Monday Open Thread [2.8.2016]
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Monmouth: Trump 30, Kasich 14, Rubio 13, Bush 13, Cruz 12, Christie 6, Fiorina 5, Carson 4
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Monmouth: Sanders 52, Clinton 42
NEW HAMPSHIRE—CNN/WMUR: Trump 33, Rubio 16, Cruz 14, Kasich 11, Bush 7, Fiorina 6, Christie 4, Carson 2
NEW HAMPSHIRE—CNN/WMUR: Sanders 58, Clinton 35
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Boston Herald/FPU: Trump 31, Cruz 16, Rubio 15, Kasich 11, Bush 10, Christie 5, Fiorina 4, Carson 3
NEW HAMPSHIRE—Boston Herald/FPU: Sanders 51, Clinton 44
NEW HAMPSHIRE—UMass/7News (Tracking): Trump 34, Rubio 13, Cruz 13, Kasich 10, Bush 10, Christie 5, Fiorina 4, Carson 3
NEW HAMPSHIRE—UMass/7News (Tracking): Sanders 56, Clinton 40
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG (Tracking): Trump 31, Rubio 17, Kasich 17, Cruz 9, Bush 9, Christie 5, Fiorina 2, Carson 1
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG (Tracking): Sanders 53, Clinton 42
From the new Monmouth poll in New Hampshire:
Barely half (49%) of likely Republican primary voters say that they are completely decided on their candidate choice just days before Tuesday’s election. Another 31% have a strong preference but are still open to considering other candidates. One-fifth either have only a slight preference (12%) or are really undecided (9%).
After Marcobot’s programming glitch on Saturday, it is now officially time for the GOP Establishment to begin panicking.
Brian Beutler: “The Republican establishment’s fondest hope before Saturday night’s debate was that Marco Rubio would deliver yet another solid (if unmemorable) debate performance, and that Donald Trump would fall on his face—compounding the damage he suffered in Iowa, and surrendering more, if not all, of his lead in New Hampshire over to Rubio, who’s in second place and climbing.”
“Instead, the establishment got almost exactly the opposite.”
James Hohmann: “Rubio’s loss means that there will be at least four tickets, and maybe even five, out of New Hampshire on Tuesday night.”
New York Magazine: “Chris Christie, whose strategy for the debate was clearly to take out Rubio, repeatedly called attention to the senator’s canned speech and accused him of using memorized sound bits to cover up for his complete lack of executive experience. That strategy worked. The exchange became an instant classic in the history of political smackdowns, especially because, incredibly, a clearly rattled Rubio continued to use his canned speech, repeating his attack on Obama a total of five times over the first half of the debate.”
James Fallows: “Most self-destructive debate performance since Quayle ’88 and J.B. Stockdale ’92.”
Politico: “Marco Rubio knew exactly what he was doing on Saturday night. The problem was he flubbed it.”
“Rubio awkwardly pivoted four times to a well-rehearsed line that President Obama ‘knows exactly what he’s doing’ as he tried to drill home the idea that he’s the inevitable general election candidate – an unforced error that his rivals pounced on and that quickly went viral.”
Dan Balz: “Rubio knew the attacks were coming, but instead of answering them directly, he sought to change the subject. Once, twice, three times he offered a quick counterpunch and then slid off the criticisms to turn to an attack on President Obama, repeating his language almost word for word and drawing boos from the audience.”
David Corn says here’s how you know Marcobot’s disastrous debate performance was serious:
This was Rubio’s emperor-has-no-clothes moment. And after the debate, he dared not enter the spin room to explain his broken-record impersonation. But his advisers, up until now one of the most savvy teams on the GOP side, quickly developed their post-debate spin. They were telling reporters that the debate demonstrated that Rubio was so committed to criticizing Obama that he would seize every opportunity to do so. At the bar, when Steele heard this, he laughed sadly. “No, no, no,” he said. “It was a major blunder.” That’s how most of the professionals saw it. Even on Fox News, which had been Rubio-friendly turf, his screw-up was the headline of the night. […]
The last time Rubio messed up big-time—when he awkwardly grabbed a bottle of water and took a swig while delivering the official GOP reply to Obama’s State of the Union address—he chose to respond with humor and made a series jokes about that awkward incident. This time, he’s going with defiance. That may be an indication that his advisers believe that this mess is damn serious and cannot be joked away. No doubt, this hang-tough approach will work fine with his pre-existing fans. But can Rubio sell it to a wider audience?
Frank Bruni has a ticket to the Tedpocalypse.
Another Ted Cruz rally, another Ted Cruz rant about the media’s failure to give him his due. I endured one in the tiny town of Weare, N.H., on Thursday afternoon and had two thoughts. The first was that I’d seldom heard a voice as ripe with self-regard — as juicy with it — as his. He’s pomposity’s plum tomato.
