This time, he’s gone too far. That’s what Republicans said after Donald Trump insulted John McCain over his military record, people lined up to criticize Trump and the party’s leaders hoped this ridiculous (if entertaining) political reality show could finally be wound down. But it didn’t turn out that way, and now they’re saying it all over again, after Trump sparred with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly during Thursday’s debate, then continued to throw insults at her all weekend. As The Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa wrote yesterday, “Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge with alarm now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse because of his repeated attacks on a Fox News Channel star and his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the eventual GOP nominee.”
Perhaps they really believe that in their hearts. Or perhaps they hope that if they tell themselves and the rest of the world it’s true, then it will come to pass.
Trump’s campaign may be a chaotic mess, as Costa and Rucker report today, but for the moment, it doesn’t seem to matter. The only poll released since the debate is this one from NBC News, which was conducted online and uses a sample drawn from people who have taken Survey Monkey polls. While they attempt to make it as representative as possible (with a large sample and weighting for demographics), it would be a good idea to wait for confirmation from other polls before putting too much stock in it. Nevertheless, the poll showed Trump still at the top with 23 percent support among Republicans. Don’t be surprised if the other polls we see in the next few days show his support essentially unchanged. I suspect that the people who are behind him don’t care if he threatens to run as an independent or if he insults women, just like they didn’t care that he jabbed at McCain and said we ought to deport 11 million people. It’s a feature, not a bug.
If this were an ordinary Republican presidential primary campaign — one obvious front-runner, five or six other candidates taking long-shot bids, a predictable arc in which a challenger emerges to that front-runner and is eventually vanquished — the presence of a character like Trump might not make much of a difference. In a year like that, he might still have managed to get support from the same one out of five primary voters who are backing him now, but it wouldn’t have put him at the front of the pack and made him the center of the campaign. After a while, he probably would have gotten bored and dropped out.
But it’s plain that as long as Trump is ahead of the other candidates, he can convince himself he’s going to win. With 17 candidates splitting the vote and the next-highest contender managing to garner only 12 or 13 percent, that could be for quite some time.
If you’re a Republican, you may be telling yourself that this will get sorted out eventually, and your party will get itself a real nominee. And you’d be right. But by the time that happens, the party will have spent months tying itself in knots. The voters Trump represents will be only more convinced that their party is, in the words Trump himself might use, a bunch of total losers. The GOP’s image is already hurting, not only among voters in general but also among its own partisans; according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 32 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party, and only 68 percent of Republicans view it favorably (86 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of their party).
Keep this in mind, too: While Trump may be setting out to alienate one key demographic group after another, his opponents are doing much the same thing, albeit in slightly less vivid ways. Trump calls Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, but the other Republicans are offering Hispanic voters exactly what Mitt Romney and John McCain did, i.e., not much. Trump insults women with, shall we say, colorful language. But in that same Thursday debate, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio emphatically declared their support for banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Their friends on Capitol Hill are trying to stop women from getting health care at Planned Parenthood, a position Barack Obama pummeled Romney for in 2012.
True to form, Trump himself is insisting that women will actually will flock to his campaign, just as he said Hispanics would. As he said on yesterday’s “Face the Nation,” “I will be phenomenal to the women.” (I was hoping he’d add, “And then, when the women hit their forties, I’ll trade them in for younger, prettier women, to whom I’ll also be phenomenal.” No such luck, though.)
While all this is going on, Hillary Clinton is waltzing toward the Democratic nomination with a bunch of popular policy proposals (today she’ll unveil a plan to make college more affordable) and a broad electoral coalition. That isn’t to say that Clinton doesn’t have her own image problems, but her eventual Republican opponent will have to slog his way through this crazy primary, offering voters reasons not to vote Republican all along the way.
So the next time Donald Trump says something outrageous or offensive (or, more likely, both) and Republican leaders say that this is finally going to be the end of his campaign, remember that you heard it before.
By: Paul Walman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 10, 2015
August 11, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, GOP Primary Debates, Republicans | GOP Debates, Hispanics, Marco Rubio, Megyn Kely, Planned Parenthood, Reproductive Choice, Scott Walker, Sexism |
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One of the more interesting things about the GOP debate wasn’t even what happened at the debate, but the meta-narrative of how it happened. It’s also interesting how weak and helpless the Republican Party appeared as events unfolded.
First, the GOP was supposed to have its strongest field in decades. This should, in theory, have allowed for real contentions over major issues and a seesaw effect as governors and senators probed each other’s weaknesses and tested new ideas with the GOP primary electorate. But that hasn’t happened. Instead each of the major candidates has shrunk under the bright lights rather than grown. The field that appeared so strong on paper has turned out to look incredibly weak and slate.
