What does a 50- to 60-ft wave face look like? Now you know. 'The Eddie' big-wave surf contest on the North Shore of Oahu was held on Thursday for the first time since 2009.
February 29, 2016
‘The Eddie’ big-wave surf contest
What does a 50- to 60-ft wave face look like? Now you know. 'The Eddie' big-wave surf contest on the North Shore of Oahu was held on Thursday for the first time since 2009.
Stop micromanaging
Plouffe to Clinton: Stop micromanaging
In an exclusive interview for POLITICO’s ‘Off Message’ podcast, Barack Obama’s master strategist says Trump will be the nominee – and a dangerous one, at that.
By Glenn Thrush
A couple of days before Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary by nearly 50 points, David Plouffe eased back in his chair at an anonymous Capitol Hill hotel and declared that the woman he helped defeat in 2008 had, oh, a 98 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.
He felt pretty, pretty confident about her odds against Donald Trump, too (predicting she could win by “an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points”). But Barack Obama’s puckish, intensely competitive former campaign manager, arguably the most successful Democratic strategist of his generation, offered a who-the-hell-really-knows shrug when asked to offer a similarly precise estimate of Clinton’s odds of beating Trump.
“I don’t think we know yet, and I think all of us should have learned by now not to get out over ourselves with Trump,” Plouffe told me during an episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast, in which he offered far-ranging opinions on Clinton’s self-defeating tendency to doubt her own staff, Trump’s role as an Uber-like disrupter and Bill Clinton’s not-quite-Obama-level status in the presidential pantheon.
“My sense, though is this: that he could completely implode,” Plouffe said of his favorite topic — Trump — tacking on a massive caveat: “So you say, well, how could someone, you know, really ferociously and viciously attack the last former Republican president and get into a worldwide verbal tango with the pope and come out OK? Well, he did. … The Trump thing is a living, breathing, growing organism. There are no rules for how you deal with it.”
Plouffe, the archetypal no-drama Obama adviser credited with implementing Obama’s delegate-hoarding strategy eight years ago, has been informally advising Clinton and her staff as needed. Last year, POLITICO reported that he had quietly met with the soon-to-be-candidate at her Washington mansion, tracing her steps, state-by-state, and offering counsel on how to avoid the rending internal dissension that helped scuttle her race against Obama.
Plouffe, several people in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters told me, speaks regularly with campaign manager Robby Mook, despite a demanding executive post at Uber that demands he travel almost constantly. Mook was checking in with Plouffe daily — sometimes multiple times a day — during Clinton’s narrow and bitterly won victory in the Iowa caucuses, they told me. Part of the problem he has identified is the sheer number of people the Clintons talk to on any given day, and the unerring certainty that each had in the quality of their own advice compared with what Mook and his team offered.
And here is where the 48-year-old Delaware political marketing whiz — who was trying to be as tactful as possible in his public dispensing of criticism — described what he believes to be the biggest danger to Clinton as she grinds through the primary headlong into a bellowing, full-steam Trump.
“I think you build your team, and you stick by your team, and you run,” said Plouffe. “It's got to be very hard for the Clintons. They’ve been on the scene for decades. So any time things go wrong, they have dozens of people, you know, in their email box, and probably calling, saying, ‘Told you so. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do this.’ ... You’re going to have your valleys, and that’s always a test. And if the thing you do is sow internal tension and allow voices from the outside to really, I think, affect the campaign in a negative way, you may not win.”
Early on, it seemed as though the Clintons were headed to the same dark place they inhabited for much of 2008. Both were in a sour, question-everything mood in the days after her microscopic victory in Iowa, when it was clear Sanders was about to deliver a humbling and decisive win in New Hampshire. There was talk of accelerating a re-evaluation of staff that had been expected after Super Tuesday, or after she secured the nomination. (Some in Clinton’s orbit even floated the nonstarter idea that Plouffe abandon his lucrative Uber gig and jump aboard the campaign.)
Despite the finger-ointing, Clinton decided to stay the course and was rewarded with game-changing victories in Nevada and South Carolina — and Plouffe hopes she doesn’t get itchy-scratchy when things go south, as they inevitably will, in a general election fight. “I think what you do need to figure out whether it’s one voice,” Plouffe said of the campaign’s overall strategy — and please do away with Clinton’s propensity to summon the clans for 10-to-20-person conference calls anytime things go wrong, he urged.
“There has to be — you know, there’s the big call, and the big meeting, and then there’s the real meeting and the real call,” he added. “You can’t make decisions with 10 people. It’s impossible. So you’ve got to figure out, and, you know, the question is, who is she talking to? And listen, they’ve got enormous [talent]: Joel Benenson [pollster and strategist], Mandy [Grunwald, Clinton ad-maker and all-around adviser], [adman] Jim Margolis, Jen Palmieri [communications director]. ... These are super-smart people. So I don’t think it’s necessarily, you know, is there a missing person from the outside … you’ve got to commit to something.”
The test, he says, will come during the general election, when some old Clinton hand panics and demands that either Hillary or Bill scuttle Mook’s strategy to address some crisis, real or imagined. “There will be moments when there’s some bad, bull---- public poll that comes out that shows them tied in Pennsylvania, and, with all due respect, Ed Rendell will call, and say, ‘You've got to [abandon] Virginia and come here for three days.’”
At this point, Plouffe is almost certain Trump will be Clinton’s opponent: He says it’s already “too late” for Republicans to consolidate behind Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, even assuming one or the other would drop out in a fit of suicidal altruism. From here on out, Trump basically needs to not implode. “Remarkably, this is completely in his control. If he can land the plane, he wins,” Plouffe says.
