Wednesday Open Thread [2.3.2016]
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG: Sanders 49, Clinton 43
NEW HAMPSHIRE—ARG: Trump 34, Kasich 16, Rubio 11, Cruz 10, Bush 9, Christie 6, Fiorina 2, Carson 2, Santorum 1
John Cassidy’s analysis from The New Yorker on Clinton’s narrow win over Sanders:
This result doesn’t mean that Hillary Clinton won’t win the nomination. Although she seems likely to lose again in New Hampshire next week, she remains a strong over-all favorite: on betting sites, even today, to win twenty dollars on Hillary emerging as the Democratic candidate, you would have to bet a hundred dollars. But for Clinton to unite her party and galvanize it for what could be a tough fight in the fall, she needs to find some way to appeal to the young, who have fastened onto Sanders’s anti-establishment message.
Sore loser wants a do-over in Iowa:
Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
Bernie, don’t follow Trump’s example.
Los Angeles Times: “Trump’s second-place finish in Iowa exposed an array of weaknesses in his campaign: His flashiness has started to grate on supporters like Goacher. He’s proved vulnerable to attacks on his ideological purity. And he failed to put together an effective ground operation.”
“All this raises questions about the novice candidate’s wherewithal to command the kind of sprawling and complex enterprise required to win the presidency. The skills that enabled Trump to build his business empire are not entirely the same as the ones he needs to win the world’s most powerful job.”
New York Times: “No candidate in either party appears to have an easy path to capture consecutive victories in the next two contests, in New Hampshire and South Carolina. No one left Iowa with a convincing, rival-crushing win.”
“And for the first time in recent history, insurgent candidates on both the left and the right are emerging from the caucuses with enough money to finance a strong offensive in the weeks ahead, across electoral terrain that will vary from famously flinty New Hampshire to conservative, middle-class upstate South Carolina to the post-recession suburbs of Las Vegas.”
“What remains for the surviving contenders — particularly on the Republican side — are convoluted and extended paths to their parties’ nominations. As of the end of December, the candidates and their allied “super PACs” had more than $288 million in cash on hand, according to Federal Election Commission reports filed through Sunday evening.”
Nate Cohn: “Bernie Sanders is right: The Iowa Democratic caucuses were a ‘virtual tie,’ especially after you consider that the results aren’t even actual vote tallies, but state delegate equivalents subject to all kinds of messy rounding rules and potential geographic biases.”
“But in the end, a virtual tie in Iowa is an acceptable, if not ideal, result for Mrs. Clinton and an ominous one for Mr. Sanders. He failed to win a state tailor made to his strengths.”
“I want to be your first.” — Jeb Bush, when told by a college student that the 2016 election would be his first time voting.
Sweet Jesus, is Jeb Bush the most awkward campaigner in all history?
Nate Cohn: “In the end, Mr. Trump came closer to taking third than to winning.”
“The result doesn’t necessarily leave us much closer to knowing who the eventual nominee will be. It probably signals the beginning of a protracted, three-way fight for the nomination. But the loss raises the possibility that Mr. Trump’s strength is at least partly an illusion; he may not be quite as strong as he looks.”
Nate Silver: “There may have been a more basic reason for Trump’s loss: The dude just ain’t all that popular. Even among Republicans.”
Clinton, who has in one way or another spent decades of her career pushing for universal health care reform, was expressing her obvious lack of patience for a candidate whose idea of starting from scratch, rather than building on the reforms of the flawed but hard-won Affordable Care Act, strikes her as pie-in-the-sky.
But in failing to present an upbeat take on her disagreement with Sanders, Clinton had sounded like a scold, the disciplinarian, the mean mommy, the pragmatic downer — all versions of a feminized role that she, and many, many women, have long found it incredibly difficult to escape.
