Tag Archives: democrats

Republicans Have Totally Lost Their Mojo

by LoganWolak Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A few hours ago I wondered why none of the other Republican candidates has seriously attacked Donald Trump. I got a bunch of responses, most of which related to policy. They can’t attack him for his xenophobia because most of them support the same policies he does (against Muslim immigration, for a border wall, etc.). They can’t attack him for his crazy tax plan because they all have crazy tax plans. They can’t attack him for wanting to steal Iraq’s oil because Republican voters probably think that sounds like a great idea.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. After all, Trump doesn’t generally attack his rivals at a policy level. He branded Jeb Bush for all eternity by calling him low energy. He got under Ted Cruz’s skin by suggesting he wasn’t a natural-born citizen. He went after Ben Carson by see-sawing between (in Conor Friedersdorf’s words) “implying that Carson is an unstable thug who can’t be trusted in office because of violent things that he wrote about in his memoir, and declaring that his memoir is obvious bullshit that only dupes would believe.”

In other words, forget about policy. Make it personal. Go after Trump for being a crappy businessman. Go after him for his serial affairs and divorces. Go after him for refusing to open his company’s books or his tax returns. Go after him for his miserly record of charitable giving. Go after him for trying to kick an old lady out of her house. More generally, I’m sure the other candidates all set their oppo dogs loose long ago. That’s what you do in campaigns. So what did they find?

Oh wait:

Multiple Republican campaign sources and operatives have confided that none of the remaining candidates for president have completed a major anti-Trump opposition research effort….Presented with that void, outside conservative groups have frantically moved to cobble something together….The same was true with a professional opposition researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity. This past fall, she decided to start digging into Trump as a side gig to her own job, convinced that the campaign staff either wasn’t up to the task or were too unfamiliar with bankruptcy and SEC filings (as opposed to more traditional political documents).

“They didn’t know how to get a grip on it,” the researcher said. “It’s just being able to connect the dots and to know where to work.”

….It is treated as a truism among Republicans that a vast reservoir of damaging opposition research remains untouched. It’s a suspicion that Democrats aren’t challenging. Indeed, one Democratic opposition research said that they’ve spent the past eight months compiling material on Trump as he’s risen up the ranks. That’s actually not a lot of time. Democrats had started focusing on Mitt Romney in 2009 — a full two years before he ran again for the presidency. But those eight months have produced some good.

That researcher estimated that of all the material they’ve compiled — court and property records, newspaper clips and videos — approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.

Holy shit. This is malpractice on a grand scale. With all the money sloshing around the primary, nobody could manage to find a few million bucks to put together a professional ratfucking operation? Republicans really are losing their mojo.

Originally from: 

Republicans Have Totally Lost Their Mojo

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Have Totally Lost Their Mojo

Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

by KarolynHDG Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have officially announced that they aren’t willing to even hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee—no matter who it is.1 There’s all the usual argle bargle about needing to “protect the will of the American people” blah blah blah, but none of that matters. They’re doing this because they want to do it and they have the power to do it. I doubt that Democrats would act much differently under similar circumstances.

That said, you can add me to the huge crowd of observers who are puzzled by the political tactics here. The obvious question is: Why refuse to even hold hearings? That just makes Republicans look sullen and obstructionist. Why not hold hearings normally, drag them out a little bit, and then vote down whoever Obama nominates? The result is the same, but Republicans look more like senators and less like small children throwing a temper tantrum.

I suppose the answer is that this is a good way of firing up their base, and they think that’s more important than appealing to the center. Fair enough. But that raises another question: What’s the best way to fire up the Republican base? I’m not trying to troll anyone here, but it seems like the answer is to hold hearings. That would keep the whole Supreme Court issue front and center for months on end. The base would be faced almost daily with the prospect of what a liberal justice would do; talk radio would go nuts; and there would be endless chances to find specific problems with the nominee—many of which would coincidentally require the production of reams of files and records to trawl through.

Democrats, conversely, would have less to get fired up about. Sure, they’d be unhappy, but they wouldn’t be able to carp endlessly about Republican obstruction. Their guy is getting a hearing, after all.

