Republicans Very Upset At How Bad They Looked on Wednesday
By Kevin Drum
I guess this was inevitable:
The Republican National Committee has pulled out of a planned Feb. 26 debate with NBC News after widespread criticism of this week's CNBC debate from both the party and campaigns. "CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in a letter to NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack.
CNBC did screw up, but mostly by failing to keep the toddlers on stage under control and being poorly prepared to deal with brazen lies delivered with a straight face. For what it's worth, I'd also agree that a few of the questions they asked were stupid and/or churlish. Not much more than any other debate, though.
But conservative grievance culture is once again demanding someone's head on a platter. After all, if conservatives look bad on television it's gotta be someone else's fault, right? So it's off with NBC's head.
Jeebus. And these guys claim that they're the steely-eyed folks who can take down Putin and the ayatollah? What a bunch of crybabies.
October 30, 2015
Trump Know?
Does Donald Trump Know the Minimum Wage?
Unsolicited advice on how CNBC should question the GOP candidates.
By Jack Shafer
he TV interrogations of the 2016 presidential candidates—which are more group press conferences than straight-ahead debates—shift on Wednesday night to CNBC, where two sets of Republicans will be fielding the questions. But the main topics under discussion at both the overcard and undercard events will be the same: money, money and money. CNBC is all about cash—how to get it, how to make it grow and how to avoid having it taxed. Think I’m kidding? The network has even come up with a capital name for the broadcast: “Your Money, Your Vote: The Republican Presidential Debate.”
The narrowing of topics from “everything” to “all things economic” could make the CNBC session the most revealing debate yet—or it could reduce it to a gabby episode of The Suze Orman Show. The problem with grilling candidates on economic topics is that every campaign can assemble a posse of economists to supply whatever buttressing a candidate may require to prop up his proposed policies. Each candidate will be free to repel aggressive policy questions with a boilerplate, “That’s not what my board of economic experts says,” every time one of the questioners (John Harwood, Becky Quick and Carl Quintanilla) challenges one of their economic policy statements.
While a candidate can protect his positions on other issues—foreign policy, gun control, global warming, immigration, abortion, et al.—by citing his “experts,” this dodge works especially well when the subject is economic policy, the most abstract and least emotional entrée on any political menu. With only 120 minutes, minus commercials and opening and closing statements, of debate time on CNBC, the 10 candidates in the overcard debate will get only an average of about 12 minutes of face time. With so many faces on the stage and so much ground to cover, the candidates should be able to filibuster their way past fundamental questions about taxes (“Lower!”), economic growth (“More!”), trade (“Fairer!”), the debt, the deficit, the budget (“Lower!”), savings (“For it!”), Social Security (“Fix it!”) and the overall health of the economy (“Terrible!”) with aggressive assertions, some wild gesticulation and a few well-planned cracks about the “Obama economy.”
The best way to test the candidates’ economic bona fides is not to question them about their policies but to probe their basic understanding of the issues. This is what British broadcaster Jeremy Paxman did last spring when he questioned the standard-bearers—Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Party leader Ed Miliband—in the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections. Unlike many state-side TV inquisitors, Paxman doesn’t give his interview subjects an easel upon which to draw meandering answers. Instead, he asks simple, direct and revealing questions that test political intelligence and, by extension, leadership potential.
“How much money have you borrowed?” Paxman asked Cameron. Cameron bicycled away from the questions three times until he finally folded, saying, “You’re going to tell me, Jeremy, presumably.” The number, Paxman said, was £500 billion.
This exchange elegantly demonstrated Cameron’s low fluency when it came to understanding his government’s economic policies. Obviously, not every question in an economic debate need test for fluency, but the brilliant thing about such direct questions is the way they reveal to voters whether the presidential candidates have any idea of what they’re talking about and whether they can help formulate policy in an intelligent fashion should they be elected.
On the long shot that Harwood and Co. still have room on their dance card for additional questions, I propose these:
* What is the current federal minimum wage?
* What is the size of the deficit? Is it larger or smaller than it was when Barack Obama became president in 2009?
* What is the top marginal income tax rate? (I can guarantee you that Donald Trump knows the answer!)
* Do you advocate a stronger dollar or a weaker dollar? Is the dollar stronger or weaker than it was in 2009?
* Do you think the Chinese government unfairly manipulates its currency? What would a proper exchange rate be between the dollar and the renminbi?
* When did the Federal Reserve last raise interest rates? When did it last lower them?
* Why has job growth been better under Democratic presidents? Why has the deficit been much lower?
* Why has unemployment dropped from 10 percent to 5 percent?
Note that none of these questions is loaded with any sort of “bias.” Nor can any of them be dismissed as gotcha questions (like the name of an obscure nation’s president) which Republican political consultant Roger Stone defines as “a knowledge question in which the moderator attempts to make the person ... look stupid.” And their pure simplicity makes them impossible for a candidate to sidestep. Anybody running for president, the head of the largest economy in the world, should be able to essay in an accurate fashion on these questions without hesitancy. Should any of the candidates ignore the question and start answering one of their own devising, the questioner should butt in and say, “That’s not the question I’m asking,” and then restate the question until it’s answered or the candidate cries “uncle.” That’s what Paxman does. And we clearly need more Paxmans in American politics.
But as illuminating as such questions would be for the chattering class, the candidates need not fear a long-term impact from a misstep with the voting public. Will such basic debate questions turn the campaign? Probably not. Like political science professor John Sides, I doubt that any one or two booted questions can undo a vigorous candidacy. As Sides wrote in the Washington Monthly in 2012, “gaffes” in the general election debates have not traditionally damaged the gaffer. After Gerald Ford uttered his Eastern Europe gaffe in his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter, it was Carter’s numbers that fell. Michael Dukakis’ bland response to a hypothetical question in the 1988 debates about his wife being raped and murdered didn’t move the Gallup Poll numbers. Events happening outside the debates, Sides tells us, appear to outweigh most debate effects.
We expect too much from presidential debates, especially debates featuring eight—or more—aspirants. Maybe by lowering our expectations and asking the candidates basic questions we can better define their capabilities. With 800 Republican debates remaining after tonight’s (whoops, only eight), it’s certainly worth trying for an evening.
Unsolicited advice on how CNBC should question the GOP candidates.
By Jack Shafer
he TV interrogations of the 2016 presidential candidates—which are more group press conferences than straight-ahead debates—shift on Wednesday night to CNBC, where two sets of Republicans will be fielding the questions. But the main topics under discussion at both the overcard and undercard events will be the same: money, money and money. CNBC is all about cash—how to get it, how to make it grow and how to avoid having it taxed. Think I’m kidding? The network has even come up with a capital name for the broadcast: “Your Money, Your Vote: The Republican Presidential Debate.”
The narrowing of topics from “everything” to “all things economic” could make the CNBC session the most revealing debate yet—or it could reduce it to a gabby episode of The Suze Orman Show. The problem with grilling candidates on economic topics is that every campaign can assemble a posse of economists to supply whatever buttressing a candidate may require to prop up his proposed policies. Each candidate will be free to repel aggressive policy questions with a boilerplate, “That’s not what my board of economic experts says,” every time one of the questioners (John Harwood, Becky Quick and Carl Quintanilla) challenges one of their economic policy statements.
While a candidate can protect his positions on other issues—foreign policy, gun control, global warming, immigration, abortion, et al.—by citing his “experts,” this dodge works especially well when the subject is economic policy, the most abstract and least emotional entrée on any political menu. With only 120 minutes, minus commercials and opening and closing statements, of debate time on CNBC, the 10 candidates in the overcard debate will get only an average of about 12 minutes of face time. With so many faces on the stage and so much ground to cover, the candidates should be able to filibuster their way past fundamental questions about taxes (“Lower!”), economic growth (“More!”), trade (“Fairer!”), the debt, the deficit, the budget (“Lower!”), savings (“For it!”), Social Security (“Fix it!”) and the overall health of the economy (“Terrible!”) with aggressive assertions, some wild gesticulation and a few well-planned cracks about the “Obama economy.”
The best way to test the candidates’ economic bona fides is not to question them about their policies but to probe their basic understanding of the issues. This is what British broadcaster Jeremy Paxman did last spring when he questioned the standard-bearers—Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Party leader Ed Miliband—in the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections. Unlike many state-side TV inquisitors, Paxman doesn’t give his interview subjects an easel upon which to draw meandering answers. Instead, he asks simple, direct and revealing questions that test political intelligence and, by extension, leadership potential.
“How much money have you borrowed?” Paxman asked Cameron. Cameron bicycled away from the questions three times until he finally folded, saying, “You’re going to tell me, Jeremy, presumably.” The number, Paxman said, was £500 billion.
This exchange elegantly demonstrated Cameron’s low fluency when it came to understanding his government’s economic policies. Obviously, not every question in an economic debate need test for fluency, but the brilliant thing about such direct questions is the way they reveal to voters whether the presidential candidates have any idea of what they’re talking about and whether they can help formulate policy in an intelligent fashion should they be elected.
On the long shot that Harwood and Co. still have room on their dance card for additional questions, I propose these:
* What is the current federal minimum wage?
* What is the size of the deficit? Is it larger or smaller than it was when Barack Obama became president in 2009?
* What is the top marginal income tax rate? (I can guarantee you that Donald Trump knows the answer!)
* Do you advocate a stronger dollar or a weaker dollar? Is the dollar stronger or weaker than it was in 2009?
* Do you think the Chinese government unfairly manipulates its currency? What would a proper exchange rate be between the dollar and the renminbi?
* When did the Federal Reserve last raise interest rates? When did it last lower them?
* Why has job growth been better under Democratic presidents? Why has the deficit been much lower?
* Why has unemployment dropped from 10 percent to 5 percent?
Note that none of these questions is loaded with any sort of “bias.” Nor can any of them be dismissed as gotcha questions (like the name of an obscure nation’s president) which Republican political consultant Roger Stone defines as “a knowledge question in which the moderator attempts to make the person ... look stupid.” And their pure simplicity makes them impossible for a candidate to sidestep. Anybody running for president, the head of the largest economy in the world, should be able to essay in an accurate fashion on these questions without hesitancy. Should any of the candidates ignore the question and start answering one of their own devising, the questioner should butt in and say, “That’s not the question I’m asking,” and then restate the question until it’s answered or the candidate cries “uncle.” That’s what Paxman does. And we clearly need more Paxmans in American politics.
But as illuminating as such questions would be for the chattering class, the candidates need not fear a long-term impact from a misstep with the voting public. Will such basic debate questions turn the campaign? Probably not. Like political science professor John Sides, I doubt that any one or two booted questions can undo a vigorous candidacy. As Sides wrote in the Washington Monthly in 2012, “gaffes” in the general election debates have not traditionally damaged the gaffer. After Gerald Ford uttered his Eastern Europe gaffe in his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter, it was Carter’s numbers that fell. Michael Dukakis’ bland response to a hypothetical question in the 1988 debates about his wife being raped and murdered didn’t move the Gallup Poll numbers. Events happening outside the debates, Sides tells us, appear to outweigh most debate effects.
We expect too much from presidential debates, especially debates featuring eight—or more—aspirants. Maybe by lowering our expectations and asking the candidates basic questions we can better define their capabilities. With 800 Republican debates remaining after tonight’s (whoops, only eight), it’s certainly worth trying for an evening.
Bush chief departs
Bush chief operating officer departs campaign
By Daniel Strauss
Christine Ciccone, the chief operating officer with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, is no longer with the organization.
Bush's campaign confirmed to POLITICO on Friday that Ciccone left as part of a reorganization announced last week. That restructuring includes salary cuts, a reallocation of resources and a renewed focus on New Hampshire as the former governor seeks to reverse frustrating polling numbers and assure donors that he is not being eclipsed by Sen. Marco Rubio in the Republican primary field.
Ciccone had a salary of about $12,000 a month, or roughly $144,000 a year, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Ciccone previously worked in President George W. Bush's administration as a Senate legislative liaison. She was also a lobbyist for the Washington consulting firm Sphere.
By Daniel Strauss
Christine Ciccone, the chief operating officer with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's presidential campaign, is no longer with the organization.
Bush's campaign confirmed to POLITICO on Friday that Ciccone left as part of a reorganization announced last week. That restructuring includes salary cuts, a reallocation of resources and a renewed focus on New Hampshire as the former governor seeks to reverse frustrating polling numbers and assure donors that he is not being eclipsed by Sen. Marco Rubio in the Republican primary field.
Ciccone had a salary of about $12,000 a month, or roughly $144,000 a year, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Ciccone previously worked in President George W. Bush's administration as a Senate legislative liaison. She was also a lobbyist for the Washington consulting firm Sphere.
Only four candidates
Pro-Rubio super PAC: Only four candidates have a shot at nomination
By Daniel Strauss
The super PAC backing Marco Rubio sees just four candidates having a shot of winning the Republican nomination. And Jeb Bush isn't one of them.
"When you consider all angles, as we do, we believe there are really only four candidates with a reasonable chance of becoming the Republican nominee: Senator Marco Rubio, Dr. Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz," Warren Tompkins, head of the Conservative Solutions PAC, and media consultant and lead strategist Jon Lerner wrote in a memo sent out to donors, friends and supporters on Friday.
"And when you look on to the general election against Hillary Clinton, we are convinced that Marco gives the GOP its best chance to win. The Clinton Machine itself openly acknowledges that Marco is the candidate they most fear."
The Friday memo follows a debate performance earlier in the week in which Bush attacked Rubio's record on votes in the Senate. Rubio quickly parried the attack, and since then some donors have begun questioning the strength of Bush's campaign and his ability to beat Rubio and the rest of the field in the primary.
And while Rubio has so far kept a relatively low profile during the 2016 race, the memo from Tompkins and Lerner is a sign that the Conservative Solutions PAC plans to ramp up its activity in the primary in support of the Florida senator.
"Our job is to bring Marco’s optimistic conservative message to as many voters as possible. Your generous help has enabled us to do that. As you know, our PAC has not yet run a single TV ad. But we are very well prepared to do so at the right time," the two operatives continue. "While we have not made a final decision about when to begin airing it, we wanted to show you what our first TV ad looks like. We hope you agree that it captures the essence of what Marco’s candidacy is all about."
By Daniel Strauss
The super PAC backing Marco Rubio sees just four candidates having a shot of winning the Republican nomination. And Jeb Bush isn't one of them.
"When you consider all angles, as we do, we believe there are really only four candidates with a reasonable chance of becoming the Republican nominee: Senator Marco Rubio, Dr. Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz," Warren Tompkins, head of the Conservative Solutions PAC, and media consultant and lead strategist Jon Lerner wrote in a memo sent out to donors, friends and supporters on Friday.
"And when you look on to the general election against Hillary Clinton, we are convinced that Marco gives the GOP its best chance to win. The Clinton Machine itself openly acknowledges that Marco is the candidate they most fear."
The Friday memo follows a debate performance earlier in the week in which Bush attacked Rubio's record on votes in the Senate. Rubio quickly parried the attack, and since then some donors have begun questioning the strength of Bush's campaign and his ability to beat Rubio and the rest of the field in the primary.
And while Rubio has so far kept a relatively low profile during the 2016 race, the memo from Tompkins and Lerner is a sign that the Conservative Solutions PAC plans to ramp up its activity in the primary in support of the Florida senator.
"Our job is to bring Marco’s optimistic conservative message to as many voters as possible. Your generous help has enabled us to do that. As you know, our PAC has not yet run a single TV ad. But we are very well prepared to do so at the right time," the two operatives continue. "While we have not made a final decision about when to begin airing it, we wanted to show you what our first TV ad looks like. We hope you agree that it captures the essence of what Marco’s candidacy is all about."
Extensive relationship
Ben Carson had extensive relationship to dietary supplement company despite denial
Chip Grabow
In Wednesday's CNBC Republican presidential debate, Ben Carson was asked about his involvement with Mannatech, a dietary supplement maker.
In 2009, Mannatech settled for $7 million following a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general over the company's claims that its products could cure cancer and autism. CNBC moderator Carl Quintanilla claimed Carson had a 10-year-long connection with the company and that it continued even after the settlement.
Carson denied the accusation, saying, "That is total propaganda ... I did a couple speeches for them, I do speeches for other people, they were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them."
Carson's statement directly contradicts promotional material that came from Mannatech, as well as his own business manager Armstrong Williams, who described Carson's relationship to the company in an interview Thursday on "The Lead with Jake Tapper."
Williams defended his boss, suggesting that while Carson did have a relationship to the company, the retired neurosurgeon didn't realize all of the details of his endorsement up front and wanted out of the deal.
"He said 'I don't believe in this. I'm not going to do it,'" Williams said, recalling negotiations with the company over the endorsement. "When that was over, he made it clear to me, 'You need to get me out of this, I'm not going to do this again,' and it was over.'"
The Wall Street Journal this month reported on Carson's connection with Mannatech, saying Carson has said he has taken the company's supplements for more than a decade.
The WSJ also cited a 2004 video of Carson speaking at a Mannatech event. In the video, he credited the company's products for his prostate cancer diagnosis symptoms disappearing. The paper points out that Carson is now "cancer-free after surgery."
The WSJ reports Carson has appeared in videos that were on Mannatech's website until earlier this month. The videos were removed soon after the Journal's reporting. The paper also reported that Carson gave four paid speeches at company events; the most recent was in 2013 for which Carson was paid $42,000.