The second thought was that he’s right.
We’ve sold him short. We continue to underestimate him. He’s even craftier than we appreciated. He’s more devious than we realized. And he has a better chance to win the Republican nomination than we want to admit, because he’s not just a preternaturally slick political animal. He’s an uncommonly lucky one.
He’s getting huge, unintended breaks from Republican elders and rivals who mostly detest him and rightly believe that he’d lead the party to ruin in a general election but are distracted by other quarry — Donald Trump, Marco Rubio — and are letting him slither by.
Bruni thinks that Cruz is unlikely to do well in New Hampshire, but should survive well enough to ride a narcissistic wind in Cruz-friendly states. The scary thing? There are Cruz-friendly states.
Franklin Foer thinks Jeb! may still have a shot: “With his few remaining breaths as a candidate, however, Bush may have a path out from his debacle, an actual shot at the nomination. For months, he tried and failed to crush Sen. Marco Rubio. But he wielded the hatchet like a man who would rather be sailing. What he needed was a wingman. Last night, Gov. Chris Christie, with his bully’s instinct for weakness, baited the golden boy into choking—thereby, relieving Bush of all the throbbing pressure to stage a miraculous New Hampshire comeback.”
“Nobody — not the media, not the GOP establishment — can now consider Rubio a fait accompli. Republicans can see the fear in Rubio’s eyes, and it has panicked them, confirming all their nagging anxieties. There was a reason that the party has resisted its urge to fully rally around the perfect paper candidate.”
“As Republicans scrounge for their center-right tribune, they will find themselves coming full circle. Christie has no cash and no organization beyond New Hampshire. Kasich is out-of-synch with his party; his moderation won’t play outside a few suburban pockets. Which only leaves one.”
Hillary Clinton went after Sen. Marco Rubio over his defense of his opposition to abortions, Politico reports.
Said Clinton: “It’s really quite sad to see what Senator Rubio is becoming in this campaign. Everybody understands that he is diving as far right as he possibly can. I’ve been on record for many years about where I stand on abortion, how it should be safe and legal. And I’ve had the same position that I’ve had for a very long time. But what’s really going on here is an effort by the Republicans to keep pushing as far as they can to overturn Roe v. Wade, to defund Planned Parenthood, to make accusations and attacks that are really extreme.”
“Donald Trump enjoys a wide lead in polls ahead of Tuesday’s primary [in New Hampshire], but the election will again test the billionaire’s ability to flout modern campaigning by relying on star power instead of data-driven voter outreach and advertising to propel turnout,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Washington Post: “Tuesday’s primary marks a crucial moment for the campaign, which skeptics accuse of failing to build a robust national ground game that will turn out voters. Campaign officials have aggressively fought the criticism and hope to prove that they are capable of transforming Trump’s enormous crowds into an electoral victory.”
“Bill Clinton uncorked an extended attack on Sen. Bernie Sanders, harshly criticizing Mr. Sanders and his supporters for what he described as inaccurate and “sexist” attacks on Hillary Clinton,” the New York Times reports.
“He even likened an incident last year, in which Sanders staffers obtained access to Clinton campaign voter data, to stealing a car with the keys in the ignition.”
NBC News: “The former president appeared angry as he poured scorn on his wife’s opponent, portraying the Sanders campaign as dishonest and his healthcare proposals as unrealistic.”
Washington Post: “For weeks, former president Bill Clinton has been the doomsday device of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — a mighty weapon capable of doing great good or harm to her campaign — so held in reserve until absolutely needed.”
Some more thoughts on last Thursday’s Democratic Debate. First, Michael Tomasky: “That was one of the best debates I’ve ever watched. The questions were (mostly) good and tough and not stupid, and Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow did a really good job of steering it without getting in the way. Both candidates were good. Very good. There were a few tough moments, a few tender moments. It was real. I don’t know if it changed the dynamic in New Hampshire, but it did suggest one possible path for Hillary Clinton to narrow Bernie Sanders’s huge lead so that we might see some drama next Tuesday after all.”
Despite some heated exchanges in the Democratic debate, the Guardian’s Richard Wolfe commended both candidates on their civility: “Bernie’s best moment – once again – was his mensch-like refusal to attack Clinton on the email saga. In fact, he stated publicly that he rejects repeated media requests to do just that…The moderators tried to lure Clinton into a similar attack on Sanders, about the number of apparent ethical questions surrounding Sanders staffers. She politely declines the opportunity to jump in, before the debate breaks for yet another ad break…After a debate in which both candidates have taken their gloves off, this was easily their most dignified moment.”
