“Oh Please!”: Huckabee Peers Up At Cruz In The Polls, Attacks Him For Lack Of Hysteria On Marriage Equality
In one of the more, er, interesting Invisible Primary diversions of the holiday season, on Wednesday Politico‘s Mike Allen tried to win the morning with a breathless report that Texas senator Ted Cruz told a private “moderate” fund-raising audience in sinful New York that rolling back marriage equality would not be a “top-three” priority. Allen found out about this shocking indiscretion via a “secret tape” sent to him by a shocked witness.
Truth is that in the same breath Cruz folded the fight against marriage equality into his “top priority,” which he describes as “defending the Constitution.” He also reminded listeners that he has long favored letting the states set marriage policies, as they generally do subject to constitutional conditions.
Not to put too fine a gloss on it, Mike Allen manufactured a “controversy” out of this nothing-burger of a quote, presumably because it could get the recently high-flying Cruz in trouble both with Christian Right activists ever alert to their issues sliding down the priority list, and with Republican voters concerned with “authenticity.” Cruz, you see, has always raised suspicions that he’s a sort of an Elmer Gantry figure, a slick Ivy Leaguer pulling the wool over the eyes of the Folks.
Personally, I think such charges have it backwards; if anyone’s getting zoomed by Ted Cruz, it’s the sophisticates who think he would be a regular old-school Republican if elected president. But that’s probably because I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the apocalyptic ravings of his favorite warm-up act and father, the Reverend Ted Cruz.
So far the only fallout from the Cruz/Allen “scandal” is the understandable reaction of Mike Huckabee, who is peering up at Ted Cruz in the poll rankings and wondering how he lost his long-established conservative evangelical base in Iowa to a Cuban-American. According to (naturally) Politico, Huck rose to the occasion:
“Conservatives are being asked to ‘coalesce’ around yet another corporately-funded candidate that says something very different at a big donor fundraiser in Manhattan than at a church in Marshalltown,” Huckabee said in a statement released by his campaign Wednesday afternoon. “Shouldn’t a candidate be expected to have authenticity and consistency, instead of having to look at a map to decide what to believe and what to say?”
Cruz’s answer to the “top-three” question may have struck a chord with Huckabee because the former Arkansas governor has issued his own “top-three” statement, allowing as how he’ll fold his presidential campaign if he doesn’t get one of those legendary three tickets out of Iowa. That will only happen over Ted Cruz’s dead (political) body, so no wonder Huck’s trying to take him down.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, December 24, 2015
“The Exact Opposite Of Reality”: Rubio’s Principal Talking Point Starts To Crumble
One of the more dramatic flaws in Marco Rubio’s presidential candidacy is a brutal contradiction: he’s a career politician, winning six elections before his 41st birthday, with no real accomplishments to his name.
In the enormous Republican field, voters can choose between established, experienced candidates who’ve done things in public office (Kasich, Bush) or insurgent outsiders with non-governmental records (Trump, Carson), but Rubio is burdened with the worst of both worlds, winning several elections without having done much in the way of meaningful work.
It’s a point about which the Florida senator appears increasingly sensitive. In fact, in October, Rubio tried to take credit for others’ work during his tenure in the state legislature. This week, Rubio’s begun telling voters that he actually has a major federal accomplishment – he helped undermine the American health care system – and his allied super PAC is pushing the line in a commercial:
“On Obamacare, some Republicans gave up. Some talked tough but got nowhere. For all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican hopeful has actually done something.”
For some GOP voters and much of the media, this seems compelling – Rubio hasn’t just spun his wheels for five years on Capitol Hill; when he’s bothered to show up for work, he invested real time and energy into interfering with families’ access to medical care.
There are, however, two important flaws in the pitch. The first, of course, is the fact that deliberately trying to undermine the American health care system is not an accomplishment upon which to build a presidential campaign.
The second, as the Washington Post explained today, is that Rubio didn’t do what he claims to have done.
Success always has many fathers, but Rubio goes way too far in claiming credit here. He raised initial concerns about the risk-corridor provision, but the winning legislative strategy was executed by other lawmakers.
