Saturday Open Thread [10.31.15]

NATIONAL—NBC/SurveyMonkey: Clinton 50, Sanders 30, O’Malley 1, Lessig 1
NATIONAL—IBD/TIPP: Clinton 48, Sanders 33, O’Malley 2

NATIONAL—NBC News/Survey Monkey poll finds Donald Trump and Ben Carson tied at 26% nationally in the GOP presidential race. They are followed by Ted Cruz at 10%, Marco Rubio at 9%, Jeb Bush at 5% and Carly Fiorina at 5%.
NATIONAL—IBD/TIPP: Trump 28, Carson 23, Rubio 11, Cruz 6, Bush 6, Fiorina 3, Jindal 2, Huckabee 1, Paul 2, Kasich 1, Christie 1, Santorum 1

Frank Rich asks if the GOP is cracking up:

So now we’ll see if Rubio’s anemic poll numbers start to rise. Meanwhile, the overall question about the GOP in 2016 remains the same. Do Republicans, especially those who vote in primaries, want a center-right candidate who has actually worked in government, or do they want a rank outsider? No matter what the pecking order, the fact is that half, or a bit more than half, of the Republican electorate still is telling pollsters that it doesn’t want a Rubio, Bush, or Kasich. It wants Ben Carson or Donald Trump or (for a while) Fiorina. I think we can say that Fiorina is done; her brief vogue ended because she is both a world-class scold and the most unconvincing populist imaginable. (She not only laid off 30,000 employees at HP but nearly destroyed the company for those who remained.) Trump is wearing thin, but even at his thinnest, he’s still outpolling most of his opponents by double digits. And Carson — the new favorite — well, he makes Trump sound like Disraeli. As the debate once again demonstrated, he babbles platitudes, generalities, and utter nonsense; lies about his own history (including as a peddler of a suspect patent medicine); and seems to regard his own ascent in politics as akin to the Second Coming. If he and Trump continue to lead the GOP field, the Republican Party has a true crack-up on its hands, with its traditional donor class and corporate infrastructure in irresolvable conflict with its radical base. It’s worth noting that the miracle man who is supposed to paper over this conflict in Washington — Paul Ryan — received scant respect from the presidential hopefuls last night. If Trump and Carson both fade, it would seem that the only acceptable alternative to the base would not be Rubio but the far-right Ted Cruz, whose debate performance was just as slick.

Frank also thinks Bush is finished, and even more than that, that he was never even a real candidate.

“I’d argue that he was never a real candidate to begin with, for all the money and Establishment support he attracted. There are three basic requirements for running for president: a cause or causes you vehemently want to advance, the proverbial fire in the belly, and an enthusiastic group of grassroots supporters who want to propel you to the White House. Bush had none of the three. His campaign has been a study in incompetence that has mainly dramatized the candidate’s sense of entitlement.”

“What’s also remarkable is how little Jeb is aware of the changes in his own party. He has seemed perpetually surprised by the heathens in the GOP’s midst. He should not have been. His own father, with his race-baiting Willie Horton campaign against Michael Dukakis, helped invite in the crazies. His brother and Karl Rove gave sotto voce encouragement to the gay-bashing forces of the religious right, and looked the other way as Sarah Palin paved the way for Trump, Carson, and Cruz. Yet Jeb still clung to a belief that the old-school patrician ethos of his parents could run to his rescue in 2016. History will look back at him, if it looks at all, as a world-class fool and the last exhausted gasp of a GOP that no longer exists.”

Remember all that bluster from Rand Paul that he was going to filibuster the Budget Deal? Yeah, it lasted all of 19 minutes.

Mark Blumenthal reviews Stanley Greenberg’s new book, American Ascendant, which calls for a new progressive era to address “revolutions that are changing America, changing politics, changing culture, changing economics.

While Greenberg counsels Democrats to advocate “very bold policy changes,” he also believes that a Republican “implosion” is now underway in the GOP presidential primary.

The Republican Party, as Greenberg describes it, is “a rural, white, married, evangelical, religious party in a country that’s becoming less married, more secular, more urban.” The “furious counter-revolution” the party has waged for a decade to keep the “new American majority” from governing, he said, has “alienated the Republican Party from the country.”

He sees the evangelical and tea party blocs as “driving the base of support” for presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson, and believes they could ultimately boost support for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Greenberg is also ready to declare former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “gone” as a presidential aspirant. “There’s no place for Bush in the Republican Party,” he said. Bush has positioned himself as a “more electable” candidate. But Greenberg pointed out that he “presents himself as the most conservative on choice issues, which makes him unacceptable to [GOP moderates], the one group of voters that might have voted for a moderate establishment candidate.”

Rick Klein: “Jeb Bush’s problem is not a flat attack on Marco Rubio, or even a news cycle or three obsessed with the question of whether his campaign can continue. It’s not about his record, or even about stray quotes regarding ‘life support.’ Jeb Bush’s problem from here is finding a plausible path to the nomination, out of the chaos of this field in this anti-establishment environment.”

“Like everyone else, he was surprised by the surge of Donald Trump and Ben Carson. He was never going to play in the Ted Cruz/Mike Huckabee/Rick Santorum evangelical space, and Bushes are no tea party or libertarian darlings. But he’s now finding his own wheelhouse crowded – with John Kasich and Chris Christie plausible establishment alternatives. That’s aside, of course, from Rubio – symbolically and substantively the single biggest threat to the idea of a Bush nomination in 2016.”

Next week, Des Moines, Iowa will host a National Religious Liberties Conference, where theocratic fascists will gather to tell attendees that birth control kills babies and how the gays should be put to death. Naturally, GOP candidates Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee will be there.