Carson's campaign manager, Barry Bennett, told the WSJ Carson is a "believer in vitamins and supplements."
CNBC moderator Quintanilla also pointed out Carson's image was on the Mannatech website's homepage, with the firm's logo prominently displayed over his shoulder. Carson said, "If somebody put me on the homepage, they did it without my permission." When Quintanilla then asked, "Does that not speak to your vetting process or judgment in any way?" Carson started to respond, "No, it speaks to the fact that I don't know those --" and was interrupted by audience boos apparently directed at the moderator. Carson concluded, "See, they know."
Despite Carson's denial in the debate, he admitted that he did paid speeches for Mannatech, and credited the company's products for his cancer symptoms disappearing and his image appeared on the firm's website as recently as 2014 -- so it appears he was very much involved with the company even after its 2009 settlement over false advertising.
Chip Grabow
In Wednesday's CNBC Republican presidential debate, Ben Carson was asked about his involvement with Mannatech, a dietary supplement maker.
In 2009, Mannatech settled for $7 million following a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general over the company's claims that its products could cure cancer and autism. CNBC moderator Carl Quintanilla claimed Carson had a 10-year-long connection with the company and that it continued even after the settlement.
Carson denied the accusation, saying, "That is total propaganda ... I did a couple speeches for them, I do speeches for other people, they were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them."
Carson's statement directly contradicts promotional material that came from Mannatech, as well as his own business manager Armstrong Williams, who described Carson's relationship to the company in an interview Thursday on "The Lead with Jake Tapper."
Williams defended his boss, suggesting that while Carson did have a relationship to the company, the retired neurosurgeon didn't realize all of the details of his endorsement up front and wanted out of the deal.
"He said 'I don't believe in this. I'm not going to do it,'" Williams said, recalling negotiations with the company over the endorsement. "When that was over, he made it clear to me, 'You need to get me out of this, I'm not going to do this again,' and it was over.'"
The Wall Street Journal this month reported on Carson's connection with Mannatech, saying Carson has said he has taken the company's supplements for more than a decade.
The WSJ also cited a 2004 video of Carson speaking at a Mannatech event. In the video, he credited the company's products for his prostate cancer diagnosis symptoms disappearing. The paper points out that Carson is now "cancer-free after surgery."
The WSJ reports Carson has appeared in videos that were on Mannatech's website until earlier this month. The videos were removed soon after the Journal's reporting. The paper also reported that Carson gave four paid speeches at company events; the most recent was in 2013 for which Carson was paid $42,000.
Carson's campaign manager, Barry Bennett, told the WSJ Carson is a "believer in vitamins and supplements."
CNBC moderator Quintanilla also pointed out Carson's image was on the Mannatech website's homepage, with the firm's logo prominently displayed over his shoulder. Carson said, "If somebody put me on the homepage, they did it without my permission." When Quintanilla then asked, "Does that not speak to your vetting process or judgment in any way?" Carson started to respond, "No, it speaks to the fact that I don't know those --" and was interrupted by audience boos apparently directed at the moderator. Carson concluded, "See, they know."
Despite Carson's denial in the debate, he admitted that he did paid speeches for Mannatech, and credited the company's products for his cancer symptoms disappearing and his image appeared on the firm's website as recently as 2014 -- so it appears he was very much involved with the company even after its 2009 settlement over false advertising.
Special forces to Syria
U.S. sending special forces troops to Syria in ISIL fight
By Nick Gass
The United States is expected to announce Friday that it is sending a limited number of special forces troops to begin operating in northern Syria to advise and assist rebels in the ongoing fight against the Islamic State.
The exact number of advisers participating in the action is unclear, but a senior administration official said President Barack Obama has authorized no more than 50.
"Specifically, we have enhanced our ability to partner with these forces - advising them and helping to facilitate their activities; providing air support for their ground offensives; and directly equipping them so that they are more effective," the official said.
The administration has at the same time "scaled back" parts of its train-and-equip mission in Syria that involved taking forces out of the country.
"We have always been clear that this would be a multi-year campaign, and that continues to be the case. ISIL is a determined enemy. And we will not defeat ISIL by military means alone," the senior administration official said. "That’s why we will continue to lead a 65-partner Coalition that is working to halt the flow of foreign fighters, constrict ISIL’s finances, stabilize liberated communities and counter ISIL’s messaging."
Obama has also authorized the deployment of A-10s and F-15s to Turkey's Incirlik air base as well as enhanced military assistance to Jordan and Lebanon in their anti-ISIL efforts.
Further, the president has authorized consultation with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi and the Iraqi government on forming a special operations task force "to further enhance our ability to target ISIL leaders and networks."
A senior administration official told the Journal separately that the U.S. has no "intention to pursue long-term, large-scale ground combat operations like those we’ve seen in the past in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to hold a news conference this afternoon in Vienna, where has been meeting with leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) called a "more serious effort" against the terror group "long overdue." The committee will hold a hearing on U.S. strategy in the Middle East in the next few weeks.
"Absent a larger coherent strategy, however, these steps may prove to be too little too late," he said in a statement. "I do not see a strategy for success, rather it seems the Administration is trying to avoid a disaster while the President runs out the clock."
The special forces plan comes after Obama said in September 2013 that he would not send any troops to Syria, with respect to the revelation that President Bashar Assad had used chemical weapons on his people in the country's civil war.
"I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan," he assured the American people in a primetime address from the White House, remarking that limited strikes did not amount to "pinpricks."
"Let me make something clear: The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks. Even a limited strike will send a message to Assad that no other nation can deliver," Obama said at the time. "I don't think we should remove another dictator with force -- we learned from Iraq that doing so makes us responsible for all that comes next."
By Nick Gass
The United States is expected to announce Friday that it is sending a limited number of special forces troops to begin operating in northern Syria to advise and assist rebels in the ongoing fight against the Islamic State.
The exact number of advisers participating in the action is unclear, but a senior administration official said President Barack Obama has authorized no more than 50.
"Specifically, we have enhanced our ability to partner with these forces - advising them and helping to facilitate their activities; providing air support for their ground offensives; and directly equipping them so that they are more effective," the official said.
The administration has at the same time "scaled back" parts of its train-and-equip mission in Syria that involved taking forces out of the country.
"We have always been clear that this would be a multi-year campaign, and that continues to be the case. ISIL is a determined enemy. And we will not defeat ISIL by military means alone," the senior administration official said. "That’s why we will continue to lead a 65-partner Coalition that is working to halt the flow of foreign fighters, constrict ISIL’s finances, stabilize liberated communities and counter ISIL’s messaging."
Obama has also authorized the deployment of A-10s and F-15s to Turkey's Incirlik air base as well as enhanced military assistance to Jordan and Lebanon in their anti-ISIL efforts.
Further, the president has authorized consultation with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi and the Iraqi government on forming a special operations task force "to further enhance our ability to target ISIL leaders and networks."
A senior administration official told the Journal separately that the U.S. has no "intention to pursue long-term, large-scale ground combat operations like those we’ve seen in the past in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to hold a news conference this afternoon in Vienna, where has been meeting with leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) called a "more serious effort" against the terror group "long overdue." The committee will hold a hearing on U.S. strategy in the Middle East in the next few weeks.
"Absent a larger coherent strategy, however, these steps may prove to be too little too late," he said in a statement. "I do not see a strategy for success, rather it seems the Administration is trying to avoid a disaster while the President runs out the clock."
The special forces plan comes after Obama said in September 2013 that he would not send any troops to Syria, with respect to the revelation that President Bashar Assad had used chemical weapons on his people in the country's civil war.
"I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan," he assured the American people in a primetime address from the White House, remarking that limited strikes did not amount to "pinpricks."
"Let me make something clear: The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks. Even a limited strike will send a message to Assad that no other nation can deliver," Obama said at the time. "I don't think we should remove another dictator with force -- we learned from Iraq that doing so makes us responsible for all that comes next."
Democratic Centrists Panic
The Rise Of Bernie Sanders And The Panic Of Democratic Centrists
"I think it is a recipe for disaster."
By Sam Stein
Though he remains, by measures of conventional wisdom and polling data, an outsider in the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has still managed to spook the ideological center of the Democratic Party.
On Wednesday morning, the think tank Third Way held a briefing in which it warned candidates that they risked personal and broadly shared electoral harm if they echoed Sanders' populist message.
"You would be back to 1972 [if Bernie were nominated]," warned Bill Daley, President Barack Obama's former chief of staff and a Third Way board member, referencing the blowout Richard Nixon win that year. "It was not a happy time for Democrats. The guy has been a socialist his whole life and now decides he is a Democrat and therefore the Democratic Party has got to move to that extreme? I think it is a recipe for disaster."
The rise of Sanders, though unanticipated, has exposed familiar ideological fissures within the Democratic Party. Virtually every modern presidential election has pitted an insurgent candidate with populist appeal against a more centrist-minded or establishment alternative.
Bill Clinton's win in 1992 ushered in a generation of modern, more moderate New Democrats. And when Clinton left office, several of his former staffers started up Third Way to discourage the party from reverting to its leftward ways. During the Obama era, the group issued similar warnings about the rise of Democratic populism and played consequential policy roles -- most memorably encouraging lawmakers to abandon the pursuit of a public option during the crafting of health care reform in 2010.
On the eve of a post-Obama America, Third Way's role appears more defensive or, at least, complicated by the few candidates running for the White House. Far from cheerleading Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, it warned her not to mimic her nearest competitor.
"They are really going to beat her up to move further and further and further [to the left] because they assume she is going to get it and they want their piece of flesh," said Daley.
The attack on Sanders, meanwhile, was one of the more overtly aggressive yet to come from within Democratic ranks.
"I think the Third Way message was great in '92 but out of date for a 2016 electorate… I have no doubt that if we can get through the nominating process against such a formidable opponent he will be very strong in the general," said Tad Devine, Sanders' top strategist, in response. "Bernie has the potential to change the composition of the electorate, and getting young people and lower income voters back into it on the side of the Democrats because his message is so powerful and believable coming from him."
Though officials at Third Way warned about potential missteps Democrats might make at the presidential level, much of the hour-long briefing on Wednesday was spent arguing that the party's success in such elections has masked fundamental problems elsewhere. And on a purely numerical level, the math is indisputable. As Jonathan Cowan, Third Way's president, noted, Democrats hold the fewest offices in Congress, statehouses and governors' mansions since 1928.
The factors behind this, however, are deeply disputed.
In its presentation, Third Way argued that a focus on issues like a $15 minimum wage, expanding Social Security benefits and advocating for single-payer health care all create the political dynamics that make Democrats electorally vulnerable. But few Democrats have made their campaigns squarely about these three issues in past races. During the disastrous 2014 midterm elections, a number of senators called for expanding Social Security benefits. But talk of single-payer health care was nonexistent outside highly progressive (and largely dismissed) quarters. And the debate at the time was about raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, not $15. Third Way itself calls for a wage floor of $10-$12, based on average hourly wages and regional cost variations.
Third Way's platform calls for passage of free trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership, making the research and development tax credit permanent and revenue-neutral corporate tax reform. The group advocates for raising tax rates on capital gains from 20 to 25 percent and for limiting deductions for high wage earners. But on the whole, it is the more corporate-minded plank of the Democratic platform, much to the distaste of its critics.
"They do nothing to challenge corporate power in the workplace, other than a higher minimum wage," said Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Third Way adversary. "If they don’t get behind policies that will really help generate middle class wage and compensation growth then they’re missing an essential piece of what’s needed, economically and politically."
Michael Briggs, Sanders' top spokesman, was a touch more sardonic. "Did Mr. Daley have anything to say about all of the American factories that closed or the millions of American jobs that were lost because he pushed NAFTA through Congress?" he asked.
Dive further into Third Way's policy suggestions and the substantive case for alarm over populism becomes muddied. The group wants investments in infrastructure and medical research; bolstered SEC enforcement; a home equity voucher program and comprehensive immigration reform. Though it opposes expanding Social Security, it does want a "minimum, employer-provided 50 cent an hour private pension contribution."
"At the end of the day, what's so bizarre about Third Way is that they do actually advocate for some things progressives would (infrastructure, immigration reform, etc.), but the rhetorical frame they use is based in the logic of the 1980s," said Neil Sroka, communications director at Democracy for America. "That is, that somehow Democrats can win things only if we trick voters into thinking that ideas from the left are actually really from the right."
At their briefing, Cowon and Daley, along with Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) and New Democrat Movement founder Elaine Kamarck, disputed the notion that the differences within the Democratic Party were limited, though they also acknowledged that their concerns with populism were about the style as well as the substance.
Obama, they argued, had fairly centrist policy achievements. But even though he is the titular leader of the Democratic Party -- whose agenda establishes the Democratic image -- the candidates sacrificed the benefits when they chose to run as populists.
"You cannot overcome a party brand if you are a senator or a House member. The only person who trumps a party brand in politics is a sitting president," said Cowan.
"I think it is a recipe for disaster."
By Sam Stein
Though he remains, by measures of conventional wisdom and polling data, an outsider in the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has still managed to spook the ideological center of the Democratic Party.
On Wednesday morning, the think tank Third Way held a briefing in which it warned candidates that they risked personal and broadly shared electoral harm if they echoed Sanders' populist message.
"You would be back to 1972 [if Bernie were nominated]," warned Bill Daley, President Barack Obama's former chief of staff and a Third Way board member, referencing the blowout Richard Nixon win that year. "It was not a happy time for Democrats. The guy has been a socialist his whole life and now decides he is a Democrat and therefore the Democratic Party has got to move to that extreme? I think it is a recipe for disaster."
The rise of Sanders, though unanticipated, has exposed familiar ideological fissures within the Democratic Party. Virtually every modern presidential election has pitted an insurgent candidate with populist appeal against a more centrist-minded or establishment alternative.
Bill Clinton's win in 1992 ushered in a generation of modern, more moderate New Democrats. And when Clinton left office, several of his former staffers started up Third Way to discourage the party from reverting to its leftward ways. During the Obama era, the group issued similar warnings about the rise of Democratic populism and played consequential policy roles -- most memorably encouraging lawmakers to abandon the pursuit of a public option during the crafting of health care reform in 2010.
On the eve of a post-Obama America, Third Way's role appears more defensive or, at least, complicated by the few candidates running for the White House. Far from cheerleading Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, it warned her not to mimic her nearest competitor.
"They are really going to beat her up to move further and further and further [to the left] because they assume she is going to get it and they want their piece of flesh," said Daley.
The attack on Sanders, meanwhile, was one of the more overtly aggressive yet to come from within Democratic ranks.
"I think the Third Way message was great in '92 but out of date for a 2016 electorate… I have no doubt that if we can get through the nominating process against such a formidable opponent he will be very strong in the general," said Tad Devine, Sanders' top strategist, in response. "Bernie has the potential to change the composition of the electorate, and getting young people and lower income voters back into it on the side of the Democrats because his message is so powerful and believable coming from him."
Though officials at Third Way warned about potential missteps Democrats might make at the presidential level, much of the hour-long briefing on Wednesday was spent arguing that the party's success in such elections has masked fundamental problems elsewhere. And on a purely numerical level, the math is indisputable. As Jonathan Cowan, Third Way's president, noted, Democrats hold the fewest offices in Congress, statehouses and governors' mansions since 1928.
The factors behind this, however, are deeply disputed.
In its presentation, Third Way argued that a focus on issues like a $15 minimum wage, expanding Social Security benefits and advocating for single-payer health care all create the political dynamics that make Democrats electorally vulnerable. But few Democrats have made their campaigns squarely about these three issues in past races. During the disastrous 2014 midterm elections, a number of senators called for expanding Social Security benefits. But talk of single-payer health care was nonexistent outside highly progressive (and largely dismissed) quarters. And the debate at the time was about raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, not $15. Third Way itself calls for a wage floor of $10-$12, based on average hourly wages and regional cost variations.
Third Way's platform calls for passage of free trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership, making the research and development tax credit permanent and revenue-neutral corporate tax reform. The group advocates for raising tax rates on capital gains from 20 to 25 percent and for limiting deductions for high wage earners. But on the whole, it is the more corporate-minded plank of the Democratic platform, much to the distaste of its critics.
"They do nothing to challenge corporate power in the workplace, other than a higher minimum wage," said Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Third Way adversary. "If they don’t get behind policies that will really help generate middle class wage and compensation growth then they’re missing an essential piece of what’s needed, economically and politically."
Michael Briggs, Sanders' top spokesman, was a touch more sardonic. "Did Mr. Daley have anything to say about all of the American factories that closed or the millions of American jobs that were lost because he pushed NAFTA through Congress?" he asked.
Dive further into Third Way's policy suggestions and the substantive case for alarm over populism becomes muddied. The group wants investments in infrastructure and medical research; bolstered SEC enforcement; a home equity voucher program and comprehensive immigration reform. Though it opposes expanding Social Security, it does want a "minimum, employer-provided 50 cent an hour private pension contribution."
"At the end of the day, what's so bizarre about Third Way is that they do actually advocate for some things progressives would (infrastructure, immigration reform, etc.), but the rhetorical frame they use is based in the logic of the 1980s," said Neil Sroka, communications director at Democracy for America. "That is, that somehow Democrats can win things only if we trick voters into thinking that ideas from the left are actually really from the right."
