Friday, January 22, 2016

Who had the worst week in Washington? Hillary Clinton.

www.washingtonpost.com
For Hillary Clinton, it’s starting to look like deja vu all over again.
Start a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination as giant front-runner. Check. Raise tens of millions of dollars and look unbeatable for large swaths of the year before the primaries start. Check. An insurgent challenger running to her ideological left? Check. Collapsing poll numbers on the eve of actual votes? Check.
Over the past week or so, Clinton has watched as her national polling lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), a self-avowed socialist, has shrunk. And, far more important, Clinton’s standing vis a vis Sanders in the key early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire has eroded as well.
In Iowa, after holding a high-single-digit lead (at worst) for months, Clinton now finds herself in a dead heat with the caucuses just over a week away. The Real Clear Politics polling average gives Clinton an edge of less than five points.
Sanders has always run stronger in New Hampshire than in Iowa, but of late several polls suggest that he is widening his steady lead over the former secretary of state. In the Real Clear Politics polling average, Sanders is up by almost 13 points.
As Hillary Clinton's lead in the polls continues to fall, her attacks on Bernie Sanders have stepped up. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
Lose both of those states early next month, and Clinton’s inevitability bubble bursts. Period.
Clinton, to her credit, is doing everything she can to avoid a repeat of 2008. She’s savaging Sanders as both too conservative (on guns) and too pie-in-the-sky liberal (on health care).
Complicating those efforts is the news that broke midweek: The intelligence community’s inspector general confirmed that dozens of emails on the private server Clinton used while she was at the State Department contained extremely highly classified information.
Clinton continues to stick by her original line on the email controversy — that she never sent or received anything that was classified at the time — but the latest news is proof that the story and its reverberations are likely to dog her all the way through November.
Hillary Clinton, for watching history repeat itself, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.
Each week, Chris Cillizza awards the worst week in Washington to an inhabitant of Planet Beltway who stands out for all the wrong reasons. You can check out previous winners or e-mail Cillizza with candidates. You can also read more from Outlook and follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.
COMMENTS

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Donald Trump is poised for the strongest primary performance in modern history


