Monday Open Thread [9.21.2015]

Vox:

That’s the whole joke. Trump seems like a racist. And people get the joke because Trump has been very widely covered.

If you know anything about politics in 2015 you know what Donald Trump has been saying, and you know it’s been racist stuff. When you hear that media coverage has powered a candidate into first place, you expect it to be positive coverage. You might be happy about that if you think the positive coverage is deserved or you might be angry about it if you think the coverage has been insufficiently critical.

But Trump hasn’t been getting particularly positive coverage. It’s coverage that makes him look good only if racism seems like an appealing attribute. It’s no coincidence that as the conservative establishment has turned against Trump, it’s white nationalists who’ve lead the pro-Trump backlash. That makes for a much more complicated — and disturbing — phenomenon than a simple media-fueled polling surge like what we’ve seen from Ben Carson recently.

NATIONAL––PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—CNN/ORC: Trump 24, Fiorina 15, Carson 14 Rubio 11, Bush 9, Cruz 6, Huckabee 6, Paul 4, Kasich 2, Christie 3, Santorum 1, Walker 0, Jindal 0, Graham 0

Walker has Zero??? WOW. Even Jim Webb has 2. Even Rick Fucking Santorum has 1!

NATIONAL––PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—CNN/ORC: Clinton 42, Sanders 24, Biden 22, Webb 2, O’Malley 1, Chafee 0

Has Hillary finally stopped her polling decline? This is the first poll in a while that shows Hillary Clinton gaining support and Sanders losing it. From the prior CNN/ORC poll earlier this month, Hillary has increased her support five points from 37% to 42%, while Sanders decreased from 27% to 42%. Bernie’s decrease may be margin of error, but Hillary’s increase is outside of it.

CNN also finds that Biden’s support comes from Clinton:

Without the vice president in the race, Clinton’s numbers climb by 15 percentage points, while Sanders’ increase by only 4 points — giving Clinton a nearly 2-to-1 lead at 57% to 28%, with O’Malley moving up to 2%.

“The possibility of Congress truly, massively embarrassing itself (is that possible?) and the entire country during Pope Francis’s historic address next week is starting to give some members the willies,” the Washington Post reports.

“Even the tradition of bipartisan, goofy, wild cheering, clapping or of standing O’s — or sitting boos — could be seen by many as way out of line. So last week, four House members — Democrats Dan Lipinski (D-IL), Juan Vargas (D-CA), and Republicans Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and Tim Murphy (R-PA) sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, asking them to put out some sort of guidance ‘to the House and Senate on the appropriate decorum, protocol and behavior…’”

So who do the political betting markets think won last week’s GOP debate? Well, here is who our free-market betters think won the debate:

They must think Bush’s Super PAC money is just going to destroy all others. But they ignore Bush’s greatest weakness: himself as a candidate. He is downright awful.

The Dems?:

And how about the General Election?

Bloomberg: “The signs of Walker’s precipitous fall were all too vivid Sunday afternoon inside Serena’s Coffee Café in Amana, Iowa, where about 40 stoic supporters showed up for his first retail campaign event in the state since Wednesday’s debate. Gone were most of the network television cameras that had followed Walker much of the summer. Just one network was on hand, along with one reporter-photographer from a nearby station in Cedar Rapids. A second event at a Pizza Ranch in Vinton, Iowa, brought out another small crowd, along with one local TV camera.”

“Walker lingered at both events, shaking virtually every hand. He’d woken Sunday morning to news that he’d fallen below 1 percent in the most recent national CNN poll, a new all-time low for his candidacy that could further rattle donors.”

“I’ve known almost every person that’s run for president since I’ve been twenty-nine years old and it all gets down to personal considerations, because you have no right as an individual to decide to run. Your whole family is implicated.”

— Vice President Joe Biden, in an interview with America magazine, on whether he’ll run for president in 2016.

Speaking of family, it looks like Jill is no longer a no. And loud talking Josh Alcorn, a fundraiser for the Draft Biden outfit, was overheard in the fucking Cafe car on Amtrak that Joe is in.

Last week, as we pointed out here, the Republican Presidential candidates were asked to name which historical American woman would they honor with a place on the $10 bill. It was an easy test that most of the candidates failed miserably. Some named women who are not Americans, like Margaret Fucking Thather and Mother Theresa. Some passed and named women of great history import: Rosa Parks, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony and Abigail Adams. But others had what they thought was a funny answer: their mother, daughter or wife. Rebecca Leber at The New Republic says that is not funny or endearing. It means they cannot name a historical woman.

No doubt the candidates love these women very much, but with all due respect to Janet Huckabee, Sonya Carson, and Ivanka Trump, they are not women of great historic import. Indeed, by describing them by their familial relationship—”my wife,” “my mother,” “my daughter”—the candidates implied that these women are important only because of their association with powerful men.

This is all too familiar terrain for politicians. They fill their stump speeches with stories about the women in their lives, to add a personal touch to their canned talking points, but overlook women’s achievements outside of the home. The heroism of women—their importance to these men—is that they are faithful wives, productive mothers, and grateful daughters.

