Saturday Open Thread [8.13.16]

COLORADO–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 46, Trump 32
FLORIDA–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 44, Trump 39
NORTH CAROLINA–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 48, Trump 39
VIRGINIA–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 46, Trump 33

Brian Beutler takes on the new GOP (and BernieBro) delusion that Hillary would be losing right now if her opponent were anybody else but Trump:

Isolating Clinton’s vulnerabilities also entails ignoring basic structural advantages Clinton would enjoy no matter who her opponent was. With the parties ideologically and racially sorted as they are today, the electoral college (and the voting-age population more generally) confers a natural advantage on Democrats. Clinton could underperform Obama’s reelection campaign considerably and still win. The economy is growing, creating jobs, lifting wages, buoying Obama’s approval rating (now above 50 percent) and in turn buoying Clinton, whose surrogates include the most famous and popular politicians in the country: Obama, his wife Michelle, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Trump has no comparable surrogates, but even the most-respected Republican in the GOP wouldn’t enjoy nearly as influential a support team.

But the biggest flaw lies with the thought experiment itself, rather than with any particular way you run it through your mind. Even if Trump had never entered the race, the nominee would still have had to prevail in the Republican primary, a process that entails appealing to the same ethno-nationalist base that Trump fully embraced. There’s a reason Rubio and Kasich fared far worse than Ted Cruz, who almost never led Clinton in head-to-heads, and who in turn fared worse than Trump. The whole construct is built upon what the writer Richard Yeselson has described as “the ahistorical anti-structural view of Trump as just a GOP screwup,” a curse that struck the party rather than a product of its political culture. There is no Republican politician who deserves the assumption he’d be beating Clinton handily right now, because no politician who survived the primary could avoid severe damage himself.

@daveweigel also Obama is popular. Does airing very aggressive insults of the president help Trump with undecideds?

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) August 12, 2016

This is an underrated point. GOP still campaigning as if Obama is Carter '80. He's closer to Reagan '88. https://t.co/y1jOYxyjru

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) August 12, 2016

Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe says electing a Democrat matters, no matter the office, no matter the state, and offers Governor John Bel Edwards (D) of Louisiana as an example:

The state of Louisiana is receiving a crash course in “elections have consequences.”

Last January, Louisiana voters elected John Bel Edwards governor (the only Democrat governor in the Deep South). On just his second day in office he signed an executive order that made Louisiana the 31st state to expand Medicaid, which is a crucial part of Obamacare. Edwards’s predecessor, Bobby Jindal, rejected the measure on the grounds – and I’m not making this up – that expanding access would “jeopardize the care of the most vulnerable in our society.”

At the time, Edwards noted that Louisiana “consistently ranked one of the poorest and unhealthiest states” and that improving Medicaid access would break the cycle of the state’s residents having to choose “between their health and their financial security.” Indeed, Louisiana is fourth from the bottom, among states, in life expectancy.

Seven months later, the impact of Edwards’s executive order is being felt across the state. Though applications for the new Medicaid benefit did not begin until June, already 265,723 Louisianians have signed up.

The law is having a transformative effect, according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times. “Patients burst into tears at this city’s glistening new charity hospital when they learned they could get Medicaid health insurance,” Noam Levey reported. One doctor said telling patients that they were eligible for health care coverage – something most of us take for granted — was like telling them, “I cured cancer.”

Obamacare just doesn't have the red-meat fire power it once had @jenhab https://t.co/JITcQP2npJ

— Paul Demko (@pauldemko) August 12, 2016

Richard Wolfe says the GOP tried to sink Obama and they destroyed their party instead while Obama will be remembered as a Mt. Rushmore President.

His name is Barack Obama. And he can thank the freak show that is Donald Trump’s Republican party for restoring his stature as a unifying, national leader with a moderated and mature approach to a complex and unstable world.

Eight years ago, Obama represented an existential threat to the Republican party, and not just because he was going to lead the Democratic party to win the White House and Congress by large margins.

No, Obama’s biggest threat was that he could realign American politics, shifting it fundamentally towards progressives for a generation. He and his campaign aides talked privately of being the Reagan of the left: a transformative figure who would leave an indelible legislative mark at home and restore America’s position on the world stage.