While he professes to be alarmed by the developer-turned-reality-star in his capacity as an “American citizen,” he gets a little giddy (not a natural Plouffian state of being) at the process of reverse-engineering The Donald’s Teflon candidacy. “If you end up with a Trump-Clinton matchup, that will be one for the ages” — and one he’s pretty sure, though not entirely convinced, she’d win in a walk.
“I think that’s a likely possibility: that Hillary Clinton could beat Donald Trump by an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points,” he says. “But if that’s not the case and he’s competitive, where he’ll be competitive is in the Upper Midwest, in the Ohios, the Wisconsins, maybe Pennsylvanias of the world — maybe Iowa and Minnesota even, potentially.”
Plouffe is quick to say, “From an Electoral College standpoint, I don’t see a Trump path,” but he’s equally quick to say the greatest threat posed by Trump is his unpredictability. Plouffe is a guy who likes to make a plan and stick with it, and Trump makes that a near impossibility. “Trump is a wild card, and you just don’t know,” he adds.
The greatest danger is that the public continues to give Trump license to change his positions any time he likes, with minimal recrimination, and that will allow him to take popular stances outside the narrow confines of GOP orthodoxy. Plouffe thinks he’ll show openness to taxing the rich, nod toward the reality of climate change, even recognize some federal government role in providing health care to the poor.
The idea of deconstructing Trump appeals to Plouffe, but the aspect of his old job he misses most is playing around with the numbers. He thinks Clinton’s greatest advantage is a sophisticated data-gathering operation capable of targeting voters, one by one, in swing states, undermining Trump’s scattershot populist messaging.
Plouffe comes by his numeracy naturally. His father, a Massachusetts native, was a physics major who joined the Army and rose to the rank of captain, where he worked in intelligence, and Plouffe earnestly says that he can’t talk about what his dad did before retiring and taking a job with DuPont.
The son inherited the father’s love for math — he fondly recalls solving calculus “puzzles” as a kid — and like many political pros he grew up a baseball box-score fanatic and, later, a devotee of Sabermetrics. But he was also a passionate fan and, like many kids in Delaware, followed the Phillies as a young boy and idolized their Hall of Fame third-baseman, Mike Schmidt. As any one who has ever worked with (or against) him knows, Plouffe is also very, very competitive. As a pre-teen, he merged all of his passions into an obsession with a 1970s-era board game, “All-Star Baseball,” that combined probability, cards with the names of his favorite players and the thrill of pure chance — in short, all the elements of modern politics.
Yet for Plouffe, politics is ultimately about loyalty, in his case an abiding loyalty to Obama that’s apparent even as he dives enthusiastically into a role as public Clinton booster and private unpaid adviser.
His old competitive instincts toward Clinton have been mostly, but not entirely suppressed. He speaks glowingly of her toughness and smarts. But when I ask Plouffe if he regrets playing hardball with Bill and Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, he grins. “Not one bit,” he says. “Not one bit.”
When Plouffe compiles his list of “consequential presidents” over the past century (the purpose is to place Obama near the top) he ticks them off, one by one. “Well, clearly Franklin Roosevelt. ... Maybe you throw in the combined Kennedy-Johnson years … and then Barack Obama, I think, on that level — and Reagan, of course.”
I interrupt. “Not Bill Clinton?”
“Bill Clinton was a very good president,” he replies, “very good.”
In an exclusive interview for POLITICO’s ‘Off Message’ podcast, Barack Obama’s master strategist says Trump will be the nominee – and a dangerous one, at that.
By Glenn Thrush
A couple of days before Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary by nearly 50 points, David Plouffe eased back in his chair at an anonymous Capitol Hill hotel and declared that the woman he helped defeat in 2008 had, oh, a 98 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.
He felt pretty, pretty confident about her odds against Donald Trump, too (predicting she could win by “an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points”). But Barack Obama’s puckish, intensely competitive former campaign manager, arguably the most successful Democratic strategist of his generation, offered a who-the-hell-really-knows shrug when asked to offer a similarly precise estimate of Clinton’s odds of beating Trump.
“I don’t think we know yet, and I think all of us should have learned by now not to get out over ourselves with Trump,” Plouffe told me during an episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast, in which he offered far-ranging opinions on Clinton’s self-defeating tendency to doubt her own staff, Trump’s role as an Uber-like disrupter and Bill Clinton’s not-quite-Obama-level status in the presidential pantheon.
“My sense, though is this: that he could completely implode,” Plouffe said of his favorite topic — Trump — tacking on a massive caveat: “So you say, well, how could someone, you know, really ferociously and viciously attack the last former Republican president and get into a worldwide verbal tango with the pope and come out OK? Well, he did. … The Trump thing is a living, breathing, growing organism. There are no rules for how you deal with it.”
Plouffe, the archetypal no-drama Obama adviser credited with implementing Obama’s delegate-hoarding strategy eight years ago, has been informally advising Clinton and her staff as needed. Last year, POLITICO reported that he had quietly met with the soon-to-be-candidate at her Washington mansion, tracing her steps, state-by-state, and offering counsel on how to avoid the rending internal dissension that helped scuttle her race against Obama.
Plouffe, several people in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters told me, speaks regularly with campaign manager Robby Mook, despite a demanding executive post at Uber that demands he travel almost constantly. Mook was checking in with Plouffe daily — sometimes multiple times a day — during Clinton’s narrow and bitterly won victory in the Iowa caucuses, they told me. Part of the problem he has identified is the sheer number of people the Clintons talk to on any given day, and the unerring certainty that each had in the quality of their own advice compared with what Mook and his team offered.