At their briefing, Cowon and Daley, along with Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) and New Democrat Movement founder Elaine Kamarck, disputed the notion that the differences within the Democratic Party were limited, though they also acknowledged that their concerns with populism were about the style as well as the substance.
Obama, they argued, had fairly centrist policy achievements. But even though he is the titular leader of the Democratic Party -- whose agenda establishes the Democratic image -- the candidates sacrificed the benefits when they chose to run as populists.
"You cannot overcome a party brand if you are a senator or a House member. The only person who trumps a party brand in politics is a sitting president," said Cowan.
Euthanize Jeb.. Those rich bastards dragged him into the race
GOP Donors to Euthanize Jeb Bush
By Marty Kaplan
"It's the humane thing to do," said a participant following an emergency donor class conference call following the CNBC Republican debate in Boulder, Colo. "After Jeb criticized Rubio's attendance record, and Rubio broke his legs, you could just see it in his eyes," said the billionaire super PAC contributor, who did not want to be named because he never is named. "Poor Jeb's like a thoroughbred begging to be put out of his misery."
Sources close to the Bush campaign rejected the judgment reached on the call. "He's joyful, he's got 39 years of experience, he's a reformer who can get things done, he's got an 11-point tax reform plan, and the only reason he's running is because those rich bastards dragged him into the race in the first place so they'd have someone they could own," said one insider, who was granted anonymity in exchange for a better quote.
Overnight polls of likely Republican caucus and primary voters put Bush well behind other presidential contenders in answer to the question, "Which candidate is best at channeling your batshit rage?" Asked to respond to the poll results, a Bush campaign spokesperson, who declined to be named because it might jeopardize her job search, said, "Look, if the only thing you care about is beating Hillary Clinton, Jeb's not your man."
It is not yet known how the donors' verdict will be implemented, and which network will have the rights to it, but ad industry expects said rates were likely to be well above the $250,000 for a 30-second spot that was charged by CNBC.
Governor Bush could not be reached for comment.
By Marty Kaplan
"It's the humane thing to do," said a participant following an emergency donor class conference call following the CNBC Republican debate in Boulder, Colo. "After Jeb criticized Rubio's attendance record, and Rubio broke his legs, you could just see it in his eyes," said the billionaire super PAC contributor, who did not want to be named because he never is named. "Poor Jeb's like a thoroughbred begging to be put out of his misery."
Sources close to the Bush campaign rejected the judgment reached on the call. "He's joyful, he's got 39 years of experience, he's a reformer who can get things done, he's got an 11-point tax reform plan, and the only reason he's running is because those rich bastards dragged him into the race in the first place so they'd have someone they could own," said one insider, who was granted anonymity in exchange for a better quote.
Overnight polls of likely Republican caucus and primary voters put Bush well behind other presidential contenders in answer to the question, "Which candidate is best at channeling your batshit rage?" Asked to respond to the poll results, a Bush campaign spokesperson, who declined to be named because it might jeopardize her job search, said, "Look, if the only thing you care about is beating Hillary Clinton, Jeb's not your man."
It is not yet known how the donors' verdict will be implemented, and which network will have the rights to it, but ad industry expects said rates were likely to be well above the $250,000 for a 30-second spot that was charged by CNBC.
Governor Bush could not be reached for comment.
Not much of a point...
A GOP Debate Without a Winner—or Much of a Point
It was an empty night of whining about the media, petty squabbling, and lost opportunities for the Republicans who would be president.
By John Nichols
Donald Trump lost interest midway through the third Republican presidential debate. It’s a bad night for Trump when his most memorable line is a closing-statement claim of credit for negotiating a shorter debate: “I got it down to two hours so we can get the hell out of here.”
The billionaire contender’s disdain for the whole affair was appropriate after an empty night of whining about the media, petty squabbling, and lost opportunities for the Republicans who would be president.
Dr. Ben Carson seemed to lose interest in his own answer to the first question he got from the CNBC panel and never really reengaged—except with a bizarre attempt to both deny and defend his role as pitchman for the nutritional-supplement maker Mannatech.
Jeb Bush lost what may have been his last chance to save a sinking campaign; his listless performance suggested the former front-runner has already decided he has something better to do than run for president. Bush got very little screen time, and did very little with it. He said at one point that he would give a “warm kiss” to a Democrat who did the right thing. He also said, “I can’t fake anger.” Actually, Bush had a hard time faking viability.
John Kasich lost his nerve and never went after the front-runners, as his pre-debate speeches and media appearances suggested he might finally do. He was reduced to recalling George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” in an effort to convince conservatives they should be concerned about college debt. Memo to Kasich: Conservatives just aren’t that into the Bushes.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz lost the point of the “freedom of the press” protection outlined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution—repeatedly attacking panelists from a business-friendly cable network for asking mildly probing questions. There is nothing wrong with challenging the media, and the CNBC panelists gave the critics plenty to gripe about. But for Rubio, in particular, this was something else—a debate tactic.
Instead of responding to legitimate inquiries regarding his dodgy personal finances and missed Senate votes, Rubio tossed off rehearsed lines about the failings of a mythological liberal media. The crowd loved it when the senator said, “The Democrats have the ultimate ‘super PAC’; it’s called the mainstream media.” But he still didn’t answer the questions.
Rand Paul lost out in so many attempts to be included in the discussion that he finally asked: “What are the rules on who gets to follow up?”
Carly Fiorina lost whatever ground she had gained in previous debates when the chief question she was asked in this one had to do with her miserable tenure as the CEO at Hewlett-Packard. And she had to feel at least a little uncomfortable when Chris Christie started talking about jailing CEOs.
Christie actually got off some of the few good lines in the most directionless debate yet for the Republican presidential contenders. He seemed to be genuinely shocked that the panel was inquiring about fantasy football, before finally answering the question with a question: “Who cares?”
Christie’s best moment came on the issue of how to hold CEOs to account. CNBC host Jim Cramer asked a good question about whether corporate executives who harm or kill consumers “belong behind bars.”
“You bet they do,” replied the former US Attorney. “And if I were the prosecutor, that is exactly where they would be.”
Good answer—not for a Republican primary, perhaps, but certainly for a general election. And, though the candidates don’t seem to be thinking much about November 2016, that is ultimately where the Republican nominee will face his or her day of reckoning.
There was one other general-election answer. And it was a very good one, even if it came from an otherwise lamentable candidate who is exceptionally unlikely to be his party’s nominee.
When the issue of Social Security arose, Mike Huckabee went off message. He did not talk about cuts, he said “we need to honor our promises.”
“This is a matter not of math, this is a matter of morality,” said Huckabee. “If this country that does not keep its promise to seniors then what promise can this country hope to be trusted to keep? And, the fact is, none of them.”
That was not anything like the answer most of the other Republican presidential contenders gave.
That was not anything like the answer soon-to-be House Speaker Paul Ryan has given—or will give.
That was, however, the right answer morally.
That was the right answer practically.
And that was the right answer for a general election—which is something that Republicans and Democrats will recognize a year from now.
It was an empty night of whining about the media, petty squabbling, and lost opportunities for the Republicans who would be president.
By John Nichols
Donald Trump lost interest midway through the third Republican presidential debate. It’s a bad night for Trump when his most memorable line is a closing-statement claim of credit for negotiating a shorter debate: “I got it down to two hours so we can get the hell out of here.”
The billionaire contender’s disdain for the whole affair was appropriate after an empty night of whining about the media, petty squabbling, and lost opportunities for the Republicans who would be president.
Dr. Ben Carson seemed to lose interest in his own answer to the first question he got from the CNBC panel and never really reengaged—except with a bizarre attempt to both deny and defend his role as pitchman for the nutritional-supplement maker Mannatech.
Jeb Bush lost what may have been his last chance to save a sinking campaign; his listless performance suggested the former front-runner has already decided he has something better to do than run for president. Bush got very little screen time, and did very little with it. He said at one point that he would give a “warm kiss” to a Democrat who did the right thing. He also said, “I can’t fake anger.” Actually, Bush had a hard time faking viability.
John Kasich lost his nerve and never went after the front-runners, as his pre-debate speeches and media appearances suggested he might finally do. He was reduced to recalling George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” in an effort to convince conservatives they should be concerned about college debt. Memo to Kasich: Conservatives just aren’t that into the Bushes.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz lost the point of the “freedom of the press” protection outlined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution—repeatedly attacking panelists from a business-friendly cable network for asking mildly probing questions. There is nothing wrong with challenging the media, and the CNBC panelists gave the critics plenty to gripe about. But for Rubio, in particular, this was something else—a debate tactic.
Instead of responding to legitimate inquiries regarding his dodgy personal finances and missed Senate votes, Rubio tossed off rehearsed lines about the failings of a mythological liberal media. The crowd loved it when the senator said, “The Democrats have the ultimate ‘super PAC’; it’s called the mainstream media.” But he still didn’t answer the questions.
Rand Paul lost out in so many attempts to be included in the discussion that he finally asked: “What are the rules on who gets to follow up?”
Carly Fiorina lost whatever ground she had gained in previous debates when the chief question she was asked in this one had to do with her miserable tenure as the CEO at Hewlett-Packard. And she had to feel at least a little uncomfortable when Chris Christie started talking about jailing CEOs.
Christie actually got off some of the few good lines in the most directionless debate yet for the Republican presidential contenders. He seemed to be genuinely shocked that the panel was inquiring about fantasy football, before finally answering the question with a question: “Who cares?”
Christie’s best moment came on the issue of how to hold CEOs to account. CNBC host Jim Cramer asked a good question about whether corporate executives who harm or kill consumers “belong behind bars.”
“You bet they do,” replied the former US Attorney. “And if I were the prosecutor, that is exactly where they would be.”
Good answer—not for a Republican primary, perhaps, but certainly for a general election. And, though the candidates don’t seem to be thinking much about November 2016, that is ultimately where the Republican nominee will face his or her day of reckoning.
There was one other general-election answer. And it was a very good one, even if it came from an otherwise lamentable candidate who is exceptionally unlikely to be his party’s nominee.
When the issue of Social Security arose, Mike Huckabee went off message. He did not talk about cuts, he said “we need to honor our promises.”
“This is a matter not of math, this is a matter of morality,” said Huckabee. “If this country that does not keep its promise to seniors then what promise can this country hope to be trusted to keep? And, the fact is, none of them.”
That was not anything like the answer most of the other Republican presidential contenders gave.
That was not anything like the answer soon-to-be House Speaker Paul Ryan has given—or will give.
That was, however, the right answer morally.
That was the right answer practically.
And that was the right answer for a general election—which is something that Republicans and Democrats will recognize a year from now.
Totally Made-Up
Meet Paul Ryan, Media Darling. He’s Sensible, Serious, and Totally Made-Up.
Fawning portrayals of the new House speaker insist he’s the Republicans’ savior. He’s not.
By Eric Alterman
The beatification of right-wing Republican Paul Ryan has become an almost annual ritual among the punditocracy. This bizarre tradition began when Ryan released his first budget as chair of the House Budget Committee in 2011, and repeated itself a year later when he rereleased it. It occurred a third time when Mitt Romney—under powerful punditocracy pressure—picked Ryan as his running mate for the 2012 presidential campaign. Now we are in the midst of yet another episode in this sorry franchise, as Republicans and their apologists and propagandists beg Ryan to use his superhero powers to save them from the lunatics who have taken over their party. It’s a measure of how deeply the Republicans have dived into know-nothing, do-nothing nihilism—and, no less significantly, how deeply our most prestigious pundits remain in denial about this fundamental fact—that Ryan has been able to continue the charade, despite having been repeatedly exposed as a math-challenged Ayn Rand acolyte.
The congressman’s emergence on the political scene earned him hosannas from both the center-left and center-right. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg led the pack: Writing beneath the headline “Good Plan!” followed by the adjectives “brave, radical, and smart,” Weisberg was particularly enamored with Ryan’s willingness to lower taxes on the wealthy as he subsequently undermined the Medicare payments upon which middle-class and poor people depend for their healthcare. On the other side of the center aisle, David Brooks insisted that Ryan had “set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion,” and credited him with the manly virtue of tackling “just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts.”
Brooks’s fellow New York Times pundits James B. Stewart and Joe Nocera also raised their pom-poms and lowered their intellectual standards to cheer Ryan on. The former misled his audience by insisting that Ryan’s plan would somehow raise taxes on the rich. The latter lamented that Democrats proved “gleeful” when they won a special congressional election that turned, in part, on the voters’ distaste for Ryan’s plan. The man was so wonderful, apparently, that the other guys should simply have forfeited the game and gone home.
Interestingly, some of the smitten already had an inkling that what they were selling was snake oil. Weisberg admitted that Ryan’s budget was full of “sleight-of-hand tricks” and wouldn’t actually come close to eliminating the deficit in the coming decade, “leaving $400 billion in annual deficits as far as the eye can see.” And Nocera dutifully acknowledged that “Ryan’s solution is wrongheaded,” before adding he was “right that Medicare is headed for trouble.”
In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Ryan’s budget would have “likely produce[d] the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase[d] poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).” The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center calculated that people earning over $1 million a year could expect, on average, $265,000 above the $129,000 they would have gotten from Ryan’s proposed extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. Meanwhile, middle-class and poor Americans would likely see their incomes decline, as Medicare and other support programs would be slashed to the point of destruction. Even Ryan admitted that enactment of his Robin-Hood-in-reverse plan would lead to a significant increase in the deficit, an unavoidable fact despite the transparently dishonest assumptions on which the argument rested. These included science-fiction levels of predicted growth, together with the pie-in-the-sky promise to close unspecified tax loopholes. Those loopholes, it turns out, only seem to increase with every campaign contribution.
By now, the narrative is all but set in stone. Washington’s own St. Paul is saving the Republicans from their out-of-control Tea Party golem. As one of many breathless Politico headlines put it, Ryan “conquered the Freedom Caucus” by forcing its members to cave in on the demands that toppled the hapless John Boehner in return for Ryan’s willingness to accept the crown of House speaker and save the party from catastrophe. Once again, however, the devilish details contradict the story line. Ryan’s deal with the Freedom Caucus crazies, according to Politico itself, rests far more on capitulation than conquest. For starters, Ryan agreed to give the Freedom Caucus more power on the influential House Republican Steering Committee. He also promised to drop immigration reform from the Republican agenda and to follow the “Hastert rule,” by which no legislation can come to the floor unless it is supported in advance by a majority of Republicans—which means guess who? If the Mets had played this well against the Dodgers and the Cubs, they’d be watching the World Series on TV.
This “Ryan to the rescue” fairy tale is merely the latest manifestation of a corrupt bargain made by many members of the mainstream media. Unable to escape the intellectual straitjacket that requires them to cover the Republican Party as if its ideas are serious, they accept a false equivalence between Republican crazy-talk and normative reality. Clearly, no honest analysis can support such coverage of a party whose leading candidates—including Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz—routinely say such nutty things that they make far-right extremists like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio sound relatively reasonable. As the respected (and centrist) political scientist Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution recently put it, “Republicans have become more an insurgency than a major political party capable of governing.” This “reality of asymmetric polarization, which the mainstream media and most good government groups have avoided discussing,” Mann notes, has come “at great costs to the country.” Quite obviously, it should also have cost its enablers their reputations for honesty, perspicacity, and prudence. But the pontification business in America is apparently a perpetual-motion machine that can run indefinitely on ideological hot air.
Fawning portrayals of the new House speaker insist he’s the Republicans’ savior. He’s not.
By Eric Alterman
The beatification of right-wing Republican Paul Ryan has become an almost annual ritual among the punditocracy. This bizarre tradition began when Ryan released his first budget as chair of the House Budget Committee in 2011, and repeated itself a year later when he rereleased it. It occurred a third time when Mitt Romney—under powerful punditocracy pressure—picked Ryan as his running mate for the 2012 presidential campaign. Now we are in the midst of yet another episode in this sorry franchise, as Republicans and their apologists and propagandists beg Ryan to use his superhero powers to save them from the lunatics who have taken over their party. It’s a measure of how deeply the Republicans have dived into know-nothing, do-nothing nihilism—and, no less significantly, how deeply our most prestigious pundits remain in denial about this fundamental fact—that Ryan has been able to continue the charade, despite having been repeatedly exposed as a math-challenged Ayn Rand acolyte.
The congressman’s emergence on the political scene earned him hosannas from both the center-left and center-right. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg led the pack: Writing beneath the headline “Good Plan!” followed by the adjectives “brave, radical, and smart,” Weisberg was particularly enamored with Ryan’s willingness to lower taxes on the wealthy as he subsequently undermined the Medicare payments upon which middle-class and poor people depend for their healthcare. On the other side of the center aisle, David Brooks insisted that Ryan had “set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion,” and credited him with the manly virtue of tackling “just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts.”
Brooks’s fellow New York Times pundits James B. Stewart and Joe Nocera also raised their pom-poms and lowered their intellectual standards to cheer Ryan on. The former misled his audience by insisting that Ryan’s plan would somehow raise taxes on the rich. The latter lamented that Democrats proved “gleeful” when they won a special congressional election that turned, in part, on the voters’ distaste for Ryan’s plan. The man was so wonderful, apparently, that the other guys should simply have forfeited the game and gone home.
