Month: February 2016

Cruz’s backers aren’t going to forget 


by digby

I just saw conservative movement icon Brent Bozell on TV and he was fit to be tied about Trump’s dominance in the campaign. He’s a Ted Cruz supporter, as so many of the real movement conservative leaders are, and he’s intensely frustrated that so many conservatives are voting for this charlatan.

As it happens I wrote about this for Salon this morning:

At this point, watching Donald Trump calling Ted Cruz the worst liar he’s ever seen and implying that he’s got a mental disorder doesn’t even phase the press. That’s just Trump being Trump. But it is noteworthy that Marco Rubio’s supposedly “high road” campaign is tarring Cruz with the same message. Even poor old Ben Carson gets in on the act, fulminating over Cruz’s alleged “dirty trick” in Iowa in which some of his campaign workers phoned into the caucuses with a bogus report that Carson was dropping out of the race and told them to vote for Cruz instead. (Carson did not lose the race because of this. He garnered only 9 percent of he vote to Cruz’s 27.6, Trump’s 24.3 and Rubio’s 23.1.)

Cruz was first fingered for alleged trickery for sending misleading flyers  in Iowa which earned a scolding from the Iowa Secretary of State. (It turned out that  Marco Rubio deployed something similar without controversy.) And in South Carolina there were flurries of accusations mostly aimed at Cruz for doing push polls and running dishonest ads. A pro-Cruz PAC ran robo-calls against Trump saying he was gay friendly and “tearing down our America.” (Those were probably balanced out by the pro-Trump white supremacist robo calls.)

Here’s one example of the kind of dirty campaigning that had the Rubio campaign crying foul:

How they do it in SC. Here’s @tedcruz mailer on @marcorubio pic.twitter.com/7VGjQ392Jo

— Michael Isikoff (@Isikoff) February 20, 2016

One of the criticisms of that mailer is that it’s “racially tinged” which seems to have meant that it implied Rubio is black which is the worst thing you can say about someone, apparently.

It wasn’t the only mailer that got the Rubio camp in a dither.  This one was very upsetting:

It’s a photoshopped picture so obvious it might as well be a cartoon rendering. It’s odd that people were so upset about it. Marco Rubio is a U.S. Senator and there are actual photographs all over the internet of him shaking hands with the president.

The reason the Rubio camp was upset about these mailers was because Cruz called attention to some areas in which Rubio agrees with President Obama. If nothing else, it’s telling that Donald Trump can call Cruz a “pussy” in front of thousands of people, but telling people your rival agrees with the man in the White House on even one issue is beyond the pale.

The Rubio campaign said Cruz ran the dirtiest race in South Carolina history. Let’s just say that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s hard to top the George W.Bush campaign’s vicious attacks on John McCain there in 2000, which included a weird whisper campaign about fathering a “black baby.” (His daughter was adopted from Bangladesh.) They accused his wife of being a drug addict and claimed that he’s slept with prostitutes and gave his wife venereal disease. They called him a traitor when he was a POW and claimed that he had been brainwashed by the North Vietnamese to destroy the Republican Party. The rumors were spread through anonymous flyer and push polls that could never be traced. The calls peaked about a week before the vote and McCain never recovered. Compared to that, Ted Cruz’s little flyers were child’s play.

This week, Cruz was hit once again with complaints that his spokesman Rick Tyler had passed around a video purporting to show Marco Rubio remarking to Ted Cruz’s father Rafael about the Bible: “Got a good book there, not many answers in it” In fact, Rubio had said it did have “a lot of answers in it.” Cruz, under increasing pressure, fired Tyler. And both Trump and Rubio promptly responded by saying Tyler was a fall guy.

Rubio added in his patented machine-gun rhetorical style:

“You are responsible for the culture you set in any organization that you run. Right now, Ted Cruz is in charge of his campaign. He is the head of his campaign. And if his campaign has created a culture of misleading people and saying things that aren’t true, and lies, he’s responsible for that.”

