Friday Open Thread [12.11.2015]

NATIONAL—CBS/NY Times: Clinton 52, Sanders 32, O’Malley 2

NATIONAL—CBS/NY Times: Trump 35, Cruz 16, Carson 13, Rubio 9, Paul 4, Bush 3, Christie 3, Kasich 3, Fiorina 1, Huckabee 3

GOP political strategist Mark McKinnon says that political ads don’t really work anymore: “There’s just very little return on media dollars anymore in politics, because people just don’t believe political advertising. They’re just demanding authenticity and something that they think is real, and they know that advertising is not real. So, you might as well just burn that money.”

Lawyers Guns & Money’s Scott Lemieux takes on the notion put forth in Doug Henwood’s new book that there’s no real difference between Democrats and Republicans:

The idea that abortion is the only issue on which Democrats are substantively different from Republicans is, at his late date of intense polarization, rather jaw-dropping. Hell, even with respect to the Supreme Court the substantive differences are massive. After a decade in which a Republican dominated Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, denied Medicaid to millions of people while coming one vote short of striking down the ACA altogether, frequently voted against the interests of consumers and employees, severely limited affirmative action, etc. etc. etc., it’s just embarrassing to suggest that abortion is the only issue at stake. And, of course, the divisions among Supreme Court justices don’t just come from nothing; they reflect the values of the presidents that appoint them. Obama and a Democratic Congress passed a historic expansion of Medicaid and increased regulation of the industry and consumer subsidies; the Republican position is that Medicaid should be curtailed or ended and that subsidies were too generous and the industry too regulated in 2008. Federal Democratic public officials generally support reproductive freedom and LBGT rights; Republican ones opposed them. Democratic public officials passed increased regulations of the financial industry and new consumer protections Republicans fiercely oppose. The Obama administration has greatly expanded environmental regulations; Republicans believe that climate change is a hoax and that environmental regulations were far too onerous in 2008. The kind of people who serve in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice are massively different under the Obama administration than under the Bush administration. This is far from an exhaustive list.

The idea that reproductive freedom is the only issue that divides Democrats and Republicans is something nobody paying any attention could possibly believe. Hillary Clinton is far from my ideal candidate. But the case for her in the general election isn’t that she’s better than the Republicans on reproductive rights. It’s that she’s massively better than Trump/Rubio/Cruz on countless core issues and worse on literally none (even foreign policy, her worst point.) By all means, criticize her. But if you try to deny this rather important point, people are going to strongly disagree with you, and not because they worship Hillary Clinton.

Molly Ball: “There’s the intellectual conservative movement, a decades-long project of institutional actors like the Heritage Foundation and the American Conservative Union, which seeks to push the party toward strict adherence with a set of ideas about limited government, strong national defense, and the traditional family. And then there is the populist, nativist strain, which isn’t really about ideas so much as a raw appeal to emotion. Trump’s dominance of the primary field is forcing the party to confront a frightening prospect: that the populist bloc may be the bigger of the two.”

McKay Coppins on the dynamic between the Paul father and son: “The two camps have spent much of the past three years bitterly feuding behind the scenes (and trying to knife each other in interviews for my book). But those closest to the family say Rand genuinely admires his father, and is anxious to make him proud by building on his legacy. And Ron? One senior staffer in Rand’s Senate office told me that after years of closely observing the dynamic between the two men, he was left stupefied by Ron’s antagonism toward his son’s career.”

Said the staffer: “He should be proud of Rand, but he’s not. It’s a really weird relationship.”

Ron Paul sounds like a genuine asshole.

The Washington Post says Cruz has the clearest shot at the nomination: “Cruz is positioned as the most conservative candidate in the race. While Trump gets all of the attention for his over-the-top statements, Cruz has staked out a position on the far right on virtually every major hot button issue — from immigration to Obamacare to national security and the fight with ISIS. And, tonally, Cruz comes across as aggressively and unapologetically conservative — a less controversial and electable version of Trump.”

“Cruz’s $65 million raised is all the more impressive because, unlike Bush who raised the vast, vast majority of his money into his Right to Rise super PAC, Cruz has relatively even balance between candidate committee ($26.5 million) and super PACs ($38 million).”

“Cruz is emerging rapidly as the favorite in Iowa’s caucuses. The calendar beyond the Big 3 favors Cruz… On March 1 is what’s being referred to as the ‘SEC primary’; Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas will all vote on that first Tuesday in March.”

