“Comprehensive Immigration Reform”: Rubio’s ‘Biggest Weakness’ Goes Unmentioned, For Now
As the race for the Republicans’ presidential nomination started to take shape, there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) chances. For example, he’s a career politician who’s never run anything. He has no real accomplishments. He’s developed no areas of policy expertise. Rubio gives a nice speech, but there’s ample reason to question whether he’s prepared for national office.
It’s quite easy to imagine, however, Republican voters overlooking all of this. Indeed, these truths may be a problem for a general-election audience, but there’s no reason to believe any of them would be a deal-breaker in GOP primaries and caucuses.
All of which brings us to the one problem Rubio may not be able to dismiss with ease: comprehensive immigration reform.
If I were a Republican presidential candidate, and I were at all worried about Rubio, I’d probably repeat one talking point every minute of every day: “Marco Rubio partnered with liberal Democrats to write Obama’s ‘amnesty’ bill.” For the GOP base, the bipartisan immigration reform package is truly despised – it’s right up there with “Obamacare” – and yet one of the party’s leading presidential candidates is one of the bill’s authors.
I don’t understand why this simple, straightforward detail isn’t dominating the Republican race. I don’t mean that in a rhetorical sense; I mean I literally don’t understand it. Shouldn’t candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump be screaming this from the hilltops?
Vox’s Matt Yglesias took a look at this dynamic today, arguing that the “chickens will (probably) come home to roost.”
One reason Rubio has looked so good thus far, in other words, is that his biggest and most obvious weakness hasn’t been on the table. That’s a lucky break, but it’s hard to see how it will last.
If by the next debate Rubio has succeeded in clearly displacing Jeb Bush as the establishment favorite, then the incentives for Cruz and Trump (or even Christie or Fiorina) to start lighting into Rubio on immigration get a lot bigger. But as Cruz himself outlined to Shane Goldmacher, his current plan is to focus on consolidating the vote that he is currently splitting with Trump and Ben Carson and only later turn on whomever the strongest establishment-friendly candidate will be.
At this point, the limited areas of disagreement between the competitive candidates will be extremely important. Candidates like Rubio and Cruz agree on practically everything, making it all the more important that the former aligned himself with Democrats on immigration while the latter fought to kill the bill.
Yglesias added, “It hasn’t hurt him thus far because it simply hasn’t been tried. But it’s nearly inconceivable that Rubio can keep coasting much longer without facing his core vulnerability.”
It’s worth emphasizing that Rubio has no doubt memorized the script on what to say when this comes up. The Florida Republican will assure his party’s base that he now opposes the bill he helped write in the last Congress, and he’s already gladly betrayed his former allies on what was supposed to be his signature issue. Never mind what he supported in 2014; he wants the focus on his brand new position rolled out in 2015.
Whether such an argument will be persuasive remains to be seen, but if the race for the nomination comes down to Cruz vs. Rubio – a scenario I consider fairly likely – the only major area of disagreement between them will be immigration, and the Texan will have a potent message to share.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 2, 2015
“A Lot More Than Two Sides”: Winning Isn’t Everything — Especially In Syria
An awful lot of people think about foreign relations the way they think about football. That is, they view the United States as the beloved home team perennially competing for victories in a season that never ends.
Trumpism, you might call it. To hear him talk, you’d think his followers’ personal prestige and happiness depended upon Team America being perennially ranked Number One.
The New York blowhard is far from alone. Lots of people are yelling: “Let’s you and him fight.”
Talking to a group of Gold Star Mothers recently, President Obama said, “Right now, if I was taking the advice of some of the members of Congress who holler all the time, we’d be in, like, seven wars right now. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been counting.”
Challenged, a National Security Council spokesman listed seven places where Obama has sent combat forces: Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Anybody who’s paying attention could add Iran, Ukraine, and the South China Sea. Sarah Palin wants troops sent to Lithuania and Estonia, although NATO just completed war games there. I’ve lost track of the countries John McCain and Lindsey Graham want to bomb.
So no, Obama wasn’t exaggerating.
“Nationalism,” Orwell wrote in 1945, “is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” With the smoke still rising from Europe’s ruins, he distinguished militant nationalism from patriotism, or love of kin and country.