So it seems like holding hearings normally would be a better way to fire up the GOP base and a better way to keep the Democratic base a little quieter. It probably wouldn’t make a huge difference either way, but it’s still a win-win. What am I missing here?

1After which they undoubtedly went out for a beer and shared their bewilderment about the fact that so many Republicans have been trained to vote for a guy like Donald Trump. What could possibly have driven them in such a direction?

Original post: 

Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

Congress Actually Did Something Pretty Great on Climate Change

by JaninaBeauchamp Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In December, Republicans in Congress struck a deal with Democrats to extend a package of tax breaks for wind and solar energy projects. Prior to the deal, things looked bleak. The tax credit for wind had already expired the year before, and the one for solar was set to expire by 2016. So the extension, which came after Democrats agreed to support lifting the long-standing ban on US oil exports, was a big and unexpected win for clean energy—one that will help buoy the industry for the next six years.

It could also prove to be one of the most significant actions taken by this Congress to reduce America’s carbon footprint, according to a new analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Thanks to all the new wind and solar that will likely get built because of the legislation, electricity-sector greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by as much as 1.4 billion metric tons by 2030 compared with what they would have been without the extension, the study found. That’s roughly the savings you’d get if you removed every passenger car from US roads for two years.

In other words, the tax breaks—2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced by a wind turbine and about 30 percent off the total cost of solar systems—add up to “one of the biggest investments in clean energy in our nation’s history,” Dan Utech, deputy assistant to President Barack Obama on climate, told reporters today.

How much wind and solar actually gets built (and thus the actual carbon savings) will also depend on what happens to the cost of natural gas, which has been low for the last few years thanks to the fracking boom but could rise again. Low gas prices make renewables less competitive, especially without the tax credit. But having the tax credit in place will enable solar and wind to compete in the market even if gas prices do stay low. The extension will also make wind and solar less vulnerable to state-level attacks on clean energy, as well as attacks on Obama’s broader climate agenda.

So, for once: Good job, Congress.

View article: 

Congress Actually Did Something Pretty Great on Climate Change

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, green energy, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Congress Actually Did Something Pretty Great on Climate Change

Hillary Clinton Needs to Explain Why Young Voters Don’t Need a Rebel

by AnnelieHollande Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over at the LA Times, Cathleen Decker says that timing is a big deal in politics, and Hillary Clinton’s timing is rotten:

She’s running a campaign for president on the argument that she is the most carefully prepared, judiciously educated candidate for the White House — at a time when many voters want to cast their lot with newcomers.

….Clinton heard it Thursday night, most painfully from one of her supporters….“We need a rebel,” a college student and supporter told the candidate, in explaining Clinton’s persistent problems with young voters. “My generation is a little wary of placing another politician in the White House. With your tenure in politics, how are you going to deserve our vote?”

If you are Hillary Clinton, how do you answer that?

I’m generally pretty skeptical of amateur speechwriting, which too often simply assumes that what a politician should really say is whatever the amateur speechwriter happens to believe. Maybe I’m about to do that too. But here’s roughly what I think she should say:

A rebel? No, that’s not what we need. What we need is a revolution.

But how do we get that? FDR got one. But he was no rebel: he was a rich patrician from the Hudson Valley. LBJ got a revolution, and he was no rebel either. He was a mainstream Democrat from Texas who loved to wheel and deal. Barack Obama got a mini-revolution, and do you think he’s a rebel? He’s not. He’s a pragmatic, evidence-driven, modern progressive.

So where did these revolutions come from? Listen to a few numbers. When FDR was elected in 1932, he got a Congress to die for: 60 Democratic senators who could power through almost any filibuster and a 71 percent majority in the House. In 1964 LBJ got 68 senators and 68 percent of the House. In 2008, Obama got 60 senators and 59 percent of the House.

What does that mean for young voters—or anyone else who wants to shake up the political establishment? It means we need a 50-state strategy—along with 50 states of grindingly hard work from the bottom up—to elect big Democratic majorities to Congress. And to go with that, we need a president who’s not only obsessive about pitching in to this tough slog from the top down, but knows how to work with Congress—including the few Republicans we’ll probably still need—to get things done.

