Monday Open Thread [1.11.2016]

IOWA—NBC News/Marist: Clinton 48, Sanders 45, O’Malley 5
NEW HAMPSHIRE—NBC News/Marist: Sanders 50, Clinton 46, O’Malley 1
IOWA—NBC News/Marist: Cruz 28, Trump 24, Rubio 13, Carson 11, Paul 5, Bush 4, Christie 3, Fiorina 3, Huckabee 2, Kasich 2
NEW HAMPSHIRE—NBC News/Marist: Trump 30, Rubio 14, Christie 12, Cruz 10, Bush 9, Kasich 9, Paul 5, Carson 4, Fiorina 3
NEW HAMPSHIRE—PPP: Clinton 50, Trump 36 | Clinton 48, Cruz 40 | Clinton 45, Rubio 42 | Clinton 50, Carson 39 | Clinton 46, Bush 40 | Sanders 54, Trump 34 | Sanders 55, Cruz 35 | Sanders 51, Rubio 37 | Sanders 50, Bush 38 |

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday that 292,000 seasonally adjusted new jobs were added to the economy in December, 275,000 in the private sector and 17,000 in government. This was far in excess of the consensus expectation of 200,000. The official unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.0 percent. The BLS also revised its previous count of new jobs created in November from 211,000 to 252,000. The October count was revised from 298,000 to 307,000.

Frank Bruni on how being a jerk has become confused for being “strong.”

In a typical presidential campaign, the most successful candidates lay claim to leadership with their high-mindedness. They reach for poetry. They focus on lifting people up, not tearing them down. They beseech voters to be their biggest, best selves.

Not the two front-runners in this freaky Republican primary. They’re unreservedly smug. They’re unabashedly mean.

If you’re not with them, you’re a loser (Donald Trump’s declaration) or you’re godless (Ted Cruz’s decree, more or less). They market name-calling as truth-telling, pettiness as boldness, vanity as conviction. And their tandem success suggests a dynamic peculiar to the 2016 election, a special rule for this road:

Obnoxiousness is the new charisma.

Dan Carter on the connection between Donald Trump and George Wallace:

Donald J. Trump, reality television star and real estate mogul, is different in many ways from major political figures in our past. But there are striking similarities between Mr. Trump and George C. Wallace, the Deep South politician who ran for president each opportunity he got from 1964 through 1976. The connections between the two — their rhetoric and their ability to fire up crowds — give us a better sense of what Trumpism will mean once he is gone from the campaign stage. After all, political losers as well as winners can shape the future. …

What both share is the demagogue’s instinctive ability to tap into the fear and anger that regularly erupts in American politics. […]

On paper his speeches were stunningly disconnected, at times incoherent. But videotapes of those 1968 rallies captured a performance. A wild energy seemed to flow back and forth between Mr. Wallace and his audience as he called out their mutual enemies: bearded hippies, pornographers, sophisticated intellectuals who mocked God, traitorous anti-Vietnam War protesters, welfare bums, cowardly politicians and “pointy-head college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.”

Fascists know how to give good speeches. If you doubt that, look at Hitler’s and Mussolini’s.

Reuters says the Donald always sleeps in his good encrusted bed in NYC every night: “After nearly every rally, the billionaire real estate developer hops into one of his planes or helicopters and returns to New York so that he can sleep in his own bed in his marble-and-gold-furnished Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan.”

“Trump’s determination to sleep at home every night raises eyebrows among election campaign veterans, who say it could cost him. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire often want more personal attention; they feel they play a special role in choosing presidential nominees because their contests are held first. Trump leads in polls in New Hampshire but he has slipped behind Cruz in Iowa. Cruz has done what U.S. presidential candidates typically do: He has made the state a virtual second home in the run-up to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus.”

United States of Militiadom from MarkFiore on Vimeo.

A new CNN/ORC poll finds 67% say they favor the gun safety changes Obama announced, and 32% oppose them. Support for the executive actions, designed to expand background checks to cover more gun purchases made online or at gun shows and to make it easier for the FBI to complete background checks efficiently, comes across party lines, with majorities of Democrats (85%), independents (65%) and Republicans (51%) in favor of them. Majorities back the measures across most demographic groups, in fact, including 57% of gun owners and 56% of rural residents.

Gov. John Kasich (R) said the New Hampshire will decide his presidential campaign’s future, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Said Kasich: “If I don’t do well in New Hampshire, I’m going home. I’m not dragging it out. I’m counting on the people here to help me do well. I feel good. I’m optimistic that we’re going to come out of here like a firecracker.”

Thanks, Obama:

The Chinese stock market is plummeting so fast that authorities there keep shutting it down. North Korea set off a bomb in a nuclear test. Two of the Middle East’s great powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are eyeing each other menacingly. In the European Union, political extremists are on the rise, migrants are pouring in and Britain may drop out (three phenomena that are not unrelated).

And in the United States, the number of people filing unemployment claims is hovering near the lowest levels in four decades, the jobless rate may well fall below 5 percent for the first time since 2007, and whatever the noise on the presidential campaign trail, Congress recently passed bipartisan legislation to keep the government running comfortably into next year.