He saw it as a kind of moral and intellectual disease: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Few are immune. Even normally sensible Washington thinkers are troubled by Obama’s disinclination to kick ass. Washington Post editorial page director Fred Hiatt concedes that “the next president will inherit an America in better shape—better positioned for world leadership—than the nation that George Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama.”
“So why doesn’t it feel that way? Why does it feel as if we’re losing?”
Brilliant New York Times’ columnist Roger Cohen is made deeply uneasy by what he calls the president’s Doctrine of Restraint. “Not since the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago” he frets “has Russia been as assertive or Washington as acquiescent.”
He concludes that “Obama has sold America short…Not every intervention is a slippery slope.”
“Syria,” Cohen thinks, “is the American sin of omission par excellence, a diabolical complement to the American sin of commission in Iraq — two nations now on the brink of becoming ex-nations.”
It’s a clever formulation, gracefully expressed. But what should Obama do? Cohen never really says. Is there any reason why Syria and Iraq should remain intact because Britain and France drew lines on a map to divide their spheres of influence 100 years ago?
Should the United States send ground troops to fight there? Against whom? In support of what? There are a lot more than two sides, you know. Spend a half hour pondering the interactive maps and charts on the New York Times website, and then tell me which should be our allies, and which our enemies.
OK, the Kurds. We’re already on their side, although our other allies, the Turks, continue to fight their own Kurdish separatists. Does anybody believe that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites can live together in peace?
The 2003 U.S. invasion that deposed strongman Saddam Hussein broke the country apart, and the fabled “Surge” so beloved of GOP pundits basically created ISIS. “Quit making us kill you, and take this money and these weapons,” Gen. Petraeus essentially told the remnants of Saddam’s army. “We’ll soon leave you to each other.”
As for Syria, University of Michigan Middle East expert Juan Cole explains that he has no dog in the fight: “I despise the al-Assad regime, which is genocidal and has engaged in mass torture. But I absolutely refuse to support any group allied with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s al-Qaeda or which envisions Syria as a hardline Salafi emirate where Christians, Alawites, Druze and Kurds (altogether maybe 40% of the population) as well as secular Sunni Arabs (another 45%) are second class citizens…. For the fundamentalists to conquer Alawite Latakia or the Druze regions would result in an enormous tragedy.”
“Fundamentalists” includes just about all the “moderate rebels” the Russians are bombing. Putin argues that even the Assad government beats no government, and represents the only hope of avoiding genocide.
Is he wrong just because he’s Russian and a cynic?
Yes, President Obama’s 2011 “red line” was a bad mistake. So were Secretary Clinton’s toothless pronouncements that Assad had to go.
But that was then. This is now.
Fareed Zakaria gets it right: “[I]f Russia and Iran win, somehow, against the odds, they get Syria — which is a cauldron, not a prize.”
And if the U.S. fights and wins? Same deal.
By: Gene Lyons, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 21, 2015
“How America Tolerates Racism In Jury Selection”: Discrimination In Jury Selection Is Indeed A National Problem
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Foster v. Chatman, a case that challenges the all-too-common practice by which prosecutors deliberately exclude African-Americans from criminal juries.
The Supreme Court tried to outlaw this practice in 1986 through its landmark ruling in Batson v. Kentucky. But prosecutors routinely ignore that decision, excluding black jurors because of marital status, manner of dress, last names and other allegedly “race neutral” reasons.
This is problematic because interracial juries make fewer factual errors, deliberate longer and consider a wider variety of perspectives than all-white juries, according to several studies.
It’s time for the court to meaningfully enforce the ban on racial discrimination in jury selection.
In 2010, the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm, studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — and found the problem to be rampant.
For example, from 2005 to 2009, prosecutors in Houston County, Ala., struck 80 percent of qualified black jurors from death penalty cases. Consequently, in a county that’s 27 percent black, half of death penalty juries were all-white. The other half had one black citizen each.
Another study of death penalty trials in North Carolina shows that from 1990 to 2010, prosecutors excluded black jurors over twice as often as nonblack jurors.
