Thursday Open Thread [1.28.2016]

IOWA>—Monmouth: Clinton 49, Sanders 42, O’Malley 6
IOWA—NBC/WSJ/Marist: Clinton 48, Sanders 45, O’Malley 3
NEW HAMPSHIRE—NBC/WSJ/Marist: Sanders 57, Clinton 38, O’Malley 2
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Emerson: Sanders 52, Clinton 44, O’Malley 3
SOUTH CAROLINA—NBC/WSJ/Marist: Clinton 64, Sanders 27, O’Malley 2
NORTH CAROLINA—Civitas: Clinton 53, Sanders 28, O’Malley 2

IOWA—Monmouth: Trump 30, Cruz 23, Rubio 16, Carson 10, Bush 4, Paul 3, Huckabee 3, Kasich 3, Christie 2, Fiorina 2, Santorum 1
IOWA—NBC/WSJ/Marist: Trump 32, Cruz 25, Rubio 18, Carson 8, Bush 4, Paul 2, Christie 2, Huckabee 2, Kasich 2, Fiorina 2
NEW HAMPSHIRE—NBC/WSJ/Marist: Trump 31, Cruz 12, Kasich 11, Rubio 11, Bush 8, Christie 7, Carson 5, Fiorina 4, Paul 4, Huckabee 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Emerson: Trump 35, Bush 18, Kasich 14, Rubio 9, Cruz 8, Christie 5, Fiorina 3, Paul 3, Carson 3, Huckabee 1
SOUTH CAROLINA—NBC/WSJ/Marist: Trump 36, Cruz 20, Rubio 14, Bush 9, Carson 8, Christie 2, Huckabee 2, Kasich 1, Paul 1, Fiorina 1

DR Tucker:

If Trump is trounced in the 2016 general election, I wouldn’t be surprised if the party’s malevolent moneymen rally behind Kasich as the man who can defeat either President Hillary Clinton or President Bernie Sanders on November 3, 2020.

The right lives and dies on narratives. If the Democratic presidential candidate wins on November 8, we will hear four years of conservative chatter about how the president is just as “weak” and “soft” as President Carter allegedly was four decades prior, and how America needs a “real leader” with Kasich’s alleged qualities. (Forget about someone like Senator Marco Rubio being positioned this way in 2020: the Florida flake always comes across as a teenager about to have a nervous breakdown, and thus cannot be cast in this role. It’s also impossible to see the “malefactors of great wealth” getting behind Jeb! again.)

You’ve got to think that the “GOP-is-doomed-this-year-if-Trump-is-nominated” crowd is already making plans for the 2020 election if their worst nightmares come true on November 8…and because of his ability to sound normal while advocating abnormal policies, you’ve got to think Kasich will be the plutocrats’ preferred politician four years from now.

Ezra Klein:

Clinton and Trump expose — and could, perhaps, exploit — each other’s vulnerabilities perfectly.

Clinton’s caution when discussing the issues — remember the months and months when she refused to take a position on the Keystone XL oil pipeline? — can often send the meta-message that she’s just another politician; that she’s poll-tested, scripted, a creature of the political establishment. Watching her campaign underscores just how unscripted and unpredictable Trump is. If people hate politicians as much as they say they do, a Trump-Clinton race would be an opportunity for them to show it.

What Trump says about the issues often suggests that he’s a lunatic — the actual words he says terrify anyone paying close attention, and they underscore Clinton’s competence, knowledge of the issues, and attention to coalition building. So as much as people say they hate politicians, they tend to elect them to the presidency, and Trump is a reminder why. “The burdens and intricacies of leadership are special; experience in other fields is not transferable,” wrote the conservative National Review in its anti-Trump editorial. “That is why all American presidents have been politicians, or generals.”

But before they can campaign against each other, both Trump and Clinton will face primary challengers who are more rounded campaigners than themselves.

Booman:

[T]he day John McCain nominated Sarah Palin as his running mate … was the last day that the Republican Party of old existed even on paper. The moment the organs of the GOP had to shift over to defending her preparedness and suitability to be a heartbeat away from the nuclear codes was the moment that their brain was disconnected from the rest of their central nervous system. From there, it was a short hop to climate science denialism, Birtherism, rape-don’t-get-you-pregnantism, Benghazism, and all the rest.

This is all a long way of saying that Donald Trump actually is an ideological match for the modern conservative movement. Silver insists that he is not and that this is one of the biggest reasons why he’s been predicting that Trump would peter out.

