“DEFCON 4”: Bernie Sanders’ PUMA Moment; Hillary Clinton ‘Not Qualified’
That didn’t take long.
I wondered Tuesday night how nasty both Democrats would get—whether Bernie Sanders would start aping conservative talking points against Hillary Clinton, and whether she would try to out-Israel him in New York. We’re not quite to those places yet, but Sanders’s blunt statement Wednesday night that Clinton “is not qualified” to be president ratchets up the arms race considerably.
This started Wednesday morning when Clinton appeared on Morning Joe and Joe Scarborough—jumping off from Sanders’s wobbly Daily News editorial board interview—tried to ask her four times whether she thought Sanders was qualified to be president. Here’s the full exchange so you can decide for yourself:
JS: In light of the questions he had problems with, do you believe this morning that Bernie Sanders is qualified and ready to be president of the United States?
HC: Well, I think the interview raised a lot of really serious questions, and I look at it this way. The core of his campaign has been break up the banks, and it didn’t seem in reading his answers that he understood exactly how that would work under Dodd-Frank and exactly who would be responsible, what the criteria were; and that means you really can’t help people if you don’t know how to do what you are campaigning on saying you want to do. And then there were other—
JS: So is he qualified?…And I’m serious, if you weren’t running today and you looked at Bernie Sanders would you say this guy is ready to be president of the United States?
HC: Well, I think he hadn’t done his homework and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions and really what it goes to is for voters to ask themselves, can he deliver what he’s talking about, can he really help people—
JS: What do you think?
HC: Can he help our economy, can he keep our country strong…Well, obviously, I think I’m by far the better choice—
JS: But do you think he is qualified and do you think he is able to deliver on the things he is promising to all these Democratic voters?
HC: Well, lemme put it this way, Joe. I think that what he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn’t seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done. And I will leave it to voters to decide who of us can do the job that the country needs, who can do all aspects of the job. Both on the economic domestic issues and on national security and foreign policy.
I don’t know how you read that, but I read it as Scarborough trying four times to get Clinton to say outright that Bernie Sanders is not qualified to be president, and her refusing to do so. She came sorta close; The Washington Post headlined a write up on it “Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president,” but she never said the words, and after attempt number four, she retreated to the standard, and appropriate, dodge about it being up to the voters. From there, the interview moved on to other topics.
And what did Sanders do? This, in a speech in Philadelphia Wednesday night.
She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am not qualified to be president.
Well, let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton: I don’t believe that she is qualified, if she is, through her super-PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds. I don’t think that you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street through your super-PAC.
I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you have supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement which has cost us millions of decent paying jobs. I don’t think you are qualified if you’ve supported the Panama free trade agreement, something I very strongly opposed and, which as all of you know, has allowed corporations and wealthy all over the world people to avoid paying their taxes to their countries.
Wait. What? “Has been saying”? “Has been saying,” as if she’d said it seven times? She didn’t even say it once!
Now—Sanders apologists will scream that she started it, and even neutral observers, if there are any, may be confused. But there’s a big difference between saying “raises serious questions” and “I’ll leave it to the voters to decide,” and saying flat out that one’s primary opponent is “not qualified.”
Clinton is still the favorite to win the nomination. I heard Chuck Todd say Wednesday morning that Sanders needs to win 67 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to overtake her lead. Since all delegates are awarded proportionally, and since there aren’t likely to be many huge blowouts in the upcoming states (we’re almost done with caucuses), that seems a tall order.
Clinton also leads the popular vote tally by almost exactly 2.4 million. Pretty hard to picture him overcoming that, too. How hard? Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, big Sanders wins in New York and California. In 2008, Clinton won both of those handily over Barack Obama—New York by 17 percent and around 250,000 votes, and California by 8 percent and around 430,000.
It’s pretty unlikely that Sanders can equal those results, but let’s just say he does, and then let’s give him another 100,000 in Pennsylvania. That would be 780,000. That still puts him 1.6 million votes behind. Say he even runs the table and nets another 300,000 or so from the smaller states. He’s still more than a million votes behind in the most optimistic scenario.
Votes are important because they tend to determine what the superdelegates do. Superdelegates are hesitant to undo the voters’ collective will. It’s worth noting here that in 2008, Clinton lost the popular vote tally to Obama by only 300,000 or 400,000, depending on how you counted them. There were controversies then over whether to count Florida and Michigan, which had disobeyed the party’s mandated calendar. If you don’t include them, Obama won by around 450,000. If you do, he beat Clinton by just 60,000 (out of 35 million cast).
So it was much closer than it seems this is going to be, but even so, the superdelegates wouldn’t overturn the voters’ choice.