An analysis of over 300 felony jury trials in Caddo Parish, La., from 2003 to 2012 found that of 8,318 qualified jurors, nearly half of black jurors were struck, compared with only 15 percent of nonblack jurors.
Clearly, Monday’s case will have national implications.
About 30 years ago, a black man, Timothy Foster, went on trial for his life in Georgia. He was accused of killing an elderly white woman. During the jury selection process, the prosecutors struck all four potential black jurors. Then, they argued before the all-white jury for a death sentence to “deter other people out there in the projects.” They probably would have made a different argument if the jury had included at least one of the black citizens called to serve.
The jurors complied and sentenced Mr. Foster to death.
In at least six different ways, the prosecutors singled out eligible black jurors: Notes from the jury selection list show they marked their names with a “B” and highlighted them in green on four separate copies; circled the word “black” on their juror questionnaires; noted several as “B #1,” “B #2”; ranked potential black jurors against one another “in case it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors”; and wrote “Definite NOs” on the list of priority strikes, which had all four possible black jurors.
And how often are whites or blacks, women or men, gays or straights, muslims or Christians, etc. dismissed because the defense strikes them?…
Although the prosecution has never admitted that race played a role in selecting a jury for Mr. Foster’s trial, some of its “race-neutral” reasons for strikes were inaccurate and inconsistent.
For example, prosecutors struck a black juror for being a social worker — but she was a teacher’s aide. Meanwhile, prosecutors accepted every white teacher and teacher’s aide in the jury pool.
When the prosecutors asked a white juror and a black juror whether the defendant’s age, which was close to that of their children, would be a factor in the sentence, the black juror said “none whatsoever” but was struck based on his son’s age. The white juror answered “probably so” and was accepted.
Along with other former prosecutors, I joined a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Mr. Foster. We recognize, and refuse to condone, the blatant unconstitutionality of the prosecutorial misconduct in this case. Moreover, my own experience suggests that discrimination in jury selection is indeed a national problem, despite over a century of attempted legislative and judicial remedies.
In 1995, at a workshop hosted by North Carolina’s district attorneys, the attendees were given a handout titled “Batson Justifications: Articulating Juror Negatives.” It listed acceptable reasons for striking potential jurors, like body language, attitude and other factors, that the prosecution could present in the face of a Batson challenge. These vague explanations are virtually impossible for future courts to interpret as race-based, although they often are.
Mr. Foster’s case offers a rare instance of extraordinary and well-documented misconduct. The prosecution’s notes show purposeful racial discrimination in jury strikes. A judicial system that allows for obviously discriminatory jury selection is intolerable. If the court cannot establish discrimination in this case, then the lofty language of Batson rings hollow.
By: Larry D. Thompson, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 30, 2015
“Deathwatch Coverage”: Why The Media Are Digging Jeb Bush’s Grave
Why hasn’t Jeb Bush started complaining about the liberal media yet? Maybe it’s because he knows that at this critical moment for his campaign, it’s important to look sunny and optimistic. But he’d have a much better case to make than his primary opponents, who are all whining about how CNBC was mean to them at their last debate. The coverage of Jeb’s campaign right now is unremittingly negative, in ways that are, if understandable, not exactly fair. The Jeb Bush Deathwatch has begun, and it’s going to be awfully difficult for him to get past it.
Back in 1983, scholars Michael Robinson and Margaret Sheehan first wrote about “deathwatch coverage” in their book about the media’s role in the 1980 presidential campaign, Over the Wire and on TV. “The deathwatch generally begins with a reference to the candidate’s low standing in the polls,” they wrote, “moves on to mention financial or scheduling problems, and ends with coverage of the final press conference, in which the candidate withdraws.” Even before it gets to that terminal point, however, the press can decide as one that you’re circling the drain, and the result will be a wave of intensely negative coverage.
Let’s take a little tour of the articles about Jeb in the media just from one day, last Friday. “Can Jeb Bush Come Back?” (Washington Post). “Jeb Bush’s Existential Crisis” (CNN). “All the Money In the World May Not Save Jeb Bush’s Campaign” (Los Angeles Times). “Jeb Bush Campaign Faces Criticism, Skepticism Following Debate” (USA Today). “Jeb Bush Seeks to Recover Momentum After Debate” (Wall Street Journal). “Jeb Bush: Campaign ‘Is Not on Life Support'” (NBC News).