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theweek.com

For months, the press and the Republican



establishment alike have been expecting the Trump bubble to implode. Now that it's clear Trump isn't going anywhere, we're seeing stories about a long slog of a campaign or even a brokered convention. But there's a very real possibility that, far from those kinds of days of reckoning, Donald Trump could actually "run the table." Ironically, Trump not only could win — he could win more decisively than any non-incumbent Republican contestant for the nomination since the dawn of the modern primary system.
Let's see how that might happen.
New Hampshire
First, let's look not at Iowa, but at New Hampshire. Trump has been leading in New Hampshire by double-digits since August. If those polls are to believed, Trump is poised not only to win, but to win decisively.
Conventional wisdom is that whichever establishment-friendly candidate places second — at this point John Kasich islined up behind Trump, but Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and even Jeb Bush are all said to have a shot — is going to be Trump's most-viable challenger for the nomination. But if Donald Trump dominates with 30 to 40 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, and they come in 15 to 20 points behind, how is that possible?
More logically, whoever wins Iowa is going to be Trump's biggest challenger, and if that candidate does poorly in New Hampshire then whoever comes in second there (assuming it's somebody else) will be a long-shot third for the nomination.
So let's look at Iowa.
Iowa
In recent weeks, Iowa has seen a neck-and-neck race between conservative stalwart Ted Cruz and Trump. But the political junkies have been saying that in fact, Cruz has the edge because he has a far more extensive ground operation.
And so he does. But it's worth pointing out that the Cruz campaign has raised expectations considerably by touting this fact. A narrow Cruz win at this point would hardly be an exciting upset.
And Cruz could still lose Iowa. His rise in the state came during a period when he faced virtually no fire from the Trump campaign — and when he was directing virtually no fire Trump's way. That's no longer true. Moreover, Trump has actually led in four of the last five Iowa polls. And that was before the Palin endorsement.
Because of heightened expectations, a Cruz loss in Iowa would be devastating. He's been counting on a victory there to propel him to second or third place in unfriendly New Hampshire, and to possible victories in subsequent primaries in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday.
If Cruz loses Iowa, and the air goes out of his balloon, who benefits? Who's the leading second-choice candidate of Cruz supporters? You guessed it.
And if Cruz does win, it's worth noting that Iowa frequently doesn't vote for the nominee. It voted for Bush in 1980, Dole in 1988, Huckabee in 2008 and Santorum in 2012. There's a common assumption that a narrow Cruz victory would puncture the Trump hype balloon — and it might. But that's not the way Iowa has ever played out before.
So, as the race stands now, the most likely outcomes are either a Trump victory in both Iowa and New Hampshire, or a Cruz win in Iowa followed by a Trump win in New Hampshire. How might the rest of the race play out? Let's look at the two states after New Hampshire: South Carolina and Nevada.
South Carolina, Nevada, and beyond
South Carolina was decisive for every GOP nominating contest until 2012. It gave 55 percent to Reagan in 1980, 49 percent to Bush in 1988, 45 percent to Dole in 1996, and 53 percent to Bush in 2000. McCain just edged past Huckabee in 2008.
And how's Trump been polling in the South Carolina? I thought so.
Of course Gingrich won South Carolina in 2012, and that predicted nothing except a change in the South Carolina electorate, which had, prior to 2012, showed a markedly deferential attitude toward the Republican establishment. The vote for Gingrich signaled a profound dissatisfaction with the party establishment that has clearly not abated.
And even if the establishment wanted South Carolina to perform its usual function in 2016, party leaders are not doing the things necessary to make it happen. Consider the role of Lindsey Graham. From the beginning, his campaign's main impact was to prevent party leaders in South Carolina from throwing their support to another, more viable candidate. Now he's dropped out — and endorsed Jeb Bush's struggling campaign, which will likely hobble the more-viable Marco Rubio's campaign even further.
If Donald Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, why wouldn't he win South Carolina? And if he loses Iowa and wins New Hampshire, why wouldn't he still have a strong shot at winning South Carolina, even against a surging Ted Cruz?
It's a similar story in infrequently-polled, less-crucial Nevada, which Marco Rubio has targeted as his "best early state" without much evidence of impact. And so on through Super Tuesday, throughFlorida, and on through the entire primary calendar.
The usual response to these sorts of claims is that polling this far out doesn't really mean much. Contests can get especially volatile as we approach an election date, nobody is paying attention yet, and Trump is riding primarily on name-recognition. But the distinctive feature of the 2016 Republican primary polling has not been its volatility but its stability — at least at the top, where Trump sits.
Volatility in recent prior GOP primary contests has been driven by dissatisfaction with the presumptive nominee: McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. But there is no establishment candidate or presumptive nominee to be dissatisfied with this time. Instead, there's a candidate from far outside that establishment, who is running explicitly against that establishment, but not running a particularly ideological campaign — certainly not one that lines up with traditional conservative shibboleths (which is what Cruz is doing). The extraordinary stability of the Trump vote may be a sign not merely of the high name-recognition of the candidate, but the wide and deep appeal of that stance — or of Trump personally.
And if voters in later states aren't paying attention yet, then what will cause them to pay attention? Primarily, the results of the early contests. Primary contests are partly ways of signaling to the partisan electorate who they are supposed to vote for. So early Trump victories could well signal to the less-engaged portions of that electorate that the party has decided — and decided for Trump. Even though, in the minds of those supposedly in charge of the party, they most certainly haven't.
Cruz is the only challenger to Trump who has gotten any kind of traction, but his rise has been overwhelmingly on the right, a path that numerous insurgents have taken and failed in. Maybe he'll succeed this time — but why assume that Trump will be easier to defeat in this manner than candidates who were manifestly more disliked by the rank-and-file GOP electorate? Isn't it more likely that, if voters in New York or Pennsylvania see their choice as "Trump or Cruz or some loser," they'll mostly go for the angry but non-doctrinaire Trump?
The rest of the crowd of candidates needs to take advantage of the nomination's "blue wall" that supposedly stops conservative candidates from winning. But Trump already has the advantage in scaling that wall. His strongest regions are the Northeast and Midwest. He polls just as well among self-described moderates as among self-described conservatives.
The mainstream candidates can't get any traction because Trump is ahead of them in their lane, while Cruz is the classic ideological conservative challenger. How does that story — a stronger-than-usual poll-leader blocking the moderate path to the nomination, and a more-divisive-than-usual candidate playing conservative insurgent — not imply that the less-ideological but charismatic poll leader is the favorite to win?
Here's the bottom line.
No non-incumbent has won both the GOP's Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary since the dawn of the modern primary system. Trump has a real shot to be the first. And no recent candidate has overcome the kind of deficit most of the other candidates face in both national and state-by-state numbers at this late date, against a candidate with as strong and stable numbers as Trump has, and gone on to win.
If Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, and then goes on to win South Carolina and Nevada — as he is favored to do — he could very conceivably win every contest, or at worst lose a favored son state or two like Cruz's Texas. Nobody has run the table like that — not Nixon in 1968, nor Reagan in 1980, nor Bush in 2000.
And if he loses Iowa to Cruz, and wins New Hampshire decisively, there's little historical reason to believe that Cruz has a better chance at the nomination than Trump does, much less that anybody else has a better shot than either.
A Trump nomination would be unprecedented. But an upset victory by any of his opponents would, in many ways, be even more so.

