“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
“And They Can’t Seem To Shake It”: The GOP’s Conception Of The Republican Primary Is Laughably Wrong
Ever since Donald Trump vaulted to the top of Republican presidential primary polls, GOP strategists have clung to the view that he could be defeated the same way so many other insurgent candidates have: First, party actors would settle on a single candidate to represent the party’s institutional wing; then, slowly, that candidate would consolidate institutional and stakeholder support, until, by late January or some time in February, he would enjoy plurality support, if not majority support, of primary voters and eventually clinch the nomination.
This is how Mitt Romney fended off late favorites like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in 2012, and how, in slightly more chaotic fashion, John McCain climbed out of purgatory to win in 2008.
Two things changed in the 2016 cycle. First, Trump established dominance like no other insurgent candidate ever has. Though dark horse after dark horse charged into the race, none of them were able to truly split the reactionary vote with him. Second, no Romney or McCain-like figure ever emerged. Jeb Bush, who was tailored for that role, faltered almost immediately, paralyzing the establishment and fracturing its support among several (currently four) candidates with whom party leaders would be satisfied.
Nevertheless, the smartest minds in the GOP have maintained their faith in the old model. So committed to it are they that they’ve devoted a great deal of effort in recent days to damaging the first plausible competitor to Trump—Ted Cruz—because Cruz, equally detested and unelectable, also spoils their strategic analysis.
Nearly all available public evidence suggests this conception of the race isn’t just wrong, but laughably simplistic and far from representative of GOP voters’ preferences. The tragic thing for Republican leaders is that as poor as this strategic analysis seems to be, the other approaches available to them are just as bad or worse.
The fatal conceit of establishment Republicans’ strategy is its belief in a zero-sum relationship between the candidates that would satisfy them and the amount of support those candidates have within the GOP electorate. That a fixed segment of voters will behave in a way that perfectly mirrors the establishment’s political strategy. That if Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich enjoy a combined 25 percent support of Republican voters, then winnowing that “lane” down to one will yield a single candidate with 25 percent support.
If this were true, you’d expect any one of those candidates’ misfortunes to redound to the benefit of one or more of the others. Instead, poll after poll suggests that as other candidates falter, it redounds more to Trump and/or Cruz’s benefit than to anyone in the not-quite-hermetically sealed establishment cocoon.
Perhaps there are no “lanes” at all, or perhaps the lanes function very literally in that changing from one to another is easy and appealing when the one you’re in is backed up. The widely expected consolidation we were all promised is playing out more like a defection to leading, insurgent candidates. It may just be the case that voters whose first choice is a brash executive like Chris Christie, or a Cuban-descended avatar of the Tea Party like Marco Rubio, might see Trump or Cruz as a more natural second choice than another candidate with establishment backing.
Under the circumstances, you might have expected mainline Republican operatives to remain neutral in the Trump-Cruz feud, reflecting a last-best hope that the two would damage each other, or at least prevent one another from running away with the race.
Instead, terrified by the possibility that their theory of consolidation would work on behalf of a candidate (Cruz) whom they despise, many of these operatives have forged alliances of convenience with Trump, in order to arrest Cruz’s popularity before Monday’s Iowa caucuses. The problem is that this, too, is redounding to Trump’s benefit, rather than to the benefit of anyone else running.
If Cruz were to win in Iowa, where he was leading until this week, he would at least buy the establishment time to regroup after New Hampshire, where Trump leads mightily. Instead, the party’s faith in its own power to defeat Trump, mano-a-mano-a-mano-a-mano-a-mano, has increased the chances that he will sweep the first three contests and never look back.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor at The New Republic, January 26, 2016
“The Guillotine Finds A Modern-Day U.S. Proponent”: Maine’s Idiotic Gov Paul ‘Rage’ LePage Wants To Roll Back The Clock
Capital punishment has evolved over time, but the progression tends to move in one direction. As we discussed last year, those who believe that the government should have the authority to kill its own citizens have adapted over time to changing norms and technologies. When one method of execution is deemed gruesome, cruel, or of dubious efficacy, policymakers move towards another.
The standards have shifted more than once: from stoning to guillotines, nooses to firing squads, electric chairs to lethal injections. In each instance, the idea has been to make the killing process cleaner and more sanitary.
Occasionally, however, we’re confronted with an official who likes the idea of rolling back the clock. Politico reports today that Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) endorses use of the guillotine.
“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people who kill Mainers,” LePage said…. He said he was “appalled” at critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, who are angry over his comments, saying they are protecting drug traffickers.
“What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he said, interrupting the hosts. “We could have public executions and we could even have which hole it falls in.”
It’s not altogether clear whether the governor was serious. With Paul LePage, it’s often hard to tell.
But the broader point about contemporary conservatives looking backwards for methods of executions is nevertheless true.
When Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) last year raised the prospect of bringing back the electric chair when chemicals for lethal injections are unavailable, Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and a national expert on capital punishment, said something interesting: “[T]hey’re going backwards. They’re going back to using a method of execution that was basically rejected because it was so problematic. That’s never happened before.”
As it turns out, some others want to go backwards, too.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 26, 2016
“It Ain’t Gonna Happen”: No, There Won’t Be A Major Third-Party Candidacy In 2016 — From Bloomberg Or Anyone Else
Let’s face it: we in the media are suckers for any kind of political story that offers something unpredictable. And like clockwork, every four years someone suggests that there might be a viable third-party presidential candidacy in the offing, spurring legions of reporters and commentators to lick their lips in anticipation. At the moment the attention is focused on former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, but there is also discussion of whether conservatives might rally around a third-party candidate if Donald Trump, no true conservative he, becomes the GOP nominee.
I have some bad news: It ain’t gonna happen.
Not only is Bloomberg not going to run, but if Trump wins the Republican nomination, every last prominent Republican will line up behind him like good soldiers.
Let’s start with Bloomberg. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that he is thinking about running because he’s distressed at the thought of a race between the vulgarian Donald Trump and the socialistic Bernie Sanders. They made it sound like he’s really on his way to a bid:
Mr. Bloomberg, 73, has already taken concrete steps toward a possible campaign, and has indicated to friends and allies that he would be willing to spend at least $1 billion of his fortune on it, according to people briefed on his deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his plans. He has set a deadline for making a final decision in early March, the latest point at which advisers believe Mr. Bloomberg could enter the race and still qualify to appear as an independent candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.
He has retained a consultant to help him explore getting his name on those ballots, and his aides have done a detailed study of past third-party bids. Mr. Bloomberg commissioned a poll in December to see how he might fare against Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, and he intends to conduct another round of polling after the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9 to gauge whether there is indeed an opening for him, according to two people familiar with his intentions.
You might read that and say, Holy cow, he’s doing it! But the thing about having $36.5 billion is that you can explore lots of things without being serious about them. Bloomberg has political consultants who work for him, and he can open the paper one morning, decide he’s troubled by today’s news, then pick up the phone and say to one of those consultants, “Write me up a report on what it would take for me to run for president.” Then they go off and do a poll, conduct a little research on ballot access, and put together a “plan” in a couple of weeks. Maybe it costs $100,000 all told to satisfy the boss’s curiosity, but that’s nothing to Bloomberg.
And he’s done it before. Here’s an almost identical article in the New York Times from eight years ago, about how he was laying the groundwork for a third-party run. Practically the only thing that’s different is the date.
You might say, “Hey, nobody thought Trump was going to run, either!” Which is true. But Trump found an opening in one of the two parties, and Bloomberg hasn’t suggested running as a Democrat. While I’m sure Bloomberg thinks he’d be an excellent president, he’s also smart enough to know that unlike in New York, where he could swamp the field with money and circumvent the Democratic Party’s dominance in the city, running a national third-party campaign is a different matter altogether.
It’s no accident that there hasn’t been a successful third-party presidential candidacy in modern American history. The closest anyone came was Teddy Roosevelt’s run in 1912, when he got 27 percent of the vote. In 1992, Ross Perot managed 19 percent of the vote — and zero votes in the Electoral College.
Perot offers us a hint as to why the talk from some Republicans about a third-party run is just that, talk. It has come most notably from Bill Kristol, who has been toying with the idea in public for a couple of months now, on the theory that if Donald Trump is the nominee, true conservatives would simply have to find an ideologically true standard-bearer to promote. Given the horror many conservatives are expressing at the prospect of a Trump nomination, you might be tempted to think they’d sign on to any conservative who decided to run.
But don’t believe it for a second. Are those conservatives heartfelt in their anguish about Trump being the GOP nominee? Absolutely. It’s not just that he’d probably lose, it’s that he obviously has no commitment to their ideals; he’s just saying whatever his current audience wants to hear, and once that audience changes (as in a general election), he’ll say completely different things. And who knows how he’d actually govern.
And yet, if he is the nominee, Republicans will be faced with a choice. They could launch a third-party bid, but that would almost certainly guarantee that the Democratic nominee would win. Republicans long ago convinced themselves that Perot delivered the 1992 election to Bill Clinton (even though the evidence makes clear that Perot took votes equally from Bush and Clinton, who won easily and would have done so with or without Perot in the race), so they’d be extremely skittish about repeating that outcome.
Far more importantly, if they have to choose between supporting their party’s nominee and mounting an almost certainly doomed third-party run, their feelings about Donald Trump will be far less critical than their feelings about the Democratic nominee, who will probably be Hillary Clinton — for whom they’ve nurtured a passionate loathing for two and a half decades now. We live in an era of “negative partisanship,” in which people’s hatred for the other party has become more central to their political identity than their love for their own party. Faced with the imminent possibility of Clinton sitting in the Oval Office, virtually every Republican will race to get behind Trump. Those now writing articles about what a nightmare a Trump nomination would be will be writing articles touting his virtues.
