“A Democrat That Can Win Is What We Need”: Translating Values Into Governance And Delivering The Goods
In my estimation, there’s only one presidential candidate in 2016 fully capable of doing the job, and she’s anything but a natural.
As Hillary Clinton has also been the target of maybe the longest-running smear campaign in American history — including roughly a dozen partisan Congressional investigations and a six-year leak-o-matic “independent counsel” probe led by the fastidious Kenneth Starr — it’s no wonder some voters mistrust her.
Overcoming that suspicion is her biggest challenge.
Republicans have predicted her imminent indictment for 20 years. You’d think by now they’d have made something stick, if there was anything to it. But it didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now for an obvious reason: in a democracy, political show trials endanger the prosecution as much as the defense.
Anybody who watched Hillary’s one-woman demolition of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s vaunted Benghazi committee should understand that.
Meanwhile, one of the best things about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is his unwillingness to smear his opponent. Too bad many of his most passionate supporters aren’t so fastidious. With Iowa’s make-or-break moment approaching for Sanders, it’s getting nasty out there.
It’s not so much the tiresome attacks on anybody who disagrees with them as a corrupt sellout. (My corporate overlords, of course, dictated that sentence.) It’s the seeming belief that people can be browbeaten into supporting their guy.
Some are a bit like Trump supporters–although normally without the threats. That too may be changing. Recently a guy visited my Facebook page saying people like me deserve “to be dragged into the street and SHOT for…treason against not only our country and our people, but the ENTIRE [BLEEPING] WORLD.”
My response — “Settle down, Beavis” — sent him into a rage.
But no, Hillary’s not an instinctive performer, although her stage presence strikes me as improved since 2008. A person needn’t be “inauthentic” (pundit-speak for “bitch”) to be uncomfortable in front of an audience.
As for authenticity, few Democrats could work a crowd like North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.
President Obama nailed it during a recent Politico interview:
Hillary does better with “small groups” than big ones, he observed, before putting his thumb heavily on the scale. He described Hillary as a fighter, who’s “extraordinarily experienced — and, you know, wicked smart and knows every policy inside and out — [and] sometimes [that] could make her more cautious, and her campaign more prose than poetry,” he said.
Even so, she came closer to defeating Obama in 2008 than Republicans have. “Had things gone a little bit different in some states or if the sequence of primaries and caucuses been a little different,” the president said, “she could have easily won.”
Indeed. As non-endorsements go, the president’s remarks couldn’t have been more complimentary. “She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” he added.
Obama wisely said nothing critical about Bernie Sanders, but nothing particularly warm either. “Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose,” he observed. The president said he understood the appeal of Sanders “full-throated…progressivism.”
Well, Mr. Hopey-Changey as Sarah Palin calls him, certainly should.
Seven years of trench warfare with congressional Republicans, however, have brought out the president’s inner pragmatist. Which Democrat is best-positioned to consolidate the Obama legacy and move it forward?
First, one who stands a good chance of being elected.
Look, there’s a reason Karl Rove’s super PAC is running anti-Hillary TV ads in Iowa. Bernie Sanders “radical” past makes him a GOP oppo-research dream. Never mind socialism. Did you know he once wrote a column claiming that sexual frustration causes cervical cancer?
That in the 1970s, he called for nationalizing oil companies, electric utilities, and — get this — TV networks? Asked about it, he deflects by noting that Hillary once supported Barry Goldwater. Yeah, when she was 16. Bernie was in his mid-30s when he called for confiscating the Rockefeller family fortune. How most Americans hear that is: if he can take away their stuff, he can take away mine.
Sure, many people went off the rails during the Seventies. Most aren’t running for president. Bernie strikes me as a fine senator and a decent man. However, the current U.S. Congress has voted 60 times to repeal Obamacare. And he’s going to give us single-payer “Medicare for all?”
No, he’s not. Assuming he could find a sponsor, it’d never get out of committee. I doubt I’ll live to see single-payer health insurance in the USA. And I’m younger than Bernie. A complete retrofitting of American health care simply isn’t in the works. The votes just aren’t there, and they won’t materialize by repeating the magic word “revolution.”
President Obama says Hillary represents the “recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.”