And here is where the 48-year-old Delaware political marketing whiz — who was trying to be as tactful as possible in his public dispensing of criticism — described what he believes to be the biggest danger to Clinton as she grinds through the primary headlong into a bellowing, full-steam Trump.
“I think you build your team, and you stick by your team, and you run,” said Plouffe. “It's got to be very hard for the Clintons. They’ve been on the scene for decades. So any time things go wrong, they have dozens of people, you know, in their email box, and probably calling, saying, ‘Told you so. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do this.’ ... You’re going to have your valleys, and that’s always a test. And if the thing you do is sow internal tension and allow voices from the outside to really, I think, affect the campaign in a negative way, you may not win.”
Early on, it seemed as though the Clintons were headed to the same dark place they inhabited for much of 2008. Both were in a sour, question-everything mood in the days after her microscopic victory in Iowa, when it was clear Sanders was about to deliver a humbling and decisive win in New Hampshire. There was talk of accelerating a re-evaluation of staff that had been expected after Super Tuesday, or after she secured the nomination. (Some in Clinton’s orbit even floated the nonstarter idea that Plouffe abandon his lucrative Uber gig and jump aboard the campaign.)
Despite the finger-ointing, Clinton decided to stay the course and was rewarded with game-changing victories in Nevada and South Carolina — and Plouffe hopes she doesn’t get itchy-scratchy when things go south, as they inevitably will, in a general election fight. “I think what you do need to figure out whether it’s one voice,” Plouffe said of the campaign’s overall strategy — and please do away with Clinton’s propensity to summon the clans for 10-to-20-person conference calls anytime things go wrong, he urged.
“There has to be — you know, there’s the big call, and the big meeting, and then there’s the real meeting and the real call,” he added. “You can’t make decisions with 10 people. It’s impossible. So you’ve got to figure out, and, you know, the question is, who is she talking to? And listen, they’ve got enormous [talent]: Joel Benenson [pollster and strategist], Mandy [Grunwald, Clinton ad-maker and all-around adviser], [adman] Jim Margolis, Jen Palmieri [communications director]. ... These are super-smart people. So I don’t think it’s necessarily, you know, is there a missing person from the outside … you’ve got to commit to something.”
The test, he says, will come during the general election, when some old Clinton hand panics and demands that either Hillary or Bill scuttle Mook’s strategy to address some crisis, real or imagined. “There will be moments when there’s some bad, bull---- public poll that comes out that shows them tied in Pennsylvania, and, with all due respect, Ed Rendell will call, and say, ‘You've got to [abandon] Virginia and come here for three days.’”
At this point, Plouffe is almost certain Trump will be Clinton’s opponent: He says it’s already “too late” for Republicans to consolidate behind Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, even assuming one or the other would drop out in a fit of suicidal altruism. From here on out, Trump basically needs to not implode. “Remarkably, this is completely in his control. If he can land the plane, he wins,” Plouffe says.
While he professes to be alarmed by the developer-turned-reality-star in his capacity as an “American citizen,” he gets a little giddy (not a natural Plouffian state of being) at the process of reverse-engineering The Donald’s Teflon candidacy. “If you end up with a Trump-Clinton matchup, that will be one for the ages” — and one he’s pretty sure, though not entirely convinced, she’d win in a walk.
“I think that’s a likely possibility: that Hillary Clinton could beat Donald Trump by an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points,” he says. “But if that’s not the case and he’s competitive, where he’ll be competitive is in the Upper Midwest, in the Ohios, the Wisconsins, maybe Pennsylvanias of the world — maybe Iowa and Minnesota even, potentially.”
Plouffe is quick to say, “From an Electoral College standpoint, I don’t see a Trump path,” but he’s equally quick to say the greatest threat posed by Trump is his unpredictability. Plouffe is a guy who likes to make a plan and stick with it, and Trump makes that a near impossibility. “Trump is a wild card, and you just don’t know,” he adds.
The greatest danger is that the public continues to give Trump license to change his positions any time he likes, with minimal recrimination, and that will allow him to take popular stances outside the narrow confines of GOP orthodoxy. Plouffe thinks he’ll show openness to taxing the rich, nod toward the reality of climate change, even recognize some federal government role in providing health care to the poor.
The idea of deconstructing Trump appeals to Plouffe, but the aspect of his old job he misses most is playing around with the numbers. He thinks Clinton’s greatest advantage is a sophisticated data-gathering operation capable of targeting voters, one by one, in swing states, undermining Trump’s scattershot populist messaging.
Plouffe comes by his numeracy naturally. His father, a Massachusetts native, was a physics major who joined the Army and rose to the rank of captain, where he worked in intelligence, and Plouffe earnestly says that he can’t talk about what his dad did before retiring and taking a job with DuPont.
The son inherited the father’s love for math — he fondly recalls solving calculus “puzzles” as a kid — and like many political pros he grew up a baseball box-score fanatic and, later, a devotee of Sabermetrics. But he was also a passionate fan and, like many kids in Delaware, followed the Phillies as a young boy and idolized their Hall of Fame third-baseman, Mike Schmidt. As any one who has ever worked with (or against) him knows, Plouffe is also very, very competitive. As a pre-teen, he merged all of his passions into an obsession with a 1970s-era board game, “All-Star Baseball,” that combined probability, cards with the names of his favorite players and the thrill of pure chance — in short, all the elements of modern politics.