Yesterday, before the Nevada caucuses, Trump and Rubio came out with dire warnings to be careful of Cruz’s dastardly deeds. Trump said to watch out for paper ballots presumably doctored by Cruz. And the cunning Rubio has set up a “truth squad” for people to report Cruz’s purportedly “malicious rumors.” But as Dave Weigel of the Washington Post pointed out, these warnings were evidence free :

Nevada’s young caucuses, plagued in the past by drowsy vote-counting, have not been hotbeds of fraud. When a Trump warm-up speaker in Sparks told the crowd to ignore rumors that “Mr. Trump isn’t on the ballot,” audience members said it was the first they’d heard of this.

Yet in the final minutes before the vote, both the Trump campaign and Rubio campaign are trying to drive home the impression that Cruz is an unrepentant fraudster.

And that’s the point. We’ve discussed before how Cruz is reminiscent of an earlier conservative politician who suffered from the lack of a winning personality but had a surfeit of brains and ambition. As it happens, that politician was also renowned for dirty politics. His name was Richard Nixon.

It strikes me as no coincidence that Ted Cruz is being tarred with that same reputation. Tricky Dick and Dirty Ted, both cut from the same cloth.

None of this is to say that Ted Cruz is not playing hardball politics. This profile of his take-no-prisoners campaign manager Jeff Roe leaves no doubt that they are very serious about winning by any means necessary.  But that’s exactly what Ted Cruz’s constituents expect of him. The idea that his reputation as a hardball campaigner “damages his brand” presumes that his brand as is someone who plays by the rules and observes all the niceties. Nothing could be further from the truth. His “brand” is Tea Party revolutionary.

Ted Cruz was sent to Washington by Tea Party conservatives with orders to do whatever it took stop the Obama agenda, and he is one of the few who took that mission seriously. And Washington hates him for it. In fact, they hate him so much, they made sure that everyone in the media and everyone in the country knows how much they hate him, thus ensuring that he was denied establishment support for his presidential run. And his rivals have taken advantage of it by piggy-backing dirty tricks accusations on top of his tattered reputation.

At this writing, Cruz was once again neck-and-neck with Marco Rubio for second place in the Nevada Caucus, so he’s not quitting anytime soon. He remains the movement conservative guy. Glenn Beck was there in Las Vegas stumping for him, and he has the backing of many members of the talk radio right. They all know that the establishment’s disdain for Cruz is a disdain for them. Even if they come around to Trump in the end, they won’t forget it. If there’s anything left of the Republican Party once this presidential campaign is over, there is going to be a reckoning.

Lunatics running the asylum
by Tom Sullivan

The sooner America legalizes marijuana and collectively lights one up, the better. At the risk of sounding as if I did at this early hour, let’s look at the some of the lunatics running the asylum.

It is an article of the one, true, conservative faith that government must be run “like a business.” NC Gov. Pat McCrory and the state of North Carolina have a state Supreme Court date in May to settle whether an ALEC-inspired legislature can abscond with a city’s water system and turn it over to a regional authority — the first step, some believe, on the road to privatizing the public water supply’s operation and/or ownership. The experience of Flint, Michigan is sure to come up. So how’d that work out for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder? A former adviser explains (emphasis mine):

Dennis Schornack, who retired after serving more than three years as a senior adviser on transportation issues to Snyder during his first term, is the first current or former Snyder official to directly criticize the governor and his management style for contributing to the public health crisis.

Schornack said he still believes Snyder is an intelligent leader and “basically a good guy.” But, he said, decisions about Flint’s drinking water should have been dictated by science instead of finances and the bottom line.

“It’s sort of a single dimension for decision making; thinking that if it can’t be solved on a spreadsheet, it can’t be solved,” Schornack said in a telephone interview from Florida. He earlier served 12 years as a senior policy adviser to Republican Gov. John Engler and in between served six years on the International Joint Commission.

“Government is not a business … and it cannot be run like one,” Schornack said. “The people of Flint got stuck on the losing end of decisions driven by spreadsheets instead of water quality and public health. Having been a Snyder staffer, luckily in a spreadsheet-rich area like transportation, I lived the culture amidst its faults.”

Donald Trump is not politically incorrect. That is politically incorrect.