That’s not Bernie. God love him, but he just isn’t much interested in getting more Democrats in Congress. Last quarter I raised $18 million to help Democrats get elected this cycle. Bernie raised nothing. Bernie has no real interest in a 50-state strategy. I do. Over a 25-year career in Congress, Bernie has accomplished virtually nothing—because he’s always been more interested in playing the gadfly than in building majorities for change.

If you want a revolution, don’t fall in love with someone who talks big. Fall in love with someone who cares about the same things you do and knows how to get them done. And help us get a Democratic Congress. It’s not sexy, but that’s where revolutions are born.

None of this is new ground for Hillary. She’s been calling herself a “progressive who likes to get things done” for a long time. She just needs a convincing elevator speech that really contrasts her favorably with Bernie on this score. Maybe not my little invention, but something along these lines.

View the original here:  

Hillary Clinton Needs to Explain Why Young Voters Don’t Need a Rebel

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton Needs to Explain Why Young Voters Don’t Need a Rebel

Obama Kept His Immigration Reform Promise to Latinos in the Only Way That Actually Matters in Politics

by ColleenGooch Posted on February 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Dara Lind reports that young Latinos are torn between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. But not because of anything either candidate has said:

Instead, the president on their mind is Obama. They’re still wrestling with his failure to keep his campaign promise to pass immigration reform, and the record deportations of his first term.

….”My biggest fear,” says Jocelyn Sida of the civic engagement group Mi Familia Vota, “is that the mentality of Latinos is going to be all about broken promises, don’t trust any candidate or campaign.”…Sida’s reference to “broken promises” is right on. For many — especially for young Latinos, many of whom came of political age during the Obama administration — the outgoing president is associated with the promise he made, then broke, on immigration reform, as well as the deportations that took place in its stead.

There are lots of obvious things to say before I comment about this. I’m not young. I’m not Latino. I’m not idealistic. And I’m a pretty big fan of Obama. So I have my own biases.

And yet…there’s still something dispiriting about this. Did Obama break his promise to introduce comprehensive immigration reform in his first year? Yes indeed. He says it was because the economy had collapsed and he had to spend all his time dealing with that. But no one really buys that. The stimulus bill passed pretty quickly, and during the rest of his first year Obama found time to deal with health care, Afghanistan, General Motors, climate change, touring the Middle East, and plenty of other things. Was he really so busy that he couldn’t spend some time on immigration reform?

The answer is that Obama is skirting the truth here—but, oddly for a politician, not in a way designed to make him look better. The real truth is that during an epic unemployment crisis he had no chance of getting the votes to pass immigration reform. So like any president, he triaged. He spent his time on other things in hopes that he could make a successful run at immigration reform a little later. Was this the right call? We’ll never know, but it sure strikes me as correct.

In the end, of course, disaster struck: Democrats lost their House majority in 2010, and even with a strong enforcement record (all those deportations) and Republican support, immigration reform could no longer pass. But this is hardly the end of the story. Obama signed the mini-DREAM executive order in 2012. He worked hard to pass comprehensive reform in 2013. He signed another historic executive order in 2014 aimed at immigrant adults. And although this is seldom given much attention, the biggest beneficiaries of Obamacare have been Hispanics.

So did Obama break his promise? Yes. Should young Latinos be demanding that the next president make immigration reform a priority? Yes. That’s how you get things done.

But should they feel betrayed by Obama? I don’t think so. The nutshell version is this: Every president has to decide which of his priorities can pass Congress. If Obama had tried to push immigration reform in 2009, it almost certainly wouldn’t have passed, no matter how hard he had pushed. That’s the fault of reality, not presidential willpower. So, as Obama so often does, he waited. He waited for the economy to improve, and in the meantime he tried to set the stage for success with a strong enforcement record—even at the expense of losing political support from an important voting bloc. When the time came, he worked with Republicans and came close to passing something. But the House balked and it failed.

