Sorry, Republicans, but it’s still Donald Trump’s world. And sorry, Donald, but now you have to share it with Ben Carson.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that Carly Fiorina won herself a big patch of political territory in Wednesday night’s marathon 11-candidate debate on CNN. But the conventionally wise have been consistently wrong about this campaign, and I wonder if voters were equally impressed with her performance.
There’s no question that Trump, the clear front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, had an off night. The blustery mogul is at his best when he can feed on the energy of a fired-up crowd, but the audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library was small and consisted mostly of party insiders. They showed him very little love.
His worst moment came when he claimed, without elaboration, that if he were president he would “get along with” Vladimir Putin and somehow convince the Russian leader to support U.S. foreign policy goals. Sure, and maybe Putin will give him a pony, too. You had to wonder if Trump has given more than five minutes’ thought to relations with Moscow.
But he stuck to his guns on the issue that propelled his rise: immigration. Trump’s claim that he can somehow deport 11 million undocumented men, women and children is absurd, ridiculous, unthinkable, cruel, dishonest — pick your adjective. But it has electrified much of the Republican Party base, and I’m betting that his supporters heard him loud and clear.
Meanwhile, Jeb Bush’s attempts to go after Trump reminded me of the time when British politician Denis Healey said that being attacked by his patrician rival, Geoffrey Howe, was “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”
Bush tried gamely to land a punch, at one point demanding that Trump apologize to his wife, Columba, for the ugly things he has said about Mexican immigrants. Trump refused, and that was that. Bush is taller than Trump but for some reason could not contrive to loom over him. Mano a mano , the billionaire still seemed large and in charge.
Carson has zoomed to second place in most polls, and I think his debate performance will give him another boost. His soft-spoken, low-key approach might annoy the political cognoscenti, but voters apparently like it, perhaps because he doesn’t seem as needy or desperate as the others.
I thought his best moment was when he was talking about border security and related his recent trip to Arizona, describing simple measures in one county that had reduced illegal crossings almost to zero. Sometimes practical solutions have more impact than high-blown rhetoric.
If Fiorina wanted to convince everyone of her toughness, she succeeded. She barged in whenever she wanted, no matter who was speaking, and she icily backhanded Trump over his piggish remarks about her face. I thought she overdid the Iron Lady routine when she declared she “wouldn’t talk to [Putin] at all,” but any woman running for high office faces unfair pressure to project strength. She made this factual error: A constitutional amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states, not two-thirds.
Did she do enough to vault into the top tier of candidates alongside Trump and Carson? Maybe, but she’s starting from the low single digits. And while she nailed Trump for his sexism, I thought the extended back-and-forth over their accomplishments in business was the one exchange in which he was a clear winner. If Fiorina gets tarred as a mediocre chief executive, what qualifications does she have to run on?
As for the rest:
John Kasich was upbeat and reasonable, qualities that would definitely help him in the general election — but maybe not in the primaries.
Chris Christie was sharp and funny. His campaign probably isn’t going anywhere, but after Wednesday it still has a pulse.
Marco Rubio was stridently, alarmingly hawkish. Where doesn’t he want to use military force? And did his youth make him seem vigorous or callow? You decide.
Mike Huckabee was so apocalyptic on Iran that he must have frightened any children who happened to be watching.
Rand Paul seems to have become a libertarian again, sticking up for individual rights. And unlike the others on the stage, he spoke out for peace rather than war.
Scott Walker looked, once again, out of his depth. The party establishment once thought this guy was its savior? I expect his slide to continue.
And finally, the unctuous Ted Cruz looked and sounded as if he were trying to sell me a reverse mortgage. No thanks, senator.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 17, 2015
September 19, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, GOP Presidential Candidates, GOP Primary Debates | Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Foreign Policy, GOP Base, Immigration, Jeb Bush, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Vladimir Putin |
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I noted at Lunch Buffet that the fact-checkers are having a ball with Carly Fiorina’s performance last night. But it’s worth remembering that’s a real pattern with her. Back on August 20, WaMo intern Celeste Bott deconstructed a Fiorina appearance at Campbell Brown’s education summit in New Hampshire, and found the former CEO did not really know what she was talking about:
Many of her responses in the Q&A stuck to the same GOP talking points the other candidates mostly stuck to, criticizing the Common Core standards and an overinvolved Department of Education. Her biggest argument? Increased federal spending on education hasn’t led to substantive improvement.
