“Isolating Themselves From Any Exposure To Policy Reality”: The GOP Only Hurts Itself By Walking Away From Tough Debates
Given the uproar within the conservative media world about the supposedly unfair CNBC debate, it’s understandable that the RNC would have to do something lest it lose what little credibility it still had with the GOP base. So Reince Priebus has pulled out of the debate partnership with NBC, even as the candidates themselves have started to form a weird pact to insulate themselves from future debates of that nature.
The problem for the Republican Party and its candidates is that while some of the questions may have been phrased a little rudely (“what is your greatest weakness?” and “comic book version of a presidential campaign” may have gone a little far in the tone department), the questions themselves were both substantive and accurate. This is has been pointed out again and again: Brian Beutler noted it at The New Republic, Ezra Klein explained it at Vox, and Charles Pierce had his own colorful version at Esquire.
The problem with the CNBC debate for Repbulicans wasn’t that a bunch of “flaming liberals” (in the words of the incomparably ghoulish Charles Krauthammer) asked them unfair questions. CNBC is, after all, the slavishly pro-Wall Street greedhead network that employs Rick “Tea Party” Santelli, Larry Kudlow and similar characters. It was that the moderators treated unserious falsehoods as, well, unserious falsehoods, from the candidates’ budget-busting regressive plans counting on phantom supply-side growth to their denials of unsavory records and associations.
So the RNC has decided to work the refs and refuse any similar debates, rather than suggest that their candidates might want to be less openly silly and unserious.
But this only hurts the Republican Party going forward. In a general election, the Democratic Party and its allies will not be shy about pointing out the weaknesses of the eventual nominee and their policy positions in the strongest possible terms.
One of the chief goals of a presidential primary is to test candidates’ weaknesses and potential general election attacks against them. On the Democratic side, that means that Clinton’s trustworthiness and Sanders’ use of the socialist label are both fair game. Democratic primary voters have a vested interest in seeing how their candidates handle those issues in a trial run before the big event.
Republicans seem to be more interested in isolating themselves from any exposure to policy reality, preferring to scream about the “liberal media” (at CNBC!) whenever anyone suggests that, for instance, handing out trillions in tax breaks to the rich just might increase budget deficits.
That will only come back to hurt them worse starting in June of next year when the real games begin.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 31, 2015
“We Have Become A Midterm Party”: RNC Chair; ‘We’re Cooked As A Party’ With 2016 Loss
Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus had hoped for a very different kind of 2016 election cycle. As we discussed a while back, the RNC chief intended to curtail the number of debates, front-load the nominating process, and effectively stack the deck in favor of established, electable candidates. Before the process even began, GOP lawmakers were also supposed to take lessons from the 2012 losses, pass immigration reform, and take steps to broaden the base.
The party, the argument went, would position itself for victory in 2016 by avoiding an embarrassing circus and steering clear of a madcap process that tarnished the party and its candidates alike.
The execution of Priebus’ plan has worked out quite differently, and when he sat down yesterday with the conservative Washington Examiner, he looked ahead to next fall.
…”I think that we have become, unfortunately, a midterm party that doesn’t lose and a presidential party that’s had a really hard time winning,” Priebus said. “We’re seeing more and more that if you don’t hold the White House, it’s very difficult to govern in this country – especially in Washington D.C.”
“So I think that – I do think that we’re cooked as a party for quite a while as a party if we don’t win in 2016. So I do think that it’s going to be hard to dig out of something like that,” Priebus told the Examiner.
It’s a fair assessment. Looking back over the last six presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote five times. If Dems expand that to a six-out-of-seven advantage, it will be that much more difficult for Republicans to characterize themselves as a national governing party.
What’s less clear is the practical implication of defeat. When Priebus imagines the Republican Party as “cooked … for quite a while,” I’m not entirely sure what he means in applied terms. Does the RNC chair think another defeat would be an impetus for dramatic intra-party change? Does he envision a splintering of the party in which right-wing members break off?
In the same interview, Priebus added that he doesn’t “anticipate” another rough cycle next year. “I think … history is on our side,” he told the Examiner.