With his appeal to independents and moderate Republicans, Obama could break the Republican party as a national force. With his appeal to minority voters – a rapidly emerging majority across the country – he could lock in the fastest growing demographics that could turn red states blue.

So the GOP leadership chose to make Obama unacceptable, unpalatable and un-American. On the night of his first inauguration, House Republican leaders met at a Washington steakhouse to plot their path back to power. They would not reform their policies or consider the root cause of their defeat. Instead, they would oppose Obama on everything, well before he tried to pass a giant stimulus bill or healthcare reform.

@Smartypants60 How Obama Moved the Overton Window to the Left https://t.co/kCLrVZ3QV9

— D. R. Tucker (@DRTucker) August 12, 2016

Joe Klein: “It will probably take a miracle for Trump to rebound sufficiently to win the presidency. But a loss in November is not the end of this story. In the midst of the Trump crumple, the New York Times put up a video of the idiot fringe of his supporters, filmed over the past year by Times reporters. These true believers seemed half crazed, disgraceful, barbaric. It was shocking to watch, and terrifying. Trump the candidate is a farce, but these people aren’t. They have always been with us, the racists and hatemongers; they have always, thankfully, been a minority. But they seem more threatening now. They are part of an international movement. They have their own self-reinforcing media, feeding them a diet of paranoid distortions. They are being prepared by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh–and, of course, by Trump himself–for a ‘rigged’ election that they will lose. And then what?”

“Trump may go away as a serious political force; he will find new business franchises to foist on the unwitting. But his followers will remain–and they will remain our fellow citizens, a slowly dwindling demographic force, more desperate in their diminution. We badly need to find a way to talk to them when this cataclysm of a campaign is over.”

This is reckless in the extreme, a display of contempt for donors. There should be resignations. pic.twitter.com/PF83KbHiHj

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) August 12, 2016

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) “left the door open for Democrats to potentially use a procedural tactic to force a vote on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland,” The Hill reports.

Said Reid: “We have a couple of options, and we’re deciding when to do that and if we should do it — when and if. I’ve been in touch with some of my senators during the break to determine that.”

Jon Favreau provides an important warning. Keep this in mind over the next few weeks.

Remember this moment of the campaign.

I say this not to gloat about Donald Trump’s latest meltdown — that’s what Twitter is for — or because I think the race is anywhere close to over. It is entirely possible, even likely, that the polls will tighten again between now and November. Bounces fade. Memories are short…

Still, even if none of this occurs, the media will eventually grow tired of the “Trump’s finished” story line and move on to the much more clickable “Trump’s comeback” narrative. Any day now, some Quinnipiac poll that shows a tied race in Pennsylvania will force Democrats to lose control of their bladders. A Trump surge in a stray tracking poll will result in a CNN Breaking News Countdown Clock that will tick down the seconds to an emergency panel of 37 pundits. The sheer hysteria of the “How Could She Blow This?” pieces will dwarf the collective freak-out that followed President Obama’s first debate loss in 2012. It won’t be pretty.

And that’s when we’ll all need to stop, take a deep breath, and remember this moment.

“More than 70 Republicans have signed an open letter to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus urging him to stop spending any money to help Donald Trump win in November and shift those contributions to Senate and House races,” Politico reports.

Cincinnati Enquirer: “With the presidential election 90 days away, the Donald Trump campaign is scrambling to set up the basics of a campaign in Hamilton County, a key county in a swing state crucial to a Republican victory, a recent internal email obtained by The Enquirer shows. The campaign has yet to find or appoint key local leaders or open a campaign office in the county and isn’t yet sure which Hamilton County Republican party’s central committee members are allied with the Republican presidential nominee.”

Donald Trump said he “certainly” wants to take part in the presidential debates this fall, but wants to see a fair moderator, The Hill reports.

Said Trump: “That’s all I’m looking for. Because we have a lot of very unfair people treating us, as Republicans and as conservatives. If you’re a Republican and a conservative, you get very unfair treatment.”

That’s how he back out of the debate, he will reject all of the Commission’s chosen moderators.