Thursday Open Thread [3.24.16]

National—FOX News–Trump 41, Cruz 38, Kasich 17
National—Bloomberg–Trump 40, Cruz 31, Kasich 25
National—Quinnipiac–Trump 43, Cruz 29, Kasich 16
National—Monmouth–Trump 41, Cruz 29, Kasich 18

That Fox News poll showing a close race looks like an outlier, as the rest of the polling looks shockingly uniform, with an average of Trump 42, Cruz 30.

National—FOX News–Clinton 55, Sanders 42
National—Quinnipiac–Clinton 50, Sanders 38
National—Monmouth–Clinton 55, Sanders 37

Wisconsin—Emerson–Cruz 36, Trump 35, Kasich 19
Wisconsin—Emerson–Clinton 50, Sanders 44
Pennsylvania—Franklin & Marshall–Trump 33, Kasich 30, Cruz 20
Pennsylvania—Franklin & Marshall–Clinton 53, Sanders 28

Man, if Cruz wins Wisconsin and Kasich wins PA, chaos!!

National—Bloomberg–Clinton 54, Trump 36
National—Fox News–Clinton 49, Trump 38
National—Quinnipiac–Clinton 46, Trump 40
Pennsylvania—Franklin & Marshall–Clinton 46, Trump 33
Wisconsin—Emerson–Clinton 47, Trump 38

So the big lies the media are telling us is that Trump will do well in the Rust Belt, which includes PA and WI. Nope. And Trump says he is beating Hillary in every poll. Nope.

Steve Benen says that Obama got the better of Castro during the Cuba Summit.

Joan Walsh:

Clinton’s big wins last week almost certainly guarantee her the nomination. Sanders promises to fight on, however, and he deserves to. He’s raising crucial issues, and he’s already helped pull Clinton to the left. But if he wants his effort to yield lasting organizing victories for the left, he better study the lessons of the first half of his campaign. One thing should already be clear: No multiracial, left-wing coalition can be successfully built out from a white base. Let’s stop trying.

Coolest President Ever.

"@Don_Vito_08: "A picture is worth a thousand words" @realDonaldTrump #LyingTed #NeverCruz @MELANIATRUMP pic.twitter.com/5bvVEwMVF8"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016

Donald, real men don't attack women. Your wife is lovely, and Heidi is the love of my life. https://t.co/pprXhIMzUT

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 24, 2016

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the Republican party “probably will” lose the 2016 presidential race, Bloomberg reports. Graham said that Donald Trump’s “campaign is based on xenophobia, race-baiting, religious bigotry, bringing out the worst in us. I think it would destroy my party for generations to come. We can afford to lose an election; we can’t afford to lose the heart and soul of who we are.” He added that Sen. Ted Cruz “wouldn’t make the best president” but has the best chance.

Byron York: “The Republican presidential race has been in overdrive since the Iowa caucuses on February 1; there have been more than 30 contests in the 51 days since then. And next Tuesday, there will be… nothing.”

“For the first time since voting began, there will be a two-week gap between Tuesday’s votes, in Arizona and Utah, and the next contest in Wisconsin on April 5. (And Wisconsin will be the only primary that day.) After that, there will be another two-week gap before the New York primary on April 19 — again, the only primary of the day.”

Jonah Goldberg says the Republican Party is over: “Nominating Donald Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. Not nominating Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. The sooner everyone recognizes this fact, the better.”

“Denial has been Trump’s greatest ally. Republicans and commentators didn’t believe he would run. They didn’t believe he could be an attractive candidate to rational people, no matter how angry with “the establishment” voters said they were. They – which includes me – were wrong.”

“Trump represents just the most pronounced of a spiderweb of ideological and demographic fault lines that are increasingly difficult to paper over. As Joel Kotkin put it in a column for the Orange County Register, the Republican Party now ‘consists of interest groups that so broadly dislike each other that they share little common ground.’ Put simply, and with the incessant and obtuse comparisons of Trump to Reagan notwithstanding, you cannot have a party that’s both Reaganite and Trumpish.”

