Wednesday Open Thread [1.20.2016]

NATIONAL—Monmouth: Clinton 52, Sanders 37, O’Malley 2
NATIONAL—NBC/SurveyMonkey: Clinton 52, Sanders 36
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG: Sanders 49, Clinton 43, O’Malley 3
NEW HAMPSHIRE—CNN/WMUR: Sanders 60, Clinton 33, O’Malley 1
MARYLAND—Gonzales Research: Clinton 40, Sanders 27, O’Malley 5
MARYLAND–U.S. SENATE—Gonzales Research: Van Hollen 38, Edwards 36
NATIONAL—NBC/SurveyMonkey: Trump 38, Cruz 21, Rubio 11, Carson 8. No other Republican gets more than 4%.
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG: Trump 27, Kasich 20, Rubio 10, Cruz 9, Christie 9, Bush 8, Paul 5, Fiorina 2, Carson 2, Santorum 1, Huckabee 1
MARYLAND—Gonzales Research: Trump 32, Cruz 15, Rubio 14, Carson 9, Christie 8, Bush 4
FLORIDA—OpinionSavvy: Trump 31, Cruz 19, Bush 13, Rubio 12, Carson 7

“The tumultuous race for the Republican nomination is taking a toll on the GOP’s image, with more than four-in-ten voters saying that the primary contest has soured their perceptions of the Republican Party — more so than impressions of the Democrats,” according to the latest NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll. Yeah, no shit. Revealing yourselves to be fascist racists wasn’t the vote-getter you all thought it would be.

“In the poll, 42% of registered voters said the primary race has made them feel less favorable about the GOP, compared to just 19% who said they feel more favorable. Thirty-eight percent said the brawl for the Republican nomination hasn’t changed their view of the party as a whole.”

I am a member of the 38%. I have always known all Republicans to be fascist racists.

First Read notes that Iowa is the most important race:

The New York Times writes that Hillary Clinton and her campaign are “preparing for a primary fight that could stretch into late April or early May and require a sprawling field operation in states and territories from Pennsylvania to Guam.” That’s one to way look at it. Here’s another way: If she wins Iowa, Clinton will be set up to separate herself from Bernie Sanders in South Carolina and the March 1 primaries — after which her campaign can start to focus on the general election. But if she loses Iowa, then, yes, a highly competitive Democratic race will extend into April and May. And that’s not all — panicky Democrats will become even more nervous, Joe Biden’s phone will ring, Michael Bloomberg’s phone will ring, too. Make no mistake, Bernie Sanders isn’t going away. But if you assume, one way or another, that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, Iowa will determine whether she gets it the easy way or the hard way. So on the Democratic side, no contest will be more impactful than the Iowa caucuses, which are now less than two weeks away.

Peter Wehner says let’s lose one for the Gipper:

Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them. He has admitted that he doesn’t prepare for debates or study briefing books; he believes such things get in the way of a good performance. No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.

It is little surprise, then, that many of Mr. Trump’s most celebrated pronouncements and promises — to quickly and “humanely” expel 11 million illegal immigrants, to force Mexico to pay for the wall he will build on our southern border, to defeat the Islamic State “very quickly” while as a bonus taking its oil, to bar Muslims from immigrating to the United States — are nativistic pipe dreams and public relations stunts.

…Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

…If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. …. I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.

Michael Gerson, another panicking Republican, says Ted Cruz “is actually more of a demagogue than an ideologue.”

“For Republicans, the only good outcome of Trump vs. Cruz is for both to lose. The future of the party as the carrier of a humane, inclusive conservatism now depends on some viable choice beyond them.”

Michael Gerson is either a liar or he is delusional. The Republican Party as it has stood for over a hundred years, has not a home to humane, inclusive conservatism. All these establishment types crying over the fact that the monster they have relied upon to win elections for over a hundred years has escaped his chains, torn the mask off his master, and torn the curtain down to reveal the true nature of the Party. If Gerson is crying, he is crying over the fact that he can no longer pretend to be respectable and a Republican at the same time.