Interestingly, some of the smitten already had an inkling that what they were selling was snake oil. Weisberg admitted that Ryan’s budget was full of “sleight-of-hand tricks” and wouldn’t actually come close to eliminating the deficit in the coming decade, “leaving $400 billion in annual deficits as far as the eye can see.” And Nocera dutifully acknowledged that “Ryan’s solution is wrongheaded,” before adding he was “right that Medicare is headed for trouble.”
In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Ryan’s budget would have “likely produce[d] the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase[d] poverty and inequality more than any other budget in recent times (and possibly in the nation’s history).” The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center calculated that people earning over $1 million a year could expect, on average, $265,000 above the $129,000 they would have gotten from Ryan’s proposed extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. Meanwhile, middle-class and poor Americans would likely see their incomes decline, as Medicare and other support programs would be slashed to the point of destruction. Even Ryan admitted that enactment of his Robin-Hood-in-reverse plan would lead to a significant increase in the deficit, an unavoidable fact despite the transparently dishonest assumptions on which the argument rested. These included science-fiction levels of predicted growth, together with the pie-in-the-sky promise to close unspecified tax loopholes. Those loopholes, it turns out, only seem to increase with every campaign contribution.
By now, the narrative is all but set in stone. Washington’s own St. Paul is saving the Republicans from their out-of-control Tea Party golem. As one of many breathless Politico headlines put it, Ryan “conquered the Freedom Caucus” by forcing its members to cave in on the demands that toppled the hapless John Boehner in return for Ryan’s willingness to accept the crown of House speaker and save the party from catastrophe. Once again, however, the devilish details contradict the story line. Ryan’s deal with the Freedom Caucus crazies, according to Politico itself, rests far more on capitulation than conquest. For starters, Ryan agreed to give the Freedom Caucus more power on the influential House Republican Steering Committee. He also promised to drop immigration reform from the Republican agenda and to follow the “Hastert rule,” by which no legislation can come to the floor unless it is supported in advance by a majority of Republicans—which means guess who? If the Mets had played this well against the Dodgers and the Cubs, they’d be watching the World Series on TV.
This “Ryan to the rescue” fairy tale is merely the latest manifestation of a corrupt bargain made by many members of the mainstream media. Unable to escape the intellectual straitjacket that requires them to cover the Republican Party as if its ideas are serious, they accept a false equivalence between Republican crazy-talk and normative reality. Clearly, no honest analysis can support such coverage of a party whose leading candidates—including Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz—routinely say such nutty things that they make far-right extremists like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio sound relatively reasonable. As the respected (and centrist) political scientist Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution recently put it, “Republicans have become more an insurgency than a major political party capable of governing.” This “reality of asymmetric polarization, which the mainstream media and most good government groups have avoided discussing,” Mann notes, has come “at great costs to the country.” Quite obviously, it should also have cost its enablers their reputations for honesty, perspicacity, and prudence. But the pontification business in America is apparently a perpetual-motion machine that can run indefinitely on ideological hot air.
Warm Kiss
Give Jeb Bush a ‘Warm Kiss’ Goodbye
After last night’s sorry performance, expect more calls for Bush to exit the race.
By Joan Walsh
fter Wednesday night’s cringe-inducing debate performance, there’s no longer any doubt: Jeb Bush doesn’t want to be president. There was one moment, early on, when it seemed otherwise, and Bush went directly at Senator Marco Rubio for his absenteeism.
“Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work,” Bush said. “Literally, the Senate, what is it, like a French work week? You get like three days where you have to show up? You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck in Florida as well. They’re looking for a senator that will fight for them each and every day.”
That was pretty feisty, for Jeb. But Rubio endured the attack calmly, and then, more in sorrow than anger, hit Bush for desperation. Senator John McCain missed a lot of votes in 2008, he observed, but Bush didn’t criticize him. “The only reason you are doing it now,” he said, “is because we are running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”
That was it. Bush didn’t follow up, which left the unmistakable impression that he thought Rubio was right. (And he probably was.) He was never a factor again—except maybe when he grossed out the audience by promising a “warm kiss” to any Democrat who wants to cut federal spending.
The debate made obvious what’s been pretty clear for quite a while: Bush is among the many lower-tier candidates who lacks a rationale for his campaign, and who needs to leave the race if so-called “establishment” Republicans want to defeat outsiders Donald Trump and Ben Carson. At the Daily Caller Thursday morning, Matt Lewis concluded, “It’s time for Jeb Bush to call it quits.” Expect more such calls in the days to come.
Other than that, I’m not sure what the debate proved, except that all the GOP candidates are very angry, and they’re running not so much against one another as against reality. Virtually all of them attacked the allegedly liberal mainstream media; ABC News counted 12 media hits; I lost count. From Rubio, who blamed the media for hyping his absenteeism while ignoring that of Senator Barack Obama in 2008, to Senator Ted Cruz, who played the unlikely role of peacemaker among his rivals as he attacked the moderators for baiting them, most of the candidates seized a moment to bash journalists.
It got lots of audience applause and lit up social media, but nobody is likely to get the boost Newt Gingrich got in 2012, when he hit moderator Juan Williams in the Fox debate in South Carolina. By now it feels standard for GOP candidates to hit the media, malign debate moderators, and mostly ignore the issues.
For instance, the same day the House passed a landmark budget agreement under departing Speaker John Boehner, the candidates hardly mentioned it, with Senator Rand Paul making a wan promise to filibuster the deal (he, like Bush, ought to be finding his way to the exit). There was a chance for a genuinely dramatic debate on Social Security, but erstwhile program defenders Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump surrendered. Huckabee defended Social Security recipients but not the program, calling it “confiscation.” It would have been a great time for Trump to jump in—but he seemed to have fallen asleep, after landing an early punch at Ohio Governor John Kasich, the supposedly working-class candidate, for going to work for Lehman Brothers.
All eyes were on Kasich, whom the media keep heralding as a potential successor to Jeb Bush for the mantle of establishment favorite. But after getting a lot of attention for attacking Trump and Carson as “crazy” earlier in the week—for their extremism on immigration and ending Medicare, respectively—Kasich overplayed his moment. He berated moderator John Harwood for not letting him lay into his rivals early on—when Harwood was actually inviting him to lay into his rivals.
Kasich did so much shouting that Larry David ought to play him on Saturday Night Live next, with different hair. Seriously, he was angrier, often inappropriately, than David’s caricature of Senator Bernie Sanders. Next debate, if he’s part of it, he should skip the Red Bull.
Trump and Carson were so much less impressive and sharp, in my opinion, than any of the single-digit guys. But I’m not going to predict what happens. Ben Carson showed, again, that he’s totally out of his depth. Confronted with evidence that his 10 percent “tithing” plan would open a huge deficit, he said he was proposing more like 15 percent—and he’d “get rid of all those deductions and loopholes.” He made no sense. Carson has the strange habit of closing his eyes for an unnerving amount of time when he answers questions, as though he hopes his interrogator will just go away. But I’ve thought Carson was bad in all three debates, and he’s continued to rise.
Likewise, in all three debates, Rubio has been judged the winner—only to see his poll standing tick up by a couple of digits, if that. This time though, Rubio’s strong debate performance could matter more, because it came at the direct expense of Jeb Bush. If Bush left the field, and his money and roughly 8 percent support went to Rubio, the freshman Florida senator would be creeping up toward 20 percent, within shouting distance of Trump and Carson. If Bush stays around, Rubio will have a tougher time jumping into that top tier—but a much easier time than Bush will. If Bush jumps anywhere at all, expect it to be out of the race.
A note to readers: My daughter is going to work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Iowa next week. At 18, she cast her first vote for Clinton in the California primary, so this is a dream job, and I’m very proud of her. I will continue to cover the campaign, and the issues that animate it, fairly and honestly. In the interest of transparency, though, I wanted to share the news with readers.
After last night’s sorry performance, expect more calls for Bush to exit the race.
By Joan Walsh
fter Wednesday night’s cringe-inducing debate performance, there’s no longer any doubt: Jeb Bush doesn’t want to be president. There was one moment, early on, when it seemed otherwise, and Bush went directly at Senator Marco Rubio for his absenteeism.
“Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work,” Bush said. “Literally, the Senate, what is it, like a French work week? You get like three days where you have to show up? You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck in Florida as well. They’re looking for a senator that will fight for them each and every day.”
That was pretty feisty, for Jeb. But Rubio endured the attack calmly, and then, more in sorrow than anger, hit Bush for desperation. Senator John McCain missed a lot of votes in 2008, he observed, but Bush didn’t criticize him. “The only reason you are doing it now,” he said, “is because we are running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”
That was it. Bush didn’t follow up, which left the unmistakable impression that he thought Rubio was right. (And he probably was.) He was never a factor again—except maybe when he grossed out the audience by promising a “warm kiss” to any Democrat who wants to cut federal spending.
The debate made obvious what’s been pretty clear for quite a while: Bush is among the many lower-tier candidates who lacks a rationale for his campaign, and who needs to leave the race if so-called “establishment” Republicans want to defeat outsiders Donald Trump and Ben Carson. At the Daily Caller Thursday morning, Matt Lewis concluded, “It’s time for Jeb Bush to call it quits.” Expect more such calls in the days to come.
Other than that, I’m not sure what the debate proved, except that all the GOP candidates are very angry, and they’re running not so much against one another as against reality. Virtually all of them attacked the allegedly liberal mainstream media; ABC News counted 12 media hits; I lost count. From Rubio, who blamed the media for hyping his absenteeism while ignoring that of Senator Barack Obama in 2008, to Senator Ted Cruz, who played the unlikely role of peacemaker among his rivals as he attacked the moderators for baiting them, most of the candidates seized a moment to bash journalists.
It got lots of audience applause and lit up social media, but nobody is likely to get the boost Newt Gingrich got in 2012, when he hit moderator Juan Williams in the Fox debate in South Carolina. By now it feels standard for GOP candidates to hit the media, malign debate moderators, and mostly ignore the issues.
For instance, the same day the House passed a landmark budget agreement under departing Speaker John Boehner, the candidates hardly mentioned it, with Senator Rand Paul making a wan promise to filibuster the deal (he, like Bush, ought to be finding his way to the exit). There was a chance for a genuinely dramatic debate on Social Security, but erstwhile program defenders Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump surrendered. Huckabee defended Social Security recipients but not the program, calling it “confiscation.” It would have been a great time for Trump to jump in—but he seemed to have fallen asleep, after landing an early punch at Ohio Governor John Kasich, the supposedly working-class candidate, for going to work for Lehman Brothers.
All eyes were on Kasich, whom the media keep heralding as a potential successor to Jeb Bush for the mantle of establishment favorite. But after getting a lot of attention for attacking Trump and Carson as “crazy” earlier in the week—for their extremism on immigration and ending Medicare, respectively—Kasich overplayed his moment. He berated moderator John Harwood for not letting him lay into his rivals early on—when Harwood was actually inviting him to lay into his rivals.
Kasich did so much shouting that Larry David ought to play him on Saturday Night Live next, with different hair. Seriously, he was angrier, often inappropriately, than David’s caricature of Senator Bernie Sanders. Next debate, if he’s part of it, he should skip the Red Bull.
Trump and Carson were so much less impressive and sharp, in my opinion, than any of the single-digit guys. But I’m not going to predict what happens. Ben Carson showed, again, that he’s totally out of his depth. Confronted with evidence that his 10 percent “tithing” plan would open a huge deficit, he said he was proposing more like 15 percent—and he’d “get rid of all those deductions and loopholes.” He made no sense. Carson has the strange habit of closing his eyes for an unnerving amount of time when he answers questions, as though he hopes his interrogator will just go away. But I’ve thought Carson was bad in all three debates, and he’s continued to rise.
Likewise, in all three debates, Rubio has been judged the winner—only to see his poll standing tick up by a couple of digits, if that. This time though, Rubio’s strong debate performance could matter more, because it came at the direct expense of Jeb Bush. If Bush left the field, and his money and roughly 8 percent support went to Rubio, the freshman Florida senator would be creeping up toward 20 percent, within shouting distance of Trump and Carson. If Bush stays around, Rubio will have a tougher time jumping into that top tier—but a much easier time than Bush will. If Bush jumps anywhere at all, expect it to be out of the race.
A note to readers: My daughter is going to work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Iowa next week. At 18, she cast her first vote for Clinton in the California primary, so this is a dream job, and I’m very proud of her. I will continue to cover the campaign, and the issues that animate it, fairly and honestly. In the interest of transparency, though, I wanted to share the news with readers.
Softball questions
Why Conservatives Are Decrying ‘Media Bias’ in the Presidential Debates
Republicans have decided that the Democratic candidates got only softball questions, but that’s not true.
By Joshua Holland
The Republican candidates took a number of swipes at the moderators of Wednesday night’s debate on CNBC for their supposedly biased and substance-free questions. They were picking the lowest of low-hanging fruit, going for an easy way to endear themselves to a conservative audience. Texas Senator Ted Cruz probably got the biggest round of applause of the evening when he said, “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media.” And the crowd really went nuts when he added that “every fawning question” asked of the Democratic candidates during their October 13 debate on CNN amounted to, “Which of you is more handsome and why?” After the show, Donald Trump echoed that sentiment, musing that perhaps the Democrats had somehow “negotiated a better deal” with CNN.
Judging by conservative reactions on social media, it’s now become an article of faith that, while the CNBC moderators were out for blood, CNN’s moderators had “lobbed softball questions” at the Democrats. After Wednesday’s debate, Ben Carson’s campaign called for a “revolt” against… someone, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Prebius was forced to issue a statement that read: “The performance by the CNBC moderators was extremely disappointing and did a disservice to their network, our candidates, and voters.”
But it’s not true that the Democrats were given an easy ride. Here’s the very first question Anderson Cooper posed to Hillary Clinton during the Democratic debate:
“Secretary Clinton, I want to start with you. Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency.
“You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the ‘gold standard.’ Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it.
“Will you say anything to get elected?”
As questions go, that was more dagger than softball. After Clinton claimed that her positions had been consistent, Cooper followed up:
“Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, ‘take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.’
“Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, ‘being kind of moderate and center.’ Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?”
Later, Cooper asked her about e-mail-gate: “For the last eight months, you haven’t been able to put this issue behind you. You dismissed it; you joked about it; you called it a mistake. What does that say about your ability to handle far more challenging crises as president?”
Contrast that with the question that set off Ted Cruz’s rant:
“Congressional Republicans, Democrats and the White House are about to strike a compromise that would raise the debt limit, prevent a government shutdown and calm financial markets that fear of—another Washington-created crisis is on the way. Does your opposition to it show that you’re not the kind of problem-solver American voters want?”
In response to that substantive question about an issue a lot of people care about, Cruz used up his entire time lamenting that they weren’t “talking about the substantive issues people care about,” and didn’t bother to answer.
In the Democratic debate, Cooper homed in on what many see as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s Achilles heel: “A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
After Sanders talked briefly about inequality and universal healthcare, Cooper followed up with this “softball”:
“The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. You—the—the Republican attack ad against you in a general election—it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not a capitalist.
“Doesn’t—doesn’t that ad write itself?”
On Wednesday night, Florida Senator Marco Rubio accused moderator Carl Quintanilla of reciting “a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents” as he dodged a question about some of his well-publicized financial management problems.
It was a tough question, but no tougher than this question to Jim Webb during the October 13 debate: “Senator Webb, in 2006, you called affirmative action ‘state-sponsored racism.’ In 2010, you wrote an op/ed saying it discriminates against whites. Given that nearly half the Democratic Party is non-white, aren’t you out of step with where the Democratic Party is now?”
I could go on. Sanders, who had a high-profile clash with Black Lives Matter activists earlier in the campaign was asked, “Do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?” Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley was forced to defend the “zero tolerance” police policies he pushed as mayor of Baltimore. Anderson Cooper came close to demanding to know what former Republican Lincoln Chaffee was even doing on the stage.
All of these questions probed the candidates’ greatest perceived weaknesses. The CNBC moderators did the same thing Wednesday night when they asked Carly Fiorina about her disastrous stint at Hewlett-Packard. It’s what moderators should do.
But the tough questions that marked the Democratic debate were immediately forgotten when the Republican candidates started working the referees with cries of media bias. Which might be expected, given that it reinforced one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in American politics: that members of the media–like academics and scientists–are hopelessly biased against Republicans.
It’s true that mainstream journalists, like all humans, have various biases. But it’s a big group, with diverse and complex biases. How they tend to help or hinder the two major parties on specific issues can make for hours of interesting debate. But the simplistic narrative that the media are in the tank for Democrats doesn’t. It just dumbs down the discourse and convinces Republican voters that their candidates’ facile charges that all of society’s ills are the fault of the federal government might seem sensible if not for the media’s pernicious influence. In that view, conservatism can never fail—it can only be failed by poor messengers and a tilted playing field.
Repeatedly calling out the moderators for their ostensible bias might have offered some tasty red meat for the base, but as John Nichols put it, for everyone else it made for “an empty night of whining about the media, petty squabbling, and lost opportunities for the Republicans who would be president.”
Republicans have decided that the Democratic candidates got only softball questions, but that’s not true.