As the major candidates were unable to seize control, an increasing number of also-rans became tempted to join the fray, producing an overcrowded clown car effect. During all of this the national Republican Party was entirely powerless to stop them and clear the field.
Then, of course, came Donald Trump. The Republican Party has never looked weaker than it has in dealing with the enormous black eye that is Donald Trump. Reince Priebus has looked variously baffled, snarky, pouty and kowtowing addressing the Trump problem. At every turn Donald Trump continues to thumb his nose at the establishment Republican Party, insulting its leaders and openly mocking any efforts it might make to reach out to women and minorities in order to solve its demographic problems.
And then comes Fox News. Fox News is often described as the media arm of the GOP. But over the years it has seemed more like the GOP is the political arm of Fox News. It was Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch who decided which candidates would appear on stage. It was Fox News’ Megyn Kelly who determined the lines of attack each candidate would face, and which ones would face an easier road than others. It was Fox News that controlled the post-debate spin. In all of this, the actual Republican Party seems to be an utter bystander at its own event.
Of course, there’s the spectacle the Koch Brothers and Shelden Adelson have made of their willingness to buy candidates outright and set up their own shadow field and campaign arms separate from the GOP.
And now comes the RedState forum. Erick Erickson has taken it upon himself to disinvite Donald Trump from the RedState forum. At first glance this might seem to be a boon to the GOP: national leaders desperately want to see the Trump “bubble” burst, and want to take the spotlight away from him in any way possible. But it’s still remarkable that in an election year when national Democratic leaders and the Clinton campaign made a decision to keep frontrunner Hillary Clinton away from the liberal Netroots Nation convention, it is the RedState forum itself that is disinviting the current Republican frontrunner. Once again, the national GOP seems to be utterly helpless.
The Republican Party is a total mess, and it has never looked weaker.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 8, 2015
August 10, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP Primary Debates | Erick Erickson, Establishment Republicans, GOP, Koch Brothers, Minorities, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, Women |
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Talking about Donald Trump can be an exhausting and pointless exercise: no sooner does he say or do one outrageous thing than he follows it up with another (the latest being an appalling and viciously misogynist menstruation-based jab at Megyn Kelly, giving Erick Erickson the excuse he wanted to disinvite Trump from the RedState gathering.)
But Trump isn’t really that interesting for his own sake. Trump’s candidacy is of interest because of what it says about the Republican base and about American conservatism itself. I’ve been hammering lately on the theme that conservatives are in such a cultural defensive crouch that they’re not seeking a policy leader so much as insurgent cultural one.
But the focus on Trump has also helped hide a fundamental lack of seriousness in the entire Republican firmament, a point effectively noted by Paul Krugman:
For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.
For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble that coincided with his time as governor….
The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.
Pundits keep pretending that Donald Trump is a media creation–a charlatan and entertainer who is crashing the otherwise serious political party to generate headlines. But he wouldn’t make those headlines without having an enormously popular appeal to the Republican base, which pundits attribute to general frustration with the political system on both sides of the aisle.
But that’s just not true. If it were true, then the Democratic Party would be just as susceptible to a liberal version of Trump. But it’s not. It’s hard to even imagine what that would look like.
The reality is that mainstream Democratic positions also happen to be broadly popular positions already without the need for demagogic bluster. Left-of-center positions tend to be based on science and a more complex, nuanced understanding of social problems. Even more importantly, liberals in the United States promote solutions that have already been shown to work elsewhere in the world. In terms of party divisions Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders simply present a more rhetorically forceful version of those positions, and where their opinions differ from centrist Democrats (especially on, say, Wall Street), their takes tend to be backed up by history and economics, and to have the support of the majority of Americans.
Once again, it’s important to note that both sides don’t, in fact, do it when it comes to political extremism. American conservatism has gone far, far off the rails. Donald Trump’s successful candidacy is only the latest–but far from the only–proof of that.
Liberals don’t have a Donald Trump because we don’t need one. Even liberal populism is a doggedly rational, evidence-based, internally consistent and broadly popular affair. Populist conservatism is anything but.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 8, 2015
August 10, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Conservatives, Democrats, Donald Trump | Bernie Sanders, Conservatism, Elizabeth Warren, GOP Presidential Candidates, Jeb Bush, Liberals, media, Republican Base |
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Well, that was kind of like watching a basketball game that had 10 teams. But hey—the questions were good. They were surprisingly tough. But were they evenly tough? That’s an interesting question. Let’s take a quick look at who was asked what, among the four top candidates. I kept track.
