“Hillary Clinton Is Still The Candidate To Beat”: Her Biggest Task Is Clear; Get Out Of Her Own Way
She keeps putting obstacles in her own path, but Hillary Clinton remains the odds-on favorite to become our next president.
The headlines screaming “Clinton’s Support Erodes” are true, but only in a relative sense. In the contest for the Democratic nomination, according to the polls, she has slid all the way from “prohibitive favorite” to something like “strong favorite” — not bad, given the way she has hobbled herself with the e-mail scandal.
A new Post-ABC News poll gives a clear view of Clinton’s status. Among registered voters who are Democrats or lean toward that party, Clinton is at 42 percent while Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is at 24 percent and Vice President Joe Biden at 21 percent. Since July, according to the poll, Clinton’s support has fallen 21 points. So yes, her campaign has reason to be concerned. But not alarmed.
The saving grace for Clinton is that only half of that lost support has gone to Sanders, who is running a smart and effective campaign, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. The other half has gone to Biden, who is not running a campaign at all — and may never do so.
In his recent media appearances, Biden has revealed his profound grief over the death of his son Beau. No one who watched him last week on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” could come away thinking that Biden is eager to run.
“I don’t think any man or woman should run for president unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president and, two, they can look at folks out there and say, ‘I promise you, you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy and my passion to do this,’ ” he told Colbert. “And I’d be lying if I said that I knew I was there.”
If you take Biden at his word and leave him out of the equation, Clinton’s support leaps to 56 percent, according to the Post-ABC News poll, while Sanders’s increases only slightly to 28 percent.
The challenge for Sanders is that while he is hugely popular with young voters and progressives, he has not connected with other key segments of the Democratic Party coalition. In August, a Gallup survey found that Clinton had a favorable rating of 80 percent among African Americans compared to just 23 percent for Sanders. This doesn’t reflect any particular antipathy toward the Vermont senator. Rather, it’s because just 33 percent of African Americans told Gallup they were familiar with him.
Am I ignoring the big picture? Have I somehow missed the fact that the major themes of the campaign thus far have been disgust with politics as usual and rejection of establishment candidates?
No, it’s just that I believe the internal dynamics of the two parties are quite different. Clinton fatigue among Democrats is one thing, but the total anarchy in the Republican Party is quite another.
Back to the Post-ABC News poll: A full 33 percent of Republican or GOP-leaning registered voters support billionaire Donald Trump for their party’s nomination and another 20 percent support retired surgeon Ben Carson. That’s more than half the party rejecting not only the establishment’s favored choices but any contender who has held political office.
Indeed, when asked what kind of person they would like to see as the next president, more than 70 percent of Democratic-leaning voters said they want “someone with experience in how the political system works.” But more than half of GOP-leaning voters, and a stunning 64 percent of self-described “conservative” Republicans, want “someone from outside the existing political establishment.”
This is terrible news for Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz and the other current or former officeholders in the GOP race. It’s good news for Clinton, because if she gets the nomination she will likely face either a novice whose qualifications and temperament are in question or a veteran politician struggling to consolidate his own fractious party’s support.
All of this assumes that Clinton doesn’t find a way to defeat herself. And yes, I realize this is a dangerous year for making assumptions.
I’m hard-pressed to imagine how Clinton and her team could have done a worse job of handling the controversy over her State Department e-mails. Instead of getting the whole truth out at once, they have let it emerge ever so slowly — and kept a damaging story alive.
Clinton’s biggest task is clear: Get out of her own way.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 16, 2015
“Crime, Fear, And The Republicans”: Moving Toward The Traditional Toxic Brew Of Race, Ethnicity And White Middle Class Insecurity
From Nixon to Reagan to the first President Bush, Republican campaigns were run like campaigns for sheriff. Nixon ran against unprecedented lawlessness and promised law and order to the silent majority. Reagan remained consistent in his view that “the jungle is waiting to take over. The man with the badge holds it back.” And George H.W. Bush rode the menacing image of Willie Horton, the furloughed rapist, to victory over Michael Dukakis. Then, in 1992, Bill Clinton took time out from his chaotic comeback in New Hampshire to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally disabled man who had shot out most of his frontal lobe.
