Monday Open Thread [10.19.15]

NATIONAL—CNN/ORC: Clinton 45, Sanders 29, Biden 18, Webb 1, O’Malley 0, Chafee 0

Apparently President Obama’s track record is shaping up as a real asset for Democratic presidential contenders. Associated Press reports, “You would expect in a Democratic primary field when people are crossing a broad ideological spectrum that they might be critical of the incumbent no matter who the incumbent is,” Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake said. “But I think Democrats demonstrated that across the spectrum it’s good to run with the president rather than against him.”

Maybe our candidates have learned the Gore Lesson: Embrace your incumbent President. Especially when he is a good one.

Politico wonders if Marco Rubio can keep pace: “Rubio may be slowly rising in the polls, but his third quarter filing revealed a campaign that’s also out-manned by many of its rivals in the early-voting states. His staff is largely concentrated in Washington, with just a small umbrella of on-the-ground, early-state operatives — and he’s already at a disadvantage because he hasn’t invested the time in early-state visits that some of his opponents have.”

“For all the recent buzz surrounding his candidacy — fueled by strong debate performances — Rubio isn’t raising enough money to keep pace with his rivals in the top tier and he’s running out of time to assemble a robust field organization.”

Politico also reports that it appears that Donald Trump is in for the long haul: “While his Republican rivals have been hoping that Trump’s candidacy would fade after the initial buzz died down, he remains in first in the polls even after coming down from his September peak. Meanwhile, his campaign has been building the infrastructure necessary to put up a real fight in the earliest primaries and beyond.”

“The latest evidence came in Thursday’s third-quarter FEC report, which showed a $3.9 million haul, mostly from small donors, and spending on many of the trappings of a typical presidential campaign: $40,000 on ballot access consulting, $7,500 on policy consulting and payments to a growing roster of staffers and consultants in early voting states.”

Trump’s FEC report also shows that he has spent the least of the candidates. Chris Cillizza:

“Sure, it’s true that some of Trump’s low spending has to do with the fact that, unlike anyone else on that chart, he is almost entirely self-funding his campaign. Without the need to hold fundraisers (or employ fundraising consultants) you can keep costs down.”

“But, even with that caveat, the fact that Trump has spent so little to get so much is remarkable. He is in first place in every single national and key-early-state poll I have seen and he continues to dominate the conversation about the race. Not only is he dominating the conversation about the race, but he has also started to dictate the terms.”

I love it when media whores like Chris Cillizza think that is remarkable given all the free media they have given him.

So his fundraising and the continued high poll numbers has some GOP consultants and strategists rethinking their past “Trump will fade” pronouncements:

GOP strategist Alex Castellanos: “I’ve resisted the idea that Donald Trump could and would become the Republican nominee. Unhappily, I’ve changed my mind. Republican voters went through a period of doubt about Trump, an understandable window of buyer’s remorse. They went shopping for someone else — but returned, finding no acceptable alternative who could match Trump’s bad-boy strength and his capacity to bring indispensable change. … Fearing they have only one last chance to rescue their country, they found no one else as big as their problem. In my experience, once voters doubt but return, doubting again is less likely. A candidate’s vote hardens.”

While Trump sucks up all the oxygen, nearly a “[h]alf a dozen Republican presidential candidates are edging toward financial crisis, raising the specter that some may be forced to drop out of the sprawling field of contenders,” Reuters reports. They all spent more than they took in during the third quarter: Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham and Rick Santorum.
“Together, they raised $6 million but spent more than $9.5 million during the summer on everything from postage to travel to campaign rallies. All six are trailing badly in the polls.”

Wendy Ellis, a prostitute who ultimately had a three-year relationship with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), tells Jason Brad Berry that she had a child by Vitter. She says that Vitter told her to get an abortion when she was four months pregnant but she refused. Ellis says she’s telling her story now because she is terminally ill and wanted to “set the record straight.”

I am now just coming to assume that if you are a pro-life pro-family anti-gay “Christian” Republican politician, then that means you have several mistresses or rentboys on the side, and you have forced abortions on all of them, well, not the rentboys.

This was excellent.

David Remnick: “History may look back on the Las Vegas debate as the event that elevated Clinton the way that Barack Obama’s eloquent victory speech after the Iowa caucuses elevated him, nearly eight years ago. It might even be regarded as the moment when she boxed out Biden, raked away the underbrush of Mssrs. Chafee, Webb, and O’Malley, and made Sanders look less like a plausible contender than like a protest candidate who forced his opponent to grapple with a political system poisoned by the outsized influence of an American oligarchy comprising, as the Times has reported, a hundred and fifty-eight families.”

“One debate will not erase all of what many voters see as Clinton’s complications: the lingering perception of her sense of moneyed entitlement, her lawyerly slipperiness under questioning, the walled garden of her political circle, her interventionist reflexes, her belatedness on gay marriage, comprehensive immigration, and Wall Street reforms. But if Clinton was not flawless she and her debating partners managed one distinct achievement: they accentuated the chaos, the intellectual barrenness, and the general collapse of their rivals in the Republican Party.”

Booman, who accurately foresaw the imminent resignations of Boehner and McCarthy as Speaker and Speaker-designate, respectively, now forecasts this:

I’ve pointed out, over and over again, that the coalition of representatives in the House that votes to pay our bills and fund our government is the real majority in the House. And that majority has been made up mostly of Democrats since John Boehner became Speaker in 2011. We’ve been able to limp along with this odd situation where Democrats are responsible for voting for Republican appropriations bills because the “responsible caucus” in Washington has been able to keep the government going and willing to act in bizarre ways in order to keep it going.

And we could theoretically continue this odd governing-coalition-not-even-in-name except for one thing. The Republicans were getting ready to defenestrate their own Speaker for working with this governing coalition instead of bending to their every demand.

So, it wasn’t hard for me to see that Boehner’s time as leader was coming to an end and that no one who would be willing to keep working with the governing coalition could be elected as his replacement.

The next step wasn’t really hard to see, either, although it certainly approached being unimaginable. In a battle between a Republican caucus that demands national default and an Establishment that will never allow that to happen, the Republicans have to lose. And if that means that they have to give up their majority control over the House, that’s eventually going to happen.[…]

I think in our present circumstances that Paul Ryan is serving, unfortunately, as a bright shiny object who obscures more than he reveals. The issue isn’t Paul Ryan per se, but whether he or any other Republican alternative can get the House Republican caucus to raise the debt ceiling. To be precise, can someone be elected Speaker without promising to default on our debts? [..]

So, a radical idea begins to take form not because the idea particularly appeals to anyone, but simply out of desperation to avoid a congressionally created global economic contraction of unknown magnitude. If the Republicans do not have the votes to elect a Speaker who will pay the bills, then they’re going to have make formal what has been informal. The real governing majority in the House will have to disregard party labels and vote for someone that the Democrats approve. They’ll also have to share power on the committees, particularly the appropriations committees that are in charge of spending.

Speaker Pelosi 2.0. Nah, more like Speaker Peter King or Speaker Charlie Dent.

Jake Tapper trapped Jeb Bush: “If your brother and his administration bear no responsibility at all, how do you then make the jump that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are responsible for what happened at Benghazi?”

Ezra Klein: “Bush’s response is almost physically painful to watch. The exchange begins at about 2:20.”