Saturday Open Thread [1.23.2016]

IOWA—Loras College: Clinton 59, Sanders 30, O’Malley 7
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Suffolk: Sanders 50, Clinton 41, O’Malley 2
NATIONAL—Fox News: Trump 34, Cruz 20, Rubio 11, Carson 8, Bush 4, Christie 3, Kasich 4, Paul 2, Huckabee 2, Fiorina 1

Sen. Ted Cruz has health insurance, and he had it all along, his campaign admitted to the Wall Street Journal, reversing what the presidential candidate said a day earlier.

Cruz had claimed he no longer had health care and lost his coverage “because of Obamacare.” So he is a liar. But he is a Republican so we already knew that.

A new Moody’s Analytics forecast is predicting that whomever lands the Democratic nomination will capture the White House with 326 electoral votes to the Republican nominee’s 212.

Thomas Wright on America First Trump:

In sum, Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal international order it helped to create and has led since World War II. He has three key arguments that he returns to time and again over the past 30 years. He is deeply unhappy with America’s military alliances and feels the United States is overcommitted around the world. He feels that America is disadvantaged by the global economy. And he is sympathetic to authoritarian strongmen. Trump seeks nothing less than ending the U.S.-led liberal order and freeing America from its international commitments.

Trump has been airing such views on U.S. foreign policy for some time. He even spent $100,000 on a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1987 that had a message remarkably similar to what he is saying today.

With his background and personality, Trump is so obviously sui generis that it is tempting to say his views are alien to the American foreign policy tradition. They aren’t; it is just that this strain of thinking has been dormant for some time.

Chris Cillizza: “The Iowa caucuses are 10 days from Friday. And Donald Trump, the larger-than-life real estate reality star, is — still — the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Not only has Trump not disappeared or imploded — as everyone everywhere predicted he would — he appears to be getting stronger in both early-state and national polling as actual votes draw closer.”

“At this point, Trump’s path to putting the nomination away quickly is far easier than the one Hillary Clinton must travel to capture the Democratic nomination.”

New York Times: “Mrs. Clinton’s eagerness to tie herself to her old boss — most conspicuously in last Sunday’s debate — has been gratifying to Mr. Obama’s aides, given the tangled history between the president and his onetime rival turned lieutenant. His aides still view Mrs. Clinton as more electable and better qualified to protect his record than Mr. Sanders, though they have been impressed by the senator’s recent performance and unsettled by hers.”

“Clinton campaign officials tell NBC News that two key factors propelled Obama to victory over Clinton in 2008: 1) Obama’s ability to galvanize the African-American vote after winning the Iowa caucuses; and 2) Obama’s domination of the caucus contests.”

“But the Clinton campaign – while acknowledging the possibility they could lose Iowa – argues that Sanders will be unable to capitalize on either factor that benefitted Obama.”

Sanders is not Obama. First, Sanders does not have Obama’s ground operation in Iowa. Second, what made the Obama campaign take off after his win in Iowa is that African Americans, who were supporting Hillary at the time, were convinced that Obama was legitimate and the flocked to him. That will not happen here. Third, Sanders won’t be winning South Carolina like Obama did. Finally, Sanders seems to be counting on a turnout over 230,000 in the Democratic contest like in 2008. That won’t happen. The marquee race is the GOP battle, and that will attract a higher turnout.

Jonathan Chait on how Conservatism created Trump:

Hypocrisy is the tribute paid to virtue by vice. In the case of Donald Trump’s candidacy, the virtue is revulsion at the spectacle of a clownish reality-television star potentially claiming their party’s nomination for the presidency. National Review’s denunciation of Trump is a sign of civic health. Conservatives and liberals may not agree on policy, but some standards of public decency ought to stand apart from ideology. Conservatives may be hypocritical about this virtue, but their tribute to it reinforces its standing.

The anti-Trump conservatives are so eager to cast him out as a heretic that they refuse to acknowledge their own reflection in him. “If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support,” asks National Review’s editorial, “what would that say about conservatives?” The editorial treats this question as rhetorical, and moves on. It needs a real answer.