Rick Klein: “Don’t look now, but is Donald Trump pulling his punches on Ted Cruz? A day after unleashing a new series of attacks on his chief rival on the Sunday shows, Trump didn’t mention Cruz by name at either of his big campaign events Monday… That decision comes after a few days where major conservative talk radio hosts – notably, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin – have publicly warned him of the dangerous game he’s playing in attacking Cruz.”

“It’s impossible to overstate the cover people like Limbaugh and Levin have given Trump in their willingness to accept him as a conservative, despite countless statements he made in the past that point to a much different ideology. Now that Cruz’s ‘New York values’ attack has brought those statements back to the surface, any hesitation among conservative leaders is notable, particularly down the campaign’s stretch. Trump may yet best Cruz in Iowa and beyond. But for one of the few times in a campaign he’s dominated, Trump is going to need to find a new strategy.”

David Leonhardt on why this election is like no other: “No doubt, there’s more than one answer. The surprising weakness of Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, once the front-runners, is part of it. Mr. Trump’s celebrity and his performance skills are also part of it, as is Mr. Cruz’s success in winning over some conservative donors.”

“Yet the biggest cause, in my view, is the mind-set of the Republican electorate. It is angrier and more disenchanted than it has been in years. Pockets of such anger have long existed. Disenchanted conservatives helped Mr. Santorum win the Iowa caucus four years ago, for example, and Pat Buchanan win New Hampshire in 1996. Ultimately, though, a different group of conservative voters — comfortable with the Republican establishment — won out.”

Greg Sargent asks why is Trump polling so well with white evangelicals?

All this has deeply puzzled some evangelical leaders. The Post quotes one evangelical leader describing Trump as a “thrice married owner of casinos with strip clubs,” and adding that he is “the most immoral and ungodly man to ever run for President of the United States.”

But even if Trump is not a very good Christian in the eyes of some evangelical leaders, the Times interviews with evangelical voters suggest that Trump’s personal morality may not matter much to them. Instead, Trump’s success among evangelical voters may be rooted in the fact that, more than any other GOP candidate, Trump is able to speak to their sense of being under siege. Trump somehow conveys that he understands on a gut level that both Christianity and the country at large are under siege, and what’s more, he is not constrained by politically correct niceties from saying so and proposing drastic measures to reverse this slide into chaos and godlessness.

Oh please? Under siege? You can no longer prevent the marriage of gays or discriminate against them openly or legally, and that means you are under siege. Seriously, these kinds of “Christians” need to die off quickly so the human race can live in peace.

Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump on the same day her son is arrested for domestic violence and threats of suicide. That sentence contains nothing but facts.

Ed Kilgore says it was inevitable that Palin would endorse Trump:

Notwithstanding the howls of pain and rage from supporters of Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin’s decision to endorse Donald Trump for president makes perfect sense when you think about what she has distinctively represented in the Republican Party. Yes, she’s a “conservative” in the sense of standing for maximum confrontation with Democrats and constantly accusing the party Establishment of acts of betrayal. But no, there’s nothing particularly ideological — or, for that matter, intellectual — about her approach to politics or issues. She represents almost perfectly the passion and resentment of grassroots cultural-issues activists. When John McCain vaulted her into national politics, she was known for two things other than her gender: She was a “walk the walk” role model for the anti-abortion movement, thanks to her small child Trig, and she had taken on the “crony capitalist” GOP Establishment in Alaska and won. Thus she was a fellow “maverick” with Christian-right street cred and a “game-changing” identity.

….[I]n many respects, the Trump campaign is the presidential campaign Palin herself might have aspired to run if she had the money and energy to do so. Her famous disregard for wonky facts and historical context is but a shadow of Trump’s. His facility with the big and effective lie can’t quite match Palin’s, who after all convinced many millions of people in a Facebook post that the Affordable Care Act authorized “death panels.” And both of them, of course, exemplify the demagogue’s zest for flouting standards of respectable discourse and playing the table-turning triumphant victim/conqueror of privileged elites.

