Wednesday Open Thread [10.28.15]

IOWA—Monmouth: Clinton 65, Sanders 24, O’Malley 5
IOWA—Loras College: Clinton 62, Sanders 24, O’Malley 3
SOUTH CAROLINA—Clemson: Clinton 43, Sanders 6, O’Malley 1
NORTH CAROLINA—PPP: Clinton 61, Sanders 24, O’Malley 5, Lessig 2

SOUTH CAROLINA—Clemson: Trump 23, Carson 19, Rubio 9, Cruz 8, Bush 7, Fiorina 6, Graham 3, Huckabee 2, Paul 1, Kasich 2, Christie 1, Jindal 1
NORTH CAROLINA—PPP: Trump 31, Carson 23, Rubio 11, Fiorina 6, Bush 6, Cruz 6, Huckabee 5, Kasich 5, Christie 3, Paul 2, Santorum 2

Brian Beutler says Marco Rubio is not the GOP Obama. He is the GOP Edwards.

The big question for Rubio isn’t whether he’s an Obama clone, but whether he can do for Republicans what Bill Clinton did for Democrats, or whether he’ll adhere to orthodoxy and squander his potential.

The GOP has been at odds with itself for years now over whether the path to victory in national elections runs through maximizing white voter turnout or appealing to the policy preferences of non-white voters. Trump embodies the former theory, Rubio the latter—to a point. Rubio famously repudiated his own immigration reform bill and has foreclosed the possibility of making unauthorized immigrants eligible for citizenship during his presidency. But he’s also hedged and obfuscated enough on the issue that he could feasibly correct course again during the general election before his impression in immigrant communities fully settles. Likewise, and in contrast to most Republican candidates, he’s expressed empathy with black and brown people who have grown to distrust law enforcement, and has a real claim to understanding the challenges poor and working-class Americans face.

But Rubio is also making the most shallow appeal of any Republican in the field. The undisguised promise of his candidacy is that his youth and background will allow him to herald an orthodox Republican policy agenda as somehow distinct and visionary. Perhaps because his heterodoxies are so superficial, Rubio enjoys the support of only 23 percent of Hispanic voters, lower than the paltry share that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In this way, Rubio resembles the Republican Party’s answer to John Edwards rather than a genuine reformer, like Clinton. Both Clinton and Edwards banked on their meager Southern upbringings—the man from Hope and the son of a mill worker, respectively—to appeal to culturally conservative, Republican-leaning constituencies. Clinton, who ran at a time when the Democratic Party needed to widen its appeal, and on a platform that genuinely deviated from party doctrine, became president. Edwards first ran as a second coming of Clinton in 2004, when Democrats were haplessly trying to out-warrior Republicans. He ran again four years later, at a moment when Democrats were ascendant, as a doctrinaire progressive with a Southern accent. He lost both times.

Al Hunt: “On paper, they look like first cousins: They are both 44, freshman senators who beat the establishment Republican candidate, and sons of Cuban immigrants who fled the right-wing Batista regime. They also are self-styled Ronald Reagan conservatives with rich political sugar daddies to give them staying power in a protracted fight.”

“Yet their differences are stark. Cruz is much more confrontational; Rubio has been able to work better, on occasion, with Democrats. Cruz, a champion college and law school debater and clerk to the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, seems smarter. Rubio, once the speaker of the Florida House, seems smoother.”

Yes, it will come down to Cruz v. Rubio. And Cruz will win.

The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky on the good Doctor Ben Carson. A must read:

The only actual interesting thing about Carson is that he raises a question we rarely get the chance to contemplate: how can a man who is so obviously distinguished and brilliant in one field be such an across-the-board nincompoop in another? Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board. He or she might be right wing or left wing, and he or she might have a weakness for French New Wave cinema or for Rock Hudson-Doris Day movies; but s/he won’t be an idiot.

But Carson is a political idiot. And it’s not all the Nazi and slavery talk, although those are certainly stupid and crude comparisons that can only be invoked by people who are dumb enough—and, I should add, insensitive enough—never to have given serious thought to the grisly particulars of what Nazism and slavery entailed. Whatever you think of Obamacare, you actually have to be a ghastly human being to compare it to practice in which horrors like this happened all the time, to many millions of people. […]

So all that is plenty bad, but even more, I mean nearly everything else that comes out of this mouth. Just Google “Ben Carson ignorance” and you’ll see quickly enough that on subjects ranging from science to foreign policy to the Constitution to virtually any political or historical or policy topic on which he chooses to speak, he says something that has no basis in real-world fact.

I’m telling you, his patients need to be seen by real doctors now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders says he will not attack Hillary Clinton “in harshly negative ways. But pollsters for his campaign are quietly testing pointed critiques of Mrs. Clinton as too close to Wall Street or as unreliably liberal for initially supporting trade deals and the Iraq war,” the New York Times reports.

“After weeks of inching toward a more aggressive posture against Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders is now walking a fine line: He is trying to draw sharp contrasts between their records, yet not attack her on a personal level. He questions her political shifts on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, the Pacific Rim free trade deal and same-sex marriage rights, for instance, while trying to avoid impugning her honesty and judgment, a favorite Republican tactic.”

Bernie Sanders knows that if he goes too far, it will backfire. Hillary Clinton is beloved by Democrats. Her favorable ratings are at Barack Obama levels of popularity (which means extremely popular). So it is a very fine needle to thread. But it seems to me that his campaign is proceeding from a false mindset. They are trying to win. They shouldn’t be. They should know that winning the nomination is extremely unlikely, and if it happens, it will be because of events far beyond their control (i.e. Hillary dying, being indicted, etc). The campaign should be focused on getting out the pure Progressive message so as to keep his numbers up and to keep Hillary moving left. That is the ultimate goal of the Bernie Sanders campaign: a more progressive Hillary.