David Greenberg: “We gripe about the suffocating presence of ‘spin’: the policies tested by pollsters and focus groups, the slogans and laugh lines penned by speechwriters, the staged photo ops and town-hall meetings… But the spin that we find so pervasive today is nothing new. It actually goes back more than a century. In fact, all those revered past presidents were pioneers in honing the modern methods of image-making and message-craft that we now so often denounce.”

“Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, when candidates began campaigning for votes and presidents started regularly courting the public, politicians have been refining the tools and techniques of what we now call spin. Spin turns out to be woven into the fabric of American politics, and though it is hardly an unmixed good, it is inseparable from many of the signature achievements of our greatest leaders.”

Byron York says Ted Cruz is hated by all the right people: “I sent Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler an email asking how Cruz has made unpopularity work for him. Tyler sent back a response with no words at all but rather a graphic of a Gallup daily tracking poll on Republican candidate favorability… Cruz was at the top of the chart, with 61% of Republicans saying they have a favorable opinion of him, versus 16% with an unfavorable opinion — a 45-point net favorable rating that put Cruz ahead of Ben Carson (40 point net favorable), Marco Rubio (35), Donald Trump (24), and the rest of the GOP field.”

“No explanation required. The Republican establishment is held in such contempt that, when it comes to the party’s base, a candidate’s best way to get ahead is to be hated by all the right people.”

Sen. Ted Cruz “has emerged as the Republican Party’s strongest challenger to frontrunner Donald Trump, inching up in Economist/YouGov Polls. He is the second choice of 40% of Trump supporters among Republican primary voters, and his favorable ratings have climbed 20 points in the last six months.”

“Among all Republican primary voters, Cruz is the clear second choice. More than four in ten primary voters name Cruz as either their first or second choice. But Trump is still ahead of both the senators: nearly half say the New York businessman is their first or second choice.”

Donald Trump said that North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, deserves “credit” for taking over his country at such a young age, Business Insider reports. Said Trump: “If you look at North Korea, this guy, I mean, he’s like a maniac, OK? And you’ve got to give him credit. How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals.”

He added: “He goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss. It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn’t play games. And we can’t play games with him. Because he really does have missiles. And he really does have nukes.”

Trumps says this with admiration. He admires the fact that he murdered all his family so he could consolidate power. Fascists admire fascists. Dictators admire dictators.

Dan Balz: “The more the Republican candidates have amped up their rhetoric, the more they have triggered a sharp response from the Democrats. Hillary Clinton, who said last fall that she is proud to think of Republicans as enemies, never seems happier on the campaign trail than when she is denouncing the other party as one captured by extremists.”

David Roberts at Vox says yes, Trump will lose. Here is how:

[T]he seeds of Trump’s destruction can be found in his greatest strength. To put it bluntly: If your value proposition is that you’re a winner, your value evaporates the minute you’re no longer winning. Losing refutes a winner, and no one wins forever. […]

Trump’s vulnerability (like his strength!) is that his appeal is entirely personal, entirely based on the expectation that he’s a winner who will win. He’s an alpha male, the top dog, the guy with the balls and the leverage to get the good deals, the guy who can’t be intimidated, the self-made, independent guy who’s not afraid to say what everybody’s thinking. “I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal. “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.”

That hyperbole has been fervently embraced by his supporters, independent of any policy positions. Policy positions are simply not the point. […]

But those who live by personal appeal die by personal appeal.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand what’s really going on with Trump. His entire career, like his campaign, has been about declaring his awesomeness and forcing others to acknowledge it. He has surrounded himself with trophy wives, sycophants, and his own name, everywhere he looks. He built a whole TV show premised on the idea that he’s a savvy, decisive business executive, harvesting obeisance from the rotating cast of supplicants. It is overcompensation on a world-historical scale.

At the root of this kind of narcissism is always the same thing: a vast, yawning chasm of need, a hunger for approval and validation that is never sated. Down there in the lizard brain, it’s fear: fear of being left out, laughed at, or looked down on, fear of never belonging, never being accepted, no matter how many towers you build.

The fear can only be calmed by validation, by accumulating visible markers of success until no one can laugh at you. There’s a submerged glacier of insecurity beneath every blowhard. […]

Under attack, or in the face of skepticism or, y’know, losing, Trump’s thin skin will make him defensive and volatile. He can’t modulate, can’t do humility, can’t abide the thought of anyone above him. All his claims, all his stories, all his insults are yuge, the best you’ll find anywhere.

The same belligerence that looked like strength when Trump was on top will look defensive and bitter when he’s not. And the more doubtful or skeptical voters and the media become, the more Trump will escalate, the more his chest will puff. He doesn’t know any other strategy. He’ll enter a negative spiral as self-reinforcing as his rise has been.

That’s my feeling as well. As soon as he loses Iowa, he will lose his lead in New Hampshire, and then he will lose New Hampshire.

Ted Cruz’s “success in consolidating evangelical Christians, which has helped propel him to front-runner status in Iowa, reflects how he has methodically and painstakingly pursued the Christian right here since he announced his candidacy last March at Liberty University in Virginia, the evangelical institution founded by Jerry Falwell,” the New York Times reports.

“He has sewn up endorsements of crucial Iowa evangelicals; deployed his pastor father, Rafael Cruz, as a surrogate; and activated networks of faith-driven voters like pastors and home-school families, which in a caucus state like Iowa are important in turning out voters.”