond that heterodox judgment, calling the third film a “nice culmination” of the tragedy of Michael Corleone. In describing that tragedy, the Texan, as he is wont to do, went into an imitation of Al Pacino delivering the best-known line in the film, about how he’s every time he tries to escape the gangster life, “they pull me back in.”
If we're talking about the Cruz daughters, Cruz's taste in movies, and Cruz's imitations of celebrities, we're not talking about his tax plan and his position on social issues and his backing for torture and indiscriminate bombing of civilians. We're not talking about his government shutdown. Could the town-halling of television election coverage help the probable Republican presidential nominee turn himself from an ogre into a dorky neighbor with an appealing family?

Okay, maybe not -- maybe he's too firmly established as unlikable in most people's minds for this to do much good. But unlike Donald Trump (who did a town hall like this a couple of days ago) and Hillary Clinton, Cruz can trot out a family that isn't familiar to viewers from gossip-page images of gala events featuring rich and famous movers and shakers. The Cruzes can look like jes' folks.

Richard Nixon was also an unlikable striver who was willing to do just about anything in the service of his own ambition, but the Checkers Speech made the public believe he was kind of a regular guy. I hope Cruz hasn't figured out the formula for an image rehabilitation, one that gets a big assist from the media.

****

UPDATE: I almost missed the soup story: Apparently, Cruz only eats soup when he's away from his family, by his own admission, and Heidi Cruz told a story at the town hall last night about Cruz buying a hundred cans of Campbell's Chunky soup when the couple returned from their honeymoon.
This was shocking to me, so we had a tough conversation about it. I said, “You don’t buy 100 of anything, much less canned soup. We can’t do this. I’ll be making things.” He said, “No, I know you. you won’t be making things.”

So the next morning, it was a weekend morning, I loaded up our car before he woke up and returned every single can. And when I got home, I called my mother just to make sure I’d done the right thing as a newlywed. And she emphatically disagreed with me. And so when Ted opened the pantry, I had to quickly tell him that I would go back and buy those cans again.
If you're cringing, well, me too. But we're effete cultural elitists. I bet in the heartland a lot of married women heard that and just thought, "Men!"
Posted by Steve M. at 10:08 AM 15 comments

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

I THINK BOTH TERRIBLE PARTY CHAIRS MIGHT SAVE THEIR JOBS

Ed Kilgore thinks Reince Priebus can't possibly win another term as Republican chair:
... you get the sense Priebus is going through the motions, sure to be replaced the next time his party reaches a resting point. To the Trump and Cruz partisans dominating the GOP presidential nominating context, Priebus is the face of the hated Republican Establishment, eyeing their presidential candidates with bad intent and doing what he can to set the stage for a stab in the back in Cleveland or soon thereafter.... But to anti-Trump and anti-Cruz Republicans, Priebus is an empty suit babbling about party unity when he should be taking a stand.

... No matter who finally claims the tarnished prize in Cleveland, it's hard to imagine Priebus will be kept around unless it's to serve as a scapegoat if things go south.
Obviously, this prediction seems plausible; if Kilgore is right, I won't be surprised. But look at it another way: Right now, many people expoect Donald Trump to win the Republican presidential nomination and then lead the GOP to a horrible defeat. They think Democrats have an excellent chance of taking the Senate and maybe even the House. They think the GOP will be split for a generation. They think there could be riots at the convention if Trump isn't nominated (or, hell, even if he is).

But with all these predictions of gloom, what if the following happens? Cruz is nominated on the second ballot and loses to Hillary Clinton by roughly the margin by which he's losing to her now -- 3 points. There's only a little turbulence at the convention because Trumpites are intimidated by the Cleveland cops and their $20 million worth of riot gear. The House is so well rigged for the Republicans that the Democrats can't come close to winning it, and incumbent Republican senators hang on in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Ohio while Democrats don't pick strong enough candidates for open seats in Nevada and Florida, so the Senate stays Republican, too.

If all that happens -- and I don't see why it couldn't -- Reince Priebus's GOP is going to look as if it escaped from a flaming wreck with only minor injuries. So why couldn't he save his job?

Almost more dispiriting than that is the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz will probably save her job, too, under these circumstances. She will have elected a president! The Democrats will have won three in a row, the first time they've done that since 1948! Never mind the fact that a year ago everyone assumed that would happen, and never mind the fact that the victory will have come against a party that nearly blew itself up, and never mind the fact that Congress will still be in the GOP's hands. She'll get a pass, too.

Am I saying that this insane presidential campaign might end calmly and with very little upheaval? Yes. And in this and other ways, that could be kind of awful.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:24 PM 6 comments
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