Month: February 2016

The grift goes on


by digby

So Fiorina and Christie have both dropped out. But one dogged campaigner will stay in the race until the money dries up completely:

Despite a disappointing finish in New Hampshire, Ben Carson says he is not feeling any pressure to exit the Republican race, predicting a strong finish in South Carolina.

“Not getting any pressure from any of our millions of supporters. You know, I’m getting a lot of pressure to make sure I stay in the race,” he said in an interview on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. “You know, they’re reminding me that I’m here because I responded to their imploring me to get involved. And I respect that and I’m not just going to walk away from the millions of people who are supporting me.”

Carson finished behind Carly Fiorina and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday night, both of whom had suspended their respective campaigns by Wednesday evening. The retired neurosurgeon won three delegates with his fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1, but he drew a blank in New Hampshire, winning just 2.3 percent of the votes in the Republican primary.

“I think I can win South Carolina,” he told CNN. “The people here align extremely well with the kind of philosophies that I have, and I think you’ll see the evidence of that.”

If I were a political vendor in South Carolina I’d be very careful about extending credit to this campaign. It’s very doubtful they’ll ever get paid.

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Chris Christie sits down and shuts up

by digby

Another one bites the dust:

I ran for president with the message that the government needs to once again work for the people, not the people work for the government. And while running for president I tried to reinforce what I have always believed – that speaking your mind matters, that experience matters, that competence matters and that it will always matter in leading our nation. That message was heard by and stood for by a lot of people, but just not enough and that’s ok. I have both won elections that I was supposed to lose and I’ve lost elections I was supposed to win and what that means is you never know what will happen. That is both the magic and the mystery of politics – you never quite know when which is going to happen, even when you think you do. And so today, I leave the race without an ounce of regret. I’m so proud of the campaign we ran, the people that ran it with me and all those who gave us their support and confidence along the way. Mary Pat and I thank you for the extraordinary display of loyalty, friendship, understanding and love.

I dunno who paid him to take down Rubio, but it was worth every penny.

Christie was supposed to be the dude who took on the prude. It didn’t work out that way. Trump made Christie look like one of those kindergarten teaches Christie likes to scream at on the stump by comparison.

I can’t say I’ll miss him. He’s one of the most repulsive characters in politics. And that’s saying a lot in a world that includes people like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

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How Trump wins the nomination

by digby

You might be wondering how Donald Trump gets the GOP nomination without having a majority of the GOP behind him. This article by Sam Wang from a couple of months ago explained that it’s all about the delegate math. The Republicans have put in place a byzantine system that was supposedly designed to keep long drawn out 2012 battles from happening and it’s resulting in something very, very different.

I’ll leave it to you to read the piece with all the charts and graphs explaining the mechanics. But the upshot is that if he can keep his 35-40% he can win it. Wang concludes his piece with this:

If no candidate gets to an outright majority, the convention becomes genuinely suspenseful. Party insiders should not necessarily be consoled by this idea. Delegates are usually selected for loyalty to their candidate. If current trends were to persist, the convention floor in Cleveland would be filled with close to 1,000 Trump delegates. These delegates won’t be from the usual pool of party loyalists. They seem like an unpromising starting point for elites to work their magic.

Is it wrong for me to hope so strongly for this shitshow?

Yes, actually it is. You don’t play around with the presidency and these people are all very dangerous, especially Trump and Cruz who are the most likely to come out the winners in my opinion. The stakes are just too high to be cavalier about handing power to fanatics.

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Bye Bye Ms Fiorina

by digby

She’s out:

This campaign was always about citizenship—taking back our country from a political class that only serves the big, the powerful, the wealthy, and the well connected. Election after election, the same empty promises are made and the same poll-tested stump speeches are given, but nothing changes. I’ve said throughout this campaign that I will not sit down and be quiet. I’m not going to start now. While I suspend my candidacy today, I will continue to travel this country and fight for those Americans who refuse to settle for the way things are and a status quo that no longer works for them.

