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“Who’s The Ugly Loser Now?”: Trump’s Moment Of Magnanimity Did Not Last Very Long

For a brief moment on Monday night, as he took the stage in Iowa to acknowledge that he came in second in the state caucuses, Donald Trump was surprisingly gracious. He was clearly unhappy with the results but seemed to accept them with equanimity and didn’t blame anyone else for his failure or call into question the legitimacy of the democratic process.

That moment of magnanimity did not last very long. By Tuesday morning, he started sending off a series of bitter, petulant tweets that made clear that he could not accept his loss and was looking for a scapegoat to kill. The crescendo of whining reached a peak Wednesday morning when he argued that winning candidate Ted Cruz had stolen the victory. In a series of tweets, he came across as an embittered loser, which endangers the brand he has worked so hard to create.

It could be argued that Trump’s sour grapes gambit is a smart move to recapture the media spotlight, and to rally his dispirited supporters by showing that he has a fighting heart—that he remains a pugilist who is willing to do whatever it takes to win. Accusations that the winner is a cheater are not unknown in the world of pro wrestling, a shaping force in Trump’s aggressive persona. And it could be that some of Trump’s fan base will take his lead and double-down.

Trump might also be muddying the waters of the Iowa election to shore up his support in New Hampshire, where he has a strong lead. Accusations that Cruz cheated are a way to staunch any flow of voters deserting Trump for Cruz and Rubio. Moreover, by bringing Carson into the fold as a fellow aggrieved victim, Trump gives another set of voters who might move to Cruz a reason to hate him.

Trump benefits from the fact that his complaint against Cruz has an element of truth to it, even though overstated with Trumpian hyperbole. The Cruz campaign did send out a mailer made to look like a government document in order to coerce voters, which was unethical and fraudulent. His campaign staff also told caucusgoers that Carson was dropping out of the race. It’s doubtful whether these tactics explains the margin of victory, given Cruz’s overwhelming superiority in ground game (a political concept that Trump himself admits he’s only recently heard about).

But Trump’s Twitter whine is more likely to hurt him. It prevents him from moving on from Iowa and keeps his loss in the news. Moreover, being a sore loser hurts one of Trump’s main arguments: that he’s tough, and a winner. Trump is supposed to be a shrewd guy who knows how to make his way among the killers of the world. But now he’s admitted that he was snookered (if not schlonged) by a weasel like Ted Cruz.

There is a way for tough guys to lose and make a comeback, which is by recasting themselves as heroic underdogs who are fighting against the odds, like Rocky Balboa. On the one hand, it should be easy for Trump to present himself as an underdog: As he rightly points out, he’s a political rookie and doesn’t have the large outside funding available to the other top-tier candidates. So it is remarkable he came in second, beating out experienced pols like Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. And considering that Trump had no real ground game, the fact that he was only 4 percent behind Cruz is remarkable. So the post-Iowa pitch Trump could make is clear: I’m a rookie who came close to winning in Iowa, I learn from my mistakes, and I’m going to win in New Hampshire.

But to cast himself as an underdog goes against every grain of Trump’s persona. Last month, Vox’s David Robert argued Trump’s pose as a winner is brittle, and doesn’t allow him to handle defeat well:

He can’t modulate, can’t do humility, can’t abide the thought of anyone above him. All his claims, all his stories, all his insults are yuge, the best you’ll find anywhere.

The same belligerence that looked like strength when Trump was on top will look defensive and bitter when he’s not. And the more doubtful or skeptical voters and the media become, the more Trump will escalate, the more his chest will puff. He doesn’t know any other strategy. He’ll enter a negative spiral as self-reinforcing as his rise has been.

At the time, I was skeptical of this analysis, thinking that Trump could remake himself as a defeated but spirited boxer. But given Trump’s Twitter meltdown this week, Roberts’s analysis holds up well. Trapped in his mask as a winner, Trump can’t adopt the best guise to make a comeback.

 

By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, February 3, 2016

February 5, 2016 Posted by | Iowa Caucuses, Ted Cruz | , , , , | 1 Comment

“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

January 28, 2016 Posted by | Ben Carson, GOP Presidential Candidates, Voters | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Health Reform Realities”: A Simple, Straightforward Single-Payer System Just Isn’t Going To Happen

Health reform is the signature achievement of the Obama presidency. It was the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare was established in the 1960s. It more or less achieves a goal — access to health insurance for all Americans — that progressives have been trying to reach for three generations. And it is already producing dramatic results, with the percentage of uninsured Americans falling to record lows.

Obamacare is, however, what engineers would call a kludge: a somewhat awkward, clumsy device with lots of moving parts. This makes it more expensive than it should be, and will probably always cause a significant number of people to fall through the cracks.

The question for progressives — a question that is now central to the Democratic primary — is whether these failings mean that they should re-litigate their own biggest political success in almost half a century, and try for something better.

My answer, as you might guess, is that they shouldn’t, that they should seek incremental change on health care (Bring back the public option!) and focus their main efforts on other issues — that is, that Bernie Sanders is wrong about this and Hillary Clinton is right. But the main point is that we should think clearly about why health reform looks the way it does.