Clinton not only took the crime monkey off the back of the Democratic party, he also enacted draconian legislation that has been a key driver in making the United States by far the most heavily incarcerated society in the world: 2.2 million men and women behind bars, disproportionately African-American, Latino, addicted and mentally ill, at an estimated annual cost of $73 billion. Yet over the last quarter century, violent crime rates have been falling, dramatically.
Of course, it can be argued that the decline is the product of mass incarceration, but a recent study by the Brennan Center shows that the effect of increased incarceration on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000. Although the Times recently reported “a startling rise in murders after years of declines,” Bruce Frederick, analyzing the statistics for the Marshall Project, found that only 3 of 20 cities have a “statistically reliable increase” in homicide rates.
In an age of hemorrhaging costs and declining crime, fiscally responsible Republicans have begun to make common cause with Democrats to start to shrink the prison-industrial complex. The Brennan Center recently published a collection of essays entitled “Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice Reform.” In his contribution, Rand Paul called for investigation of racial disparities in sentencing and argued against imprisonment for non-violent drug offenders, who make up the largest single group behind bars. Ted Cruz decried mandatory minimum sentences, which vests too much power in prosecutors. Marco Rubio declared there were too many federal crimes that were too poorly defined, and too poorly disclosed. Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee all called for compassion for drug offenders and showed interest in drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration.
Then along came Trump, blowing the old Republican dog whistle on race and crime. Ronald Reagan’s “jungle” was encroaching again, this time from the south. Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Doubling down when the statistics showed otherwise, Trump said “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” but reiterated that Mexicans coming here “are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” His website section on issues does not address crime, or indeed any other issue, except one — immigration.
The conservative National Review sees the potential here for a Republican renaissance on fear of crime. In a recent paean to Nixonian nostalgia, “Revive Law and Order Conservatism,” Stephen Eide writes, “So long as the New York Times and anti-cop activist groups continue with their provocations, we can be reasonably confident that more violent unrest is to come. The spectacle of chaos descending on cities long dominated by Democrats obviously plays to the GOP’s advantage.”
He decries conservative attitudes on crime as “notably softer now than they have been in many decades.” Acknowledging that “New York City’s murders hit a 50-year low,” he observes, “there were still more than three times as many as in London, which has about the same population.” Surely that could have nothing to do with robust Second Amendment rights, another cornerstone of the Republican platform. Eide counsels Republicans that a key to victory in 2016 is to “emphasize that we still have a serious crime problem.”
Republican candidates are taking note. On Hot Air, a conservative web site, Scott Walker properly lamented a recent spate of tragic police shootings but blamed them on President Obama. “In the last six years under President Obama, we’ve seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric. Instead of hope and change, we’ve seen racial tensions worsen and a tendency to use law enforcement as a scapegoat.” And Chris Christie threw Bill de Blasio under the bus as well, “It’s the liberal policies in [New York] that have led to the lawlessness that’s been encouraged by the president of the United States,” he said. “And I’m telling you, people in this country are getting more and more fed up.”
Republicans are increasingly positioning the issue as a rift between Black Lives Matter and police unions, between Sanctuary Cities and thousand mile anti-rapist walls. The constructive discourse in recent months about the crushing costs of incarceration, the waste of mandatory minimum sentences, the twin crises of mental health and addiction in prison, the endless cost and delay in enforcing the death penalty has all but ended. In its place, Republicans are moving toward the traditional toxic brew of race, ethnicity, white middle class insecurity and panic about crime.
Get ready for the return of Willie Horton.