“Let’s talk about what’s not working. It’s pretty obvious what’s not working. The Department of Education has gotten more money every year for roughly 30 years, and yet these income disparity gaps I described are getting worse. We’re not improving in terms of our achievement rates relevant to other nations. So we know factually speaking that when Washington spends more money, the quality of education in this nation does not improve.”
What Fiorina said, however, is factually inaccurate, even if it plays to common misperceptions about our “failing” public schools. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which education experts generally agree is the most reliable measure of K-12 attainment, reading scores for American nine year olds have increase by 12 points, or an entire grade level, and math scores have gone up 24 points, or two grade levels, since the early 1970s. And the disparities between advantaged and disadvantaged students she says have widened have in fact narrowed: black and Latino students’ test scores have risen faster than white scores. Though the topline NAEP scores are flat, making it seem like there has been little progress, as the conservative American Enterprise Institute has pointed out this is a statistical quirk arising from the fact that in recent decades the percentage of students who are affluent and white (and generally score relatively high) has decreased while the percentage who are lower-income and minority (and generally score relatively low) has increased. In fact, NAEP scores for all subgroups have increased substantially, during the same period that federal spending and involvement has grown.
That wasn’t the only problem with Fiorina’s education rap.
A great deal of Fiorina’s responses centered around promoting school choice, going so far as to say that if elected, she would surround herself with people who have built successful charter schools. When asked about challenges to choice, she pointed to federal programs like the Obama administration’s Race to the Top.
“Federal government money is being used to pick winners and losers. You see a program like Race to the Top being used to determine, ‘Well, you’re doing it the way we want you to do it, so you get federal money’ and ‘You’re not doing it the way we want you to do it, so you don’t get federal money.’ That’s not going to work. The truth is more federal money ought to flow out of Washington D.C. into the states, and money at the state level ought to flow into the community level.”
Race to the Top, a so-called barrier to school choice, awarded grants to states for lifting their caps on charter schools, effectively providing incentives for states to offer more choices and create innovative programs, the very things Fiorina is advocating.
Bott concludes by noting Fiorina’s assertion that the federal government should get out of education policy and instead focus on its primary responsibilities, like “repairing roads and bridges.”
Wrong again, Batman!
In fact, the vast majority of roads and bridges in America are owned and maintained by state and local governments, with the federal government picking up only 24 percent of all surface transportation costs, mostly for interstate highways and mass transit systems.
As we saw again last night, Fiorina relies on speed and specificity to give the impression of substantive knowledge, even if it’s not actually there. But what else would you expect from some fast-talking politician who’s been in office playing these games for years?
Oh, wait….
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, September 17, 2015
September 18, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Carly Fiorina, Education, GOP Primary Debates | Charter Schools, Common Core, GOP Talking Points, Infrastructure, NAEP, Public Schools, Race to the Top |
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Well, that was all kind of…interminable. For a time there in the middle, I thought Ben Carson had strolled out to perform some elective surgery. I guess we kind of agree that Carly Fiorina won, since she did manage to convey some real or at least manufactured-real passion on about three or four occasions.
But you wanna know who really won that debate? Hillary Clinton. Go ahead, go ahead, laugh all you want. Yes, her stock is selling awfully low right now. Nate Silver says, accurately, that she is in a “self-reinforcing funk” right now and that there’s no obvious way out for the time being.
But consider. She is still the overwhelming favorite to be the Democratic nominee. She still leads the Republicans in a strong majority of the general election head-to-head matchups. And that’s after two horrible media months in which, by Silver’s count, she has endured 29 negative news stories while enjoying just one positive one. All that, and she’s still mostly ahead.
And being the Democrat, she has the Electoral College advantage that any plausible Democrat has these days because the GOP has just positioned itself too far right to win states that it regularly won back in the Nixon-to-Bush Sr. era. That advantage is either 257 electoral votes that tilt strongly Democratic, or 247, if you put Iowa and New Hampshire on the fence as, for example, Larry Sabato does. I do not, because those two states have both gone Democratic five of the last six times, which is trend enough for me. The comparable Republican number, the “natural” Republican Electoral College vote, is 206. If Clinton holds every state that’s gone Democratic in five out of the last six and sneaks by in Virginia, boom, Madam President. She doesn’t even need Ohio or Florida.