By Joshua Holland
The Republican candidates took a number of swipes at the moderators of Wednesday night’s debate on CNBC for their supposedly biased and substance-free questions. They were picking the lowest of low-hanging fruit, going for an easy way to endear themselves to a conservative audience. Texas Senator Ted Cruz probably got the biggest round of applause of the evening when he said, “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media.” And the crowd really went nuts when he added that “every fawning question” asked of the Democratic candidates during their October 13 debate on CNN amounted to, “Which of you is more handsome and why?” After the show, Donald Trump echoed that sentiment, musing that perhaps the Democrats had somehow “negotiated a better deal” with CNN.
Judging by conservative reactions on social media, it’s now become an article of faith that, while the CNBC moderators were out for blood, CNN’s moderators had “lobbed softball questions” at the Democrats. After Wednesday’s debate, Ben Carson’s campaign called for a “revolt” against… someone, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Prebius was forced to issue a statement that read: “The performance by the CNBC moderators was extremely disappointing and did a disservice to their network, our candidates, and voters.”
But it’s not true that the Democrats were given an easy ride. Here’s the very first question Anderson Cooper posed to Hillary Clinton during the Democratic debate:
“Secretary Clinton, I want to start with you. Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency.
“You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the ‘gold standard.’ Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it.
“Will you say anything to get elected?”
As questions go, that was more dagger than softball. After Clinton claimed that her positions had been consistent, Cooper followed up:
“Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, ‘take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.’
“Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, ‘being kind of moderate and center.’ Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?”
Later, Cooper asked her about e-mail-gate: “For the last eight months, you haven’t been able to put this issue behind you. You dismissed it; you joked about it; you called it a mistake. What does that say about your ability to handle far more challenging crises as president?”
Contrast that with the question that set off Ted Cruz’s rant:
“Congressional Republicans, Democrats and the White House are about to strike a compromise that would raise the debt limit, prevent a government shutdown and calm financial markets that fear of—another Washington-created crisis is on the way. Does your opposition to it show that you’re not the kind of problem-solver American voters want?”
In response to that substantive question about an issue a lot of people care about, Cruz used up his entire time lamenting that they weren’t “talking about the substantive issues people care about,” and didn’t bother to answer.
In the Democratic debate, Cooper homed in on what many see as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s Achilles heel: “A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
After Sanders talked briefly about inequality and universal healthcare, Cooper followed up with this “softball”:
“The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. You—the—the Republican attack ad against you in a general election—it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not a capitalist.
“Doesn’t—doesn’t that ad write itself?”
On Wednesday night, Florida Senator Marco Rubio accused moderator Carl Quintanilla of reciting “a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents” as he dodged a question about some of his well-publicized financial management problems.
It was a tough question, but no tougher than this question to Jim Webb during the October 13 debate: “Senator Webb, in 2006, you called affirmative action ‘state-sponsored racism.’ In 2010, you wrote an op/ed saying it discriminates against whites. Given that nearly half the Democratic Party is non-white, aren’t you out of step with where the Democratic Party is now?”
I could go on. Sanders, who had a high-profile clash with Black Lives Matter activists earlier in the campaign was asked, “Do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?” Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley was forced to defend the “zero tolerance” police policies he pushed as mayor of Baltimore. Anderson Cooper came close to demanding to know what former Republican Lincoln Chaffee was even doing on the stage.
All of these questions probed the candidates’ greatest perceived weaknesses. The CNBC moderators did the same thing Wednesday night when they asked Carly Fiorina about her disastrous stint at Hewlett-Packard. It’s what moderators should do.
But the tough questions that marked the Democratic debate were immediately forgotten when the Republican candidates started working the referees with cries of media bias. Which might be expected, given that it reinforced one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in American politics: that members of the media–like academics and scientists–are hopelessly biased against Republicans.
It’s true that mainstream journalists, like all humans, have various biases. But it’s a big group, with diverse and complex biases. How they tend to help or hinder the two major parties on specific issues can make for hours of interesting debate. But the simplistic narrative that the media are in the tank for Democrats doesn’t. It just dumbs down the discourse and convinces Republican voters that their candidates’ facile charges that all of society’s ills are the fault of the federal government might seem sensible if not for the media’s pernicious influence. In that view, conservatism can never fail—it can only be failed by poor messengers and a tilted playing field.
Repeatedly calling out the moderators for their ostensible bias might have offered some tasty red meat for the base, but as John Nichols put it, for everyone else it made for “an empty night of whining about the media, petty squabbling, and lost opportunities for the Republicans who would be president.”
Migrant boat sinks, more will follow...
Greece searches for 34 migrants off Lesbos, five children drown
By Michele Kambas and Angeliki Koutantou
An extensive search was underway off a Greek island on Thursday for at least 34 people missing after their boat sank in one of the largest maritime disasters since a massive refugee influx began this year.
Five children, two men and one woman were known to have drowned after the wooden boat, crammed with more than 280 people, sank near the island of Lesbos on Wednesday. Eight more people drowned at two other locations, bringing the day's total dead to 16.
Some 242 people were safely plucked out of the sea after their boat sank about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) north of Lesbos in rough seas, the coastguard said.
At least 15 children between the ages of three months and ten years were taken to hospital with hypothermia, according to the U.N. refugees agency UNHCR.
More than 500,000 refugees and migrants have entered Greece through its outlying islands since January, traveling on to central and northern Europe as part of the biggest humanitarian crisis on the continent in two decades.
Lesbos, located less than 10 km from the coast of Turkey, has been a primary gateway for thousands of migrants crossing the European Union's outermost border. There has been a surge recently as migrants attempt to beat the worsening weather that makes sea crossings more dangerous.
Refugees report that smugglers now offer "discounts" of up to 50 percent on tickets costing from 1,100 to 1,400 euros ($1,206 to $1,536) to make the journey on inflatable boats in bad weather, the UNHCR said.
Circumstances of the vessel's sinking on Wednesday afternoon were unclear. Smugglers had to force passengers onto the boat at gunpoint because they were fearful about its seaworthiness, Greek state television quoted witnesses as saying.
It sank when its upper deck crammed with people collapsed onto the lower desk, broadcaster ERT reported.
Quoting newly arrived refugees, UNHCR said smugglers based in Turkey were looking for larger boats like the one that sank on Wednesday. It was capable of carrying hundreds of people at a time at prices between 1,800 and 2,500 euros per passenger.
Elsewhere, another 123 people were rescued off the islands of Samos and in another incident off Lesbos. There were 11 children among the 16 people drowned on Wednesday, the coast guard said. A baby has been missing for more than 12 hours.
Doctors and volunteers on Lesbos made desperate efforts to help a baby breathe, TV footage showed. Some of the survivors were sheltered in a chapel, a Reuters witness said.
"We have warned for weeks that an already bad situation could get even worse if desperate refugees and migrants must continue to resort to smugglers who send them out to sea despite the worsening weather," said Alessandra Morelli, UNHCR's senior operations coordinator for Greece.
The latest sinkings came after an EU leaders meeting on Sunday agreed to boost cooperation and provide UN-aided housing for 100,000 people, half of them in Greece. The EU is expected to cover costs for accommodation for 20,000 in leased apartments in addition to temporary camps for 30,000 people.
Nations needed to stop avoiding responsibility in the crisis, said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
"I am convinced that we won't get anywhere if we just point the finger at each other, if one considers that the responsibility lies with the other," Steinmeier said during a meeting in Athens with Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos.
By Michele Kambas and Angeliki Koutantou
An extensive search was underway off a Greek island on Thursday for at least 34 people missing after their boat sank in one of the largest maritime disasters since a massive refugee influx began this year.
Five children, two men and one woman were known to have drowned after the wooden boat, crammed with more than 280 people, sank near the island of Lesbos on Wednesday. Eight more people drowned at two other locations, bringing the day's total dead to 16.
Some 242 people were safely plucked out of the sea after their boat sank about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) north of Lesbos in rough seas, the coastguard said.
At least 15 children between the ages of three months and ten years were taken to hospital with hypothermia, according to the U.N. refugees agency UNHCR.
More than 500,000 refugees and migrants have entered Greece through its outlying islands since January, traveling on to central and northern Europe as part of the biggest humanitarian crisis on the continent in two decades.
Lesbos, located less than 10 km from the coast of Turkey, has been a primary gateway for thousands of migrants crossing the European Union's outermost border. There has been a surge recently as migrants attempt to beat the worsening weather that makes sea crossings more dangerous.
Refugees report that smugglers now offer "discounts" of up to 50 percent on tickets costing from 1,100 to 1,400 euros ($1,206 to $1,536) to make the journey on inflatable boats in bad weather, the UNHCR said.
Circumstances of the vessel's sinking on Wednesday afternoon were unclear. Smugglers had to force passengers onto the boat at gunpoint because they were fearful about its seaworthiness, Greek state television quoted witnesses as saying.
It sank when its upper deck crammed with people collapsed onto the lower desk, broadcaster ERT reported.
Quoting newly arrived refugees, UNHCR said smugglers based in Turkey were looking for larger boats like the one that sank on Wednesday. It was capable of carrying hundreds of people at a time at prices between 1,800 and 2,500 euros per passenger.
Elsewhere, another 123 people were rescued off the islands of Samos and in another incident off Lesbos. There were 11 children among the 16 people drowned on Wednesday, the coast guard said. A baby has been missing for more than 12 hours.
Doctors and volunteers on Lesbos made desperate efforts to help a baby breathe, TV footage showed. Some of the survivors were sheltered in a chapel, a Reuters witness said.
"We have warned for weeks that an already bad situation could get even worse if desperate refugees and migrants must continue to resort to smugglers who send them out to sea despite the worsening weather," said Alessandra Morelli, UNHCR's senior operations coordinator for Greece.
The latest sinkings came after an EU leaders meeting on Sunday agreed to boost cooperation and provide UN-aided housing for 100,000 people, half of them in Greece. The EU is expected to cover costs for accommodation for 20,000 in leased apartments in addition to temporary camps for 30,000 people.
Nations needed to stop avoiding responsibility in the crisis, said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
"I am convinced that we won't get anywhere if we just point the finger at each other, if one considers that the responsibility lies with the other," Steinmeier said during a meeting in Athens with Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos.
Anti-Knowledge
The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge
by Mike Lofgren
In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic culture in America.
Some common-sense philosophers have observed this point over the years. “Genuine ignorance is . . . profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas,” observed psychologist John Dewey.
Or, as humorist Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”
Fifty years ago, if a person did not know who the prime minister of Great Britain was, what the conflict in Vietnam was about, or the barest rudiments of how a nuclear reaction worked, he would shrug his shoulders and move on. And if he didn’t bother to know those things, he was in all likelihood politically apathetic and confined his passionate arguing to topics like sports or the attributes of the opposite sex.
There were exceptions, like the Birchers’ theory that fluoridation was a monstrous communist conspiracy, but they were mostly confined to the fringes. Certainly, political candidates with national aspirations steered clear of such balderdash.
At present, however, a person can be blissfully ignorant of how to locate Kenya on a map, but know to a metaphysical certitude that Barack Obama was born there, because he learned it from Fox News. Likewise, he can be unable to differentiate a species from a phylum but be confident from viewing the 700 Club that evolution is “politically correct” hooey and that the earth is 6,000 years old.
And he may never have read the Constitution and have no clue about the Commerce Clause, but believe with an angry righteousness that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.
This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author’s note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn’t). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.
It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances. And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes.
Why the Ignorance?
Journalist Michael Tomasky has attempted to answer the question as to what Ben Carson’s popularity tells us about the American people after making a detour into asking a question about the man himself: why is an accomplished neurosurgeon such a nincompoop in another field? “Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board.”
Well, not necessarily. English unfortunately doesn’t have a precise word for the German “Fachidiot,” a narrowly specialized person accomplished in his own field but a blithering idiot outside it. In any case, a surgeon is basically a skilled auto mechanic who is not bothered by the sight of blood and palpitating organs (and an owner of a high-dollar ride like a Porsche knows that a specialized mechanic commands labor rates roughly comparable to a doctor).
We need the surgeon’s skills on pain of agonizing death, and reward him commensurately, but that does not make him a Voltaire. Still, it makes one wonder: if Carson the surgeon believes evolution is a hoax, where does he think the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plague hospitals come from?
Tomasky expresses astonishment that Carson’s jaw-dropping comments make him more popular among Republican voters, but he concludes without fully answering the question he posed. It is an important question: what has happened to the American people, or at least a significant portion of them?
Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism with fundamentalist revivalism.
The current wave, which now threatens to swamp our political culture, began in a similar fashion with the rise to prominence in the 1970s of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But to a far greater degree than previous outbreaks, fundamentalism has merged its personnel, its policies, its tactics and its fate with a major American political party, the Republicans.
An Infrastructure of Know-Nothing-ism
Buttressing this merger is a vast support structure of media, foundations, pressure groups and even a thriving cottage industry of fake historians and phony scientists. From Fox News to the Discovery Institute (which exists solely to “disprove” evolution), and from the Heritage Foundation (which propagandizes that tax cuts increase revenue despite massive empirical evidence to the contrary) to bogus “historians” like David Barton (who confected a fraudulent biography of a piously devout Thomas Jefferson that had to be withdrawn by the publisher), the anti-knowledge crowd has created an immense ecosystem of political disinformation.
Thanks to publishing houses like Regnery and the conservative boutique imprints of more respectable houses like Simon & Schuster (a division of CBS), America has been flooded with cut-and-paste rants by Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin, Parson Weems-style ghosted biographies allegedly by Bill O’Reilly, and the inimitable stream of consciousness hallucinating of Glenn Beck.
Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the political bloodstream in the United States.
Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians.
The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means. Likewise, there is a baseline opposition to the prevailing secular culture, and adherents are frequently warned by church authority figures against succumbing to the snares and temptations of “the world.” Consequently, they retreat into the echo chamber of their own counterculture: if they didn’t hear it on Fox News or from a televangelist, it never happened.
For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.
We saw this mindset on display during the Republican debate in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday night. Even though it was moderated by Wall Street-friendly CNBC, which exists solely to talk up the stock market, the candidates were uniformly upset that the moderators would presume to ask difficult questions of people aspiring to be president. They were clearly outside their comfort zone of the Fox News studio.
The candidates drew cheers from the hard-core believers in the audience, however, by attacking the media, as if moderators Lawrence Kudlow and Rick Santelli, both notorious shills for Wall Street, were I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebusnearly had an aneurism over the candidates’ alleged harsh treatment.
State-Sponsored Stupidity
It is when these forces of anti-knowledge seize the power of government that the real damage gets done. Under Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia government harassed with subpoenas a University of Virginia professor whose academic views contradicted Cuccinelli’s political agenda.
Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. A school textbook in Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating it had nothing to do with the Civil War).
This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn’t agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government’s attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.
It is not surprising that Carson, himself a Seventh Day Adventist, should receive his core support from Republicans who identify as fundamentalists. Among the rest of the GOP pack, it is noteworthy that it is precisely those seeking the fundamentalist vote, like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who are also notorious for making inflammatory and unhinged comments that sound like little more than deliberate trolling to those who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid (Donald Trump is sui generis).
In all probability, Carson will flame out like Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and all the other former panjandrums of a theological movement conservatism that revels in anti-knowledge. But he will have left his mark, as they did, on a Republican Party that inexorably moves further to the right, and the eventual nominee will have to tailor his campaign to a base that gets ever more intransigent as each new messiah of the month promises to lead them into a New Jerusalem unmoored to a stubborn and profane thing called facts.
by Mike Lofgren
In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic culture in America.
Some common-sense philosophers have observed this point over the years. “Genuine ignorance is . . . profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas,” observed psychologist John Dewey.
Or, as humorist Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”
Fifty years ago, if a person did not know who the prime minister of Great Britain was, what the conflict in Vietnam was about, or the barest rudiments of how a nuclear reaction worked, he would shrug his shoulders and move on. And if he didn’t bother to know those things, he was in all likelihood politically apathetic and confined his passionate arguing to topics like sports or the attributes of the opposite sex.
There were exceptions, like the Birchers’ theory that fluoridation was a monstrous communist conspiracy, but they were mostly confined to the fringes. Certainly, political candidates with national aspirations steered clear of such balderdash.
At present, however, a person can be blissfully ignorant of how to locate Kenya on a map, but know to a metaphysical certitude that Barack Obama was born there, because he learned it from Fox News. Likewise, he can be unable to differentiate a species from a phylum but be confident from viewing the 700 Club that evolution is “politically correct” hooey and that the earth is 6,000 years old.
And he may never have read the Constitution and have no clue about the Commerce Clause, but believe with an angry righteousness that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.
This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author’s note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn’t). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.
It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances. And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes.
Why the Ignorance?
Journalist Michael Tomasky has attempted to answer the question as to what Ben Carson’s popularity tells us about the American people after making a detour into asking a question about the man himself: why is an accomplished neurosurgeon such a nincompoop in another field? “Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board.”
Well, not necessarily. English unfortunately doesn’t have a precise word for the German “Fachidiot,” a narrowly specialized person accomplished in his own field but a blithering idiot outside it. In any case, a surgeon is basically a skilled auto mechanic who is not bothered by the sight of blood and palpitating organs (and an owner of a high-dollar ride like a Porsche knows that a specialized mechanic commands labor rates roughly comparable to a doctor).
