Wednesday Open Thread [2.17.16]

NATIONAL—Quinnipiac–Trump 39, Rubio 19, Cruz 18, Kasich 6, Carson 4, Bush 4
NATIONAL—Quinnipiac–Clinton 44, Sanders 42
SOUTH CAROLINA—CNN/ORC–Trump 38, Cruz 22, Rubio 14, Bush 10, Carson 6, Kasich 4
SOUTH CAROLINA—CNN/ORC–Clinton 56, Sanders 38
VIRGINIA—Christopher Newport Univ.–Trump 28, Rubio 22, Cruz 19, Kasich 7, Carson 7, Bush 4
VIRGINIA—Christopher Newport Univ.–Clinton 52, Sanders 40
SOUTH CAROLINA—SC House GOP–Trump 34, Cruz 16, Rubio 15, Bush 15, Kasich 8, Carson 7
SOUTH CAROLINA—ARG–Trump 33, Cruz 14, Rubio 16, Bush 9, Kasich 14, Carson 3
SOUTH CAROLINA—ARG–Clinton 61, Sanders 31
NEVADA—CNN/ORC–Trump 45, Rubio 19, Cruz 17, Carson 7, Kasich 5, Bush 1
NEVADA—CNN/ORC–Clinton 48, Sanders 47

A new Morning Consult poll finds 34% of Americans said George W. Bush’s policies kept us safer, while 35% said he kept us less safe. Twenty percent of voters said they didn’t think his policies made any impact.

Dana Milbank has some very thick rose colored glasses: “I had a twinge of nostalgia watching George W. Bush campaign for his little brother in South Carolina Monday night… He was earthy… Bush was corny… He was also self-deprecating.”

“But mostly, W’s cameo in the 2016 campaign served as a reminder that, not too long ago, conservative politics wasn’t so beastly. Bush, wading into the manure pile that is the 2016 Republican primary fight, was pleasant, civil and decent.”

New York Times says Trump gains as he defies the Republican Party: “The stubborn popularity of Mr. Trump, who defies Republican orthodoxy on issue after issue, shows how deeply the party’s elites misjudged the faithfulness of rank-and-file Republicans to conservatism as defined in Washington think tanks and by the party’s elected leaders.”

“The dichotomy is particularly vivid here in South Carolina, the most conservative state on the nominating calendar so far, where Mr. Trump holds a double-digit lead over his closest rivals in the latest polls.

Jonathan Chait:

Republicans disagree internally on aspects of Bush’s domestic legacy, but his record on counterterrorism remains a point of unified party doctrine. Bush, they agree, Kept Us Safe. To praise the president who oversaw the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history for preventing domestic terrorism is deeply weird, and the only way this makes any sense is to treat 9/11 as a kind of starting point, for which his predecessor is to blame. (Marco Rubio, rushing to Dubya’s defense at Saturday night’s Republican debate, explained, “The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.”) Trump not only pointed out that Bush was president on 9/11 and that the attacks that day count toward his final grade, but he also noted that Bush failed to heed intelligence warnings about the pending attack and that his administration lied to the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

America. pic.twitter.com/TeduJkwQF3

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 16, 2016

Jeet Heer:

It’s hard to interpret this tweet as anything other than a response to the constant emasculation that Bush has suffered at the hands of Donald Trump. The real estate mogul has spent months cutting Bush down with insults that suggested the former Florida governor was less than a man.

Huffington Post reporter Paul Blumenthal found an apposite quote from Freud: “It is quite unmistakable that all weapons and tools are used as symbols for the male organ.”

But in showing off the size of his gun, Bush has made himself an even sadder figure.

Twitter was full of parodies on that tweet all night long.

Seth Masket:

Senator Bernie Sanders has staged an impressive insurgency so far against the Democratic party’s presumed choice for its presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. In some ways, he’s following a similar path that Barack Obama forged against Clinton eight years ago, inviting numerous comparisons. But the coalition backing Sanders differs from the one that backed Obama in important ways.

Sanders’ and Obama’s levels of support are surprisingly similar across several subgroups, including men, women, whites, liberals, and younger voters. The one striking disparity is among African Americans. Barack Obama had tremendous support from the African-American community. In the 2008 survey, 76 percent of African Americans said they were supporting Obama; only 16 percent were backing Clinton. Today, however, the tables are reversed, with only eight percent of African Americans backing Sanders, and 82 percent backing Clinton.