Yet for Plouffe, politics is ultimately about loyalty, in his case an abiding loyalty to Obama that’s apparent even as he dives enthusiastically into a role as public Clinton booster and private unpaid adviser.
His old competitive instincts toward Clinton have been mostly, but not entirely suppressed. He speaks glowingly of her toughness and smarts. But when I ask Plouffe if he regrets playing hardball with Bill and Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, he grins. “Not one bit,” he says. “Not one bit.”
When Plouffe compiles his list of “consequential presidents” over the past century (the purpose is to place Obama near the top) he ticks them off, one by one. “Well, clearly Franklin Roosevelt. ... Maybe you throw in the combined Kennedy-Johnson years … and then Barack Obama, I think, on that level — and Reagan, of course.”
I interrupt. “Not Bill Clinton?”
“Bill Clinton was a very good president,” he replies, “very good.”
University fraud case
Presidential campaign becomes a factor in Trump University fraud case
By Maggie Severns
In the latest turn in the class-action lawsuit accusing Trump University of fraud, Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a judge to block the lead plaintiff from removing herself from the case — which she is seeking to do in part because of his presidential bid.
The plaintiff, Tarla Makaeff, has been deeply involved in the case against Trump’s education business since it was filed in federal court in San Diego in 2010. But as the case crept closer to a trial, she filed paperwork asking to leave the class action. She said she is grieving the death of her mother, has developed health and anxiety issues, and never anticipated she could be heading to court to testify against the leading presidential candidate.
"No one could have anticipated that he would become a viable presidential candidate and a 24/7 media obsession as this case neared trial," Makaeff's lawyers wrote earlier this month. "Subjecting herself to the intense media attention and likely barbs from Trump and his agents and followers simply would not be healthy for her."
But Trump’s lawyers wrote in a filing submitted Friday that it’s too late for her change of heart. Trump argues that the entire court battle would have played out differently — with the defense doing different discovery in the months leading up to trial — has Makaeff not been front and center. They also point out apparent discrepancies in Makaeff’s case against Trump, namely that she rated a number of her experiences at Trump University highly while she was taking the coursework. (Makaeff and others have said they were pressured to praise the courses.)
“Makaeff brought this lawsuit, allowed herself to become the public poster child for it, and should be required to finish what she started,” the filing says.
Trump also brought Makaeff’s fears to realization on Saturday when he attacked her — although he mangled her name — at a rally in Arkansas, pointing to her positive ratings for Trump University.
“Her name is Tarloff or something,” he said. “She is a horrible, horrible witness. She’s got in writing that she loves it.”
By Maggie Severns
In the latest turn in the class-action lawsuit accusing Trump University of fraud, Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a judge to block the lead plaintiff from removing herself from the case — which she is seeking to do in part because of his presidential bid.
The plaintiff, Tarla Makaeff, has been deeply involved in the case against Trump’s education business since it was filed in federal court in San Diego in 2010. But as the case crept closer to a trial, she filed paperwork asking to leave the class action. She said she is grieving the death of her mother, has developed health and anxiety issues, and never anticipated she could be heading to court to testify against the leading presidential candidate.
"No one could have anticipated that he would become a viable presidential candidate and a 24/7 media obsession as this case neared trial," Makaeff's lawyers wrote earlier this month. "Subjecting herself to the intense media attention and likely barbs from Trump and his agents and followers simply would not be healthy for her."
But Trump’s lawyers wrote in a filing submitted Friday that it’s too late for her change of heart. Trump argues that the entire court battle would have played out differently — with the defense doing different discovery in the months leading up to trial — has Makaeff not been front and center. They also point out apparent discrepancies in Makaeff’s case against Trump, namely that she rated a number of her experiences at Trump University highly while she was taking the coursework. (Makaeff and others have said they were pressured to praise the courses.)
“Makaeff brought this lawsuit, allowed herself to become the public poster child for it, and should be required to finish what she started,” the filing says.
Trump also brought Makaeff’s fears to realization on Saturday when he attacked her — although he mangled her name — at a rally in Arkansas, pointing to her positive ratings for Trump University.
“Her name is Tarloff or something,” he said. “She is a horrible, horrible witness. She’s got in writing that she loves it.”
Breaking News... Thomas Speaks...
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asks first question in 10 years
By Eliza Collins
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked a question for the first time in a decade while hearing arguments on Monday — and then he kept going.
According to the official transcript of the case in question, Stephen L. Voisine and William E. Armstrong III v. United States, Thomas broke in just as Justice Department lawyer Ilana Eisenstein was about to sit down.
"Ms. Eisenstein, one question," Thomas said. "Can you give me — this is a misdemeanor violation. It suspends a constitutional right. Can you give me another area where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right?"
Thomas then followed up with multiple other questions about the case, which involves whether a conviction on charges of domestic violence ought to bar someone from owning a gun.
Judging from his questions — Thomas pressed Eisenstein on whether someone's First Amendment rights could be stripped following a misdemeanor charge — it's pretty clear where the justice was leaning.
The last time Thomas asked a question was Feb. 22, 2006, during a case on the death penalty.
By Eliza Collins
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked a question for the first time in a decade while hearing arguments on Monday — and then he kept going.
According to the official transcript of the case in question, Stephen L. Voisine and William E. Armstrong III v. United States, Thomas broke in just as Justice Department lawyer Ilana Eisenstein was about to sit down.
"Ms. Eisenstein, one question," Thomas said. "Can you give me — this is a misdemeanor violation. It suspends a constitutional right. Can you give me another area where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right?"