Dylan Matthews has updated his piece from 2015 titled “Barack Obama is officially one of the most consequential presidents in American history.”

This [past] Wednesday marks the sixth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, which President Obama signed into law on March 23, 2010. Together with a companion bill passed a week later, the law represented the biggest reform to the American health care system since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

Its anniversary, then, serves as a crucial reminder that, love him or hate him, Barack Obama is one of the most consequential presidents in American history — and that he will be a particularly towering figure in the history of American progressivism.

He signed into law a comprehensive national health insurance bill, a goal that had eluded progressive presidents for a century. He got surprisingly tough reforms to Wall Street passed as well, not to mention a stimulus package that both blunted the recession and transformed education and energy policy.

He’s put in place the toughest climate rules in American history and signed a major international climate accord. He opened the US to Cuba for the first time in more than half a century, and reached a peaceful settlement to the nuclear standoff with Iran.

You can celebrate or bemoan these accomplishments. Liberals hail them as moves toward a social democratic welfare state and a foreign policy more skeptical of military intervention; conservatives critique Obama’s efforts to expand regulation and the government’s reach, and accuse him of abdicating America’s role as world hegemon.

But no one can deny that the changes Obama has wrought are enormous in scale.

Frank Rich:

Fear has brought out the worst in America throughout its modern history. We tirelessly recall that FDR told America it had nothing to fear but fear itself at his first inaugural address in 1933, but often omit the part that he signed an order to incarcerate Japanese-Americans in internment camps later in his presidency. So many calamities in modern American history have been prompted by fear, it’s impossible to list them all, from the Red Scare of the McCarthy era to the failure of the Reagan administration to address the AIDS crisis to the misbegotten, 9/11-generated Iraq War, which helped create the Islamic State that has rained down blood on Paris, San Bernardino, and Brussels in less than five months. […]

Trump[‘s] fear-driven solutions for dealing with ISIS — more torture, sealing our borders, reducing support of NATO — are as ineffectual as they are incoherent. Cruz’s plan to have wholesale policing of American Muslim communities is nothing if not a propaganda gift to the Islamic State, inviting more terrorism. And John Kasich’s proposal in the aftermath of Brussels: President Obama should cut short his trip to Cuba. That’ll show ’em!

You will notice that none of the Republican candidates — nor Clinton, who called for steady leadership and one of her typical bullet-point lists of more or less existing American policies — proposes ground troops in the Middle East. You’ll notice that Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen, both of whom offered thoughtful critiques of Obama policy in this morning’s Times, had no real solutions of their own, unless Friedman’s pitch for American support to the developing democracies of Tunisia and Kurdistan counts as one. (As goes Tunisia, so might Syria? This seems like magical thinking.) I certainly don’t have a solution either, but I do get why Obama is doing everything he can to tamp down fear, even at the price of being criticized for passivity, weakness, etc. Policy based on fear prompts even rational politicians like Clinton to sign on to debacles like Iraq, and politics based on fear can only increase the odds of a self-professed strongman like Trump gaining power.

President Obama smacks Cruz: “As far as the notion of having surveillance of neighborhoods where Muslims are present, I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance. Which, by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped for America.”

First Read: “As the Republican presidential race turns next to the April 5 primary in Wisconsin, the reality for Donald Trump is that, heading into the Cleveland convention, he can’t afford to miss hitting the magic number of 1,237 — the delegates needed to clinch a majority to win the nomination. Why? Because there’s an active effort to stop him on a second ballot if anyone falls short of the number.”

One unbound delegate from North Dakota told National Review: “Voters in the primaries are not representative of the people who are gonna’ be sittin’ in the chairs in Cleveland,” he said. “The convention delegates from Arizona are going to be very conservative people, I guarantee ya’.