“This Isn’t Complicated, People”: Joe Scarborough Will Never Be President For Many Very Obvious Reasons
I guess we’re doing this again? Morning show host and coffee chain pitchman Joe Scarborough has a book out, about how the Republican Party can save itself by being less angry and extreme, and trying to do more to appeal to “swing voters” and “moderates.” Scarborough has been giving lots of interviews about his book and its very original thesis. Ronald Reagan is on the cover of the book. Now people are asking Joe Scarborough if he is going to run for president, and he “won’t rule anything out.” He should. He definitely should rule it out, as soon as possible.
Now TPM says that Scarborough will be among the potential candidates in a survey taken at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in New Hampshire. That doesn’t really mean a whole lot. It’s not “proof” that Scarborough is dumb enough to actually run for president. He is, hopefully, just indulging the 2016 speculation to promote his book. But if he does even slightly well in this poll — and Northeast Republican Leaders are probably the closest thing to Scarborough’s “crowd” in the modern GOP, so it’s not impossible — there will be a lot of very insufferable words written, by the sort of people who appear or want desperately to appear on “Morning Joe,” about how Scarborough could make a serious run for the presidency. Mike Allen and Dylan Byers will say that “insiders” are “buzzing” about Scarborough 2016.
OK. Let’s be absolutely clear about this: Joe Scarborough is not a serious potential presidential candidate. That is nonsense.
The people who write credulously about candidate Scarborough tend to imply that because Scarborough is a television host, that he has built-in national name recognition and popularity. That is not actually true. Scarborough’s show is popular among people who follow politics closely. Most Americans don’t. And so, most Americans are watching something else most weekday mornings. Among Beltway (and New York) political journalists and media people, it is not a huge stretch to say that “everyone” watches “Morning Joe.” But in the real world, only a couple hundred thousand people watch it. That’s (a lot) fewer people than watch “Community.” I’m not trying to be harsh on Scarborough’s ratings, I am just trying to explain that the man is not, by normal standards, a huge television talk show star. He is more like the most popular local news guy for the Acela corridor.
Meanwhile, a million people watch Fox’s brain-dead morning program. Based on popularity as measured by ratings — a decent measure of popularity, I think — Joe Scarborough would be a less successful political candidate than Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and the Rev. Al Sharpton. In a Republican primary, in any state, for any office, nearly any Fox News host — probably even that old rascal Shep Smith — would almost certainly beat Joe Scarborough.
Suggesting that Scarborough run for president because political junkies like his show is like saying a “Crossfire” panelist should have run for president in 1992. Except that when that actually happened, it wasn’t a total disaster. Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter turned TV pundit, ran for president three times. The second time, in 1996, he actually won New Hampshire, and came in close in Iowa. Still, he didn’t win. What can Scarborough learn from Buchanan’s campaigns? What made Buchanan a popular enough figure to actually win Republican primaries, beating the more experienced choice of the party elite?
Well, he was not a moderate pragmatist. Just not at all. The key to Buchanan’s almost-victory was that he was an outspoken white populist (and, in certain respects, white supremacist) who ran as the true conservative, opposed to the Washington establishment. He expressed anti-free trade beliefs that white working-class voters weren’t hearing from any other candidate in either party. He went big on the culture wars. His campaign semi-jokingly referred to its supporters as “the peasants with pitchforks.” It was, essentially, a proto-Tea Party campaign. That’s how Buchanan came close (though never that close) to winning the GOP nomination for the presidency: by doing exactly the opposite of what Joe Scarborough believes Republicans ought to do to win.
It is hard to believe that Joe Scarborough, coastal pro-business “moderate” who works for MSNBC, would do as well as Pat Buchanan, populist anti-corporate member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, in a GOP primary campaign, even in 2016. A third-party or independent run would be a colossal waste of time and money. Please, stop suggesting that this could actually happen.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 13, 2013
“Recycling For Fun And Profit”: The Imminent Return Of The ‘Clinton Scandals’
Hillary Clinton may well run for president in 2016. Or she may not. But while the nation awaits her decision, both jittery Republican politicians and titillated political journalists – often in concert – will seize upon any excuse to recycle those old “Clinton scandals.”
