Wednesday Open Thread [12.23.2015]
The Washington Post says Rubio avoids actual voters: “Republican activists — including many who appreciate Rubio’s formidable political gifts and view him as the party’s best hope for beating Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton — say they are alarmed at his seeming disdain for the day-to-day grind of retail politics. Even some staunch supporters are anxious.”
“That may be, as some of his allies fret privately, a sign of overconfidence in his own abilities. Or it may be a smart strategic decision that the personal touch is overrated in an era in which celebrity billionaire Donald Trump is leading the field with a campaign that consists largely of mega-rallies, barrages of tweets and television interviews that are literally phoned in.”
Dana Milbank on the GOP strawman of Political Correctness: “The notion of political correctness became popular on college campuses a quarter-century ago but has recently grown into the mother of all straw men. Once a pejorative term applied to liberals’ determination not to offend any ethnic or other identity group, it now is used lazily by some conservatives to label everything classified under ‘that with which I disagree.’ GOP candidates are now using the ‘politically correct’ label to shut down debate — exactly what conservatives complained politically correct liberals were doing in the first place.”
Nate Cohn asks if Rubio could lose all the early states and still win the nomination: “Usually, it would be pretty hard to win the nomination without an early victory. But this year, there’s a good case for why it might be easier: The candidates favored in Iowa and New Hampshire might be such flawed candidates that they would not necessarily block Mr. Rubio.”
“Those candidates, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, will face protracted resistance from the party’s elite and many of its voters. The opposition they face will not evaporate, even if one of them wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Opposition could even grow in a desperate, last-ditch effort to stop them — assuming such an effort still seems possible.”
Bill Scher says President Obama has broken the Second Term Curse: “Presidential scholars have a term to describe the typical experience of a chief executive who wins re-election to the White House. It’s called the ‘second-term curse.’ There’s evidence for it. Midway through their second terms, George W. Bush suffered Hurricane Katrina and the Iraqi quagmire, Bill Clinton was impeached, Ronald Reagan was staggered by the Iran-contra scandal, and Richard Nixon was run out of town.”
“But Obama, unlike all of his second-term predecessors in the last 40 years, has not been knocked off course by scandal. Even if something truly awful happens in his last year, he has already been able to pocket several significant wins that will burnish his legacy.”
At least in modern terms, it’s tough to top Obama’s first term when it comes to major successes: ending the Great Recession, passing health-care reform, overhauling Wall Street safeguards, rescuing the American auto industry, etc.
But the president’s second term ranks among the more important of any modern two-termer, most notably because of historic accomplishments on foreign policy: an international nuclear agreement with Iran; overhauling a failed U.S. policy towards Cuba; a breakthrough global climate-change agreement, and so on. If his executive actions on immigration clear the courts, it will be another important piece of his second-term legacy.
Those struggling with a “second-term curse” tend to struggle; Obama’s done the opposite.
Taegan Goddard says we might be in for a repeat of the long 2008 primary, this time on the Republican side:
With the exception of Rubio winning three or four of the early states — which doesn’t seem possible at this point — it’s hard to see any scenario where any candidate wraps up the nomination quickly.
Instead of deciding the nominee, the early state contests will more likely cull the herd down to three or four candidates — perhaps Trump, Cruz, Rubio and one other. That fourth candidate is probably no more than a spoiler depending on how long he or she stays in the race.
The remaining contenders will be well-funded and have the ability to fight on for many months. In some ways, the GOP nomination fight could resemble the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. But with three candidates, it will be even harder for any one to get a majority of the delegates.
Donald Trump repeatedly joked that he would “never kill” reporters, even though he detests them, Business Insider reports. Said Trump: “I would never kill them but I do hate them. And some of them are such lying, disgusting people. It’s true.”
He talks about it like it is an option available to him. Given power, it might be despite his dismissal now.
David Frum on the great GOP revolt: “Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.”
“The puzzle for the monied leaders of the Republican Party is: What now? And what next after that? None of the options facing the GOP elite is entirely congenial. But there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.”
Sen. Ted Cruz predicted to the National Review that the GOP presidential race “will boil down to the familiar dynamic of an establishment favorite squaring off against a conservative challenger after they claim victories in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively.”
Said Cruz: “I believe I will be that conservative candidate. I don’t know who the moderate candidate will be.”
“Cruz’s confidence owes to his campaign, an Obama-style grassroots-heavy operation that prioritizes direct voter contact and ground organization. So certain of his operational superiority has the senator become that he dons his strategist cap gleefully and discusses the most granular details of his polling enterprise and outreach program. Moreover, he mocks the approach taken by Rubio’s campaign, which is famously allergic to process stories and defiantly dependent on media buys… And yet Cruz clearly believes Rubio is best positioned to consolidate the other lane of the race.”
Your 2016 Republican Nominee will be Ted Cruz.
Mike Lux channels Jason330 when he asks “What are Democrats to do?”
Demographic trends are in fact moving steadily our way, year after year. What we have to do is keep from having the kind of blowout Republican years that we had in 2010 and 2014, especially in the non-presidential cycles. How do we accomplish that task?
What we have to do is reorient our strategy in those years. Instead of our candidates running for the hills and distancing themselves from anything remotely favored by the Democratic Party, we need to energize and mobilize our voters.
Republicans were pumped up to come out and vote in 2010 and 2014, but Democrats saw no reason to come out because their standard bearers were not speaking to them. The most fundamental problem by far in those years was a lack of Democratic turnout. In his book Brown is the New White, coming out in February, Steve Phillips details these trends and argues for a massive new investment in turning out Democratic leaning voters in each and every election. Demographics alone will not win every election for us, but if we make a serious investment in turning those likely supporters out, it will make a huge difference.
[…] In terms of creating the demographic coalitions we need to win most races, extra dollars spent to register and turn out to vote new African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native American, and Arab-American voters- as well as progressive whites- are far more efficient and effective ways of spending money than ever more expensive TV buys trying to persuade increasingly smaller numbers of harder to get white people that are more conservative in their views. When you look at what campaign tactics and dollars will actually get Democrats more votes, focusing on turnout of the base is a better way to allocate dollars.
Here’s the other reason I don’t think there is a contradiction here: progressive messaging that motivates base voters who are people of color to vote also appeals to the kinds of white voters who are open to voting for Democrats: unmarried working class women, younger people, union members, the LGBT community, people with disabilities, less religiously observant people and non-Christians. A strong populist progressive message not only appeals to but actually motivates all of those kinds of voters as well as people of color. And these more progressive minded whites, in combination with people of color, do make up a clear majority of eligible voters in this country.