Hard-won reality, that is, as opposed to fantasy.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 27, 2016
“Citizens United And New Media Are On A Collision Course”: New Technology Has Potential To Deal A Blow To Big Money In Politics
New media is challenging the basic business model of advertisements as a way to pay for television programming. First came remote controls and options like Tivo, which allowed viewers to skip ads. Now, in the age of digital streaming, the number of households that are “cord cutters” (no cable or satellite television service) has increased 60% in the last 5 years.
This evolution comes just as the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United allowed for unlimited contributions to campaign super pacs – whose main role has been to pay for expensive television advertising. The conflation of those two developments might help explain why Jeb Bush’s super pac has spent over $15 million on television ads (far more than any other campaign), and yet their candidate has dropped to fifth place in the polls, leading long-time Bush family friend John Sununu to say, “I have no feeling for the electorate anymore. It’s not responding the way it used to.”
We essentially saw the same thing in the 2012 election when Karl Rove’s super pacs had a 1% return on their investment in television ads, while a video recorded by a waiter at a Romney event was likely a game-changer. At some point super pacs are going to have to ask themselves what they should be spending all those millions of dollars on if television advertising doesn’t move the needle on poll numbers, while free media becomes a determining factor.
It’s also interesting to note that a candidate like Donald Trump has spent very little money so far and recently swore off having any super pacs. The reason he’s been able to do that is because he gets a tremendous amount of free media for saying outrageous things. That poses it’s own kind of danger as long as the press prioritizes the sensational over the substantive. But in the end, it is not significantly different from all the free media the Obama campaign got with the video of Romney’s “47%” remarks in 2012.
The one Republican candidate whose super pacs are experimenting more aggressively with the use of new media is Ted Cruz. Kellyanne Conway, who runs one of the Cruz super pacs, recently said that their goal was to be “more surgical, spending on digital, cable, direct mail, radio, in addition to TV.”
Brian Fisher, who runs an organization called “Online for Life” (which has developed apps and social media to connect with women seeking to end a pregnancy), has formed a company called Red Metrics LLC that will serve as the data and digital operation for Cruz’s four Keep the Promise super pacs. One of the visible results of that collaboration is the Facebook page: Reigniting the Promise, which already has over 380,000 followers.
To date, the Cruz super pacs have spent almost nothing on television ads, and yet their candidate is inching up in the polls and his campaign has raised more “hard money” than anyone in the Republican field except Ben Carson. Whether or not Cruz has a chance at actually being the nominee remains to be seen. But when you compare the results of super pac spending on new media vs paid television advertising, it is obvious that there is a new game in town.
It is always important to remember that the role of money in politics is to influence voters. As long as super pacs continue to spend their money on something that doesn’t have much impact on them (estimates are that they’ll spend $4.4 billion on TV ads this election cycle), the concern about the wealthy being able to control our elections is muted.
On the other hand, just as new media is having an impact on the music, entertainment and publishing industries, it is also affecting political campaigns. As we’ve seen with those other industries, new media is inherently more democratic and less expensive. That puts it on a bit of a collision course with the big money that is flooding into super pacs.
New media is clearly here to stay. While mega-donors and their super pacs will catch on to that fact some day and make adjustments, it is time to begin asking ourselves whether or not this new technology has the potential to deal a definitive blow to the role of big money in politics.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 1, 2015
“How Donald Trump Broke Jeb Bush”: Political Jujutsu; Turning An Asset Into An Albatross
In jujutsu, one uses an opponent’s weight against him. And, in the version most often seen in politics, a candidate turns his opponent’s strength into a weakness. In political jujutsu, assets can become liabilities.
In 1992, Bill Clinton faced off against George H.W. Bush. The latter had been a congressman, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, special envoy to China, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Vice President of the United States. By contrast, Clinton was governor of the 32nd-largest state—Arkansas.
If that election had boiled down to résumés, Bush would have walked off with it. But the Clinton War Room created a new narrative that revolved around youth, energy, fresh ideas. They made Bush’s experience a liability instead of an asset.
Now, in 2015, Donald Trump has employed the same strategy against Jeb Bush, and quite effectively at that. In most polls, Bush seems cemented in fifth place—behind Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.
In the lead-up to the 2016 election, one of Bush’s major strengths was thought to be his strong appeal to Hispanic voters. Republicans were still smarting from Mitt Romney’s decisive defeat in 2012 at the hands of an incumbent president who enjoyed a wide margin of support from Hispanics. Romney did horribly with those voters.
