“The GOP’s Worst Nightmare And A Pundit’s Dream”: A Brokered Convention In 2016
There are so many Republicans running for president, or thinking about running for president, that the Republican National Committee is having a hard time keeping track of them all. An official GOP online straw poll lists 36 potential candidates (and as Politico noted, that list actually missed at least two former governors who have said they’re mulling White House bids).
Regardless of the final tally, it’s becoming increasingly clear that debate planners will need to come up with creative ways to fit so many podiums on the stage when the candidates first face off in August.
But what makes this election so interesting isn’t just the sheer number of candidates. It’s that it could remain undecided until the GOP’s national convention in the summer of 2016. With so many candidates splitting the vote, it’s quite possible that no candidate gets a majority of delegates by the end of the primary season.
Now, it’s true that political junkies like me hope for a brokered convention every four years — one where backroom deals ultimately decide the eventual nominee. (Read more about brokered conventions here.) Each time, our dreams are ultimately foiled by one candidate who gains momentum through the primary season, causing the others to drop out.
But this year may be different for three unique reasons:
1. Look at the early polls. No Republican candidate can break even 20 percent support on a consistent basis in national surveys. In fact, the latest Real Clear Politics average finds just three possible candidates who register more than 10 percent. There’s really no frontrunner at all.
2. A winning coalition isn’t easy to put together. There are already several candidates who appeal mainly to evangelical Christians, a bunch who are attractive to national security hawks, and a handful who attract the Wall Street establishment crowd. There’s even a libertarian or two in the mix. With so many candidates on the menu, primary voters won’t necessarily have to pick the lesser of the evils. They’ll find a candidate who speaks to the issues they most care about.
3. Follow the money. Super PACs, which have become a pre-requisite for running for president this year, can raise unlimited sums from large donors. While they cannot legally coordinate their actions with the official campaigns, their war chests can ensure a candidate can stay in the race much longer than ever before. There’s little need to drop out if you have a billionaire or two committed to influencing the race with your candidacy.
Put this together and it’s very possible that no candidate will win two of the first four early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. If that happens, it’s impossible to predict what comes next.
RNC rules require states that hold nominating contests before March 15 to award delegates proportionally, meaning that the winner-take-all states that might decide the nomination come later in the process. Favorite-son candidates in delegate-rich states like Florida (Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio) or Texas (Rick Perry and Ted Cruz) could further splinter the delegate counts.
The odds probably still favor the Republican nomination fight coming down to just a couple candidates. But at this point, it’s impossible to predict when so many candidates have a plausible path to the nomination.
In fact, a chaotic primary season – with more than a dozen candidates with plenty of money to spend — makes the most improbable outcome much more possible.
By: Taegan Goddard, The Week, May 18, 2015
“It Ain’t Over Yet, There’s A Whole New Inquiry”: Christie’s Administration Is Facing Another Investigation
If after last week’s Bridgegate indictments you thought Chris Christie was finally done as the focus of government investigations, think again. The Republican governor’s administration in New Jersey is facing a whole new inquiry — this one involving hundreds of millions of dollars, and not just blocked-off bridge lanes.
At issue are the fees being paid by New Jersey’s beleaguered public pension system to Wall Street firms. In recent years, Christie’s officials have shifted more of the retirement savings of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public workers into the hands of private financial firms. That has substantially increased the management fees paid by taxpayers to those firms. Indeed, while Christie says the pension system cannot afford to maintain current retirement benefits, pension fees paid to financial firms have quadrupled to $600 million a year — or $1.5 billion in total since he took office in 2010.
In recent months, details have emerged showing that Christie officials have directed lucrative pension management deals to some financial companies whose executives have made contributions to Republican groups backing Christie’s election campaigns. Additionally, Christie’s officials have admitted that they have not been fully disclosing all the fees the state has been paying to private financial firms.
Not surprisingly, this has made the trustees who oversee the state’s retirement system more than a little bit nervous — especially since the ever-higher fees have coincided with below-median returns for the state’s pension fund. So the trustees began asking questions, and when they didn’t get the answers they were looking for, they announced in April that they are launching a formal investigation of the matter.
Wayne Hall, the chairman of one of the state’s pension funds, told the Newark Star-Ledger that the new investigation is designed to help retirees understand why the state is paying so much.
“I’m a layman. I’m not on Wall Street. I’m not an investor, and I have 33,000 people that I answer to and they’re not investors either,” he told the newspaper. “Why are we paying that kind of money? When I see the exorbitant fees the state has been paying for the last couple of years, I have to question that.”
In their quest for better disclosure, Hall and his colleagues received a boost from an unlikely source: conservative activists. When it comes to pensions, those activists are often calling for benefit cuts, but when it comes to transparency, they are standing on the same side as the retirees.
