“Donald’s Trump Card”: His Candidacy Is A Headache For The GOP, But A Third Party Run Would Be A Catastrophe
Donald Trump. For Democrats who care about this presidential election cycle, the infamous Republican candidate has been the gift that keeps on giving. And now, he’s threatening to give Democrats more than they could have possibly hoped for in the form of a third party run.
According to an interview with The Hill, Trump may consider a third party bid if he doesn’t feel the Republican Party has been fair to him during the primary process. When asked about the possibility of the independent run, Trump said, “I’ll have to see how I’m being treated by the Republicans. Absolutely, if they’re not fair, that would be a factor.”
Understandably, Trump’s run for the nomination has been a thorn in the side of the national GOP. He’s monopolizing the press coverage, leading the polls, and has been a menace on the campaign trail. His inflammatory comments – most recently disparaging Sen. John McCain’s, R-Ariz., status as a war hero – are garnering the wrong kind of attention for his party. He’s also really starting to annoy the other candidates – just ask Sen. Lindsey Graham.
However, as tough as his candidacy has been for the Republican party thus far, a third party run would make things 10 times worse.
Third party candidates are usually a spoiler in presidential contests. They rarely have the resources to win, but if they run well, they can draw enough support to thwart one of the major party candidates. Trump has been fashioning himself as a mostly conservative candidate who has appeal among conservative voters. According to the New York Times, he has “become the new starring attraction for the restless, conservative-minded voters who think the political process is in need of disruption.”
Due to this appeal, it’s fair to say that, in a three way race, the candidate most likely to be thwarted by Trump’s run would be the Republican nominee. An independent Trump candidacy would mean the Republican nominee would be battling on two fronts. He would be fighting the Democratic nominee for the all-important swing voters, and he would also be fighting Trump for votes among his conservative base. In a close race, the support lost to Trump could be enough to cost Republicans the entire race and put a Democrat in the White House.
However, Trump’s ability to be such a spoiler depends entirely on whether he makes it out of his primary run with any political juice left. Some of the other 15 candidates vying for the Republican nomination are starting to realize they can break through Trump’s hold on the press by attacking him. Rick Perry, in particular, has been taking this approach. Earlier this week, the former Texas governor called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer on conservatism,” and said that the billionaire presidential candidate could lead to the demise of the Republican Party. How long before the other candidates start following suit?
Harsh and persistent criticism from his own party could damage Trump’s credibility as a candidate and start to limit his appeal. Trump may also yet prove to be his own worst enemy. He appears to have faced few consequences for his recent attacks on McCain, but he’s proven to be a candidate with a penchant for speaking without thinking. Eventually, that could prove to be his undoing. The less popular Trump is when the primaries end, the less impact he will be able to have as a third party candidate.
And yet, even with limited potential for effectiveness, a third party run for Donald Trump would not be a good scenario for the national GOP. Trump would continue to dominate press coverage and would undoubtedly still be able to compete at some level with the Republican nominee for support and resources. It’s also likely that if he runs because he feels the national party has treated him unfairly, he would direct most of his ire at the Republican candidate. All of that adds up to a huge headache that will divert party attention away from the quest to win the election. For Democrats, it all adds up to a huge advantage.
By: Cary Gibson, Government Relations Consultant with Prime Policy Group; Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, July 24, 2015
“This Whole Debate Is A Charade”: Let’s Stop Pretending Republicans Have A Serious Critique Of The Iran Deal
Secretary of State John Kerry went to Capitol Hill today to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the deal to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. As expected he absorbed a lot of insults and invective from Republicans who are critical of the deal. Along with Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, Kerry tried to rebut the criticisms as best he could.
But you could see in Kerry’s occasionally exasperated expression something that we all ought to be willing to acknowledge: This whole debate is a charade.
There’s a reason no Republican has managed to answer President Obama’s challenge to articulate an alternative that would be preferable to what the six-party negotiations produced, and it isn’t because this deal is perfect or couldn’t have been better. It’s that from where Republicans sit, any deal negotiated with Iran is a bad one by definition.