As a factual matter, he’s entirely correct. Looking back over the post-WWII era, parties have nearly always struggled to hold onto the White House for three straight elections. Democrats do, in fact, go into 2016 facing historical headwinds.
But it’s nevertheless easy to imagine Dems prevailing anyway, leaving Republicans “cooked.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 16, 2015
“Laying Priebus’s Plans To Waste”: A Nation of Sociopaths? What The Trump Phenomenon Says About America
The Republican Party has a Donald Trump problem—and that has some Democrats thanking Lady Luck for apparently blowing on their dice. The casino mogul, after all, has thrown the GOP into a disarray even greater than that wrought by the Koch brothers and the Tea Party, dashing the hopes of Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to launch a nominee who could reach out to racial and ethnic minorities, or one who at least would not say terrible things about women.
With his continued antagonism of Spanish-speakers, his incendiary denouncement of the Black Lives Matter movement, and his base comments about actor Rosie O’Donnell and Fox News host Megyn Kelly, as Trump continues to surge in polls of Republican primary voters, he threatens to lay Priebus’s plans to waste.
This is no way to win a general election, the thinking goes. And so in some corners of Democratland, there is happy dancing in the streets.
Trump offers other benefits, as well, to liberals and progressives in the form of the monkey wrench he could throw into the works of Charles and David Koch, who have been positioning their organizational network as the party within the party, replete with resources for candidates who would run on their platform of smashing unions and coddling private capital. Among these resources is a voter data system said to be superior to that of the RNC.
Part of the Koch network of political and policy organizations and entities, the i360 data system is made available to Republican candidates; they in turn use the data collected to construct their campaigns. But then the data stays within the Koch network, allowing the billionaire brothers and their confrères to act as kingmakers within the party at a level beyond the ad-buy and ground-soldier support bestowed by the network’s other entities, such as Americans for Prosperity.
The Trump campaign, through the candidate’s support for socialized medicine and raising taxes on the wealthy, as well as his opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, constitutes a major nose-thumbing at the Kochs. By staying in the race, he denies them the level of control over the 2016 presidential campaign that they surely expected to have.
Beyond the question, though, of whether Trump is good for Democrats lies the question of whether his candidacy is good for America. Some have implied that the response to Trump on the stump—the smoking out of nativists, racists, and misogynists, bringing them to the surface—is indeed a good thing, because it reveals, in no uncertain terms, to whom the Republican Party most appeals. Heck, even avowed white supremacists—not a constituency prone to endorsing candidates of either major party—are professing their love for The Donald.
If I had faith that America would look at those smoked-out varmints in horror, and resolve as a nation to ostracize all who professed such views—and, better yet, enact policies to rectify the vestiges of past oppression and discrimination in our present society—I might be able to buy the “Trump is good for America” argument. But, alas, I am not familiar with an America whose people, as a whole, are willing to do that.
Instead, what Trump is doing, via the media circus of which he has appointed himself ringmaster, is making the articulation of the basest bigotry acceptable in mainstream outlets, amplifying the many oppressive tropes and stereotypes of race and gender that already exist in more than adequate abundance.
For all the ink I’ve just spilled on these two questions, neither is the most important one that should be asked about the Trump candidacy. That would be this one: What is wrong with America that this racist, misogynist, money-cheating clown should be the frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of its two major parties?
Donald Trump is a rich man despite having driven several businesses into the ground, resurrecting himself through the bankruptcy process—meaning that he essentially cheated his creditors out of what they were owed. According to CNN, “no major U.S. company has filed for Chapter 11 more than Trump’s casino empire in the last 30 years.”
In giving Trump, star of The Apprentice—a reality show in which he played an abusive boss whom the audience apparently loves for his frequent utterance of the words, “You’re fired!”—an even greater platform as a potential occupant of the White House, America enables a vicious swindler, holding him up as a figure to emulate.
He’s a boon to the ratings of news programs, both on the networks and on cable channels. It’s not just the wing-nuts who are watching. America just can’t get enough of this guy!
