“The Biggest Threat To Carson’s Campaign”: Low-Information Candidate Worried About Low-Information Voters
On Wednesday afternoon, Ben Carson told Wolf Blitzer that his biggest threat in the presidential election isn’t Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, the two candidates who happen to be beating him right now.
No, Carson, whose poll numbers have dropped so far that he could grab a toboggan and slide down them into irrelevance, thinks the biggest barrier to his victory is “the fact that people sometimes are not well educated.”
Back in October, when Carson was in second place, he was doing much better among voters without a college degree than he is doing today with any voters.
“They don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Carson, who was once described by his former campaign manager as “just living in an alternative universe,” said, “and yet these are people who vote … I implore people to really inform yourself about who the candidates are, inform yourself of what their positions are.”
Ben Carson — a very good neurosurgeon who reportedly doesn’t understand foreign policy even though people keep trying to explain it to him over and over — for example, believes that free college will destroy our nation; that pyramids were used to store grain instead of dead bodies; that the minimum wage is good or bad; that Muslims shouldn’t be president; that it is okay to take a break from your presidential campaign to sell copies of your book; that gun control helped the Nazis; that people in mass-shooting situations should yell, “Hey, guys, everybody attack him!“; that prison turns people gay (“So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question.”); that spending a lot of money to raise money is a great idea; that Hamas is pronounced “hummus”; that New Hampshire is actually pretty far away from Vermont; and that “Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”
Hopefully this list will inform voters of who Ben Carson really is — and inform Ben Carson that the biggest threat to his campaign is actually the fact that he just isn’t a very good candidate.
By: Jamie Fuller, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 27, 2016
“Facts Are Facts”: Bernie Sanders Will Not Be President
I respect Bernie Sanders. I admire his passion and his devotion to the common good as he conceives it. I find his style of leftist politics — with greater ties to the class-focused concerns of the Old Left than to the cultural and identity obsessions of the New — quite compelling. I admire the democratic socialist welfare states of Northern Europe on which he models his own policy proposals and would be happy to see the United States move further in that direction.
But it isn’t going to happen.
If you Feel the Bern, by all means keep fighting the good fight. Work to get Sanders and his issues placed front and center in the campaign. Act as if you think he has a good chance of burying Hillary Clinton, winning the Democratic nomination, and then triumphing over whichever candidate comes out on top at the end of the GOP primary scrum.
But facts are facts — and the fact is that Bernie Sanders is not going to be elected president of the United States.
The first obstacle Sanders faces is of course winning the Democratic Party’s nominating contest against Hillary Clinton. At the moment Sanders and his supporters feel like they have a good shot because he’s currently leading many polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. If he takes those first two states, showing that Clinton is beatable, then all bets are off.
Except that they’re not.
For one thing, lily-white Iowa isn’t especially representative, and neither is even more lily-white New Hampshire, which also just so happens to border Sanders’ home state of Vermont. Once the voting moves on to states in the South, West, and Midwest, and to bigger, more demographically diverse states where vastly more delegates are at stake, Clinton is quite likely to come out on top over and over again.
How likely? Very. We know this because of the national polling spread. Clinton has led Sanders in every poll taken since the start of the election cycle. The most recent ones place Clinton in the lead by anywhere from 4 to 25 percentage points, with the RealClearPolitics polling average showing Clinton nearly 13 points ahead. When a candidate consistently comes out on top, she is winning.
But what about the 2008 scenario? That’s when Barack Obama leapt ahead of Clinton in February after trailing her handily up to that point and ended up beating her to the nomination. That’s obviously the script that Sanders supporters hope to see repeated this time around.
The problem is that Bernie Sanders isn’t Barack Obama — and no, I’m not just talking about Obama’s presumably much greater ability to mobilize the African-American vote. I also mean his enviable capacity to inspire moderates as well as liberals to vote for him. Sanders, by contrast, is the strong favorite of those who identify as “very liberal” but understandably polls weakly among self-described “moderate” Democrats. With Sanders continuing to propose very liberal economic policies that even leading progressive commentators consider to be vague and unrealistic, that is unlikely to change.
But doesn’t Clinton face equal and opposite problems of her own by appealing primarily to moderates in the party? She would if there were equal numbers of economically liberal and moderate Democrats, but there aren’t. Though the number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents willing to describe themselves as economically liberal has increased in recent years, the terms still apply to just 32 percent of the total. The proportion of those describing themselves as economically moderate or conservative, meanwhile, is 64 percent.
Which means that Clinton’s more economically moderate base of support is roughly double the size of Sanders’ liberal base.