We need the surgeon’s skills on pain of agonizing death, and reward him commensurately, but that does not make him a Voltaire. Still, it makes one wonder: if Carson the surgeon believes evolution is a hoax, where does he think the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plague hospitals come from?
Tomasky expresses astonishment that Carson’s jaw-dropping comments make him more popular among Republican voters, but he concludes without fully answering the question he posed. It is an important question: what has happened to the American people, or at least a significant portion of them?
Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism with fundamentalist revivalism.
The current wave, which now threatens to swamp our political culture, began in a similar fashion with the rise to prominence in the 1970s of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But to a far greater degree than previous outbreaks, fundamentalism has merged its personnel, its policies, its tactics and its fate with a major American political party, the Republicans.
An Infrastructure of Know-Nothing-ism
Buttressing this merger is a vast support structure of media, foundations, pressure groups and even a thriving cottage industry of fake historians and phony scientists. From Fox News to the Discovery Institute (which exists solely to “disprove” evolution), and from the Heritage Foundation (which propagandizes that tax cuts increase revenue despite massive empirical evidence to the contrary) to bogus “historians” like David Barton (who confected a fraudulent biography of a piously devout Thomas Jefferson that had to be withdrawn by the publisher), the anti-knowledge crowd has created an immense ecosystem of political disinformation.
Thanks to publishing houses like Regnery and the conservative boutique imprints of more respectable houses like Simon & Schuster (a division of CBS), America has been flooded with cut-and-paste rants by Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin, Parson Weems-style ghosted biographies allegedly by Bill O’Reilly, and the inimitable stream of consciousness hallucinating of Glenn Beck.
Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the political bloodstream in the United States.
Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians.
The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means. Likewise, there is a baseline opposition to the prevailing secular culture, and adherents are frequently warned by church authority figures against succumbing to the snares and temptations of “the world.” Consequently, they retreat into the echo chamber of their own counterculture: if they didn’t hear it on Fox News or from a televangelist, it never happened.
For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.
We saw this mindset on display during the Republican debate in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday night. Even though it was moderated by Wall Street-friendly CNBC, which exists solely to talk up the stock market, the candidates were uniformly upset that the moderators would presume to ask difficult questions of people aspiring to be president. They were clearly outside their comfort zone of the Fox News studio.
The candidates drew cheers from the hard-core believers in the audience, however, by attacking the media, as if moderators Lawrence Kudlow and Rick Santelli, both notorious shills for Wall Street, were I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebusnearly had an aneurism over the candidates’ alleged harsh treatment.
State-Sponsored Stupidity
It is when these forces of anti-knowledge seize the power of government that the real damage gets done. Under Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia government harassed with subpoenas a University of Virginia professor whose academic views contradicted Cuccinelli’s political agenda.
Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. A school textbook in Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating it had nothing to do with the Civil War).
This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn’t agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government’s attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.
It is not surprising that Carson, himself a Seventh Day Adventist, should receive his core support from Republicans who identify as fundamentalists. Among the rest of the GOP pack, it is noteworthy that it is precisely those seeking the fundamentalist vote, like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who are also notorious for making inflammatory and unhinged comments that sound like little more than deliberate trolling to those who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid (Donald Trump is sui generis).
In all probability, Carson will flame out like Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and all the other former panjandrums of a theological movement conservatism that revels in anti-knowledge. But he will have left his mark, as they did, on a Republican Party that inexorably moves further to the right, and the eventual nominee will have to tailor his campaign to a base that gets ever more intransigent as each new messiah of the month promises to lead them into a New Jerusalem unmoored to a stubborn and profane thing called facts.
Won the GOP Debate
Forget the Polls. Google Tells Us Who Really Won the GOP Debate.
A spin through the world's biggest search engine shows what people think about the Republican candidates.
By AJ Vicens
A few dominant narratives emerged from Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate in Boulder, Colorado. One: The GOP and its supporters hate the media. Two: Donald Trump polls well with the GOP base, regardless of his debate performance. And three: Jeb Bush's campaign might be toast.
But there's also something to be learned from Google, the company that seems to know what we're thinking before we even think it. The folks at Google Trends compiled a mound of data during the debate, looking at real-time searches of the candidates, what people are trying to learn about each of them, and the sheer dominance of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during the night's undercard debate that preceded the main event.
One Google interactive looked at which candidate people searched for after searching for another candidate. In other words, after people looked up Trump, whom did they search for next? The answer: Ben Carson. Click on a candidate below to see the related candidates.
Clearly, Trump was winning that race. But it shifted after the debate, with Carson and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida gaining some ground.
That seems to coincide with one of the story lines from the debate: Rubio handled questions about his voting absences and finances fairly well, and he may have supplanted Bush as the go-to establishment candidate in the race.
A spin through the world's biggest search engine shows what people think about the Republican candidates.
By AJ Vicens
A few dominant narratives emerged from Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate in Boulder, Colorado. One: The GOP and its supporters hate the media. Two: Donald Trump polls well with the GOP base, regardless of his debate performance. And three: Jeb Bush's campaign might be toast.
But there's also something to be learned from Google, the company that seems to know what we're thinking before we even think it. The folks at Google Trends compiled a mound of data during the debate, looking at real-time searches of the candidates, what people are trying to learn about each of them, and the sheer dominance of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during the night's undercard debate that preceded the main event.
One Google interactive looked at which candidate people searched for after searching for another candidate. In other words, after people looked up Trump, whom did they search for next? The answer: Ben Carson. Click on a candidate below to see the related candidates.
That seems to coincide with one of the story lines from the debate: Rubio handled questions about his voting absences and finances fairly well, and he may have supplanted Bush as the go-to establishment candidate in the race.
Bush donors
Rubio team goes after Bush donors
On conference call with donors, Rubio team urges backers to not attack Bush.
By Eli Stokols
For months, Republican donors viewed Marco Rubio as a growth stock. After his bull run in Wednesday’s debate, investors are buying.
It started even before the debate in Boulder ended. Donors who had been getting calls from Rubio’s Colorado campaign chairman for two months were suddenly emailing him. Seven donors he’d been working couldn’t convey their messages fast enough: I’m in.
“The movement in donors and activists is significant and palpable,” said Josh Penry. “People saw Marco last night and they saw a conservative and they saw a winner. The people who always liked him but doubted his polish now see a guy on stage they can see next to Hillary Clinton.”
What Penry felt in Colorado was happening nationwide. In the hours after the debate, Rubio’s campaign saw its online fundraising numbers skyrocket.
As of 3 p.m. Thursday, Rubio had raised $750,000 in online contributions from more than 14,000 unique donations, according to a top campaign official. Rubio wasn’t the only one to see a boost – competitor Ted Cruz, who scored one of the most talked-about lines in the debate, raised $772,000, and even more quickly, his team said.
But for Rubio, the influx of donors marks a gain against rival Jeb Bush in a feud for establishment money that has been simmering for weeks.
Rubio aides Todd Harris and Anna Rogers held a conference call with Rubio’s financial backers on Thursday, and told them not to expect a massive immediate rush of defections among Bush’s donor base. There are heavy emotions involved when people make a switch like this, Harris said, and the campaign shouldn’t expect folks to just turn on a dime.
But big donors seem ready to move, according to some Rubio backers. Penry declined to discuss specific Colorado donors, although one of the biggest gets in the state, Larry Mizel, appears to be on board.
“Phones have been ringing off the hook all day,” the campaign official said. “Fundraisers already scheduled are seeing increased attendance—and lots of people want to host events."
Mizel, a Sheldon Adelson confidante and member of his Republican Jewish Coalition, met with Rubio earlier this week, spent Wednesday afternoon in the spin room and watched the debate in person. Thursday morning, he walked into the Brown Palace Hotel downtown for a Rubio fundraiser (a make-up for a previously postponed event) carrying a check.
“He likes to keep his name out of it and work behind the scenes, but he’s with Marco,” said a source close to Mizel.
Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei, the most sought after Colorado Republican donor who remains uncommitted to a candidate, was also in the audience to see Rubio’s debate and his devastating counter-punch that leveled Jeb Bush. But Maffei, who bought six tickets to the debate and brought along his main political adviser, has yet to tip to his associates if he’s any closer to putting his support behind Rubio or any GOP presidential hopeful.
While Wednesday night’s debate may turn out to be a major turning point in the nomination fight, the moment when big money donors shift from Bush to Rubio, the senator’s campaign team knows that they have a lot of work to do to catch up to Bush’s organizational strength.
Bush’s camp knows it too. His brother warned against predicting the end of Bush’s campaign. “Four years ago Perry and Cain were fighting for the lead,” former President George W. Bush told a gathering of White House alumni in Washington, according to an attendee. “It’s too early to rely on polls. Jeb will be fine.”
Plus, Rubio’s team is eager to avoid fueling what could be seen as a petty fight with an old, and still respected friend.
"Be respectful of Marco's relationship with Jeb," Harris said, according to one person familiar with what was said on the call, urging Rubio's supporters to not attack Bush after the former governor’s lackluster debate performance. He reminded those on the call that Rubio and Bush had a long relationship that predated the current contest.
Harris and a Rubio spokesman, Alex Conant, declined to comment on the finance call.
“The general feeling is that we had a very good night, but still have a lot of work ahead of us,” said a campaign official. “It was one of many debates, and we have another in less than two weeks. We have over three months to go before the first contests—we're staying focused on executing our strategy with the goal of being first in February.”
On conference call with donors, Rubio team urges backers to not attack Bush.
By Eli Stokols
For months, Republican donors viewed Marco Rubio as a growth stock. After his bull run in Wednesday’s debate, investors are buying.
It started even before the debate in Boulder ended. Donors who had been getting calls from Rubio’s Colorado campaign chairman for two months were suddenly emailing him. Seven donors he’d been working couldn’t convey their messages fast enough: I’m in.
“The movement in donors and activists is significant and palpable,” said Josh Penry. “People saw Marco last night and they saw a conservative and they saw a winner. The people who always liked him but doubted his polish now see a guy on stage they can see next to Hillary Clinton.”
What Penry felt in Colorado was happening nationwide. In the hours after the debate, Rubio’s campaign saw its online fundraising numbers skyrocket.
As of 3 p.m. Thursday, Rubio had raised $750,000 in online contributions from more than 14,000 unique donations, according to a top campaign official. Rubio wasn’t the only one to see a boost – competitor Ted Cruz, who scored one of the most talked-about lines in the debate, raised $772,000, and even more quickly, his team said.
But for Rubio, the influx of donors marks a gain against rival Jeb Bush in a feud for establishment money that has been simmering for weeks.
Rubio aides Todd Harris and Anna Rogers held a conference call with Rubio’s financial backers on Thursday, and told them not to expect a massive immediate rush of defections among Bush’s donor base. There are heavy emotions involved when people make a switch like this, Harris said, and the campaign shouldn’t expect folks to just turn on a dime.
But big donors seem ready to move, according to some Rubio backers. Penry declined to discuss specific Colorado donors, although one of the biggest gets in the state, Larry Mizel, appears to be on board.
“Phones have been ringing off the hook all day,” the campaign official said. “Fundraisers already scheduled are seeing increased attendance—and lots of people want to host events."
Mizel, a Sheldon Adelson confidante and member of his Republican Jewish Coalition, met with Rubio earlier this week, spent Wednesday afternoon in the spin room and watched the debate in person. Thursday morning, he walked into the Brown Palace Hotel downtown for a Rubio fundraiser (a make-up for a previously postponed event) carrying a check.
“He likes to keep his name out of it and work behind the scenes, but he’s with Marco,” said a source close to Mizel.
Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei, the most sought after Colorado Republican donor who remains uncommitted to a candidate, was also in the audience to see Rubio’s debate and his devastating counter-punch that leveled Jeb Bush. But Maffei, who bought six tickets to the debate and brought along his main political adviser, has yet to tip to his associates if he’s any closer to putting his support behind Rubio or any GOP presidential hopeful.
While Wednesday night’s debate may turn out to be a major turning point in the nomination fight, the moment when big money donors shift from Bush to Rubio, the senator’s campaign team knows that they have a lot of work to do to catch up to Bush’s organizational strength.
Bush’s camp knows it too. His brother warned against predicting the end of Bush’s campaign. “Four years ago Perry and Cain were fighting for the lead,” former President George W. Bush told a gathering of White House alumni in Washington, according to an attendee. “It’s too early to rely on polls. Jeb will be fine.”
Plus, Rubio’s team is eager to avoid fueling what could be seen as a petty fight with an old, and still respected friend.
"Be respectful of Marco's relationship with Jeb," Harris said, according to one person familiar with what was said on the call, urging Rubio's supporters to not attack Bush after the former governor’s lackluster debate performance. He reminded those on the call that Rubio and Bush had a long relationship that predated the current contest.
Harris and a Rubio spokesman, Alex Conant, declined to comment on the finance call.
“The general feeling is that we had a very good night, but still have a lot of work ahead of us,” said a campaign official. “It was one of many debates, and we have another in less than two weeks. We have over three months to go before the first contests—we're staying focused on executing our strategy with the goal of being first in February.”
Indian wars
The new Indian wars in Washington
How the Supreme Court and a divided Congress have stymied efforts by poor tribes to recover long-lost lands.
By David Rogers
Custer’s long gone, but a hostile Supreme Court and divided Congress are still playing havoc these days with Indian tribes trying to get some of their lands back.
“With all due respect, there’s not anybody on the court who knows very much about Indians or Indian law,” says Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who hails from the Chickasaw tribe. It’s little better in the House and Senate where the growth in Indian gaming has so poisoned the well that getting any relief for the tribes is harder and harder.
The immediate issue is how Congress should respond to a 2009 ruling in which the justices narrowed the mandate of the Indian Reorganization Act that has guided federal policy since the New Deal. In the process, the court effectively created two new classes of tribes under the 1934 law and cast doubt on decades of land conveyances approved by the Interior Department.
“They literally overturned what both parties and successive secretaries of the Interior thought was the law for 80 years,” says Cole.
But getting a simple legislative fix is anything but simple in Congress, as major stakeholders have seized the chance to demand larger changes — not just in IRA but also the direction of Indian gaming.
Indeed, the whole Indian lands debate in Washington has turned 180 degrees. The fight is less about the justice of returning historic territory and more simply cash — whether measured in the revenues gained from casinos or property taxes lost for local counties. From Oklahoma to California, rich tribes play the political system to protect their share of the gaming markets. Lost is any perspective on the hundreds of poorer tribes just trying to establish some economic foothold and homeland for themselves.
“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” says Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) with a rueful laugh. But defying the odds, this Yale-trained orthopedist and rodeo physician has set out to mend these old bones and try to end the impasse this year.
The early spadework has been done in the form of hearings and discussion groups held since Barrasso took over the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs last winter. A first draft of his bill was filed in July. A manager’s amendment is now in the works. And the Wyoming Republican brings two important assets: his Western GOP credentials and the learning experience of having watched past efforts fail.
“Anybody who thinks they can solve this on their own has to be kidding themselves. What we’re trying to do is put a whole group together,” he says. “We have draft legislation. We’ve asked for input … Nobody’s saying `stop the process.’”
Nonetheless, the political obstacles remain huge. And no debate in Congress goes more to heart of the American experience.
“We didn’t invade Europe. Europe invaded the tribes. And just because that invasion was successful doesn’t mean we no longer want the tribes,” said William Rice, a tribal member himself and co-director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Tulsa. “We never gave up our rights to self-government, we never gave up our rights to territory. We’ve been recognized as nations since the days of the Founding Fathers.”
Land is inextricably part of this calculus, not just for the property itself but the opportunity to establish a tribe’s identity and sovereignty. That’s why IRA was such a watershed event, and Franklin Roosevelt’s administration billed it then as a “New Deal” for Native Americans after the destructive policies enacted by Congress in the late 19th century.
Prior to IRA, the federal goal had been more one of forced assimilation, imposing new blood rules on the tribes as to who qualified as a member and breaking up community lands. Between passage of the General Allotment Act in 1887 and 1934, total Indian land holdings had fallen by almost two-thirds, from 138 million acres to 48 million. Nearly half of what remained was better described as desert or semi-desert.
The new IRA law sought to go in the opposite direction by promoting self-governance and tribal sovereignty. Stop-loss provisions were put in place to protect the remaining lands. Most important to the current debate in Congress, Interior was charged with supervising a new lands-to-trust process by which tribes could bring lands under their control.
In the decades since, about 8 million acres have been added to Indian land holdings. But to the surprise of many, the 2009 court ruling said IRA only narrowly applied to those tribes that can prove they were both recognized and “under federal jurisdiction” in 1934.
It was a quirky little case, matching Rhode Island’s small Narragansett tribe against the Republican governor at the time, Donald Carcieri, and will have a place forever in the annals of Indian law. Just 31 acres were in dispute and it all turned on the legislative meaning of a single word: “now.”
But by ruling as it did, the Supreme Court cast a cloud over IRA and a much broader universe of land transactions covering thousands of acres more. Lawsuits have since popped up in states like Alabama. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) accuses the justices of imposing a “caste” system on Native Americans. Most striking is how raw relations are between the tribes and the court, once viewed as their protector.