All that speaks to the advantages she still enjoys, even with the quicksand she’s been stuck in lately. But all that isn’t why she won the debate. She won the debate because these people are jokers. Donald Trump, come on. I mean, look: I’ve come to believe here lately that he’d be a better president than most of them in some ways. I could picture the Trump whom Jonah Goldberg detests nominating someone to the Supreme Court who is not a knuckle-dragger. But that doesn’t erase the fundamental and self-evident preposterosity of the idea of President Trump. He slipped Wednesday night. That moment when he said he’d know plenty about foreign policy in good time was embarrassing.
Ben Carson. Yes, he seems like a nice enough man. But he had nothing interesting to say. Carly Fiorina had good lines. She’s well prepped for these things. But if she actually did call “the supreme leader”—did you notice how she called him that, just like the quisling Obama does?—on her first day in office and change the terms of the Iran deal as radically as she suggested, Tehran would have a nuclear weapon in about four months. She was also well prepped on her Hewlett-Packard tenure, how to answer the disaster charge (she walked away with a $40 million parachute, by the way). But that doesn’t change the fact that it was bad, and not just because of the economy. Her Compaq decision, among others, had a lot to do with it. If we’re sizing up business people, she is less qualified than Trump.
As for the “serious” ones, Jeb Bush and the others, they are in their way even worse. Unlike the outsider triumvirate, they know actual facts about governmental policy, and yet they still persist in uttering this fantasy gibberish to assuage the hard right base. It’s one thing for Trump to say he can bully the Ford Motor Company in one day to keep a plant in Michigan. He probably truly believes he could. But it’s quite another for Bush to say his brother “kept America safe.” Yes, he did. Except for 9/11. Well, whatever. And what were those brainwashed idiots doing applauding that line? This is the kind of thing that only conservatives believe, because it’s just obviously not true, and everyone else knows it.
There were a few moments of quasi-reality. Rand Paul and John Kasich were sort of interesting on foreign policy, which we can assume hurt them badly. But basically, the whole thing was ridiculous. The jokers are ahead, and they haven’t offered a serious proposal among them. The allegedly serious ones are mostly just doing what Mitt Romney did, to his peril, in 2012, jumping up in front of the base saying, “See, I can be crazy right-wing, too!”
Meanwhile, Clinton has offered serious policy proposals one after the other. No Republican even comes remotely close, with the partial exception of Paul, who has been rewarded for his quasi-seriousness with what, 3 percent support. Compare, for example, Clinton’s tax proposal to Bush’s. Yes, they both want to end the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers, which is the headline.
But look beyond the headline. In a July 12 speech, Clinton paired that announcement with a series of other steps that would do what eliminating the carried-interest loophole is designed to do: try to alleviate inequality. Bush, in contrast, tossed elimination of the loophole in there as a look-good sop in a package of tax proposals that otherwise will exacerbate inequality and continue the party for the 1 percent that his brother so diligently advanced.
I could go on, and on. But suffice it to say: Clinton is putting forward policy after policy that address America’s great problems. These people are just making stuff up. Eventually, issues will matter. And voters will see what they saw in 2008 and 2012, two elections when Republicans couldn’t believe they lost to such a lightweight. In 2016, they’ll say we can’t believe we lost to such a corrupt blah-da-de-blah, and the answer will be the same as it was then: You people aren’t in the real world where most Americans live.
The best line of the night? Rick Santorum, at the JV debate. When he said his party is all about business owners but won’t talk to workers. The 11 on the main stage failed Santorum’s test, except with respect to government workers who feel their religious beliefs are being violated. Clinton passes his test, and by Election Day, it will matter.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 17, 2015
September 18, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2016, GOP Primary Debates, Hillary Clinton | Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump, Economic inequality, Electioral College, GOP, GOP Base, Iran Nuclear Agreement, Jeb Bush |
3 Comments
Watching the second Republican presidential debate on CNN and its aftermath, millions of Americans learned again what we already know about the candidates: These people embellish, prettify, and fabricate their own biographies without hesitation, from Donald Trump’s much-parodied boasting about his business acumen to Carly Fiorina’s super-selective accounting of her tenure at Hewlett-Packard to Chris Christie’s highly romanticized account of his appointment and record as U.S. Attorney to Jeb Bush’s wildly inflated claims about the Florida economy when he was governor.
