Thursday Open Thread [2.4.2016]

NATIONAL—PPP: Clinton 53, Sanders 31.

[Sanders] still has some weaknesses that may make it hard for him to catch up. Primary among these is African American voters- Clinton leads 82/8 with them and has a 79/9 favorability compared to 27/23 for Sanders. That does suggest some possibility for Sanders to improve his position- part of his problem is just that black voters don’t really know him yet- but he’s starting at a tremendous disadvantage that will make the upcoming run of Southern primaries very difficult for him.

NEW HAMPSHIRE—Suffolk/UMass-Lowell: Sanders 58, Clinton 36
NATIONAL—PPP: Trump 25, Cruz 21, Rubio 21, Carson 11, Bush 5, Kasich 5, Christie 3, Fiorina 3, Gilmore 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Harper: Trump 31, Bush 14, Kasich 12, Rubio 10, Cruz 9, Christie 6, Fiorina 5, Carson 3
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Suffolk/UMass-Lowell: Trump 36, Rubio 15, Cruz 14, Bush 8, Kasich 7, Christie 5, Carson 4, Fiorina 3

With Huckabee, Paul and Santorum all ending their Presidential campaigns over the last few days, GOP Polling just got a little more manageable.

“Still riding a wave of confidence after winning the Iowa Caucuses, Ted Cruz was in rare form Wednesday night as he mocked Donald Trump over everything from losing Iowa to a previous record of liberal policy positions,” Politico reports.

Said Cruz: “Have you noticed Donald doesn’t take losing well? Donald told us every day for a year he was going to win Iowa, win it big, win it ‘yuuuuuge.’”

Good job by Cruz. Mocking Trump as a loser will cause Trump to lash out even more outrageously. It is an effective attack.

“I’ll beat her rear end on that stage, and you know what, after I do, she’ll be relieved because she’ll just be worried I was going to serve her with a subpoena. It’ll be a relief just to lose the debate.”

— Gov. Chris Christie, quoted by MSNBC, boasting that he is “the last person” Hillary Clinton would want to meet on the debate stage in September.

More Republican misogyny.

So Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got into a little bit of a Twitter war yesterday, over Progressivism. If there is a war as to who is the MOST progressive, Bernie wins. But Bernie does what every Purist Progressive does, in that they think they can define for all who and who is not Progressive, with the answer always being that only Purists can be called Progressive. Purist Progressives are horrible, HORRIBLE, at building coalitions for this very reason. Because any deviation from dogma is a sin and the sinner must be cast out and burned at the stake.

Hillary is who she says she is, a pragmatic progressive who likes to get things done. To Bernie, getting things done is a heresy that must be condemned.

And Brian Beutler says Bernie better quit it soon or else he will be unelectable.

One of the questions at the heart of the fight between Clinton and Sanders is whether Sanders’s promise to lead a political revolution that brings the United States closer to social democracy is credible or fantastic. The argument frequently pits cynics and pragmatists, who see Barack Obama’s high-minded-candidacy-turned-difficult-presidency as an object lesson in the unloveliness of governing, against idealists and counterfactualists, who say Obama never attempted to turn the promise of his campaign into progressive action.

Even if you side with Team Sanders on this question, the insight that gave rise to that tweet (that pitting progressives against moderates is an effective tactic in a two-person Democratic primary) is incompatible with the goal of uniting the existing Democratic base with the unattached voters and Republicans of the white working class. It may even be incompatible with building a majority coalition in a general election.

The list of reasons to worry Sanders is unelectable is unusually long. To paraphrase Vox’s David Roberts: Sanders would be far and away the oldest president to take office; he has self-identified as a socialist for most of his career, undeterred by the media’s inability to distinguish between social democrats (what he is) and Leninists (what Republicans will say he is); he supports a higher tax on middle-class labor, which is politically and substantively the worst way to finance a welfare state expansion.

On top of all that, he is unabashed about his disinterest in party coalition building. He’s happy to represent one wing of it, but not inclusively enough to pick up endorsements from influential party actors. This is all exacerbated by the fact that he’s spent his congressional career as an independent who caucuses with Democrats, and has never plied his popularity into helping Democratic colleagues get elected. This increases the likelihood that down-ballot Democrats would run away from him in a tough race, rather than rally to unite the party.

But you can set all that aside, too, and just consider the ramifications of Sanders’s defeating Clinton by boxing her out of the progressive movement, and using the term “moderate” as an epithet to describe deviations from his agenda.

Progressives should welcome Clinton’s embrace of progressivism, for that means that Progressivism has control of the party. At this rate, if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination, he will lose in such spectacular fashion that he will destroy Progressivism for 50 years.

Joshua Green on the great GOP realignment: “It’s easy to view this year’s Republican primary as a cult of personality and no more—the rise and fall of a colorful billionaire who stars in the greatest reality show on television. But what’s happening is much broader than Trump and Cruz. It’s an extension of a shift in Republican politics that’s been under way for several years.”