Hispanics have a disproportional importance to the political process for three reasons—youth, unpredictability, and location. First, they’re younger than most other groups of voters; Hispanics have a median age of 27, compared to 37 for the overall U.S. population. So they’ll be around for a while.
Next, while the majority of Hispanics are registered Democrats, they have shown a willingness to cross party lines to support moderate Republicans. George W. Bush is the prime example, winning 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.
And lastly, they represent a significant presence in three “purple” battleground states: Colorado, Florida, and Nevada.
As Republicans proceeded to do an autopsy on Romney’s defeat, two different schools of thought emerged. Either the GOP nominee came up short because he hadn’t inspired enough white conservatives to come out, or because he had done such a poor job of reaching out to those voters who don’t typically vote Republican—especially Hispanics.
For those in the first school, the problem was that the party had nominated the wrong person. A more dependable conservative, they reasoned, could have done a better job of bringing out the GOP base.
Those in the second school agreed that the GOP needed to get behind a different sort of candidate in 2016. But, for them, the problem wasn’t that Romney didn’t excite the base but that he did nothing to widen it.
That’s the view of former White House political adviser and GOP strategist Karl Rove, who during a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe shot down the idea that there was some “magical cache of conservative voters” that could save the day in 2016. Instead, he argued, the emphasis for Republicans should be on peeling off voters that traditionally vote Democratic.
Asked if Donald Trump could win the general election, Rove said, “My view is no, but we’ll see.” Asked to explain why not, he referred back to the party’s nominee in 2012.
“If Mitt Romney lost with 27 percent among Latinos,” Rove said, “how good would someone do when he’s got an 11 percent approval rating among Latinos?”
Rove and Co. decided early on in the prep for 2016 what was needed was a Republican with a proven track record of appealing to Hispanic voters, getting them out of their Democratic comfort zone, and showing them enough respect that they actually consider voting for the Republican nominee for president.
That candidate was supposed to be Jeb Bush, who had all the ingredients of being the most Hispanic-friendly Republican candidate in history. Bush speaks fluent Spanish, has a Mexican-born wife, spouts moderate views on immigration, and won more than 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in each of his Florida gubernatorial races in 1998 and 2002.
Bush was supposed to be the peacemaker who mended fences with Hispanics, and reassured them that Romney’s cold shoulder notwithstanding, they were indeed welcome in the Republican Party. Mi casa es su casa.
But with a series of deft maneuvers, and a little political jujutsu, Trump managed to turn Bush’s asset into a liability that essentially took him out of the race.
When Bush described as “an act of love” the concept of a Mexican immigrant traveling north to the United States—even without proper documents—in order to reunite with family members or to support a family back home, or when Bush spoke to Hispanic crowds in Spanish and fielded questions from Spanish-language media in the same language, or when Bush told an audience in New Hampshire that he had a “grown up plan” to deal with immigration that combined border security with earned legal status for the undocumented, Trump pounced. And pounced. And pounced some more. In tweets, speeches, and jabs, Trump has learned to effectively use Bush’s own words against him.
On one occasion, the weapon wasn’t Bush’s choice of words but something much more personal: His choice of a life partner.
In July, Trump advanced the theory that Jeb’s moderate views on immigration stem from the fact that his wife, Colomba, was born in Mexico. It started with a tweet created by a third party, but retweeted by Trump’s account, which asserted: “Jeb Bush has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife.” The tweet was later deleted. Colomba Bush came to the United States legally, and eventually became a U.S. citizen.
During an interview on CNN’s AC360, Trump was asked by Anderson Cooper if he authorized the retweet. He said he didn’t, but also that he didn’t regret that the retweet went out from his account. Then, in so many words, he restated the accusation.
“I don’t regret it,” Trump said. “I mean, look, I would say that he would. If my wife were from Mexico, I think I would have a soft spot for people from Mexico. I can understand that.”
Understand this. All these things—that Bush speaks Spanish, supports legal status for the undocumented, married a woman from Mexico—feed the narrative that Trump has pushed to working-class whites since he first began attacking the establishment’s candidate: “Bush isn’t for you. He’s for the Mexicans.”
It’s not unlike the accusations from some on the right wing in 2008 that Barack Obama, if elected, would be a president for African Americans but no one else.