Thomas then followed up with multiple other questions about the case, which involves whether a conviction on charges of domestic violence ought to bar someone from owning a gun.
Judging from his questions — Thomas pressed Eisenstein on whether someone's First Amendment rights could be stripped following a misdemeanor charge — it's pretty clear where the justice was leaning.
The last time Thomas asked a question was Feb. 22, 2006, during a case on the death penalty.
Super Tuesday Break down
Breaking down the GOP's Super Tuesday map
A state-by-state look at the day that will define the rest of the Republican primary.
By Kyle Cheney
Super Tuesday could cripple every Republican presidential candidate not named Donald Trump.
The best-case scenario for Trump would put him far ahead of his rivals in the race for delegates, and polls have him competitive almost everywhere that Republicans are voting. But even if he stumbles, Trump will leave Super Tuesday with enough delegates to remain at the front of the race.
Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Ben Carson all lack that luxury. Rubio revived establishment hopes with an aggressive debate performance on Thursday, but a weak finish this week would leave him hobbled heading into his must-win home state of Florida on March 15. Cruz is hoping his brand of conservatism will resonate in the seven Southern states that will dole out the largest share of delegates, but polls show Trump uncomfortably close even in Texas, where Cruz allies admit a loss would be disastrous. Kasich is holding out for Ohio later in March, but if he doesn’t outperform his polls, he’ll struggle to make the case that he’s a national candidate. And even Carson’s allies are suggesting that, barring a miracle, Super Tuesday is likely the end of the line.
About 600 delegates are up for grabs, more than a quarter of all delegates that will be handed out throughout the primary. Though every state is required by party rules to divide those delegates proportionally, rules setting minimum thresholds could end up shutting out Cruz or Rubio if they fall even narrowly short.
Here's a breakdown of each Super Tuesday state and the dynamics in play:
Alabama primary; 50 delegates
Don't be fooled by Gov. Robert Bentley's endorsement of his colleague Kasich. This is conservative country. It's the home of immigration hard-liner Jeff Sessions, whose endorsement has been courted by both Cruz and Trump. There have been few polls of the largely rural state, but Trump dominated the most recent one, a December poll funded by state lawmakers that showed Trump with a 20-point edge over Cruz.
Brent Buchanan, an unaligned Republican strategist in Alabama, said he expects the state to mirror the results of South Carolina: a strong Trump win and a Rubio second-place finish. Buchanan noted that Rubio just earned the endorsement of 31 state lawmakers and that Cruz pulled out of an Alabama forum Saturday, which Rubio attended. Anecdotally, he said, energy for Cruz has slid. It could leave Cruz empty-handed if he fails to reach 20 percent support in the state, the minimum threshold for receiving delegates.
Alaska caucuses; 28 delegates
The Alaska caucuses are virtually invisible. The low-population state is so far out of the way, few candidates devoted much time there. One potential factor: Sarah Palin. A longtime Cruz ally, Palin endorsed Trump last month. In a small state like Alaska, where Palin was governor before her vice presidential run in 2008, an endorsement could carry weight. The only poll that included Trump, taken in early January, showed a close race between the mogul and Cruz.
Arkansas primary; 40 delegates
One of the few obvious opportunities on the map for non-Trump candidates is here. The only recent poll shows Cruz with a narrow lead and a second-place tie between Trump and Rubio. Rubio is the beneficiary of a recent endorsement by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, part of a wave of establishment support he received after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race. Trump has spent time here, though. He held a rally shortly before the New Hampshire primary and he returned Saturday for a rally in Bentonville. He also recently hired Sarah Huckabee, daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, as a senior communications adviser.
Georgia primary; 76 delegates
Trump holds massive leads over his rivals in recent polls of Georgia, the second-largest prize on Super Tuesday. It may be the reason that Trump will spend Monday in Valdosta. The state also has a 20 percent support threshold for doling out delegates, a dangerous dynamic for Cruz and Rubio, who have both floated around that level in recent polls. Rubio recently opened his first office in the state; Trump and Cruz have had a presence there for a while.
Massachusetts primary; 42 delegates
Trump is poised to run away with a win in Massachusetts. The main question is by how much. A resounding victory that features buy-in from the state's significant contingent of blue-collar, Reagan Democrat/independent voters is already spooking Democrats about Trump's strength for the general election. It's also bad news for Kasich, whose team and supporters hoped his second-place finish in New Hampshire would come with Massachusetts coattails. Kasich is expected to get crushed in the South and hasn't had the resources to build much of an organization, so he's been counting on victories on less conservative turf to carry him through Super Tuesday. He won't find much shelter here though. He will, however, likely pick up a few delegates. The state distributes delegates to any candidate who receives more than 5 percent of the vote.
Minnesota caucuses; 38 delegates
The only Midwestern state on the calendar Tuesday, Minnesota will be a true wild card. Trump reportedly has limited organization in the state, and the most recent poll there puts Rubio and Cruz in a statistical tie with Trump. That might explain Rubio's recent visit there. He's in search of any state in which to notch an outright win so that he's not swept on Super Tuesday, as he was in the early states. Rubio received endorsements last week from two prominent Minnesota Republicans, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Sen. Norm Coleman. Trump didn't schedule any time in Minnesota over the past week, as he barnstormed the South.
State GOP chairman Keith Downey said Minnesota is one of the few mysteries on the map. He's urged party officials to prepare for up to twice their record-level turnout of 2008. "I think Cruz, Rubio and Trump might be a little more bunched together in Minnesota, similar to Iowa," he said. Downey added that Trump, of late, has begun assembling a field team that could help him corral more votes on Tuesday.