Our Republican Party must fight alongside these Americans as well. We must end crony capitalism by fighting the policies that allow it to flourish. We must fix our festering problems by holding our bloated, inept government bureaucracy accountable. Republicans must stand for conservative principles that lift people up and recognize all Americans have the right to fulfill their God-given potential.
To young girls and women across the country, I say: do not let others define you. Do not listen to anyone who says you have to vote a certain way or for a certain candidate because you’re a woman. That is not feminism. Feminism doesn’t shut down conversations or threaten women. It is not about ideology. It is not a weapon to wield against your political opponent. A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses and uses all her God-given gifts. And always remember that a leader is not born, but made. Choose leadership.

As I have said to the many wonderful Americans I have met throughout this campaign, a leader is a servant whose highest calling is to unlock potential in others. I will continue to serve in order to restore citizen government to this great nation so that together we may fulfill our potential.

I think we’ll all remember her most for this, don’t you?

A feminist for our time.

Jeb’s big move

by digby

You simply will not believe this:

Jeb Bush is already laying the groundwork for a brutal South Carolina campaign against establishment rivals John Kasich and Marco Rubio.

In an internal memo circulated late Tuesday evening, the campaign distributed talking points to top campaign aides and surrogates, highlighting lines of attack they plan to take against both candidates.

The memo suggests that Kasich, who campaigned extensively in New Hampshire, does not have a realistic path to winning the Republican nomination.

“Governor Kasich has little to no chance in South Carolina, and does not have a national organization that can compete,” the memo says. “Kasich has consistently supported gutting the military and has no viable path in the Palmetto State.”

The memo also outlines hard-hitting avenues of attack against Rubio, who for months has been in Bush’s crosshairs: “Senator Rubio has lost momentum and has been exposed as completely unprepared to be president,” it says, repeating an argument that Bush has used frequently against Rubio.

It adds: “Rubio has demonstrated no respect for the nomination process and expects this to be a coronation.”

The memo also claims, “Jeb also did well because he remains the only GOP candidate willing to take on Donald Trump and willing to stand up for conservative values.”

“As we saw in the last week, this race is increasingly coming down to who has a proven record and who is best prepared to be Commander-in-Chief, and that is not an unserious reality television star or backbench senator who has never made a tough decision.”

What planet are these people living on? What’s it going to take for them to realize that there are two frontrunner and neither of them are named Kasich or Rubio?

After all this, Jeb is training his firepower on those two pipsqueaks when it’s Cruz and trump who are running away with this thing. And if he thinks they can’t compete in South Carolina, he’s even stupider than we think.

That’s just sad. but I guess it’s good for the economy. All that billionaire money goes to line the pockets of GOP functionaries and local media so I guess you could call it a sort of stimulus — like paying people to dig holes and then fill them up again.

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About last night …

by digby

I wrote about last night’s GOP primary for Salon this morning:

“We’re going to make America great again but we’re going to do it the old fashioned way. We’re going to beat China, Japan, beat Mexico at trade. We’re going to beat all of these countries that are taking so much of our money away from us on a daily basis. It’s not going to happen anymore.”

There’s more at the link.

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Experience: 0 percent
by Tom Sullivan

By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

President George W. Bush was not a mistake. The conservative movement worked for decades to put him there, or someone else just like him. That movement conservatives didn’t like it when they got what they wanted seems not to have sunk in.

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address. The movement had its marching orders and set off double time. By the end of the Reagan years, Rush Limbaugh had arrived to bring the message daily into millions of households across the country. It was a Two Minutes Hate that lasted for hours. By the mid-nineties it was, “America Held Hostage: Day (Number of days in Clinton’s term).” Government is the problem. Government cannot be trusted. Put us Republicans in charge and we’ll prove it. They did.

Even after the September 11 attacks, it persisted. Only now we were a country with a case of collective PTSD (that has yet to subside). Bush was president when the towers fell, but somehow it was not “on his watch.” Then he and Dick Cheney lied the country into invading Iraq where the promised WMDs never appeared. They proved the case that government is the problem. Despite the fact that many a good conservative will never admit error — Conservatism never fails; it can only be failed — conservatives knew they’d been had. The sense that the government cannot do anything right (except kick other country’s asses) deepened.