None of this would have changed if Obama had barreled ahead in his first year. He would have lost just as badly, but two other things would also have happened. First, some of his other first-year initiatives would likely have fallen by the wayside. Second, he would have had a big, symbolic losing fight to his name. That would have done him a world of good in the Hispanic community, but he wasn’t willing to go down that cynical path.

I’m not young. I’m not Latino. I’m not idealistic. But I don’t consider it a betrayal to have a president who shows me the respect of foregoing the cheap and cynical political stunt in favor of a longer, tougher, but more realistic chance of getting something actually done.

From – 

Obama Kept His Immigration Reform Promise to Latinos in the Only Way That Actually Matters in Politics

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama Kept His Immigration Reform Promise to Latinos in the Only Way That Actually Matters in Politics

Hillary Clinton’s Secret Weapon Is Bernie Sanders’ Colleagues

by JocelynCamp63 Posted on February 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Sen Al Franken (D-Minn.) opened for Hillary Clinton Saturday night in Portsmouth with one very important message: she’s good enough, she’s smart enough, and doggone it, she’s a Paul Wellstone progressive.

Clinton’s final pitch to New Hampshire voters is as much about the people she surrounds herself with as it is the former secretary of state herself. On Friday, four woman senators were there to co-opt Bernie Sanders by arguing that the “revolution” America needs is electing the first woman. Stefany Shaheen, daughter of the New Hampshire senator, warmed up the crowd in Portsmouth by name-dropping celebrity backers Lena Dunham, Gloria Steinem, Abby Wambach—proof she’s not only experienced, but maybe cool. Franken was there to follow-up on a subject of intense debate over the last week—what it means to be a progressive.

“Let my clarify something: why they let a guy up here,” Franken began, flanked by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Gov. Maggie Hassan, and the former secretary of state. He didn’t waste any time invoking the legacy of the late Minnesota senator, a progressive icon who died in a plane crash in 2002 shortly before the midterm elections:

I’m Al Franken, I’m a Senator from Minnesota, and I hold the seat that Paul Wellstone once held. And I can point to someone on this stage whom I wouldn’t be senator from Minnesota without, and that is Hillary Clinton. My first election was kind of close. I won by 312 votes. Hillary Clinton came twice for me, once in October and then I got a call from her the Sunday before the election, she said “I’m coming out.” And we did a big rally in Duluth and got more than 312 votes at that rally, I gotta tell you. I’m a Paul Wellstone progressive. And let me tell you what that means: Paul said, “We all do better when we all do better.” Now if I knew what a haiku was, I’d say that was a haiku. But evidently I’m told it isn’t. But Paul knew that we all do better when we all do better.

He launched into a personal story of growing up middle-class in Minnesota. And then he returned again to why they let the guy up there.

“Sen. Shaheen, my colleague, and I, like the only other Senate Democrats who have endorsed in this race, have endorsed Hillary Clinton for a reason,” he said. “Because this is serious stuff. This is serious stuff. This is Sherrod Brown. This is Cory Booker. This is Tammy Baldwin. We are progressives. And we know what it takes to get things done.”

None of these endorsers will shift many votes on their own (notwithstanding Franken’s claims of Clinton in Duluth), but it’s a death by a thousand cuts strategy. And with Sanders boasting just two members of Congress on his side, Clinton is all too happy to tell voters that the candidates they’ve worked so hard to get elected in the past—the Baldwins and Frankens of the world—are with her.

Original article:

Hillary Clinton’s Secret Weapon Is Bernie Sanders’ Colleagues

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton’s Secret Weapon Is Bernie Sanders’ Colleagues

Let Us All Take a Random Walk Through New Hampshire

by FredaCulver Posted on February 6, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’m feeling a little bored, and that means all of you have to listen to me regaling you with a bunch of random political tweets from my timeline. This is, truly, the best way of getting a real feel for the campaign trail from afar. First up is Donald Trump, who canceled an event today because airports were closed in New Hampshire:

Apparently so. CNN reports that Trump’s operator at LaGuardia was open for business, and the operator in Manchester says it is “always open for business, 24 hours a day.” And even if Trump did have airport trouble, it was only because he insists on going home to New York every night. Apparently the man of the people just can’t stand the thought of spending a few nights at a local Hilton.

