NATIONAL—ABC News/Wash Post: Clinton 55, Sanders 36, O’Malley 4
IOWA—QuinnipiacSanders 49, Clinton 45, O’Malley 4
The First Read says Monday’s forum was a good sign that Clinton is ahead in Iowa: “On the Democratic side, last night’s CNN town hall in Iowa appeared to confirm a Fox News poll of the Hawkeye State showing Hillary Clinton leading Bernie Sanders by six points among likely caucus-goers, 48%-42%. Sanders looked and sounded like a candidate who was slightly behind — he was defensive and very aggressive. When shown a recent Clinton TV ad, Sanders used it to criticize her record. On the other hand, Clinton looked and sounded like the candidate who was narrowly ahead — she stated her case, deflected questions, and didn’t aggressively attack Sanders.”
The pathetic coward who is the frontrunner for the GOP nomination said yesterday that he would not attend tomorrow’s day because one of the moderators, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, asked him a fair and legitimate question in last summer’s debate that revealed him to be sexist pig. Well, the Donald could not have that, so he proceeded to act out after the August debate by being a sexist pig. I hope Fox News stands their ground and refuses to budge. Let his podium stand empty.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, for some inexplicable reason, does not want to attend a new debate that is being scheduled by MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader. The debate is not sanctioned by the DNC, but Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton have agreed to attend the debate, which will take place in the week before the New Hampshire primary. Everyone all campaign long have complained about the minimal number of debates the Democrats have scheduled, including Bernie Sanders. And now Bernie doesn’t want to show up. Bernie, stop acting like Donald Trump.
Another big news story is that the traitors out in Oregon got some justice thrown at them yesterday. One traitor was killed and another was injured when they refused to surrender to authorities and proceeded to engage in a gun battle with the FBI and the Oregon state authorities. Here is the statement from the FBI:
At approximately 4:25 p.m. (PST) on Tuesday, January 26, 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Oregon State Police (OSP) began an enforcement action to bring into custody a number of individuals associated with the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. During that arrest, there were shots fired.
One individual who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased. We will not be releasing any information about that person pending identification by the medical examiner’s office.
One individual suffered non-life threatening injuries and was transported to a local hospital for treatment. He was arrested and is currently in custody.
The arrested individuals include:
Ammon Edward Bundy, age 40, of Emmett, Idaho Ryan C. Bundy, age 43, of Bunkerville, Nevada Brian Cavalier, age 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada Shawna Cox, age 59, Kanab, Utah Ryan Waylen Payne, age 32, of Anaconda, Montana These probable cause arrests occurred along Highway 235.
In a separate event in Burns, Oregon, at approximately 5:50 pm, Oregon State Police arrested the following individual:
Joseph Donald O’Shaughnessy, age 45, Cottonwood, Arizona
All of the named defendants face a federal felony charge of conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 372.
This might be the first time I have embedded a clip of Fox News here:
John Edwards, not Barack Obama, was the Bernie Sanders of 2008.
The main candidate of self-conscious anti-corporate inequality-focused progressives at this point in the 2008 cycle wasn’t Barack Obama but John Edwards. Ralph Nader said of him before his campaign fell short in Iowa: “Edwards now has the most progressive message across a broad spectrum of any leading candidate I’ve seen in years.” He was the darling of the progressive “netroots.” Pressed by his wife, the late Elizabeth Edwards, and advised by Dean ’04 guru Joe Trippi, Edwards in turn pushed the entire field to the left. Had he won in Iowa (and he, not Hillary Clinton, led in early polls), there’s no telling what might have been, or how quickly the bizarre drama of his personal life would or would not have come out. But he, not Obama, w0uld likely have been the progressive champion in the race.
Bryon York of the Washington Examiner says a lot of Republicans up in New Hampshire have never met any Trump supporters.
