Tuesday Open Thread [1.19.2016]

UTAH—Salt Lake Tribune/SurveyUSA: Clinton 50, Sanders 40, O’Malley 2
UTAH—Salt Lake Tribune/SurveyUSA: Cruz 18, Trump 17, Rubio 15, Carson 15, Bush 7, Fiorina 5, Paul 4, Christie 2, Kasich 1
SOUTH CAROLINA—Opinion Savvy: Trump 32, Cruz 18, Bush 13, Rubio 11, Carson 9
FLORIDA—Florida Times-Union: Trump 31, Cruz 19, Bush 13, Rubio 12, Carson 7, Christie 4, Fiorina 4, Kasich 3, Paul 3, Huckabee 2
GEORGIA—FOX 5 Atlanta: Trump 33, Cruz 23, Rubio 8, Carson 7, Bush 7, Fiorina 4, Kasich 4, Paul 4, Huckabee 3, Christie 4

A new FiveThirtyEight forecast finds Ted Cruz has a 51% chance of winning Iowa when national and state polls as well as endorsements are taken into account. Donald Trump has a 29% chance of winning.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is believed to have an all-but-certain victory over Bernie Sanders.

Matthew MacWilliams on the one trait shared by Trump supporters: “I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism.”

“That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.”

First Read: “NBC/WSJ co-pollster Peter Hart (D) remarked last summer that Clinton is a subpar candidate when she’s the overwhelming frontrunner, but that she’s much, much better when her back is against the wall. We’ll see if that pattern continues with a closer-than-expected race in all-important Iowa.”

David Atkins says we should celebrate the ascendancy of Trump and Cruz.

[The] monster has turned on its creators. No longer can the Republican party of the Bushes and Romneys count on an attack dog to do their dirty work for them on election day so they can implement policy that benefits only economic elites while keeping a sunny, smiling Reaganesque face. The monster has broken free of its chains and it is demanding at long last to be fed. […] If you’re a Republican, the disempowerment of the generation of leaders who left the Republican Party a legacy of failure in economics and foreign policy should be welcome even at the expense of temporary embarrassment. If you’re a Democrat you should fear the dangerous beast that is the Trump-Cruz ascendancy, but watching it gorge on the flesh of the malevolent wizards who created it is not only a source of pleasant schadenfreude, but ultimately good for the country. […]

If you believe, as most progressives and even many conservative activists do, that the combination of big business interests and crony-capitalist Washington Consensus lobbyists are the biggest challenges facing the country, then a future led by Rubio/Bush is far more to be feared than one led by Trump/Cruz. A similar dynamic exists on the left in the Democratic nomination fight between Clinton and Sanders. A very large number of Americans feel that the system is so broken that it needs an outsider’s wake-up call from any direction—and there is copious evidence to suggest that they are right.

Is the Trump-Cruz ascendancy in the GOP scary? Of course it is. But we should celebrate and encourage it nonetheless. The country is likely to be better for it in the end.

Nate Silver shows us that Donald Trump is really really hated as a general election candidate:

Contra Rupert Murdoch’s assertion about Trump having crossover appeal, Trump is extraordinarily unpopular with independent voters and Democrats. Gallup polling conducted over the past six weeks found Trump with a -27-percentage-point net favorability rating among independent voters, and a -70-point net rating among Democrats; both marks are easily the worst in the GOP field. (Trump also has less-than-spectacular favorable ratings among his fellow Republicans.)

Steve Benen says Bernie and Hillary offer Dems a choice: revolution or evolution.

More so than at any point in recent memory, Hillary Clinton presented herself last night as the inheritor of President Obama’s mantle. [In press releases during the debate last night, the Clinton campaign said] “Hillary Clinton believes we must build on the progress achieved under President Obama and that, no matter what, we can’t go backwards,” the press release said. “Despite 70 consecutive months of private sector job growth and landmark legislation for universal health care and Wall Street reform, Senator Sanders has a troubling history of questioning President Obama and his achievements.” […] Clinton wants to build on Obama’s legacy, while Sanders supports a far-more progressive and ambitious platform that would replace some of what Obama has done.

If you’re a Democrat who believes the Obama era has been filled with important accomplishments, Clinton wants you to know she’ll fight to protect those policies from Republicans who would tear them down. If you’re a Democrat who believes Obama’s successes have been too moderate and incremental, Sanders offers a more revolutionary alternative.