Recall the days following the 2008 Iowa caucus, when the media took advantage of Clinton’s defeat to let loose with their resentment and animosity toward her. That was when conservative Mark Rudov told Fox News that Clinton lost because “When Barack Obama speaks, men hear ‘Take off for the future!’ When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear ‘Take out the garbage!’” It was in the days after Iowa that Clinton got asked infamously about how voters believed her to be “the most experienced and the most electable” candidate but “are hesitating on the likeability issue.” In late January, columnist Mike Barnicle told a laughing all-male panel on Morning Joe that Clinton’s challenge was that she looks “like everyone’s first wife standing outside of probate court.”
What was true in ’08 remains true this year.
Brian Beutler says the Republican Establishment is still on the ropes:
The GOP now falls back on its hope that Rubio can convert his third-place performance in Iowa to a leap into second place in New Hampshire next week, and, eventually, to outright victory in some future primary.
But that won’t happen unless Cruz inexplicably fails to capitalize on his come-from-behind Iowa victory, and Trump somehow collapses after a perfectly respectable second-place finish there. Until then, everything we’ve seen for months suggests Republican voters want to deny the Republican establishment a victory. That’s exactly what they did in Iowa, and they did it because the establishment decided, through years and years of fecklessness, to let them.
Matthew Yglesias says Cruz is even less electable in a general than Trump. That’s true. Indeed, as Jason330 often say, with Trump, we had to be careful what we wished for because he, and I, could see Trump winning in certain scenarios. With Cruz, those certain scenarios fall to maybe 1.
People know that Cruz is extreme. But few people fully recognize exactly how unpopular the Cruz policy agenda is likely to be once it is exposed to the light of day.
In an era when no politician of either party wants to cut retirement benefits for current seniors or raise taxes on the middle class, Cruz has quietly stumbled into proposing a gigantic tax increase on middle-class retirees. The media hasn’t noticed yet, and liberal groups don’t seem all that eager to point it out — perhaps because they’re hoping to save their ammunition until after Cruz is actually the nominee. Cruz’s appeal is rooted in his deep understanding of the GOP base and sophisticated grasp of the modern media landscape. But he’s never run in a meaningfully contested general election of any kind, and trying to do so on an anti–middle class, anti-elderly policy agenda is extraordinarily unlikely to succeed. […]
A year ago, the fundamentally unelectable nature of Cruz was well-understood, and it was universally believed that for that reason the Republican establishment would never let him win. Trump’s rapid rise and astonishing resilience have called into question the establishment’s ability to actually control events. But Trump has also created a gravitational distortion in how we view the candidates. Cruz’s résumé — which includes winning an actual Senate election, plus experience in jobs in the federal judiciary and state government — looks downright conventional by comparison.
But conventional isn’t the same as electable by any means. Trump’s actual policy positions are generally more moderate than Cruz’s, and his support within the GOP primary electorate does not look particularly ideological. Trump as nominee would certainly be a risky (and probably disastrous) leap into the unknown. But Cruz as nominee would be a leap into something we’ve actually seen quite clearly before in 1964 and 1972 — a factional candidacy by a senator from the fringe of his own party caucus who gets drubbed on Election Day.
Concord Monitor: “If the Iowa entrance surveys are any indication, Trump could face trouble in the Granite State.”
“While the Republican businessman cleaned up with Iowa voters who made up their minds more than a month ago, first-place finisher Cruz and third-place finisher Marco Rubio beat him among caucus-goers who made up their mind within a week of the election.”
“Hillary Clinton is dispatching at least 150 people from her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn Heights to New Hampshire for an all-hands-on-deck effort here in advance of the Democratic primary on Tuesday,” BuzzFeed reports.
Politico: “The feeling at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters these days isn’t about pulling off an upset — it’s about closing the gap, and halting Sanders’ momentum by denying him an easy win in a state that should be a cakewalk. In some respects New Hampshire is the only state where Team Clinton can flip the inevitability script — with Sanders positioned as the favorite with lots to lose.”
