“The Fun Never Ends”: Fox News Statement Taunting Trump Was ‘100 Percent’ Roger Ailes
As the war between Fox News and Donald Trump ratchets up, Roger Ailes is fighting off criticism from his senior executives over his handling of the crisis. According to one highly placed source, last night, Ailes sent out the now-famous statement mocking Trump as being scared to meet with the “Ayatollah” and “Putin” if he became president. “That was Roger 100 percent,” the source explained. “A lot of people on the second floor” — where top Fox executives work — “didn’t think it was a good idea.”
Fox executives are also troubled that Ailes’s principal adviser right now is his longtime personal lawyer and Fox & Friends contributor Peter Johnson Jr. “He wrote the statement with Peter,” the source explained. “Peter is running the war room,” another Ailes friend told me. Fox executives are worried that Ailes is relying on an attorney with scant communications experience as the network is reeling from the biggest PR crisis in recent memory. Historically, during a crisis like this Ailes would have huddled with his veteran communications guru Brian Lewis. But Ailes fired Lewis in 2013 over his concerns that Lewis had been a source for my 2014 Ailes biography. Since Lewis’s ouster, Johnson has taken on the role of media counselor.
Fox spokesperson Irena Briganti did not return a call. When asked about his role advising Ailes, Johnson responded to me with an ad hominem statement. “If you were ever actually fair, any semblance of integrity was swamped by your reaction to the failure of your critically panned hit job on Fox and Ailes,” he said. “Just like your latest tweets and articles, your questions today are based on your own malicious fabrication.”
New signs emerged today at just how frantic Ailes has become to get Trump back to the table. The two men have not spoken since yesterday, sources told me. This morning, Joe Scarborough reported that Ailes called Trump’s daughter Ivanka and wife, Melania, to get through to the GOP front-runner. But Trump is saying he’ll only talk to Rupert Murdoch directly. In a further challenge to Ailes’s power, Bill O’Reilly is scheduled to host Trump. Last night, Ailes directed Sean Hannity to cancel Trump’s interview. O’Reilly’s refusal to abide by a ban adds a new dynamic to the clash of egos. For O’Reilly, this is an opportunity to take back star power from Kelly. Sources say O’Reilly feels he made Kelly’s career by promoting her on his show, and he’s been furious that Kelly surpassed him in the ratings.
Meanwhile, Fox producers are scrambling with the practical matter of how to program the debate without Trump. “Right now, it is about how the moderators handle Trump,” one producer said. “They do not want to be seen either directly criticizing him since he’s not there, and they don’t want to seem like they are drumming up criticism by letting the candidates attack Trump rather than stake out their own positions and debate one another. For all the talk of the optics right now, the bigger issue is how to program a debate without the front-runner. Remember, Fox may be a political machine, but it is still a damn good television programmer.”
For Ailes, the internal dissent over his handling of the crisis would seem to only weaken his grasp on the helm of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch has become more hands-on at Fox since questions about Ailes’s faltering health have been raised. Now Murdoch has to wonder why Ailes, who runs the most valuable asset at parent company 21st Century Fox, is getting PR advice from a lawyer Ailes personally pays.
A spokesperson for Murdoch did not return a call.
By: Gabriel Sherman, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 27, 2016
“The Biggest Threat To Carson’s Campaign”: Low-Information Candidate Worried About Low-Information Voters
On Wednesday afternoon, Ben Carson told Wolf Blitzer that his biggest threat in the presidential election isn’t Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, the two candidates who happen to be beating him right now.
No, Carson, whose poll numbers have dropped so far that he could grab a toboggan and slide down them into irrelevance, thinks the biggest barrier to his victory is “the fact that people sometimes are not well educated.”
Back in October, when Carson was in second place, he was doing much better among voters without a college degree than he is doing today with any voters.
“They don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Carson, who was once described by his former campaign manager as “just living in an alternative universe,” said, “and yet these are people who vote … I implore people to really inform yourself about who the candidates are, inform yourself of what their positions are.”
Ben Carson — a very good neurosurgeon who reportedly doesn’t understand foreign policy even though people keep trying to explain it to him over and over — for example, believes that free college will destroy our nation; that pyramids were used to store grain instead of dead bodies; that the minimum wage is good or bad; that Muslims shouldn’t be president; that it is okay to take a break from your presidential campaign to sell copies of your book; that gun control helped the Nazis; that people in mass-shooting situations should yell, “Hey, guys, everybody attack him!“; that prison turns people gay (“So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question.”); that spending a lot of money to raise money is a great idea; that Hamas is pronounced “hummus”; that New Hampshire is actually pretty far away from Vermont; and that “Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
Hopefully this list will inform voters of who Ben Carson really is — and inform Ben Carson that the biggest threat to his campaign is actually the fact that he just isn’t a very good candidate.