That’s partly because it was negotiated by the Obama administration, of course, and the GOP has gotten itself to a position where opposition to pretty much anything Barack Obama does is not just reflexive but mandatory for any elected Republican who wants to keep his job. It’s also because the sustained critique of Obama’s foreign policy that Republicans have pushed for the last six and a half years is that everything Obama does is “weak.” The word comes up again and again in Republican statements about foreign policy; ask them what they’d do differently, and in every situation their answer always revolves around being stronger. The content of this strength is rarely detailed, but when it is it usually involves more aggressive use of the military.
And it assumes that when dealing with adversaries like Iran, negotiation is weak, again by definition. Negotiation means talking to those we hate, and even offering them concessions. Successful negotiation ends with an outcome that our adversaries actually praise, when what we really want is for them to fall to their knees and surrender to our might. This is what elected Republicans believe, and more importantly, it’s what they’ve been telling their constituents for years, so it’s what those constituents demand.
So there was literally no deal this administration could have negotiated with Iran that Republicans would have agreed to. None. From their perspective, the substance of the deal never mattered. No one who has been remotely attentive to our politics in recent years could honestly deny that.
And there’s something important to understand about whether Republicans have an alternative. Yes, it’s a reasonable rhetorical point to demand that they explain what other kind of deal they’d support. But right now, they are actually proposing an alternative: that the U.S. pull out of this deal. And we need to explore what that means.
You can argue that this deal should have been different, but when it comes time to vote on whether it should go forward, members of Congress will be choosing between two options, neither of them hypothetical. A yes vote means all the parties — not only Iran and the United States, but also the United Nations, China, Russia, and the European Union — implement this deal. A no vote, in contrast, doesn’t mean that some fantasy deal will fall from the sky. It means that the U.S. walks away from this deal, and it collapses.
That also could mean that the existing sanctions regime collapses. We can keep our sanctions on Iran, but the reason sanctions have been so devastating to the country’s economy is that they haven’t just come from the U.S., but also from the United Nations, the European Union, and elsewhere. If those other sanctions were to disappear, Iran would get most of what it wanted without having to fulfill any obligations at all. And if they want to pursue a nuclear weapon, they could then go right ahead.
So now that the deal is on the table and congressional votes are on their way, what Republicans really need to explain is not what sort of deal they might have preferred. We know their answer to that question — they’ll say they would have rather had a deal where Iran gives us everything we want, and we give up nothing. But that’s irrelevant at this point. What they need to explain now is why the U.S. pulling out of this deal — and what happens afterward — will be preferable to implementing it, imperfections and all. Do they think the Iranians will come crawling back and make further concessions? Do they think the rest of the world’s powers, which support the deal they helped negotiate, will just follow us and impose new sanctions in the hope that eventually that might lead to more negotiations (which, like these, would take years) and ultimately the fantasy deal where Iran capitulates? What precisely is the chain of events Republicans think will occur if we pull out?
If they’ve given that question even a moment’s consideration, you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. But it’s what they ought to be asked now.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014
“A Stark Difference”: Republicans Fear Their Activist Base. Democrats Don’t
We’ve gotten so used to Republican infighting over the last few years that it would have been easy to forget that historically it’s the Democrats who have been the most consumed by internecine arguments. Over the weekend we got a reminder, as a group of protesters disrupted a forum at the Netroots Nation gathering of liberal activists where Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley were speaking. By all accounts, neither Sanders nor O’Malley handled it particularly well.
But if we look at this event in combination with what’s happening on the Republican side, we can see the stark differences in the relationship of each side’s base, its activists, and its candidates.
If you want a moment-by-moment account of the event, I’d recommend this one from Eclectablog or Dara Lind’s insightful analysis of the different forces at play. If the protesters wanted to make the point that Sanders in particular is not spending enough time talking about racial injustice, then he did their work for them by reacting in a somewhat combative way and trying to forge ahead with what he wanted to say about economics. But it’s hard to avoid this question: Is Bernie Sanders the guy you want to be protesting? To what end?