DR Tucker \at the Washington Monthly:
The suggestion that most Sanders-supporting progressives will refuse to vote on November 8 if Sanders isn’t the Democratic nominee defies all logic. Sure, there may be a few disgruntled Bernie-backers who will either skip the polls or pull the level for presumptive Green Party nominee Jill Stein if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, but ask yourself: considering the stakes involved, do you honestly believe that the folks who have been attracted to Sanders’s message would, in essence, concede the election to whichever radical from last night’s debate wins the GOP nomination?
Remember the nonsensical “PUMA” movement in 2008? The idea that large numbers of Clinton supporters would actually refuse to vote for Barack Obama in the general election was laughable—and the idea that most Sanders supporters will throw a tantrum in the event the Vermonter is vanquished is just as silly.
[…] To accept the premise that most Sanders supporters would go on a general-election strike if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination is to accept the right’s premise of progressive irrationality. In order to buy the idea that the “Bernie or Bust!” movement is real, one would have to believe that most Sanders supporters:
* are unmindful of the importance of the United States Supreme Court, US District Courts of Appeal, and US District Courts, and the judges appointed to each division;
* are perfectly willing to allow a situation whereby a Republican President, Republican House and Republican Senate are finally in a position to obliterate Obamacare;
* would have no problem with four years of nothing being done to stem the bloody tide of handgun violence;
* would give the Christian right the opportunity to reinstate coathangers as the only reproductive option for women facing unplanned and unwanted pregnancies;
* would tolerate a Republican president fomenting a culture of racial and religious intolerance;
* would ignore the prospect of the GOP gutting President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and successfully sabotaging the 2015 Paris climate agreement; and
* would gamble on the idea that a Republican president could be thrown out of office in 2020 in favor of, presumably, Democratic presidential nominee Elizabeth Warren.
In other words, to buy this idea, one would have to buy absolute absurdity.
Members of the progressive family are simply having an argument over who will be the best individual to lead the country into the next decade. Yes, the language in this argument is sometimes raw, crude, personal. However, does anyone really believe that at the end of the primary, the progressive family will not set aside its differences and come together?
Indeed, those Sanders supporters who say they will not vote for Hillary are the type of voter that have never voted for the Democratic nominee in the first place. They vote Green, Working Families, Socialist, Communist or not at all. So if you want to see how large their numbers are, look at prior vote totals for those parties.
Donald Trump is in “full populist mode” as he wraps up his New Hampshire campaign, Byron York reports.
“There were portions of Trump’s Plymouth speech that sounded like Bernie Sanders, if Sanders had Trump’s sense of showmanship. In fact, Trump mentioned Sanders favorably, saying they agree on trade. Trump also said Sanders is correct in his charge that Hillary Clinton is compromised by the big-money contributions she has accepted — a charge the billionaire developer aimed at his Republican rivals as well.”
Paul Krugman on the Time-Loop Party:
Mr. Rubio’s inability to do anything besides repeat canned talking points was startling. Worse, it was funny, which means that it has gone viral. And it reinforced the narrative that he is nothing but an empty suit. But really, isn’t everyone in his party doing pretty much the same thing, if not so conspicuously?
The truth is that the whole G.O.P. seems stuck in a time loop, saying and doing the same things over and over. And unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” Republicans show no sign of learning anything from experience. […]
First, there’s the ritual denunciation of Obamacare as a terrible, very bad, no good, job-killing law. Did I mention that it kills jobs? Strange to say, this line hasn’t changed at all despite the fact that we’ve gained 5.7 millionprivate-sector jobs since January 2014, which is when the Affordable Care Act went into full effect.
Then there’s the assertion that taxing the rich has terrible effects on economic growth, and conversely that tax cuts at the top can be counted on to produce an economic miracle.
Rebecca Leber of the New Republic on Hillary Clinton’s Leftward Shift on Climate:
In July, the climate grassroots group 350 Action asked Hillary Clinton at a campaign stop in New Hampshire for her position on banning fossil fuel development on public lands. Clinton gave what she deemed a “responsible answer” that she wouldn’t accept a ban until we get “the alternatives in place.” I asked her campaign chair John Podesta the same question in October, and he only suggested a willingness to use “policy levers” to affect fossil fuel production.
Now, Clinton is ready to take a more definitive stand on limiting fossil fuel extraction on federal lands—which has emerged as a top priority for climate organizers after their victory against the Keystone XL pipeline. Griffin Sinclair-Wingate, a 350 Action organizer, approached Clinton after the New Hampshire debate on Thursday night and asked her, “Would you ban extraction on public lands?”
“Yeah, that’s a done deal,” Clinton said, as though her position were obvious. Afterward, she told another 350 activist that she agrees with “where the president is moving. No future extraction.” Adam Greenberg asked her in a third video on Friday while campaigning in New Hampshire, “Would you end all oil, coal, and gas leases on federal lands?” Clinton said, “I want to impose a moratorium … because there are legal issues you have to go through, you know all of that, but I would support a moratorium.”
