E. J. Dionne, Jr. provides an astute observation about the Trump phenomenon in a global context: “Trumpism does have its uniquely American characteristics. Not many places would turn a loudmouthed real estate tycoon first into a television celebrity and then into a (temporarily, at least) front-running presidential candidate…a gift to us all from a raucous entrepreneurial culture that does not hold bad taste against someone as long as he is genuinely gifted at self-promotion…Trump is a symptom of a much wider problem in Western democracies. In country after country, traditional, broadly based parties and their politicians face scorn. More voters than usual seem tired of carefully focus-grouped public statements, deftly cultivated public personas and cautiously crafted political platforms that are designed to move just the right number of voters in precisely the right places to cast a half-hearted vote for a person or a party.”
Jonathan Chait: “It is tempting to treat the lack of specifics in the Republican health-care plans as a problem of details to be filled it. But it is not a side problem. It is the entire problem. They will not finance real insurance for the people who have gotten it under Obamacare, nor will they face up to the actual costs they’re willing to impose on people. The party is doctrinally opposed to every available method to make insurance available to people who can’t afford it. They have spent six years promising to come up with an alternative plan, and they haven’t done it, because they can’t.”
Indeed. And it is because they do not believe healthcare is a right. They believe it is a privilege for those who can afford it. If you are poor and sick, then you die. If you are rich and sick, then you don’t. That is the Republican healthcare plan.
Fired HP CEO Carly Fiorina wants to get rid of the minimum wage. Because running the only company she had run into the ground was not enough.
Nate Silver on Hillary’s odds of being the Democratic nominee:
“Personally, I give Clinton about an 85 percent chance of becoming the Democratic nominee. That’s a pinch higher than betting markets, which put her chances at 75 to 80 percent.”
“But wait — wasn’t Clinton ‘inevitable’ in 2008 too? Not to nearly the same extent. Her lead in the polls is considerably larger this time around, her edge in the endorsement race is much greater, and her opponents are weaker than Barack Obama and John Edwards were. If you set a lower threshold for ‘inevitability’ and included Clinton’s 2008 campaign in your equation, you’d probably also need to include winning campaigns like Romney in 2012 and Mondale in 1984, in which case the front-runners would be six-for-seven — an 86 percent success rate, which is about where I’d put Clinton’s chances now.”
“In fact, Gore is the only non-incumbent in the modern era to have swept all 50 states. (Two incumbents, Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, also lost some states.) More often, candidates similar to Clinton have lost Iowa or New Hampshire, along with a few other states, before consolidating their support and eventually winning fairly easily.”
The bottom line is that Clinton is about where you should have expected her to be by now if you didn’t buy the earlier hype and figured a Democratic challenger would emerge to take advantage of (a) unhappiness with Clinton and Obama among white progressives in the early states and (b) the desire of many Clinton supporters to “keep her honest” via left-bent pressure. The popularity she brought into the cycle (largely a product of a “honeymoon” period following her service as Secretary of State) was sure to erode. After all, her last name is “Clinton” and most of the media stereotypes about her are too deeply embedded to change.
Washington Post on the fringe GOP ideas that are now their platform: “The ideas once languished at the edge of Republican politics, confined to think tanks and no-hope bills on Capitol Hill. To solve the problem of illegal immigration, truly drastic measures were necessary: Deport the undocumented en masse. Seize the money they try to send home. Deny citizenship to their U.S.-born children.”
“Now, all of those ideas have been embraced by Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, who has followed up weeks of doomsaying about illegal immigrants with a call for an unprecedented crackdown.”
And those ideas would wreak havoc on society. If not destroy it entirely.
Despite his nativist rhetoric, Mr. Trump may grasp the staggering economic and social havoc that mass deportation would wreak. Hence his offhand comment, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he’d “bring them back rapidly, the good ones.”
According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 87 percent of the United States’ undocumented immigrants — some 10 million people — have no serious criminal record. If those turn out to qualify as Mr. Trump’s “good ones,” what purpose would be served by deporting them only to “bring them back rapidly”?
What Mr. Trump proposes is nothing less than manufacturing a humanitarian upheaval on a scale rivaling the refugee crisis in Syria. Notwithstanding his cavalier rhetoric, there’s no evidence Americans would tolerate such a mass uprooting of people who have planted deep roots in this nation.
Jay Bookman at The Atlanta Journal Constitution dives into the CNN poll numbers:
[I]f you were to pick the three candidates who appeal to those Republicans deeply frustrated with their party’s leadership and performance in Washington, who would you choose? I think you would pick Trump, Carson and Cruz. They happen to be the three leading the Fox poll, and together, they pull 47 percent of the total.
Conversely, the three candidates most favored by the party leadership and big-money donors are Bush, Marco Rubio (at 4 percent, down from 13 percent in April) and Scott Walker (6 percent, down from 12 percent in April). Together, the establishment favorites now pull just 19 percent of the GOP primary vote, considerably less than Trump by himself.That, more than the performance of any individual candidate, is the news out of the poll. That’s how deep the disenchantment runs among Republican voters who believe their leaders have grossly over-promised and under-delivered. As I wrote last week, “the realization is sinking in that they are being played, that the base has been promised many many things that the party has no intent or capability of delivering.”
Maybe the GOP leaders should stop lying to their voters? Maybe they should tell them that marriage equality is here to stay forever and nothing will change that, so accept it. Maybe they should tell them that Obamacare is here to stay, that affordable healthcare is a right for all. Maybe they should stop dog whistling. Maybe they should stop the absolutist rhetoric, where every move by a Democratic President is the act of a despotic tyrant.
The only good thing about Trump is that he is very effectively shoving the GOP’s rhetoric up their own ass for the world to see.