Why all these numbers? Just to show that it’s still likely that at the end of the process, Clinton will be ahead, and Sanders will have to endorse her. Not certain, of course, but likely. So the question is, how can he endorse her after saying flat out that she’s not qualified to be president?
Well, politicians have their ways. “She’s better than Trump/Cruz.” But won’t it ring awfully hollow? For her part, Clinton, looking toward a future mending of fences, brushed off Sanders’s remarks. It’s worth noting, too, that back in 2008, Clinton gave up the fight in early June right after the primaries ended and endorsed Obama. One has trouble picturing Sanders doing the same, if it comes to that, and what he said Wednesday night makes it even less likely.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 7, 2016
“Courting With Disaster”: GOP Elites Think Stealing The Nomination From Trump Will Be A Cakewalk. They’re Wrong
The Republican presidential primary is settling into one of history’s most familiar grooves: Failing elites confront an internal rebellion by doing their absolute utmost to change nothing whatsoever.
The Donald Trump insurgency has demonstrated several things. First, there is a large constituency among Republican primary voters for outright bigotry and xenophobia; second, the commitment to traditional conservative economics among many Republican base voters is totally ephemeral.
It turns out that hardscrabble racist white people aren’t actually interested in gutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security, or Olympus Mons-sized tax cuts for the rich. The perception that they were was mainly created by the canny exploitation of the culture war and wealthy conservatives purchasing the entire slate of Republican candidates every year.
Now Trump has blown the scam wide open. But instead of trying to reckon with the fact that the consensus party ideology is cracking apart before their eyes, Republican elites — led by the nose by the donor class — are plotting to deliver the presidential nomination to a nice friendly establishment figure, perhaps Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
Now, they are enabled in this by Trump himself, who just had the worst two weeks of news coverage of the entire primary. His campaign manager is literally being charged with battery, he stumbled on abortion, he got into an unbelievably petty fight over Ted Cruz’s wife, and the latest polling shows him being utterly blown out of the water in the general election. Then on Tuesday night, he got creamed by Cruz in the Wisconsin primary.
All that created a sense that Trump had finally, finally doomed himself. His support would begin to melt away, and the Republican big money grandees could come together and hand the nomination to a reliable plutocrat who could enact the welfare and tax cuts 1 percenters demand. Charles Koch himself is reportedly behind Paul Ryan, should Trump enter the convention at least 100 delegates short of a first ballot victory.
These people are fooling themselves. First of all, while Trump might really have done himself in, this is about the 40th time this exact same groupthink has taken hold and it’s been wrong every time so far. Moreover, whatever damage was done has barely registered in the polls. He’s off his large lead only slightly in the national average, and Wisconsin wasn’t a great spot for him in the first place. A bunch of states are coming up where conditions are a lot more favorable, and in the ones with recent polling (New York, Pennsylvania) he’s ahead by a lot.
In short, while he might not come into the convention with enough delegates to win a first-ballot victory, conditions would have to change dramatically for Trump to fail to get a large delegate plurality — and that’s leaving aside the distinct possibility that he could bounce back from his current troubles by changing the subject, perhaps with yet another round of anti-Muslim bigotry.
What’s more, the second place contender (behind by 237 pledged delegates at the moment) is Ted Cruz, who is nearly as rabidly anti-establishment (and as bad a general election candidate) as Trump. It is literally mathematically impossible for John Kasich, the only sort of non-extremist left in the race, to win in a first ballot.
Primary elections have been exhaustively covered and have developed a deep democratic legitimacy. If Trump comes into the convention with a large plurality of delegates, trying to wrest the nomination from him is courting disaster. It probably wouldn’t even work, as the delegates would likely get cold feet at what amounts to a massive, bald-faced election theft. Even if it did, Trump would have every reason to attempt a third-party run and split the conservative vote — and might even do better than the Republican candidate.
Trying to wrest the nomination from Cruz as well, so the billionaire donor class can hand it to one of their pets who didn’t even enter the primary, is even crazier than that. It’s the kind of thing that actually destroys parties. At that point the donors would be openly stamping on the expressed preference of something like nine-tenths of their own voters, and all but teeing up a presidential challenger that would beat their own candidate by 40 points.
The GOP elite, such as it is, is largely controlled by people who think a full-blown populist rebellion can be handled with a few backroom conversations and massive checks. They’re about to find out the hard way that they’re wrong.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 7, 2016
“Republicans Are Plotting Economic Disaster For 2016: The American People Will Be The Collateral Damage
Since George W. Bush’s presidency, Republican economic ideas have become drastically more conservative. Instead of massive tax cuts for the rich coupled with a general tolerance of the rest of government (or even new welfare programs), the party is now committed to much larger tax cuts coupled with eye-watering cuts to government.