As a Mexican-American, I knew this day would come—when someone who spoke Spanish and had moderate views on immigration would be accused of being too close to “the Mexicans.” But I never imagined the accusation would be hurled at a white guy.
Using political jujutsu, Trump will probably keep Bush out the top tier of GOP presidential candidates until that moment when Bush drops out of the race altogether.
And that’s a real shame. Bush isn’t the perfect candidate, but he’s a serious person who could step into the role of president on Day 1. He could also move his party forward on immigration and help make things right with a group of voters who Republicans can’t afford to write off. Besides, by all accounts, he’s a good man. That can’t be said of his chief nemesis. What Trump did to Bush was evil. Brilliant, but evil.
By: Ruben Navarrettte, Jr., The Daily Beast, November 30, 2015
“Trump’s Got The GOP By The Balls”: Trump Has The Power To Elect Clinton, And Both He And Priebus Know It
Deflating as it is, the likely Donald Trump scenario is this: He burns hot for a little while longer; he says something really out there in the first debate that roils up the base but makes Reince Priebus and Karl Rove break out in canker sores; but by the time of the baseball playoffs maybe, his act gets old, and somebody else becomes the Herman Cain of October. Then, next year, the primaries will start, and he’ll have to get votes. He’s not going to be all that competitive in Iowa, so it’s New Hampshire where he’ll need to deliver something. And if he doesn’t, he’ll just go away.
That’s the pattern anyway. I seem to recall that at this point in 2011, Michele Bachmann had a pretty good head of steam going. So maybe we shouldn’t get too overheated about him.
But Trump is different from Bachmann, and even from fellow entrepreneur Cain, in one major respect: He doesn’t give a crap about the Republican Party. He cares about Trump. And don’t forget he has the power singlehandedly to make Hillary Clinton president. He knows it, and you better believe Priebus knows it, and it is this fact that establishes a power dynamic between Trump and the GOP in which Trump totally has the upper hand and can make mischief in the party for months.
How does he have the power to elect Clinton all by himself? By running as an independent. Two factors usually prevent candidates who lose nominations from running as independents. One, they lack the enormous amount of money needed to pursue that path (pay the lawyers to get them on 50 state ballots, etc.). Two, they have a sense of proportion and decency, and they figure that if primary voters rejected them, it’s time to go home.
Well, Trump has the dough and lacks the decency. In an interview this week with Byron York, he left the door open a crack to such a candidacy. And that would be all it would take. Given his fame and name recognition, he’d likely hit the polling threshold needed to qualify for the fall debates. And with that kind of exposure, he’d do well—enough. All he needs to get is 5 percent of the vote in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado, and the Republican, whoever it is, is sizzled. Another electoral landslide.
The question is would he, and the answer is who knows? To York, he expressed awareness of the obvious drawbacks, pointing to the spoiler role he says Ross Perot played in 1992: “I think every single vote that went to Ross Perot came from [George H.W.] Bush…Virtually every one of his 19 percentage points came from the Republicans. If Ross Perot didn’t run, you have never heard of Bill Clinton.” He is—shocker—wrong about this, but what matters for present purposes is that he believes it, so maybe that means he wouldn’t follow through.
But he is an unpredictable fellow. Suppose Priebus and the GOP piss him off in some way, and he thinks the hell with these losers. Suppose he decides—and don’t doubt the importance of this—that an independent run would be good for the Trump brand in the long run. And suppose he doesn’t actually mind so much the idea of Hillary Clinton being president. We already know he retains a soft spot for old Bill. And he donated to Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign.
All that’s speculative. But even in the here and now this dynamic has consequences. It means the GOP can’t afford to offend Trump. This is why Priebus’s spokesman characterized the chairman’s Wednesday evening phone chat with Trump as “very respectful.”
And it’s why the other candidates’ criticisms of him have been a little, ah, restrained. Politicians aren’t always real smart about any number of things, but one thing in my experience that they almost always have a very keen sense of is risk. Members of Congress, for example, generally know exactly what percentage of their electorate they’re going to sacrifice by casting X vote. Jeb Bush’s Trump criticisms are muted because he has a lot to lose by offending Trump and his supporters. Chris Christie, who’s little more than an asterisk in the polls, has less to lose, so he’s willing to be a bit more blunt. Same goes for Rick Perry.