The headlines only partly convey how brutal things are getting for Bush. All the questions he now faces are about process—not “How would your tax plan work?” but “Why aren’t you doing better?” They’re questions about the campaign itself, not about what he wants to do if he becomes president. Reporters have also taken to asking Jeb whether he’s having fun on the campaign trail, which has a whiff of cruelty about it. He plainly isn’t, but what is he supposed to say? It’s almost as though they just want to see how he’s going to squirm. They might explain that they’re asking him this question because in January 2014 he said he intended to campaign “joyfully,” and there’s not much joy in Jebville right now. But that’s an excuse, not a justification.
So the frame of almost every story about Bush is how he’s floundering, struggling, and sinking. When you’re operating within that frame, it determines the kinds of questions you ask, not just of Bush himself when you get the chance, but of the other people you interview, and of yourself as you’re writing your story. Those questions will be things like: What’s he doing wrong? Why don’t people like him? What mistakes has he made?
When you set out to answer those questions, everything you produce will reflect poorly on Bush. That doesn’t mean there’s anything inaccurate about the coverage, just that it focuses on one particular aspect of reality and not others.
Now let’s compare that to Marco Rubio, whom most knowledgeable people have now concluded is the most likely Republican nominee. If you wanted, you could ask similarly uncomplimentary questions about him. Why has this guy who was once hailed as the savior of the Republican Party been unable to get more than 10 percent or so of the vote in national polls? Why is he stuck in fourth place in Iowa and sixth place in New Hampshire? How come he’s being beaten in fundraising by the likes of Ben Carson and Ted Cruz?
Those are perfectly legitimate questions, but if the focus of your story about Rubio is how he’s on the rise, they’re the kinds of things you’ll either leave out completely or deal with quickly (in the inevitable “To be sure…” paragraph).
Now for my own “To be sure…” paragraph: To be sure, there are perfectly good reasons why a reporter would describe Jeb’s campaign the way it’s being described and ask the questions he’s being asked. Expectations for him were very high. He was supposed to be this year’s version of the well-established, middle-aged white guy the GOP always nominates, and his super PAC quickly raised a staggering $100 million. For a time, he was indeed the frontrunner (though he never averaged more than 15 percent in the polls), so the fact that he’s now in fourth place or so is a significant fall. And Jeb hasn’t been particularly compelling on the stump, to say the least. He has struggled with things like trying to figure out whether the Iraq War was a mistake, and he seems flummoxed by the competition he’s gotten from other candidates, particularly Donald Trump.
But let’s not forget that no one has actually voted for president yet. The Iowa caucuses are still three months away. Super Tuesday isn’t until a month after that. The voters of California, our most populous state, don’t vote until June, a full seven months from now. A heck of a lot is going to happen just between now and Iowa.
Not only that, while Jeb’s place in the polls is certainly nothing to be proud of, other candidates getting much more positive attention aren’t doing much better. In the Huffpost Pollster average, Jeb is at 7.5 percent, admittedly no great shakes. But Rubio, who is now luxuriating in an invigorating bath of positive press coverage, is at a whopping 8.5 percent. Everyone seems to think Rubio is probably going to be the nominee, but the voters themselves don’t seem to be aware of it yet. Ted Cruz, whom insiders think has shrewdly positioned himself to be a strong contender as the race winnows? He’s at 5.5 percent.
One of the attractions of the deathwatch story for reporters always looking for a new angle on the presidential race is that it’s novel and, in its way, rather dramatic. And like much of what the press does, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Say that a candidate is toast often enough, and before long donors won’t want to contribute to him and voters won’t bother to support him. But we’re still far enough away from the primaries that another new story, the exciting Jeb Comeback, is still a possibility. He might even earn that exclamation point after his name. Is it likely? Maybe not. But you never know.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, November 2, 2015
“Reading The 2016 Tea Leaves”: GOP Candidates Shaping Up To Be No Match For Hillary Clinton
Pull up a chair and step into my political therapy and prediction parlor.