This whole thing cracks me up because of Trump’s insistence that he’s a “high energy” guy. But he can’t handle a real campaign, the kind where you spend weeks at a time on the road doing four or five events a day. He flies in for a speech every few days and thinks he’s showing real fortitude. He’d probably drop from exhaustion if he followed the same schedule as Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush.

Next up is Marco Rubio:

This is what makes it hard for me to figure out Rubio’s appeal. To me he seems like a robot: he’s memorized a whole bunch of virtual index cards, and whenever you ask a question he performs a database search and recites whatever comes up. The index cards aren’t bad, mind you, and I suppose they allow him to emulate a dumb person’s notion what a smart person sounds like. This is despite the fact that he normally talks with the same kind of hurried clip employed by nervous eighth graders reading off actual index cards.

Of course, this is just a specific example of a more general problem. Every four years, it looks to me like none of the Republican candidates can win. They all seem to have too many obvious problems. But of course someone has to win. So sure, Rubio reminds me of an over-ambitious teacher’s pet running for student council president, but compared to Trump or Carson or Cruz or Fiorina or Christie—well, I guess I can see how he might look good.

And now for some old-school Hillary Clinton hate:

Well, I’ll be happy to credit the Intercept, but I can hardly say it reflects well on them. This is yet another example of hCDS—Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome.1 I mean, has any candidate for any office ever been asked for transcripts of their paid speeches? This is Calvinball squared. Besides we all know the real reason Hillary doesn’t want to release the transcripts: she gave the same canned speech to everyone and happily pocketed an easy $200 grand for each one. Hell, who wouldn’t do that? Plus there’s the obvious fact that the hCDS crowd would trawl through every word and find at least one thing they could take out of context and make into a three-day outrage. Hillary would have to be nuts to give in to this.

Who’s next? How about Ted Cruz?

Cruz really pissed off Ben Carson in Iowa, just like he seems to piss off nearly everyone who actually gets a whiff of him up close. This is bad for Cruz because he’s trying to appeal to evangelical voters. Unfortunately, Carson has apparently decided that as long as he’s going to lose, he might as well mount a kamikaze attack against Cruz on the way down. And evangelicals listen to Carson. If he says Cruz bears false witness, then he bears false witness.

Finally, some good news for Bernie Sanders:

As it turns out, the Quinnipiac poll is probably bogus. Sam Wang points out that the median post-Iowa bounce was +6 percent in New Hampshire and +4 nationally—in Hillary’s favor. So everyone should take a deep breath.

Still, the big Bernie bounce is what people were talking about today, and it will contribute to an irresistible media narrative. And let’s face it: Hillary Clinton has never been a natural politician. Most Democrats like her, but they don’t love her, and this makes Sanders dangerous. What’s more, since Clinton already has a record for blowing a seemingly insurmountable lead to a charismatic opponent, he’s doubly dangerous. If Democrats convince themselves that they don’t have to vote for Clinton, they just might not. She has lots of baggage, after all.

Is this fair? No. It’s politics. But Clinton still has more money, more endorsements, more superdelegates, more state operations, and—let’s be fair here—a pretty long track record as a sincerely liberal Democrat who works hard to implement good policies. Sanders may damage her, but she’s almost certain to still win.

And that’s that. Isn’t Twitter great? It’s practically like being there. I can almost feel my shoes crunching on the snow drifts.

1This is a good example of a retronym. At first, we just had CDS. But then Hillary ran for president, so we had to make up a new term for insane Bill hatred: bCDS. And that, of course, means we also need hCDS. It’s like brick-and-mortar store or manual transmission.