Bernie Sanders goes ‘hope and change’ in closing ad featuring thousands of inspired supporters

www.washingtonpost.com
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released a new campaign ad titled "America." Paul Simon's song "(All Come To Look For) America" plays over scenes of rural and suburban America. Sanders appears nearly halfway into the ad greeting crowds at a rally. (Bernie 2016)
There are images of Iowa farms, the New Hampshire seacoast, coffee shops, kitchen tables and thousands and thousands of inspired Bernie Sanders supporters, in intimate settings and at the large-scale rallies that have come to define his campaign.
The new 60-second television spot reaches it’s crescendo as Simon & Garfunkel sing “they’ve all come to look for America” while an expanding grid of people who’ve all come to see Sanders flashes on the screen.
The Vermont senator has produced a powerful closing ad that evokes President Obama’s promise of hope-and-change from 2008 — and it’s one that’s certain to create buzz less than two weeks before the first votes are cast in the 2016 Democratic race against Hillary Clinton.
The ad — which captures the festival-like feel of Sanders's campaign events — is also remarkable in that not a single word is spoken, aside from the lyrics to the classic Simon & Garfunkel song “America” and the authority line at the end. In that, Sanders says in his heavy Brooklyn accent, “I’m Bernie Sanders, and I approve this message.”
There’s no mention of Sanders’s agenda or his critique of a country in which he says the “billionaire class” has far too much control over the economy and political process.
Instead, the ad just shows people who’ve been moved over the past nine months by a once-obscure 74-year-old senator from Vermont who’s already exceeded everyone’s expectations in this race and is now positioned to possibly pull off wins in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Aides said the spot will start airing Friday in both of the first two nominating states.
COMMENTS