Jeb Bush, let’s start with you. It’s over. Seldom has the nation’s political class expected so much promise – and seen and heard so little – from a presidential contender.
On Aug. 31, in this space, I declared the former Florida governor “unelectable.” Few pundits and pollsters grasped that at the time. Except for Maureen Dowd, who just published a sharp-edged elegy for Jeb in The New York Times. She’s the leading observer of the Bushes in the wild in Washington, Florida, Texas and Maine.
All I knew was that Jeb had nothing smart, witty or winning to say. My friends and I were gobsmacked that there was a Bush we liked less than the warmongering George W. Bush, who left the country trashed just like his Yale fraternity house. Jeb’s dreary, dutiful campaign came across like peeling an onion and ending up in tears.
His frail father, the 41st president, recently restated the Bush philosophy in a note to Jeb: “Go win.” Letting down “Poppy” (George H.W. Bush’s nickname) will be the the unkindest cut for Jeb.
But entitlement and mediocrity don’t sell well a second time around the block. Clueless Jeb thought his last name was an asset and found no fault with “my brother.” That’s how he was raised in the competitive family jock compound, from mother’s milk on: Bushes win, whatever it takes. (Case in point: Florida in 2000.) Sorry, but he deserves to lose before the first ballot is cast for boring us silly.
Jeb feels doubly betrayed, first because the party could not save his place, his rightful first place in the race. Second, young Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida rebuked him in the last debate for making a snide remark about Rubio missing Senate votes. (Jeb managed to insult France, too.) That was utterly devastating moment for Bush, shaking up his blue-blooded order of things. Refusing to defer, Rubio met his mentor as an equal on the field of battle and drew blood. Anything but nimble, if Jeb can’t nail an opponent for missing votes (a cardinal sin), then let him be gone. In Donald Trump’s words: “You’re fired.”
Now it’s your turn, Sen. Rubio, the new media darling, because that’s how fickle we are. I’ve actually watched him in the Senate, when he shows up, and can tell you he is seen as a show horse, not a workhorse. That’s a quaint distinction, but it’s as if it were invented for Rubio, who has done virtually nothing of weight. There were high hopes in 2013 that he might build a bipartisan immigration bill, but he did not have the legislative chops to make that happen. Simply put, Rubio does not command enough respect among his 99 colleagues to do something big in a divided body. Lately, his open scorn for the job is hurting his Senate Q score even more.
Now comes Sen. Ted Cruz, another young, southern Republican in the running. He is probably the least-liked senator, known for his tea parties of one on the Senate floor and his insults and barbs across the aisle. He even “dissed” his own majority leader, Mitch McConnell, which is just not done in public. Cruz doesn’t care. He was a champion debater at Princeton and clearly loves politics as a blood sport. He’s also shrewd enough to cast his lot with Trump, who looks like the jovial Muffin Man next to Cruz.
Brighter and meaner than Rubio, still Cruz shares something important in common with him. They’re both children of Cuban immigrants. Fidel Castro’s influence still reaches down to the children of the exiled generation, who have dominated the political scene in Miami. They hold important seats in Congress, too, always a vehemently conservative coalition. And I mean, even more reactionary than your average elephant. Most prominent Cuban-Americans in national politics are still acting out in anger (or reacting) over the Castro revolution. That event happened more than 50 years ago, before Rubio and Cruz were born. Let’s move on, shall we?
It’s ironic that just as President Obama unlocks the door to diplomatic relations with Cuba, there are two candidates to succeed him that have been shaped by furious anti-Castro feeling as an article of political faith. It would be sad if this hostility reached the level of the White House.
To wrap up, Vice President Joe Biden was wise not to go to the deep end of the pool and run for president for a third time. He will be 73 this month. While many swooned for him, fellow scribes, I wrote weeks ago the likable Biden was not really electable, either. I won’t go into all that again.
Let me count the most important reason Biden was right – getting in history’s way. They call the zeitgeist wind Hillary Clinton, and my muse is reading it right so far. Let’s say this from the parlor: She is going to blow them all away.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, November 2, 2015
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