Thursday Open Thread [9.10.2015]

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—CNN/ORC: Trump 32, Carson 19, Bush 9, Cruz 7, Huckabee 5, Walker 5, Fiorina 3, Paul 3, Rubio 3, Christie 2, Kasich 2, Graham 1, Jindal 1, Santorum 1, Gilmore 0, Pataki 0, Perry 0

IOWA–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—Quinnipiac: Sanders 41, Clinton 40, Biden 12, O’Malley 3, Webb 1, Chafee 0

Said pollster Peter Brown: “Sen. Bernie Sanders has become the Eugene McCarthy of 2016. He is the candidate of the Democratic left, against his own party’s bosses and their prized presidential candidate, Secretary Hillary Clinton. Sanders has seized the momentum by offering a message more in line with disproportionately liberal primary and caucus voters.”

He can also be described as the Howard Dean of 2016. The key question is whether he is the Barack Obama of 2016. Because McCarthy and Dean both lost.

Eugene Robinson highlights all the reasons President Obama has to smile:

He seemed to smile throughout the trip [to Alaska], and why not? The nuclear agreement that Secretary of State John F. Kerry negotiated with Iran is now safe from congressional meddling. U.S. economic growth for the second quarter was a healthy 3.7 percent. Unemployment has fallen to 5.1 percent, according to figures released Friday. Saudi King Salman — portrayed by Obama’s critics as peeved with the president — dropped by the White House on Friday for a chat, reportedly renting an entire luxury hotel for his entourage. And this month, Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to arrive for what promises to be the most important state visit of the year.

Obama gives the impression of having rediscovered the joy of being president. Maybe he really needed that Martha’s Vineyard vacation. Or maybe he is beginning to see some of his long-term policies finally bearing fruit — and his legacy being cemented.

The Daily Beast looks at the Fam-Fav number for each candidate, and finds that Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the strongest candidates, with Hillary besting all. Carson and Sanders are in a second tier that is well liked but not well known. The rest of the Republican field is the bottom tier.

A good baseline measure for candidate viability is what we call a “fam-fav” analysis: familiarity and favorability measures for each candidate. Typically, candidates early on in their campaigns struggle most with name recognition: those who people recognize do better (than they would or will otherwise) solely because people recognize their names (familiarity) and indicate in polls that they would vote for them. By pairing this with data on how favorably people feel about the candidate, we’re often able to identify early likely winners and “duds.”

For example, if we look at the 2011/12 Republican Primary candidates, Romney had the strongest fam/fav combination—he ultimately taking the candidacy. Comparatively, Herman Cain, while polling well-known—was indeed a “flash in the pan” given his weak favorability scores.

As such, we would expect that while Trump’s familiarity levels would be very high, his favorability would be comparatively lower due to his non-political background and blustering persona. However, we can see in the chart below that Trump enjoys very high fam/fav ratings and indeed clusters with “serious” politicians Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton—far outstripping all his Republican opponents on both familiarity and favorability measures.

better President than Reagan ever was, when it comes to jobs and unemployment.

So how’s the President doing on job-creation as we celebrate Labor Day 2015? Paul Krugman reports, “As of last month, the U.S. unemployment rate, which was 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office, had fallen to 5.1 percent. For the record, Mr. Romney promised during the campaign that he would get unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of 2016. Also for the record, the current unemployment rate is lower than it ever got under Ronald Reagan. And the main reason unemployment has fallen so much is job growth in the private sector, which has added more than seven million workers since the end of 2012.”

Today in Outrageous Trump Quote of the Millenium that will totally destroy his campaign but of course won’t:

When the anchor throws to Carly Fiorina for her reaction to Trump’s momentum, Trump’s expression sours in schoolboy disgust as the camera bores in on Fiorina. “Look at that face!” he cries. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly asked Fiorina to respond to Trump’s comments during a Wednesday night interview.

“Well, I think those comments speak for themselves,” Fiorina responded, adding that the “many, many, many, thousands of voters” who support her are “very serious.”

The man is a misogynist. Any woman anywhere thinking of voting for him hates herself and her gender.

Ed Kilgore says the GOP can screw up a one car funeral. Greg Sargent says the GOP is going to snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat.

What am I talking about? Well, we all know that the Iran Deal is done. President Obama has secured the support of enough Democrats in the House and Senate to not only sustain his veto of the potential Disapproval Resolution from the Congress, but also to filibuster the Resolution in the Senate so that it never passes in the first place. And that is not sitting well with your Radical Republican. They hate it when the President and America wins. So instead of going through with the vote on the Iran Deal and passing their Disapproval Resolution, radical conservatives in the House have hatched a new plan that is also doomed for failure.