After stamping their feet, then waffling, then stamping their feet some more, Republican leaders in the Senate are all in on denying a hearing to any replacement Supreme Court Justice from President Obama. Public opinion is firmly on the president’s side. No matter. Forward into the breach:

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will not hold hearings or vote on any nominee to replace long-serving conservative Justice Antonin Scalia until after the next president takes office next January. Scalia died on Feb. 13.

McConnell, a Republican nemesis of Obama during the president’s seven years in office, said he even would refuse the standard courtesy of meeting with whomever Obama chooses. Under the U.S. Constitution, the Senate has the power to confirm or reject a president’s Supreme Court selection.

With the U.S. presidential election looming on Nov. 8, Republicans were aiming to allow the next president to fill Scalia’s vacancy, hoping a Republican will be elected.

Yeah, good luck with that. And should they lose? Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Charlie Pierce gives Obama some advice on on his next steps:

He finds the most ridiculously qualified candidate he can find among whatever demographic or social group is most disadvantageous to the Republicans, and he puts that candidate up as quickly as possible. He does event after event, with the candidate by his side. He campaigns for Senate candidates in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois, all places with vulnerable Republican incumbents, and he brings the nominee along with him.

Our old friend, voter-fraud fraudster Hans Von Spakovsky, believes the dead should still be able to vote
in the case of Antonin Scalia (IOKIYAR).

Donald Trump won the Nevada caucuses last night. No surprise. Except when Trump crashed a speech Glenn Beck gave on behalf of Ted Cruz. Trump gave one of his own.

Republican voters are not behaving as expected in the primary contests. “This is an electorate that does not care about what it is supposed to do,” writes Philip Bump. What’s driving Republican primary voters? Fear. So what’s new?

President Obama sent Congress a proposal yesterday for closing down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Republicans reacted as you might expect:

ICYMI this is what I think about @POTUS' plan to close #GITMO & send terrorists to the U.S. pic.twitter.com/5ceyu5I2tc— Pat Roberts (@SenPatRoberts) February 24, 2016

Finally, seeing America in distress, our neighbors to the north announce their Canadacy:

They may have something there.

Ben Carson, interrogation expert

by digby

Please make him stop…

Carson and CNN host Poppy Harlow were discussing GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s views on the effectiveness of torture when the retired neurosurgeon suggested the United States could use a “truth serum” instead.

“I believe there are a number of ways to extract information,” Carson said. “Including, you know, some medical ways of, you know, putting people into a less than conscious state which allows information to be extracted much more humanely.”

Harlow asked Carson to clarify what he meant by “medical ways,” so Carson put it in simpler terms.

“Well, the average person might understand it as truth serum,” he said. “But, you know, there are ways where you decrease a person’s conscious defenses and they might be much more willing to give up information.”

“What is truth serum?” Harlow asked. “What is that?”

“Sodium amytal,” Carson said. “There are a variety of different things we can use now. We’ve made some advances in that kind of science.”

No, not really. Sodium amytal has been around since the 1920s and is in the same old category of barbiturates like sodium pentothal they experimented with for decades as “truth serums” and they are as unreliable as ever.

Sodium pentothal — the original “truth serum” — was discovered in 1936 by Ernest H. Volwiler and Donalee L. Tabern working in Chicago at Abbott Laboratories. They were trying to create an injectable drug for use in general anesthesia. Their discovery was a success and had a huge impact on surgery. Sodium pentothal is still used today to knock out patients before they are given another, longer-lasting anesthetic to keep them unconscious during surgery. 

Sodium pentothal made surgery far less painful. It also has an interesting side effect. People under its influence lose their inhibitions and babble on about all sorts of things, leading to some amusing moments for surgical teams. This loss of inhibition gave a few researchers hope that the drug or something like it could be used to get the truth out of people in police stations, security interrogations or trials. 

But outside of Hollywood, no drug passes muster as a potion capable of getting accurately at the truth. People do get uninhibited and talk more freely, but they don’t necessarily stop lying or fantasizing. They also grow more compliant, tending to agree with those asking them leading questions. 

There is no solid evidence that what is said under the influence of a “truth” drug correlates reliably with the truth. For the most part, people yammer away. If anything, they behave as if they were drunk rather than diligently affirming the sober truth.