Washington Post: “Many conservatives expressed sharp reservations about the spending agreement, negotiated secretly in recent weeks by Boehner, President Obama and other congressional leaders. But centrist Republicans and Democrats appeared largely united in support, leaving leaders of both parties confident that the bill will pass.”

Greg Sargent carefully deconstructs the deal and its costs and benefits to both parties.

What Democrats got:

— $40 billion in additional non-defense spending, over and above the caps imposed by the sequester, over two years
— a debt limit hike through March of 2017, meaning no more conservative-manufactured debt limit extortion through that date
— an end to conservative-manufactured government shutdown drama through the election and beyond
— a solution to a glitch in cost-of-living calculations that threatened to hike premiums for millions on Medicare Part B
— a reallocation of Social Security funds that Dems had sought to keep disability insurance solvent

What Republicans got:

— $40 billion in additional defense spending, over and above the caps imposed by the sequester, over two years, plus an additional chunk of defense spending in a side contingency fund. That is to say, an increase in defense spending overall that is higher than the increase in non-defense spending
— Medicare cuts, but (according to reports and experts) only on the provider side
— A tightening of eligibility requirements to the Social Security Disability Insurance program that experts say does not equal a benefits cut
— a debt limit hike through March of 2017, meaning no more conservative-manufactured debt limit extortion through that date
— an end to conservative-manufactured government shutdown drama through the election and beyond
— a solution to a glitch in cost-of-living calculations that threatened to hike premiums for millions on Medicare Part B

“The budget agreement struck late Monday between the White House and Congress hands President Obama a major victory, vindicating his hard line this year against spending limits that he argued were a drag on the economy and also buying himself freedom for the final 14 months of his term from the fiscal dysfunction that has plagued his presidency,” the New York Times reports.

“The deal is the policy equivalent of keeping the lights on — hardly the stuff of a bold fiscal legacy for the president — but it achieves the main objective of his 2016 budget: to break free of the spending shackles he agreed to when he signed the Budget Control Act of 2011.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says he’ll filibuster a bill to raise the debt ceiling, BuzzFeed News reports.

Said Paul: “I think it’s a horrible — it’s hard for me to not use profanity in describing it.. It’s a bill that shows a careless disregard for debt. It will raise the debt with no limit.”

If he does, I say you force Rand to stand there speaking until he literally dies. Seriously. No water. No chair. No breaks. No bathroom. No food.

This is what Congressional Polarization and Realignment looks like over the last 70 years.

Vox.

A local blogger from Iowa has a Jefferson Jackson Dinner post mortem. From John Deeth:

The flip side, of course, is Team Hillary needs to be planning ahead. Sure, Bernie’s folks will eventually need to get on board. But Clinton needs to get them on board, which is a tricky task.
The John Kerry campaign never really seemed to make an effort to get the Deaniacs on board; it was just assumed we would go along to Beat Bush. And while we pretty much all VOTED for Kerry – the Nader vote dwindled to a tenth of its 2000 share – a lot of folks did nothing BUT vote. And Clinton may have work to do to get even that.

She’s carefully not attacking, which may not be helping but at least isn’t deepening the wound. Positions on issues aren’t doing it, because Sanders just keeps saying he was right on DOMA or the Iraq War or whatever FIRST. For now, she’s carefully aiming at the left of the general electorate, embracing the median of the Obama era Democratic Party where it’s understood that the white male South is gone forever.

Over my 25ish years in politics, I’ve seen literally dozens of campaigns, local and national, center their strategy around getting non-voters to vote. Only two have ever succeeded: Barack Obama, and the first 19 Bar campaign here in Iowa City in 2007 that got students out for a city election. (The second effort, in 2010, also successfully implemented the strategy, but fell just short.)

Sanders is trying that strategy, and while I wish him well, in the new zero-sum dynamic of the Democratic race, he also need to convince some of the kinds of folks who care about control of the state Senate, folks who are largely in the Clinton camp now, that he can be a team player. Because having a Democratic president didn’t do jack for the teachers and public employees of Wisconsin.

Booman says Rubio is doomed as a general election candidate:

[W]hich of the other eleventy billion right-wing prospects is a good general election candidate? Is it Ben Carson? Really? Surely people don’t think Ted Cruz or Chris Christie or Rand Paul are solid general election candidates. And who is the last person to acknowledge that the Bush Brand is deader than New Coke?

I know the press loves Marco Rubio but does anyone realize what his record down in Florida actually looks like when you scrutinize it? The man’s record makes Sarah Palin look clean. A Rubio candidacy will make the GOP wish they’d hired they guy who closed down the George Washington Bridge for days out of petty political spite. The Clintons would treat Rubio like a chew-toy and make him wish he’d kept the boring job that he hates.

I know no one really serious wants to put their eggs in Carly Fiorina’s basket, and the rest of the candidates are bordering on Alan Keyes-crazy and Gary Bauer-charismatic.

Except for Ohio Governor John Kasich, of course, who is the only guy in the field with the resume and the record and the willingness to pursue the middle to make an actual case for himself. Maybe the GOP base will figure this out in time, but it’s looking unlikely at the moment.

The bottom line is that when people say Trump is the most electable, that’s like saying the guy on the stool at the end of the bar is the most electable. Compared to Bush, Carson, et. al., that’s actually true.