“Iowa Intrigue”: Huckabee And Santorum Backers Reportedly Plotting To Help Rubio Against Cruz
The late stages of the invisible primary would not be complete without reports of intrigue and skullduggery in Iowa, with campaigns forming tactical alliances against common enemies. We have one today from National Review‘s Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson, who report that supporters of the last two caucus winners, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, are so bitter at being eclipsed by Ted Cruz that they are conspiring to block the Texan and instead elevate Marco Rubio. There’s only one problem with that scenario: Under Republican caucus procedures, there’s no way the disgruntled social conservatives can achieve their alleged goal without damaging their own candidates, who will probably drop out if they don’t do surprisingly well in Iowa.
The reason Democrats are usually featured in these Iowa intrigue stories is that their caucus procedures encourage tactical alliances via minimum thresholds for “viability” (i.e., the opportunity to elect state convention delegates, which is the only measurement of success), meaning that support can be loaned to favored candidates and denied to disfavored candidates on a precinct-by-precinct basis. Republicans, by contrast, have a simple candidate preference vote at their caucuses, so there’s no way for would-be tacticians to loan or borrow support without hurting their own candidate’s statewide tally.
That’s what makes the NR report suspect. Are Huck and Santorum zealots really so angry at Cruz that they’d screw over Huck and Santorum to help Rubio? That’s not at all clear. Yes, the campaigns of the two former caucus winners are going after Cruz hammer and tongs, trying to exploit Mike Allen’s pseudo-scoop about Cruz telling an audience in sinful New York that fighting same-sex marriage would not be a “top-three priority” (long story short: Cruz enclosed the issue in his top priority, defending the Constitution as he misunderstands it). But that’s because the Texan is obviously the primary obstacle to their survival in Iowa. Helping Rubio try to beat him by giving away any of their own meager support would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise.
The intrigue-within-the-intrigue is burnished by the fact that the only people on the record validating the part of the cabal involving surreptitious support for Rubio are (1) a 2012 Santorum supporter who’s now neutral, and (2) Craig Robinson, proprietor of influential web page the Iowa Republican, who’s not really a Christian right figure but who does for some reason seem to hate Ted Cruz. There is a quote from a Santorum campaign official saying that Rubio’s immigration record is “more honest” than Cruz’s, but that’s in the context of condemning both.
The bottom line is that what Alberta and Johnson are reporting appears to be either a Rubio campaign plant, or scuttlebutt from scattered folk in the Huckabee and Santorum camps who actually want their candidates to drop out sooner rather than later and are (disloyally) already making their plans for the future. In Iowa, the intrigue is often deeper than it first appears.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 30, 2015
“How Trump Beats Cruz”: Define Cruz As Just Another Politician Controlled By Special Interests
Sen Ted Cruz is poised for launch. He has the money, the ground game, and Iowa in his pocket. Conservatives love him, and trust him; the party establishment will fall in line if the choice is between him and Donald Trump. Both Cruz and Trump are each (a bit self-servingly, of course) predicting that’s the choice Republican voters will have to make down the stretch. If it plays out that way, the pressure will be on Trump to halt Cruz’s momentum out of Iowa before the contests in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and the rest of the Southern swing in early March.
Is there any message Trump could use to stop Cruz? There’s a pretty strong one, in fact. It’s one that undercuts Cruz’s central appeal as an “outsider” while reinforcing Trump’s central appeal as a right-wing populist. It portrays Cruz as another double-dealing politician and Trump as the guy who “tells it like it is,” so to speak, and it pits Cruz as a representative of the elite, coastal Republican class against which Trump’s campaign has sparked a working-class rebellion.
Trump can define Cruz as a Wall Street lackey, bought and paid-for by special interests, who will turn his back on the priorities of their overlapping base as soon as he’s in the Oval Office.
Cruz’s money doesn’t come from nowhere. According to a Yahoo Finance analysis in mid-November, 18.6 percent of the money backing Cruz—as in, campaign and super PAC contributions—comes from the financial industry. That was the fourth highest percentage of all presidential candidates, behind Gov. Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Sen. Lindsey Graham; in terms of hard dollars ($12.1 million), it was second only to Bush ($35.3 million.) Bush makes no bones about representing the will of the GOP donor class. Cruz does.