Jonathan Chait on how Donald Trump opened the door for Ted Cruz to win:

At the beginning of this year — back when the notion that Donald Trump might dominate the presidential race was a dystopian scenario as unimaginably remote as The Man in the High Castle — the most horrifying thing Republican insiders could imagine was a Ted Cruz nomination. In much the same way that Trump has set the terms of the presidential debate in ways that discomfited the party’s leadership and fired up the base, Cruz did the same in Washington. The intense loathing Cruz inspired among every professional Republican politician not named Ted Cruz made his nomination difficult to fathom. But the rise of Trump has changed many things, and one of them may be to grant Republican insiders a new perspective on just what unacceptable means. […]

Cruz’s demagoguery is specific to a certain set of conditions — a world in which Republicans control Congress but not the White House — that by definition would not apply if Cruz won the White House. Unlike Trump, a bona fide free agent, Cruz has given his party no reason to doubt his convictions. If elected, a Cruz presidency would be functionally identical to a Rubio presidency. He would sign the most conservative fiscal and regulatory legislation that could make it through Congress, and appoint reliable movement conservative to the judiciary. Cruz would have more leeway to direct foreign policy, but he might, if anything, steer a more cautious path than Rubio.

All this is to say that Cruz’s irritating demagoguery has given him a reputation as a right-wing flamethrower somewhat out of proportion to his actual policy stances, which differ from those of other Republicans primarily on the margins. His party’s distrust rises in part from personal (and, hence, not entirely rational) considerations. Washington Republicans despise Cruz, but they could learn to live with him, and it’s entirely possible that they will need to do just that.

More Jonathan Chait, this time on the President using the 150th Anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment (the one that banned slavery) to not-so-subtly attack Donald Trump:

Donald Trump has not, as of press time, proposed the reinstitution of chattel slavery. He has, however, made himself the spokesman for a variety of retrograde social beliefs, his proposal to exclude Muslim immigrants being only the most current.

Obama customarily framed his remarks as a rebuke both to those on the right who deny the continuing power of racism, and those on the left who deny evidence of social progress. (“We condemn ourselves to shackles once more if we fail to answer those who wonder if they’re truly equals in their communities, or in their justice systems, or in a job interview … But we betray our most noble past as well if we were to deny the possibility of movement, the possibility of progress; if we were to let cynicism consume us and fear overwhelm us.”)

He proceeded to frame his vision of the arc of social justice as inevitably running up against opposition. His depiction of that opposition today may sound like a certain presidential candidate we could name: “However harshly, loudly, rudely challenged at each point along our journey, in America, we can create the change that we seek.” And his embrace of freedom took pains to encompass immigrants and religious minorities: “Our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others — regardless of what they look like or where they come from or what their last name is or what faith they practice.”

Frank Rich:

There are not enough Trump partisans to capture the presidency, no matter how much some liberals liken his rise to those of Hitler and Mussolini. There may well not be enough Trump supporters to win him the GOP nomination (though it cannot be ruled out). But there are certainly enough to destroy his party for the foreseeable future by branding it as a haven for bigots at a time when America is on its inexorable path to be a white-minority nation. So you’d think that those now at the top of the GOP would try to banish Trump by any and all available means, if only out of self-interest. That’s still not happening. Those who wield the strongest anti-Trump language among his primary opponents are those with rock-bottom poll numbers (e.g., Lindsey Graham, who told him to “go to hell”) and no clout. Jeb (!) Bush, whose poll numbers are also near rock bottom, has also pumped up his anti-Trump rhetoric, but he’s still too low-energy and too late, and he has no moral standing to attack Trump’s Islamophobia since he only recently (like Ted Cruz) proposed banning Syrian refugees who aren’t Christians. Party titans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have condemned Trump’s latest jeremiad, but they are wusses, too fearful of both him and his fans to say they would disown him if he got the party’s nomination. (Jeb has also recently reaffirmed that he’d support Trump over Hillary.) Cruz and Marco Rubio, besides indulging in their own Muslim-bashing, have been pointedly mild in their criticisms of Trump and his views because they hope to annex his crazies should he flame out.

Nancy LeTourneau: What we’re witnessing is the collapse of an entire political party that has run out of ideas and is holding on to the last shred of itself by blowing up as much fear as possible. Donald Trump is merely the one lighting the fuse.

Matt Bai on the GOP v. Trump: “The interesting question is what happens from here, because the way I see it, the cold war between Trump and the Republican governing establishment, which everyone hoped throughout the summer and fall might just resolve itself, has now become a zero-sum contest. And Republicans find themselves faced with an existential threat that has no parallel for either party in my lifetime.”

“Either Trump or the Republican Party as we’ve known it can come out of this election without having been politically destroyed — but almost certainly not both.”

Larry Sabato: “The Trump effect is now probably long-term, meaning that even if he falls by the wayside in the nomination contest, he will continue to be a factor. Maybe he will run as an independent. Maybe he will make life difficult for the eventual GOP nominee from his permanent headquarters on Twitter. Or maybe it’s simply the accumulation of his offensive statements on videotape that will be used by Democrats to taint the fall Republican ticket.”