If we could start from scratch, many, perhaps most, health economists would recommend single-payer, a Medicare-type program covering everyone. But single-payer wasn’t a politically feasible goal in America, for three big reasons that aren’t going away.

First, like it or not, incumbent players have a lot of power. Private insurers played a major part in killing health reform in the early 1990s, so this time around reformers went for a system that preserved their role and gave them plenty of new business.

Second, single-payer would require a lot of additional tax revenue — and we would be talking about taxes on the middle class, not just the wealthy. It’s true that higher taxes would be offset by a sharp reduction or even elimination of private insurance premiums, but it would be difficult to make that case to the broad public, especially given the chorus of misinformation you know would dominate the airwaves.

Finally, and I suspect most important, switching to single-payer would impose a lot of disruption on tens of millions of families who currently have good coverage through their employers. You might say that they would end up just as well off, and it might well be true for most people — although not those with especially good policies. But getting voters to believe that would be a very steep climb.

What this means, as the health policy expert Harold Pollack points out, is that a simple, straightforward single-payer system just isn’t going to happen. Even if you imagine a political earthquake that eliminated the power of the insurance industry and objections to higher taxes, you’d still have to protect the interests of workers with better-than-average coverage, so that in practice single-payer, American style, would be almost as kludgy as Obamacare.

Which brings me to the Affordable Care Act, which was designed to bypass these obstacles. It was careful to preserve and even enlarge the role of private insurers. Its measures to cover the uninsured rely on a combination of regulation and subsidies, rather than simply on an expansion of government programs, so that the on-budget cost is limited — and can, in fact, be covered without raising middle-class taxes. Perhaps most crucially, it leaves employer-based insurance intact, so that the great majority of Americans have experienced no disruption, in fact no change in their health-care experience.

Even so, achieving this reform was a close-run thing: Democrats barely got it through during the brief period when they controlled Congress. Is there any realistic prospect that a drastic overhaul could be enacted any time soon — say, in the next eight years? No.

You might say that it’s still worth trying. But politics, like life, involves trade-offs.

There are many items on the progressive agenda, ranging from an effective climate change policy, to making college affordable for all, to restoring some of the lost bargaining power of workers. Making progress on any of these items is going to be a hard slog, even if Democrats hold the White House and, less likely, retake the Senate. Indeed, room for maneuver will be limited even if a post-Trump Republican Party moves away from the scorched-earth opposition it offered President Obama.

So progressives must set some priorities. And it’s really hard to see, given this picture, why it makes any sense to spend political capital on a quixotic attempt at a do-over, not of a political failure, but of health reform — their biggest victory in many years.

 

By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 18, 2016

January 21, 2016 Posted by | Bernie Sanders, Health Reform, Hillary Clinton, Single Payer | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“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

January 19, 2016 Posted by | Bernie Sanders, Democratic Presidential Primaries, Hillary Clinton | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“An Unhealthy Dose Of Politics”: Gov Matt Bevin Is Letting His Dislike For The President Blind Him To The Success Of Kynect

The New York Times reports that Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin has informed the Obama administration that he intends to shut down his state’s health insurance exchange. The move will mean that Kentuckians will have to seek health insurance from the federal exchange. The newly-elected Republican governor may also make changes to the state’s Medicaid expansion program. Both moves would fulfill promises that Bevin made on the campaign trail last year.

Health insurance exchanges were established by the Affordable Care Act to serve as a marketplace for individuals who are not covered by the employer-based market. While the law envisioned that these exchanges would be run entirely by the states, in practice there are only 13 state-based exchanges, including the one in Washington, D.C. The rest of the states rely, either in part or entirely, on the federal exchange, Healthcare.gov.

Of the states that chose to run their own exchanges, Kentucky was doing well. The state’s exchange, known as Kynect, has in fact been lauded as one of Obamacare’s best success stories. The Washington Post reports that since it launched, Kynect has cut Kentucky’s uninsured rate in half. While some other states have struggled in their efforts to establish their own state-based exchange, Emily Beauregard, executive director of Kentucky Voices for Health, told the New York Times that “Kynect is working perfectly, and it’s been good for Kentucky.”

If the exchange had not been successful in reducing the state’s uninsured, Bevin’s plan would be justified. However, given Kynect’s effectiveness, Bevin’s plan to dismantle it makes little sense. His decision is driven purely by political motives and not with the welfare of his constituents in mind. Although the Obama administration has promised a “seamless” transition to Healthcare.gov for those who receive coverage through Kynect, there are still bound to be disruptions in coverage. For some, that disruption in coverage could be devastating.

Taking Kynect apart will also cost the state money. According to the Times, the previous governor’s administration estimated it will cost “at least $23 million” to shut it down. There’s also the question of unused grant money, approximately $57 million, which Kentucky might have to repay to the federal government. In contrast, leaving the exchange in place would provide consistency and predictability for its customers and allow the state to continue building on Kynect’s success, perhaps even lowering the state’s uninsured numbers further.

Unfortunately, Bevin is letting his dislike for the president blind him to the success of Kynect and its benefit to his constituents. Kynect has worked well for Kentucky, and the new governor should keep it in place.

 

By: Cary Gibson, Thomas Jefferson Street Blig, U. S. News and World Report, January 15, 2016

January 16, 2016 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, KyNect, Matt Bevin | , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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