“Both government workers and taxpayers deserve to know why such an incredible sum is being expended every year with the current system in deep crisis,” said Erica Klemens of the New Jersey chapter of Americans for Prosperity. “These are dollars that could be funding the system and preventing the state’s pension hole from growing even deeper. The decision by the trustees to look into this matter is the right thing to do.”
You might assume that the conservative support was designed to set the stage for New Jersey’s Republican governor to cooperate with the investigation’s push for transparency. But no — quite the opposite.
Only days after prosecutors indicted his appointees in the Bridgegate affair, Christie vetoed a bipartisan anti-corruption bill designed to insulate the state’s pension system from undue political influence. One of that bill’s provisions would have forced the state to better disclose the fees being paid to politically connected Wall Street firms.
That leaves the trustees to try get to the bottom of what’s really happening at the state’s $80 billion pension fund. They may not have the governor’s bully pulpit, but thousands of retirees are relying on them to bring the truth out from the shadows.
By: David Sirota, Senior Writer at The International Business Times; The National Memo, May 8, 2015
“It Takes A Party”: Personality-Based Political Analysis Is Always A Dubious Venture
So Hillary Clinton is officially running, to nobody’s surprise. And you know what’s coming: endless attempts to psychoanalyze the candidate, endless attempts to read significance into what she says or doesn’t say about President Obama, endless thumb-sucking about her “positioning” on this or that issue.
Please pay no attention. Personality-based political analysis is always a dubious venture — in my experience, pundits are terrible judges of character. Those old enough to remember the 2000 election may also remember how we were assured that George W. Bush was a nice, affable fellow who would pursue moderate, bipartisan policies.
In any case, there has never been a time in American history when the alleged personal traits of candidates mattered less. As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other. The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.
For example, any Democrat would, if elected, seek to maintain the basic U.S. social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — in essentially their current form, while also preserving and extending the Affordable Care Act. Any Republican would seek to destroy Obamacare, make deep cuts in Medicaid, and probably try to convert Medicare into a voucher system.
Any Democrat would retain the tax hikes on high-income Americans that went into effect in 2013, and possibly seek more. Any Republican would try to cut taxes on the wealthy — House Republicans plan to vote next week to repeal the estate tax — while slashing programs that aid low-income families.
Any Democrat would try to preserve the 2010 financial reform, which has recently been looking much more effective than critics suggested. Any Republican would seek to roll it back, eliminating both consumer protection and the extra regulation applied to large, “systemically important” financial institutions.
And any Democrat would try to move forward on climate policy, through executive action if necessary, while any Republican — whether or not he is an outright climate-science denialist — would block efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
How did the parties get this far apart? Political scientists suggest that it has a lot to do with income inequality. As the wealthy grow richer compared with everyone else, their policy preferences have moved to the right — and they have pulled the Republican Party ever further in their direction. Meanwhile, the influence of big money on Democrats has at least eroded a bit, now that Wall Street, furious over regulations and modest tax hikes, has deserted the party en masse. The result is a level of political polarization not seen since the Civil War.
Now, some people won’t want to acknowledge that the choices in the 2016 election are as stark as I’ve asserted. Political commentators who specialize in covering personalities rather than issues will balk at the assertion that their alleged area of expertise matters not at all. Self-proclaimed centrists will look for a middle ground that doesn’t actually exist. And as a result, we’ll hear many assertions that the candidates don’t really mean what they say. There will, however, be an asymmetry in the way this supposed gap between rhetoric and real views is presented.
On one side, suppose that Ms. Clinton is indeed the Democratic nominee. If so, you can be sure that she’ll be accused, early and often, of insincerity, of not being the populist progressive she claims to be.
On the other side, suppose that the Republican nominee is a supposed moderate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. In either case we’d be sure to hear many assertions from political pundits that the candidate doesn’t believe a lot of what he says. But in their cases this alleged insincerity would be presented as a virtue, not a vice — sure, Mr. Bush is saying crazy things about health care and climate change, but he doesn’t really mean it, and he’d be reasonable once in office. Just like his brother.
As you can probably tell, I’m dreading the next 18 months, which will be full of sound bites and fury, signifying nothing. O.K., I guess we might learn a few things — Where will Ms. Clinton come out on trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership? How much influence will Republican Fed-bashers exert? — but the differences between the parties are so clear and dramatic that it’s hard to see how anyone who has been paying attention could be undecided even now, or be induced to change his or her mind between now and the election.
One thing is for sure: American voters will be getting a real choice. May the best party win.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 15, 2015
“Awwwwwkward”: Meet Ted Cruz’s Tax-Dodging Sugar Daddy
Hedge fund CEO Robert Mercer is all in for the conservative Texas Republican Ted Cruz, and the billionaire will have unusually substantial influence in how his contributions get spent.
