Thursday Reads

Henri Matisse: Winter Landscape on the Banks of the Seine

Good Morning!!

There’s a Republican debate tonight on the Fox Business Channel. We’ll have a live blog as usual. The kid’s table section will start at 6PM and the main event will be at 9PM. I don’t know why they don’t just let all the candidates on the main stage. Actually, I don’t know why the also rans don’t just drop out. Anyway, there could be some fireworks tonight between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. We’ll find out later tonight.

Time Magazine: The Stage Is Getting Smaller at GOP Debates.

The stage is set for Thursday night’s debate in Charleston, South Carolina, and only seven podiums remain for the top-tier candidates.

With the lead-off nominating contests starting in less than a month, it’s fast becoming clear which candidates have a credible shot at winning the Republicans’ presidential nomination and, perhaps more tellingly, which do not.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and former tech executive07 Carly Fiorina were bumped from the primetime lineup, and Paul says he’s skipping the earlier undercard debate. Fiorina will face former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, two darlings of Christian conservatives.

Remaining on the main stage are frontrunner Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

With Iowa having the first nominating contests on Feb. 1, the dynamics of the race are incredibly fluid and the candidates’ attacks are getting sharper….

At this moment in the campaign, the biggest question for Republicans is what happens in Iowa. Will the thrice-married Trump keep his advantage in a state ripe with Evangelicals, or will Cruz be able to claim the top spot? Trump’s unconventional campaign is betting his reality star approach can sustain him against Cruz, who has done three times as many events as Trump. If Trump falters in Iowa, can he catch himself in New Hampshire, or will he fade? And will any of it matter for his legions of supporters?

Trump may have “legions of supporters” in Iowa, but will they show up to caucus for him? The New York Times has a really good story today about Trump’s dysfunctional ground game in the state.

Donald Trump’s Iowa Ground Game Seems to Be Missing a Coach.

Mr. Trump, who Iowa polls show is neck-and-neck with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, may well win the caucuses, now less than three weeks away. But if he does, it will probably be in spite of his organizing team, which after months of scattershot efforts led by a paid staff of more than a dozen people, still seems amateurish and halting, committing basic organizing errors….

Compared with the well-oiled machines of other leading candidates in both parties, particularly that of the Cruz campaign, the Trump ground game in Iowa seems partly an afterthought, as if Mr. Trump’s strategy is to leverage his charisma — the appeal that draws thousands to his rallies — to motivate voters.

But the challenge in Iowa is that historically, caucusgoers — only a sliver of registered voters — have had to be coaxed out by a field team, rather than be counted on to show up and vote on their own. This is especially true of the demographic that supports Mr. Trump: younger voters and others with a low propensity to turn out.

As temperatures plunged to single digits over the weekend, canvassers for Hillary Clinton posted photographs of themselves on social media going door to door in the snow. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s volunteers in Davenport, a city where the campaign appears to be better organized than elsewhere, decided it was too cold to go out.

Seven volunteers worked the phones at the Iowa headquarters of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida in a Des Moines suburb one night last week. At the state headquarters of Mr. Cruz, there were 24 volunteers in a room beneath a sign proclaiming a daily goal of making 6,000 calls. The Trump state headquarters in West Des Moines were largely deserted.

Wow. If Trump’s organization is that bad in Iowa, what is he doing in later voting states? One fairly serious organizer the Times talked to is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Another said he hadn’t yet gotten any fliers from the campaign detailing Trump’s positions on issues, and besides he didn’t plan to make any calls until the last week before the caucuses. At rallies some Trump supporters say they will caucus for him, but most have never done it before and have no idea what it involves.

Yesterday the NYT reported that Ted Cruz had failed to report some large loans he used to help finance his campaign for the Senate in 2012, including one from Goldman Sachs, where Cruz’s wife Heidi was a “managing director” at the time. Cruz thinks it’s no big deal.

The Week: Ted Cruz shrugs off report that he got undisclosed Goldman Sachs loan for Senate campaign.

Tuesday Reads: State of the Union and Campaign News

Good Morning!!