By: Jamie Fuller, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 27, 2016
“A Democrat That Can Win Is What We Need”: Translating Values Into Governance And Delivering The Goods
In my estimation, there’s only one presidential candidate in 2016 fully capable of doing the job, and she’s anything but a natural.
As Hillary Clinton has also been the target of maybe the longest-running smear campaign in American history — including roughly a dozen partisan Congressional investigations and a six-year leak-o-matic “independent counsel” probe led by the fastidious Kenneth Starr — it’s no wonder some voters mistrust her.
Overcoming that suspicion is her biggest challenge.
Republicans have predicted her imminent indictment for 20 years. You’d think by now they’d have made something stick, if there was anything to it. But it didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now for an obvious reason: in a democracy, political show trials endanger the prosecution as much as the defense.
Anybody who watched Hillary’s one-woman demolition of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s vaunted Benghazi committee should understand that.
Meanwhile, one of the best things about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is his unwillingness to smear his opponent. Too bad many of his most passionate supporters aren’t so fastidious. With Iowa’s make-or-break moment approaching for Sanders, it’s getting nasty out there.
It’s not so much the tiresome attacks on anybody who disagrees with them as a corrupt sellout. (My corporate overlords, of course, dictated that sentence.) It’s the seeming belief that people can be browbeaten into supporting their guy.
Some are a bit like Trump supporters–although normally without the threats. That too may be changing. Recently a guy visited my Facebook page saying people like me deserve “to be dragged into the street and SHOT for…treason against not only our country and our people, but the ENTIRE [BLEEPING] WORLD.”
My response — “Settle down, Beavis” — sent him into a rage.
But no, Hillary’s not an instinctive performer, although her stage presence strikes me as improved since 2008. A person needn’t be “inauthentic” (pundit-speak for “bitch”) to be uncomfortable in front of an audience.
As for authenticity, few Democrats could work a crowd like North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.
President Obama nailed it during a recent Politico interview:
Hillary does better with “small groups” than big ones, he observed, before putting his thumb heavily on the scale. He described Hillary as a fighter, who’s “extraordinarily experienced — and, you know, wicked smart and knows every policy inside and out — [and] sometimes [that] could make her more cautious, and her campaign more prose than poetry,” he said.
Even so, she came closer to defeating Obama in 2008 than Republicans have. “Had things gone a little bit different in some states or if the sequence of primaries and caucuses been a little different,” the president said, “she could have easily won.”
Indeed. As non-endorsements go, the president’s remarks couldn’t have been more complimentary. “She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” he added.
Obama wisely said nothing critical about Bernie Sanders, but nothing particularly warm either. “Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose,” he observed. The president said he understood the appeal of Sanders “full-throated…progressivism.”
Well, Mr. Hopey-Changey as Sarah Palin calls him, certainly should.
Seven years of trench warfare with congressional Republicans, however, have brought out the president’s inner pragmatist. Which Democrat is best-positioned to consolidate the Obama legacy and move it forward?
First, one who stands a good chance of being elected.
Look, there’s a reason Karl Rove’s super PAC is running anti-Hillary TV ads in Iowa. Bernie Sanders “radical” past makes him a GOP oppo-research dream. Never mind socialism. Did you know he once wrote a column claiming that sexual frustration causes cervical cancer?
That in the 1970s, he called for nationalizing oil companies, electric utilities, and — get this — TV networks? Asked about it, he deflects by noting that Hillary once supported Barry Goldwater. Yeah, when she was 16. Bernie was in his mid-30s when he called for confiscating the Rockefeller family fortune. How most Americans hear that is: if he can take away their stuff, he can take away mine.
Sure, many people went off the rails during the Seventies. Most aren’t running for president. Bernie strikes me as a fine senator and a decent man. However, the current U.S. Congress has voted 60 times to repeal Obamacare. And he’s going to give us single-payer “Medicare for all?”
No, he’s not. Assuming he could find a sponsor, it’d never get out of committee. I doubt I’ll live to see single-payer health insurance in the USA. And I’m younger than Bernie. A complete retrofitting of American health care simply isn’t in the works. The votes just aren’t there, and they won’t materialize by repeating the magic word “revolution.”
President Obama says Hillary represents the “recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.”
Hard-won reality, that is, as opposed to fantasy.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 27, 2016
“A National Embarrassment”: Maine Gov. LePage; Bring Back The Guillotine
Maine Gov. Paul LePage says the guillotine should be brought back so there can be public executions of drug traffickers.
In a radio interview Tuesday on WVOM, LePage said legislative proposals to increase prison sentences for drug traffickers do not do enough.
“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people who kill Mainers,” LePage said. “We should give them an injection of the stuff they sell.”
He said he was “appalled” at critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, who are angry over his comments, saying they are protecting drug traffickers.
“What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he said, interrupting the hosts. “We could have public executions and we could even have which hole it falls in.”
LePage, who is no stranger to controversial remarks, earlier this month got into hot water for comments he made about drug dealers impregnating white women.
