National

The issue of Obama’s legacy will come into sharper focus in the months and years to come, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows noted over the weekend “three big things that have happened during his presidency that in all probability would not have happened without him”:

* The climate deal itself, as explained in a NYT piece just now, and in unbelievable contrast to the utter collapse of the Copenhagen negotiations early in Obama’s term; * The rapprochement with Cuba, marking the beginning of the end of the single stupidest (but hardest to change) aberration in modern U.S. foreign policy; and * The international agreement with Iran, which in the short term offers (as I have argued at length) the best prospects for keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and in the long run has the potential of beginning to end Iran’s destructive estrangement from the international order.

Given the reaction of some in the media, namely Ben Smith and Tom Brokaw, last week during the brewhaha that was the Republican presidential frontrunner calling for the banning of a religion and its adherents, it seems that it is finally starting to sink into some in the self-beloved media that, perhaps, just perhaps, Donald Trump was saying things that were really not so entertaining. That perhaps, just perhaps, caring solely about ratings was not the Fourth Estate's job. As Matt Taibbi so wonderously phrases....

Essentially, TV news producers are wondering: "How do we keep getting the great ratings without helping elect the Fourth Reich?"

“Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta handicapped the GOP race for 90 Democratic donors assembled at a private fundraising event… telling the crowd that he viewed Cruz as the likeliest nominee, followed by Trump, and then Marco Rubio,” Politico reports. “Podesta’s remarks — which he made sure to say represent his own views, not an official campaign position — came after the real-estate magnate proposed a blanket ban on Muslims entering the United States, and Podesta suggested that the resulting surge of attention being paid to Trump didn’t change his belief that Cruz was the likeliest pick.” Podesta must be reading Delaware Liberal, because we have been saying it for over a year.

Stephanie Hansen, environmental and land use attorney and the President of New Castle County Council from 1996 to 2001, will primary Tom Gordon according to unconfirmed reports.

Paul Krugman says the Republican Party made Donald Trump.

The GOP “hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy,’ and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.” “But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.” “Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch. They seem, for example, to imagine that the base supports cuts to Social Security and Medicare, an elite priority that has nothing to do with the reasons working-class whites vote Republican.”