Campaigner-in-Chief Bill Clinton Gives a Worrisome Speech in Iowa


www.bloomberg.com
Former President Bill Clinton, campaigning for his wife in New Hampshire Wednesday, bluntly admitted how much more difficult than expected Hillary Clinton's race for the Democratic presidential nomination has become.
“This has turned into an interesting election,” the candidate's husband told a rally in Salem. “We’re fighting it out in Iowa. We’ve got a little lead that I think is solidifying and maybe growing a little bit. We’re on a home-field disadvantage here."
With less than two weeks before the first ballots of the election are cast in Iowa, Hillary Clinton, who promised that she would “work for every vote,” is having to do just that. News of endorsements withheld and renewed questions about her e-mail practices as secretary of state continued the drip-drip-drip of small setbacks that have prevented her from gaining the traction she needs to stride confidently into the first contests. Instead, she and her team seem to be trying to navigate a slippery floor.
Most of all, the Clinton campaign itself—through its stepped-up activity against her chief rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont—suggested that the once-prohibitive Democratic front-runner sees herself in a competitive battle with a septuagenarian self-described socialist.
“Hillary does not consider Planned Parenthood a member of the establishment and I don't see how anybody else could,” her husband told an audience in Concord. He was responding to Sanders' characterization a day earlierof the women's reproductive rights group that Republicans in Congress have sought to defund and that endorsed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.  
The nation needs “not anger but answers,” the former president went on to say, taking on Sanders' efforts to portray Clinton as an insider and himself as an agent of change. “I think you should vote for her because she is the best change-maker I've ever met,” he said of his wife.
“The real issue is: Who can win the election? Who’s prepared the do the job? Who can make real change?” the former president added.
Until now, Bill Clinton has more often cast his wife as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and focused on Republicans as the enemy, while ignoring or downplaying Sanders.
But Hillary Clinton took a more aggressive approach than in the past to Sanders in Sunday's primary debate in Charleston, South Carolina. One day after her foreign policy surrogates questioned Sanders' readiness, Clinton told NPR that Sanders' comments about the Middle East are cause for “concern,” questioning his understanding of the shifting alliances in the Middle East, and emphasizing her own credentials and links to the current occupant of the White House.
“President Obama, when he was elected, immediately turned to me. He trusted my experience and my judgment,” Clinton said. 
Meanwhile her campaign released new ads in Iowa and New Hampshire emphasizing her experience.
But the formidable resume that her husband alluded to, and that Clinton and her supporters hoped would make her the prohibitive favorite to become the nation's first female president, may be more a handicap than an asset in a year when voters in both parties are exasperated with the nation's financial and political establishment. In a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Polltaken earlier this month, 44 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers described themselves as anti-Wall Street, 43 percent described themselves as socialist, and 22 percent described themselves as politically “independent,” rather than Democrat.
In an e-mail to supporters on Wednesday, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote that a higher proportion of Sanders' supporters appear to be funding his campaign than hers “and that worries me.”
On the stump Wednesday night in Burlington, Iowa, the candidate herself argued that she and Sanders have substantial areas of agreement but favor different approaches. “Let’s not fight about health care. Let’s keep improving it. We can get to universal coverage,” she said. When it comes to Wall Street, she added, the Democratic field is “in a vigorous agreement but we’re not exactly seeing eye to eye.”
But, like her husband, Clinton also called out Sanders' comments on Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, saying she was “somewhat confused” by his comments and could only wish that women's rights and gay rights were settled issues. “We have to keep working to make sure that people are not taken advantage of, are not stripped of their rights,” she said.
This all comes as polls show Clinton facing a closer-than-expected race against Sanders on Feb. 1 in Iowa and the prospect of defeat to Sanders on Feb. 9 in New Hampshire, which shares a border with Sanders' home state. Meanwhile, some voices Clinton would have liked in her corner are withholding a verdict.
Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer told Reuters on Wednesday he isn't yet ready to endorse Clinton and didn't rule out supporting Sanders, even though Steyer last May held a $2,700-a-person fundraiser for Clinton.
Nevada's Culinary Union said it will not endorse ahead of the state's Feb. 20 caucus. The 57,000-member union, an affiliate of the hotel worker union UNITE HERE, is Nevada's largest and most politically powerful.
Amid a dispute over caucus sites days before the 2008 contest in Nevada, UNITE HERE, which had endorsed Obama, ran an radio ad declaring “Hillary Clinton does not respect our people.” But the Culinary's political director told Bloomberg in August that members are “ready to learn where Senator Clinton is at today, and feel her out, without holding any grudges about what happened in 2008.”
In September, Clinton joined Sanders and O'Malley in calling for a repeal of Obamacare's so-called “Cadillac tax,” levied on the kind of generous health benefits unions negotiate. The Culinary had identified eliminating the tax in August as its top issue in the race.
And Clinton may face a new headache in the controversy over her use of private e-mail servers while she was secretary of state, after reports this week that intelligence officials identified information that was more than top secret. In the interview with NPR, she dismissed the findings as a “continuation of an interagency dispute” over when to classify information and suggested she's the victim of a politically motivated leak. “I never sent or received any material marked classified,” she said.
“I know we're in a hard fight here and I know we're running against one of your neighbors,” Bill Clinton told the crowd in Concord. “This state has been so good to me and Hillary,” he said, an indirect reference to his close second-place finish there in 1992 that earned him the nickname “The Comeback Kid” and to her 2008 primary win in New Hampshire over Barack Obama. He and Hillary both had learned “a great deal” about what's going on in America from what people told them in New Hampshire, Bill Clinton said.
He refrained from using Sanders' name, repeatedly referring instead to his wife's opponent. He hinted rather than hammered at the idea that Republicans would rather run against Sanders than Clinton. “They're good at this,” he said of Republicans. “They don't want to run against her. They have sent us a clear signal.” He also said, as if it were an acknowledged fact, that his wife is “the only person” from either party ready for the job, before asking, “So what's going on out there?” And he laid out an analysis of Americans' fears across various demographic groups about everything from wages to terrorism.
Republicans, he said, in no particular order blame “Muslims, Mexicans, President Obama” for what's wrong with the country. “Or they blame Hillary.” Meanwhile, “Hillary's opponent says this was all caused by Wall Street and billionaires,” which are “a better object of our hatred and more accurate” but also, he indicated, not entirely on point. Hillary, he said, saw the nation's difficulties since the 2008 economic collapse in large part as failures of government. He said she is committed to reforms that can win enough bipartisan support to be implemented. In contrast, he said, Sanders' newly unveiled plan for Medicare for all is “a recipe for gridlock” and “we cannot afford to waste a year or two.”
—With assistance from Sahil Kapur in Concord, New Hamphire, and Josh Eidelson in Washington.
COMMENTS