Paul Krugman says the “concern” of the bankers at the Fed’s decision last week to keep interest rates low is become transparent:

Yet the Fed has faced constant criticism for its low-rate policy. Why? The answer is that the story keeps changing. In 2010-2011 the Fed’s critics issued dire warnings about looming inflation. You might have expected some change in tune when inflation failed to materialize. Instead, however, those who used to demand higher rates to head off inflation are still demanding higher rates, but for different reasons. The justification du jour is “financial stability,” the claim that low interest rates breed bubbles and crashes. […]

Well, when you see ever-changing rationales for never-changing policy demands, it’s a good bet that there’s an ulterior motive. And the rate rage of the bankers — combined with the plunge in bank stocks that followed the Fed’s decision not to hike — offers a powerful clue to the nature of that motive.

It’s the bank profits, stupid.

The higher the interest rate, the more money the banks can make.

William Kaufman at In These Times has a post that puzzles me. It is titled “Why Radical Leftists Need To Stop Worrying and Back Bernie Sanders.” I was unaware that there are those on our side of the aisle who feel Bernie Sanders himself is not pure enough. That there exist some progressive out there that thinks Bernie Sanders is too compromised or a slave to corporate interests is pure comedy gold.

In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities, it seems, but against… Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without an ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders exposés seem to have become a thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.

It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point any further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jerry Corbyn, or even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other leftish types and the jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent essentially the same political impulse?

The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left, in fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse, or even smile at a Democrat.

One quibble: Sanders is not a Democrat. So these leftists should be smiling at him.

Michael Tomasky says Hillary won last week’s GOP debate:

“She is still the overwhelming favorite to be the Democratic nominee. She still leads the Republicans in a strong majority of the general election head-to-head matchups. And that’s after two horrible media months in which, by Silver’s count, she has endured 29 negative news stories while enjoying just one positive one. All that, and she’s still mostly ahead. And being the Democrat, she has the Electoral College advantage that any plausible Democrat has these days because the GOP has just positioned itself too far right to win states that it regularly won back in the Nixon-to-Bush Sr. era.

All that speaks to the advantages she still enjoys, even with the quicksand she’s been stuck in lately. But all that isn’t why she won the debate. She won the debate because these people are jokers. Donald Trump, come on. I mean, look: I’ve come to believe here lately that he’d be a better president than most of them in some ways. I could picture the Trump whom Jonah Goldberg detests nominating someone to the Supreme Court who is not a knuckle-dragger. But that doesn’t erase the fundamental and self-evident preposterosity of the idea of President Trump. He slipped Wednesday night. That moment when he said he’d know plenty about foreign policy in good time was embarrassing.

Ben Carson. Yes, he seems like a nice enough man. But he had nothing interesting to say. Carly Fiorina had good lines. She’s well prepped for these things. But if she actually did call “the supreme leader”—did you notice how she called him that, just like the quisling Obama does?—on her first day in office and change the terms of the Iran deal as radically as she suggested, Tehran would have a nuclear weapon in about four months. She was also well prepped on her Hewlett-Packard tenure, how to answer the disaster charge (she walked away with a $40 million parachute, by the way). But that doesn’t change the fact that it was bad, and not just because of the economy. Her Compaq decision, among others, had a lot to do with it. If we’re sizing up business people, she is less qualified than Trump.

As for the “serious” ones, Jeb Bush and the others, they are in their way even worse. Unlike the outsider triumvirate, they know actual facts about governmental policy, and yet they still persist in uttering this fantasy gibberish to assuage the hard right base.

Washington Post: “Clinton’s decision to leave the nation’s first presidential primary state for a few hours to attend a ‘grass-roots organizing’ meeting here underscored her dual tasks in coming months: She needs to shore up support in Iowa and New Hampshire, early nominating states where Bernie Sanders has become a real threat, but also be prepared for a nomination fight that could lost longer than Democrats initially expected.”

“Maine Democrats have a scheduled March 6 caucuses, by which time nearly 20 other states are expected to have weighed in on who should be the party’s nominee. Clinton is also planning to campaign Monday in Arkansas and Louisiana, both of which have early March nominating primaries.”

David Atkins on why the press gets Donald Trump and the GOP base wrong. It is willful, not ignorance.

As long as Trump leads, it’s impossible to maintain the fiction of equally extreme “both sides do it” partisanship. As long as Trump rules (and, to a lesser extent, that Bernie Sanders continues to rise on the left) It’s also increasingly difficult to pretend that “moderates” in either party are actually the center of public opinion, rather than caterers to a unique brand of corporate-friendly upper-class comfort that labels itself as moderate without holding any legitimate claim to the title.

Acknowledging those realities would force the press to start reporting the fundamentals of American politics as they stand today:

First, that the Republican base wants a rebel leader to take their country back from the inconvenience of being nice to women, gays and minorities;

Second, that the wealthy Republican establishment and its center-right Third Way Democratic counterparts don’t actually have a legitimate base of voters, but rather illegitimate institutional capture of government via legalized bribery; and

Third, that the rest of the country wants liberal public policies that would resemble a Scandinavian government, but most of them are so turned off by the futility of the American political process that not enough of them turn out to vote to make a real difference outside of the bluest states.

Those would be very uncomfortable admissions for the establishment press, so they settle instead for hoping that Donald Trump will go away and lose support organically so things can return to “normal.” That’s not going to happen.