Oklahoma primary; 43 delegates
Oklahoma is looking like the “bragging rights” state. That’s the way party Chairwoman Pam Pollard sees it. Pollard noted that Oklahoma, one of the three most conservative states in the country, also holds the first totally “closed” primaries — meaning only voters who registered as Republicans by Feb. 5 can cast ballots. Earlier states and even other Super Tuesday states allow some crossover voting by Democrats or voting by independents.
That means the winner in Oklahoma can demonstrate he won a state in which only “Republicans voted for Republicans.” That might explain the late flurry of activity in the state. Trump was in Oklahoma City on Friday, and Pollard said Rubio would be in the state for two stops on Monday. Cruz, she said, had visited three times and would be back again before Tuesday’s primary.
Polls have shown Trump holding a solid but potentially surmountable lead. The Oklahoman poll put Trump ahead with 29 percent support to Rubio's 21 percent. According to the State Elections Board, as of Friday afternoon, mail-in absentee ballots in Oklahoma hit 13,600, already significantly outpacing the 10,500 in 2012, and early voting hit 15,700, already beating 2012's 14,500.
Tennessee primary; 58 delegates
The state -- whose elongated geography drew candidates due to its overlap with media markets in a slew of surrounding states -- is something of an ideological mystery. The state's governor, Bill Haslam, was reelected resoundingly in 2014, but he drew ire from conservatives during a failed attempt to expand Medicaid. Haslam endorsed Rubio last week. A Middle Tennessee State University poll taken in mid-January showed Trump lapping the field with 33 percent to Cruz's 17 percent, though more than a quarter of voters were still undecided.
Texas primary; 155 delegates
This is must-win turf for Cruz. In fact, anything other than a huge victory would be a problem for his campaign. Cruz's path to the nomination revolves around dominance in the South, starting in his home state. If he doesn't come away from Super Tuesday with a delegate lead, it will raise enormous questions about his viability going forward. Absent that kind of showing, his best hope may be a divided electorate that sends the contest to a floor fight at the July convention. Cruz has shown strength in recent polls, leading by double digits in a new Monmouth University survey.
The state party requires a 20 percent threshold of support for candidates to receive delegates. Trump and Cruz may be the only two who come away with delegates if current polling trends hold.
Vermont primary; 16 delegates
With the tiniest pot of delegates up for grabs Tuesday, Vermont hasn’t gotten much attention. But Trump did hold a rally there in January, and Kasich has argued that, like Massachusetts, this generally liberal state could be a pickup opportunity for a more moderate candidate. The state’s only recent poll tells a different story. Trump is dominant and trailed distantly by a second-place Rubio. If these results, and those in a Massachusetts poll, hold, Kasich could come away winless on the day. The state doles out delegates only to candidates who earn 20 percent support or more — meaning Trump could shut out his rivals if he holds his large lead.
Virginia primary; 49 delegates
Donald Trump held a double-digit lead over Rubio and Cruz in recent polls of the state. But the state's impact will be diluted because it doesn't have a delegate threshold, ensuring that even lower-performing candidates will come away with a share of delegates. Kasich made three stops in Virginia last week, and his team has cast Virginia as a state where he could prove sneaky-strong, but polls don't bear that out. A Roanoke College poll out Friday gives Trump a 23-point edge over Cruz, who is statistically tied with Rubio. Carson and Kasich lag the field with just 8 percent support apiece.
Wyoming convention; 29 delegates
No drama here. Wyoming will send its 29 delegates to the July convention unbound. It holds no presidential preference poll or vote of any kind, a distinction shared by only North Dakota and Guam. If the Republican convention becomes a first-ballot nail-biter, these unbound delegates could help tip the balance.
A state-by-state look at the day that will define the rest of the Republican primary.
By Kyle Cheney
Super Tuesday could cripple every Republican presidential candidate not named Donald Trump.
The best-case scenario for Trump would put him far ahead of his rivals in the race for delegates, and polls have him competitive almost everywhere that Republicans are voting. But even if he stumbles, Trump will leave Super Tuesday with enough delegates to remain at the front of the race.
Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Ben Carson all lack that luxury. Rubio revived establishment hopes with an aggressive debate performance on Thursday, but a weak finish this week would leave him hobbled heading into his must-win home state of Florida on March 15. Cruz is hoping his brand of conservatism will resonate in the seven Southern states that will dole out the largest share of delegates, but polls show Trump uncomfortably close even in Texas, where Cruz allies admit a loss would be disastrous. Kasich is holding out for Ohio later in March, but if he doesn’t outperform his polls, he’ll struggle to make the case that he’s a national candidate. And even Carson’s allies are suggesting that, barring a miracle, Super Tuesday is likely the end of the line.
About 600 delegates are up for grabs, more than a quarter of all delegates that will be handed out throughout the primary. Though every state is required by party rules to divide those delegates proportionally, rules setting minimum thresholds could end up shutting out Cruz or Rubio if they fall even narrowly short.
Here's a breakdown of each Super Tuesday state and the dynamics in play:
Alabama primary; 50 delegates
Don't be fooled by Gov. Robert Bentley's endorsement of his colleague Kasich. This is conservative country. It's the home of immigration hard-liner Jeff Sessions, whose endorsement has been courted by both Cruz and Trump. There have been few polls of the largely rural state, but Trump dominated the most recent one, a December poll funded by state lawmakers that showed Trump with a 20-point edge over Cruz.