Why don’t these people ever listen to the actual experts on interrogation (like the FBI) who know that the only way to get reliable info is to gain a suspect’s trust. I guess it’s just not as fun to get information if you don’t use some kind of coercion or force to extract it against the person’s will. On the other hand, I guess we should be grateful that Carson isn’t endorsing torture and mayhem like the GOP front runner.

In Carson’s case it’s because he saw a movie from the 50s once and he read something in medical school at one time and thinks he knows what he’s talking about. It’s still disconcerting that a world renowned brain surgeon , a man who is clearly extremely well educated and highly accomplished could be so lame about everything but doing brain surgery. But he is.

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Money isn’t everything

by digby

If there’s one thing Trump’s run has made crystal clear it’s that money in politics doesn’t… er … Trump everything:

Marco Rubio’s Super PAC is advertising in eight states at $1.2 million, while Ted Cruz’s campaign is up with $185,000 in five states.

The eight Rubio states: Alabama ($52,000), Arkansas ($74,000), Georgia ($89,000), Oklahoma ($107,000), Tennessee ($150,000), Texas ($631,000), Vermont ($42,000) and Virginia ($91,000).

The five Cruz states: Alabama ($45,000), Arkansas ($12,000), Cruz ($67,000), Oklahoma ($28,000), Tennessee ($33,000).

And John Kasich’s Super PAC is spending a mere $35,000 in two Super Tuesday states – Massachusetts ($12,000) and Vermont ($23,000).

Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, hasn’t spent a single cent on ads in Super Tuesday states.

Obviously, it helps him to have his own money to spend on travel and staff although he’s collected several unsolicited millions from his fans.

Not to say that money has no effect on politics or campaigns, obviously. But if you look at the biggest spender in the race, Jeb Bush, and the lowest spender in the race, Donald Trump, you can see that it’s not dispositive. Money isn’t everything. Our world and the humans in it are lot more complicated than that.

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by digby

I never doubted this outcome. The only thing notable about this is the fact that their base mistrusts them so much it will not even allow them to pretend they care about institutional norms anymore:

Key Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee emerged from a closed door meeting in Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office Tuesday united in their determination not to consider any nominee to replace Antonin Scalia until the next president takes office. 

Tuesday was the first full day the Senate was back in session since Scalia’s death Feb. 13.
“We believe the American people need to decide who is going to make this appointment rather than a lame duck president,” said Majority Whip John Cornyn. 

When asked if they would start the process after the new president took office or if they would consider doing it in the lame duck session, Cornyn replied “No, after the next president is selected. That way the American people have a voice in the process.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham said that “there’s no use starting a process that’s not going to go anywhere and we are going to let the next president decide,” when asked why there would be no hearings.

There you have it.

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QOTD: The littlest Oathkeeper

by digby

Congressman Darrel Issa said it was up to U.S. military leaders to decide whether to follow Obama’s plan, which he said was unlawful.

“Are they going to obey an unlawful order, an unlawful order to move people from Guantanamo, an unlawful order to close the base?” 

Then he evoked the Trail of Tears:

“Remember the Trail of Tears was only possible, the murder of those Native Americans was only possible, because the military obeyed an order in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court,” he added. “So do I believe that the military may push back on the President if he’s given an unlawful order? Actually, I do. I can see flag officers resigning rather than obeying a clearly unlawful order.”

h/t to Rick Perlstein

Donald Trump, disco evangelist

by digby

Ben Domenech says that Donald Trump is the left’s fault because they fought for their own values and refused to accept evangelical theocracy:

Trump has been able to peel away so many evangelicals as his supporters, despite being an unchurched secularist with three wives who couldn’t tell a communion plate from an offering basket. It is because of the increasingly large portion of evangelicals who believe the culture wars are over, and they lost.

If you’re a conservative who thinks the culture wars are over (they’re never really over, of course), then you are a lot more open to the idea of a unprincipled blowhard who promises he’s got your back on political correctness. From the perspective of the southern evangelicals I’ve spoken to in South Carolina, they don’t have any qualms about admitting that Trump is not a good Christian. They have no illusions about his unbelief. The difference is that while they believe Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would be one more round of good soldiers for their cause, they think Donald Trump would be a tank.