By: Eric Lewis, Chairman of Reprieve US, a Human Rights Organization; The Marshall Project, Brennan Center for Justice, September 15, 2015
“A Rerun Of What His Brother Tried”: Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan Shows Republicans Can’t Learn From Economic History
Jeb Bush released the first details of his tax plan today in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, so we finally learn the secret that will produce spectacular growth, great jobs for all who want them, and a new dawn of prosperity and happiness for all Americans. Are you ready?
It’s…tax cuts for the wealthy! If only we had known that this amazingly powerful tool was available to us all along!
To be fair, not everything in Bush’s tax plan is targeted at the rich — there are some goodies in there for other people as well. But it’s pretty clear that in addition to wanting to revive the Bush Doctrine in foreign affairs, Jeb is looking to his brother’s tax policies as a model for how we can make the economy hum, I suppose because they worked so well the first time.
While many of the details are still vague, here are the basics of what Bush wants to do. He would reduce the number of tax brackets from its current seven down to three, of 10 percent, 25 percent, and 28 percent. This would represent a huge tax cut for people at the top, who currently pay a marginal rate of 39.6 percent. He also wants to eliminate the inheritance tax and the alternative minimum tax (both paid almost entirely by wealthy people), and slash corporate taxes. On the other end, he’d raise the standard deduction and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps the working poor. He would also eliminate the carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund managers to pay lower rates on their income.
“We will treat all noninvestment income the same,” he says, which is a reminder that investment income, which is mostly gained by wealthy people, would still be treated more favorably than wage income, which is what working people make.
As Dylan Matthews notes, Bush’s plan is something of a compromise between the supply-siders and flat-taxers who think that cutting taxes on the wealthy is literally the only thing necessary to spur the economy, and the “reform conservatives” who would give the wealthy some breaks but put more of their effort toward changes affecting the middle class. But the biggest problem with Bush’s plan may not so much the particulars, but the fact that he believes that making these changes will “unleash” the American economy.
We’ve had this debate again and again in recent years, and every time, events in the real world prove Republicans wrong, yet they never seem to change their tune. When Bill Clinton’s first budget passed in 1993 and raised taxes on the wealthy, Republicans said it would cause a “job-killing recession”; what ensued was a rather extraordinary economic boom and the first budget surpluses in decades. When George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003, primarily for the wealthy, they said that not only would the economy rocket forward into hyperspace, but there would be little or no increase in the deficit because of all that increased economic activity. What actually happened was anemic growth and dramatically increased deficits, culminating in the economic catastrophe of 2008. When Barack Obama raised taxes, Republicans said the economy would grind to a halt; instead we’ve seen sustained job creation (despite weak income gains).
The lesson of all this, to any sane person, is that changing tax rates, particularly the top marginal income tax rate, has little or no effect on the economy. Yet Jeb Bush wants us to believe that his plan will produce sustained growth of 4 percent or more — something no president since Lyndon Johnson has managed — with what is essentially a rerun of what his brother tried.
He’s hardly alone in this belief. Indeed, with the bizarre exception of Donald Trump, all the Republican candidates put tax cuts that would benefit the wealthy at the center of the their ideas for helping the American economy. So why can’t they learn from history?
The answer is that for conservatives, cutting taxes on the wealthy is less a practical instrument to produce a healthy economy than it is a moral imperative. When they talk passionately about the crushing burden taxation imposes on the “job creators,” those noble and virtuous Americans whose hard work and initiative (even when it comes in the form of waiting for their monthly dividend checks) provide the engine that moves the nation forward, you can tell they believe it deep in their hearts. If cutting the top marginal rate hasn’t delivered us to economic nirvana before, well they’re sure it will eventually. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still the right thing to do.
There are some cases where partisans will alter their philosophical beliefs in response to real-world evidence; for instance, right now, many Republicans are reexamining what they used to think about criminal justice and the utility of get-tough policies. But taxes occupy a singular place in the conservative philosophical hierarchy, so much so that many elected Republicans literally take an oath swearing never to raise them for any reason. Fourteen of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates have sworn that oath (though Bush is one of the three who hasn’t).