The latest trip around this endless loop began when Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican of extremist pedigree and nebulous appeal, deflected a question about his party’s “war on women” by yapping about Monica Lewinsky, former “inappropriate” playmate of Bill Clinton. Then the Free Beacon, a right-wing Washington tabloid, published some old papers about the “ruthless” Hillary and the “loony-toon Monica” from the archives of the late Diane Blair, a longtime and intimate Arkansas friend of the Clintons.
Suddenly the media frenzy of the Nineties resumed, as if there had never even been a pause.
What was truly bizarre in Senator Paul’s outburst was his suggestion that somehow Hillary Clinton is implicated in the Lewinsky affair (which he and others have wrongly characterized as “harassment” or victimization of the young White House intern). Most voters will consider that kind of insinuation more repulsive than persuasive.
Still, there were other long-running pseudo-scandals that featured Hillary. Are we doomed to revisit every crackpot allegation and conspiracy theory? Very likely so, if only because that brand of moonshine brought in wads and wads of money from the same credulous wingnuts who follow Fox News. Last week many of them surely sent money to Senator Paul or clicked on the Free Beacon.
The Clintons are still big box office in the mainstream media as well. Our historical amnesia will make the old charges against them sound new again. And if there’s a sucker born every minute, a lot of minutes have passed since they left the White House.
To prepare for the coming tsunami of bullbleep, a brief guide to past scandals may prove useful. Then when another lightweight politician or television personality starts spouting about Whitewater or Filegate or Travelgate – about which he or she actually knows approximately nothing – pertinent facts will be available. (For the longer version, with colorful narrative, consult The Hunting of the President.)
Whitewater: Kenneth Starr spent roughly millions of dollars trying to find evidence of chicanery in a land deal that lost money for the Clintons – and his probe ended up demonstrating their innocence, like several earlier investigations. Having whispered to gullible journalists that he was about to indict Hillary in December 1996, Starr instead abruptly resigned as independent counsel in February 1997, knowing he had no case against her.
Indeed, the Clintons have undergone more thorough and invasive financial vetting than any couple in American history, from the exhaustive Starr investigation through Hillary’s Senate financial disclosures to the Clinton Foundation donors disclosed before her nomination as Secretary of State.
Travelgate: Feverish coverage of Hillary Clinton’s firing of several White House employees who handled press travel arrangements neglected some salient facts –such as the suspicious absence of accounting records for millions of dollars expended by the White House Travel Office, the Travel Office director’s offer to plead guilty to embezzlement, and evidence that he had accepted lavish gifts from an air charter company. The First Lady and her staff didn’t handle the controversy skillfully, but she had plenty of reason to suspect chicanery. And again, exhaustive investigation found no intentional wrongdoing by her.
Filegate: Sensational accusations that Hillary Clinton had ordered up FBI background files to target political opponents soon became a Republican and media obsession, with respectable figures warning that Filegate would be the Clintons’ Watergate. “Where’s the outrage?” cried Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee. Starr investigated the matter and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Finally, in 2010, a Reagan-appointed federal judge mockingly dismissed a civil lawsuit based on the allegations, saying “there’s no there there.”
In truth, there never was.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, February 14, 2014
“Portrait Of A Man Republicans Can’t Trust”: Four Basic Problems Stand Between Chris Christie And The 2016 Nomination
The emergence of Chris Christie as one of America’s most popular national figures comes as a godsend to the Republican Party. Having angrily turned down every opportunity to compromise with an electorate that spurned them a year ago, they now see the enticing chance, in the form of Christie’s all-but-declared presidential candidacy, to right their course without veering left. “The road to Republican political redemption may well run through Trenton, N.J,” says Politico’s Ben White. Savvy operative Ralph Reed, whose ties run from the Grover Norquists of the party to its Christian wing, gave the governor his blessing, seemingly paving the way for Christie to clear the party’s ever-more-stringent ideological purity tests. Christie used his acceptance speech to establish the themes for this run, repeatedly highlighting his support from Democratic constituencies and his record of cutting taxes and spending.