But the billionaire also has some baggage—like, the avoiding billions in taxes kind of baggage.
His alleged failure to pay those taxes led to substantial congressional scrutiny in 2014—and it’s not clear the investigation is over.
This, and some of Mercer’s side projects, could present interesting challenges for Cruz’s campaign. Especially since Cruz has been a vocal opponent of those who “give favors to Wall Street” and engage in “crony capitalism.”
On the one hand, Mercer’s support is fantastic for Cruz for all the obvious reasons (having a billionaire in your corner is nice). On the other hand, Mercer’s hedge fund—Renaissance Technologies—recently faced an unflattering congressional investigation, the results of which indicated that it used complex and unorthodox financial structures to dramatically lower its tax burden.This drew scorching bipartisan criticism from investigators on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
“Renaissance profited from this tax treatment by insisting on the fiction that it didn’t really own the stocks it traded—that the banks that Renaissance dealt with, did,” said Sen. John McCain during a hearing on the issue, per Mother Jones. “But, the fact is that Renaissance did all the trading, maintained full control over the account…and reaped all of the profits.”
In his opening statement for that hearing, then-subcommittee chair Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said that Mercer’s business avoided paying more than $6 billion in taxes between 2000 and 2013.
Since then, Levin has retired from the Senate and Republican Sen. Rob Portman has taken his place as subcommittee chair. When I called the subcommittee’s Capitol Hill office to see if any investigation into Renaissance was still underway, the person who answered the phone said he couldn’t comment on active investigations. I then asked if that meant the investigation was in fact active.
“I can’t say whether it’s active, I can’t say whether it’s inactive, I can’t even say whether we’ve investigated them,” he said.
Later, Portman’s spokeswoman, Caitlin Conant, emailed to say that the committee doesn’t comment on its work beyond what’s in the public record. Renaissance Technologies didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether they’re currently being investigated.
Given this probe into his company’s books, it’s no surprise Mercer has invested heavily in keeping financial industry watchdogs from gaining political power. However, you’d think this might conflict with his candidate’s populist zeal.
“[M]y criticism with Washington is they engage in crony capitalism,” Cruz told Bloomberg Politics. “They give favors to Wall Street and big business and that’s why I’ve been an outspoken opponent of crony capitalism, taking on leaders in both parties.”
But the Cruz campaign doesn’t seem to see any problems with the arrangement. When I asked Rick Tyler, the campaign’s senior communications adviser, if he was worried about potential conflicts, he said, “No way.”
Mercer has long backed conservative candidates, and he’s spending heavily on Cruz through a new breed of super PACs started by the super rich.
An anonymous Cruz source told Bloomberg on Wednesday that a franchise of pro-Cruz super PACs—formed just this week—will have raised $31 million by end of the day on Friday. There are four super PACs, called Keep the Promise, Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II, and Keep the Promise III.
This is not normal; presidential candidates usually give their imprimatur to one such group, which then rakes in contributions and makes independent expenditures to help the candidate. After all, there are legal limits on how much donors can give to presidential candidates, but no limits on how much they can give to these PACs.
One longtime campaign lawyer said the widespread Republican donor buyer’s remorse exists from the 2012 general elections—when a few powerful super PACs spent massive sums of money to get Mitt Romney elected, and were left empty-handed on Election Night. As a result, billionaires are starting their own PACs to fund political campaigns to have more control on how their money gets spent.
It’s worth noting that this explanation doesn’t make sense to everyone. Dan Backer, an attorney who’s worked extensively with Republican and Tea Party groups on campaign finance issues, said he thought having multiple super PACs could make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone involved.
“All you’re doing is multiplying your reporting and compliance burden for no good reason,” he said. “At first blush, it just strikes me as a little weird.”
Regardless, the operating assumption seems to be that having a cadre of super PACs will give mega-donors like Mercer more power over the dynamics of the presidential election. Saul Anuzis, a Michigan Republican operative who started a Mercer-funded super PAC in the 2014 midterms, indicated as much in an interview with Mother Jones. He told the magazine that he expected to see “more and more super-PACs starting that are donor-centric or district-centric.” In Cruz and Mercer’s case, that prediction seems remarkably prescient.
In 2010, 2012, and 2014 the billionaire spent significant money trying (unsuccessfully) to take out Oregon Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio, who has made his support of higher Wall Street taxes a signature issue. And DeFazio has used the fact that he’s a Mercer target to burnish his fiscal-progressive bona fides.
Mercer helped Lee Zeldin defeat former Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor George Demos in a 2014 Republican House race primary. Mercer also helped Zeldin win the general election, where he defeated a Democratic incumbent who was a vociferous defender of Dodd-Frank.