After all that has happened in the last couple of decades, it’s clear that there is literally no conceivable economic event or development that would dent the Republican conviction that cutting taxes for the wealthy is, if not the only thing that can help the economy, the sine qua non of economic revival. Maybe it’s too much to expect them to learn from history.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 9, 2015
“A Little Late To The Party”: Why Kim Davis Has Missed Her Moment
Years ago, I remember Christian right leaders fretting about pastors going to jail if they expressed their anti-gay views; when that didn’t come to pass, they fretted about churches losing their tax-exempt status. These worst case scenarios never happened, because we have this thing called the First Amendment, which protects peoples’ and churches’ right to say gay people are going to hell, or shouldn’t be able to get married, or should be cured by divine redemption.
Years later, the Christian right finally has its martyr in Kim Davis. Thanks to United States district judge David Bunning—who, despite having other options for securing marriage licenses for all Rowan County, Kentucky residents, ordered Davis to jail for six days—a new heroine was born.
Yet while Davis is most obviously a symbol for a Christian right bent on claiming its religious freedom is under siege, she is really a symbol of something else entirely. The Republican Party, and even its most reliable base of support, the Christian right, is being forced to move on when it comes to the marriage issue. According to a 2014 Pew survey, 58 percent of Republican millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) favor gay marriage. A Public Religion Research Institute survey conducted last year found “white evangelical Protestant Millennials are more than twice as likely to favor same-sex marriage as the oldest generation of white evangelical Protestants (43% vs. 19%).” That’s not a majority of millennial white evangelicals, but it’s certainly significant, given that this demographic has long been one of the staunchest opponents of marriage equality.
Davis, then, is a little late to the party, an anachronism delivered to the doorstep of the party’s most desperate presidential candidates. Her host and chief supporter Mike Huckabee reminded us at yesterday’s rally in Grayson, Kentucky, that Davis came to Christ just four and a half years ago. To her, everything is new again, but to evangelicals who have either embraced marriage equality or acquiesced to its inevitability, her rebirth as a celebrity victim of Rowan County’s gay and lesbian betrotheds and of the judiciary’s “tyranny” must feel a bit stale.
The Davis phenomenon has some Republicans worried, as Sahil Kapur and Greg Stohr report at Bloomberg. “I think the longer this lingers, the worse it is for the Republican Party and for the conservative movement,” John Feehery, a Republican strategist and lobbyist, told Bloomberg, adding that Davis’s stance “smacks of bigotry.”
Then there is the matter of the law. Yesterday Davis embraced Huckabee and lawyer Mat Staver, both of whom have pronounced the Supreme Court to be without authority to decide constitutional questions like whether bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. Even Fox News host Gregg Jarrett called this view “stunningly obtuse” and his guest Sharon Liko, a lawyer, called it “ridiculously stupid.” Piling on, the network’s Shepard Smith described the entire spectacle as a “religious play” and criticized Davis’s refusal to accept an accommodation, adding, “Haters are going to hate. We thought what this woman wanted was an accommodation, which they’ve granted her, something that worked for everybody. But it’s not what they want.”
While not a majority view among a group of evangelical thought leaders interviewed for the web site Breakpoint, Hunter Baker, a lawyer and political science professor at Union University, opined, “Kim Davis’s office is obligated to perform the state function of issuing wedding certificates. She disagrees that marriage can exist between two people of the same sex. I agree with her.” But, Baker maintained, “the state of Kentucky has little choice other than to respect the ruling of the Supreme Court.”
Who else agrees with that statement? None other than Donald Trump, who called the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges “the law of the land.”
Trump’s perch atop the GOP field is, of course, driving his adversaries in search of a potent boost from the fractured evangelical base. At yesterday’s rally, a Huckabee aide did the Christ-like thing of blocking Ted Cruz from a key photo opportunity with Davis; after all, the Bible does say those polling in the single-digits shall reap the glory of exploitative publicity stunts.