See the article here – 

Let Us All Take a Random Walk Through New Hampshire

Posted in Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Let Us All Take a Random Walk Through New Hampshire

Ted Cruz Attacks Sean Penn—and Here’s Penn’s Response

by JunePounds Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At an addiction policy forum in Hooksett, New Hampshire, on Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz, the winner of the Republican Iowa caucuses, turned his talk about the awful consequences of addiction into a rant against…illegal immigration. And, of course, the media and Hollywood. After describing how addiction has affected his family—his half sister died of a drug overdose in 2011—Cruz quickly pivoted to discuss the flood of “undocumented Democrats” (Freudian slip?) coming across the border from Mexico and the need to build a wall to keep them out. He suggested the wall was also needed to protect the United States from drug cartels. Then he turned to the entertainment industry and one member in particular:

El Chapo. You know, Sean Penn seems to think he is a sexy and attractive character. I so appreciate Hollywood for glorifying vicious homicidal killers. What a cute and chic thing to celebrate. Someone who murders and destroys lives for a living. El Chapo’s organization brings vast quantities of drugs into this country, vast quantities of heroin.

Of course, this was a reference to Sean Penn’s recent Rolling Stone article, in which Penn conducted an interview with the fugitive drug cartel chieftain in a secret jungle location. The piece did not celebrate El Chapo—but Cruz was looking to blame all the usual suspects for the drug epidemic in New England: the media, Democrats, and a big-name actor.

Asked to respond to Cruz’s effort to link him to the addiction plague in the Granite State, Penn, in an email, told Mother Jones:

Ted Cruz is a generically funny and dangerously adept thought-smith. Clearly, he watches too much television and neglected to read my article before criticizing. It’s understood. He’s busy trading genius and raising aspirations with Mr. Trump. Blame Canada.

Penn’s last sentence is a reference to this.

We’ve asked the Cruz campaign if it would like to respond—and whether the senator is a fan of South Park.

Read the article:

Ted Cruz Attacks Sean Penn—and Here’s Penn’s Response

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ted Cruz Attacks Sean Penn—and Here’s Penn’s Response

After Iowa, Both Parties Are Facing Hostile Takeovers

by SVDElise894 Posted on February 2, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As Iowans trekked to caucuses across their state on Monday evening, both major political parties were on the verge of hostile takeovers. By night’s end, the Democratic establishment and Hillary Clinton had apparently held the threat at bay—barely!—with the former secretary of state seemingly defeating Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-professed democratic socialist channeling populist ire, by a small number of votes in what was almost a tie. On the Republican side, Sen. Ted Cruz, a nemesis of the GOP establishment, prevailed in Iowa the traditional way by rounding up evangelical and social conservative voters, and Donald Trump, the reality television tycoon, placed a close second (28 to 24 percent) with his they’re-all-losers schtick—meaning that half of Republican voters rebelled against their party’s poohbahs.

Anyone reading this knows the usual yada-yada-yada of Campaign 2016: this is the year of the outsiders. Donald Trump entered the Republican race, called everyone an idiot, and turned the GOP into the latest extension of Trump Empire™. Cruz, a onetime corporate lawyer (who happens to be married to a Goldman Sachs executive), campaigned as a pious bomb-thrower eager to take on the do-nothing status-quoticians of Washington (Republican and Democratic). And Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old Vermont senator who a year ago was not even a Democrat, crashed Hillary Clinton’s coronation with his call for a “political revolution” that would break up the big banks, slam the billionaires class, and deliver single-payer health care and free college to all Americans. But this convenient, soundbite-friendly description of what’s going on is too easy an explanation, for the supposed outsider energy in each party is different, particularly when it comes to Trump.

Let’s start with the Dems. Sure, Sanders called for smashing up the big-money establishment and implied (strongly!) that Clinton, a Washington insider who has pocketed campaign cash and speaking fees from Wall Street, was part of the corrupt system. Not to take anything away from Sanders’ populist message and his campaign’s delivery, but he was able to take advantage of—that is, speak to—a pre-existing and ever restless ideological bloc within the Democratic primary electorate: progressives.

