Friday, January 22, 2016
Who had the worst week in Washington? Hillary Clinton.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Donald Trump is poised for the strongest primary performance in modern history
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
Campaigner-in-Chief Bill Clinton Gives a Worrisome Speech in Iowa
www.bloomberg.com
GOP Consultant Rick Wilson to MSNBC: Trump Supporters ‘Childless Single Men Who Masturbate to Anime’
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.Follow Breitbart.tv on Twitter@BreitbartVideo
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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