To those, finally, who look to Donald Trump’s remarkable ascent in the Republican primary field as a sign that a populist insurgent can overturn the preferences of party establishments, a note of caution is in order. Leaving aside the fact that, unlike Sanders, Trump has been leading in national polls for six months straight, and often by wide margins, there remains the complication that Trump’s campaign scrambles established ideological assumptions on the right rather than simply reinforcing or radicalizing them. The mogul from Manhattan combines a far-right stance on immigration with economic positions that make him sound like a moderate Democrat. That’s why his candidacy is so dangerous to the GOP: It threatens to tear apart the electoral coalition and ideological agenda that has more or less held the party together since Ronald Reagan was elected 36 years ago.
Sanders’ candidacy threatens no such thing. It merely aims to pull his party further to the left — as Democrats have defined the left since 1972. Now if Sanders had responded to Clinton’s very liberal latter-day stance on gun control by championing the rights of gun owners, or if he’d made other strategic moves to the right on social issues (on abortion or religious freedom, perhaps), then he might well have sowed Trumpean chaos among Democrats and ended up leapfrogging Clinton to the nomination. But as it is, Sanders is merely doing what ideologically doctrinaire primary candidates always do: working to radicalize and purify his party’s already established ideological commitments.
That strategy will only win Sanders the nomination if the Democrats lurch quite a bit further leftward — or if some new (or old) scandal suddenly engulfs Hillary Clinton — in the coming weeks or months.
But in that unlikely (but not impossible) event, wouldn’t Democratic nominee Sanders stand a very good chance of winning the presidency? Haven’t a series of head-to-head polls shown that Sanders does well and in some cases even better than Clinton against the leading Republican candidates?
Yes they have, but those polls deserve to be taken with several grains of salt.
For one thing, these same polls also show Clinton in a dead-heat against the fading and transparently absurd sideshow candidacy of evangelical neurosurgeon Ben Carson. That’s strong prima facie evidence that the poll results are driven to a significant extent by voter ignorance. Put Carson on a debate stage opposite Clinton, and his support would collapse rapidly and dramatically.
Perhaps even more far-fetched is the finding that Sanders would defeat Trump by a wider margin than Clinton. Clinton’s hypothetical victory over Trump by a narrow 2.5 percentage points can be explained by the fact that both candidates would be appealing to the same bloc of white working-class voters, many of whom are Democrats. That could indeed make Clinton vulnerable against Trump. But to believe that Sanders would outperform her to beat Trump by 5.3 percentage points one has to presume that Sanders could do a better job than Clinton of persuading this (or some other) bloc of pro-Trump voters to support him instead.
Let’s just say that I find that implausible. Americans as a whole are strongly disinclined to vote for a socialist — more disinclined than they are to vote for a Catholic, a woman, a black, a Hispanic, a Jew, a Mormon, a homosexual, a Muslim, or an atheist. Is it at all likely that white working-class would-be Trump supporters are among the country’s most open-minded voters in this respect?
Sorry, I don’t buy it — and neither should you.
Bernie Sanders is a good man and an effective advocate for the causes he champions. But he isn’t going to be president.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 19, 2016
“Clinton’s Clever Debate Strategy”: Cling To Obama In A Party That’s Already Missing Him
If only Democratic primary voters were as furious at their own party’s powers-that-be as are Republican voters, the posture taken by Bernie Sanders in the NBC/YouTube debate Sunday night would’ve been a clear winner: Both parties have been bought by wealthy interests, and only an anti-corporate crusader like Bernie can avoid the terrible policy mistakes committed by and under the Clinton and Obama administrations. Indeed, if a sizable majority of Democrats thought the last two administrations of their own party were the corporate betrayals that many of Sanders’s most avid supporters consider them to be, HRC would be the perfect symbol of the continuing DINO establishment that had to be overthrown to install progressive governance.
Alas for the Sanders campaign, that’s not how Democrats feel. According to the latest Gallup weekly presidential-job-approval tracking poll, the 44th president’s rating among Democrats is 84 percent. Among self-identified Liberal Democrats it’s at 89 percent; among African-Americans it’s at 85 percent. Yet it is extremely difficult for Sanders to make his case that HRC is too close to Wall Street or too militaristic or too timid on domestic policy without co-indicting the incumbent president. Hillary Clinton understands that, which is why she took so much care in the NBC debate to identify her approach to the regulation of Wall Street with Obama’s; to defend Obamacare in contrast to Sanders’s advocacy of a single-payer health-care system; to remind Democrats she was a major architect of Obama’s foreign policy; and to refuse opportunities to separate herself from Obama even though some consultants probably think she’ll need to do that to win a general election.