The central question most often is where to draw the line between state and tribal authority, two competing sovereigns. It’s here where Native American professionals and legal experts say there has been a decided shift beginning with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and now his former clerk, Chief Justice John Roberts. In fact, the 2015 edition of the casebook, American Indian Law: Cases and Commentary, found that the Roberts court had decided 11 Indian law cases thus far and ruled against tribal interests in all but two of them, an 82 percent loss record.
“Every Indian lawyer, expert, close observer cringes every time they take a case,” said Joe Valandra, an attorney who has long been active in Indian affairs and gaming. “I will say there are folks on the Supreme Court who are reflexively anti-Indian,” said Matthew Fletcher, a professor of law at Michigan State University.
Robert Anderson once served in the Interior Department and now teaches law at the University of Washington and Harvard. He opts for the gentler-sounding: “anti-tribal sovereignty.” But the bottom line is still the same.
“They are definitely hostile,” Anderson said of the current majority. “It is all federal common law and the court is basically legislating through these decisions what the powers of the tribes are in the absence of particular congressional direction.”
“They are very protective of states’ rights,” Anderson said. “When Indian governmental powers run up against the states, they give a very hard look to the Indian powers. There’s a majority that wants to trim the Indian sovereignty back in favor of the states.”
Anderson’s description of the high court as “legislating” is telling here. And it illustrates what’s become a three-arena battle in Washington over who sets Indian policy.
The Constitution assigns that power foremost to Congress. But the current paralysis has created a void in which the court has been more aggressive on behalf of the states while the executive branch under President Barack Obama has championed the tribes.
This administration has sped up approvals for restoring lands to Indian sovereignty; more than 305,000 acres have been approved since 2009. And alarm bells are going off now in Congress over new proposed rules drafted by Interior to update the process by which tribes can seek recognition from Washington.
Leading the charge is Kevin Washburn, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, a soft-spoken former law school dean who is of Chickasaw ancestry.
“I do think there is hostility among certain segments of Congress to tribal sovereignty in general,” Washburn says. “To some degree it’s a backlash against our own success. The Obama administration has done a lot of positive things for tribes and I feel this is a backlash against all the positive steps we have done.”
He welcomes Barrasso’s efforts at compromise. “We don’t agree with everything in it, but it looks like they’ve done some difficult thinking,” Washburn says of the Senate bill. “At this point after seeing so many efforts fail, I’m really grateful that someone’s willing to take up the task. He has bravely plowed forward.”
But there are flashes of anger in Washburn: moments which show his impatience with what he sees as the core injustice of the Indian lands debate and his growing concern that time is running out on the chances for a deal.
“You’ve not hidden your prejudices and I respect that … [But] I worry that your vision returns us to what some believe were the darkest days of Indian policy,” Washburn snapped back at Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) at a tense hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources in May. And in an interview, Washburn mocks demands from Western Republicans that federal lands should be “returned” to the states by Washington.
“That’s just a misreading of history,” he says. “Most of it was not taken from the states. It was taken from the tribes. If they really wanted to return it, give it back, it would be given back to the tribes from whom it was taken in the first place.”
Navigating between the Supreme Court and executive branch, Barrasso wants Congress to reassert itself and address the issues at hand. He finds the court confusing but is frustrated too by Interior’s reliance on executive memoranda to map a path forward. From his experience, the tribes and local governments can work well together but clarity is needed to improve the process and avoid litigation for both sides.
“The idea is to add some certainty,” he says. “Because ever since the Supreme Court ruling, things have been pretty confusing for just about everyone … We want to allow tribes to take land into trust by statute, not by lawsuit and Interior Department memorandum.”
To give himself some running room, Barrasso broadly titled his bill, the “Interior Improvement Act.” Introduced in late July, the 15-page measure includes a retroactive provision to protect existing Indian lands from lawsuits born of the high court’s decision in Carcieri. But it would also tighten the lands-to-trust process going forward. Tribes would be required to be more specific about their development plans. Interior must give more timely notice to local towns and counties affected by the outcome.
“This goes beyond a fix,” Barrasso says. “This is a complete reform.”
That said, the challenges ahead are illustrated by the tangled politics of two states, California and Oklahoma, where the advent of Indian gaming has affected the landscape.
Total annual revenues for the industry nationally run near $28.5 billion, a number that dwarfs Washburn’s entire budget or tribal receipts from oil and gas revenues. But the dark side of gaming’s success has been the often poisonous tribal divisions it creates between the haves and have-nots. And this being Washington, the haves tend to be heard first.
In California’s case, public sentiment is running against further expansion of Indian casinos and some of the most successful gaming tribes are spending heavily to keep out new entrants — and perhaps block Barrasso.
This was seen just a year ago in the Proposition 48 ballot referendum fight, in which the “no” forces enjoyed a huge financial advantage and rolled up 61 percent of the vote against a new casino in the Central Valley that had been endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democratic state Legislature.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has tapped into this state movement and is out front demanding that Barrasso do more to rein in what she calls “reservation shopping” by tribes, who want access to urban markets far from their historic lands.
“As currently implemented, there is effectively no limit to where a tribe may propose a casino,” she wrote in an Oct. 1 letter to the committee. And Feinstein proposes to reopen the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and insert tougher language that would require tribes to show a “substantial, direct, aboriginal connection” to any lands that are taken into trust for gaming.
A former mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein’s roots in local government make her naturally sympathetic with the added burdens on county officials imposed by the casinos. But her critics add that she and her allies are pulling up the draw bridge after they have already gained advantage on the other side.
In fact, the senator’s husband, investment banker Richard Blum, held an important stake in the Perini Corp. from November 1996 to January 2006 — a window during which Perini profited from major contracts to build some of the biggest tribal casino projects in California. And the “no” forces in the Proposition 48 fight received large contributions from some of the same tribes, enriched by their own casinos.
A Feinstein aide said she had no involvement in her husband’s business dealings and keeps all her assets in a blind trust. But there’s a significant overlap between those casino tribes that helped bankroll the Proposition 48 fight and the client list for Ietan Consulting, a prominent Washington lobbying shop on Indian issues.
Ietan’s principals share past ties to the Clinton administration, which was aggressive in promoting the spread of Indian gaming. But Ietan has since promoted what it calls the “Aboriginal Lands Coalition” — a collection of often wealthy tribes that fear gaming’s image and their own profits could suffer unless more is done to prevent new casinos far from historic lands.
The coalition has yet to endorse Feinstein’s language outright but clearly shares common interests with the senator and worries about the direction taken by Barrasso thus far.
“Allowing tribes to `leap-frog’ other tribes for better gaming markets would undermine public support for Indian gaming,” said Larry Rosenthal of Ietan. “Tribal leaders have met with Sen. Feinstein to discuss their concerns about off-reservation gaming outside a tribe's aboriginal lands.”
Oklahoma has its own set of haves and have-nots, but the politics break very differently than in California.
That’s because the often-preferential treatment enjoyed by a handful of dominant tribes has allowed them to largely corner the gaming market at the expense of the often-poorer Plains Indians. For these haves, the top priority for any Carcieri fix is to make it as broad as possible, then to protect their gains from future legal challenges.
This is seen in Cole’s own Carcieri bill introduced in the House in July and quickly matched by a companion Senate measure put forward in August by Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas).
Like Barrasso, Cole includes a retroactive section protecting against lawsuits. But he goes well beyond Carcieri and would ratify “any action” taken by the secretary on past trust deals quite apart from whether the tribe was recognized in 1934 or not. “It was drafted as broadly as possible,” an aide confirmed. “To address as many `fee-to-trust challenge scenarios’ as possible, and avoid further litigation on the issue.”
Cole’s approach has won the support of the Chickasaw tribe, which dominates the Oklahoma gaming market and has grown to be a major political contributor at the state and federal level.
“The Chickasaw Nation stands with Indian Country in urging Congress to enact a clean fix to the Supreme Court’s Carcieri decision," said the tribe’s long-time Gov. Bill Anoatubby. “We appreciate the efforts of Tom Cole and Sen. Jerry Moran for introducing legislation to accomplish that goal.”
Cole insists his bill was not tailored for any Oklahoma interest. And in Congress, he is well-respected as a voice for tribal rights far beyond his home turf. But Cole also likes to tell his colleagues: “Just remember when you are involved in Indian wars, be on the side of your Indians.” And his legislative language clearly serves the Chickasaw.
That’s because legal questions still hang over the tribe’s huge gaming empire, built on a series of rapid-fire land deals approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the first decade after passage of IGRA in 1988.
Because all such land-to-trust approvals constitute a “federal action,” an environmental impact analysis is typically required under the National Environmental Protection Act. Yet records show the well-connected Chickasaw often received categorical exemptions from BIA, even though the newly-acquired land was clearly being converted to a very different purpose.
A second legal question arises from how the BIA enforced the tougher standards set by IGRA for gaming on lands brought into trust after 1988. Here again the Chickasaw benefited from an expansive view of what qualified as “former reservation” lands in Oklahoma and was therefore exempt under Sect. 20 of IGRA.
An early draft rule circulated by the BIA in 2006 defined “former reservation” lands as those that are “within the jurisdiction of an Oklahoma tribe and that are within the boundaries of the last reservation for that tribe in Oklahoma.” But the jurisdiction clause was later dropped after the Apache tribe of Oklahoma quoted back BIA’s own language in challenging what grew into the Chickasaw’s Chisholm Trail casino in Stephens County.
The history of this case is telling of what still angers the poorer Plains tribes who have felt squeezed out of the gaming market. The lost revenues compound the inequities in how federal aid is distributed among the tribes.
Records indicate the land itself was acquired by the Chickasaw in 1992 and brought into trust soon after in 1993. The property fell within the old treaty boundaries, but the Apache argued that the Chickasaw had not exercised jurisdiction prior to the purchase and therefore did not meet IGRA’s standard for what constitutes Indian lands for gaming.
When BIA nonetheless signed off on the compact, the Apache brought suit. A federal judge remanded the case back to BIA in 2007, saying the administrative record is “so lacking in substance that it fails to provide a satisfactory explanation” to support the approval.
The following year the jurisdiction language was dropped from the final BIA rule without explanation. In 2010, the agency again approved the compact in a lengthy solicitor’s opinion that cited the less restrictive definition of a “former reservation.” In a final twist, the same 2010 legal opinion cited a tribal police substation on the site as evidence of the Chickasaw’s jurisdictional claims. But that station didn’t even exist at the outset of the case.
For sure, history played a big hand in how the Oklahoma gaming market took shape. The old Chickasaw treaty lands included a wide swath of southeast Oklahoma, near key highways and customers from Texas.
But the fast pace of BIA approvals also helped. In the 23 years from 1985 to 2008, an estimated 16,915 acres were brought into trust by BIA’s eastern Oklahoma regional office, according to government numbers requested by POLITICO. That’s almost three times the 5,713 acres conveyed into trust in western Oklahoma since 1980 — a much longer time period.
Today, public records of how much the state of Oklahoma collects in fees from each of the 30 tribe’s gaming operations are a good measure of who is enjoying the most revenues from gaming and who is not. The Chickasaw alone accounted for 35 percent of this in 2015. When the Cherokee and Choctaw gaming operations are factored in, the numbers show that just these three powerful tribes account for almost two-thirds of the market shared with 27 others.
“They essentially created a land rush for the preferred tribes who were given special locations to start to grab the market way ahead of everybody else and before the rules were equally applied,” said Richard Grellner, an attorney with a long history of representing the Plains Indian tribes. “Everything since then has been to move the goal posts to protect what was previously done.”
Given his own Chickasaw ties, Washburn must recuse himself from matters now involving the tribe. He remains proud of its success but admits too that fairness is not always served by the growth in Indian gaming.
“It’s not fairly distributed, that’s the heartbreak of it, “ Washburn said. But he then adds: “The fact is everybody used to be have-nots.”
How the Supreme Court and a divided Congress have stymied efforts by poor tribes to recover long-lost lands.
By David Rogers
Custer’s long gone, but a hostile Supreme Court and divided Congress are still playing havoc these days with Indian tribes trying to get some of their lands back.
“With all due respect, there’s not anybody on the court who knows very much about Indians or Indian law,” says Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who hails from the Chickasaw tribe. It’s little better in the House and Senate where the growth in Indian gaming has so poisoned the well that getting any relief for the tribes is harder and harder.
The immediate issue is how Congress should respond to a 2009 ruling in which the justices narrowed the mandate of the Indian Reorganization Act that has guided federal policy since the New Deal. In the process, the court effectively created two new classes of tribes under the 1934 law and cast doubt on decades of land conveyances approved by the Interior Department.
“They literally overturned what both parties and successive secretaries of the Interior thought was the law for 80 years,” says Cole.
But getting a simple legislative fix is anything but simple in Congress, as major stakeholders have seized the chance to demand larger changes — not just in IRA but also the direction of Indian gaming.
Indeed, the whole Indian lands debate in Washington has turned 180 degrees. The fight is less about the justice of returning historic territory and more simply cash — whether measured in the revenues gained from casinos or property taxes lost for local counties. From Oklahoma to California, rich tribes play the political system to protect their share of the gaming markets. Lost is any perspective on the hundreds of poorer tribes just trying to establish some economic foothold and homeland for themselves.
“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” says Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) with a rueful laugh. But defying the odds, this Yale-trained orthopedist and rodeo physician has set out to mend these old bones and try to end the impasse this year.
The early spadework has been done in the form of hearings and discussion groups held since Barrasso took over the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs last winter. A first draft of his bill was filed in July. A manager’s amendment is now in the works. And the Wyoming Republican brings two important assets: his Western GOP credentials and the learning experience of having watched past efforts fail.
“Anybody who thinks they can solve this on their own has to be kidding themselves. What we’re trying to do is put a whole group together,” he says. “We have draft legislation. We’ve asked for input … Nobody’s saying `stop the process.’”
Nonetheless, the political obstacles remain huge. And no debate in Congress goes more to heart of the American experience.
“We didn’t invade Europe. Europe invaded the tribes. And just because that invasion was successful doesn’t mean we no longer want the tribes,” said William Rice, a tribal member himself and co-director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Tulsa. “We never gave up our rights to self-government, we never gave up our rights to territory. We’ve been recognized as nations since the days of the Founding Fathers.”
Land is inextricably part of this calculus, not just for the property itself but the opportunity to establish a tribe’s identity and sovereignty. That’s why IRA was such a watershed event, and Franklin Roosevelt’s administration billed it then as a “New Deal” for Native Americans after the destructive policies enacted by Congress in the late 19th century.
Prior to IRA, the federal goal had been more one of forced assimilation, imposing new blood rules on the tribes as to who qualified as a member and breaking up community lands. Between passage of the General Allotment Act in 1887 and 1934, total Indian land holdings had fallen by almost two-thirds, from 138 million acres to 48 million. Nearly half of what remained was better described as desert or semi-desert.
The new IRA law sought to go in the opposite direction by promoting self-governance and tribal sovereignty. Stop-loss provisions were put in place to protect the remaining lands. Most important to the current debate in Congress, Interior was charged with supervising a new lands-to-trust process by which tribes could bring lands under their control.
In the decades since, about 8 million acres have been added to Indian land holdings. But to the surprise of many, the 2009 court ruling said IRA only narrowly applied to those tribes that can prove they were both recognized and “under federal jurisdiction” in 1934.
It was a quirky little case, matching Rhode Island’s small Narragansett tribe against the Republican governor at the time, Donald Carcieri, and will have a place forever in the annals of Indian law. Just 31 acres were in dispute and it all turned on the legislative meaning of a single word: “now.”
But by ruling as it did, the Supreme Court cast a cloud over IRA and a much broader universe of land transactions covering thousands of acres more. Lawsuits have since popped up in states like Alabama. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) accuses the justices of imposing a “caste” system on Native Americans. Most striking is how raw relations are between the tribes and the court, once viewed as their protector.
The central question most often is where to draw the line between state and tribal authority, two competing sovereigns. It’s here where Native American professionals and legal experts say there has been a decided shift beginning with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and now his former clerk, Chief Justice John Roberts. In fact, the 2015 edition of the casebook, American Indian Law: Cases and Commentary, found that the Roberts court had decided 11 Indian law cases thus far and ruled against tribal interests in all but two of them, an 82 percent loss record.
“Every Indian lawyer, expert, close observer cringes every time they take a case,” said Joe Valandra, an attorney who has long been active in Indian affairs and gaming. “I will say there are folks on the Supreme Court who are reflexively anti-Indian,” said Matthew Fletcher, a professor of law at Michigan State University.
Robert Anderson once served in the Interior Department and now teaches law at the University of Washington and Harvard. He opts for the gentler-sounding: “anti-tribal sovereignty.” But the bottom line is still the same.
“They are definitely hostile,” Anderson said of the current majority. “It is all federal common law and the court is basically legislating through these decisions what the powers of the tribes are in the absence of particular congressional direction.”
“They are very protective of states’ rights,” Anderson said. “When Indian governmental powers run up against the states, they give a very hard look to the Indian powers. There’s a majority that wants to trim the Indian sovereignty back in favor of the states.”
Anderson’s description of the high court as “legislating” is telling here. And it illustrates what’s become a three-arena battle in Washington over who sets Indian policy.
The Constitution assigns that power foremost to Congress. But the current paralysis has created a void in which the court has been more aggressive on behalf of the states while the executive branch under President Barack Obama has championed the tribes.