It’s time to put down the mesmerizing kaleidoscope of the Trump media spectacle, and examine the Trump phenomenon through a more penetrating lens. Revealed is America as a deeply troubled, even sociopathic, nation.
But, damn, it’s one heck of a show.
By: Adele M. Stan, The American Prospect, September 9, 2015
“Now Operating Entirely From A Position Of Strength”: Donald Trump Has The Republican Party In The Palm Of His Hand
On Thursday, Donald Trump signed a loyalty pledge to the Republican Party, stipulating that he would support whoever becomes the GOP’s presidential nominee and foreclose the option of mounting an independent or write-in or third-party candidacy. The purpose of the pledge was to bring Trump to heel. By announcing his decision publicly, and holding the signed pledge up to a thousand cameras, Trump gave the Republican party readymade and provocative attack ad material: In the event that he shirks the agreement, and mounts an independent candidacy at some point, Republicans can air footage that proves Trump broke his word.
There may be some solace in that, but the fact that he was willing to sign the pledge at all should alarm Republicans more than it soothes them. Trump wasn’t communicating to the party that its knock against him for threatening an independent run has been effective. To the contrary, it’s that he doesn’t think the threat is necessary anymore—that he’s now genuinely well-positioned to win the primary, rather than an insurgent threat who can be neutralized by party heavyweights.
This isn’t just a matter of polling—though the polling is consistent with it—but of the way Trump speaks about the pledge itself. He clearly doesn’t see it as an inviolable agreement, but rather as a way to keep the Republican Party from organizing to sabotage his candidacy.
“I really got nothing,” Trump said at a Thursday press conference in New York, speaking about his meeting with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. “Absolutely nothing other than the assurance that I would be treated fairly…. I have no intention of changing my mind.”
He got nothing, in other words, aside from an all-purpose and unchallengeable exception, which will force party officials to constantly police one another to make sure they don’t give Trump the excuse he’ll need to launch an independent campaign.
Trump is now operating entirely from a position of strength.
As Slate’s Josh Voorhees noted, over the course of three months, the percentage of likely Iowa caucus goers who told survey takers for Bloomberg and the Des Moines Register that they would “never” support Trump collapsed, from 58 down to 29 percent. A nationwide Monmouth poll of Republican voters conducted a few days later found that Trump has completely reversed his dangerously low net favorables, from 20-55 in June to 59-29 today.
In head-to-head matches with nine other Republican candidates, Trump beats everybody except for Ben Carson. He trounces Jeb Bush 56-37, Marco Rubio, 52-38, and Scott Walker, 53-38, suggesting that as the field winnows, dark horse backers are more likely to migrate to Trump than to any of the establishment-friendly candidates.
This is in some ways no surprise. The right-wing vote has been a majority share of the primary electorate since the campaign began. But building a majority for an anti-establishment candidate seems easier than ever before. It can now be achieved, per Matt Bruenig, by combining the support of just three candidates: Trump, Carson, and Ted Cruz.
A few weeks ago, the best argument that Trump couldn’t win the nomination rested on the premise that his maximum support was too low, and that the party would array against him aggressively as the field narrowed. Trump has spoiled both premises. It is now easy to imagine Trump eclipsing 40 percent of the vote before the primaries begin, and ripping up that pledge if a panicky Republican Party responds by erecting obstacles to his victory. Right now, in the GOP primary campaign, the most pressing question has nothing to do with Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or any of the people who were supposed to win. It’s whether Ben Carson can keep up the fight, or Donald Trump runs away with it.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, September 4, 2015
“Why The RNC’s Loyalty Pledge Was A Huge Mistake”: Whether Priebus Knows It Or Not, He’s Been Played, And It’s Going To Hurt
Another day brings another poll with Donald Trump in the lead. According to a new Monmouth University poll of Republicans nationwide released Thursday, the real estate mogul leads the pack with 30 percent of the vote. His next closest competitor, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, takes 18 percent. By contrast, the most mainstream and viable candidates—Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio, and Govs. Scott Walker, John Kasich, and Chris Christie—take 8 percent, 5 percent, 3 percent, 2 percent, and 2 percent respectively, for a combined total of 20 percent support among the five of them.