Meanwhile, Sanders is on the horns of an excruciating dilemma: Even if he manages to win in both Iowa and New Hampshire early next month, the long-term success of his campaign will depend on a breakthrough with minority voters in the South and large industrial states who don’t particularly know or have reason to trust him, and don’t particularly want to hear the first nonwhite president — who has been, and is continuing to be, assailed by Republicans on a daily basis as a hopeless incompetent and near-traitor — being instead described by a Democrat as a corporate whore. Yet an implicit indictment of the Obama administration (and less directly, Bill Clinton’s administration) as compromised by corporate ties and hobbled by unprincipled centrist compromises is at the heart of the entire Sanders campaign, and intrinsic to the kind of activist energy he’s showing in the first two states and other hotbeds like the Pacific Northwest.
Beyond that, it seems difficult for Sanders to think or talk beyond the Evil Corporate Cash Nexus to embrace other Democratic voter concerns. Even when he stops talking about economics — as he briefly did in this debate in a very well-wrought and comprehensive answer to a question about police conduct — you get the sense he wants to get back to his Great White Whale. In a conversation on climate change, Sanders insisted fossil-fuel industry campaign contributions were the sole reason for climate-science denialism, ignoring the regional, cultural, and even religious factors feeding the reactionary position of the GOP and the conservative movement on this subject.
Sanders did get in some telling shots at Clinton’s acceptance of speaking fees from Goldman Sachs (though one wonders if the name of that firm inspires the same fury in his listeners as better known banks they deal with every day), and defended his oscillating position on guns pretty well. And even his response to the “bipartisanship” question — the Naderite position that both parties have been bought and sold — wasn’t that much less convincing than Clinton’s or O’Malley’s stale rap about reaching across party lines and forging the kind of coalitions that have become largely a distant memory.
But Bernie’s plight was perhaps best captured by the moment observers are already calling one of his best in the debate, when he sharply replied to Andrea Mitchell’s out-of-context quote of his condemnation of Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Lewinsky scandal by saying:
I cannot walk down the street, Secretary Clinton knows that, without being told how much I have to attack Secretary Clinton.
That’s undoubtedly true. His core supporters want a civil war — for “the soul of the Democratic Party,” as the pundits love to say. But it’s doubtful the Democratic Party, and particularly the voters he most needs to expand his beachhead in nearly all-white states into more representative Donkey territory, wants its soul contested.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 18, 2016
“A Different Kind of Courage”: Soul Piercing Hard, Quiet Sacred Moments
Much has been written lately by people who think that President Obama has done an inadequate job of calming the nation’s fears. Today he takes on a very different task as the Consoler-in-Chief. On his way to the family’s Christmas vacation in Hawaii, the President will stop in San Bernardino to spend some private time with the victims and families of the shootings that took place there earlier this month.
I don’t expect that we’ll hear much about these meetings. But they’ll probably be much like the ones he held with the families of the shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago. If you’ve never read Joshua Dubois’ account of that day, here is a portion of it:
The president took a deep breath and steeled himself, and went into the first classroom. And what happened next I’ll never forget.
Person after person received an engulfing hug from our commander in chief. He’d say, “Tell me about your son. . . . Tell me about your daughter,” and then hold pictures of the lost beloved as their parents described favorite foods, television shows, and the sound of their laughter. For the younger siblings of those who had passed away—many of them two, three, or four years old, too young to understand it all—the president would grab them and toss them, laughing, up into the air, and then hand them a box of White House M&M’s, which were always kept close at hand. In each room, I saw his eyes water, but he did not break.
And then the entire scene would repeat—for hours. Over and over and over again, through well over a hundred relatives of the fallen, each one equally broken, wrecked by the loss…
And the funny thing is—President Obama has never spoken about these meetings. Yes, he addressed the shooting in Newtown and gun violence in general in a subsequent speech, but he did not speak of those private gatherings. In fact, he was nearly silent on Air Force One as we rode back to Washington, and has said very little about his time with these families since. It must have been one of the defining moments of his presidency, quiet hours in solemn classrooms, extending as much healing as was in his power to extend. But he kept it to himself—never seeking to teach a lesson based on those mournful conversations, or opening them up to public view.
Those were quiet sacred moments – much as the ones today will be.
There is a twisted way in which our culture often associates courage with the kind of chest-thumping we saw on the Republican debate stage Tuesday night. But that dismisses the kind that it takes to look into the eyes of a mother/father/son/daughter/husband/wife who has lost a loved one to senseless violence and embrace their grief. There is a reason why most of us avoid being put in a situation like that whenever possible. It’s soul-piercing hard. So today I want to take a moment to think about what it says about President Obama that he would chose to go there. Beyond what he’s actually done to keep us safe, that’s at least as important as what he says to allay our fears.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 18, 2015
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