GOP Consultant Rick Wilson to MSNBC: Trump Supporters ‘Childless Single Men Who Masturbate to Anime’

20 Jan 2016



Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In,” Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who has a long track record of attacking Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump and his supporters, once again took aim at Trump’s supporters.



“Who think Donald Trump is the greatest thing, oh, it’s something,” Wilson said to host Chris Hayes. “But the fact of the matter is, most of them are childless single men who masturbate to anime. They’re not real and political players. These are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity. What’s really driving the Republican Party, though, is still a limited government conservatism that is still a structure built around a government that`s less invasive, less intrusive, less taxes, less government, more freedom. We don’t always get there by a straight line path. We don’t always get there in a direct way. But that is still what drives this party. And there’s also a major part of the party that is still trying to sort itself out on what the balancing test is between the limited government side, the national defense side, the social conservatism side. And I don’t think this other stuff Trump is toying with is really a part of the mainstream conservative movement by any stretch of the imagination.
Transcript as follows:
HAYES: Joining me now, MSNBC national correspondent Joy Reid, Charlie Peirce, writer at large for “Esquire” Magazine, and Republican media consultant Rick Wilson.
Well, well, well, Joy, let me start with you. OK, what did we see today? What was that?
JOY REID, MSNBC NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I have to tell you, I think we`re going to look back at today as sort of the quintessentially perfect day in the Republican primary — in the sense that we found out what I`ve always called this legged stool of conservatism, where you got the elites, you got the evangelicals, and you got the sort of meat and potato blue collar wing of the party, we discovered there`s actually four wings of this party. You essentially have the intellectual movement conservative wing, which is what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) represents.
I`ve been in a worm hole of been reading “Red State” and reading a lot of conservative sort of publications that are about movement conservatism and intellectual conservatism. That`s who Ted Cruz is, right?
HAYES: They love Cruz.
REID: They love Ted Cruz. He`s hanging with “Duck Dynasty”, but that`s not who he is. He`s the Harvard guy. He`s the Ivy League.
HAYES: He`s both, that`s why he`s great.
REID: Right. Then you`ve got the sort of real meat and potatoes base which isn`t necessarily ideologically conservative. They want more stuff. They want Medicare. They want their ethanol subsidies. They want their life to be made comfortable by the government if that`s what happens.
They just want that feeling of power that America use today have when their parents were young, right? So, he represents that fourth wing of the party, i.e., people think of these two as the same way. I actually don`t think they are.
We also saw briefly there`s a celebrity conservatism element, too. It`s perfect you have John Wayne, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, reality show conservatism. That is what was seen today.
HAYES: Well, Rick, I mean, obviously, the subtext of what Joy said I think is exactly at the heart of the issue, because what`s setting up, what`s happening is Trump and Cruz go after each other, is Cruz is pointing to all the apostasies of Donald Trump, right? And the fact he used to support single-payer and he gave money to the Clintons.
You know, X, Y, Z. This question about what is conservatism? Really, what does it come down to? Sarah Palin comes into vouch and say, all these elitists are telling you what this is. We know what it is. It`s making America great again.
RICK WILSON, REPUBLICAN MEDIA CONSULTANT: Look, there`s a thing I`ve described as the troll party which Trump is sort of energized and activated over the last six months. And what`s happened with the troll party element of this, is they are very driven by the celebrity of Trump and Sarah Palin is a reality TV star, celebrity, as well. She transformed from a political figure to a reality TV show figure.
This is sort of the singularity of the entertainment wing of the Republican Party where there`s not a firm ideological underpinning about it anymore. Sarah Palin was always a populist who was seated in limited government conservatism but, you know, she`s managed to flip that on its head in one day and essentially walk away from all the limited government part of her background and just embrace the Trump populism and the yell louder, yell longer, be madder, be more furious division of the party.
Look, I think Joy`s right. This was one of those like crystal moments of the whole campaign where you had all these elements coming together at one time. I mean, every TV camera in country was on that event and there`s a reason for that. It`s great show. It`s a great entertaining spectacle.
And there`s nothing else like it going on in the field. I think Ted Cruz`s attacks on Trump would have had more credibility and a little more heft and a little more weight if he hadn`t spent the last six months serving as the pilot fish to Donald Trump`s shark and following him around and wagging his tail every time Trump said something absurd, Ted Cruz was sitting in the background with his thumbs up.
So, it would have had more credibility and more oomph this recitation of Trump`s complete lack of conservative credentials of which he has none, it would have been a much more effective argument if he hadn`t been Trump`s fan boy until yesterday.