Evangelicals tried for years to fight for the culture—to win the argument for their traditional views regarding marriage, family, and the value of human life. Now they want to fight on different ground: political correctness. And since Trump is the king of that—an ally who isn’t Jesus-y but says he’s with the Jesus people—he can tear off a third of that evangelical electorate without moderating any of his secularism.
Ever since the 1980s and the Moral Majority, evangelicals have been loyal to the Republican Party, giving their votes in return for promises on abortion, family, and other arenas of policy which promised them protection for their churches and their priorities. These policies were supposed to serve as a defense against losing the culture war. But for all this loyalty, evangelicals have little to show for it.
Republican judicial nominees have been a mixed bag at best. George W. Bush never reasserted the Reagan Rule on abortion funding. Roe v. Wade is still on the books. And religious liberty has been a line a surprising number of Republicans are unwilling to defend, lest they be called bigots.

Some evangelicals now believe this approach is a failure at best, and a lie at worst. On the one hand, that inspires a desire for revenge—on the other, for just walking away. Both tendencies aid the Trump phenomenon.

He is not one of them—they know that. But they believe he is for them at a time when their faith and beliefs have become politically incorrect. They know he doesn’t care if he’s called a bigot, and that is a very powerful thing in today’s political fray. They don’t care if he’s a good person—they care that he’s a warrior for everything at odds with the elite opinion of the day… which now includes them.

Or maybe they’re just unreconstructed bigots, just like Donald Trump, and they’ve finally found a candidate who doesn’t dogwhistle it and instead says it right out loud. Maybe their evangelical identity isn’t about religion at all. Maybe it’s a about tribalism.


Sarah Posner takes a different tack in this piece about Trump’s appeal to the evangelical voters’ who buy into prosperity theology that I think is a little bit more intriguing. I mentioned this in pieces about Cruz vs Trump in South Carolina over the past couple of weeks noting that the evangelical vote is actually split (like everything else in the GOP coalition) between the true believers and …. something else.

Posner explains what that is:

Sen. Ted Cruz of (R-Tex.) seems to be the quintessential evangelical candidate: a pastor’s son who can strut a campaign rally stage as though it’s a revival and who pledged to inspire millions of supposedly apathetic evangelicals to vote for a resurgent Christian America.

Cruz amassed the endorsements of more than 300 pastors and other religious leaders in South Carolina. TheBlaze founder Glenn Beck, one of Cruz’s most high-profile supporters, told voters at a South Carolina rally that the senator was “raised for this hour” by the “hand of divine providence.” Cruz was supposed to be a messianic figure to save Christian America from its downward secularist spiral.

But Trump, whose Bible has seemed like more of prop than a campaign-animating principle, understands other impulses of evangelical voters. This intuition also enabled him to best Cruz, 30 to 13 percent, among non-evangelical voters in South Carolina.

That impulse, which is Trumpism in a nutshell, is the magical thinking of how Americans get rich, whether it’s by surviving a reality television show, getting lucky with an investment, winning the lottery or being blessed by God.

Trump is arguably the candidate most resembling a televangelist.

For many evangelicals, Pentecostals and charismatic Christians, magical thinking has found its expression through the prosperity gospel, much to the consternation of Christians who consider it a heresy and a fraud. A uniquely American contribution to the evolution of Christianity in the modern age, the prosperity gospel teaches that God wants believers to be rich.

It’s also called the health and wealth gospel: Its adherents believe that God blesses the faithful with great wealth, keeps their health robust and cures the faithful of every malady. Successful televangelists boast of revelations received directly from God and of their ability to produce miracles.

If you’re poor or if you’re sick, that’s a sign of a lack of faith. Or in Trump’s parlance, a loser.

Despite countless exposés of prosperity televangelists’ excesses — including Creflo Dollar’s pleas for his followers to fund his $60 million Gulfstream airplane, Benny Hinn’s phony faith healings, and Kenneth Copeland’s luxurious homes, cars and planes — televangelism still thrives in America. It is, according to the scholar Kate Bowler, who wrote a book about it, “one of the most popular forms of American Christianity.” It has permeated evangelical culture, through television, megachurches, conferences and books that are found not just in Christian bookstores but also at the checkout line at supermarkets and in airports. It is everywhere.