The Corker-Cardin Act passed and signed into law last spring that provides the mechanism of Congress’ review of the Iran Deal provided for 60 days for the Congress to review the Deal after it had been executed and after the Congress had received all the documents requested relating to the deal. All the documents pertaining to the deal were delivered to the Congress as required by the law, and the clock started running. The clock expires on September 17. If Congress takes no action by then, then it looses its chance to do anything that can affect the Iran Deal (not that they have that chance now in reality, but by law they do).

I’ll have Vox explain the new plan for the GOP:

So now the new hotness among Republicans is that they shouldn’t bother voting to disapprove of the Iran nuclear deal, and instead should vote for a resolution that, according to Politico’s Jake Sherman, “would delay a disapproval vote because they believe Obama has not disclosed some elements of the deal.” The entire caucus is not yet on board, but it looks like they’re moving in this direction.

The entire House caucus is not onboard, and the Senate wants no parts of this. Not mention, the allegation that the deal documents were not produced is an outright lie by the Republicans.

Republicans’ argument is basically this: President Obama promised to send Congress the full text of the Iran nuclear once it was reached (true), after which Congress has 60 days to review before voting on whether to disapprove of the deal (true), but Obama did not technically complete his end of the bargain (false) because he did not send Congress the text of the “secret side deal” with Iran (complicated; see below). Therefore the 60-day congressional review never happened (false), thus the deal is illegitimate (false).

The alleged “secret side deal” is an agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN nuclear watchdog) and Iran over how the IAEA will conduct certain inspections and verification procedures of Iranian facilities, as well as IAEA investigations into past elements of Iran’s nuclear program that may have had a military component.

The IAEA has such agreements with every country where it works, including the United States. Because the IAEA wants as much access as possible, and because countries do not necessarily want the details of their nuclear facilities broadcast to the world, the details of these agreements are typically secret. That is the case with the IAEA’s agreement with Iran.

It is not a “side deal,” nor is its existence secret; the nuclear deal requires the IAEA to monitor Iranian facilities, so naturally the IAEA was going to work out the logistical details of that with Tehran. As nuclear experts Mark Hibbs and Thomas Shea explained recently in the Hill, anyone with the most basic knowledge of the IAEA understands that this is how it works, and that this secrecy ultimately helps the IAEA — and thus the US — against Iran’s nuclear program:

The IAEA has safeguards agreement with 180 countries. All have similar information protection provisions. Without these, governments would not open their nuclear programs for multilateral oversight. So IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano was acting by the book on August 5 when he told members of Congress that he couldn’t share with them the details of a verification protocol the IAEA had negotiated with Iran as part of a bilateral “roadmap” to address unresolved allegations about Iran’s nuclear behavior. […]

Republicans are now pretending that this is all a big surprise and that they have a right to see the complete text of any IAEA agreements. In fact, there is nothing guaranteeing Congress review over IAEA agreements with Iran. The IAEA would never agree to such a thing (fortunately for the US, which has its own agreements with the IAEA), and neither would the Obama administration.

Don’t take my word for it: You can read, for yourself, the law that Congress passed articulating its authority to disapprove the Iran deal. Section 135 describes the congressional review period, and specifically articulates the documents that the Obama administration is required to give Congress. There is nothing in there about the text of IAEA safeguards agreements with Iran.

So the GOP is going to lie and say that the President did not give them all the documents required by law, even though the law says that Congress is not entitled to the documents the GOP is saying Obama did not give them. And thus, the GOP will get to call Obama a liar and a deal-breaker and pretend the Dictator is going through with an illegitimate, all the while never voting on it.

I say Obama and the Democrats should call their bluff. Every Democrat in Congress and the President should say to every Republican: if you really believe that, and if you really think that is true, fucking impeach me. Do it. Put your money where your lying mouth is. What are you afraid of, you fucking Republican cowards? Impeach me.

“People like Bernie are always attractive, as I was. They speak truth to power. The problem with candidates like that — and like me — is that as you get closer to election time, you’re more careful about how your vote’s going to be used. You’re going to tend to want to see somebody who you think looks presidential as the nominee of your party. That’s one of the things that sank me.”

— Howard Dean, in an interview with the Washington Post.