Then a frustrated but hopeful American public elected a black president. The economy collapsed from financial fraud of biblical proportions and Wall Street got a bailout, yet the “malefactors of great wealth” never faced justice. They showered in gold while turning families out into the street and the only trickle down was to grasping politicians. Mission accomplished.
Reagan’s case was made. The nativists grew restless.

And here we are. One of their kind, Donald Trump, has won the Republican primary in New Hampshire and appears on track to win the Republican nomination for president in 2016. With zero percent experience as a legislator or in government service.

“When Americans have more faith in the military than the political class, democracy is in trouble,” read the subhead on Glenn Reynolds’ piece last month in USA Today. A longtime purveyor of “government is the problem,” Reynolds is now worried by his own partisans, and with reason. Reynolds knows his readers:

If this were just one-sided anger at the Obama Administration, then it would be troubling, but not dangerous. But if, as seems plausible, a majority of Americans don’t think a Republican administration would represent a substantial improvement, then we’ve got a bigger problem. If voters think that they can’t vote their way out of a problem, then they may look to other solutions.

A much-hyped YouGov poll from last fall found that 29% of Americans could imagine supporting a military coup. That poll probably overstated popular support — it didn’t ask if people favored a coup right now, just whether they could imagine supporting one, including in the instance of the government violating the Constitution — but there was also this, as Newser reported: “Some 71% said military officers put the interests of the country ahead of their own interests, while just 12% thought the same about members of Congress.“

NBC News examined a Pew poll back in November. It revealed the lowest levels of confidence in government in a half century:

Just one month after 9/11, 60 percent of Americans said they could trust the government. But confronted with the Iraq War and economic uncertainty, trust began to decline. By July 2007, it had fallen to 24 percent. Since then, the survey found that public trust remains at historically low levels.

Distrust of government also varies along party lines. Twenty-six percent of Democrats say they can trust the federal government nearly always or most of the time, compared with just 11 percent of Republicans. Since President Obama took office in 2009, Democrats have expressed greater trust in government than Republicans.

Pessimism over politics has pervaded the public’s perceptions in a number of ways. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that on issues that matter to them, their side loses more often than it wins. Even for millennials, the future seems bleak: only about four-in-ten adults younger than 30 say they have “quite a lot” of confidence in the nation’s future.

The poll results are here.

On the Democratic side last night, millennials in New Hampshire chose an anti-establishment candidate, Bernie Sander, by over 3 to 2.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from December yielded similar results:

Perhaps most vexing for the dozen or so candidates vying to succeed President Barack Obama, the poll indicates widespread skepticism about the government’s ability to solve problems, with no significant difference in the outlook between Republicans and Democrats.

“They can’t even seem to get together and pass anything that’s of any importance,” said Doris Wagner, an 81-year-old Republican from Alabama who said she’s “not at all confident” about seeing solutions in 2016. “It’s so self-serving what they do,” said Wagner, who called herself a small-government conservative.

In Texas, Democrat Lee Cato comes from a different political perspective but reached a similar conclusion. She allowed for “slight” confidence, but no more. The 71-year-old bemoaned a system of “lobbyists paid thousands upon thousands of dollars to get Congress to do what they want” for favored industry. “They aren’t doing anything for you and me,” she said.

In Donald Trump, Republicans have reaped what they’ve sown. After 25 years of Clinton smears, Hillary Clinton has gotten caught in the fallout. Plus, whatever her lefty bona fides, if transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street groups come out, she’s toast with Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession and face life in an unforgiving, metastasized capitalism.

It’s an anti-establishment electorate out there. Buckle up.

In honor of the past frontrunner Ben Carson



by digby

I already miss him.

