Thursday Open Thread [10.15.15]

Finally, a post debate poll! I yearned all yesterday for one (and no, those Frank Lutz focus groups are not what I want). It is from Gravis, which is associated with the “Fox News is Too Liberal” One America Network, and it gives Jim Webb 12% of the vote (see below), probably because they have conservatives making up 16% of the Democratic Party. Perhaps that is true in some alternate universe somewhere, but not in our reality. So take this poll with a big grain of salt.

CONNECTICUT–Quinnipiac: Clinton 37, Sanders 25, Biden 18, O’Malley 0, Webb 0, Lessig 0
PENNSYLVANIA–PPP: Clinton 40, Sanders 22, Biden 20, Chafee 3, O’Malley 2, Webb 1, Lessig 1

NATIONAL–FOX News: Trump 24, Carson 23, Cruz 10, Rubio 9, Bush 8, Fiorina 5, Huckabee 5, Paul 3, Kasich 1, Christie 1, Jindal 1, Pataki 1, Santorum 0, Graham 0
NEVADA–CNN/ORC: Trump 38, Carson 22, Fiorina 8, Rubio 7, Bush 6, Cruz 4, Huckabee 4, Paul 2, Christie 1, Pataki 1, Kasich 1, Jindal 0, Santorum 0, Graham 0
SOUTH CAROLINA–CNN/ORC: Trump 36, Carson 18, Rubio 9, Fiorina 7, Bush 6, Cruz 5, Graham 5, Paul 4, Huckabee 3, Christie 2, Kasich 1, Jindal 0
CONNECTICUT–Quinnipiac: Trump 34, Carson 14, Fiorina 11, Rubio 7, Bush 6, Cruz 6, Kasich 4, Christie 4, Paul 1, Pataki 1, Huckabee 0, Santorum 0, Jindal 0, Graham 0
PENNSYLVANIA–PPP: Trump 24, Carson 23, Fiorina 9, Cruz 9, Christie 7, Bush 7, Rubio 6, Kasich 3, Huckabee 3, Santorum 2, Paul 1, Jindal 0, Pataki 0

William Greider on the coming breakup of the GOP:

Fresh chatter among Washington insiders is not about whether the Republican Party will win in 2016 but whether it will survive. Donald Trump—the fear that he might actually become the GOP nominee—is the ultimate nightmare. Some gleeful Democrats are rooting (sotto voce) for the Donald, though many expect he will self-destruct.

Nevertheless, Republicans face a larger problem. The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968—welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln—is now devouring itself in ugly, spiteful recriminations.

The abrupt resignation of House Speaker John Boehner was his capitulation to this new reality. His downfall was loudly cheered by many of his own troops—the angry right-wingers in the House who have turned upon the party establishment. Chaos followed. The discontented accuse party leaders of weakness and betraying their promises to the loyal rank and file.

At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. Americans are rapidly shifting toward more tolerant understandings of personal behavior and social values, but the Republican Party sticks with retrograde social taboos and hard-edged prejudices about race, gender, sexual freedom, immigration, and religion. Plus, it wants to do away with big government (or so it claims).

No it doesn’t, as Hillary says. The GOP wants Theocracy, forcing one national religion upon all. It will take a big government to do that, to police the sexual habits of 350 million, to monitor millions of pregnancies every day to make sure none are aborted, to build and monitor a wall that keeps all in and out. The libertarian and business wings are repulsed by the racists and the theocrats, but only with them can they be a national party. Only with them can they have a chance to win national elections. But perhaps we have reached the point of not caring anymore. Boehner did.

Steve Benen says Hillary’s stellar and dominating debate performance on Tuesday may well change both primaries:

Over the course of two impressive hours, however, Clinton emerged as a sure-footed, quick-witted, presidential-level powerhouse. There’s simply no credible way Biden or any of his boosters watched the debate and saw an opportunity for the V.P. to seize. For that matter, Republican officials, increasingly confident about their general-election odds, received a timely reminder of just how formidable Clinton really is.

The intra-party argument over debates also took a turn last night. For months, a variety of Democratic insiders and candidates have complained that the DNC has scheduled too few debates, probably in the hopes of shielding the frontrunner. Last night turned the whole argument on its head – Clinton is easily the best debater, in either party, running in this cycle.[…]

Republicans must have been discouraged by Clinton’s strong showing, but I hope they also noticed how much better last night’s debate was than anything the GOP candidates have shown in their events. On every front, the exchanges in Las Vegas showed Democratic candidates better prepared, more substantive, and more knowledgeable than their far-right counterparts.

During the debate, Politico’s Glenn Thrush noted on Twitter, “The level of discourse – nuance of discussion – compared to the GOP debates? Not even close.” The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel added soon after, “[W]atching this debate after slogging through all the Trump debates is like moving from kindergarten into grad school.”

Hillary Clinton won big [Tuesday]. Republicans lost.

In an article in the American Conservative, Alfred McCoy takes a large view of President Obama’s foreign policy and how it is changing the historical trajectory of the role of the United States in global affairs.

Without proclaiming a presumptuously labeled policy such as “triangulation,” “the Nixon Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence.

Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security—all in search of a new version of American supremacy.

Jed Legum at Think Progress on what the House Disaster Caucus wants for their votes for a new speaker. No blood oath to fulfill these demands from the Speaker candidate means no Disaster Caucus votes.