Cruz has raised some $38.6 million dollars in outside money, mostly through a set of four super PACs to which New York hedge fund manager Robert Mercer serves as ringleader. Major law firms, investments banks, and energy groups dominate his industry breakdown of his largesse. It is also worth acknowledging that Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is on leave from her job as a Goldman Sachs executive during her husband’s presidential campaign.
How has Cruz hoovered up all of this money, despite frequently bashing “billionaire Republican donors” who “look down on [Republican] voters as a bunch of ignorant hicks and rubes”? It may just be that Cruz has a different tone when addressing donors than he does with the God-fearing Heartland patriots of rhetorical lore. That would make him like most other representatives of the “political class,” but being separate and apart from those vipers is critical to Cruz’s image.
Consider the issue of gay marriage. Big Republican donors in New York love gay marriage. Cruz himself has pointed this out, most vividly in a Senate floor speech he delivered in September:
I can tell you when you sit down and talk with a New York billionaire Republican donor—and I have talked with quite a few New York billionaire Republican donors, California Republican donors, their questions start out as follows. First of all, you’ve got to come out for gay marriage, you need to be pro-choice, and you need to support amnesty. That’s where the Republican donors are. You wonder why Republicans won’t fight on any of these issues? Because the people writing the checks agree with the Democrats.
Thanks to some audio that Politico scooped up, we now have direct evidence of what Cruz says to “New York billionaire Republican donors”—or at least donors well-heeled enough pay four or five figures to attend a luncheon—regarding same-sex marriage. One question posed to Cruz at a December fundraiser, hosted by the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, went as follows: “So would you say it’s like a top-three priority for you—fighting gay marriage?”
“No,” Cruz said. “I would say defending the Constitution is a top priority. And that cuts across the whole spectrum—whether it’s defending [the] First Amendment, defending religious liberty.
“I also think the 10th Amendment of the Constitution cuts across a whole lot of issues and can bring people together,” he continued. “People of New York may well resolve the marriage question differently than the people of Florida or Texas or Ohio. … That’s why we have 50 states—to allow a diversity of views.” The donor who asked the question, apparently content to learn that stripping same-sex couples of their newfound constitutional right might be a top-five or top-10 concern but certainly not a top-three concern, told Cruz, “Thanks. Good luck.”
This is not a flip-flop. Cruz’s position on same-sex marriage throughout the campaign has been a constitutional amendment “to prevent the federal government or the courts from attacking or striking down state marriage laws,” an amendment he introduced in Congress last year. In other words: He would leave it to state legislatures, as he explained in his answer at the fundraiser.
But good God, the shift in tone! Cruz made a show of offering the most vociferous response to the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage this summer. In a piece for National Review, Cruz wrote that the decision “undermines not just the definition of marriage, but the very foundations of our representative form of government.” On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Cruz declared that the same-sex marriage decision, along with the previous day’s Affordable Care Act decision, marked “some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history.” He reiterated his call for a constitutional amendment, and went further by calling for judicial retention elections as a check on the “lawlessness of the court.”
That was cleverly designed to appeal to evangelical voters of Iowa who both disapprove of same-sex marriage and, a few years ago, led a successful campaign to vote out the state Supreme Court justices who had legalized same-sex marriage there. Cruz now has Iowa evangelicals wrapped around his finger. Even though he didn’t confess to a changed position in the fundraiser tape, do you think those voters will appreciate hearing about how Cruz told wealthy New York socially liberal donors that reversing the right to same-sex marriage isn’t one of his top priorities? Cruz has worked doggedly to win the trust of evangelicals, so this alone won’t do him in. But Mike Huckabee, at least, considers these fighting words, and don’t be surprised to hear Rick Santorum or another lagging Iowa candidate jump into the fray next.
There’s also the case of Cruz’s shifting positions on legal immigration. For a while, Cruz was an ardent supporter of markedly increasing the number of H-1B visas for skilled workers, a policy which wealthy donors applaud. That, however, was before Trump dragged the debate into overtly nativist territory. Cruz’s immigration plan now calls for a six-month suspension of the H-1B program and to “halt any increases in legal immigration so long as American unemployment remains unacceptably high.”