HAYES: Well, it`s very funny to watch both of them go after each other. They spend six months saying nothing but nice things about each other. Now, they`ve discovered how secretly liberal the other one is.
I want — Charlie, I think we`re getting down to here it, all politics, I want to be clear on this, because I don`t want to say this is just about conservatism. I mean, I think it is. All politics are emotional. All politics are about who you identify with.
We use this term identity politics which is always used to talk about people usually people of color. But all politics are identity politics which is what we`re seeing in this campaign. And to me the moment that sums up this campaign so far was this moment of Trump chanting “USA, USA” into a microphone. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(CHANTING)
TRUMP: USA, USA, USA, USA, USA, USA. Thank you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Trump — Charlie, that is the Trump campaign. That`s it. That`s the Trump campaign in ten seconds. That`s what this campaign has been.
CHARLIE PIERCE, WRITER AT LARGE, ESQUIRE MAGAZINE: I`m glad he did that because if he farmed out to governor Palin, I`m not sure she would have been able to spell it.
Look, I refuse to look upon then whole event today as anything besides spectacle. If it is a pivotal moment in American politics, then this country is screwed from hell to breakfast. OK, you`ve got — I`m sorry.
You have a not particularly bright person auditioning as court jester to a clown basically. That`s the sum total of what happened today. I mean, with all due respect to Rick, the Republican Party is forcing — has been forcing its presidential candidates to look ridiculous for two cycles now.
I mean, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is talking about having bought a gun for Christmas because he wanted to defend his family against ISIS as the pickup trucks come up Biscayne Boulevard. Chris Christie is out there today talking about how he`s going to undo Michelle Obama`s healthy food and let kids in middle school eat whatever they want for lunch. Jeb Bush is just ridiculous on the face of it.
This is just the quiescence (ph) of it. I don`t think you have to be born a cynic, although I was, to wonder exactly how much this endorsement cost.
HAYES: Huh.
REID: But at the end of the day, though, Chris, you know, it`s interesting because for decades, you`ve had Rush Limbaugh and the sort of conservative entertainment complex holding together these various wings of the party as if there was a core belief in a set of specific conservative values among the base. When it turns out what the base wants is a feeling that can be delivered by Rush but some policies that are apostasy to movement conservatives.
HAYES: So, Rick, this is, Mike (INAUDIBLE) wrote this piece today in “The Week” where he looked at this Samuel Francis, who was a white nationalist, white supremacist, who sort of started out main street conservative who was an advisor to Patrick Buchanan, basically said your best path is get rid of all the conservatism stuff, all the limited government deficits, markets, all that stuff, and just go whole hog at essentially ethno-nationalism and Michael writing about the Trump campaign says what so frightens the conservative movement about Trump`s success is he reveals just how thin their support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institution.
It says the Republican Party doesn`t need all these think tanks or supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the one in tassel loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don`t need them and you`re better off without them.
What do you think of that, Rick?
WILSON: Well, look, first off, I think that`s absurd. I think there is definitely still a very significant portion of the party that is a limited government conservatism based faction of the overall coalition.
Now, the screamers and the crazy people on the alt right as they call it, you know, who love Donald Trump, who have plenty of Hitler iconography in their Twitter icons.
HAYES: They sure do. I can back that up.
WILSON: Who think Donald Trump is the greatest thing, oh, it`s something. But the fact of the matter is, most of them are childless single men who masturbate to anime. They`re not real and political players. These are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity.
What`s really driving the Republican Party, though, is still a limited government conservatism that is still a structure built around a government that`s less invasive, less intrusive, less taxes, less government, more freedom.
We don`t always get there by a straight line path. We don`t always get there in a direct way. But that is still what drives this party. And there`s also a major part of the party that is still trying to sort itself out on what the balancing test is between the limited government side, the national defense side, the social conservatism side. And I don`t think this other stuff Trump is toying with is really a part of the mainstream conservative movement by any stretch of the imagination.
HAYES: I know, you know, Rick, I think the question to me is this is all going to be tested, right? I think — which is to say I agree with you. There are large parts of people who are avowed Republicans and conservatives who really genuinely care about limited government. But what we`re seeing this sort of electoral test. And that`s what makes today so fascinating, this fight so fascinating, what happens — we are dealing with this sort of seismic question about what exactly we`re looking at as a 21st century Republican Party.
Joy Reid, Charlie Pierce, and Rick Wilson, thank you all.
REID: Thank you.
WILSON: Thanks, Chris.
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Norman Lear: Donald Trump Is [the Far Right’s] ‘F— You to All the Clowns and the Establishment’

Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

by DANIEL NUSSBAUM20 Jan 2016232

Television legend Norman Lear does not believe Donald Trump will become the next President of the United States.

In a brief interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the creator of television classics like All in the Family and The Jeffersons said that the Republican presidential frontrunner is just a product of America’s anger at the political establishment, but that anger would not be enough to “take him all the way.”

“I have enough confidence in the American people to believe that Trump is the middle finger of their right hand,” Lear told the outlet, echoing comments he made about Trump in October. “He is [the right’s] f— you to all the clowns and the establishment generally because [they believe] the leadership of the country is at an all-time low.”

“It’s their way of saying, ‘If you give us that kind of leadership, take this,'” he added. “But I don’t think it’s going to take him all the way, and I think they’ll retract that finger. They have to.”

Lear has made no secret of his disdain for Trump. Last month, the famously liberal but self-described “bleeding-heart conservative” said that his progressive advocacy organization People for the American Way would launch an initiative to combat “hate speech and anti-Muslim rhetoric” propagated by Trump and the other Republican presidential contenders.

“I haven’t believed — and don’t believe now — that the American people would elect Donald Trump president,” Lear said at his organization’s Spirit of Liberty Dinner in December. “I see Donald Trump only as the middle finger of the American right hand.”

In his interview with THR, the 93-year-old Lear said that conservatives have galvanized since the ’80s to become “louder and politically more potent”: “Jerry Falwell’s gone, but politically within the Tea Party and to its right, there’s a lot going on. They are a good deal stronger than they were at the top of the ’80s.”

Lear also revealed his own presidential preference.

“Nobody’s asked me formally, but I’ll take Hillary,” he told THR. “I think she’ll be the candidate. She’s the candidate that’s most electable, and I care for her. Anybody who knows me knows I’m not going to be voting for any of the cons on the other side.”

Lear is plenty busy these days. In addition to launching the initiative against Trump’s “hate speech,” he will also produce an all-Latino remake of his classic 1970s sitcomOne Day At A Time for Netflix.

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Big Hollywood2016 Presidential Race,Donald TrumpHillary ClintonNorman LearAll in the FamilyPeople for the American WayOne Day At A Time

Hillary Clinton Super PAC’s Statement on Trump’s Palin Endorsement Is Just a Mocking Smiley Face

by PATRICK HOWLEY19 Jan 201677
The pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA officially responded to Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump by releasing a graphic of a smiley face pointing and laughing.
Unable, apparently, to string together a couple sentences, the PAC instead released a mocking image.


Liberals and Democrats in the post-Jon Stewart Age frequently fail to argue substantive points, but rather use the strategy of empty ad hominem attacks to insult conservatives without actually saying anything meaningful.


This tactic allows younger, groupthink-minded progressives to feel like they’re part of a fashionable crowd, in opposition to conservatives, while also appealing to the most base and vicious elements of human nature.
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