But his areas of interest are broader than just elections. He singlehandedly paid for a $1 million TV ad campaign opposing the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. And his affinity for conservative causes seems to go back to his early days doing research for the Kirtland Air Force Base’s weapons lab in New Mexico.
Mercer hinted at his political evolution in a 2014 speech he gave to accept the Association for Computational Linguistics lifetime achievement award. He described rewriting a computer program so that it worked more efficiently, and then said that his bosses at the lab decided to just make the program do more complicated computations.
“I took this as an indication that one of the most important goals of government-financed research is not so much to get answers as it is to consume the computer budget, which has left me ever since with a jaundiced view of government-financed research,” he said.
Excepting Zeldin, Mercer’s chosen candidates haven’t fared particularly well. The billionaire spent $1 million to help pay for the 2012 Republican National Convention, and also gave Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS significant funds to try to boost Republicans’ fortunes. And he spent $200,000 on Wendy Long’s Senate race. Who’s Wendy Long, you ask? Right.
There’s a kind of funny flip in the media narrative here, too. After Cruz announced that he would run, a Politico sub-hed blared that he was “months behind his competitors in recruiting mega-donors and bundlers.” If the storied $31 million materializes, then those concerns were probably meritless.
But, to paraphrase the poet, with new money comes new problems. And it remains to be seen how a cozy alliance with a guy whose hedge fund allegedly dodged $6 billion in taxes could play out for the senator.
By: Betsy Woodruff, The Daily Beast, April 10, 2015
“Clinton Must Address Income Inequality In 2016”: Hillary Needs A Set Of Policies That Go Beyond Raising The Minimum Wage
Poor Hillary Clinton. She’s rich. And that’s a problem for her presidential campaign.
Even as the economy finally mounts an apparently sustained recovery, income inequality remains a primary worry for American voters. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center last November, 78 percent saw the gap between the haves and the have-nots as a big problem.
Since the 1970s, wages have been stagnating for average workers, who have been buffeted by the crosswinds of globalization and the technological revolution. Factories have fled to cheaper lands. Jobs that were once commonplace — such as those of bank tellers and grocery store clerks — have been lost to technological innovations: ATMs and digital scanners. Meanwhile, the economic gains have accumulated in the bank accounts of a wealthy few.
Clinton — who shares with her husband, former president Bill Clinton, an estimated net worth of more than $20 million — is definitely among those haves. That means the optics of her lifestyle are considerably different from those of Barack and Michelle Obama when he sought the White House: They had barely paid off their student debt.
But appearances aren’t the biggest problem for the former secretary of state. Plenty of rich folk have won the White House in the past; wealth is clearly no barrier.
The far bigger problem for her is that she is not easily associated with the battle to lift up the 99 percent, unlike, say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). If Warren runs for the presidency, as many observers assume she will, Clinton needs to quickly come up with a viable plan to restore America’s dwindling middle class. That ought to be the centerpiece of her campaign.
For that matter, her rivals, especially among the Republicans, need viable proposals to restore the middle class, too. (Warren has said she will not run, but Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, is considering a run for the Democratic nomination. He is a longtime advocate for average workers.)
Mitt Romney’s greatest weakness during his 2012 presidential campaign wasn’t his wealth, which, at an estimated $250 million, dwarfs that of the Clintons. His Achilles’ heel was his clear disdain for those who struggle to make ends meet, evidenced in his infamous remarks about the “47 percent.”
He was also weakened by his association with Bain Capital, a private equity firm that, among other things, bought up companies and sometimes streamlined their workforces. In an age of widespread economic anxiety, Obama was able to paint Romney as a callous — and clueless — plutocrat.
Clinton can’t be so easily characterized as an out-of-touch member of the 1 percent; her political positions fit comfortably within the moderate-to-liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Still, she is associated with the centrist economic policies of her husband, who worked hard during his presidency to cozy up to Wall Street and change the image of the Democratic Party, which was believed to be hostile to the business elite. Indeed, President Clinton helped to loosen some of the regulations that had held Wall Street in check.
The results of that loosening are still wreaking havoc on households across the country. The big banks, reckless and greedy, used their new freedom to crash the economy. And, unfortunately, many of the moguls responsible for the mess were unscathed by the wreckage.
As if that were not galling enough, the taxpayers bailed out Wall Street, even as millions of average folks lost their homes to foreclosure. The bailout may have been necessary, but it’s still infuriating. Clinton needs to demonstrate that she understands the anger still loose in the land — among liberal and conservative voters alike.
She needs to be able to answer questions about the high-dollar fees that she has collected from exclusive audiences and about the campaign contributions she has accepted from corporate interests, especially Wall Street types. But more than that, she needs a set of policies that go beyond raising the minimum wage.
She may have to risk alienating some of her big-money donors if she is to assist the shrinking middle class. If she has the courage to do that, Clinton will be hard to beat.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, February 14, 2015
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