I say that not because Sanders has a strong record on civil rights, though he does. And if the complaint is that Sanders isn’t talking about race as much as he could, well that’s true, too. The truth is that however good his intentions, Bernie Sanders is a longtime Democratic politician who has never really needed the support of the single most important Democratic constituency, African-Americans. He represents the whitest state in the union — only one percent of Vermonters are black. So he may not have the instinctive feel for what African-Americans care about that another politician who had of necessity spent years courting them and working with them would have developed.
But you know who does have that instinctive feel? Hillary Clinton. She spent her political life in Arkansas and New York, where there are plenty of African-Americans. She’s spent more Sundays in black churches than you can count. Toni Morrison famously called her husband the first black president. Yes, there was plenty of tension and ill feelings when black voters left her and got behind Barack Obama in 2008, but I promise you that they’ll be with her in 2016.
But Clinton didn’t attend Netroots Nation this year, and Sanders and O’Malley did, so they’re the ones who got protested, for little reason other than the fact that they were handy. And while they suffered some discomfort, one thing the protesters weren’t demanding was that Democrats vote against either one of them in the primaries. In fact, I’m sure that if you asked the protesters what primary voters should do, they’d say that it’s not their real concern — elections aren’t the point.
Which is where the contrast with Republicans couldn’t be more stark. The Tea Party started just as much as a movement of self-styled outsiders, but unlike activists on the left, they pursued an inside strategy from the outset, one focused clearly on elections. They saw the path to achieving their goals running through Congress and the White House, and they all but took over their party by mounting successful primary challenges to Republican incumbents. How many prominent Democratic incumbents have faced the same kind of strong grassroots challenge from the left in recent years? There was Joe Lieberman, who was beaten in the 2006 Democratic primary in Connecticut by Ned Lamont. But apart from a backbench House member here and there, that’s about it.
In contrast, Republican activists have gotten one prominent scalp after another, from incumbent senators like Richard Lugar and Bob Bennett to important House members like Eric Cantor. The result is that Republican politicians regard their base with barely-disguised terror. You can see it in how they’ve approached Donald Trump, a spectacular buffoon who has tied the party in knots. Even when he was saying one bigoted thing after another about the demographic group the party desperately needs if it’s ever to win back the White House, his opponents stepped gingerly around him, lest they offend his supporters. It was only after Trump’s remarks about John McCain’s war record (which, frankly, he sort of got baited into making) gave them an excuse removed from any policy area that most of them finally started criticizing him.
Even if Trump pulled out of the race tomorrow (sorry, Republicans, no such luck), the rest of the candidates would still operate from fear of their base, which means that activist conservatives will be able to extract commitments from the candidates on the issues that they care about. You can argue that in the long run this hurts the GOP by radicalizing the party and making its presidential candidates unelectable, and you’d probably be right, but in the short run, it probably feels to those conservative activists like success.
The situation on the Democratic side isn’t the same at all. The activists involved in Black Lives Matter and similar efforts would say that they don’t want just to become players in the Democratic Party, because they’re looking to create change on entrenched issues with roots that go back centuries. And they might be right that an outside strategy will be more effective at achieving that change than a strategy focused on making gains within the party. After all, you can argue that while tea partiers have almost taken over the GOP, they’ve gotten very little of the substantive change they wanted — the Affordable Care Act lives, Barack Obama got reelected, and history keeps marching forward despite their efforts, even if they’ve managed to stop things like comprehensive immigration reform.