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Rubio melts under the spotlight

by digby

My God, are people really saying that Marco Rubio’s nervous tic is him trying to be consciously poetic? Yes they are:

C’mon. Repeating phrases to build a theme is a common device in the very best of political rhetoric pic.twitter.com/VKd9c4ujDB

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 9, 2016

There is a specific term in rhetoric for what Rubio was doing in his extemp remarks tonight. It’s called “Anaphora.” Look it up.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) February 9, 2016

Uhm no. As I wrote in this piece for Salon, this is in keeping with his other weird nervous tic he cannot seem to resist doing in public, particularly when he’s stressed: the water thing. I mean, he did that when he was on national television rebutting the State of the Union!

He’s got some kind of issue.  I doubt that in and of itself it’s disqualifying. But when you combine it with his general inexperience and his lack of gravitas it’s a problem. You can’t show that kind of lack of control over what you say and how you act in public and be president.

Anyway, here’s Jonathan Chait on why that particularly stupid argument about his “poetry” is daft:

Okay, I looked it up. Anaphora is the “deliberate repetition of the first part of the sentence in order to achieve an artistic effect.” For instance, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Or, “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air …”

Repetition of the first part of a sentence is a poetic device. Here is what Rubio said:

We are taking our message to families that are struggling to raise their children in the 21st century because, as you saw, Jeanette and I are raising our four children in the 21st century, and we know how hard it’s become to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats.

In the 21st century, it’s becoming harder than ever to instill in your children the values they teach in our homes and in our church instead of the values that they try to ram down our throats in the movies, in music, in popular culture.

That is not anaphora, because it is not the repetition of the first part of the sentence. This important difference explains why Dickens did not write, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and why Churchill did not say, “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, and we shall fight in … France.”

Nor is it part of some poetic device that makes sense if you watch the context of the speech, which I did, and which is just Rubio cycling through his standard stump lines rather than repeating them for some kind of literary effect.

And this is why Rubio visibly hesitates when he is about to say “throats” for the second time. It is the horrified panic of a candidate who realizes he has just done the one thing he desperately needs at this moment not to do.

And when you look at his glitch on Saturday it’s even more obvious. He wasn’t giving some soaring speech. He was responding to Chris Christie’s accusation that he only spoke in soundbites by repeating his soundbites! There wasn’t even the slightest bit of poetry in any of it.

This is silly. Rubio has an issue. Maybe he’s too sped up — too much caffeine or something — and his brain gets ahead of his mouth. But he’s been giving speeches daily for many, many months now and it’s downright weird that this is happening at a time when he was on the brink of success. At his greatest moments of scrutiny, Rubio blows it. This is a problem.

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New Hampshire’s xenophobe voters get another shot

by digby

I wrote a little bit about Trump and New Hampshire for Salon today:

Mr. Buchanan revels in controversy. But as he assails illegal immigration as an “invasion” and refers to Mexicans en masse as “Jose,” his critics are accusing him of taking controversy a step too far. They say Mr. Buchanan is speaking in code, using xenophobic images like those or anti-Semitic references to excite bigots without alienating mainstream voters…

Trying to shout down a heckler in Gila Bend on Friday, for example, Mr. Buchanan said of illegal immigrants: “They’ve got no right just because you have a lousy government down there to walk across the borders of the United States of America, because this is my country.”

But Marciano Murillo, 18, a native-born American whose father was a naturalized illegal immigrant, replied: “They help your economy as well as any American here helps it.”

Mr. Buchanan shot back:”They’ve got no right to break our laws and break into our country and go on welfare, and some of them commit crimes.”

 “There isn’t any name in American politics Pat Buchanan hasn’t been called,” he told the crowd. “Not one. But let me tell you something. I’m not intimidated. I won’t back down. I’ll stand my ground, you’ve got my word. No matter what they say about me, I will defend the borders of the United States. I will stop this massive illegal immigration cold. Period, paragraph.”

In an interview on Friday night, Mr. Buchanan rejected the idea that he rhetorically winks and nods to bigots. “It’s silly,” he said. “There are people out there with anxieties and concerns about their future and their children’s future. What I’m saying is, ‘Don’t turn your back on politics. Don’t despair.’ I’m offering them something besides the back of my hand.”

“When I raise my hand to take that oath of office your New World Order comes crashing down.”