Tonight at 9:00 President Obama will give his final State of the Union Address. We’ll have a live blog to discuss what he says. Here’s what ABC News thinks we should expect from tonight’s speech.

Experts predict that rather than trying to cajole a Republican-controlled Congress to cooperate with him in 2016, the president will be asking viewers around the country to remember his legacy items and consider the future in an attempt to set the tone for the next (he hopes, Democratic) president.

“It’s not going to be a laundry list of things on the agenda” like most State of the Union addresses, said Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

That’s how the president himself framed it in a video message sent to supporters we’ve made, not just what I want to get done in the year ahead, but what we all need to do together in the years to come,” he said.

Read more projections about the speech at the link.

The LA Times says Obama’s speech will be about “staying relevant.”

Speaking to Democratic donors recently in his hometown of Chicago, President Obama took some delight in recalling how long it had been since someone reminded him he was a “lame duck” president.

“We’ve been flapping our wings a lot,” he said, noting a Pacific Rim trade agreement, a deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear program, positive economic trends and new actions on climate change.

In that spirit, White House officials have said for weeks that Obama’s final State of the Union address Tuesday will be a “non-traditional speech.” That’s a well-worn line from second-term administrations entering their final year as they try to stay relevant in the national debate.

The relatively early date for the president’s annual address to Congress is indicative of the need to avoid being overshadowed by the campaign to succeed Obama, with the Iowa caucuses less than three weeks away. But Obama and his team nonetheless see a rare opportunity for the president to not just be part of the 2016 debate, but to set its terms.

“This one moment where the country sort of acknowledges that the president gets an hour to assess the condition of the country and to offer up a prescription for confronting the challenges and capitalizing on the opportunities is as important as ever,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.

The article goes on to discuss how the White House will use social media, YouTube, and other digital methods to engage the home audience.

This week we’re also going to have two debates–a GOP debate on Thursday and a Democratic one on Sunday. Of course we’ll have live blogs each both nights. On the Republican side, Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina have been excluded from the main stage.

We’re approaching the dates of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, so things are heating up on the campaign trail. Last night ABC News and Univision held a Democratic Forum and the three Democratic Candidates were there.

The annual Black and Brown Forum, hosted by Fusion, a joint venture between ABC News andUnivision, touched on issues ranging from the Obama administration’s deportation policy to sexuality in America and the White House as “public housing.” ….

During a rapid-fire question round, Sanders was asked if it would be “off-brand” for a DemocraticSocialistto live “in a mansion like the White House?” The Vermont Senator, who lives modestly on the campaign trail and jokes about how few suits he owns, outwitted the questioner, drawing laughs as he retorted: “I would think of it more like public housing.” ….

With new polls showing them neck-and-neck in Iowa, Clinton and Sanders both agreed the race was up in the air. “Anyone can win!” Clinton said. “Who would have thought Donald Trump would be leading in national polls? I mean for those who ever thought about running for president, take heart.”

Hillary got in a couple more good digs at Trump:

ABC News: Hillary Clinton Says She Got Donald Trump ‘Nothing’ For His Wedding.

During the Fusion network’s Brown & Black Democratic forum on Monday night in Des Moines, Clinton was asked what she got the Republican frontrunner when she attended his 2005 wedding to model Melania Knauss.

“Nothing, nothing,” she said.

“He was basically a Democrat before he was a Republican,” Clinton explained. “He was, you know, somebody we all knew in New York, and he was supportive of Democrats and supportive of a lot of causes I care about and people I knew cared about.”

“Now he seems to have taken another road,” she added.

Hahahahahahahahahaha!!

Bernie Sanders has been going around claiming that he is the most electable Democratic candidate. At the Washington Post, Philip Bump points out some points out some problems with that argument.

On Sunday, Bernie Sanders’s campaign put out a press release titled, “Electability Matters.”

“A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll,” it read, “found that Sanders does better than Clinton against the leading Republican candidates by an average of 6 points in Iowa and a stunning 21 points in New Hampshire. Specifically, the poll put Sanders 13 points ahead of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump here in Iowa.”

A fine point was put on it: “Bernie’s substantial advantage over Republicans in the general election versus Secretary Clinton is another important reason that Democratic primary voters should choose him as our nominee,” the campaign’s Jeff Weaver wrote….