The irony is, Rubio has recently tried to take credit for others’ work as a way of differentiating himself from President Obama. “I’m not like that other one-term senator who ran for president,” the Florida Republican has effectively argued, “because I’ve gotten things done in Congress.”
It’s not just a lazy lie; it’s actually the exact opposite of reality.
As we discussed a few months ago, Obama put far more effort into his congressional career than Rubio, and as a result, he had more success. As a senator, Obama developed a reputation as a work horse, being well prepared for briefings and hearings, introducing a lot of bills, and developing an expertise on serious issues like counter-proliferation.
There’s a great story from 2005 in which the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a day-long hearing on U.S. policy in Iraq, and then-Chairman Dick Lugar (R-Ill.) praised Obama for being the only other senator who was on hand for the entire thing, start to finish. As Salon’s Simon Maloy noted, “It was minor stuff, but it gave Obama a reputation as someone who was willing to do the basic work needed to get things done.”
Rubio has never developed that kind of reputation among his colleagues. On the contrary, he’s seen as a senator who misses a lot of votes, skips a lot of hearings, and fails to show up for a lot of briefings.
Eight years ago, there was a talking point that made the rounds in GOP circles when going after then-candidate Obama: he’d never run a city; he’d never run a state; and he’d never run a business. The trouble is, the exact same talking point can be applied to Rubio, and can even be made a little worse: he’s never built up a legislative record, either.
It’s not fair to say Rubio never passed a bill, but it’s awfully close. According to congress.gov, the far-right Floridian, over the course of five years, took the lead in sponsoring a measure that was signed into law. It’s called the “Girls Count Act,” and it encourages developing countries to register girls’ births. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the policy, but it was a largely symbolic measure that passed both chambers without so much as a vote.
He also helped name September as National Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month.
That’s about it.
If Rubio and his allied super PAC find that embarrassing, they should probably try to change the subject – because deceptive claims and taking credit for others’ work isn’t generally a recipe for an improved presidential campaign.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 23, 2015
“For-Profit Prison Bosses Bankroll Rubio”: Making Money Keeping Undocumented Immigrants Behind Bars
The GEO Group—a shady, for-profit prison company—has invested more heavily in Marco Rubio for years and his presidential campaign is no exception.
This past spring, the organization gave Rubio super PAC Conservative Solutions a fat check for $100,000, a massive donation dwarfs the prison organization’s prior contributions to the freshman Senator.
The donation also ups the ante of already well-established support for Rubio, empowering the Rubio super PAC to boost the senator’s candidacy for the White House.
When challenged about his donors by the press or on the campaign trail, Rubio often says that contributors are buying into his agenda, not the other way around. But since the failure of the Gang of Eight immigration reform package, it is worth noting that Rubio has to an enforcement-first, border security approach—which, consciously or not, would benefit private prison organizations like GEO Group.
Rubio isn’t the only presidential candidate to benefit from the GEO Group’s political largess: the organization also gave $100,000 to Jeb Bush’s super PAC, for example, around the time of the Rubio contribution. Bush wrote in the mid-90s about the need for more for-profit prisons.
But Rubio’s close ties with the prison company are unique, and GEO’s historical support for Rubio is substantially greater than that for Bush.
Before the most recent six-figure contribution, Rubio had received nearly $40,000 in campaign funds from GEO, making him the number one Senate recipient of the group’s political donations. And Rubio’s first Senate chief of staff, Cesar Conda, is a founder of what has become GEO’s main lobbying firm, Navigators Global. Navigators Global’s employees have also been frequent contributors to Rubio’s political efforts.
The Rubio campaign told The Daily Beast that it didn’t comment on outside groups. A spokesman for Conservative Solutions declined to comment.
The GEO Group did well when Rubio was speaker, having been awarded a $110 million state government contract right after Rubio hired a consultant who had been a trustee for a GEO real estate trust.
Rubio voluntarily disclosed in 2008 that he had raised $50,000 from GEO Group for organizations that he was involved with.
The private prison company is naturally controversial since the Florida-based group makes its money in part by detaining undocumented immigrants—in total, it runs 64 prison facilities in the United States, with a total of 71,973 beds.