On the other hand, circumstances will eventually produce another Republican president, even if it isn’t next year or four years after that. And when that president gets elected, the conservative activists will come to collect on the commitments he made.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 20, 2015
“Dishonest And Dishonorable”: Service Record; Trump, McCain, And Republican Contempt For Veterans
As soon as Donald Trump brayed that John McCain is “not a war hero” and went on to mock his suffering in North Vietnamese captivity, the righteous reaction of Republicans was entirely predictable. Nearly every would-be presidential candidate in the GOP, humiliated and worried by Trump’s sudden rise in the polls, immediately sought to wrap the loud-mouthed celebrity’s gaffe around his neck. No doubt some of them, like Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of his Arizona colleague, were truly incensed by Trump’s slur. But either way, the incident presented an irresistible opportunity to stoke public indignation against an opponent whose taunting has become unbearable, even as his rise appears inexorable.
Whether this episode will cost Trump the admiration of the Tea Party horde remains uncertain. Many of them already dislike McCain and may hear Trump’s insults as brutal candor. But in denigrating a war hero to advance himself, the casino mogul did nothing more or less than what other “conservatives” have done for political expediency in elections past. Nobody should be shocked to hear a right-wing chicken-hawk disparaging a worthy veteran at this late date. In the Republican Party, it is standard operating procedure — and for any Republican to pretend otherwise now is risibly hypocritical.
Need we recall every example of this profoundly distasteful and unpatriotic conduct? One of the most poisonous occurred in 2002, when a Georgia Republican named Saxby Chambliss ran ads suggesting that Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam War hero who had lost both legs and one arm in an accidental grenade explosion, lacked the guts to face down Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Cleland, a Democrat who had served in the Veterans Administration under President Carter, had cast a vote protecting the rights of civil service workers in the new Department of Homeland Security, thus earning him a smear at the hands of Chambliss — one of those smooth favorite sons who had nimbly avoided the Vietnam draft.
When Cleland spoke up against President George W. Bush two years later, Ann Coulter sniped at him with an even nastier shot:
“Max Cleland should stop allowing Democrats to portray him as a war hero who lost his limbs taking enemy fire on the battlefields of Vietnam,” she wrote, describing his misfortune as “an accident during a routine non-combat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman …. Luckily for Cleland’s political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.” Ugly and appalling, even from her reliably foul mouth — and replete with lying insinuation. Although he lost his limbs in an accident — when a young infantryman dropped a live grenade that Cleland picked up — he is an authentic war hero who won a Silver Star for “exceptionally valorous action” at the Battle of Khe Sanh.
According to the official citation:
When the battalion command post came under a heavy enemy rocket and mortar attack, Capt. Cleland, disregarding his own safety, exposed himself to the rocket barrage as he left his covered position to administer first aid to his wounded comrades. He then assisted in moving the injured personnel to covered positions. Continuing to expose himself, Capt. Cleland organized his men into a work party to repair the battalion communications equipment which had been damaged by enemy fire. His gallant action is in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service, and reflects great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.
That action took place four days before the accident that maimed Cleland and sent him into years of depression from which he emerged, with great courage, to lead a life of service to his fellow veterans and his country. He possesses a kind of nobility and grace that the likes of Coulter and Chambliss could not even comprehend.
The Cleland episode served as a prelude to the infamous “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” assault on John Kerry, another heroic veteran who returned home to testify and organize against the same terrible war in which he had served with such distinction. Kerry’s brave dissent brought him the lasting enmity of the Republican right — and, when he ran for president in 2004, a litany of outlandish claims about his own highly decorated service, for which he had earned a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.
Those false charges were concocted and publicized, as I reported at the time, with money provided by Texas millionaires allied with the Bush family and their political boss Karl Rove. The Republicans led by Rove went so far as to mock Kerry’s Purple Hearts on the floor of their convention. Their aim was not only to ruin Kerry’s reputation, but to deflect attention from the highly questionable service record of George W. Bush — a subject about which he had lied shamelessly in his own 1999 campaign autobiography, A Charge To Keep.
Ultimately, Kerry and the Navy vets who had actually served with him refuted all of the bogus Swift Boat accusations. By then, however, the political damage was done. He had lost a close election to a man whose presidential candidacy was originally rejected by most voters, and whose presidency came to be seen as a tragic mistake by most Americans.