The only problem is that the argument isn’t a great one.

We can start with those numbers from Iowa and New Hampshire. When it comes to state match-ups, the extent to which the Democrat wins New Hampshire — a state that’s gone for the Democrats in five of the last six elections and which is worth less than 1 percent of the country’s electoral votes — doesn’t amount to a whole lot. Iowa is slightly different, with a few more electoral votes and somewhat closer recent elections (although still a tilt toward the Dems). Sanders does do better against the leading Republicans in those states, but Clinton still beats Trump in both.

Iowa and New Hampshire both have a distinction which has been to Sanders’s benefit in the primaries there, too: They’re very white. Clinton has much more support among non-white voters than Sanders, which is why she’s up big in South Carolina. Once we start talking about states like Missouri or Georgia, we can expect the calculus to shift.

Read much more at the WaPo link.

I’m going to have to add more links in the comment thread, because WordPress is behaving badly this morning. What stories are you following today? See you down below, and have a great Tuesday!

Extra Lazy Saturday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

There’s quite a bit of news today for a weekend, I have a cold, and I’m very late; so this is going to be a link dump post. There’s so much to talk about, I hardly know where to begin.

Even though national polls are essentially meaningless at this point, this one is still disturbing.

AP via US News: Trump Could Win It All. A new survey shows a sizable number of Democrats ready to defect from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.

So if Donald Trump proved the political universe wrong and won the Republican presidential nomination, he would be creamed by Hillary Clinton, correct?

A new survey of likely voters might at least raise momentary dyspepsia for Democrats since it suggests why it wouldn’t be a cakewalk.

The survey by Washington-based Mercury Analytics is a combination online questionnaire and “dial-test” of Trump’s first big campaign ad among 916 self-proclaimed “likely voters” (this video shows the ad and the dial test results). It took place primarily Wednesday and Thursday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.

Nearly 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they’d cross sides and vote for Trump, while a small number, or 14 percent, of Republicans claim they’d vote for Clinton. When those groups were further broken down, a far higher percentage of the crossover Democrats contend they are “100 percent sure” of switching than the Republicans.

Read about the survey at the link. Fortunately, that isn’t how we elect presidents. We do it state by state, and you have to actually leave the house and vote at your local polling place.

For some rational discussion of the Trump phenomenon, here’s Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: Three Theories Of Donald Trump’s Rise. The three possible explanations are:

Theory 1: Trump’s support reflects a Republican populist revolt.In a nutshell: Trump is extremely popular among Republican voters, who are attracted to his combination of populism, nativism and anti-elite resentment….

Theory 2: Trump’s support reflects a Republican Party power vacuum. In a nutshell: Party elites and insiders usually have a tremendous amount of influence on the identity of the nominee, with Republican voters eventually falling in line behind one of their preferred choices. The fact that Trump is leading now reflects a lack of consensus among those party elites. However, these elites will rally behind whichever establishment-approved choice performs best in Iowa and New Hampshire, elevating that candidate to the frontrunner’s position….

Theory 3: Trump’s support reflects a media bubble. In a nutshell: Trump’s standing in the polls substantially reflects the disproportionate amount of media coverage he’s receiving; it’s not that remarkable for a candidate to poll at 35 percent when he’s recently been getting 70 percent of the media coverage of the Republican race. That makes Trump’s position vulnerable if media coverage eventually evens out, or as the election approaches in each state as voters learn more about the candidates on their own and less through the lens of the national media.

Read the detailed discussion at the link.

Here’s a must-read on a dramatic change in the way the media as reacted to Trump’s outrageous lies and extreme proposals: “Influential news outlets have set aside traditional notions of balance…” by Jay Rosen. Be sure to check it out.

Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium is convinced that Trump can win the Republican nomination, based on the current state of Republican polls.

Since actual election results will deviate from current polls by many points, parametric approaches (i.e. calculating means, medians, standard deviations, regressions, and so on) may be of limited use. Let me take a look at the data to ask a simpler question: what does current polling rank predict about the nominee?

