Friday Open Thread [11.13.2015]

TEXAS—UT/Texas Tribune: Clinton 61, Sanders 30, O’Malley 1

ARIZONA—Behavior Research Center: Carson 23, Trump 21, Rubio 15, Bush 8, Cruz 5, Fiorina 2, Paul 1, Kasich 1, Huckabee 1, Christie 1
TEXAS—UT/Texas Tribune: Trump 27, Cruz 27, Carson 13, Bush 4, Rubio 9, Fiorina 4, Huckabee 2, Paul 4, Christie 1, Kasich 1, Santorum 1

LOUISIANA—University of New Orleans: Edwards (D) 56, Vitter (R) 34
LOUISIANA—Market Research Insight: Edwards (D) 52, Vitter (R) 38.

Elspeth Reeve writes about The Hillary Clinton Living Inside the Republican Brain.

According to the collective wisdom of the GOP crowd, Clinton is a power-mad monster who is nearly unstoppable, but she’s also weak. She is afraid of debating Republicans, but Republican debates are making her stronger. She is a hard leftist who hasn’t been shaken from her mission to drive America into socialism, but also a flip-flopper who only recently began capitulating to the left.

It’s how they view Obama and all Democrats: we are incredibly weak, but we are devious tyrants that must be stopped.

ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

I love how the President is going to be part of this campaign.

The Establishment is panicking!!!

“Less than three months before the kick-off Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them,” the Washington Post reports.

“According to other Republicans, some in the party establishment are so desperate to change the dynamic that they are talking anew about drafting Romney — despite his insistence that he will not run again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans, who were briefed on the talks, though Romney has shown no indication of reviving his interest.”

Donald Trump told CNN that Marco Rubio favors “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants because the Florida senator and his parents are Hispanic. Said Trump: “That’s why he wants amnesty.”

He added: “He was always in favor of amnesty, he was always in favor of letting people pour into the country, then what happened is, when people found that out, he sank like a rock in the water.”

I am loathe to defend Rubio here, but this is just blatant racism. And Trump will improve his position because of it.

First Read wonders if Trump has finally gone too far:

“Personal attacks are one thing; baselessly comparing an opponent (who is almost universally popular with your own base!) to a child molester is jaw-dropping. Whether Trump was tired, frustrated, cranky, whatever – this off-the-rails attack may have been the best illustration yet of why so many folks believe Trump can’t make it over the nomination finish line. While most of his other attacks on rivals — ‘low energy,’ ‘puppets,’ etc. — have played into narratives with some grain of truth to them, this one is just mean-spirited word association accusing a well-liked political figure of literally *the worst possible thing* a person can do. And this comes after plenty of reports that Trump was toning down his rhetoric, acting like a more mature candidate and thinking more strategically about his path.”

“The question is: How and where could Trump’s attacks on the field’s most popular candidate hurt him? And is ‘child molester’ finally the threshold for his bombastic language to start wearing on voters?”

It’s starting to get nasty! Trump also went after Carson yesterday for being a pathological liar, which is correct. Fiorina, also a pathological liar, defending her fellow pathological liar by saying on Facebook:

“Donald, sorry, I’ve got to interrupt again. You would know something about pathological. How was that meeting with Putin? Or Wharton? Or your self funded campaign? Anyone can turn a multi-million dollar inheritance into more money, but all the money in the world won’t make you as smart as Ben Carson.”

And she is also right. Donald does lie as well, creating meetings with world leaders out of whole cloth, lying about self funding his campaign. He was born with a silver spoon. The only thing Carly gets wrong is this: Ben Carson is not smart.

Former conservative Damon Linker at The Week asks why conservative intellectuals aren’t more disgusted with the GOP:

I can’t grasp how an intelligent, well-read man or woman, regardless of ideological commitments, could watch the Republican debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday night and not come away disgusted. I certainly did. It was a familiar feeling. […]

Somehow, my friends on the right don’t seem to hear anything troubling, anything intellectually offensive emanating from the mouths of the Republican candidates. And I just don’t get it.

The appropriate response to someone attempting to turn you into the victim of a hoax or a swindle is anger. It’s insulting to be treated like a sucker, a chump. And yet, my conservative intellectual friends appear not to be bothered in the least.

