Monday Open Thread [11.30.15]

So with Carson and Trump out, Cruz is the frontrunner. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Gov. Chris Christie gained some traction with an endorsement from New Hampshire’s Union Leader, traditionally the most respected newspaper voice in the first-in-the-nation primary state. Not that it has a track record of helping out the endorsees that much. Remember when former Governor Pete du Pont won the New Hampshire primary in 1988? Yeah, neither do Presidents Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, John McCain, or Newt Gingrich.

From the editorial: “Gov. Christie is right for these dangerous times. He has prosecuted terrorists and dealt admirably with major disasters. But the one reason he may be best-suited to lead during these times is because he tells it like it is and isn’t shy about it.”

New York Times: “Mr. Christie’s slavish devotion to New Hampshire, and his painstaking cultivation of its political leadership, paid by far their biggest dividend on Saturday when the influential New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper offered him an unexpectedly early and forceful endorsement.”

“Over the next few days, his determination will yield still more prizes: the endorsements of a widely courted former speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Donna Sytek, and two powerful and wealthy local real estate developers, Renee and Dan Plummer.”

As the primaries get underway, I think it is helpful to look at the schedule of primaries and caucus in the GOP race. And I think it is helpful to also think about which states are must wins for candidates. As you will see, New Hampshire is make or break for many.

February 1, 2016–Iowa–Santorum, Carson
February 9, 2016–New Hampshire–Kasich, Christie, Pataki, Paul, Fiorina
February 20, 2016–South Carolina–Graham, Huckabee
February 23, 2016–Nevada
Super Tuesday, March 1, 2016–Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Wyoming–Bush, Trump, Cruz
March 5, 2016–Maine, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana
March 8, 2016–Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, Michigan
March 12, 2016–DC, Guam
March 13, 2016–Puerto Rico
March 15, 2016–Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina–Rubio
March 22, 2016–Arizona, Utah
April 5, 2016–Wisconsin
April 19, 2016–New York
April 26, 2016–Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island
May 3, 2016–Indiana
May 10, 2016–Nebraska, West Virginia
May 17, 2016–Oregon
May 24, 2016–Washington
June 7, 2016–California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota

“The race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination enters a new and urgent phase this week after an already brutish stretch in which the dominance of Donald Trump and Ben Carson has exasperated rivals and the party’s political class,” the Washington Post reports.

“After months of waiting for the popular outsiders to implode, numerous Republican strategists no longer expect them to do so. Instead, opponents are angling to position themselves for what could become a protracted primary fight.”

“In conversations over the past month, GOP establishment donors have confided to The Hill that for the first time in recent memory, they find themselves contemplating not supporting a Republican nominee for president.”

“Most, however, still believe that Trump will flame out before they have to face that decision.”

Sen. Marco Rubio told CBN that religious believers must “ignore” laws that violate their faith.

Said Rubio: “In essence, if we are ever ordered by a government authority to personally violate and sin — violate God’s law and sin — if we’re ordered to stop preaching the Gospel, if we’re ordered to perform a same-sex marriage as someone presiding over it, we are called to ignore that. So when those two come into conflict, God’s rules always win.”

Ah, God’s Rules. The problem with God’s Rules is that many are contradictory. For example, I am to stone to death anyone who works on the Sabbath, or any one who touches the skin of a dead pig, or anyone who wears clothing of two different fabrics, but then the Ten Commandments tells me that I shall not kill. Which is it?

As the President is in Paris for the Global Climate Summit that starts this week, Curt Stager reports on some astounding facts about our impact on the climate of our planet Earth.

It’s a mistake to think the climatic effects of our carbon emissions will be over within a few decades or centuries. Our intergenerational responsibilities run much deeper into the future.