In other words, Clinton wants the Democratic primary to be a referendum on the Obama presidency – and in her vision, pro-Obama Democrats should side with her.

That’s actually not a bad plan. As Politico’s Michael Grunwald explained this morning, “The politics of this warm embrace aren’t hard to understand. Obama’s approval rating has climbed to nearly 50 percent, and nearly 90 percent among Democrats; he’s especially popular among African-Americans, a big part of South Carolina’s primary electorate. With unemployment down by half on Obama’s watch, the deficit down three fourths, gas at $2, and the uninsured rate at historic lows, what’s harder to understand is why the Democratic candidates have taken this long to embrace him. They’re going to be accused of running for Obama’s third term no matter what they say; it can only help them to make a case for the first two.”

Isaac Chotiner of Slate:

Clinton’s debating performance is formidable because it combines her intelligence with a sincerity and level of conviction that often seem absent in other forums. When she opened the debate speaking of Martin Luther King Jr.’s role fighting for increased wages, she used his career as a subtle metaphor for what she is pitching: principled leadership with a strong practical bent. That mixture, along with her strength in close-quarter combat and an ability to wrap herself in President Obama’s record—something that played well to the Charleston crowd in the auditorium—was what won her this debate. […]

Even so, there was no knockout moment for Clinton: Most of Sanders’ supporters, like Trump’s, are probably not too caught up in his debate performances, and are instead rightly focused—here they differ from Trump’s fans—on his policy platform. But despite all the headlines about Clinton’s recent struggles, she is still overwhelmingly likely to be the Democratic nominee. She doesn’t need to knock Sanders out.

In “Republicans’ White, Working Class Trap: A Growing Reliance,” NPR’s Asma Khalid notes, “while white, working-class voters are now only about a third of the overall electorate, they’re about half of the Republican electorate.”

Steve Benen on the President’s successful Iran diplomacy:

That gamble [the Iran Nuclear Deal and other diplomatic negotiations with Iran] has paid off in ways even optimists probably find surprising. As a result of the deal, and Iranian officials’ willingness to honor their commitments, Iran has shipped 25,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium materials out of the country; it’s accepted IAEA weapons inspectors; it’s used concrete to fill its heavy-water reactor in Arak; and it’s dismantled more than 12,000 centrifuges. And on a related-but-not-directly-connected note, five Americans are now free.

It’s a vindication of the Obama administration’s policy, which has turned out to be quite effective, and the kind of breakthrough that Americans can be proud of. Indeed, when it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, heartening developments have been far and few between for quite a while, but welcoming home these Americans, held for too long in Iran, can be a unifying cause for celebration. At least, that is, in theory.

In reality, many of the president’s Republican critics spent the weekend complaining, doing their very best to turn the developments into yet another partisan dispute. Under normal circumstances, when good things happen for the United States, there’s nothing wrong with being happy – especially if you intend to lead the United States. But in this case, most Republicans were so reflexively opposed to diplomacy with Iran, so repulsed by any of President Obama’s successes, and so worried about the possible perception that the White House’s foreign policy is actually working, several national GOP candidates condemned the triumph – the success was “a sign of weakness,” according to Republicans – and conservatives went out of their way to deny Obama credit for the positive developments.

Ed Kilgore says it won’t be 2008 all over again for Hillary Clinton:

But the biggest difference is in Clinton’s own team. It could not be 2008 all over again without Mark Penn, the ubiquitous pollster-strategist who offended just about everyone (including his many detractors in Hillaryland) and hogged media attention. By all accounts, in fact, the whole Clinton operation, under low-key campaign manager Robby Mook, is massively less fraught with rivalries and negative vibes. And the strategic lessons of 2008 have surely been learned; there is zero chance Clinton will neglect to devote resources to small-state caucuses, where Obama, nearly unopposed, offset her Super Tuesday wins.

[I]t’s unlikely Clinton will lose in Iowa and then win New Hampshire, which is probably Sanders’s best state outside his own Vermont or perhaps those Bern-ed over grounds in the Pacific Northwest where he’s so immensely popular. But it’s also unlikely, at present, that she will get wiped out in a string of southern states stretching from Virginia to Louisiana the way she was by Obama, unless Sanders shows an appeal to African-Americans that he can only dream about at present.

Ted Cruz says he can convert Democrats. LOLz.

Michael Eric Dyson, in “Yes She Can” in the New Republic, says Hillary will do more as President for African Americans than Obama did or could.