They won’t be dissembling — rather, they’ll just be trying to make the best of a bad situation. Once the point of reference is not a more preferable Republican but Hillary Clinton, Trump will look to them like a hero in the making. So as fun as a three-way presidential race in the fall might be, we in the media won’t be so fortunate. But don’t worry — it’s still going to be an interesting election.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, January 25, 2016
“Is Bloomberg Betting Hillary Gets Indicted?”: Conservatives, Well, They At Least Hope It’s Going To Happen
The conventional wisdom says that Mike Bloomberg, whose presidential dreams were revealed Saturday by The New York Times, will in all likelihood not run against Hillary Clinton. The conventional wisdom is probably right in this case. It’s hard to imagine that against Clinton, Bloomberg would be anything but a Naderesque spoiler, which he would know and not want to be; against Bernie Sanders on one side and “Crump” (either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump) on the other, however, I think Bloomberg becomes a candidate—and a real player.
Unfortunately for Bloomberg, the chances of Sanders winning the Democratic nomination are quite slim, as he surely knows. So the rubber-hitting-road question is: Is there any chance he’d run against Clinton? I mean, if nothing else, this is presumably his last shot at glory, as he’s a few weeks shy of 74 (what’s with all these septuagenarians, anyway?).
There was a hint in that Times article that suggested he might consider doing that—that at a dinner party at the home of a prominent Clinton backer last fall, Bloomberg offered a “piquant assessment” (those Times euphemisms!) of Clinton’s weaknesses, built around “questions about her honesty” and the email mess.
I can back this up. On Saturday, I spoke with a longtime New Yorker I know who heard Bloomberg inveigh similarly last year at another such event, as Bloomberg delivered a blistering critique of the email controversy and even suggested—well, piquantly!—that Clinton deserved to be in very serious legal trouble. This person was “shocked by how little he seemed to think of her.”
A source in Bloomberg world says this is nonsense; this person claims to have heard the ex-mayor limn Clinton in adulatory tones numerous times, saying, in this person’s words, that she was practically alone among the candidates in being able “to take care of business”—simply to run the government and country responsibly and prudently. From the technocratic Bloomberg, praise doesn’t come higher.
Both these things can be true, of course. Let’s assume that Bloomberg was aghast at the email situation last year, but that it’s faded, and he’s now decided he’d be fine with a Clinton presidency even as he explores a bid of his own. Okay. But even this brings us to another thought—that maybe Bloomberg thinks there’s some chance Clinton might be indicted sometime soon.
If you were shocked to read that sentence, you’re clearly not reading enough conservative web sites. Let me say up front here that while I have no idea of the status of the ongoing FBI investigation into the email business, I would be really surprised to see this happen. Righties have been predicting her imminent indictment ever since Bill Safire’s ignominious 1996 column, but as far as is known publicly, Clinton is not under investigation. It was last summer when the FBI started looking into the matter, and officials announced then that Clinton wasn’t a target.
But that was months ago, so who knows, really? This Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general who keeps retroactively stamping “classified” on emails Clinton read or wrote when she was secretary, and who originally notified the executive branch last July that classified information might exist on Clinton’s server, sure seems to be an aggressive sort.
I think it’s a farfetched scenario myself. An ex-prosecutor friend tells me that a crime would require criminal intent. Then there’s the question of the timing. Somebody’s going to bring serious charges against one of the two major parties’ leading presidential hopeful in an election year? Conservatives whose carotid veins are popping after reading that sentence would do well to remember a time when they excoriated a prosecutor who brought suspiciously timed indictments of Republicans. Google Lawrence Walsh.
But mostly it seems farfetched to me because I just consider it pretty unlikely that any secretary of state, any American in that position, would knowingly compromise U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts.
If you talk to plugged-in liberals, they say forget it, ridiculous. If you talk to plugged-in conservatives, they, well, they at least hope it’s going to happen, think it clearly ought to happen, and maybe this week, i.e., before Democrats start casting votes. If nothing else, a non-indictment gives them all a chance to caterwaul for another few months (or years) about how the Clinton’s keep getting away with things and go raise money off that.
And what if these conservatives happen to be right? Well, when I’ve discussed this with liberals, most people think Joe Biden is the automatic Plan B. John Kerry gets a few mentions, on the grounds that he tried it once before, but that strikes me as a minus, not a plus. In any case, Democrats I’ve discussed this with all assume they rally behind a new establishment-type candidate rather than throwing in their eggs with Bernie. Or maybe they could rally to a Bloomberg bid, since many, many Democrats represent districts where a Sanders endorsement could hurt them. And don’t forget, the above scenario seems to assume that Clinton under such circumstances would just stop in her tracks. Not sure we can assume that.
I hope, and believe, all this will remain hypothetical. I just bet it’s rattling around in Bloomberg’s cage somewhere.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 25, 2016
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