Is this what his team is saying behind closed doors, though? In a meeting with Hispanic Republican leaders last week, Cruz campaign chairman Chad Sweet “repeatedly told the group Cruz wants to be the champion of legal immigration,” according to Republican immigration advocate Alfonso Aguilar, who was in the room. According to Aguilar, Sweet “said there’s no better friend than Ted Cruz to legal immigration.” This is the line that Cruz frequently used to describe his legal immigration platform, before he changed his position. Is he still using it in private, when the audience is right?
One of Trump’s most appealing traits to voters is that he cannot be bought, doesn’t need to raise money, and doesn’t need to curry favor in private with select interest groups. If he needed to court big-dollar donors, you wouldn’t hear him railing on so unreservedly against immigration or free trade or cuts to federal entitlement programs. As David Frum writes in a lengthy Atlantic piece this month, Trump has blown wide open the long-simmering feud between GOP elites, who typically control the party’s presidential nominating process, and GOP working-class voters, who have always fallen in line.
In Cruz, Trump has a foil who fits neatly into his narrative of the enemy career politician subservient to powerful interests. Cruz has done a good job keeping a lid on the lucrative big-dollar fundraising connections that might complicate his narrative as the consummate “outsider.” Expect Trump, a human bullhorn, to change that.
By: Jim Newell, Slate, December 23, 2015
“A Walking, Talking Outrage”: Why Even People Who Agree With Him Hate Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz is now ahead of Donald Trump in a GOP presidential poll of Iowa, where the Texas senator is campaigning hard. That leap-frogging is the likely reason that Trump insanely, desperately, and dangerously called Monday for a “complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the U.S.
But let’s move beyond the proto-fascist in the GOP ranks and talk about Ted Cruz. Like Mike Huckabee before him, Cruz has a political style that resonates with Iowa’s conservatives: emotional, low-church, slightly rebellious. Still, it is hard to predict Cruz’s path forward, because it is difficult to think of a major party candidate more hated by his own party, Donald Trump notwithstanding.
Past enfant terrible candidates are rarely hated in this way. Ron Paul was treated as a funny curio. Pat Buchanan’s revolt was partly mourned, as if he couldn’t help it. Trump’s has been greeted with consternation and some fear. But Cruz is greeted as a walking, talking outrage. He’s treated as an offense in himself. And, it should be said, he seems to relish it. “I welcome their hatred,” Franklin Roosevelt once said after being labeled a class traitor. It’s easy to imagine Cruz feeling the same way about his political enemies.
Cruz has chutzpah. At a recent Republican debate, he got applause for castigating the debate moderators for trying to divide Republicans. Republican senators on that stage must have gagged; Cruz’s whole career has been about dividing Republicans. He has spent the last several years trying to create a caucus in the House that is loyal to his school of high-risk, no-reward brinksmanship. He promises to defund ObamaCare when the Senate can do no such thing. Or argues that the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide did not really apply to the whole nation. This strategy burnishes Cruz’s reputation among the Republican base, but it creates headaches for senators and for the Republican House leadership.
The distaste for Cruz goes far beyond just his divisive political strategy, or the perception that he says nothing, true or untrue, unless it is maximally self-serving. It goes to his oleaginous, hyper-moralizing personality, even the repulsively sentimentalized way he talks about the “Children of Reagan” who are taking over the Republican Party. Frank Bruni related in a column that veterans of the 2000 George W. Bush campaign learned to loathe Cruz, and that many of them would, under truth serum, admit to preferring Trump to him. Cruz’s college roommate Craig Mazin is dragged before media to give amusingly nasty assessments of Cruz’s character. “I did not like him at all in college,” Mazin said, “…And, you know, I want to be clear, because Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics, but truthfully his personality is so awful that 99 percent of why I hate him is just his personality.”