Election Day exit polls typically ask voters whether they are “born-again or evangelical” or not. That’s not particularly helpful in discerning the varieties of evangelicals in America, or in understanding whether there are trends in their Republican presidential preferences.

But Trump’s style is nonetheless a marker of how prosperity theology has pervaded political culture as well. Trump, who was raised on the power-of-positive-thinking theology of the late Norman Vincent Peale, has fully assimilated the supernatural appeal of the prosperity message. He doesn’t have an economic policy platform. Instead, he touts his own wealth and success as the evidence of how he will “make America great again.”

Every presidential candidate, of course, relies in part on aspirational oratory. But Trump’s stump speeches are particularly devoid of policy proposals, focusing instead on his celebrity. When Trump boasts that his great deal-making skills will make him a great president, he’s telling his supporters to just have faith that a victor will keep replicating his victories. “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he says, as he jets to campaign stops in a luxury private jet with 24-carat gold-plated seat belts and faucets.

Copeland’s television program is called “The Believer’s Voice of Victory.” Winning. Copeland was one of a roomful of televangelists who laid hands on Trump last year, thanking God “for a bold man, a strong man and an obedient man.” If you’ve been inside the world of the prosperity gospel, you know how obedience — meaning to a preacher like Copeland — is central to how these televangelists make money.

I called them disco-evangelists. Posner’s article is well worth reading in its entirely. She’s on to something. And, by the way, the other elements of Trump’s ppeal to people who are not suckers for rich evangelical preachers and the suckers for right win talk radio who also like The Donald’s showbiz style

Anyway, if you haven’t read Elmer Gantry lately, now’s a good time to pick it up. Some things never change.

Brother Gantry was shaking hands all around. His sanctifying ordination, or it might have been his summer of bouncing from pulpit to pulpit, had so elevated him that he could greet them as impressively and fraternally as a sewing-machine agent. He shook hands with a good grip, he looked at all the more aged sisters as though he were moved to give them a holy kiss, he said the right things about the weather, and by luck or inspiration it was to the most acidly devout man in Boone County that he quoted a homicidal text from Malachi.

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They can’t win with only white votes


by digby

I wrote about why immigration reform is such a huge issue for the GOP at Salon today:

It must strike many average Americans as odd that the Republicans are so vehement about immigration right now, since undocumented labor is actually dramatically down from former years. Of course there have always been nativist impulses in America that wax and wane in intensity. And certainly the undercurrent of conservative unrest over Latino workers has been growing for some time as undocumented laborers migrated to areas within the U.S. to which they had not traditionally traveled.

A tentative toot of the victory horn?

by Gaius Publius

Picking up on something digby wrote yesterday (be sure to check out the graph), it appears Donald Trump may think the race is his, barring the unforeseen.

CNN, after Trump’s South Carolina victory:

Trump said he expects to win enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination before the party’s convention in July.

“I
don’t think we’re going to have a convention, a brokered convention. I
think it’s unlikely. I think I’m doing better than that,” he said.

He
laid out his own road map to general election victory, pinpointing two
states — Michigan and New York — that he said he’d sweep into the
Republican column. 

“I’ll win states that aren’t in play. I’ll win states that Republicans don’t even think of,” Trump said.

He’s confident, but not overly:

Trump acknowledged he could still lose the GOP nominating contest —
“certainly nobody’s unstoppable,” he said — and launched another
broadside at establishment politics, saying that “the day I decided to
run, which was June 16, I became an outsider.”

For all the bombast, there’s a measuredness about his manner that should be concerning. He’s worked with the bigs his whole adult life, and he’s not a fool at it.

He thinks Clinton has a similar lock on the nomination, by the way.

Donald
Trump’s general election prediction: He’ll face Hillary Clinton, and
the two will bring out “the greatest turnout in history.”

“Frankly,
if she gets indicted, that’s the only way she’s going to be stopped. I
think it’s going to be Hillary and myself,” the Republican real estate
mogul said Sunday in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of
the Union.”

