Wednesday Open Thread [5.27.15]

First Read: “By itself, making money shouldn’t be an issue for Bill and Hillary Clinton; after all, so many of our past presidents have been wealthy. By itself, Bill Clinton having a shell LLC wouldn’t be an issue either. But when you add the two together, you see that the Clintons have a Mitt Romney problem on their hands — wealth and ‘otherness’ that voters might not be able to relate to, especially when the likes of Bernie Sanders are campaigning against wealth.”

“Of course, there’s one BIG difference between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney: Romney wanted to cut taxes for the wealthy, while Hillary likely wants to raise them and eliminate tax loopholes benefitting the well-off. As the Clintons have said before, people like them should be paying more in taxes. And you probably won’t hear that rhetoric from the eventual GOP nominee.”

The voters won’t care. They only care when someone who is wealthy wants to cut taxes for him so as to further enrich himself at the expense of the voters. If a candidate who is wealthy wants to raise taxes on himself or herself while at the same providing benefits and services to the voter as a result, the voters will lap that right up. Remember the Kennedy’s. They were fabulously wealthy. But also liberal.

To get elected as a rich person in this country, you better be a liberal Democrat.

Politico: “Catholic Republicans are developing a pope problem. Earlier this month, Francis recognized Palestinian statehood. This summer, he’s going to issue an encyclical condemning environmental degradation. And in September, just as the GOP primary race heats up, Francis will travel to Washington to address Congress on climate change.”

“Francis may be popular with the general public, but key Republican primary constituencies — hawks, climate-change skeptics and religious conservatives, including some Catholics, are wary of the pope’s progressivism.”

“These people are so greedy, they’re so out of touch with reality. They think they own the world…I’m sorry to have to tell them, they live in the United States, they benefit from the United States, we have kids who are hungry in this country. We have people who are working two, three, four jobs, who can’t send their kids to college. Sorry, you’re all going to have to pay your fair share of taxes.”

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in an interview with CNBC, on Wall Street executives.

Steve Kornacki: “The scale of the challenge Bernie Sanders faces is well-established. In Hillary Clinton, he will square off against the most overwhelming non-incumbent front-runner either party has seen since the dawn of the modern nominating process. And while the odds that he’ll actually defeat her are vanishingly slim, he may nonetheless be better-positioned than any other Clinton challenger to at least make her break a sweat.”

First Read: “For political historians out there, think of Sanders as a potential Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy’s ability to gain traction against LBJ drove LBJ out in 1968 and sparked more Dems to run. If Sanders gets enough traction to actually knock off Clinton in an early state, then Katie bar the door.”

Jonathan Chait: “Indeed, the striking fact about the Republican Party is how little it has questioned Bush’s economic program. The central tenets of Bush-era economic doctrine remain as firmly entrenched as ever. All the Republican economic proposals combine deep tax cuts, higher defense spending, and a general refusal to accept that revenues must bear some long-term relationship to likely outlays.”

“The party’s disposition toward Bush’s Iraq War has attracted deep (and warranted) scrutiny. Its disposition toward Bush’s economic policies has not. Despite their bellicose rhetoric, none of the Republican candidates are actually proposing to recapitulate his regime-change policy, in Iraq or elsewhere. It is in domestic policy where Bush-era dogma remains completely unreconstructed.”

The Miami Herald, meanwhile, argues against sending in US troops to fight ISIS:

Instead of using the defeat as an excuse to recommit U.S. ground troops to the fight, as war hawks such as Sen. John McCain are urging, this should be a moment to find out how much Iraqis are willing to do for themselves. Ultimately, it’s their country and their fight.

Consider: If the United States is willing to step into the fray every time the Iraqi government is threatened, why should Iraq’s people make the sacrifices and political compromises necessary to defeat a persistent and bloodthirsty enemy? Critics of the Obama administration’s policy on Iraq who claim the United States “abandoned” Iraq are way off base. U.S. forces spent more than a decade fighting in that country — at a cost of some 36,000 dead and wounded, not to mention trillions of dollars — and worked hard to lay the groundwork for a prosperous future built on traditional Iraqi values and an amicable relationship between Sunnis and Shiites.

The departure of American troops was as orderly as such things can be, and the result of a painful process of negotiation with Iraq’s government. If Iraqis haven’t been able to get their act together, it’s hardly America’s fault. And it’s doubtful that the infusion of another U.S. infantry division would make a significant or permanent difference. Any administration that disregarded the pitfalls and added a small contingent of troops would soon find itself mired in mission creep and facing urgent calls to do even more.