Friday Open Thread [5.6.16]

NATIONAL—Pew Research–Clinton 54, Sanders 42

So, a lot happened yesterday. Speaker Paul Ryan, the highest ranking elected Republican in the country, broke with his party’s presidential nominee and said he could not support Trump. It is not surprising, but it is shocking when you stop to think about that. Trump responded as you would expect, childishly and petulantly, shooting himself in the foot in the process. He said “Oh yeah, well I don’t think I can support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.” Speaker Ryan’s agenda, such that it is, is the conservative agenda. That was a fucking bullhorn signal to conservatives that Trump is not on their side. That might have devastating consequences, all because Trump is an immature child who always has to respond insultingly. And I am somehow supposed to fear this man? Yeah, no.

We also got a lot of leakage in the Hillary Clinton/FBI story, which always tells you that the investigation is wrapping up and a conclusion has been reached on the nature of it. CNN reported that “some of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, including her longtime adviser Huma Abedin, have provided interviews to federal investigators, as the FBI probe into the security of her private email server nears completion[.]” While the investigation is still ongoing and will conclude after a final interview of Hillary herself, “so far investigators haven’t found evidence to prove that Clinton willfully violated the law.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post is reporting that “[p]rosecutors and FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server have so far found scant evidence that the leading Democratic presidential candidate intended to break classification rules[.] This was always going to be a Republican non-scandal, just like Whitewater, just like Benghazi. The most disappointing thing about the Democratic primary this year was seeing just how many supposed progressives gleefully repeated Republican talking points about Benghazi and her emails.

And then we had this:

Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://t.co/ufoTeQd8yA pic.twitter.com/k01Mc6CuDI

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016

A glorious round of mocking ensued everywhere. Yeah, I should fear him. /sarcasm.

Trump, and a lot of idiot Bernouts, believe Hillary has never been vetted. Steve Benen eviscerates you all:

Hillary Clinton, whether you love her or hate her, has been vetted to an almost ridiculous degree over the course of two lengthy presidential campaigns, two statewide campaigns in one of the nation’s largest states, a Senate cabinet confirmation process, and multiple terms as First Lady at the state and federal level.

Clinton’s detractors will come up with all sorts of criticisms, some more compelling than others, but if Team Trump [and sexist BernieBros] is convinced the Democrat has skated by with no real scrutiny of her background, the Republican’s general-election campaign is off to a deeply odd start.

Cook Political Report: “This has been an exceedingly unpredictable year. Although we remain convinced that Hillary Clinton is very vulnerable and would probably lose to most other Republicans, Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity with wide swaths of the electorate – women, millennials, independents and Latinos – make him the initial November underdog.”

“As a result, we are shifting 13 ratings on our Electoral Vote scorecard, almost all of them favoring Democrats. Our assessments are based on publicly available polling, data on demographic change and private discussions with a large number of pollsters in both parties. Much could change, but undecided voters begin more hostile to Trump than Clinton.”

In his column, “Please don’t mainstream Trump,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. warns of the threat of media complaisancy in the months ahead: “Many forces will be at work in the coming weeks to normalize Trump — and, yes, the media will play a big role in this. On both the right and the left, there will be strong temptations to go along…There will be much commentary on Trump’s political brilliance. But this should not blind us to the degree that Trumpism is very much a minority movement in our country. He has won some 10.6 million votes, but this amounts to less than a quarter of the votes cast in the primaries this year. It’s fewer than Clinton’s 12.4 million votes and not many more than the 9.3 million Bernie Sanders has received.”

Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are planning to stay silent in the race for the Oval Office, the Texas Tribune reports.

Red State wants the Supreme Court blockade to end: “Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee, this is not even a close call. There is absolutely no reason to drag this out any longer. Garland is not a great choice, but he is not a terrible one, either. And more than anything, he is old (for a modern Supreme Court appointment) and will be up for replacement in probably 10 years instead of 20 or 30.”

“Republicans must know that there is absolutely no chance that we will win the White House in 2016 now. They must also know that we are likely to lose the Senate as well. So the choices, essentially, are to confirm Garland and have another bite at the apple in a decade, or watch as President Clinton nominates someone who is radically more leftist and 10-15 years younger, and we are in no position to stop it.”

Huffington Post: “Around Washington, chatter about the possibility of an independent run by a traditional conservative is becoming louder. It is fueled in part by the business end of the political cycle: Campaign consultants eagerly await — and financially plan for — the quadrennial, billion-dollar payday that is a presidential election.”

“Rest assured, the Donald Trump campaign will offer no shortage of opportunities for grifters… But there are also political reasons to run an independent candidate. A traditional conservative on the ballot who could peel a few points away from Trump would virtually assure Hillary Clinton of victory — giving business-minded conservatives who prefer Clinton a way to support her without having to support her directly. As importantly, a third-party conservative candidate could potentially draw in Republican voters disaffected by having Trump on top of the ticket, thereby giving a much-needed boost to down-ballot candidates.”

Washington Examiner: “Repelled by Trump and convinced he can’t beat Hillary Clinton, wealthy GOP contributors are abandoning the presidential contest and directing their lucrative networks to spend to invest in protecting vulnerable Republican majorities in the House and Senate.”

“They are undoubtedly gun shy after wasting time and money on Republicans who Trump destroyed in the primary. They raised untold millions for more than a dozen top flight candidates, and wrote big personal checks to their super PACs. But on policy and fitness for the presidency, the party’s most active contributors and bundlers simply can’t bring themselves to support their front-runner, reluctantly preferring a Clinton administration that is checked by a GOP congress.”