Every Republican presidential candidate proposes staggering tax cuts heavily weighted toward the rich. Donald Trump would give the top one-thousandth of taxpayers $1.3 million apiece per year, while Ted Cruz would give them an even $2 million. Trump does favor preserving the welfare state, but he is a marked outsider in this respect. The entire rest of the party is committed to gigantic cuts to welfare, as shown by the budget formulated by House Republicans. Their most recent plan would slash $5.3 trillion in spending over a decade, 69 percent of which would come from programs for the needy.
The party’s intellectual apparatus (distinct from the Trumpist insurgency) has more-or-less fully regressed to an economic libertarianism straight out of the 1920s. They view basically all government programs outside of the military and the courts as illegitimate, to be slashed or eliminated wherever possible. The only problem with this is that when you try it, the results are immediate disaster.
Republicans haven’t been able to fully implement their plan of tax and service cuts on the federal level, but they have tried it in a few places on the state level. Louisiana under Gov. Bobby Jindal has had it the worst. Jindal’s massive cuts to education and services were not nearly enough to cover his gigantic tax cuts, and draining every rainy day fund in the state only delayed the day of reckoning. Eventually the results were so disastrous that the unthinkable happened — a Democrat replaced Jindal. Now Gov. John Bel Edwards is scrambling to deal with the most extreme budgetary emergency of any state government in decades, working feverishly just to keep the state from literal financial collapse.
Kansas is also suffering from Republican quack economics. Gov. Sam Brownback (who barely scraped through re-election in 2014 and now sits at a 21-percent approval rating) tried the same tricks as Jindal, though to a somewhat lesser degree, and the results were similar: a huge budget deficit with none of the promised explosive growth or job gains. Now Kansas conservatives are running into problems with the state’s Supreme Court, which found legal problems with the distribution of education cuts. Their solution: Attack the justices politically, by drawing up a new impeachment law and trying to get them thrown out in an upcoming confirmation election.
It’s the same story in Wisconsin with both deficits and lousy economic performance. Gov. Scott Walker’s major innovation has been an effort to basically destroy the Wisconsin state university system with drastic cuts and the abolishment of tenure, which is already leading to serious problems at the flagship school in Madison.
However, it could have been worse for all these states. The federal government, with its grants, its spending on social programs, and its employment of in-state government workers and contractors, provides a buffer of spending state governments cannot cut. For example, Louisiana gets over 40 percent of its state budget from the feds, as well as $5,917 per person in social spending, $3.5 billion in federal contracts, and $5.3 billion in compensation paid to almost 68,000 federal workers (as of the most recent data). That’s $48 billion in income against $39 billion paid in federal taxes (other states don’t make out so well).
This means that the results would be far more disastrous should Republicans get to implement their ideas on a federal level. Great chunks of the federal programs — food stamps, federal health programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and so on — that have provided inadequate but vital economic stabilization would be cut or eliminated altogether.
The results would be just as what happened on the state level, only worse.
It took many years for Republicans to talk themselves out of the fact that Herbert Hoover’s presidency was a disastrous failure, but with the exception of Trump, Hooverism is where they stand. It’s an ideology that can gain wide popularity only insofar as it is not actually tried on a wide scale. It turns out that a vision of government that was already outdated a century ago (when farmers were over a quarter of the workforce) is not very well-suited to a modern economy. It’s just too bad the American people might have to be the collateral damage in re-learning that lesson.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 4, 2016
“Just A Clownish Governor”: Paul LePage’s Latest Tantrum Is A Doozy, Even For Him
Susan Deschambault, a Maine Democrat, recently won a state Senate special election, and as part of the process, she was invited to Gov. Paul LePage’s (R) office for an official swearing-in ceremony. So, Deschambault and her family drove 72 miles, arriving at the governor’s office bright and early on Friday morning for her 9 a.m. appointment.
What she did not know, however, is that LePage preferred to throw a tantrum, refusing to swear Deschambault in because the far-right governor is mad at Democratic legislators. The Portland Press Herald reported:
Gov. Paul LePage abruptly canceled a swearing-in ceremony Friday morning for a newly elected senator in response to Democratic lawmakers’ votes against one of his nominees.
Senator-elect Susan Deschambault, a Democrat who won a special election Tuesday for the Senate District 32 seat representing the Biddeford area, showed up with her family at LePage’s office for her scheduled swearing-in at 8:50 a.m. only to be told the event had been canceled.
According to LePage’s spokesperson, the governor – a grown adult – was looking for payback. Apparently, the Republican nominated a conservative talk radio figure to serve on the Maine Unemployment Insurance Commission, but Democrats defeated the nomination last week.