In one of my first conversations at the Radisson, with two Republican activists, I asked a simple what’s-up question about Trump. Both immediately responded in exactly the same way: “I don’t know anybody who supports him.” They’re politically active and aware, but they said they have no contact in their daily lives with even a single person who supports their party’s front-runner.
After that conversation, I began to ask everyone I met: Do you know anyone who supports Donald Trump? In more cases than not — actually, in nearly all the cases — the answer was no. I asked one woman Friday night, and she said she hadn’t thought about it. I ran into her the next morning at breakfast, and she said, “That was a good question you asked me last night, and I’ve given it some thought.” And no, she didn’t know any Trump supporters.
Ed Kilgore says that both the right and the left want radical change, but only the right is very close to getting it.
Bernie Sanders implicitly accuses the last two Democratic presidents and the Democratic Establishment candidate for 2016, Hillary Clinton, of excessive timidity and an insufficient commitment to thoroughgoing economic and political change. Ted Cruz explicitly accuses his Republican Senate colleagues and presidential rivals of surrendering to liberalism without a fight. [Paul] Krugman asks the right question to advocates of Big Change: How, exactly, is it supposed to occur? […]
[T]here are “hidden majority” theories that hold that “bold” proposals can mobilize vast majorities of Americans to support radical action and break down gridlock. Few are as easy to explode as Ted Cruz’s “54 million missing Evangelicals” hypothesis, but the belief of some Sanders supporters that Trump voters (and many millions of nonvoters) would gravitate to Bernie in a general election is not far behind as the product of a fantasy factory.
You could go on all day with left-right parallelisms on the subject of radical change, but progressives should internalize this fact of life: The right is a lot closer to the left in possessing the practical means for a policy revolution (or counterrevolution, as the case might be). Whereas the left needs constitutional amendments and overwhelming congressional majorities to break the political power of wealthy corporations and other reactionary interests, the right only needs the presidency to reverse most of President Obama’s policy breakthroughs. And assuming a GOP presidential victory would almost certainly be accompanied by Republican control of both parties in Congress (which is not at all the case for Democrats), a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered could briskly revolutionize health care, tax, and social policy without a single Democratic vote.
Matthew Yglesias says Bernie Sanders is right, the Fed should and could do more to help working people:
Politicians rarely talk about the Federal Reserve even though it’s the main agency that regulates the pace of job creation. It’s true that the Fed operates independently of elected officials’ views, but so does the Supreme Court — and elected officials are perfectly aware that it makes no sense to talk about abortion rights without mentioning the Supreme Court.
Sanders’s core insight, which he laid out in a New York Times op-ed that ran on December 23, is that if you want to talk about jobs and the economy, you need to talk about the Fed. And if you want to understand sluggish wage growth over the past 15 years, it’s important to note the Fed’s structural biases in favor of Wall Street preoccupations with financial stability and inflation control.
Ruby Cramer has one of the better Hillary articles I’ve seen:
Here is how Hillary Clinton sees herself: radically consistent, motivated by a core philosophy — voiced now through two words rarely associated with her. “Love and kindness.” If this sounds unlikely, she knows it. For 50 years, she’s struggled to explain the values that motivate her — in public life, as a candidate, as a person. The one time she really tried to, in the early 1990s, she was brutally mocked. In the view of some of her closest aides, Clinton never fully recovered from the critical backlash.
Now, Clinton doesn’t talk about this much, not like she did then. On this particular day, after a routine campaign event at a college in Manchester, New Hampshire — after taking photos and giving a speech, after getting a question from the audience about the women who’ve alleged they were sexually assaulted by her husband and answering it without hesitation or alarm, after moving onto the noise and chaos of a crowded rope line —Clinton is shepherded away to the quiet of an available room: the building’s industrial-style kitchen. And it’s in this setting, seated in a fold-out chair at a small table, that Clinton seems almost surprised by the most basic line of questioning: why she runs.
“I think most people who interview me never ask me,” she says. “They nibble a little bit around the edges but there’s very—” Clinton turns to the one aide present, her press secretary, also seated at the table, and asks him to think back: “I don’t know of very many instances in the last 14 years that we’ve had these kinds of conversations.”