And that I just don’t understand.

I don’t either.

Paul Krugman at The New York Times looks at the Republican economic plans on display at the last debate:

It’s not too hard to understand why everyone seeking the Republican presidential nomination is proposing huge tax cuts for the rich. Just follow the money: Candidates in the G.O.P. primary draw the bulk of their financial support from a few dozen extremely wealthy families. Furthermore, decades of indoctrination have made an essentially religious faith in the virtues of high-end tax cuts — a faith impervious to evidence — a central part of Republican identity.

But what we saw in Tuesday’s presidential debate was something relatively new on the policy front: an increasingly unified Republican demand for hard-money policies, even in a depressed economy. Ted Cruz demands a return to the gold standard. Jeb Bush says he isn’t sure about that, but is open to the idea. Marco Rubio wants the Fed to focus solely on price stability, and stop worrying about unemployment. Donald Trump and Ben Carson see a pro-Obama conspiracy behind the Federal Reserve’s low-interest rate policy.

First Read on the Rubio Paradox: “After his strong debate performances, after the endorsements he’s picked up and after Jeb Bush’s weakened position, Marco Rubio looks to be the Republican frontrunner — at least in the ‘establishment’ bracket of the GOP race. And there’s the emerging perception that, if the early contests started tomorrow, Rubio would be the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. But here’s what gives us a little pause: Is he built to win in either Iowa or New Hampshire? Remember, in this modern political era, every GOP nominee has won EITHER Iowa or New Hampshire. Right now, he’s standing in third place in public polling in both states – behind both Trump and Carson.”

“But here’s the question everyone should ask themselves: Can Rubio fall short in both Iowa and New Hampshire and still win the GOP nomination?”

Steve Benen:

Consider the series of events: when Clinton’s economic plan was considered in Congress, it received literally zero Republican votes, and GOP lawmakers insisted that Clinton’s reckless approach would cause multiple recessions and widespread despair. Instead, it succeeded beautifully.

When George W. Bush’s economic plan reached Congress, Republicans backed it en masse, certain it would be a wild success. It wasn’t.

In the Obama era, Republicans said the Recovery Act would fail (it succeeded); they said the rescue of the auto industry would fail (it also succeeded); and they said the White House’s domestic policies would crush job growth (they did the opposite).

It’s against this backdrop that GOP candidates are going into the 2016 election cycle effectively saying, “Don’t believe your lying eyes; our agenda is bound to work eventually.”

Jeet Heer wonders if Bernie Sanders really is in the race to win it:

Sanders claim that his goal is to “run to win” but his own actions belie that argument. Given his bold stance as a democratic socialist, and his often fiery rhetoric, Sanders has been far more successful than he might have hoped, but he still lags far behind Clinton. According to a recent Huffington Post poll, he sits at 31.7 percent, nearly 25 percentage points behind Hillary, who sits at 56.1 percent. Given Clinton’s formidable lead, Sanders’s only hope for actually winning involves convincing Hillary voters that they have to switch to him. And while he has turned somewhat more negative in the last month, it would entail running a far harsher campaign than Sanders has been willing to run so far.

During the first debate, it was noticeable that Sanders kept his speechmaking guns trained on Wall Street, but refused to make the plausible argument that Clinton is the candidate of big business. Sanders has also avoided playing up other potential weak areas for Clinton, such as her foreign policy hawkishness (which many in the Democratic base might be wary of) and also the character issues revealed in her handling of the email controversy that engulfed her. In fact, Sanders went to the other extreme, acting not as Clinton’s rival but as her advocate and protector. In the most memorable moment of the first debate he declared, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”

[…]

To judge by the first debate, Sanders wants to be the left wing of Clintonism, rather than a viable electoral alternative to Clinton within the Democratic Party. But given the excitement that his campaign has generated, which seems to surprise Sanders himself, he could try to win for real.

Eight years ago, another Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination faced the same dilemma that Sanders does today. Barack Obama enjoyed roughly the same level of popularity that Sanders does now, a passionate third of voters. Like Sanders today, Obama was loath to run a negative campaign and wanted to offer a more optimistic, constructive politics. But Obama and his staff realized that going after Hillary Clinton was the only road they had to the White House.