Giving GOP leadership trouble normally doesn’t trouble me. And I’m tempted to agree with Cruz on some things, like the perfidy of the Republican donor class. But last fall, Cruz was invited to speak at an ecumenical gathering of Middle Eastern Christians who were lobbying for support from Washington to help their embattled flocks (some of which face genocidal violence.) For reasons I still can’t comprehend, Cruz decided to offer this tiny effort a political decapitation. He goaded the audience about its lack of support for the state of Israel and then accused them of being anti-Semites. And it is only more galling in that Ted Cruz knows the relevant history. And he knows that his evangelical audience in America is mostly ignorant of it. He knew how to get a rise out of both audiences, and raised his own profile doing it.
It was a moment so cynical and underhanded, I joined the unofficial anyone-but-Cruz caucus.
Still, as a pundit, I have to admit I’m intrigued by the premise of Ted Cruz. He is the embodiment of the GOP’s on-again, off-again populist rhetoric. He seems to be running his campaign on the false wisdom about 2012, that there were millions of voters who stayed home because Mitt Romney wasn’t conservative enough for them. This is a campaign that is aiming for glory or ignominy and won’t settle for anything in between.
For any conservative who has wanted to see the leadership of the Republican Party horse-whipped, Ted Cruz looks like a gnarly weapon at hand. He is the revenge they deserve.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, December 8, 2015
“Carson’s Admirable Qualities Don’t Extend To Politics”: Count Me Among Those Who Are Skeptical
To read Ben Carson’s memoir, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, is to enjoy an uplifting and inspiring tale of a man who overcame a traumatic childhood to become one of the nation’s leading neurosurgeons. That man is certainly worthy of widespread admiration.
But who is the guy taking his place on the campaign trail? Who is the man bashing Muslims, denouncing gays, and dismissing science? Who is the candidate engaging in all sorts of weird conspiracy theories? That Ben Carson deserves nothing but contempt.
Yet, the good doctor remains a leading Republican presidential candidate, either besting Donald Trump for the top spot, according to several polls, or coming in a close second. While he and Trump have managed to befuddle most professional prognosticators with their dominance of the Republican field, a new survey shows Carson has pulled off another equally surprising feat: He’s well-liked by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Indeed, according to Gallup, Carson is among the most popular of the presidential candidates of either party. Among all voters, regardless of partisan affiliation, he’s viewed favorably by 42 percent. Among Republicans, 67 percent have a favorable view, while a mere 8 percent dislike him.
That high esteem is certainly understandable for Dr. Carson, the surgeon, who embodies the quintessential American story of the self-made man. Through grit, hard work, and a deep-seated religious faith, he overcame poverty and teenage recklessness to graduate from Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School.
After a fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the nation’s most prestigious medical facilities, he joined the faculty there, rising to become director of pediatric neurosurgery. His memoir was turned into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr., and the millions of viewers who’ve seen it probably count among his many admirers.
Besides that, if you’ve watched any of the GOP presidential debates, Carson’s low-key demeanor compares favorably to the boisterous braggadocio of The Donald, whose every sentence struggles under the weight of first-person pronouns and whose every pronouncement is a heroic tale of his own achievements and talents. If you’re watching the neurosurgeon next to the reality TV star and real estate mogul, you certainly come away with a more favorable impression of the former.
Still, candidate Carson holds some distressing views. He has declared that he doesn’t think it would be appropriate for a Muslim to hold the presidency of the United States — a bias that directly contradicts the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly states that there shall be no religious test for political office. He opposes same-sex marriage and has dismissed homosexuality as “a choice.” (For the record, he also disputes broad areas of scientific consensus, including evolution, global warming and archeologists’ views of Egypt’s pyramids.)
The good doctor is also given to outrageous rhetoric, comparing Obamacare to slavery, for example. In a recent interview, he claimed that limiting firearms in the United States could lead to the rise of a government like that of Nazi Germany.
Given Carson’s worldview, it’s perhaps folly to try to find, among his beliefs, those that are most outside the mainstream. But a leading candidate for that dubious distinction is Carson’s fixation on a John Birch-type figure named W. Cleon Skousen, who has been described by the conservative National Review as a “nut job.” Carson frequently quotes works by the late Skousen, who wanted to repeal the minimum wage, outlaw unions, eliminate anti-discrimination laws and repeal the income tax.
Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that Carson knows next to nothing about how the government actually works. Shouldn’t a candidate for president, especially one who is so widely admired, at least be comfortable with the social and civic mores of the late 20th century — if not the 21st?
Count me among those who are skeptical that Carson’s stock will remain high throughout the primary season. By the time he’s done with his candidacy, his poll numbers won’t be the only thing in decline. It’s likely his broad appeal will have evaporated, as well.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, November 7, 2015
“Stretching Facts To Fit His Preconceptions”: Only Softballs? Transcript Shows Trump Lied About Democratic Debate
By now you may have noticed that Donald Trump exists in his very own reality — a pleasing world where the Mexicans will pay us to build a border wall, where industrial nations will capitulate instantly to his trade demands, and where global climate change is merely a myth “created by and for the Chinese.” Lunatic as The Donald’s confident assertions often may be, not all of them are as easily debunked as certain remarks he made at today’s press conference in New York to introduce his new book.
Discussing the presidential debates, Trump complained more than once about the free ride that Hillary Clinton supposedly enjoyed at the last Democratic debate, which was televised by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper. According to the real estate mogul, the questioning by Cooper and his colleagues “was very unfair because Hillary Clinton was given all softballs. They didn’t ask her one tough question! They didn’t talk about the foundation, they didn’t talk about the emails….She only got softballs, that’s all she got…Hillary had only softballs, all night long. ‘Here, Hillary, hit this one over the park.’”
That struck me as a pandering and distorted account of the debate — so I checked.
It is true that Cooper didn’t inquire about the Clinton Foundation, but the questions he did ask (reproduced below without Clinton’s answers, which can be found in the full transcript here) indicate just how far Trump is willing to stretch facts to fit his preconceptions. Not only did Cooper pose several tough questions to her, from the very beginning of the debate, but he seized every chance to pillory Hillary in framing questions he put to the other candidates. (And he did ask her — and the others — about the damned emails.)
Unlike the Republicans, she spared us the post-debate whining.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, I want to start with you. Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency. You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the “gold standard”. Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it. Will you say anything to get elected?
COOPER [following up]: Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, “take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.” Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, “being kind of moderate and center.” Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Russia, they’re challenging the U.S. in Syria. According to U.S. intelligence, they’ve lied about who they’re bombing. You spearheaded the reset with Russia. Did you underestimate the Russians, and as president, what would your response to Vladimir Putin be right now in Syria?
COOPER [to Martin O’Malley]: Secretary Clinton voted to authorize military force in Iraq, supported more troops in Afghanistan. As Secretary of State, she wanted to arm Syrian rebels and push for the bombing of Libya. Is she too quick to use military force?
COOPER [following up insistently]: Does she — does she want to use military force too rapidly?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, on the campaign trail, Governor [sic] Webb has said that he would never have used military force in Libya and that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was inevitable. Should you have seen that attack coming?
COOPER [following up]: But American citizens did lose their lives in Benghazi.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, you are going to be testifying before Congress next week about your e-mails. For the last eight months, you haven’t been able to put this issue behind you. You dismissed it; you joked about it; you called it a mistake. What does that say about your ability to handle far more challenging crises as president?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, with all due respect, it’s a little hard — I mean, isn’t it a little bit hard to call this just a partisan issue? There’s an FBI investigation, and President Obama himself just two days ago said this is a legitimate issue.
COOPER [after Bernie Sanders dismissed the email controversy]: It’s obviously very popular in this crowd, and it’s — hold on.
(APPLAUSE) I know that plays well in this room. But I got to be honest, Governor Chafee, for the record, on the campaign trail, you’ve said a different thing [challenging Clinton’s ethics]. You said this is a huge issue. Standing here in front of Secretary Clinton, are you willing to say that to her face?
COOPER: Governor O’Malley, you expressed concern on the campaign trail that the Democratic Party is, and I quote, “being defined by Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.”You heard her answer, do you still feel that way tonight?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, how would you address this [income inequality] issue? In all candor, you and your husband are part of the one percent. How can you credibly represent the views of the middle class?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Governor O’Malley says the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth between two royal families. This year has been the year of the outsider in politics, just ask Bernie Sanders. Why should Democrats embrace an insider like yourself?
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 3, 2015
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