Among those who spoke up on Kerry’s behalf, unsurprisingly, was none other than his friend and fellow veteran McCain, who denounced the Swift Boat campaign as “dishonest and dishonorable.” Recalling how supporters of George W. Bush spread lies about his own service during the 2000 primaries, McCain told the Associated Press that the “independent” Swift Boat ads attacking Kerry were “the same kind of deal that was pulled on me,” and called on the Bush White House to repudiate them. Equally unsurprisingly, Bush rejected McCain’s plea for decency. The Bush family, including Jeb — who once considered posing as a conscientious objector to avoid the Vietnam draft — quietly let the dirty tricksters do their dirty work, as usual.
But that wasn’t quite the end, as blogger extraordinaire Oliver Willis reported over the weekend. On the day before his brother’s second inauguration in January 2005, Jeb Bush sent a groveling letter (on official Governor of Florida stationery) to George E. Day, one of the leaders of the Swift Boat campaign. “As someone who truly understands the risk of standing up for something.” he wrote pompously, “I simply cannot express in words how much I value the [Swift Boat Veterans’] willingness to stand up against John Kerry. Their efforts, like their service to their country, speak volumes about what matters most.”
On Saturday, Jeb quickly seized the chance to pose as a defender of those who have served, while bashing his rival Trump. “Enough with the slanderous attacks,” he tweeted. “@SenJohnMcCain and all our veterans – especially POWs – have earned our respect and admiration.”
For those who know the story behind Jeb’s feigned outrage, that tweet could evoke nausea, or laughter, or perhaps both. What it could not do is erase the stain on his character that this episode has revealed. Sure, Donald Trump is a demented, obnoxious character who lacks moral values. But somehow Jeb, a tough-talking weenie and sanctimonious fraud, seems even worse.
By; Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Featured Post, Editors Blog, July 20, 2015
“A Big Staging Ground For The More Diffuse Fight”: The Supreme Court Didn’t Cure Republicans Of Homophobia
It’s tempting to imagine that the abrupt end to the fight for marriage equality will ultimately prove to be a godsend for frustrated Republicans. Same-sex marriage enjoys the backing of a huge, youthful political movement, and, before the Supreme Court made it legal nationwide, it was becoming the kind of issue that could seal a politician’s fate with a huge swath of voters. In settling the debate by fiat, the Court might also have saved Republicans from having to wage the alienating opposition to marriage equality for several more years.
Though the Court had the power to end that fight mercifully, it could do nothing about the fact that many conservatives opposed marriage equality because they believe gays and lesbians are inherently defective, and thus couldn’t prevent the energy conservatives have spent battling marriage equality from spilling over into other issues.
Just this week, for instance, the Boy Scouts decided to change its longstanding policy and allow gay men to lead amenable scout troops. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who announced his presidential candidacy on Monday, responded by saying he liked things better the way they were before, because the blanket ban on gay scout leaders “protected children.”
There are two ways to interpret Walker’s statement, both of which speak to the view that same-sex marriage resistance is more than just an expression of concern for the traditions of a particular institution. If you believe that banning gay people from Boy Scouts “protects children,” then you either believe discredited caricatures of gay men as child predators or you believe homosexuality and homosexuals are unsavory things that children should be “protected” from categorically, like drug addiction or verbal abuse.
The movement to make the Boy Scouts a more tolerant organization may not be as large or public facing as the movement to force states to recognize same-sex marriages. But it’s still a big staging ground for the more diffuse fight over how our society should treat gays and lesbians generally. And because the question at hand doesn’t touch on the nature of the Boy Scouts as an institution, it’s much harder for conservatives to disguise deprecatory views of LGBT people themselves behind an alleged concern for institutional continuity.
Which is all to say, Republican politicians will still have plenty of opportunities to treat gays and lesbians like aberrant miscreants. The ongoing partisan disagreement over LGBT equality will gather at smaller focal points, but the overall political valence of the issue won’t disappear anytime soon.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, July 14, 2015
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