Brent Buchanan, an unaligned Republican strategist in Alabama, said he expects the state to mirror the results of South Carolina: a strong Trump win and a Rubio second-place finish. Buchanan noted that Rubio just earned the endorsement of 31 state lawmakers and that Cruz pulled out of an Alabama forum Saturday, which Rubio attended. Anecdotally, he said, energy for Cruz has slid. It could leave Cruz empty-handed if he fails to reach 20 percent support in the state, the minimum threshold for receiving delegates.
Alaska caucuses; 28 delegates
The Alaska caucuses are virtually invisible. The low-population state is so far out of the way, few candidates devoted much time there. One potential factor: Sarah Palin. A longtime Cruz ally, Palin endorsed Trump last month. In a small state like Alaska, where Palin was governor before her vice presidential run in 2008, an endorsement could carry weight. The only poll that included Trump, taken in early January, showed a close race between the mogul and Cruz.
Arkansas primary; 40 delegates
One of the few obvious opportunities on the map for non-Trump candidates is here. The only recent poll shows Cruz with a narrow lead and a second-place tie between Trump and Rubio. Rubio is the beneficiary of a recent endorsement by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, part of a wave of establishment support he received after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race. Trump has spent time here, though. He held a rally shortly before the New Hampshire primary and he returned Saturday for a rally in Bentonville. He also recently hired Sarah Huckabee, daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, as a senior communications adviser.
Georgia primary; 76 delegates
Trump holds massive leads over his rivals in recent polls of Georgia, the second-largest prize on Super Tuesday. It may be the reason that Trump will spend Monday in Valdosta. The state also has a 20 percent support threshold for doling out delegates, a dangerous dynamic for Cruz and Rubio, who have both floated around that level in recent polls. Rubio recently opened his first office in the state; Trump and Cruz have had a presence there for a while.
Massachusetts primary; 42 delegates
Trump is poised to run away with a win in Massachusetts. The main question is by how much. A resounding victory that features buy-in from the state's significant contingent of blue-collar, Reagan Democrat/independent voters is already spooking Democrats about Trump's strength for the general election. It's also bad news for Kasich, whose team and supporters hoped his second-place finish in New Hampshire would come with Massachusetts coattails. Kasich is expected to get crushed in the South and hasn't had the resources to build much of an organization, so he's been counting on victories on less conservative turf to carry him through Super Tuesday. He won't find much shelter here though. He will, however, likely pick up a few delegates. The state distributes delegates to any candidate who receives more than 5 percent of the vote.
Minnesota caucuses; 38 delegates
The only Midwestern state on the calendar Tuesday, Minnesota will be a true wild card. Trump reportedly has limited organization in the state, and the most recent poll there puts Rubio and Cruz in a statistical tie with Trump. That might explain Rubio's recent visit there. He's in search of any state in which to notch an outright win so that he's not swept on Super Tuesday, as he was in the early states. Rubio received endorsements last week from two prominent Minnesota Republicans, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Sen. Norm Coleman. Trump didn't schedule any time in Minnesota over the past week, as he barnstormed the South.
State GOP chairman Keith Downey said Minnesota is one of the few mysteries on the map. He's urged party officials to prepare for up to twice their record-level turnout of 2008. "I think Cruz, Rubio and Trump might be a little more bunched together in Minnesota, similar to Iowa," he said. Downey added that Trump, of late, has begun assembling a field team that could help him corral more votes on Tuesday.
Oklahoma primary; 43 delegates
Oklahoma is looking like the “bragging rights” state. That’s the way party Chairwoman Pam Pollard sees it. Pollard noted that Oklahoma, one of the three most conservative states in the country, also holds the first totally “closed” primaries — meaning only voters who registered as Republicans by Feb. 5 can cast ballots. Earlier states and even other Super Tuesday states allow some crossover voting by Democrats or voting by independents.
That means the winner in Oklahoma can demonstrate he won a state in which only “Republicans voted for Republicans.” That might explain the late flurry of activity in the state. Trump was in Oklahoma City on Friday, and Pollard said Rubio would be in the state for two stops on Monday. Cruz, she said, had visited three times and would be back again before Tuesday’s primary.
Polls have shown Trump holding a solid but potentially surmountable lead. The Oklahoman poll put Trump ahead with 29 percent support to Rubio's 21 percent. According to the State Elections Board, as of Friday afternoon, mail-in absentee ballots in Oklahoma hit 13,600, already significantly outpacing the 10,500 in 2012, and early voting hit 15,700, already beating 2012's 14,500.
Tennessee primary; 58 delegates
The state -- whose elongated geography drew candidates due to its overlap with media markets in a slew of surrounding states -- is something of an ideological mystery. The state's governor, Bill Haslam, was reelected resoundingly in 2014, but he drew ire from conservatives during a failed attempt to expand Medicaid. Haslam endorsed Rubio last week. A Middle Tennessee State University poll taken in mid-January showed Trump lapping the field with 33 percent to Cruz's 17 percent, though more than a quarter of voters were still undecided.
Texas primary; 155 delegates
This is must-win turf for Cruz. In fact, anything other than a huge victory would be a problem for his campaign. Cruz's path to the nomination revolves around dominance in the South, starting in his home state. If he doesn't come away from Super Tuesday with a delegate lead, it will raise enormous questions about his viability going forward. Absent that kind of showing, his best hope may be a divided electorate that sends the contest to a floor fight at the July convention. Cruz has shown strength in recent polls, leading by double digits in a new Monmouth University survey.