The most prominent theme in the anti-Trump symposium is that Trump is not a real conservative. […] That is all mostly correct. Trump is not a movement conservative, and people who are have good reason to doubt that he would stick with their principles if (and when) they became inconvenient. But Trump’s ability to commandeer the presidential race is no more an accident than Palin’s brief but torrid rise to the heights of right-wing idolatry. Modern American conservatism is inherently vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.

One reason for this is that, whereas liberalism tries to apply the conclusions of science and academia to public policy, conservatism rejects those conclusions in favor of an a priori belief that more government is always wrong. One contributor, the not notably hinged commentator Glenn Beck, assails Trump for supporting the stimulus, the auto bailouts, and the bank bailouts — three measures that most economists believe helped prevent a much deeper recession. Movement conservatism rejects the conclusions of wide swaths of economists, social scientists, the entire field of climate science … of course it is liable to attract anti-intellectual candidates.

A second problem is that conservative doctrine is unpopular with the public as well. The majority may often support generalized anti-government sentiment, but it does not follow those generalities through to their specific implications.

“The Clinton Presidential Library plans to release later this year a trove of records relating to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump and his business,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The documents, which must be released in early April unless the White House or Mr. Clinton’s office request an extension or claim executive privilege, could prompt further criticism from Republicans that Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Clintons in the decades before his presidential campaign was inappropriately cozy.”

Eli Lake:

One reason so many Republican bigwigs oppose Cruz is that he is considered by many political professionals to be too right-wing to win a national election. One senior Republican House member told me this week that a Cruz nomination would hand the Democrats the Senate. As Politico reported this month, a leading GOP pollster predicted a Cruz ticket would jeopardize many Republican House races.

But the main reason so many Republican insiders oppose Cruz is that he has spent the last three years in the Senate stoking popular conservative resentment against his own party. In floor speeches, he calls Republican leaders members of an elite cartel. He has questioned their integrity, like in July during the debate on trade promotion authority, when he called McConnell a liar and accused him of making a back-room deal to prevent votes on amendments to end the Export-Import Bank. He has insisted that senators cast votes for or against raising of the debt limit, instead of hiding behind procedural maneuvers that shield these votes from public scrutiny.

On the stump, Cruz mocks Dole, McCain and Romney by asking if anyone remembers their presidencies, saying that it will take an uncompromising conservative to win a presidential election.

All of this is deliberate.

Xpostfactoid, after considering the approach from Bernie and Hillary:

As Democrats mull how change works, consider Obama.

Bernie Sanders’ light sketch of single-payer healthcare Utopia has got Democrats debating their theory of change. Generate mass support for fundamental restructurings — of healthcare, banking, wage law –or take any step you can, by legislative compromise or executive order, to make current institutions more progressive?

Obama is often held up these days as a proto-Bernie who stoked the thirst for swift transformation in 2007-8 and then disappointed. But if Hope and Change was the Obama trumpet call, his bass note was always slow, hard, pragmatic step-by-step progress.

Even at his most apparently messianic, Obama has always stressed the incremental nature of change for the better…
The biggest flaw in Obama’s theory of change was born of arrogance rooted in past personal success. He plainly thought he could win Republicans over by moving toward them. I don’t think he fully corrected on that until the sequester took its first bite and he realized that Republicans wouldn’t compromise to shut it off. That quirk aside, though, I don’t think that Democrats ruminating over how change works can find a more nuanced or effective perspective than Obama’s.

Progressives really need to get over this Green Latern Theory of Change. That if we just elect one person the revolution will come and all will be well, simply because President Sanders has the bully pulpit. Did you all learn nothing from Obama? You need to elect more than one person. In 2006, and 2008, we elected a shit ton of Progressive Democrats, and that still was not enough to get all that we wanted. Politics and policy enactment is a long never ending struggle that takes decades. And you have to do two things at once: defend the progress you have made while at the same time trying to take the next step. It’s like walking in a Blizzard.