If the federal government further enhances border enforcement, as many Republicans are calling for it to do, it stands to profit from holding foreigners who have violated the law.
GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison company, holds as its largest client the Federal Bureau of Prisons. And business has been good: between 2000 and 2012, net income jumped from $16.9 million to $78.6 million, in part due to federal government efforts to charge those who cross the border illegally.
The GEO Group has lobbied to increase the number of mandatory immigration detention spots, having already benefited from Congress’ requirement that the feds maintain approximately 34,000 detention beds.
They’ve been accused of mistreating undocumented immigrants, including providing insufficient medical care and even allegations of sexual assault against its guards (a subsequent Department of Homeland Security investigation found no evidence to support the assault allegations).
And as The Daily Beast reported, GEO Group is dealing with a lawsuit from former detainees, who have accused the prison group of engaging in human trafficking to increase its profits.
The GEO Group, for its part, said that it does not “take a position or advocate for any specific criminal justice or immigration policy,” but that like many other corporations “participates in the political process.”
“Our company’s political and lobbying activities focus entirely on promoting the use of public-private partnerships across correctional and detention services and in the delivery of offender rehabilitation and community reentry programs, and they do not entail any advocacy either for or against criminal justice or immigration policies,” a company spokesman said. “Over the last 30 years, our company has made significant investments in the development of evidence-based offender rehabilitation and community reentry programs aimed at reducing recidivism and helping the men and women in our care reintegrate into society.”
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, December 23, 2015
“How Much Change Can The Right Take?”: Trump Is Getting Too Much Media Attention
Brent Budowsky is experiencing some exuberance. Whether it’s irrational exuberance or not, we may never know.
Stop the presses! According to a new poll by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) destroys Republican candidate Donald Trump in a general election by 13 percentage points. In this new poll, Sanders has 51 percent to Trump’s 38 percent. If this margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives.
It is high time and long overdue for television networks such as CNN to end their obsession with Trump and report the all-important fact that in most polls, both Hillary Clinton and Sanders would defeat Trump by landslide margins. In the new Quinnipiac poll, Clinton would defeat Trump by 7 percentage points, which is itself impressive and would qualify as a landslide, while the Sanders lead of 13 points would bring a landslide of epic proportions.
Obviously, polls like this taken eleven months before a general election aren’t worth much. But there’s a point here regardless. There’s a pretty strong assumption in many quarters that a Brooklyn-raised seventy-four year old self-proclaimed socialist Jewish guy from granola-chomping Vermont doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected president of the United States. Yet, this Quinnipiac poll shows he’d schlong the current Republican front-runner, and schlong him like a drum. Not only that, but he’d have more potential coattails than Hillary Clinton.
Maybe that’s true right now–maybe it would even still be true next November–but that’s not the main point that Budowsky wants to make. His point is that Trump is getting too much media attention and Bernie Sanders (especially) and Hillary Clinton are getting too little.
I know a lot of regular voters who are not media-types who would vote for Sanders over Clinton in a heartbeat if only they could be assured that he wouldn’t lose a very winnable election. And who knows what happens when the Republicans bring out all their Willie Hortons and Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth? Does Sanders have the kind of teflon that the Clintons are famous for possessing?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I do sometimes wonder if the right in this country will just completely and finally lose their shit if we elect someone like Sanders as president. Putting up with a President Hillary Clinton seems like indignity enough for these folks who have been raised on Vince Foster watermelon conspiracies and Benghazi heat-fever dreams. But, at least the Establishment knows that the Clintons are what happens to you when you lose an election and not some earth-shattering proof that your country has been lost forever and turned over to the communists.
Then part of me just has a prurient interest in seeing just how mental the right will go if it turns out that Sanders can not only win but that he can destroy them in a wipeout landslide.
What I am pretty sure about is that Trump is at least as unorthodox and unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate as Sanders would be. In a matchup between the two of them, we’d be assured of getting something we’ve never seen before and basically no one thought was possible.
I’d have plenty to write about, that’s for sure.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 23,2015
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