“Although the media is portraying the outcome in Iowa as a repudiation of Trump, it’s better understood as a repudiation of the party establishment—just the latest in a series of uprisings dating to the 2010 election. At the congressional level, the GOP has already realigned itself to reflect this anger. Almost 60 percent of House Republicans were elected in 2010 or after. They’ve radicalized their party in Congress and driven out its establishment-minded speaker, John Boehner.”

These words from President Obama were powerful.

In our lives, we all have many identities. We are sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters. We’re classmates; Cub Scout troop members. We’re followers of our faith. We’re citizens of our country. And today, there are voices in this world, particularly over the Internet, who are constantly claiming that you have to choose between your identities — as a Muslim, for example, or an American. Do not believe them. If you’re ever wondering whether you fit in here, let me say it as clearly as I can, as President of the United States: You fit in here — right here. You’re right where you belong. You’re part of America, too. You’re not Muslim or American. You’re Muslim and American.

That came at the end of a speech where President Obama reminded us of some facts about how Muslims have been an integral part of the this country’s experience from the beginning and laid out a few principles for how we can go forward as one American family where everyone belongs. If you haven’t already, you can watch it here.

Marco Rubio says that Obama, in his ONE AMERICA speech, is pitting Americans against each other. Donald Trump said the President looked like he belonged in a Mosque. I hope they both die slowly from an infection of the dick. Too far?

This is just painful.

Elizabeth Bruenig on the battle over progressivism between Hillary and Bernie among young voters:

Young voters likely find the majority of their memory dominated by the Great Recession, and their concerns marked by its privations: student debt, high healthcare costs, and limited job prospects. Millennials find ourselves faced with plenty of education and little to show for it; lower rates of home ownership than our parents, higher rents, and the sense that, despite the gains of the Affordable Care Act, getting sick can still be disastrous for one’s finances. Thus it is no surprise that Sanders dominated the youth vote in the Iowa caucuses, claiming 84 percent of voters between the ages of 17 and 29. With policies like single-payer universal healthcare, a $15-per-hour minimum wage, and universal free college on offer, it would have been somewhat startling if Sanders hadn’t captured the attention of young voters.

But Sanders’s easy way with the young hasn’t pleased Clinton’s supporters, who see in the youth rejection of Hillary both a ridiculous starry-eyed utopianism and a frustrating redefinition of what it means to be progressive. “Bernie’s attractiveness as a candidate relies on the premise of purity—a political value as ancient as politics itself,” Alexandra Schwartz, herself a millennial, recently wrote in The New Yorker. But, Schwartz warned her fellow youths, “purity, a highly useful principle to make use of while running for office, is all but useless to politicians who actually arrive there, and the voters least likely to see that are young ones.” Bernie’s hardline adherence to his principles, in other words, was made to seem a campaign sham. Meanwhile, Schwartz surmised that the “suspicion that political compromise is inherently venal is at the root of the grievances that so many of Bernie’s young supporters harbor against Hillary, whose long record bears the kind of battle scars that are easily dodged by an independent senator from Vermont.” Clinton has the grit, and Sanders the glamour. Clinton’s impurity—her periodic deviation from what young voters now view as proper progressivism—is a symptom of her maturity, and millennials’ disdain for it is a marker of their naïveté.

So the battle for the true-progressive mantle would seem to be a losing one for each candidate, with Sanders standing accused of manipulating the dreams of children, and Clinton charged with a career-long habit of rank centrism, no better for the recession-disaffected millennial than an emperor without clothes.

Some good moments from last night’s town hall. In the first clip, Hillary opens up about herself, and I find it very honest.

Bernie jokes about being Larry David.

Josh Marshall:

But here’s the one thing that stood out to me. Again, I won’t say it’s new in the campaign. But in this townhall, it was articulated on both sides in a sharper relief.

Sanders is saying that the kind of society most Democrats want can’t be achieved by operating within the current system – you need a fundamental shift in the role of money in public life, the values that drive our political system, etc. He is saying quite clearly and crisply that we’re never going to get there through incrementalism. Phrased that way, I think there’s a very good argument that he’s right.

Clinton is coming at things from an altogether different vantage point: Think what we could lose. Think about all the tangible, if incremental, things we’ve achieved and realize that we could lose them. The Affordable Care Act, voting rights, advances for women and the LGBT community. Even if you have a Republican Congress forever, a Democrat in the White House is the great protector of all of that. It is implicit in what she says and sometimes said openly that without a dramatically different Congress none of what Sanders is proposing will even get a hearing in Congress let alone get passed. But the deeper argument – realism and protecting gains – is the essence of the message she’s pushing.

It has the benefit of being a pretty stark and clear cut choice.

I would consider voting for Sanders if he had any plan, any plan at all, other than touting the supposed “political revolution,” of electing more progressive Democrats to Congress so that he can actually enact his agenda. But he has no plan. He does not care about electing other Democrats, even progressive ones. I guess he just assumes that if he gets elect President, it will mean that all Republicans everywhere will somehow lose.