Thursday Open Thread [10.8.2015]

CALIFORNIA–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY–Field–Clinton 40, Sanders 31, Biden 15, O’Malley 0, Webb 0, Chafee 0

MARYLAND–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY–Goucher College–Clinton 43, Biden 23, Sanders 17, O’Malley 2, Webb 2, Chafee 0

Frank Rich:

What’s working best for Clinton is the Republicans. House-speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy’s statement that his party was pursuing its endless Benghazi investigation to bring down her poll numbers was manna from heaven for the Clinton campaign. The September 2012 attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi has never gained any real traction as a partisan political issue — just ask Mitt Romney, who tried to milk it in the stretch of his ill-fated campaign. But McCarthy’s truthful admission has flipped the question entirely: Now the issue is not going to be what happened at Benghazi but Congress’s waste of taxpayers’ money and time on a wild-goose chase that sullies and insults the memories of the Americans who were slaughtered there. Clinton is already playing the moral-outrage card brilliantly in public statements and in an ad in wide circulation on the web. Her scheduled October 22 appearance before the Benghazi committee — once thought to be a D-Day for Trey Gowdy and his fellow House inquisitors — looms as a self-inflicted Waterloo for them instead.

Clinton’s SNL appearance, hitting just the right note of cheerful self-mockery, was winning. But her subsequent attempts to show humor and spontaneity and heart (all words used by her own campaign team to describe the latest re-branding of her candidacy) will not have the benefit of SNL writers, or cue cards, or Darrell Hammond, whose brief cameo as Bill provided the biggest laugh in the sketch. And should Joe Biden get into the race, as Washington increasingly seems to believe, he’ll have the advantage on humor and spontaneity in the Democratic race. Or he will unless Bernie Sanders reveals heretofore hidden comic chops when he appears on Ellen DeGeneres’s show next week.

Paul Starr, a progressive columnist and co-editor at American Prospect, reminds Democrats and liberals to keep the eye on the ball.

On the Democratic side, the candidates are unlikely to race to the left in a way that’s comparable to the Republican race to the right. But the idle talk about adopting single-payer health care and emulating a Scandinavian welfare state has a similar air of unreality about it. Without a total remaking of American society and politics, these ideas have no chance of being enacted outside of Vermont (which didn’t get anywhere with single-payer after initially approving it). […]

The Democrats now face one political imperative above all others: holding the presidency so as to restore a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. To be sure, Democrats will have a chance to move the Court further if they also regain control of the Senate, but the presidency is the key. The next four years will likely bring at least one and possibly two retirements among the Court’s liberal justices, and if a Republican president replaces them, conservatives will be able to consolidate their majority and entrench far-right constitutional ideas.

If Democrats can prevent that from happening, there will come a time when they can again pass substantial liberal legislation. But it is not likely to be in the next four years because of the Republican hold on the House.

Emailgate is a political problem for Hillary Clinton, but it also reveals why she’d be an effective president, or so says Matt Yglesias at Vox. In fact, he says she is exactly the kind of President we need at this moment in time.

Democrats have almost no chance of securing a majority in the US Senate [wrong] and even worse odds of securing a majority in the House [probably]. So if there is a future for making progressive policy, that future is executive action.

It took Democrats five years to learn this lesson. Even though the basic configuration of forces was visible as soon as the results of the 2010 midterms were in, Democrats in general and the Obama White House in particular were clearly slow to embrace it. The president spent most of the next two years pining after a “grand bargain” on fiscal issues that would cement his legacy and supposedly clear the legislative deck for other agenda items. It didn’t happen. Then he turned to the hope that after securing reelection, the GOP “fever” of non-cooperation would break, laying the groundwork for comprehensive immigration reform.

That didn’t happen either. So in the final years of his presidency, Obama has reconciled himself to being a president who grinds out policy wins through executive action while facing constant lawsuits and controversy rather than the kind of president who secures huge bipartisan majorities and ushers in a broad era of good feelings. […]

Clinton’s record in politics is characterized by a clear willingness to push harder than the typical public figure against existing norms. […] She decides what she wants to do, in other words, and then she sets about finding a way to do it — exactly the mentality any Democrat would need to move the needle on policy in 2017.

None of this means that you need to like Clinton. On many issues she’ll push executive power in somewhat unorthodox ways in pursuit of an agenda conservatives hate. On a handful of issues — likely those most directly connected to foreign policy — she’ll push executive power harder than Obama did, in pursuit of an agenda that liberals will find much less congenial than Obama’s.

But she truly is the perfect leader for America’s moment of permanent constitutional crisis: a person who cares more about results than process, who cares more about winning the battle than being well-liked, and a person who believes in asking what she can get away with rather than what would look best. In other words, as nervous as the rumblings of scandal around her emails make many Democrats, the exact same qualities that led to the server drama are the ones that, if she wins, will make her capable of delivering on the party’s priorities in a way few others could.

Francis Wilkinson:

According to the Associated Press, the mother of the 26-year-old Oregon gunman who killed nine and injured nine “told investigators he was struggling with some mental health issues.”
Yes, he was.

Neighbors have described Christopher Harper-Mercer as an anxious, alienated young man. His mother, Laurel Harper, appears to have written in online forums about his mental and social struggles.

It’s a profile so familiar it’s cliché. Dylann Roof, the “quiet” 21-year-old white supremacist accused of murdering nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in June, was similarly disturbed. And, of course, Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who in 2012 sprayed gunfire through the classrooms of Sandy Hook Elementary School, had all the markings of the agonized loner who seeks catharsis by making others suffer horribly in turn.

The three have something else in common, as well. Each was encouraged by a parent to relish guns.

Noam Levey:

With the first primaries of the 2016 presidential campaign just months away, the national healthcare debate is poised to enter a new phase, more focused on consumers’ pocketbooks than on re-litigating the 5-year-old Affordable Care Act.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is campaigning on a detailed program to crack down on rising drug prices and runaway medical bills, is making a play for the hearts of voters increasingly irritated about what they have to pay for healthcare.

In the process, Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has issued an implicit challenge to her Republican rivals, who continue to campaign with broadsides against Obamacare but few details about how they would address consumers’ basic healthcare worries.

“She is talking to people’s wallets … at a time when healthcare prices are a huge concern,” said Frank Luntz, an influential Republican strategist who helped develop the GOP’s highly successful campaign to tarnish Obamacare even before the law was enacted. “It’s smart.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders “is uninterested in going through the motions of typical debate practice,” Politico reports.

“While CNN is billing the event as a showdown, Sanders’ team sees the first Democratic debate as a chance to introduce a fairly niche candidate to a national audience. So his team intends to let him do what he’s been doing. Far from preparing lines to deploy against Clinton — let alone O’Malley, Lincoln Chafee, or Jim Webb — Sanders plans to dish policy details, learned through a handful of briefings with experts brought in by his campaign.”

I think that would be a good thing. A detailed filled debate. No personal attacks. Quite a contrast to the GOP.