We’ll see if Trump has developed that politician’s sense of risk. If he goes too far, one or certainly two more equivalents of “Mexican rapists,” it’ll be open season on him. He’s at a point of maximum leverage right now, and if he wants to stay there, he’s got to tuck it in about 10 or 15 percent and start employing the kind of racialized euphemisms that are not only tolerated but celebrated within the Republican Party—build the damn fence, no amnesty, Al Qaeda is storming the mainland through Obama’s porous border, etc. That way, he’ll hang around. And he’ll build enough of a following that the threat of a viable independent candidacy remains a real one. And that is Trump’s trump card. And it makes Reince Priebus a very nervous man.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Dail Beast, July 10, 2015
“Koch Brothers’ Humiliating Secret”: Why Even Their Billions Can’t Save The GOP From Self-Destruction
Faced with the nightmare of up to 20-something GOP presidential candidates in 2016, Fox News last week announced its bid for sanity: It would limit its debate to the top 10 candidates in national polls. Now David Koch tells Larry Kudlow that he and brother Charles are likely to distribute some of the $900 million they’ve socked away for 2016 to “several” contenders, not just one Republican candidate.
Paul Waldman reads this as an attempt to cull the GOP field, and so do I. The Kochs can spread the wealth, at least among Republicans, because the entire 2016 roster supports their tax-slashing, regulation-gutting, climate-change accelerating policies. Their real interest is having a limited debate among the “grown-ups” of the party and sending a strong candidate off to face the Democratic nominee, most likely Hillary Clinton.
Charles Koch said something similar last month to USA Today, specifically mentioning Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. ”Those are the ones we have talked to the most and who seem to be the possible leaders,” Koch said.
At the time, Charles’s comments were widely interpreted as cleaning up an earlier mess made by brother David, when he told New York GOP donors that the Kochs would only get involved “when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination.” That was taken as a sign they backed the man who turned Wisconsin into an arm of Koch Industries.
When Charles Koch came out days later and said the brothers would in fact back “several” GOP candidates, I took it as evidence that they recognized that Walker had stumbled early and often in his first forays into national politics, and he shouldn’t be their only bet.
Now I think it’s a sign of many things, none of them good for the GOP.
First, even though the Democrats’ 2014 effort to raise awareness of the Kochs’ control of the GOP was widely perceived as a failure, it succeeded in making the Kochs edgy about their public image. They don’t want anybody IDed as the Kochs’ man.
It’s also a signal they don’t see anyone who’s a slam-dunk winner: Walker and Jeb Bush have matched each other for missteps all year, and the Kochs can’t afford to back a loser.
But it’s also a sign that for all their influence with the GOP field, the Kochs can’t force a change in the top candidates’ political platform. Despite their claims that they’re still libertarian on abortion rights and marriage equality, and despite evidence they support comprehensive immigration reform, the brothers don’t even pretend to be searching for a candidate who’s moderate on any of those things.
Even the great and powerful Kochs can’t force GOP moderation on those issues — and they don’t really care that much, because their political commitments are all about their bottom line, anyway.
While the Kochs look for a way to prop up “the possible leaders” of the GOP field, Fox will try to stage-manage the clown show. Fox’s decision to use national polls, rather than polling in key primary-state races, has the benefit of wider inclusion. Biographic and demographic curiosities like neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, two “non-politicians” who don’t have a prayer of running serious, nationwide campaigns, will likely make the cut.
Thus the Fox debate stage will likely feature two Latinos (Cruz and Rubio), plus an African American and a woman, vying to lead a party in which white men make up the majority of voters.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported Friday that the Kochs’ efforts were eclipsing Karl Rove and his American Crossroads empire, which failed spectacularly in the 2012 cycle. Rove is suffering for his ties to the last, spectacularly unsuccessful GOP president, George W. Bush – but he doesn’t particularly get along with Bush’s brother. Not to worry: Crossroads seems to be carving out a role in attacking Hillary Clinton.
But Rove, too, was supposed to be seeking the great GOP moderate after Tea Party extremists hijacked his party and made it unelectable in presidential races. Neither Rove nor the Kochs seem able to steer the field away from demographically destructive policies on gay rights or immigration. Money can’t buy moderation on social issues, at least not yet, so the GOP’s best hopes involve trashing the Democratic nominee in 2016.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 26, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 