Donald Trump was asked eight questions, about: why he wouldn’t back the GOP nominee (which he of course brought on himself by volunteering that he might not); all the names he’s called women; what his evidence was for saying that Mexico is “sending” us its rapists; why he used to support single-payer; his four bankruptcies; why he was once pro-choice; whether his tone is appropriate in a president; the Iran deal.
Jeb Bush was asked six questions, about: dynastic politics; his previous Iraq faux pas; Common Core; his 4 percent growth pledge; being on that Bloomberg board (an abortion question); did he call Trump a “clown,” “buffoon,” or “asshole.”
Scott Walker (seven questions): the Wisconsin abortion bill that makes no exception for the life of the mother; his path-to-citizenship flip-flop; what more we could be doing with our Mideast allies; Wisconsin’s poor job growth; the Iran deal; police shootings; cyber war.
Marco Rubio (six questions): lack of experience; immigration; Common Core; how he’d help small businesses; what Megyn Kelly thought was his support for rape and incest exceptions for abortion; about God and veterans.
Lots of people seem to think that Rubio had a strong night. I would submit to you that the question list helps explain why. They lobbed a few massive softballs in his direction. For example, both he and Bush were asked about Common Core. But whereas to Bush this was a challenging question, because he’s swimming against the GOP tide on the question, to Rubio it was just, as a Senator, what do you think of what Governor Bush just said? The immigration and small-business questions were totally teed up. And God and veterans? They might as well have asked him if he loved his mother (which he answered anyway; he does).
The other top-tier candidates all got tougher questions. Seven of Trump’s eight questions could fairly be called confrontational or at least challenging. Five of Bush’s six were the same; maybe all six. Three of Walker’s seven. And just one or at most two of Rubio’s. And even those were only mildly so. The lack-of-experience question, for example, was an obvious set-up for him to launch into his future shtick, which he plans on making his main line of attack against Hillary Clinton should he be the nominee.
Now I’m not suggesting that there’s some Murdoch-orchestrated conspiracy here to elevate Rubio. Moderating a 10-candidate debate is probably a really hard thing to do. They surely drew up at least 20 questions for each candidate, knowing that they could only get to some of them, and of course they had to make sure that the questioning was evenly distributed. It’s a high-pressure gig, and the three of them—Kelly, Baier, and Wallace—did pretty well overall.
But it is a fact that they didn’t hit Rubio with any gotcha questions. Two possibilities spring to mind. They could have asked him about his hard-line Cuba position, which isn’t supported even by Cubans in Florida themselves, except those aged 65 and older. And if they’d really wanted to zing him, they could have brought up that hearing where he seemed to think that Iran and ISIS were allies and John Kerry had to explain politely that they weren’t.
In contrast, it seemed clear that they wanted to rake Trump over the coals. The opening question, about whether they’d all support the GOP nominee, was obviously aimed squarely at him, and he obliged them by affirming that no, he would not. Well, Trump’s the front-runner, and the front-runner should get tough questions. And Trump was pretty bad. He clearly didn’t prepare much, he wasn’t funny (and he can be), and he didn’t manage at all to do the one thing he really should have done, which was to say something, just one thing, that was substantive, that showed he had a surprising command of policy, so that the talking heads afterward would have been forced to say, “Hey, that Donald, give him credit, he showed us something new tonight.” He showed nothing new.
Bush was…okay. His task was to be the one who seized on any Trump stumble to communicate to people: See, I’m the real front-runner. But he never really did that. Walker was kind of a blank until almost the very end of the debate, when he pulled out that line about how Russia knows more about Hillary Clinton’s emails than the United States Congress.
As for the second tier: John Kasich probably had the best night. At least he managed to get an audience of conservatives to applaud the fact that he attended a gay wedding. That’s what a home-court advantage will do for you. But his saying that God’s unconditional love for him meant he should love a potentially gay daughter was the right way to do it.
And yes, I’m kind of surprised that I’m 860 words into this column and haven’t mentioned Ted Cruz. Now there’s a guy who needs a lot more than 60 seconds to find his rhythm.