According to a Gallup poll taken last year, 44 percent of Democrats call themselves liberals. This number has been on a steady rise since 2000, when only 29 percent claimed that label. So as several Democratic strategists have pointed out to me in recent weeks—including those backing and not backing Clinton—Sanders began with a big potential base to tap. Call it the Elizabeth Warren Collection: populist-minded Democrats yearning for a crusader. Any Democratic candidate challenging Clinton with a heartfelt, authentic and enthusiastic progressive appeal had a chance to attract these Democratic voters. (This wing has always been there. In the 1980 Democratic primary, Teddy Kennedy won 37 percent of the vote to the 52 percent bagged by incumbent President Jimmy Carter.) It may be a bit of a mystery why former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley flopped so miserably in his effort to court these looking-for-a-hero Democrats. But the fiery Sanders, whose leftism was never in doubt, went for them, and when Clinton, whose progressivism has often been debated, seemed to stumble (those “damn emails”) and failed to inspire younger and more liberal Democrats, Sanders had an opening to present himself as this year’s true progressive model and a cool alternative to the ideologically-suspect and baggage-heavy Clinton. Voila! He made a connection with a major Democratic subset that has always been there.

Forget about Iowa for a moment—especially now that this unrepresentative event is done—and look at the average of the national polls in the Democratic race. Clinton leads Sanders, 52 to 37 percent. Sanders’ take is darn close to that 40-percent mark long associated with the progressive wing. Sanders surpassed that level in Iowa, and he’s likely to do so in New Hampshire, where three recent polls have put his lead over Clinton between 20 percent and 31 percent. Yet in the long run, can he continue to stay above 40-percent —particularly when the contest shifts to states with more diverse electorates (meaning more black and Latino voters) and states where voters are less familiar with this self-proclaimed socialist? Those contests will show whether Sanders has reshaped the party or whether he has only deftly addressed a desire Clinton could not fulfill.

Cruz did something similar to Sanders: he appealed to an ideological bloc that pines for a champion. With the collapse of Ben Carson, who at one point led the GOP pack in Iowa, Cruz, who fielded an effective on-the-ground organization, was able to consolidate much of the social conservative vote. (Carson placed a distant fourth behind Sen. Marco Rubio, who came in a close third with 23 percent.) Still, Trump’s ability to grab one out of four voters in Iowa—and his commanding lead in New Hampshire polls—indicates his bid to seize control of the Republican Party has not been neutralized.

Trump has not been waging an ideological war. He is no Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. Just as there is a progressive base in the Democratic Party, there is a conservative foundation in the GOP, and those right-wing heroes of yesteryear won the Republican presidential contests (respectively in 1964 and 1980) by rallying the conservative grassroots within the GOP. At the time, each contended that the path to victory for the GOP was to beat back the more moderate elements of their party (Take that, Nelson Rockefeller! Ka-pow, George H.W. Bush!) and run to the right in November. (Only one of the two had their argument proven correct in the general election.) Theirs was an ideological mission. Cruz adopted this model, and he fared well in a state that has in recent years rewarded Republicans who appeal to the religious right. He’s an outsider in Washington, but not within this historical framework.

Trump’s play was not to become the leader of the party’s conservative wing. He’s been waging a cultural revolution, not an ideological rebellion, within the GOP. His main argument, such as it is, is not that the government is too big, but that everyone in government—and just about everyone who doesn’t agree with him—is stupid. And he’s a winner. (Well, at least until Monday night.) With his campaign, the political is the personal. His policy prescriptions, if they deserve to be called that, do not hew to a clear ideological line. He bashes hedge fund guys, calls for The Wall, wants less taxes, opposes trade deals backed by Big Business, decries the corruption of Washington (big-money donations and special-interest lobbyists), derides the US invasion of Iraq, but vows to obliterate ISIS with a massive, you-won’t-believe-how-big military built-up. It’s a mishmosh.

Trump is a protest candidate protesting…just about everything, as he peddles bigotry by pushing a ban on Muslims entering the United States. He’s not playing to the ideological voters of the GOP, but to the angry ones. His target audience: people who resent pushing 1 for English and 2 for Spanish. And I’m guessing many of these people have spent the last eight years detesting President Barack Obama, suspecting he’s some kind of secret Muslim, Kenya-born socialist who has a clandestine plan for destroying the United States of America. This hatred of Obama has been encouraged and exploited by leading Republicans who gained power in Washington with the tea party. These establishment GOPers giggled with delight as their mad-as-hell voters rushed to the polls, after being told that Obama was setting up death panels, that Obamacare would wreck the economy, that the president had once palled around with terrorists, and that Obama was feckless and dictatorial. They fed the beast. But that only created hunger for more hatred.