[They] seeks a commitment from the next speaker to tie any increase in the debt ceiling to cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The United States will reach the debt limit on November 5. If the limit is not raised prior to that point, the United States could default on its obligations. This could have disasterous effects on the economy of the United States and the entire world. In 2013, a Treasury Department report found “default could result in recession comparable to or worse than 2008 financial crisis.”

Cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is extremely unpopular, even among Republicans. These programs are sacrosanct to most Democratic members of Congress. There is effectively no chance that President Obama or Senate Democrats — both of whom would need to support such legislation — would agree to “structural entitlement reforms” in the next month under these kind of conditions.

The House [Disaster] Caucus essentially wants to make it impossible for the next speaker to raise the debt ceiling. But that is just the beginning.

The House Freedom Caucus also wants the next speaker to commit to numerous conditions on any agreement to avoid a government shutdown:

[…] The House Freedom Caucus wants the next speaker to commit to not funding the government at all unless President Obama (and Senate Democrats) agree to defund Obamacare, Planned Parenthood and a host of other priorities. This is essentially the Ted Cruz strategy which prompted at 16-day shutdown in 2013. This would now be enshrined as the official policy of the Speaker Of The House.

Cry Havoc!! And let slip the dogs of war.

Mitch McConnell is jumping on the Disaster Caucus bandwagon in preparing his own similar hostage demands for a debt ceiling rise. McConnell is seeking a reduction in cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security recipients and new restrictions on Medicare, including limiting benefits to the rich and raising the eligibility age, several sources said. In addition, the Kentucky Republican is eager to see new policy riders enacted, including reining in the Environmental Protection Agency’s clean water regulations.

The answer to all that is no. Clean Debt Ceiling Rise only, or else Civil War and Depression.

As if on cue, Politico is reporting that outgoing House Speaker John Boehner is looking to move a bill that would lift the debt ceiling before he steps down, without any hostage demands. LOL. Seriously, Boehner should just stay on as Speaker of a bipartisan coalition government of Democrats and the rump “responsible” wing of 30 some odd Republicans. We’ll only pass status quo budgets and other necessary but perfunctory bills until 2017.

Greg Sargent:

Until last night, the Democratic presidential primary had largely been viewed through a simple frame: Bernie Sanders represents the full-throatedly populist and progressive wing of the party on economic issues, and Hillary Clinton occupies a more moderate, less populist, less-overtly redistributive zone, while edging in Sanders’ direction in order to obscure economic differences between them in the eyes of Democratic voters.

This analysis of the race had mostly taken shape around the preoccupations of the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of the Democratic Party, spurred on by ongoing debate over (among other things) how far to go in raising the minimum wage, taxing the wealthy to fund massive new social spending, and confronting the size and power of major financial institutions.

In last night’s debate, Clinton may have broken this frame.

It has been widely observed that Clinton went on offense against Sanders by sparring with him over his unabashed socialist vision and his weakness on gun control, while simultaneously defending her economic policies as being even tougher than his. But what is crucial to understand is that Clinton also sought to redefine what counts as “progressive” in this race on her own terms, by making women’s and children’s issues — and family-oriented workplace flexibility policies — more central than the other candidates did.

In other words, Clinton answered Sanders not only by debating him over whether she is progressive enough on the issues he has tried to own, but also by laying claim to issues such as paid family and sick leave and early childhood education. In so doing, she staked out her own progressive turf, rather than fighting on his alone.

Frank Rich:

Sanders’s usefulness to Clinton was omnipresent last night. He has pushed her to the left on a number of his populist economic issues, and it’s clear she has worked hard to find a way to make those positions sound less “socialist” (not to mention less New Yawk) than he can. (She has not found a way to explain her flip-flop on the Pacific trade agreement, however.) Sanders also revealed that he has failed to find a way to dig himself out of his occasional heterodoxy on gun control, giving Clinton a free path to milk the one issue on which she is to his left.

Donald Trump was wrong: Ratings for Tuesday night’s first Democratic debate were the highest ever for a Democratic debate. An impressive 15.3 million viewers tuned in.

Booman on style and asthetics, which, when you have policy agreements for the most part, counts:

What struck me about Clinton was that she appeared almost jovial and much more relaxed than she usually seems. She had some awkward moments, of course, and some of her answers were so scripted that they made me cringe. But she came across as happy to be there, mostly enjoying herself and the process, and ready enough to answer the questions that she had little difficulty adding little flourishes and quite a bit of passion to her answers. For a candidate who has been in a bit of a bunker and often displays a bunker attitude, this was a significantly better-than-average performance. I say this knowing that it’s focused on superficial aspects rather than the substance of her answers, but it isn’t substantive answers that Clinton needed to improve on. She has to be likable. She has to establish trust. She can’t appear defensive and secretive, and she definitely doesn’t want to come across as petulant or entitled. This is why the superficial stuff is so important for her. And I’d have to give her very high marks for style.

Bernie had an opportunity to do three things. First, he got to introduce himself to everyone who cares about politics more than baseball, which must be a few hundred thousand people, at least. Second, he got a chance to demonstrate that he can stand on the stage with a seasoned campaigner and debater and hold his own under hostile questioning. Third, he got a chance to create a sound byte that would be replayed all day today.

On all three tests, he did an outstanding job. Let’s face it, Bernie can be a little gruff. But he didn’t come across that way except when he was blasting the moderators and the media for obsessing over Clinton’s emails, and that was his sound byte and the highlight of the night. He got a good grilling from the moderators and some sharp criticism from Clinton and Jim Webb, but he stood up under the pressure. So, I think he’ll be fine in future debates and probably improve with each one.