Bottom line: Trump drops, Rubio gains. But the most interesting figure, even though he is personally quite boring, is Bush. When will he demonstrate that he actually deserves to be the one getting all these millions of dollars raised for him? He’s just a bet by moneyed class, not because of what he is, but because of what he isn’t (not Trump, not extremist). He wasn’t bad enough that any of the money people are going to panic. But if it were my money, I’d be shopping around.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 7, 2015
August 10, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP Primary Debates | Common Core, Iraq War, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Reproductive Choice, Scott Walker, Sexism, Single Payer |
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Whether any of the Republican candidates for president will be perceived as having “won” the first prime time debate of this year’s primary season is unclear. In the initial coverage of the debate, however, one winner has emerged: Fox News. Many observers praised the tough questioning of the candidates. A particular target for rave reviews was news anchor Megyn Kelly. “She may not be in the presidential race, but it looks like Megyn Kelly earned at least the popular vote on Thursday,” wrote Elle’s Mattie Kahn. Her hometown newspaper beamed with pride about the debate’s “star.” And there’s plenty more where that came from.
I agree that at least some of this praise was justified—it may not be hard to get Donald Trump to whine, but Kelly was really onto something. Early on in the debate, I was struck by questions that were indeed tougher and more substantive than one would be likely to see from less consciously ideological media outlets. And I agree that Kelly deserves credit for addressing Donald Trump’s history of egregiously sexist comments (“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”)
Even better was the question Kelly asked Walker about his abortion policies. You might expect Fox News moderators to allow Republican candidates to sidestep their least popular views on the subject. To her credit, Kelly asked Walker to defend his position that bans on abortion should not even contain exemptions for the life of the mother—making the laws even more restrictive than they were in most states before Roe v. Wade—observing that Walker’s position was opposed by 83 percent of the public.
Given that the abortion debate is so often conducted on terrain Republicans would prefer, and not just on Fox News, this question was a welcome surprise and yielded important information about one of the Republican frontrunners, who confirmed his radical views.
But before we get carried away praising Kelly and the other moderators, we should keep a couple of things in mind. First of all, even if Kelly is a good journalist and asked some good questions last night, she has some views that are nutty enough that Trump would sign for them. In particular, she has expressed consistently bizarre and retrograde views on race: obsessing over the utterly irrelevant New Black Panthers as if Richard Nixon was still in the White House, defending the racist emails sent by police officers in Ferguson as normal, and insisting that the fictional Santa Claus “just is” white. Not to mention her willfully misleading attacks on Black Lives Matter.
Granted, the personal politics of the moderators don’t matter if the questions are fair. But even on this score Fox News has been overpraised. It’s certainly true that some of the candidates were asked tough questions—Trump, most notably, but also other candidates like Walker and Ben Carson. But consider the kind of questions that were given to Florida senator Marco Rubio:
WALLACE: All right, well, Senator Rubio, let me see if I can do better with you. Is it as simple as our leaders are stupid, their leaders are smart, and all of these illegals coming over are criminals?
WALLACE: Senator Rubio, when Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for presidency, he said this: “There’s no passing off responsibility when you’re a governor, no blending into the legislative crowd.”
Could you please address Governor Bush across the stage here, and explain to him why you, someone who has never held executive office, are better prepared to be president than he is, a man who you say did a great job running your state of Florida for eight years.
BAIER: Senator Rubio, why is Governor Bush wrong on Common Core?
WALLACE: Senator Rubio, more than 3,000 people sent us questions about the economy and jobs on Facebook. And here is a video question from Tania Cioloko from Philadelphia. Here she is. (begins video clip) “Please describe one action you would do to make the economic environment more favorable for small businesses and entrepreneurs and anyone dreaming of opening their own business.”
KELLY: Senator Rubio, I want to ask you the same question. But I do want to mention, a woman just came here to the stage and asked, what about the veterans? I want to hear more about what these candidates are going to do for our nation’s veterans. So I put the question to you about God and the veterans, which you may find to be related.
Rubio wasn’t so much thrown softballs as he was given softballs set up on a tee with 10 strikes and the defensive team told to leave the field. (When Kelly asked the last question, I expected her to ask Rubio his position on motherhood and apple pie too.)
The questioning, in other words, was much less fair than it might have seemed on the surface. Donald Trump, who isn’t going to win the nomination but has a toxic effect on the party as long as he’s in the race, was treated to a brutal inquisition. Rubio, who is arguably the most appealing general election candidate in the field but whose campaign is floundering, was thrown one life preserver after another. John Kasich and Jeb Bush were also treated more gently than the other candidates.
In other words, as Ed Kilgore noticed last night, the candidates who Republican elites would most like to see get traction were given much easier questions than the candidates Republican elites would prefer pack up and go away. Ultimately, Fox News gotta be Fox News.
By: Scott Lemieux, U. S. Contributing Opinion Writer, The Guardian; Talking Points Memo, August 7, 2015
August 9, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Fox News, GOP Primary Debates | Abortion, Black Lives Matter, Chris Wallace, Ferguson, Marco Rubio, Megyn Kelly, Racism, Scott Walker, Sexism |
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