There is only one flaw with the plan: Shepherding Christie through a competitive Republican primary will be vastly more difficult than anybody seems to be figuring at the moment. Four basic, interrelated problems stand between Christie and the 2016 nomination:
1. His ideological deviations are not fake. They’re real. Christie has openly endorsed gun control, called for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and conceded the legitimacy of climate science (“But when you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role it’s time to defer to the experts.”)
The largest, and least appreciated, of Christie’s betrayals of party doctrine is his decision to participate in the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. Some other Republican governors have made the same decision, but they have all faced unrelenting and bitter opposition from legislators of their party and conservative activists. Unyielding hatred to every aspect of Obamacare, regardless of its practical impact, has become the main doctrinal tenet of conservative thought. That alone could potentially disqualify him.
2. Christie’s popularity is somewhat fluky. Christie has some real political talent. But he has benefitted from his juxtaposition against a corrupt, divided, ineffectual state Democratic Party that consistently allowed him to claim the good government high ground. Even so, Christie’s approval ratings hovered in the low-to-mid-fifties, until he achieved beatification through Hurricane Sandy.
Christie benefitted in two ways from Sandy. One was through the kind of active, sleeves-rolled-up response to disaster that can lend politicians stratospheric approval (like the sort Rudy Giuliani won after 9/11, and sought, unsuccessfully, to leverage into higher office.) Second, and more significantly, Christie defined himself as above partisanship by metaphorically and literally embracing President Obama.
In a bitterly partisan era, Christie’s cooperation and apparently warm personal relations with Obama made him a uniquely appealing figure. In particular, it is the key to his lofty standing in the African-American community: In pointed contrast to the ceaseless rage and contempt displayed by his party, Christie treated the nation’s first black president with open respect and affinity.
Of course, having safely won reelection, Christie can undertake a campaign of vilification against Obama. He’ll have to – the taint of collaboration with the hated Obama, if not scrubbed away, would prove as fatal as Joe Lieberman’s kiss proved to his plane crash of a presidential campaign in 2004.
But in so doing, he’ll undercut the bipartisan appeal that is the source of his national standing, eroding the incentive for party elites to rally around him as the sole electable nominee. It’s not an impossible line to walk, but it will require a very deft touch.
3. Christie lacks a deft touch. The Christie method for retaining the goodwill of his party has been, whatever he loses through policy squishiness, he wins back in personal abuse. In the past I have heavily discounted the possibility that this kind of style can translate beyond New Jersey. It is possible that I am underselling Christie’s personal appeal in states that have not spawned The Sopranos and Jersey Shore. Maybe America is truly ready for a loud, angry man in the White House.
But are Republican voters? They may like the spectacle of Christie heaping verbal punishment upon random Democrats who challenge him. It’s another thing altogether if he gives this treatment to Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, or other fellow partisans. If Christie tries to bully fellow Republicans in good standing, it would seem more likely to confirm the accusation that Christie, not them, is the cultural and ideological alien. And if he can’t use bluster, what tools are available to him? It’s not like Christie can cut legislative deals with his primary opponents the way he did in New Jersey.
It is easy to forget how culturally foreign the northeast is to a Southern-dominated party, and how Christie’s belligerent tone may confirm the worst suspicions about him. Conservative columnist Phillip Klein once reported the frequent murmurings of disapproval he found among primary voters when he was covering Giuliani’s race: “one thing I kept running into among voters in early states when covering the campaign was that his background as a New Yorker was a real turnoff and made voters view him as rude and somehow shady.”
4. Christie may actually be shady. Mitt Romney wanted to make Christie his vice-presidential nominee, but took a close look at what the vetters came up with and, my colleague John Heilemann and Mark Halperin report in their new book, promptly changed his mind. Romney’s prudish disdain for Christie’s weight commanded gossipy attention, but the sheer breadth of the potential issues surrounding Christie suggests serious trouble:
The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.”