But as Christie himself pointed out – in a remark targeted at Trump and Fiorina – why would anybody even pay attention to the tall tales told by these politicians (or the self-styled political “outsiders,” who sound exactly like politicians) about themselves? While the bickering is sometimes amusing and mostly annoying, does anyone believe that it matters?
For these characters to prevaricate endlessly about their résumés and achievements is neither surprising nor important. Of much greater consequence are the bat-winged lies they emit about issues that affect all of our lives, as well as the future of the United States and the world.
Evidently all of the Republicans on the stage at the Reagan presidential library wanted us to believe that Planned Parenthood should be shut down everywhere because its clinics sell post-abortion fetal body parts for profit. That is a false and outrageous accusation, disproved in the same videotapes that they cited as proof. Attacking the venerable women’s health organization, Fiorina went even further, furiously describing a scene in those videos supposedly showing a “fully formed fetus” with legs kicking and heart beating while someone prepares to “harvest its brain.”
Such horrific practices, she declared, “erode the character of our nation.” What erodes the character of our nation, in fact, is Fiorina’s blatant chicanery, repeated by her the next morning on ABC News. The video she claims to have watched does not exist, according to Vox.com reporter Sarah Kliff, who viewed all 12 hours of those videos.
What exist in reality are hundreds of thousands of women who will lose access to health care if fanatics like Fiorina and her fellow Republican candidates ever succeed in wrecking Planned Parenthood. Having “harvested” tens of millions of dollars from Hewlett-Packard for nearly wrecking the company, however, she doesn’t need to worry about medical care for other people.
Nearly every Republican on that stage brayed his or her opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement – and every one of them falsely described that deal. Typical was Senator Ted Cruz, who warned, “We won’t know under this agreement—there are several facilities in Iran they designate as military facilities that are off limits all together…the other facilities, we give them 24 days notice before inspecting them.”
None of what Cruz said is true or relevant. All of Iran’s designated nuclear facilities will fall under continuous video and electronic monitoring in addition to physical visitation by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who will also monitor any movements of nuclear materials or equipment there. Hostile to scientific facts as they are, Cruz and his fellow Republicans are probably unaware of how easily as little as a billionth of a gram of radioactive dust could be detected by IAEA inspectors, as the Center for National Security at Fordham University noted in a factsheet.
These examples represent only a few of literally dozens of mendacious statements about crucial public issues, usually bordering on absurdity, broadcast by CNN with little contradiction on Wednesday evening. Senator Marco Rubio insisted that we can do nothing about man-made climate change without destroying the economy, when every reputable study shows that the economy and the world will be destroyed if we do nothing. Christie promised to “save” Social Security from insolvency by denying payments to wealthy recipients, when that won’t significantly improve the system’s finances – and the “crisis” he touted is overblown anyway. Trump insisted that life-saving vaccines cause autism, complete with anecdotal “proof” from an “employee” whose “beautiful baby” contracted a fever and then “became autistic” after being vaccinated.
Not only did Trump concoct that sad story, but there is little doubt that his own children, including little Barron Trump, have received proper vaccinations. (Manhattan private schools don’t accept the unvaccinated.) Disgracefully, neither of the two physicians on stage, Rand Paul and Ben Carson, had the guts to forcefully contradict him.
Try as they will to reject Trump, he fits in perfectly among Republicans – and not only because he worships money, spews xenophobic nonsense, and encourages callous bigotry. Like them, he relies on fabrications and falsehoods, manipulating the prejudices of ill-informed voters.