“With the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty — these types of guys — they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home,” LePage said at a town hall event. He added, “Half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whom LePage has endorsed for president, defended his surrogate at the time.
“We all know that he shoots from the hip, and when he does that there are going to be times when even he, in retrospect, thinks he shouldn’t have said,” Christie said in an interview with “Morning Joe.”
By: Eliza Collins, Politico, January 26, 2016
“The Debate Between The Two Sides Got Lost”: What Happened To The Battle For The Soul Of The Republican Party?
Remember when the 2016 presidential primary on the GOP side was going to be a “battle for the soul of the Republican Party”? At the conclusion of a period of frustration and tumult, with Barack Obama’s reign coming to its end, they were going to have a passionate debate over the party’s identity. What does it mean to be a Republican at this moment, and what do they want to achieve? Who does their coalition include? How do they appeal not just to the voters they have now, but to those they want to win over in the future?
The problem is that a party’s ability to have that kind of debate in a primary depends on both the people running for president and its voters themselves. Both have to be willing to have the debate—to explore the possibilities, advocate for different approaches, and come to a conclusion. But with the Iowa caucuses just days away, that’s not how it turned out.
Even the battle between the “establishment” and the “insurgents” has been far less than it was cracked up to be, because the insurgents won before it even started. Every candidate agreed from the outset that the establishment was vile and loathsome, and they wanted nothing to do with it. The closest thing to an establishment candidate, Jeb Bush, turned out to be a pathetic failure. Even the candidates who were supposed to unite the two camps—first Scott Walker, then Marco Rubio—failed to convince too many voters of their merit (though obviously Rubio might still gain strength).
In the process, the debate between the two sides got lost. Right now the two leading Democratic candidates are having a spirited argument about whether their voters should seek the kind of revolutionary, dramatic change represented by Bernie Sanders, or the more pragmatic approach of Hillary Clinton. As Paul Krugman wrote, “Mr. Sanders is the heir to candidate Obama, but Mrs. Clinton is the heir to President Obama,” one focusing on lofty ideas and fundamental ideals, while the other understands the hard slog of governing and the necessity of accepting half a loaf when you can get it. But Republicans aren’t talking nearly as much about their varying approaches to governing. Indeed, it’s hard to tell if most of them have even thought about it, beyond the notion that they’ll deliver everything conservatives want and make America great again.
Which brings us to perhaps the biggest reason Republicans haven’t been able to fight it out over their party’s soul: Donald Trump. At the moment, we see two things happening simultaneously. First, as Dana Milbank noted, everyone from The Wall Street Journal editorial page to the likes of Bob Dole “are acquiescing to the once inconceivable: that a xenophobic and bigoted showman is now the face of the Republican Party and of American conservatism.” Part of that comes from terror at the prospect of Ted Cruz leading them to electoral disaster, but it’s also a simple acknowledgement that Trump could be their nominee, and the party elite is a practical group.
But at the same time, other members of that elite are making last-ditch panicky pleas to the voters to come to their senses. The National Review just published a package of articles under the headline “Against Trump,” where movement figures from Ed Meese to Glenn Beck made the case that a Trump nomination would be a betrayal of everything they all stand for.
And on that at least, they’re probably right. Trump isn’t a “real” Republican in that he has little history with the party, but more importantly, there’s no reason to believe he has any commitment to conservative ideology. Everything he’s doing now is to appeal to the particular electorate he’s courting, and it’s hard to imagine even his supporters thinking he’s genuinely a huge advocate of the Second Amendment, or a huge opponent of abortion, or a huge fan of the Bible. Everyone laughed about him quoting “Two Corinthians” at Liberty University, but what’s more telling is that after quoting it he said, “Is that the one, is that the one you like? I think that’s the one you like.” The man who proclaims his brave willingness to say what’s “politically incorrect” is actually the most deeply cynical politician running this year, and if he wins the GOP nomination, I promise you he’ll become markedly less conservative as soon as he starts trying to appeal to a wider set of voters.
Contrast that with someone like Mitt Romney, who also had his conservative bona fides questioned. Had Romney won, he would have governed like exactly the hard-right conservative he ran as. He was a creature of his party, and had made commitments that couldn’t be revoked. Republicans would have gotten no unpleasant surprises from him. But Trump? He’d be completely unpredictable.
So while a year ago everyone assumed that there would be some insurgent candidate getting support from the unruly and angry voters and then everyone else would coalesce around an establishment-blessed alternative, now conservatives face the horror of a race being fought out between an insurgent they can’t stand and a demagogue they can’t trust.
In the process, they’ve lost the chance to define today’s Republican conservatism for the voters and for themselves. Imagine that they lose in November, as is looking increasingly likely. What would the GOP that emerges from this election look like? How will it remake itself to win back the White House? If anyone knows, they can’t be heard over the din coming from Iowa and New Hampshire.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, January 26, 2016
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