That’s … a lot of potential scandals. On top of all that, the report about Christie’s expenses “raised questions for the vetters about Christie’s relationship with a top female deputy who accompanied him on many of the trips.” That detail, published in the book but not the excerpts, seems very potentially troublesome.
All these potential problems – Obamacare, Obama, Christie’s exotic cultural background, and the swirl of scandal – all feed into each other. Collectively they form the portrait of a man Republicans fundamentally can’t trust.
Am I suggesting Republican voters would never trust Christie? No. Under the right circumstances, Christie could overcome his many hurdles. After all, Mitt Romney also possessed enormous ideological baggage, and overcame it. But Romney benefitted from enormous luck: his only opponents were staggeringly incompetent, broke, repellant to the party establishment, or all three. Romney staggered to a drawn-out victory while running virtually unopposed.
Christie seems likely to face off against real opponents with credibility and money. The case they have to make against him is strong.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, November 6, 2013
“Dudley Brown’s War”: The 2016 GOP Presidential Primary Is Going To Be A Cannibalistic Train Wreck
Chances are, unless you’re a Colorado political insider, you’ve never heard of Dudley Brown, the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners or the National Association for Gun Rights. But Dudley, as he’s universally known in Colorado, is one of the reasons Democrats have turned Colorado blue, and his scorched-earth tactics on gun rights could very well play in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Dudley’s National Association for Gun Rights spent more money opposing gun legislation than the NRA, a group he considers soft, and has become closely affiliated with Senator Rand Paul.
Dudley is the subject of “Dudley Brown’s War” an extensive profile by reporter Eli Stokols in this month’s 5280 Magazine. It leads with this telling and appalling anecdote:
True to form, last July, two days after James Holmes shot 70 moviegoers in Aurora, killing 12, I asked him about proposals to limit ammunition purchases. When I mentioned Holmes had 6,000 rounds with him that night, Brown said, “I call 6,000 rounds running low.”
Dudley has a long history of attacking Colorado Republicans he considers too-compromising on gun rights, ensuring a weak, extremist candidate in the general election. Stokols continues:
Brown’s hostage-holding of any center- or left-tilting Colorado Republican has crippled the GOP’s ability to regain a political foothold, making Colorado a swing-state microcosm of the national GOP’s biggest problem: breaking free of its base and becoming more “inclusive,” an imperative Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus outlined in March.
Dudley is an equal-opportunity misogynist: the object of some of his worst vitriol has been Republican women. He was responsible for an ugly anti-gay mailer in a Republican state Sen. primary that pitted incumbent Jean White, who voted for civil unions, against challenger Randy Baumgardner (who’s now running for Senate). The gay couple featured in the hate mailer is now suing for unauthorized use of their photo. White lost. And even if he beats 2010 GOP nominee Ken Buck, who just filed papers for the race, Baumgardner can’t beat Democratic Sen. Mark Udall.
Dudley also went after Republican State Rep. B.J. Nikkel for supporting civil unions. As B.J. told me on Twitter, “He can’t stand any woman he can’t control.”
So the cannibalistic exercise that will be the Republican 2016p primary is hardly unfamiliar to Colorado voters. It’s gained volume with the Rand Paul-Chris Christie spat, and shows no signs of abating with Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz visiting Iowa and urging a government shutdown. Meanwhile Paul, a senator from Kentucky, and the National Association for Gun Rights have already started attacking other Republicans for being too soft on gun rights.
According to Politico, back in April during the height of the gun safety bill debate in Congress, “The group has blitzed the districts of Virginia Republicans Cantor and Rep. Scott Rigell with $50,000 worth of TV and radio ads accusing them of helping President Barack Obama pass gun control legislation.”
Sound familiar? Rigell had an A- from the NRA. But that wasn’t good enough for Rand Paul and Dudley Brown.
If Paul makes a serious run at the nomination, he’ll have Dudley Brown to thank. And if he loses the election, Democrats will have Dudley Brown to thank.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, August 9, 2013
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