Amanda Marcotte on why the Republican Scalia Tantrum is a gift to Hillary Clinton and Democrats:

The next few weeks, possibly months (possibly 11 months!) are going to suck for whatever sacrificial lamb (or lambs) Obama throws up for the Republicans to reject in an impotent attempt to register their continuing anger that he just keeps sitting in the White House like the duly elected President he is. But for the rest of the Democrats, this is going to be a political boon.

This goes double for Hillary Clinton, who will be able to use the ongoing fight over the Supreme Court to push her argument that her brand of liberal politics is the best fit for our current political climate, better both than the idealism offered by Bernie Sanders and than the politics of obstruction and resentment that define all her Republican opponents.

It says a lot about our current political situation that the best outcome for the Democrats is almost surely what the Republicans are threatening to do, which is to stonewall anyone Obama nominates, just because he’s Obama and they have a superstitious belief that everything he touches is unclean. While it’s going to be a policy disaster to have a court that is set up to tie so many important decisions, having the Republicans loudly proclaim that they prioritize impotent insults aimed at the President over actual governance is a political boon of the sort that you can’t buy even with Citizens United money. Every day this drags out, the news will be a glorious reminder to the voters that the Republicans are such babies that they shouldn’t be trusted to run a small town McDonald’s franchise, much less be given so much power in the U.S. government.

This is especially delicious since the only Republican candidate who has a chance to walk away from this unscathed — maybe even finding a way to turn it to his advantage— is Donald Trump.

Taegan Goddard:

Donald Trump seems to have a similar level of support — 35% to 40% — in both the national and state polls. […] If Trump’s support is constant no matter what, it also means he’s well on his way to winning the Republican nomination. Unless the GOP race becomes a two-man contest very quickly, Trump will win. The deadline to finding just one Trump-alternative is fast approaching.

Assuming it becomes a two-man race in time — which at this point seems highly unlikely — the only other question is whether Trump has a ceiling of 35% or 40% on his support and could actually be defeated.

Republicans are showing signs of caving to the President and doing their actual job:

[W]ithin 72 hours, the GOP began showing some signs of division on tactics. Some Republicans are open to at least considering an Obama nominee in the GOP-controlled Senate, even if it amounts to nothing more than a show trial. Other still want to reflexively block any hearings or votes regardless of who Obama chooses.

It’s a sign that at least some in the party fear political blowback if Republicans look like they’re being unreasonable in obstructing Obama with almost a full year left in his term.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, who said Saturday it “only makes sense” to let the next president pick the justice, wouldn’t rule out holding hearings for Obama’s eventual pick.

“I would wait until the nominee is made before I would make any decisions,” Grassley told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday, according to Radio Iowa. “In other words, take it a step at a time.”

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, also sounded skeptical of simply rejecting any nominee at the outset. “I think we fall into the trap if we just simply say, sight unseen—we fall into the trap of being obstructionists,” Tillis said on the Tyler Cralle Show. “All we’re trying to say is that based on the president’s actions, it is highly unlikely” he’ll nominate someone in the mold of Scalia, he added. “And if he puts forth someone that we think is in the mold of President Obama’s vision for America then we’ll use every device available to block that nomination.”

The slight cracks in what has been a rallying cry among the party’s base of “no hearings, no votes” doesn’t mean a confirmation is particularly likely, at least before the November elections.

The cracks in unity show that even Republicans realize they will be destroyed at the ballot box.

Matt Yglesias says that Donald Trump is the ideological heir to George W. Bush.

When Benjy Sarlin went to South Carolina to interview voters who’d come to see George W. Bush speak on behalf of his brother, he found lots of W fans who are planning to vote for Trump. The partial overlap in W and Trump voting bases suggests the feud between the Bushes and Trump isn’t about their differences, after all. […]

In an important sense, Trump isn’t doing much more than following a political trail that W blazed — becoming the first (and so far only) Republican Party politician to follow the template of populist nationalism that the only successful GOP presidential candidate of the past 30 years rode to the White House.

Rick Klein: “If Donald Trump captures the Republican Party’s nomination, the party itself will almost need a new name. He’s not running for the GOP but against it – against the party’s formal structure, its biggest players, and, yes, some of its core values. Consider his actions just since this past weekend. Trump is accusing the Republican Party of breaking its pledge to treat him fairly, in an implicit threat of a third-party run; saying that the GOP’s most-recent, two-term president tied the nation into a war; mocking the two leading establishment candidates, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, for energy level and propensity to perspire, respectively; and calling his leading rival, Ted Cruz, ‘very unstable’ and the biggest liar he’s ever come into contact with.”