This administration has sped up approvals for restoring lands to Indian sovereignty; more than 305,000 acres have been approved since 2009. And alarm bells are going off now in Congress over new proposed rules drafted by Interior to update the process by which tribes can seek recognition from Washington.
Leading the charge is Kevin Washburn, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, a soft-spoken former law school dean who is of Chickasaw ancestry.
“I do think there is hostility among certain segments of Congress to tribal sovereignty in general,” Washburn says. “To some degree it’s a backlash against our own success. The Obama administration has done a lot of positive things for tribes and I feel this is a backlash against all the positive steps we have done.”
He welcomes Barrasso’s efforts at compromise. “We don’t agree with everything in it, but it looks like they’ve done some difficult thinking,” Washburn says of the Senate bill. “At this point after seeing so many efforts fail, I’m really grateful that someone’s willing to take up the task. He has bravely plowed forward.”
But there are flashes of anger in Washburn: moments which show his impatience with what he sees as the core injustice of the Indian lands debate and his growing concern that time is running out on the chances for a deal.
“You’ve not hidden your prejudices and I respect that … [But] I worry that your vision returns us to what some believe were the darkest days of Indian policy,” Washburn snapped back at Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) at a tense hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources in May. And in an interview, Washburn mocks demands from Western Republicans that federal lands should be “returned” to the states by Washington.
“That’s just a misreading of history,” he says. “Most of it was not taken from the states. It was taken from the tribes. If they really wanted to return it, give it back, it would be given back to the tribes from whom it was taken in the first place.”
Navigating between the Supreme Court and executive branch, Barrasso wants Congress to reassert itself and address the issues at hand. He finds the court confusing but is frustrated too by Interior’s reliance on executive memoranda to map a path forward. From his experience, the tribes and local governments can work well together but clarity is needed to improve the process and avoid litigation for both sides.
“The idea is to add some certainty,” he says. “Because ever since the Supreme Court ruling, things have been pretty confusing for just about everyone … We want to allow tribes to take land into trust by statute, not by lawsuit and Interior Department memorandum.”
To give himself some running room, Barrasso broadly titled his bill, the “Interior Improvement Act.” Introduced in late July, the 15-page measure includes a retroactive provision to protect existing Indian lands from lawsuits born of the high court’s decision in Carcieri. But it would also tighten the lands-to-trust process going forward. Tribes would be required to be more specific about their development plans. Interior must give more timely notice to local towns and counties affected by the outcome.
“This goes beyond a fix,” Barrasso says. “This is a complete reform.”
That said, the challenges ahead are illustrated by the tangled politics of two states, California and Oklahoma, where the advent of Indian gaming has affected the landscape.
Total annual revenues for the industry nationally run near $28.5 billion, a number that dwarfs Washburn’s entire budget or tribal receipts from oil and gas revenues. But the dark side of gaming’s success has been the often poisonous tribal divisions it creates between the haves and have-nots. And this being Washington, the haves tend to be heard first.
In California’s case, public sentiment is running against further expansion of Indian casinos and some of the most successful gaming tribes are spending heavily to keep out new entrants — and perhaps block Barrasso.
This was seen just a year ago in the Proposition 48 ballot referendum fight, in which the “no” forces enjoyed a huge financial advantage and rolled up 61 percent of the vote against a new casino in the Central Valley that had been endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democratic state Legislature.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has tapped into this state movement and is out front demanding that Barrasso do more to rein in what she calls “reservation shopping” by tribes, who want access to urban markets far from their historic lands.
“As currently implemented, there is effectively no limit to where a tribe may propose a casino,” she wrote in an Oct. 1 letter to the committee. And Feinstein proposes to reopen the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and insert tougher language that would require tribes to show a “substantial, direct, aboriginal connection” to any lands that are taken into trust for gaming.
A former mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein’s roots in local government make her naturally sympathetic with the added burdens on county officials imposed by the casinos. But her critics add that she and her allies are pulling up the draw bridge after they have already gained advantage on the other side.
In fact, the senator’s husband, investment banker Richard Blum, held an important stake in the Perini Corp. from November 1996 to January 2006 — a window during which Perini profited from major contracts to build some of the biggest tribal casino projects in California. And the “no” forces in the Proposition 48 fight received large contributions from some of the same tribes, enriched by their own casinos.
A Feinstein aide said she had no involvement in her husband’s business dealings and keeps all her assets in a blind trust. But there’s a significant overlap between those casino tribes that helped bankroll the Proposition 48 fight and the client list for Ietan Consulting, a prominent Washington lobbying shop on Indian issues.
Ietan’s principals share past ties to the Clinton administration, which was aggressive in promoting the spread of Indian gaming. But Ietan has since promoted what it calls the “Aboriginal Lands Coalition” — a collection of often wealthy tribes that fear gaming’s image and their own profits could suffer unless more is done to prevent new casinos far from historic lands.
The coalition has yet to endorse Feinstein’s language outright but clearly shares common interests with the senator and worries about the direction taken by Barrasso thus far.
“Allowing tribes to `leap-frog’ other tribes for better gaming markets would undermine public support for Indian gaming,” said Larry Rosenthal of Ietan. “Tribal leaders have met with Sen. Feinstein to discuss their concerns about off-reservation gaming outside a tribe's aboriginal lands.”
Oklahoma has its own set of haves and have-nots, but the politics break very differently than in California.
That’s because the often-preferential treatment enjoyed by a handful of dominant tribes has allowed them to largely corner the gaming market at the expense of the often-poorer Plains Indians. For these haves, the top priority for any Carcieri fix is to make it as broad as possible, then to protect their gains from future legal challenges.
This is seen in Cole’s own Carcieri bill introduced in the House in July and quickly matched by a companion Senate measure put forward in August by Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas).
Like Barrasso, Cole includes a retroactive section protecting against lawsuits. But he goes well beyond Carcieri and would ratify “any action” taken by the secretary on past trust deals quite apart from whether the tribe was recognized in 1934 or not. “It was drafted as broadly as possible,” an aide confirmed. “To address as many `fee-to-trust challenge scenarios’ as possible, and avoid further litigation on the issue.”
Cole’s approach has won the support of the Chickasaw tribe, which dominates the Oklahoma gaming market and has grown to be a major political contributor at the state and federal level.
“The Chickasaw Nation stands with Indian Country in urging Congress to enact a clean fix to the Supreme Court’s Carcieri decision," said the tribe’s long-time Gov. Bill Anoatubby. “We appreciate the efforts of Tom Cole and Sen. Jerry Moran for introducing legislation to accomplish that goal.”
Cole insists his bill was not tailored for any Oklahoma interest. And in Congress, he is well-respected as a voice for tribal rights far beyond his home turf. But Cole also likes to tell his colleagues: “Just remember when you are involved in Indian wars, be on the side of your Indians.” And his legislative language clearly serves the Chickasaw.
That’s because legal questions still hang over the tribe’s huge gaming empire, built on a series of rapid-fire land deals approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the first decade after passage of IGRA in 1988.
Because all such land-to-trust approvals constitute a “federal action,” an environmental impact analysis is typically required under the National Environmental Protection Act. Yet records show the well-connected Chickasaw often received categorical exemptions from BIA, even though the newly-acquired land was clearly being converted to a very different purpose.
A second legal question arises from how the BIA enforced the tougher standards set by IGRA for gaming on lands brought into trust after 1988. Here again the Chickasaw benefited from an expansive view of what qualified as “former reservation” lands in Oklahoma and was therefore exempt under Sect. 20 of IGRA.
An early draft rule circulated by the BIA in 2006 defined “former reservation” lands as those that are “within the jurisdiction of an Oklahoma tribe and that are within the boundaries of the last reservation for that tribe in Oklahoma.” But the jurisdiction clause was later dropped after the Apache tribe of Oklahoma quoted back BIA’s own language in challenging what grew into the Chickasaw’s Chisholm Trail casino in Stephens County.
The history of this case is telling of what still angers the poorer Plains tribes who have felt squeezed out of the gaming market. The lost revenues compound the inequities in how federal aid is distributed among the tribes.
Records indicate the land itself was acquired by the Chickasaw in 1992 and brought into trust soon after in 1993. The property fell within the old treaty boundaries, but the Apache argued that the Chickasaw had not exercised jurisdiction prior to the purchase and therefore did not meet IGRA’s standard for what constitutes Indian lands for gaming.
When BIA nonetheless signed off on the compact, the Apache brought suit. A federal judge remanded the case back to BIA in 2007, saying the administrative record is “so lacking in substance that it fails to provide a satisfactory explanation” to support the approval.
The following year the jurisdiction language was dropped from the final BIA rule without explanation. In 2010, the agency again approved the compact in a lengthy solicitor’s opinion that cited the less restrictive definition of a “former reservation.” In a final twist, the same 2010 legal opinion cited a tribal police substation on the site as evidence of the Chickasaw’s jurisdictional claims. But that station didn’t even exist at the outset of the case.
For sure, history played a big hand in how the Oklahoma gaming market took shape. The old Chickasaw treaty lands included a wide swath of southeast Oklahoma, near key highways and customers from Texas.
But the fast pace of BIA approvals also helped. In the 23 years from 1985 to 2008, an estimated 16,915 acres were brought into trust by BIA’s eastern Oklahoma regional office, according to government numbers requested by POLITICO. That’s almost three times the 5,713 acres conveyed into trust in western Oklahoma since 1980 — a much longer time period.
Today, public records of how much the state of Oklahoma collects in fees from each of the 30 tribe’s gaming operations are a good measure of who is enjoying the most revenues from gaming and who is not. The Chickasaw alone accounted for 35 percent of this in 2015. When the Cherokee and Choctaw gaming operations are factored in, the numbers show that just these three powerful tribes account for almost two-thirds of the market shared with 27 others.
“They essentially created a land rush for the preferred tribes who were given special locations to start to grab the market way ahead of everybody else and before the rules were equally applied,” said Richard Grellner, an attorney with a long history of representing the Plains Indian tribes. “Everything since then has been to move the goal posts to protect what was previously done.”
Given his own Chickasaw ties, Washburn must recuse himself from matters now involving the tribe. He remains proud of its success but admits too that fairness is not always served by the growth in Indian gaming.
“It’s not fairly distributed, that’s the heartbreak of it, “ Washburn said. But he then adds: “The fact is everybody used to be have-nots.”
Revolt against RNC
Exclusive: GOP campaigns plot revolt against RNC
The Sunday evening meeting comes after an eruption of complaints by the candidates about the debates.
By Alex Isenstadt
Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee.
Not invited to the meeting: Anyone from the RNC, which many candidates have openly criticized in the hours since Wednesday’s CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado — a chaotic, disorganized affair that was widely panned by political observers.
On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks.
The gathering is being organized by advisers to the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. Others who are expected to attend, organizers say, are representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum. The planners are also reaching out to other Republican candidates.
Spokespersons for the RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” said Christian Ferry, Graham’s campaign manager. The objective, Ferry said, was to “find out what works best for us as a group.”
Figuring that out could be contentious as each campaign has a number of different complaints about the process. Some — such as Bush and Paul — have griped about unequal speaking time. Others have complained bitterly about how polling is used to determine who qualifies for the prime-time and undercard debates. Some have insisted on giving opening and closing statements, despite the networks' desire to have the candidates spend as much time as possible clashing with each other on stage.
Jindal, who polls better in Iowa than he does nationally, has argued that criteria for determining who qualifies for debates should be based on early state polling, not just national surveys.
“Our continuous complaint is candidate exclusion and the delusional debate polling criteria. It's unacceptable,” said Gail Gitcho, a Jindal spokeswoman. “Maybe this meeting will change that, maybe it won't. But we aren't going to shut up about it.”
Graham’s campaign has argued that there should be two debates — with two groups of seven or eight candidates selected randomly.
Carson said on Thursday that he had asked his staff to contact other campaigns to propose format changes, without sharing specifically what he thinks those changes should be.
“It’s not about me and gotcha questions. It’s about the American people and whether they have the right to hear what we think,” Carson said before an event at Colorado Christian University. “The whole format was just craziness … You got to be really bad for the whole crowd to boo you."
"I think the families need to get together here, because these debates as structured by the RNC are not helping the party," Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett told the Washington Examiner. "There's not enough time to talk about your plans, there's no presentation. It's just a slugfest. All we do is change moderators. And the trendline is horrific. So I think there needs to be wholesale change here."
Rubio, largely considered the standout of Wednesday's debate, said the questions from CNBC's moderators "became irritating" as the night wore on.
"I think the bigger frustration you saw is that all those candidates onstage had prepared for a substantive debate. Everyone was ready to talk about trade policy and the debt and tax policies," Rubio said on Fox News. "And we're ready for that, everybody was. And then, you got questions that everyone got, which were clearly designed to get us to fight against each other or get us to say something embarrassing about us and then get us to react."
"The campaigns are not going to allow the networks to control this process," Huckabee told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Thursday night.
Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly demanded that the debates last no longer than two hours. On Wednesday night, he even boasted of muscling CNBC into changing the format for the third debate. "Everybody said it was going to be three hours, three-and-a-half, including them, and in about two minutes, I renegotiated it so we can get the hell out of here," he said. "Not bad."
Sources at Fox Business Network, the hosts of the next GOP debate on Nov. 10, said that as of Thursday afternoon, they hadn't heard from any campaigns or the RNC about their debate format, but that they weren't concerned. They pointed to positive reviews of the first GOP debate, hosted by Fox News, and noted that though it's Fox Business' first debate, viewers and the candidates can expect the same results next month with moderators Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto.
The Sunday evening meeting comes after an eruption of complaints by the candidates about the debates.
By Alex Isenstadt
Republican presidential campaigns are planning to gather in Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening to plot how to alter their party’s messy debate process — and how to remove power from the hands of the Republican National Committee.
Not invited to the meeting: Anyone from the RNC, which many candidates have openly criticized in the hours since Wednesday’s CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado — a chaotic, disorganized affair that was widely panned by political observers.
On Thursday, many of the campaigns told POLITICO that the RNC, which has taken a greater role in the 2016 debate process than in previous election cycles, had failed to take their concerns into account. It was time, top aides to at least half a dozen of the candidates agreed, to begin discussing among themselves how the next debates should be structured and not leave it up to the RNC and television networks.
The gathering is being organized by advisers to the campaigns of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Bobby Jindal and Lindsey Graham, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. Others who are expected to attend, organizers say, are representatives for Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum. The planners are also reaching out to other Republican candidates.
Spokespersons for the RNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I think the campaigns have a number of concerns and they have a right to talk about that amongst themselves,” said Christian Ferry, Graham’s campaign manager. The objective, Ferry said, was to “find out what works best for us as a group.”
Figuring that out could be contentious as each campaign has a number of different complaints about the process. Some — such as Bush and Paul — have griped about unequal speaking time. Others have complained bitterly about how polling is used to determine who qualifies for the prime-time and undercard debates. Some have insisted on giving opening and closing statements, despite the networks' desire to have the candidates spend as much time as possible clashing with each other on stage.
Jindal, who polls better in Iowa than he does nationally, has argued that criteria for determining who qualifies for debates should be based on early state polling, not just national surveys.
“Our continuous complaint is candidate exclusion and the delusional debate polling criteria. It's unacceptable,” said Gail Gitcho, a Jindal spokeswoman. “Maybe this meeting will change that, maybe it won't. But we aren't going to shut up about it.”
Graham’s campaign has argued that there should be two debates — with two groups of seven or eight candidates selected randomly.
Carson said on Thursday that he had asked his staff to contact other campaigns to propose format changes, without sharing specifically what he thinks those changes should be.
“It’s not about me and gotcha questions. It’s about the American people and whether they have the right to hear what we think,” Carson said before an event at Colorado Christian University. “The whole format was just craziness … You got to be really bad for the whole crowd to boo you."
"I think the families need to get together here, because these debates as structured by the RNC are not helping the party," Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett told the Washington Examiner. "There's not enough time to talk about your plans, there's no presentation. It's just a slugfest. All we do is change moderators. And the trendline is horrific. So I think there needs to be wholesale change here."
Rubio, largely considered the standout of Wednesday's debate, said the questions from CNBC's moderators "became irritating" as the night wore on.
"I think the bigger frustration you saw is that all those candidates onstage had prepared for a substantive debate. Everyone was ready to talk about trade policy and the debt and tax policies," Rubio said on Fox News. "And we're ready for that, everybody was. And then, you got questions that everyone got, which were clearly designed to get us to fight against each other or get us to say something embarrassing about us and then get us to react."
"The campaigns are not going to allow the networks to control this process," Huckabee told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Thursday night.
Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly demanded that the debates last no longer than two hours. On Wednesday night, he even boasted of muscling CNBC into changing the format for the third debate. "Everybody said it was going to be three hours, three-and-a-half, including them, and in about two minutes, I renegotiated it so we can get the hell out of here," he said. "Not bad."
Sources at Fox Business Network, the hosts of the next GOP debate on Nov. 10, said that as of Thursday afternoon, they hadn't heard from any campaigns or the RNC about their debate format, but that they weren't concerned. They pointed to positive reviews of the first GOP debate, hosted by Fox News, and noted that though it's Fox Business' first debate, viewers and the candidates can expect the same results next month with moderators Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto.
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