Conservatism for both Trump and Palin simply supplies the raw material of politics and a preassembled group of aggrieved white people ready to follow anyone purporting to protect hard-earned threatened privileges, whether it’s Social Security and Medicare benefits or religious hegemony. So it’s natural Palin would gravitate to Trump rather than Cruz, who’s a professional ideologue but a mere amateur demagogue. The endorser and the endorsee were meant for each other.

The Fix says the GOP Establishment really hates Cruz: “There’s an assumption among casual consumers of politics that establishment Republicans loathe Donald Trump. Not really true. Yes, they worry about what Trump might do downballot to the GOP if he is the nominee. But most view him with some mix of puzzlement and fascination. The Republican establishment saves its actual hatred for one man and one man only: Ted Cruz.”

“Carpet bombing would be completely useless. It’s totally contrary to the American way of war. Total disregard for civilians. So, I mean, part of the concern that I have with the campaign, particularly when it comes to national security, is that the solutions being offered are so simplistic and so at odds with the reality of the rest of the world, with the way the world really works.”

— Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, quoted by Politico, saying the GOP presidential candidates “don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Some good news from the Supreme Court today. They declined to hear a case involving the Arkansas 12-Week Abortion ban, a ban that had been invalidated as unconstitutional by the lower Federal District and Circuit Courts. By declining to hear the case, the rulings of those lower courts stand and the ban remains forever unconstitutional. This is a devastating blow to conservatives hoping for a reversal of Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey anytime soon.

David Brooks is panicking:

The Tea Party, Ted Cruz’s natural vehicle, has 17 percent popular support, according to Gallup. The idea that most women, independents or mainstream order-craving suburbanites would back a guy who declares his admiration for Vladimir Putin is a mirage. The idea that the G.O.P. can march into the 21st century intentionally alienating every person of color is borderline insane.

Worse is the prospect that one of them might somehow win. Very few presidents are so terrible that they genuinely endanger their own nation, but Trump and Cruz would go there and beyond. Trump is a solipsistic branding genius whose “policies” have no contact with Planet Earth and who would be incapable of organizing a coalition, domestic or foreign.

Cruz would be as universally off-putting as he has been in all his workplaces. He’s always been good at tearing things down but incompetent when it comes to putting things together.

Paul Waldman analyzes the charge that President Obama is a divisive president:

Yet if you spend some time investigating what evidence Republicans offer when they call Obama divisive, what you find is not actually evidence at all, but their own skewed interpretations of events. “He says ‘It’s my way or the highway’ on legislation!”, they charge — although he doesn’t actually say that. It’s just that he has a different legislative agenda than they do. “He crammed ObamaCare down our throats!” — this is a sentence that has been written and spoken a thousand times (just Google it for yourself). Back on Planet Earth, the Affordable Care Act spent over a year going through endless hearings, floor speeches, and debates, and in the end passed the House and Senate and was signed by the president, which you may recall is how a bill becomes a law.

Here’s the truth: You might like Barack Obama or you might not; you might think he has been a good president or a bad one. But the idea that blame for the political divisions we confront lies solely or even primarily at his door is positively deranged.

Harry Enten says Donald Trump is Sarah Palin 2.0:

1. They’re not all that conservative

Palin has a reputation for being very conservative, but she’s not. OnTheIssues.org, which grades public statements, rates her as a “moderate conservative.” Palin supported a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. She has described herself as a feminist. Palin is far less conservative than other Republican bigwigs, such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio; both rate as “hard-core conservatives.”

Palin’s ideology lines up much better with Trump’s. When you convert Palin’s and Trump’s OnTheIssues grades to a -100 (most liberal) to 100 (most conservative) scale,1 Palin and Trump have nearly identical scores (47.4 for Palin and 47.5 for Trump). Trump has strayed from conservative orthodoxy on abortion, foreign policy, gay marriage, Social Security and a whole host of other issues. Palin is more interested in outsider credentials than conservative bona fides.