While Trump’s summertime standing with evangelicals was thought to be a blip, it has persisted into September—along with continued analyses of why. “Mr. Trump’s criticism of the Obama administration and of Republican Party leaders has many social conservatives cheering for him,” the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
Writing on the Fox News website, Robert Jeffress, the Texas megachurch pastor who in 2011 called Mormonism a “cult,” maintains, “No Evangelical I know is expecting Trump to lead our nation in a spiritual revival.” But, he goes on, President Barack Obama has “drastically lowered the threshold of spiritual expectations Evangelicals have of their president. No longer do they require their president to be one of them. Evangelicals will settle for someone who doesn’t HATE them like the current occupant of the Oval Office appears to.”
Do evangelicals need Kim Davis, political motivator? She may very well have missed her moment.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, September 9, 2015
“Electioneering Committees”: Buying A President For 30 Bucks And Change
For today’s report, I have a bunch of statistics for you. Wait — don’t run away! Where are you going? Come back here and sit still while I drill these stats into your head! It’ll be fun, and you’ll learn something.
I realize that numbers can numb the brain, but this is a good story, and I promise that these statistics are easy to absorb. In fact, the number 400 pretty much sums up this story of political intrigue and corruption involving some of America’s wealthiest families and corporations.
Let’s start with the “Billionaire 400,” a clique of the elite organized by the conniving Koch brothers. These ultra-rich right wingers gather each winter in some warm-weather resort for a secretive, invitation-only retreat. There, they plot strategies and pledge money to elect politicos who’ll support their vision of corporate rule in America. For the 2016 elections, they’ve already committed nearly a billion dollars to impose their vision of plutocracy over our democratic ideals — double the combined amount that the Republican and Democratic parties will spend. I wonder: What do they think they’re getting for that price?
Then there are the secretive SuperPACs that are sacking up tens of millions of dollars to back various presidential candidates. Again, a few hundred corporations and rich families — each writing checks for hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars — have put up nearly half of all the money in these electioneering committees.
Keep that 400 number in mind when I offer my sincerest congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Middle-Class America, since they are all the rage in this present presidential contest, for Jeb, Hillary, and all the rest — even The Donald — say their campaigns are all about the hurting middle class that hasn’t yet recovered from the Great Recession. Well, don’t look now, but after each one promises that they’ll do the most for the Great Mass of the Middle Class, they disappear into the shadows and scurry off to schmooze with the little group of Americans they truly love: The exclusive club of multimillionaires and billionaires, who are shoveling those big bucks into those campaign pockets.
Now, back to our statistics: Jeb Bush got a million dollars each from 26 of his SuperPAC backers; Hillary Clinton took a million each from nine funders; of the $16 million in Marco Rubio’s PAC, 78 percent came from only four donors; and Ted Cruz got the most from the fewest, taking practically all of his $37 million from just three fat-cat families.
So while candidates for the highest office in our land are soaking up applause for the grand rhetoric they’re giving to the middle class, they’re also quietly collecting millions of dollars by pledging their steadfast fealty to the ruling class. Donating millions is not an innocent or noble political transaction. Written on the back of each of their checks is their own corporate agenda, trumping the people’s agenda.
Ironically, it’s Donnie Trump, the bombastic billionaire, who candidly admits that these so-called “gifts” amount to the outright, plutocratic purchase of politicians. He’s long been a campaign donor in order to secure political favors, he confesses, and it works: “When I need something from them … they are there for me.” There’s a word for that: Corruption.
But now, here comes the antidote to this corruption of our politics by fat cats. Instead of being financed by 400 special interests, Bernie Sanders’ campaign has raised its $15 million (as of July) from over 400,000 ordinary Americans. In fact, the average donation to Bernie is a heartwarming, soul-saving $31.30!
You can’t buy a president for just over 30 bucks — but you can help elect one who isn’t owned by Big Money. And isn’t that the way democracy ought to be?
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, September 9, 2015
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