At Tom Sullivan pointed out, turnout will turn out to be key. Now I need a fainting couch…

GP

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An “existential sense of betrayal”
by Tom Sullivan

Democratic leaders have finally figured out that “The Bern” has “tapped into the zeitgeist of college-age voters, a key demographic for the party in a presidential election year,” Politico reported yesterday. In spite of Hillary Clinton’s momentum coming out of her Nevada caucuses win on Saturday, Sanders’ unexpected strength and fundraising ability has Democrats studying his message and trying to figure out how to incorporate it into their own:

… Democrats, particularly in the House, are actively strategizing about how they can reach the young, white voters who propelled Sanders to victory in New Hampshire and a near win in Iowa. And if Sanders can rocket out of obscurity to challenge a political heavyweight like Clinton, they admit it would be wise for Democrats to try and incorporate his most successful messages.

“I think Bernie Sanders has a very positive message,” Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared at a recent party meeting in Baltimore, echoing comments she’s made elsewhere. “It’s about fairness, it’s about opportunity. … I’m very proud of the way Sen. Sanders has expanded the universe of young people especially interested in the political process.”

Still, the progressive love for Sanders is something of a catch-22 for House Democrats. The majority of Democrats in the House are liberal but the party needs to win support from blue collar and moderate voters to retake seats in swing districts.

The catch is that Donald Trump himself is doing a pretty good job of appealing to blue collar workers. So while they are at it, the DCCC brain trust might want to examine Trump’s message as well. The xenophobia and racism is so flagrant and offensive that they might be missing deeper cues. National Review contributor J.D. Vance took up that task for USA Today:

What unites Trump’s voters is a sense of alienation from America’s wealthy and powerful. People with Ivy League degrees lord over our business and political institutions, yet literally zero graduates of my high school class attended an Ivy League undergraduate college. People in my hometown voted for President Reagan — for many, like my grandpa, he was their first Republican — because he promised that tax cuts would bring higher wages and new jobs. It seemed he was right, so we voted for the next Republican promising tax cuts and job creation, George W. Bush. He wasn’t right. We’ve seen little in the way of higher wages in nearly 20 years.

Politicians of both parties told us that free trade with Asia and Latin America would spur economic growth, and maybe it did somewhere else. In our towns, though, factories continue shutting down or moving overseas. We might have sympathy for the Mexican immigrant trying to make a better life for his family, but many see those immigrants primarily as competition for an ever dwindling supply of jobs. We watch our sons go to war, disagree with the rationale for sending them, loathe the men who ordered them to battle and then, when the veterans come home, beg and plead with the local VA to ensure they have access to proper care.

Ted Cruz appeals to more well-to-do, married evangelicals, Vance writes, people who, whatever their social complaints, have their lives essentially intact. Trump’s voters? Not so much:

Trump’s voters, instead, wear an almost existential sense of betrayal. He relies on unmarried voters, individuals who rarely attend church services and those without much higher education. Many of these Trump voters have abandoned the faith of their forefathers and myriad social benefits that come with it. Their marriages have failed, and their families have fractured. The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs, but also a sense of purpose and community. Their kids (and themselves) might be more likely to die from a heroin overdose than any other group in the country.

For years, Democrats puzzled that such people voted Republican when it was so obvious that “trickle down,” and culture war issues were just bright, shiny objects Republicans used to win their votes. Trump doesn’t need a bright, shiny object to hold their attention. He is the bright, shiny object. Trump knows how to yank their chains, but it is unlikely he knows how to make them whole or really cares to.

It is not clear enough that Democrats do either. If I were a blue-collar worker, Sanders’ focus on college-age voters and Democrats’ embrace of neoliberal trade deals still leave me feeling unheard and under-represented. Democrats slapped their foreheads for decades and wondered when working-class voters would finally figure out they were being played and come to the light. But the Democratic Party grew tired of waiting, and rather than fight harder for the working class, bought into the Republicans’ game, chased the money, and dimmed our lamps in doing so. Well, this is the moment Democrats have long waited for. The door is open. Will we step through it or let Trump, the modern Pied Piper, take American workers?

(h/t HS)