Although Donald Trump’s support might be higher or lower than the numbers indicate, nobody seriously questions the observation that he is in first place nationally. But what does that predict for the nomination?

Wang looks at past election cycles and shows that by this time the man who became the GOP nominee was in first or second place in most polls. Read more at the link.

Ted Cruz is also in the news–for the latest birther controversy and an incredibly stupid remark about his children and Hillary Clinton.

From TPM: Ted Cruz’s Mother Was On Official List Of Canadian Citizens Eligible To Vote.

Thursday Reads

Good Morning!!

Donald Trump has succeeded in making an issue out of Ted Cruz’s Canadian birth, and it only took him a about a week. Another Republican are now questioning whether Cruz is eligible to be POTUS. Ironically, that Republican is John McCain who was also born outside the U.S. He was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone.

CBS News: John McCain Says Ted Cruz’s citizenship is “worth looking into.”

In an interview Wednesday on Phoenix radio station 550 KFYI’s Chris Merill Show, McCain said he “doesn’t know” whether Cruz’s birth in Canada makes him eligible to be president. Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, asserts that he is a U.S. citizen because his mother was an American.

“I know that came up in my race because I was born in Panama, but I was born in the Canal Zone which is a territory. Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was territory when he ran in 1964,” McCain said.

McCain added that he was born on a U.S. military base, which he said is not the same as being born in Canada.

“That’s different from being born on foreign soil. I think there is a question. I’m not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to look into it.”

Asked if the Supreme Court might have to weigh in on the “natural born citizen” issue, McCain said, “It may be, that may be the case.”

I don’t think so. After all George Romney was born in Mexico and he was deemed eligible to run for the presidency in 1968. But John McCain hates Ted Cruz’s guts and so do most of his other Senate colleagues. It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.

What I find really frightening is Trump’s ability to gin up bogus issues so easily. How is this going to affect Hillary’s campaign?

From ABC News, here’s the latest on the birther “issue” from Trump: Donald Trump Wants Ted Cruz to ‘Go Before a Judge’ About His Citizenship.

Donald Trump wants Ted Cruz to go before a judge to “immediately, like tomorrow” to determine whether or not he is a “natural born citizen” and therefore eligible to run for president.

Trump made the request for Cruz to seek a declaratory judgment from federal court on the issue during an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

Trump cast such a move as “for the good of Ted.”

“You go in seeking the decision of the court without a court case. You go right in. You go before a judge, you do it quickly. Declaratory judgment. It’s very good,” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “So when there’s a doubt — because there’s a doubt. You want the court to rule.”

LOWELL, MA – JANUARY 4: Republican candidate for President Donald Trump speaks to thousands of spectators at a rally in Lowell, Massachusetts on Monday evening January 4, 2016. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Donald Trump held a rally in Lowell, Massachusetts on Monday. Lowell is a 15 minute drive from the New Hampshire border. Anyway Charlie Pierce was in attendance at the rally. Here’s his report: My Monday Night in Massachusetts with He, Trump. Pierce begins by noting the irony of Trump appearing in the building named after the late Senator Paul Tsongas.

The late Senator Paul Tsongas was a brilliant, mild man of substance and ideas. I didn’t agree with all of the latter; Tsongas was an early neoliberal deficit hawk, about which we amiably argued for a number of years. As a political person, he was as far from He, Trump as a chamber quartet is from an industrial shop floor. The greatest monument to his dogged, determined approach is the city of Lowell itself. The Lowell National Historical Site, a monument to the city’s legacy as an industrial center, was Tsongas’s dream. He worked night and day to make it a reality and it revitalized the city, which is why the arena in which He, Trump brought his monkey show was named after him.

Former U.S. Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, D-Mass., who rebounded from cancer to briefly become the Democratic frontrunner for president in 1992, died Saturday, Jan. 18, 1997, of pneumonia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was 55. Tsongas is shown in this Feb. 2, 1992 photo when he spoke at a town meeting in Nasua, N.H. (AP Photo/Greg Gibson)

A little more:

The primary policy prescription is to elect He, Trump, because he knows everything, including enough smart, top guys who will help him in the unlikely event that he comes up against a problem about which he doesn’t know everything. (He once again cites Carl Icahn and the rest of his proposed junk-bond Cabinet.) I would analyze the ideas presented to the loving audience, but the only idea presented was electing He, Trump, who knows everything. For example, he proposes that, to defeat ISIS, we should “take the oil.” Taking the oil is the beginning and the end of the policy, the alpha and the omega of the idea.“We should be unpredictable,” he says, and I don’t really know what that means, but everyone cheered….