In this new Anthropocene epoch, the “Age of Humans,” we have become so numerous, our technology so powerful, and our lives so interconnected that we are now a force of nature on a geological scale. By running our civilization on fossil fuels, we are both creating and destroying climates that our descendants will live in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years from now. […]

Research by the University of Chicago oceanographer and climate scientist David Archer and others shows that the cleanup will take tens of thousands of years even if we switch quickly to renewable energy sources. When the Earth’s slow cyclic tilting and wobbling along its eccentric orbital path once again leads to a major cooling period some 50,000 years from now, enough of our heat-trapping carbon emissions will still remain in the atmosphere to warm the planet just enough to weaken that chill. In other words, our impacts on global climate are so profound that we will have canceled the next ice age.

Leonard Pitts on Trump:

Keeping the customer satisfied, giving the people what they want, is the fundament[sic] of sound business. More effectively than anyone in recent memory, Trump has transferred that principle to politics. Problem is, it turns out that what a large portion of the Republican faithful wants is racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, the validation of unrealistic fears and the promise of quick fixes to complex problems.

Emphasis mine.

Michael Gerson agrees with me, that Ted Cruz will be the GOP Nominee:

No one I consulted can explain the Donald Trump phenomenon, which seems to defy typology, so they tend to talk about down-ticket conflicts: Cruz vs. Rubio. Rubio vs. Jeb Bush. Ben Carson vs. his foreign policy homework.

Cruz is benefiting from a common but specious conservative argument — that recent GOP presidential candidates have lost because they weren’t conservative enough. This claim has been around since the days of President Barry Goldwater. But it has gained traction in Iowa, with a twist. Given the perceived political vulnerability of Hillary Clinton, might it be possible to nominate and elect a “real” conservative this time around, defined as the rejection of compromise at the highest decibel level?

Cruz has the decibel part mastered and has moved rightward on immigration in an attempt to sew up conservative support. “He goes where he needs to go,” one Republican strategist told me. Influential and obstreperous Rep. Steve King has endorsed Cruz; influential evangelical Bob Vander Plaats seems about to. Cruz has benefited in one way from the Trump ascendency. He looks positively reasonable in comparison. And Cruz doesn’t have Trump’s main drawback in reaching out to conservatives — that Trump isn’t actually a conservative.

Simon Malloy:

The Obama administration’s response to the Paris terrorist attacks has provided an opening for pundits to indulge in one of their favorite pastimes: overwrought complaints about President Obama’s leadership and “tone.” National Journal’s Ron Fournier, the chief “leadership” fetishist of the Beltway press, wrote a terribly earnest column in which he sadly, solemnly declared that the Paris attacks proved once and for all that Ron Fournier is right and Obama can’t lead. A similar take was offered by the New York Times’ Frank Bruni, who complained: “From Obama we needed fire. Instead we got embers, along with the un-presidential portrayal of Republicans as sniveling wimps whose fears about refugees were akin to their complaints about tough debate questions.” The idea that Obama is “detached” from the terrorism debate was a key part of Josh Kraushaar’s column arguing that 2016 is shaping up to be a “landslide” election for the GOP.

Much of this is just theater criticism. The politics of terrorism and national security in the post-9/11 era still put a premium on tough-guy chest thumping. People like Chris Christie are widely presumed to be strong leaders on national security because Christie goes on TV and barks about how when he’s president, all of the country’s adversaries will be cowed by his potent manliness. Obama doesn’t do that kind of stuff, and he never has, and so commentators – with an unsubtle assist from Republican and conservative messaging efforts – argue that he’s weak and feckless.

This is frustrating because it also gives a pass to people who go out there and overreact to terrorist threats and get way ahead of what is actually happening in the world. Marco Rubio’s response to the Paris attacks was to cut an ad warning that the same thing could happen here because we are in a “civilizational struggle” with ISIS. That’s complete foolishness that vastly overstates the power and reach of the Islamic State, and it actually feeds into the terrorist group’s preferred narrative of an apocalyptic confrontation between Islam and the West. But he sounds so very serious and he’s promising to take strong action, so no one points out that he’s detached from reality.

Glenn Thrush says Ted Cruz is running the best GOP campaign: “The fundamentals are in place for a big winter push. Cruz’s fundraising has been near the top of the field ($26 million as of Oct. 15) and his campaign has an efficient 50 percent burn rate with about $14 million cash-on-hand.”