But that assumes that the key animators of the conservative movement are the familiar things like low taxes, a strong national defense, and a ban on abortion. Those aren’t the keys. The keys are 1) fear 2) hatred 3) greed and 4) a need to be led.

Trump encapsulates those almost perfectly.

“When I’m president I’m a different person. I can do anything. I can be the most politically correct person you have ever seen,” Trump said at a rally in Pella, Iowa, on Saturday. But I thought his supporters loved him because he was politically incorrect and being politically correct was what made America not great again. So Trump is saying he will betray his supporters the moment he is in office.

“Hours after Hillary Clinton ratcheted up her pressure on him to accept an invitation to an unsanctioned debate on Feb. 4, Bernie Sanders escalated the debate by calling for three new debates,” Politico reports.

Said Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver: “From the beginning of this campaign Sen. Sanders has called for more debates. Secretary Clinton has not. Now she is asking to change the rules to schedule a debate next week that is not sanctioned by the DNC. Why is that? The answer is obvious. The dynamics of the race have changed and Sen. Sanders has significant momentum.”

Fair point. But Bernie, you only lead in New Hampshire. No where else. And you are acting like you are the undisputed frontrunner for the entire country. You should want more debates. You are still the scrappy challenger who is most likely the runner up in this contest.

Joe Klein: “In a Trumpless world, I realized, the Republican race would have been a fascinating thing, probably involving the two young Cuban-American Senators. It might even have involved a debate of real substance about really important things. Cruz favors a flat tax with a levy on business sales; Rubio favors a simpler version of the current graduated income tax system. Rubio is an aggressive neoconservative on foreign policy; Cruz is more cautious, wary of attempting regime change in the Middle East, but he camouflages that caution with incendiary rhetoric about carpet bombing and ripping up the Iran deal. Both are superior on the stump, effortlessly eloquent. Cruz has an ironic edge; Rubio is more substantive.”

“Ahh, Trump. There is a British expression that comes to mind: he is playing ‘silly buggers’ with us, taking us for fools. He has been all along. There was all sorts of speculation about why he would drop out of the Fox debate. He would dominate the news for days with his defiance, shutting out his opponents. He might even get Fox’s Roger Ailes to make a concession—fire the aide who sent out a nasty press release about Trump—but, knowing Ailes, I figured that was as likely as Mexico paying for the wall. Certainly, the substance of debates was a risk for Trump and this was a way to avoid a big one—one in which he might finally have been the target of his opponents.”

Larry Sabato and Kyle Kondik: “With just a few days to go before the Monday caucuses, we believe Clinton is decently positioned to survive Iowa. Momentum and excitement appear to be more on Sanders’ side, but he may be over-reliant on a base of supporters that are not well distributed throughout the state and a bit less likely to turn out at the level he needs… If despite all this, Clinton still comes up short, let’s not forget that Iowa’s Democratic activists are overwhelmingly white and somewhat more liberal than in many other states where Clinton will be favored due to strong minority backing. So a Clinton loss here is far from fatal.”

“For the Republicans, the late momentum (at least as this is written) appears to be Donald Trump’s, and he has built a modest edge in the kickoff contest. The GOP’s leadership, faced with a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea (Trump and Ted Cruz) from their establishment perspective, seem to favor the flexible Republican Trump over the ideologue Cruz, at least for now. We still have questions about Trump’s ability to get his supporters to caucus locations on Monday, but if he can jump that hurdle, he may only grow in strength in the state contests to come.”

Amy Walter: “One of the most enduring misconceptions of this election is that Trump can say or do anything and not lose support. That is only half true. He has been able to turn around his image among GOP voters, but his image among the rest of the electorate is terrible. The most recent NBC/WSJ poll finds his disapproval ratings among all voters to be 58%. Almost HALF of all voters (47 percent) have a VERY negative opinion of him. To put that into perspective, Hillary Clinton is at 37% VERY negative. Not great, but better than his.”

Joan Walsh on declaring for Hillary:

I’m struck by the insistence among Sanders supporters that Democrats who support Clinton—and right now, we are still the majority—are doing so joylessly, like party automatons. On Monday, on my Facebook page, where a lot of my close friends are supporting Sanders, three people I love shared the same op-ed by Republican operative Alex Castellanos, which purported to explain why Clinton’s campaign “sags” (get it?) while Sanders “surges.” This is the same Castellanos, by the way, who defended calling Hillary Clinton a “white bitch” during the 2008 campaign, when Jeffrey Toobin complained about it. “Some women, by the way, are named that, and it’s accurate,” he said smoothly. Trust me: If Castellanos had used a racial slur against Obama eight years ago—”Some black men, by the way, are named [N-word, or your slur du jour], and it’s accurate,” for instance—no progressive would be enthusiastically touting his views on the 2016 Democratic campaign. Not one. Could I really be the only one who remembered his ugly sexist attack on Clinton?