He does not deliver speeches. He delivers remarks. He recites his poll numbers. He explains his long fight against the odds that has resulted in said poll numbers. He mocks Jeb Bush and he sucks up to Tom Brady. He cracks that Hillary Clinton “has the biggest teleprompters,” and everybody laughs a laugh straight out of a frathouse smoker, and he’s rambling on to another topic, usually involving He, Trump. 

Pierce doesn’t get the appeal of this narcissistic display, and neither do I. Nevertheless there are apparently quite a few Americans who lap it up, and that is truly scary. Please go read the rest at the link above.

Another “issue” that came up on the Republican side yesterday was about Marco Rubio’s new shoes with fancy Cuban heels. From NY Magazine’s The Cut: A Vote for Marco Rubio Is a Vote for Men’s High-Heeled Booties.

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio and One Direction bandmember Harry Styles have something in common. Well, two things, actually: an appreciation for the 1D song “What Makes You Beautiful,” and a love of heeled booties.

At a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday, Rubio appeared wearing incredibly fashionable, incredibly well-heeled black leather ankle boots that are sure to feed those rumors about his extravagant spending habits. The boots — which we think are eitherthese Giorgio Brutini boots or these Margiela ones — look a lot like a pair favored by Styles, albeit with slightly less pilgrim flair.

The shoes got a surprising amount of attention from the media and other GOP presidential candidates.

From Slate: Serious Adult Presidential Candidates Make Fun of Marco Rubio’s Fancy Shoes.

It is January of a presidential year. Voting begins in a few weeks. It is time that voters stop dabbling with silly clowns like Donald Trump and his childish insults and consider serious candidates. Political leaders, like Jeb Bush, who will soberly discuss complex issues of great import including trade, budgeting, diplomacy, war …

… and Sen. Marco Rubio’s girly little girl boots.

But what about those high heeled cowboy boots lots of conservative guys wear? How is that any different? Oh well, I just don’t get Republican thinking period. A few more links on this:

Policy Mic: Marco Rubio’s Shiny High-Heeled Black Boots Dominated Social Media for No Reason At All.

Vanity Fair: How Much Do Marco Rubio’s Boots Cost?

The Guardian: Devilish history of Cuban heels proves they’re too sexy for Rubio’s God squad.

USA Today: Marco Rubio unamused about ‘high-heeled booties’ scrutiny.

On the Democratic side, the Clinton scandal-mongers are at it again. I’m not going to link to a lot of stories, but you can find some on Memeorandum.com. Here’s Karen Tumulty at the Washington Post:

The ghosts of the 1990s have returned to confront Hillary Clinton, released from the vault by Donald Trump and revved up by a 21st-century version of the scandal machine that almost destroyed her husband’s presidency.

This is a moment that her campaign has long expected. What remains to be seen is whether a reminder of allegations of sexual impropriety against Bill Clinton — which were deemed to have varying levels of credibility when they were first aired — can gain new traction in a different context.

The fresher case being made is that Hillary Clinton has been, at a minimum, hypocritical about her husband’s treatment of women, and possibly even complicit in discrediting his accusers.

And it is being pressed at a time when there is a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact, and when one of the biggest news stories is the prosecution of once-beloved comedian Bill Cosby on charges that he drugged and assaulted a woman 12 years ago — one of dozens who have accused him of similar behavior.

I’m not aware that Bill Clinton has been accused on drugging women, but I suppose Hillary is going to have to deal with this somehow.

On the positive side, here’s a great article on Hillary’s campaign at Fast Company: How the Hillary Clinton Campaign Built A Campaign Staff as Diverse as America. You really need to go read the whole thing, so I’m not going to post excerpts.

What else is happening? Please let us know in the comment thread.