As expected, Bernie Sanders won blowout wins in Washington, Hawaii and Alaska. It keeps him going, although it does little to change the structure of the race. To do that, he is going to have to win New York by blowout margins. He narrowed the delegate yesterday by winning 104 delegates to her 38, earning him a net gain of 66 delegates. So now Clinton’s delegate lead is down to 250. To win the nomination, Bernie will need to win all the remaining states by margins he enjoyed yesterday, 73 to 25. And there are only two more caucus states remaining where he can do that (Wyoming and North Dakota).
What do the attacks in Brussels on Tuesday portend for America? The Republican party, so far, has rendered its verdict: the United States must crack down on Muslims – all Muslims.
This posturing isn’t spurred only by this week’s attacks themselves. Rather, the tragic deaths of more than 30 people in a terrorist attack became just the latest propaganda point for a party that has gone completely off the rails. One of America’s two major political parties is, sadly, completely dedicated to overt bigotry.
While most of the attention in the 2016 Presidential primary has been focused on the Republican race, there’s one strange finding on the Democratic side that bears exploring: self-identified socialist Bernie Sanders typically does better in national head-to-head match-ups than frontrunner Hillary Clinton. A new study shows why: many Americans just aren’t ready for a woman President.
Tough. Those who vote their prejudices weren’t ready for a black President either. I don’t think it is a good argument for Berniebros to make, that we should cowtow to the prejudices of the bigoted few just to run up the score. Plus, the flip side of this coin is that once Bernie faces the onslaught of the GOP and media Wurlitzer as a Democratic nominee, his numbers will go south like a duck in winter.
And here’s the final point. It now seems very likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee and that he will face Hillary Clinton, the first woman ever to be the presidential nominee of a major US political party. If Trump is driven by a contempt and anger at female power at his core that is a pretty big thing in itself. Of course, Hillary Clinton since the early 90s has been a focus of, a symbol of empowered women not just for her many political supporters but even more for her political enemies. This is, to put it mildly, a highly combustible situation. I’ve said before that I don’t think Trump can just etch-a-sketch it and become a totally different candidate for the general election. The primaries will come with him and because the psychodrama and resentment operating within his supporters is operating within him. In this case, the need to dominate or knock down powerful women is clearly something that transcends political calculation for Trump. So, yes, there’s going to be racial and religious bigotry but it will be a woman battling Trump and standing between him and the presidency. That will bring out in him something of a different order entirely. That means the general election will be very ugly but in all likelihood lead to Trump’s devastating defeat.
New Yorker: “The Democratic-primary turnout likely isn’t all that accurate a projection of the general elections. In the first place, people usually come out to vote under two conditions… first, when races are competitive and, second, when they see a significant difference between the candidates. With a smaller field and a front-runner who has held on to that spot, the Democratic race has clearly been much less competitive than the Republican one, even if Sanders has proved to be a more relentless marathon runner than many people thought he’d be. That’s a sharp contrast with the polarized Republican contest, and with the feeling a majority of Republican voters said they harbored of having been betrayed by their party’s leading politicians.”
“A general election pitting Clinton against Trump would offer about the most Manichaean contrast imaginable in American electoral politics… And while it might not be that closely competitive—polls at this point show both Clinton and Sanders handily beating Trump in an electoral-vote contest—there’s an exception to the rule that people are more likely to vote when they perceive the contest as tight… Sometimes, voters are so horrified by a candidate that they come out to register their opposition, even when they’re reasonably confident he or she will lose.”
Donald Trump “said that if elected, he might halt purchases of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies unless they commit ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State or ‘substantially reimburse’ the United States for combating the militant group, which threatens their stability,” the New York Times reports. Said Trump: “If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection, I don’t think it would be around.” “He also said he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on the American nuclear umbrella for their protection against North Korea and China.”
That is why the election of Donald Trump was rated a top 5 Global Risk Event, akin to the outbreak of World War III and the collapse of Chinca.
The Gallup tracking poll now shows President Obama’s approval rate at 53% to 44%.
Nicholas Kristof: “Those of us in the news media have sometimes blamed Donald Trump’s rise on the Republican Party’s toxic manipulation of racial resentments over the years. But we should also acknowledge another force that empowered Trump: Us.”
“I polled a number of journalists and scholars, and there was a broad (though not universal) view that we in the media screwed up. Our first big failing was that television in particular handed Trump the microphone without adequately fact-checking him or rigorously examining his background, in a craven symbiosis that boosted audiences for both.”
Another view from Callum Borchers: “It’s convenient to blame the media for Trump’s rise, but the reality — made dishearteningly apparent this week — is that the press isn’t powerful enough to be responsible for his success or failure. It can’t even control the campaign narrative, never mind the outcome.”
Frank Bruni on how the GOP is learning to stop worrying and love Ted Cruz:
It was clear to me weeks ago, even before Marco Rubio threw in the towel, that the G.O.P. was getting ready to cuddle with Ted Cruz.
But I never expected a love quite like this to bloom.
It’s a singularly tortured love, one that grits its teeth, girds its loins and pines for a contested convention.
It’s hate worn down into resignation, disgust repurposed as calculation. Stopping a ludicrous billionaire means submitting to a loathsome senator. And so they submit, one chastened and aghast Republican leader after another, murmuring sweet nothings about Cruz that are really sour somethings about Donald Trump. […]
Cruz has gone from the insufferable nemesis of Republican traditionalists to their last, best hope, and the likes of Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush have now given him endorsements — or approximations thereof — that will go down in political history as some of the most constipated hosannas ever rendered.
They hardly mention Cruz’s name. They barely manage to assign him a single virtue.
On the surface, Cruz is a straightforward figure: The ideological zealot, the politician-as-activist, the unbending embodiment of True Conservatism. He’s the scourge of Obamacare, the bane of the G.O.P. establishment, the evangelical moralist with a flat-tax plan and a Reagan quote for every occasion. If Trump has dynamited Republican orthodoxy and tapped out nasty tweets from the rubble, Cruz has kept pace by promising to rebuild that same orthodoxy stronger than before.
In this framing, Cruz is basically Barry Goldwater come again, an ideological crusader who might still grab his party’s nomination, but whose general election prospects are limited by his own extremism.