The unhappy governor, in an “I’ll show you…” frame of mind, took out his frustrations on Deschambault, turning her and her family away when they showed up for the ceremonial event.
The newly elected Democrat reportedly thought this was some kind of April Fool’s joke, before realizing that LePage wasn’t kidding. He simply wouldn’t swear her in.
The Bangor Daily News ran a piece over the weekend, wondering what in the world LePage hoped to gain from this: “What was gained by refusing to swear in Susan Deschambault? Nothing. Literally nothing…. Now the story is about how a woman who won an election had her family travel to the capital to celebrate her accomplishment, only to have made the trip for nothing because of a partisan disagreement. How is this a win?”
The NBC affiliate in Portland reported yesterday that the governor’s office announced that the newly elected lawmaker will eventually be sworn in – when LePage feels like it.
Two days after the ceremony was postponed, Gov. LePage attended the opening of a store in Swanville. When asked whether or not the oath would happen, he answered, “Yeah, she’s going to be sworn in. But it’s not on her schedule. My schedule is a little busier than hers.”
When pressed further if he would be the person to administer the oath, he said, “Of course I am. You know, they kick you and beat you and slap you over the head. And then the very next morning at 8 o’clock, they’re there before you put your briefcase down, your cup of coffee on the desk, they want to be sworn in. She will be sworn in according to the laws of the Constitution of the State of Maine.”
In case you were wondering, Deschambault’s special-election victory did nothing to change the makeup of the chamber – the 35-member Maine Senate will still have a Republican majority, 20 to 15, even after she’s sworn in. In other words, there’s no legislative or policy reason to delay the process.
Rather, this is just a clownish governor throwing the latest in a series of tantrums, simply because he can.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 4, 2016
“Religious Liberty Is For One People Only”: How Ted Cruz Made A Mockery Of Republicans’ Religious Freedom Arguments
The Republican Party, which has accused “liberal elites” of waging a “war on religion,” last week dispatched its leading lights to the rhetorical battlefields in a religious war of its own making.
On March 22, Americans awoke to the news of the horrific terrorist attacks in Brussels, which should have prompted calls for solidarity coupled with rational and effective law enforcement. But for Ted Cruz — who has made religious liberty a central focus of his campaign — it was instead an opportunity to propose an unconstitutional and dangerous program for targeting American Muslims.
The two Republican presidential frontrunners are engaged in a sordid one-upmanship of who can more blatantly scapegoat American Muslims. For Donald Trump and Cruz, it’s an essential part of the gladiator politics that have come to define the GOP primary. Trump has said “Islam hates us” and notoriously proposed banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. Cruz has called for all Syrian Muslims to be banned from the entering the U.S., but for Syrian Christians to be allowed in.
So after the Brussels attack last week, Cruz said, “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Uncharacteristically agreeable, Trump called the unconstitutional proposal a “good idea.”
Somehow this was only one half of Republicans’ very mixed-up week on religious freedom.
A day after Cruz thumbed his nose at the Constitution, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that even the nation’s staunchest religious freedom advocates have called into question. At issue is whether the government violates the religious freedom of faith-based non-profits by requiring them to fill out a form to opt out of providing contraception coverage in their health care plans, as required under the Affordable Care Act.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Cruz has singled out the most sympathetic of the religious non-profits, an order of Catholic nuns called the Little Sisters of the Poor, as exhibit A in President Obama’s alleged war on religion. He has accused Obama as having “the audacity to sue the Little Sisters of the Poor,” when in fact the order of nuns sued the administration.
After the Supreme Court hearing last week, Cruz renewed his full-throated cries for religious liberty. He released recommendations on Thursday from his Religious Liberty Advisory Council, which include a pledge to “direct the Department of Health and Human Services to exempt all employers who object for moral and religious reasons from any contraception mandate.”
“Whether Hobby Lobby or the Little Sisters of the Poor, people of faith should not be made to bow down at the altar of political correctness,” Cruz said.
If “political correctness” sounds familiar, it’s because he wields it constantly to portray religious pluralism as the enemy of Christianity. In fact, he invoked it days earlier when calling for a “people of faith,” Muslims, to be subjected to increased government surveillance. “In the wake of the Brussels attacks, I called for vigorously guarding against the political correctness that has plagued Europe,” he wrote in a New York Daily News op-ed.
This is par for the course for Cruz. Throughout his campaign, he has portrayed the conscience rights of conservative Christian non-profits (and business owners) as being under mortal threat, but he has seemed oblivious to the perils to the constitutional rights of religious minorities, like Muslims he believes should be targeted by law enforcement for their religion and nothing more.
As always for Cruz, religious liberty is for one people only: Christians.
By: Susan Posner, The Week, March 30, 2016
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