The Republican rejection of reality – which these candidates will act out in debate after debate for months to come – inflicts grave costs on this country every day. It is hard to imagine the damage that will be done if one of these deceivers comes to power.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, The National Memo, September 17, 2015
September 18, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Carly Fiorina, GOP Primary Debates, Planned Parenthood, Women's Health | Climate Change, CNN, Conservatives, Donald Trump, Iran Nuclear Agreement, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Vaccinations |
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When you eat a bowl of Simply Granola in the morning, you may think you’re making a healthy start to the day, courtesy of Quaker Oats. But you’re taking in the amount of sugar in almost four Oreo cookies.
When you listen to the politicians who want to lead the United States through the treacherous early 21st century, you may think you’re doing your job as a citizen of this clamorous and vulgar democracy of ours. You’re not. You’re getting a sugar high. It feels good. It won’t last. And ultimately, it’ll make you sick.
I’ve been trying to eat healthy, metaphorically, for the month of August. But it’s been a bust. There’s just too much bad stuff to binge on. We have a pending deal with Iran that could imperil Israel, or make the Mideast safer for a decade. We have an approaching visit of a transitional pope. We have a fledgling health care plan that’s given coverage to 15 million Americans who never had any — and one party wants to take it away. And we’re muddling through the hottest year on record, so far, surpassing the last warmest one, 2014.
And yet, what are the leaders-in-waiting talking about? Roll the highlight reel of our junk politics, starting with the also-rans:
At least one Republican wants to sic the Internal Revenue Service on his political enemies. So promised Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, in a remarkable statement overlooked at the kids’ table debate last week. “I guarantee you under President Jindal, January 2017, the Department of Justice and the I.R.S. and everybody else we can send from the federal government will be going into Planned Parenthood.”
Other Republicans think we should be living in a theocracy. “It’s time we recognize the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being,” said Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, testing the latest version of his church-lady demagogy. He wants to ignore the high court on both gay marriage and abortion — breaking the law while waving his Bible.
Huckabee would also use the force of government to intervene with any woman seeking an abortion, claiming a constitutional right, the 14th and 5th Amendments, to protect a zygote. When he mentioned this Brave New World idea in the debate, no one challenged him. Instead, other candidates were equally extreme, refusing to make abortion exceptions even when the life of a woman is at stake. This is junk women’s health care, driven by religious fanaticism.
More empty calories: Scott Walker, the governor whose foreign policy experience is limited to breakfast at the old International House of Pancakes, threatens to start at least two wars upon taking office. He promises to use military action if necessary to coax Iran into doing what he wants it to do. He also wants to pick a fight with Russia, sending weapons to Ukraine and erecting a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Walker’s home state of Wisconsin ranks 35th in private sector job creation. But New Jersey is worse, suffering nine credit downgrades and ranking near the bottom in job growth. Even the governor of the state, Chris Christie, would not rise to Jersey’s defense after fellow candidates described Atlantic City as something akin to Baghdad on a hangover.
Those governors want to apply their ruinous models to the rest of the country. In the same vein, a failed former chief executive officer, Carly Fiorina, having fired 30,000 employees and driven her company’s stock price into the ground, feels more qualified than ever to be president. She’s never held elective office and rarely voted while living in California. A junk comeback.
Which gets us to Donald Trump, who boasts of four company bankruptcies, and paying people to come to his wedding. He is “a very smart person” and will be “phenomenal to the women” just like “the blacks.” It’s hard for women to attack him, he says, “because I’m so good-looking.”
Normal politics can’t explain Trump. For that you need Freud. Trump fits the classic definition of narcissistic personality disorder, as Marc C. Johnson, an astute observer of American politics, noted in a recent blog post. Everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is junk, but at least it fits a pattern.
Finally, to the Democrats. A 73-year-old socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is getting lots of attention because Hillary Clinton’s email story is boring, by Clinton scandal standards. When a noisy intruder, an African-American, jumped to the podium and refused to let Sanders speak, it was widely interpreted as a big problem for the candidate and race relations.
Wrong. The censor with the mouth was, it turns out, a self-described “extremist Christian,” from a family that once backed Sarah Palin. Some members of Black Lives Matter distanced themselves from her.
How did this stunt become a thing among the national press corps? Junk media. Sadly, the sugar high goes two ways.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, August 14, 2015
August 17, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2016, GOP Primary Debates, Presidential Primaries | Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Donald Trump, Iran Nuclear Deal, Planned Parenthood, Scott Walker, Women's Health |
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