Obama never had to face the heat of Black Lives Matter as he ran for office. His slow action on police problems, and his reluctance to confront racial crises, opened a leadership vacuum into which this movement has slipped. Obama has been a big disappointment to many of the black people who, like me, looked to him for leadership. On race, as his conservative opponents like to say about foreign policy, he has led from behind. He has offered lectures about failed black morality but, until recently, avoided embracing race as an issue, for fear that it would damage his ability to “get things done” with the white mainstream.

Which means that Obama has been, until late in his presidency, of little practical use to black folk, the same people who magnified his symbolic value while deflecting attention from his failure to adopt substantive policies to counter, for instance, black unemployment, or persistent intergenerational poverty, or until recently, a criminal justice system that has engulfed the lives of millions of his people. Obama and his fellow Democrats, unlike the BLM activists, have mostly steered safely clear of the folklore of race, the strains of anti-blackness that thread through American history and shape this country’s policies, perspectives, and politics.

Bill Clinton manipulated the racial passions of black folk frustrated at being denied access to the parlors of power. He offered a kind of racial parallelism that suggested—but never delivered—equality between black and white life and privileges. Obama, meanwhile, argued that what was good for America was good for black folk, when exactly the opposite is true: Helping black folk turns out to help America. Tamping down the war on drugs, which targeted black and brown folk, also spared hundreds of thousands of white youth hooked on methamphetamine. Strengthening the social safety net for our most vulnerable black and brown citizens also helped struggling white families hit hard by the recession. Obama’s handsome black face and megawatt smile were enough to blind black folk to the stunning underperformance of his administration on race. If Bill Clinton gave black America bad policy and Obama gave black America no policy, then Hillary Clinton is left only with good policy. She must achieve what her predecessors only promised.

In a sense, Clinton has emerged at precisely what seems like a strikingly unpropitious moment. The boring, the tedious, the serious attention to the small gestures that make big impacts are ill-suited to the unruly temper of the times. But this perceived liability may be her strongest asset to the black masses: She can offer strict attention to policy that unapologetically plays to black needs without ever feeling pressure—as Obama has—to disown, to begrudge the style, of explicit black advance.

In New York, when I asked Clinton what policies her administration would put forth to help black folk, she effortlessly rattled them off: She spoke of redirecting federal resources to local and state law enforcement. She spoke about black unemployment, a subject Obama has hardly acknowledged, the school-to-prison pipeline, which, she said, “often starts because black kids get suspended and expelled at a much higher rate.” She talked about creating “real alternatives to incarceration” for black people, adding that “we don’t want them being put into the prison system for nonviolent, low-level offenses, but we also don’t want them just thrown out on the street. There’s got to be a much better array of services that is available for people to try to get their own lives on the right track.” She touted community empowerment and “the use of the federal dollar to try to support small businesses, which are still the backbone of most African American communities”; she advocated job-training programs, addiction services, mental health treatment: the meat, the substance.[…]

The pre-Obama Bill Clinton took full advantage of his honorary black status. The post-Obama Hillary Clinton has no such luck. But in truth, she has a greater chance of success than either her husband or her potential predecessor. If Hillary Clinton becomes president, she will have already been tested by a fiercer racial challenge from black America than either her husband or Obama faced, and she can expect the heat to continue after she takes office. If she continues to grow, and refuses to drink from the trough of white privilege, she may achieve something that neither Bill nor Barack can claim: a presidency built on racial transparency and honesty, one that doesn’t lecture black people about what they should do to get themselves together, but instead thrives on principled engagement with black suffering.

Rick Klein asks if Trump has met his match in Ted Cruz.

“Consider how Cruz is handling Trump – and yes, it’s Cruz handling Trump, and not the other way around. Trump has been trying to draw him out for months with small and often veiled attacks. Cruz refused to engage. Then the birther buzz began, courtesy of Trump. Cruz found an opening for what may go down as the most effective attacks of the race: ‘New York values.’”

“Cruz took his lumps for it. But he knows that being attacked by The New York Daily News, Bill de Blasio, and, especially, Hillary Clinton is a good thing in the Democratic primary. He’s now focused scrutiny on Trump’s past statements and positions – scrutiny he’s been able to avoid via his own bluster and media ubiquity until now.”

“Cruz has vulnerabilities of his own, including some that are only just now surfacing. Trump is now unloading on a man he now calls ‘a nasty guy’ whom ‘nobody likes.’ Cruz is savvy enough to know what kind of words hurt, and what’s just noise.”