Enter Trump, who first auditioned for this role as a birther. Here was a guy brave enough to tell the Obama despisers the real truth. Here was a guy willing to target Muslims. Here was a guy who would characterize Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Here was a guy who would mock all those other Republicans who wouldn’t talk this way, essentially declaring them phony-baloney (and weak and ugly). The infuriated GOP voters who had bought the Republican propaganda that Obama has destroyed the United States gobbled all this up. Make America great, indeed. These are voters not seeking an ideological crusader who quotes the Constitution and presents intellectually sound arguments for smaller government and lower taxes. They are looking for a venter-in-chief who is as furious as they are and who promises that he and the nation will win, win, win.

The GOP unleashed the dogs of resentment and rage. And a bombastic, arrogant, demagogue billionaire shouted to them, “Follow me, not those louts in Washington.” Trump’s takeover of the GOP was going smoothly until Cruz, who has also tried to capitalize on right-wing resentment, bested Trump in Iowa, and Marco Rubio, a tea partier turned establishment favorite, came within 3,000 votes of bumping Trump to third. Now Trump’s going to have to try harder. And it will be interesting to see how voters respond to a diminished Trump. He still is positioned to do well in New Hampshire. And after that, why not Trump victories in South Carolina and Nevada (the land of casinos), and then the southern states that hold primary contests on Super Tuesday? But Cruz and Rubio will be nipping at his heels. (Watch the establishment money flood into Rubio’s campaign treasury.) And there’s no telling whether the Trump bubble has burst or whether he can return to the top of the heap with what will likely be an intensified effort to inflame the passions of irate voters.

After Iowa, the Democratic Party and Clinton are facing a fierce ideological challenge from an unlikely and previously underestimated source, while the Republican old guard is confronted by Cruz’s traditional assault and Trump’s unconventional attack. It’s the season of disruption.

See original article here: 

After Iowa, Both Parties Are Facing Hostile Takeovers

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, bigo, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on After Iowa, Both Parties Are Facing Hostile Takeovers

Why Does Everyone Still Treat Donald Trump With Kid Gloves?

by RichieLehrer Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As many, many people keep pointing out, no one has really taken on Donald Trump. Nor does anyone seem likely to start. Trump has somehow developed a myth of invincibility: nothing anyone says ever hurts him, so why bother trying?

But this is ridiculous. No one has ever really tried. The other Republican candidates tiptoe around, uttering only milquetoast criticisms, and nobody cares what Democrats have to say. But if there’s anything Trump has shown us, it’s the fact that presidential contenders can be a whole lot blunter than we ever thought. So why not really go after him? I can think of at least half a dozen avenues:

His serial affairs, divorces, and remarriages to models and actresses.
His obvious lack of religious faith.
His miserable financial record: bankruptcies, lawsuits, failed businesses, refusal to pay vendors, etc.
His endless penny ante shilling (Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump mortgages, etc.)
His many, many liberal beliefs held as recently as a decade ago.
His absurd penchant for lying.
The “bone spurs” that kept him out of the Vietnam War.
His abominable charitable record
His risible habit of naming everything after himself.

I’m not suggesting that somebody ask him about this stuff. That will just produce the usual hot air. Nor am I thinking of routine “contrast” ads. I’m thinking of full-bore, kick ’em in the nuts, Willie Horton style ads. Ones where you get to frame the attack in as vicious and unfair a way as you want. Ads that will really hurt him.

Would it work? Beats me. But it’s hard to believe that no one is even bothering to try long after it’s become obvious that he’s not going to collapse on his own. There’s a ton of money sloshing around the Republican primary this year, and Republicans aren’t especially noted for conducting touchy-feely campaigns. So why is Trump being treated with kid gloves?

Continue reading:  

Why Does Everyone Still Treat Donald Trump With Kid Gloves?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Does Everyone Still Treat Donald Trump With Kid Gloves?