Michelle Goldberg of Slate previews what some of the GOP attacks on Sanders would be in a fantasy alternate universe where Sanders would actually be the nominee. Thankfully we are saved from McGovern II:

Right now there’s no way of knowing [if Sanders could win in the fall], because there’s been only scattered excavation of Sanders’ radical connections. He has never been asked to account for his relationship with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, for which he served as a presidential elector in 1980. At the time, the party’s platform called for abolishing the U.S. military budget and proclaimed “solidarity” with revolutionary Iran. (This was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.) There’s been little cable news chatter about Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.” It would be nice if this were due to a national consensus on the criminal nature of America’s support for the Contras. More likely, the media’s attention has simply been elsewhere.

The Clinton campaign has also ignored Sanders’ youthful sex writings. Republicans are unlikely to be so decorous. Imagine an ad drawing from the old Sanders essay “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death.” First it might quote the candidate mocking taboos on child nudity: “Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others [sic] sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing!” Then it would quote him celebrating girls who defy their mothers and have sex with their boyfriends: “The revolution comes … when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has ‘taught’ her and accepts her boyfriends [sic] love.” Finally, it would remind viewers that Sanders was one of 14 congressmen to vote against the law establishing the Amber Alert system and one of 15 to vote against an amendment criminalizing computer-generated child pornography. The fact that these votes were cast for entirely principled civil libertarian reasons is, in the context of a general-election attack, beside the point. (It’s also beside the point that lots of people, myself included, have no problem with either child nudity or teenage sex.) It takes no special political insight to see that Republicans will try to make Sanders seem like a sexual weirdo. Will it work? I have no idea, but there’s no shorter route to the frightened lizard brain of the American electorate than dark talk about children and sex.

One could go on and on in this vein. My colleague William Saletan has already written about how support for Sanders’ positions tends to fall apart when people hear the details—particularly if they learn their own taxes would go up. As the nominee, Sanders would have to address his former opposition to public schools and praise for parents who believe that it is “better for their children not to go to school at all than for them to attend a normal type of establishment.” He’d have to explain whether he still feels that sexual repression causes cancer, whether he still opposes the concept of private charity, and whether he still supports the public takeover of the television industry.

One also assumes Republicans would, in keeping with Karl Rove’s playbook, try to hit Sanders where he’s strongest—on issues of financial integrity. They’d probably do it by going after Jane Sanders, who has been accused of trying to defraud the Catholic Church on a land deal she undertook as president of Burlington College. (After being forced out of that job, she received a $200,000 golden parachute.) If you think this can’t blow up, remember that Hillary Clinton never personally profited off of Whitewater, the land deal that became a pretext for endless investigations of her and her husband.

The Sanderistas appear to believe they were treated unfairly, even viciously, in this primary. In fact, they’ve been handled incredibly gingerly. That might end up being to Sanders’ detriment: If we’d spent the past few months chewing over his glaring electoral weaknesses and he was still leading Clinton in head-to-head matchups against the GOP, he might have a case for a contested convention. It would be a cynical, anti-democratic case that contradicts the people-powered rationale of his candidacy, but it wouldn’t be as nonsensical as the argument he’s making now.

It’s understandable that Sanders, like anyone, would be carried away by the experience of hearing tens of thousands of people deliriously chanting his name. Perhaps it seems like the revolution might really be at hand, and thus any means are justified. But it’s not. He’s just losing.

The taxes is where he would really be destroyed. A Vox tax calculator estimates that he raises taxes on a middle class family of four making $75,000 a year by a whopping $10,000! Yeah, no way Bernie wins a national election after the first GOP ad on that.

The Economist: “During its 160-year history, the Republican Party has abolished slavery, provided the votes in Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act and helped bring the cold war to a close. The next six months will not be so glorious. After Indiana’s primary, it is now clear that Republicans will be led into the presidential election by a candidate who said he would kill the families of terrorists, has encouraged violence by his supporters, has a weakness for wild conspiracy theories and subscribes to a set of protectionist and economically illiterate policies that are by turns fantastical and self-harming.”

“The result could be disastrous for the Republican Party and, more important, for America. Even if this is as far as he goes, Mr Trump has already done real damage and will do more in the coming months. Worse, in a two-horse race his chances of winning the presidency are well above zero.”

Joe Klein says Bill Clinton had a much rougher go of it in 1992 than Hillary has had: “He had larger problems than an email server: he had recently been found out as a Vietnam draft dodger and a womanizer. People called him Slick Willie. Within weeks, he would be in a deeper, darker hole than Hillary has experienced this year–he would be running third, behind George H.W. Bush and the independent Ross Perot. By June, only 13% of the public thought him trustworthy. He was toast.”

“This is old news, but it’s living history for the Clintons. It is what keeps Hillary buoyant, even as the most glamorous Democratic constituencies–celebrities, idealistic college kids–have flocked to Bernie Sanders. More than any other politicians I’ve covered, the Clintons have a perfect sense of chronology. They know that politics moves more slowly than the daily media frenzy, that new story lines–comebacks, especially–are catnip to cable networks. They know that polls can change, that Trump will have his day, that the general election will be Armageddon. But they are confident she’ll win.”

Notable tidbit: Trump told WaPo that he is eager to start receiving regular classified intelligence briefings from the U.S. government

— Robert Costa (@costareports) May 5, 2016

That is horrifying.

Associated Press: “Democrats will have female Senate candidates on the ballot in nine states in November, a near-record, and these contenders will likely be sharing the ticket with the first major-party female presidential nominee in history in Hillary Clinton.”

“Donald Trump, whose commanding win in Indiana cemented his improbable status as the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, is viewed unfavorably by 70 percent of women, according to Gallup. So as discomfited Republican Senate candidates released statements trying to change the topic or have it both ways Wednesday, Democrats made plans to link their largely male opponents to Trump, aiming to win back control of the Senate in November by electing Democratic women from coast to coast.”