She has been asked every day, for decades, what she thinks, but rarely why. And here, next to a dishwasher, Clinton slides right back into the subject. Her words are slow and deliberate and she takes the conversation to this discussion she’s been trying to talk about, to bring up on the trail, as she is again ensnared in a campaign that’s more difficult than expected, in an election dominated by the language of anger and fear.
“I am talking about love and kindness,” she says.
Charlie Cook: “Iowa should winnow the more conservative half of the GOP field, likely ending the campaigns of Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum and allowing Ted Cruz to consolidate the more strongly ideological wing of the party. Conversely, New Hampshire is likely to cull the herd of conventional Republican candidates—Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio. All are not likely to remain contenders after the Granite State votes.”
“The only question is whether New Hampshire will push one or two of the conventional candidates from the race, or even three if there is a big gap between the first-place establishment candidate and the runner-up. Thus the results and fallout from Iowa and New Hampshire should provide a lot more clarity to a race in which Republicans were faced with a dizzying array of choices, much like a kid walking into Baskin-Robbins for the first time.”
In the unlikely event that Cruz wins the nomination, he will find it difficult to gain the loyalty of other elected officials and Party leaders, and he will make a poor opponent for Hillary Clinton. His nomination will be akin to Barry Goldwater’s victory in 1964, or, on the Democratic side, McGovern’s victory in 1972. Both Senators were too far outside the mainstream to win in a general election. Cruz would likely lose, but he wouldn’t necessarily destroy the G.O.P. in the process. However much his colleagues dislike him, he’s still one of them.
Trump is not. Some prominent Republicans fear that a Trump nomination would fundamentally alter the identity of the Republican Party, even if he goes on to lose the general election, which seems likely.
Greg Sargent: “If the GOP nominee tries to win primarily by increasing the white vote, it would not only require a very large mobilization of whites, and/or very high levels of support among them, but it would also require the minority share of the vote to remain somewhat depressed relative to what demographic trends dictate. But the very rhetoric and proposals needed to mobilize and/or win over whites in that fashion would probably energize minorities in opposition and potentially drive away some college educated whites — both of which would work against the overarching goal of the strategy in the first place.”
Rick Klein: “Republicans are coming around to the idea of Donald Trump as their nominee, with two-thirds of voters saying they think that will happen, and a similar portion saying they’ll accept him in that role, according to the new ABC News/Washington Post poll. But while Ted Cruz warns that an Iowa win for Trump could make Trump ‘unstoppable,’ other sentiments still point to a longer fight ahead.”
“That could make Marco Rubio’s voting results the ones to watch in the coming contests. He’s third in the new poll, behind Trump and Cruz. But asked for their second choice, respondents made Rubio No. 1 – the selection of 23 percent of GOP voters. That’s up 9 points since last month, despite an onslaught that’s made him the target of basically all of his rivals. Trump has consolidated his lead and shows strengthened support, across demographics and issue areas. All of his rivals are craving a one-on-one opportunity against Trump, whose conservative credentials are only now being aggressively questioned on the airwaves. Such a matchup may be most favorable to Rubio, who has stayed in the mix without a breakout moment that would take him from top prospect to all-star.”
Politico has a profile of Ted Cruz when he was still an insider, and an alumnus of the Bush 2000 campaign and Administration: “In a never-before-reported meeting in [former President] Bush’s Dallas office [prior to his 2012 Senate campaign], Cruz began to outline his 2012 campaign playbook for the former president… Cruz explained how he would consolidate conservatives yearning for a political outsider, how he would outflank the front-runner on the right, how he would proudly carry the mantle of the ascendant tea party to victory over entrenched elites.”
“It was impressive foreshadowing. But Bush cut Cruz off before he could finish.”
Said Bush: “I guess you don’t want my support. Ted, what the hell do you think I am?”