In other words, the age of Trump is here, it shows no sign of retreat, and Republican leaders are nervous. If Trump becomes the nominee—still unlikely, for the same reasons it’s difficult for Sen. Bernie Sanders to pull a win in the Democratic primary—he’d be an easy target for Democrats, who could blast him for everything from inexperience and temperament, to his nativist rhetoric and unsubtle racism. But a Trump nomination is so unlikely that it’s not the actual nightmare for the Republican Party. The nightmare is a third-party run, where Trump gets himself on the ballot in all 50 states, and siphons white voters from a GOP that needs white turnout to win national elections.
That nightmare is why, on Wednesday, the Republican National Committee privately circulated a “loyalty pledge” to the party’s presidential candidates. “I [name] affirm that if I do not win the 2016 Republican nomination for president of the United States I will endorse the 2016 Republican presidential nominee regardless of who it is,” reads the pledge. “I further pledge that I will not seek to run as an independent or write-in candidate nor will I seek or accept the nomination for president of any other party.” The obvious hope was that Trump would agree, rule out an independent run, and let Republican leaders breathe easy (or at least, more easily).
On Thursday, Trump obliged. He signed the pledge and held a press conference, where he made a verbal commitment to the Republican Party. “I see no circumstances under which I’d tear up that pledge,” he said, adding later that he’s been “treated well” by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and the RNC. He’ll commit to conservative principles, and if he loses, he loses.
On the surface, this is an important victory for Republican leaders. But look carefully, and it’s somewhere between a disaster and a catastrophe. Trump hasn’t just bound himself to the RNC, the RNC has bound itself to Trump and put pressure on other candidates to do the same. Let’s say Rubio wins the primary and becomes the Republican nominee. Thanks to the pledge, he’s linked to Trump, and Democrats can run wild with guilt-by-association. By the end of the campaign, Trump might be the face of the Rubio campaign, as much as the Florida senator himself.
That’s the disaster. The catastrophe is that there’s nothing to hold Trump to the pledge. As soon as it becomes inconvenient, he can break it. And because he’s untethered from the institutions of the Republican Party, Trump has nothing to lose from breaking the pledge. Indeed, anything he gains from signing—the imprimatur of the GOP and commitments from other candidates—is almost irrelevant to his appeal as the “outsider” who understands the world of the “insiders.” The only thing that ties Trump to his word, on this score, is the promise of official “respect.” For a man of Trump’s ego, that’s weak binding.
Consider Ross Perot, whose 1992 run was a challenge to George H.W. Bush, although it didn’t cost him the election. Initially, Perot denied a plan to run. But, on a February episode of Larry King Live, he hedged his refusal. “If voters in all 50 states put me on the ballot—not 48 or 49 states, but all 50—I will agree to run,” he said. Voters came out, and he ran. But by the summer, his campaign was pockmarked by controversy and on the decline. Appearing with Larry King again, he announced his political departure. “I have not gone away,” Perot told King. “But I have concluded that I should not be the candidate.” This lasted for a few short months, at which point, Perot jumped into the race for good. “The volunteers in all 50 states have asked me to run as a candidate for President of the United States,” Perot said in an October speech. “Jim Stockdale, our vice-presidential candidate, and I are honored to accept their request.”
No, Perot didn’t sign a pledge or run in either primary. But that doesn’t make him a different case; the point is that Perot made a promise, and broke it. And why wouldn’t he? He had nothing to lose. On the same score, it’s not hard to imagine a world where Trump loses the primary, but “the voters” still want him to run. What stops Trump from citing imagined “disrespect” and starting a third-party campaign? Nothing. The Republican Party can’t stop him, and it can’t sanction him. The party thinks it has power over him, but it doesn’t.
If anything, the loyalty pledge enhances his platform. He can run his campaign—touting Social Security and condemning illegal immigration—and when he loses the nomination, he’ll have the audience and support he needs to make an independent run. Whether Priebus knows it or not, he’s been played, and it’s going to hurt.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, September 3, 2015
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