“The biggest shocker is that Trump might win South Carolina and much more because of such statements, not in spite of them. For those who have come up under existing power structures – and that list includes Bush, Rubio, Cruz, and John Kasich – Trump’s continued strength is confounding, dangerous, and yet very much reality.”

The Public Policy Polling survey in South Carolina that shows Donald Trump leading the GOP presidential race also shows his support is built on a base of voters among whom religious and racial intolerance pervades.

Most interesting: “70% think the Confederate flag should still be flying over the State Capital, to only 20% who agree with it being taken down. In fact 38% of Trump voters say they wish the South had won the Civil War to only 24% glad the North won and 38% who aren’t sure. Overall just 36% of Republican primary voters in the state are glad the North emerged victorious to 30% for the South, but Trump’s the only one whose supporters actually wish the South had won.”

More:

-By an 80/9 spread, Trump voters support his proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. In fact 31% would support a ban on homosexuals entering the United States as well, something no more than 17% of anyone else’s voters think is a good idea. There’s also 62/23 support among Trump voters for creating a national database of Muslims and 40/36 support for shutting down all the mosques in the United States, something no one else’s voters back. Only 44% of Trump voters think the practice of Islam should even be legal at all in the United States, to 33% who think it should be illegal. To put all the views toward Muslims in context though, 32% of Trump voters continue to believe the policy of Japanese internment during World War II was a good one, compared to only 33% who oppose it and 35% who have no opinion one way or another.

And here is what they found about the Democrats:

…Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders 55/34. South Carolina exemplifies the way in which the Democratic race changes in places where there’s a large African American electorate. Clinton and Sanders are tied with white voters at 46%, pretty similar to how the race played out in Iowa. But among African Americans Clinton continues to have a substantial advantage over Sanders at 63/23. Clinton is very popular among black voters with a 71/12 favorability, while feelings about Sanders continue to be pretty mixed with him coming in at 39/33.

South Carolina’s being an open primary works to Sanders’ advantage. Clinton is up 31 with actual Democrats, 60/29, but Sanders cuts a lot into her advantage thanks to a 55/27 lead with the independents planning to vote in the Democratic primary. Some of the other customary big demographic splits we’ve seen in other places present themselves in South Carolina as well- Sanders is up 45/43 with men and 44/42 with younger voters, but that is more than drowned out by Clinton’s 64/25 advantage with women and 70/20 one with seniors.

First Read says we are on the verge of a Constitutional Crisis: “Maybe more importantly, this political fight over Scalia’s eventual successor could finally break the U.S. Senate, Congress, and all of Washington. Think about: The past congressional fights have been over things like the debt ceiling, the sequester, and the fiscal cliff. But this is the Supreme Court — something that isn’t as esoteric to most Americans. Ditto the fact that a vacancy could last a year or longer. This is a big deal. It’s maybe not a constitutional crisis yet. But it could certainly head that way.”

Ben Carson accidentally told the truth: if the GOP controlled the White House, they would fill Scalia’s seat. Hell, even former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says so, and says the GOP Senate should fill the vacancy.

Jackie Calmes fills us in on what Austan Goolsbee and Jared Bernstein have to say about the economics of Bernie Sanders’ proposals. One of the things it assumes is that economic growth will be 5.3%. As Steve Benen notes:

To put that in perspective, how many modern presidents – from either party – have seen 4% growth during their tenures? None. Literally, not a single one. Not Clinton, not Obama, not Reagan, no one has achieved growth that high. If any of them did, it’s awfully likely the Fed would raise interest rates, deliberately cooling growth out of inflationary fears.

I’ll gladly concede that many of Sanders’ domestic priorities would help the economy enormously…But if Sanders makes his numbers add up by assuming 5.3% growth, there’s a problem with this plan.

Many Republicans, in order to make the math add up with their huge tax cut plan, also make this false assumption, that economic growth will skyrocket to never seen in 40 years levels, and thus that will bring in more revenue to balance the books. Bernie is doing the same thing.

Gov. John Kasich apparently didn’t file a petition to be placed on the Pennsylvania primary ballot, according to Ballot Access News. That’s pretty shocking.