I want some commentary on this:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/02/the-college-where-martin-luther-king-is-problematic.html?via=twitter_page
I know we’re suppose to pretend this is an anomaly or something and that these campus kids are doing important work… 🙂 How many of these will it take until an adult stands up and tells these fucking idiots what’s what?
Bernie’s demographic is young, single, with some college. He needs to expand if he wants to have a chance. If Clinton can come close in NH, she has it locked up barring an indictment. If Rubio can pass Kaisich and finish a strong second, the three man race scenario will be enacted. If he topples Trump, I can see his ego getting tired of being bruised.
Dorian – I’ll bite (after 3 cut and pastes of the goddamn link).
Much ado about pretty much nothing. A student proposed it, the student union voted it down. A reporter thought it noteworthy (it isn’t) and then extrapolated this one student’s proposal with another stupid proposal on a college campus on the other side of the country. Then he drew a line between these two outliers and called it a trend line.
It was then advertised all over this place like some sort of roadside political sign.
Aww. Damn. I really wanted Pandora or Prof Newton to talk their way round it. It was going to be the highlight of my otherwise boring day.
It’s funny how we see several of these every week and the story is that it’s just an outlier and it should be ignored. Nothing to see.
You know that’s not true. You know there’s a problem on campuses (a ‘trend’), but nobody wants to really take it on because then… well, you know. Fair enough.
Hmmm…
damn, D… you are feisty these days. Pickin fights with internet handles left and right. And why do you suddenly have a problem with college campuses? Campuses have always been a center of PC going very very far (as in, one of my favorite 90s movies) That is where the Bernmentum is strongest. It’s all these kids who dont understand the world projecting their naive ideals onto everything.
Hillary being beaten by a 74 year old Wacko is pretty funny..
Dorian–intersectionality. First observation: this intellectual construct did not spread from campus to campus via students; it generally doesn’t work that way. I would love to be able to map all the campuses on which this phenomenon has thus far been noticed and graph that against certain types of published scholarship from those campuses. Faculty are almost certainly the vector of spread.
This isn’t particularly surprising. While intersectional elements have been in play in psychology and sociology, I think it was Crenshaw in the late 1980s or early 1990s who provided the modern incarnation in her Black [Marxist] Feminism. Since then it has picked up some steam as a Marxist-Feminist interpretation in literature, sociology, psychology, and mass comm. It hasn’t ironically, really penetrated political science very much.
There are some good ideas in the whole mix with intersectionality, including the idea that the maintenance of hegemony of any sort is dependent upon fragmenting the retainer and lower classes, and that it is often more effective to look at the common means of that fragmentation than to examine the particularity of any given “ism.” Some of Lani Guiner’s work in this area is actually very strong, but by the same token I have seen her also criticize some of the zealots.
The overall discipline as its most fervent adherents construct it, should be dismissed by students as one of those interesting intellectual curiosities you go to college to be exposed to, but not to become an acolyte unless you never plan to hold a real job. (When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s that position was held by TA–Transactional Analysis–which was supposed to make my generation different and more effective than everything that had come before. Yawn.)
Two final observations: (1) Intersectionality in its ideological (as opposed to true academic) form is less a mechanism for change than it is a mechanism for some kind of faux hipster self-labeling/posturing among the young; and (2) despite the best efforts of this and other authors vainly looking for signs of real political activism on college campuses, the reality is that both the students and professors at the non-elite institutions are far more focused on getting a degree, surviving budget cuts, and job placement after graduation than they are on the niceties of intellectual theory.
In sophomore history classes these days it is difficult to keep students awake long enough to learn the definition of, say, “social darwinism,” let alone trying to explain a postmodernist, Marxist-feminist, constructivist, anti-neo-liberal hodge-podge like the fringes of Intersectionality.
There. Discussed it for you.
@TK “Hillary being beaten by a 74 year old Wacko is pretty funny..”
Well, you got the 74 part right. But he’s hardly wacko, and he is not actually beating Hillary…
I’m a 54 year old wacko and I take offense to that