I’ve always admired Sanders, but I happen to think he has more than a tin-ear on gender.
Eight years ago, I found myself drawn into the media vortex, standing up for Clinton in the face of extraordinary media bias and sexism of the type Castellanos typified. I styled myself as a Clinton defender, not exactly a supporter, partly for journalistic reasons, and partly because I was genuinely torn about not supporting the amazing African-American senator running in the primary against her. This time, I feel a slight twinge of regret that I’m not supporting the socialist in the race—I want to do it for my old friend Jimmy Weinstein, the late founder of In These Times, where I once worked—but it’s not at all the same. Yet I’m being told it should be, that once again the historic quest of the first front-running female presidential candidate should take a backseat to another historic crusade, that of our first Brooklyn-born Jewish socialist.

I’ve always admired Sanders, but I happen to think he has more than a tin-ear on gender. He routinely talks about “mothers” needing family leave, and he doesn’t even seem to try to substitute the now-customary (on the left, anyway) “he or she” or “him or her” into his speeches. I noted that Monday night, when he declared “I believe that every kid in this country who has the ability and the desire should be able to get a higher education regardless of the income of his family.” For making this observation, I’m still being told I’m a PC shrew on social media two days later. Bernie is building a movement, we’re told (with little evidence of lasting organization, by the way), but it’s a movement whose loudest advocates are entitled young men who heap the vilest abuse on women who don’t deign to join it. To his credit, Sanders rapid response director has seen the online abuse, and warned on Twitter Monday night: “If you follow Bernie Sanders, please follow the senator’s lead and be respectful when people disagree with you.” Still, the larger message to Clinton supporters is that our demand for equal representation at the highest level of government at last, by a supremely qualified woman who is thoroughly progressive if not a socialist, must sadly wait. Again.

I won’t wait. I’m supporting Clinton, joyfully and without apologies.

So am I.

Remember, the 2008 race was pretty nasty:

By this time in the '08 race, Obama aides had called Clinton (D-Punjab) and Clinton was talking about the concerns of "white Americans."

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 28, 2016

Bloomberg:

The race remains fluid, with 71 percent of Republican primary voters saying that they can still be persuaded to support another candidate. Even among Republicans who did not back Trump, 52 percent of them said they could still be persuaded to do so; 42 percent said they could not. The rest remained unsure.

“Trump is continuing a long trend of polls that show him in a strong position nationally, but the poll suggests there could be more fluidity in the race after Iowa,” said Doug Usher, a managing partner at Purple Strategies.

From Vox.

Bernie Sanders met in the Oval Office with President Obama yesterday. I felt it was a little odd since I did not hear that it was scheduled. It was not announced by the Sanders campaign or the White House, at least not that I am aware of and I read all the things everywhere everyday in order to put together this Open Thread. So it felt like it was hastily scheduled, and maybe it took place due to a Sanders’ complaint that he was tipping the scales for Hillary in that Glenn Thrush interview (even though Sanders said otherwise). Here is Ed Kilgore on what he thinks the Sanders-Obama meeting meant:

Sanders had to do something to counter the impression that Hillary Clinton has been avidly promoting — most overtly in the NBC News debate in South Carolina on January 17 — that she was the best-equipped candidate to protect and build on Barack Obama’s legacy. This impression was undoubtedly buttressed by media interpretations of the interview Obama gave to Politico’s Glenn Thrush in which the 44th president praised his secretary of State while indirectly pouring cold water on the “political revolution” Sanders is purporting to lead. So today’s White House meeting, even if Sanders cannot say much about it, was intended to reestablish presidential neutrality. That’s a big deal in Iowa, where (according to the last Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Iowa poll) Hillary Clinton has been running even with Sanders among people who caucused for Obama in 2008. And it’s a bigger deal down the road where African-Americans begin to play a far more dominant role in Democratic primary electorates.

[…] Aside from the White House meeting, he’s beginning to manage expectations for Iowa, which were beginning to become so robust that a narrow defeat there might be perceived as devastating. First he expressed doubt that turnout would be anything like 2008’s or that he could match Obama’s margin. But, more important, he’s making it clear that he does not regard an actual win in the state as necessary for his nomination.

From the polls, and the polling average, and the feel of the race right now from the actions of both campaigns, it seems clear that Hillary is going to win Iowa. The question is by how much. Sanders is trying to manage the expectations game, which is smart.