Monday Open Thread [8.31.15]
The headline today is that Ben Carson is your new GOP frontrunner, at least in Iowa.
IOWA–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—Monmouth/Selzer: Carson 23, Trump 23, Fiorina 10, Cruz 9, Walker 7, Bush 5, Kasich 4, Rubio 4, Paul 2, Huckabee 2, Santorum 2
IOWA–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—DM Register: Trump 23, Carson 18, Walker 8, Cruz 8, Fiorina 5, Bush 6, Rubio 6, Huckabee 4, Paul 4, Kasich 2, Christie 2, Jindal 2, Perry 1, Santorum 1, Graham 0
IOWA–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—DM Register: Clinton 37, Sanders 30, Biden 14, O’Malley 3, Webb 2, Chafee 1
E. J. Dionne looks at the nuclear treaty with Iran.
Foreign policy debates rarely get away from being reflections of domestic political conflicts, but they are also usually based on unstated assumptions and unacknowledged theories. That’s true of the struggle over the Iran nuclear agreement, even if raw politics is playing an exceptionally large role. …
There is also the unfortunate way in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to frame Congress’s vote as a pro- or anti-Israel proposition. Many staunch supporters of Israel may have specific criticisms of the inspection regime, but they also believe that the restraints on Iran’s nuclear program are real. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), for example, has said that U.S. negotiators “got an awful lot, particularly on the nuclear front.” And the “nuclear front,” after all, is the main point. …
A yes vote from Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, would be a true profiles-in-courage moment — and have a real influence on his wavering colleagues.
Josh Barro has a primer on “anchor babies,” and notes “According to Pew, in 2012 there were 4.5 million American children with at least one parent who was an unauthorized immigrant, and four million unauthorized immigrants living with an American child….There is one other myth in the debate: A citizen child is not necessarily a shield against deportation. In the second and third quarters of 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that over 46,000 parents of citizen children were deported, accounting for 22 percent of all deportations.”
But the GOP is less concerned about deporting the undocumented parent(s) of the citizen child, then they are with deporting the citizen child, hence the unconstitutional and fascist cries for ending birthright citizenship.
In arking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Paul Krugman noted that Katrina was the moment that the scales fell off the eyes of Americans to reveal who George W. Bush actually was:
“Katrina was special in political terms because it revealed such a huge gap between image and reality. Ever since 9/11, former President George W. Bush had been posing as a strong, effective leader keeping America safe. He wasn’t…It took a domestic disaster, which made his administration’s cronyism and incompetence obvious to anyone with a TV set, to burst his bubble.”
He thinks we are witnessing a similar moment with Jeb Bush.
“Consider Jeb Bush, once hailed on the right as “the best governor in America,” when in fact all he did was have the good luck to hold office during a huge housing bubble. Many people now seem baffled by Mr. Bush’s inability to come up with coherent policy proposals, or any good rationale for his campaign. What happened to Jeb the smart, effective leader? He never existed.”
Greg Sargent on the new Democratic ad above:
“Seventeen Republicans are running for president — with one message for immigrant families,” the ad intones. It then airs footage of Donald Trump calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and calling for mass deportations; Jeb Bush defending his use of the term “anchor babies”; and Scott Walker seeming to agree that we should end birthright citizenship.
“This is the Republican Party,” the ad concludes. All of this rhetoric from the GOP Presidential candidates is helpfully translated into Spanish text that spools forth on the screen.
Maggie Haberman reports that the ad will start airing in states with large Latino populations, such as Florida, Colorado, and Nevada.
Here’s why this is so significant: It shows that Democrats are not taking for granted the durability of their recent gains among Latinos. As I reported the other day, some Democrats worry that those gains could prove fleeting, particularly if Jeb Bush (who is fluent in Spanish, has a Mexican wife and Latino American children, and could credibly make a cultural appeal to Latino voters) ends up as GOP nominee. Some have hoped for a more aggressive effort to seize on the astonishingly fortuitous arrival (for this purpose, anyway) of Donald Trump to try to inflict as much damage on the GOP brand among Latinos as possible. The new ad perhaps suggests we may see a new level of activity along these lines.
Ruth Marcus makes the case for Joe Biden.
Could Joe Biden be the man for this season?
… there is an argument that 2016 could be Biden’s year — a moment that will reward, even celebrate, his loose-lipped authenticity and his from-the-gut middle-class politics. In Iowa the other day, Donald Trump received thunderous applause when he proposed outlawing teleprompters. In 2016, Biden’s unscriptedness could be appealing.
Look at the latest polling. Matched up against Trump, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, Biden outperforms Clinton in the new Quinnipiac poll.
Sure, there are stumbling blocks, even leaving aside the still-dominant position of Clinton and the daunting mechanical challenges of instantly assembling the necessary staff and money.
… One person’s career politician is another’s devoted public servant: Biden has never spun through the revolving door to vacuum up six-figure speaking fees. A delicate topic, to be sure, but a comparison with a Certain Other Candidate that others might make.
Ross Douthat on Trump the gentle despot.
The Donald Trump phenomenon is a great gift to pundits because it can be analyzed and criticized in so many different ways. But two shorthands seem particularly useful. First, Trump is essentially using the Republican primary to run a third-party campaign, not a right-wing insurgency. Second, Trump’s appeal is oddly like that of Franklin Roosevelt, in the sense that he’s a rich, well-connected figure — a rich New Yorker, at that — who’s campaigning as a traitor to his class. …
So far he’s running against the Republican establishment in a more profound way than the Tea Party, challenging not just deviations from official conservative principle but the entire post-Reagan conservative matrix. He can wax right wing on immigration one moment and promise to tax hedge fund managers the next. He’ll attack political correctness and then pledge to protect entitlements. He can sound like Pat Buchanan on trade and Bernie Sanders on health care. He regularly attacks the entire Iraq misadventure, in its Bush-era and Obama-era manifestations alike, in a way that neither mainstream Republicans nor Hillary Clinton can plausibly manage.