The state party requires a 20 percent threshold of support for candidates to receive delegates. Trump and Cruz may be the only two who come away with delegates if current polling trends hold.
Vermont primary; 16 delegates
With the tiniest pot of delegates up for grabs Tuesday, Vermont hasn’t gotten much attention. But Trump did hold a rally there in January, and Kasich has argued that, like Massachusetts, this generally liberal state could be a pickup opportunity for a more moderate candidate. The state’s only recent poll tells a different story. Trump is dominant and trailed distantly by a second-place Rubio. If these results, and those in a Massachusetts poll, hold, Kasich could come away winless on the day. The state doles out delegates only to candidates who earn 20 percent support or more — meaning Trump could shut out his rivals if he holds his large lead.
Virginia primary; 49 delegates
Donald Trump held a double-digit lead over Rubio and Cruz in recent polls of the state. But the state's impact will be diluted because it doesn't have a delegate threshold, ensuring that even lower-performing candidates will come away with a share of delegates. Kasich made three stops in Virginia last week, and his team has cast Virginia as a state where he could prove sneaky-strong, but polls don't bear that out. A Roanoke College poll out Friday gives Trump a 23-point edge over Cruz, who is statistically tied with Rubio. Carson and Kasich lag the field with just 8 percent support apiece.
Wyoming convention; 29 delegates
No drama here. Wyoming will send its 29 delegates to the July convention unbound. It holds no presidential preference poll or vote of any kind, a distinction shared by only North Dakota and Guam. If the Republican convention becomes a first-ballot nail-biter, these unbound delegates could help tip the balance.
Leads Sanders
Massachusetts poll: Clinton leads Sanders by 8
By Nick Gass
Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by eight points in Massachusetts a day before Super Tuesday, according to the results of a new Suffolk University poll released Monday, which does not exactly portend good things for the Vermont senator's electoral chances in the New England state.
While Sanders has made significant inroads against Clinton in the state, he still trails her 50 percent to 42 percent in the latest survey conducted between last Thursday and Saturday. Clinton held a much stronger lead of 54 percent to 29 percent in the same survey in November. About 9 percent remain undecided.
Clinton led among voters aged 45 and older, while Sanders held a 17-point lead among younger voters. Sanders trailed Clinton in every region of the state, except for western Massachusetts, on the border of his home state of Vermont. Among men, Sanders led Clinton 49 percent to 42 percent, but he trailed Clinton among women, earning just 36 percent to Clinton's 55 percent.
About seven-in-10 likely voters — 68 percent — indicated that they would definitely be voting for the candidate they currently had in mind, with 18 percent saying they could change their mind and the other 14 percent undecided about their eventual decision.
Massachusetts is one of several states where Sanders is expected to be competitive on Super Tuesday, along with Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont.
The telephone poll was conducted Feb. 25-27, surveying 500 likely Democratic primary voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
By Nick Gass
Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by eight points in Massachusetts a day before Super Tuesday, according to the results of a new Suffolk University poll released Monday, which does not exactly portend good things for the Vermont senator's electoral chances in the New England state.
While Sanders has made significant inroads against Clinton in the state, he still trails her 50 percent to 42 percent in the latest survey conducted between last Thursday and Saturday. Clinton held a much stronger lead of 54 percent to 29 percent in the same survey in November. About 9 percent remain undecided.
Clinton led among voters aged 45 and older, while Sanders held a 17-point lead among younger voters. Sanders trailed Clinton in every region of the state, except for western Massachusetts, on the border of his home state of Vermont. Among men, Sanders led Clinton 49 percent to 42 percent, but he trailed Clinton among women, earning just 36 percent to Clinton's 55 percent.
About seven-in-10 likely voters — 68 percent — indicated that they would definitely be voting for the candidate they currently had in mind, with 18 percent saying they could change their mind and the other 14 percent undecided about their eventual decision.
Massachusetts is one of several states where Sanders is expected to be competitive on Super Tuesday, along with Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont.
The telephone poll was conducted Feb. 25-27, surveying 500 likely Democratic primary voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Tirade
Rubio grows hoarse on anti-Trump tirade
By Nolan D. McCaskill
A hoarse Marco Rubio amped up his anti-Donald Trump tour on Monday, vowing to lose his voice if he has to in order to win the Republican nomination, and scolding the mogul for his apparent reluctance to disavow white supremacists.
“You may not be able to tell, but this is not my normal voice,” Rubio told an Alcoa, Tennessee, crowd ahead of Super Tuesday, adding that his voice sounds as deep as Barry White’s. “We’ve been working hard for you, and if it means that by the end of tonight I don’t have a voice and I have to whisper how strongly I feel about the future of our country I’m willing to do it.”
Rubio's laser-focused attacks on Trump come as the real-estate mogul is embroiled in his latest controversy, after he declined to disavow the support of the Ku Klux Klan and former Grand Wizard David Duke on Sunday. On Monday, though, the businessman said he could hardly hear the question and blamed CNN’s “lousy earpiece.”
Rubio, labeling Trump unelectable after his vacillation regarding the KKK and Duke, said Republicans can’t afford to “nominate someone who refuses to criticize the Ku Klux Klan or distance himself from an avowed racist like David Duke.”
“I don’t care how bad the earpiece is, Ku Klux Klan comes through pretty clearly,” he added.
After ridiculing Trump on Sunday for his “small hands” and alleged spray tan, Rubio took a more serious tone as he continued to go after the billionaire’s record.
“As a candidate I have offered serious ideas and serious proposals, unlike Donald Trump, who won’t tell you where he stands on these issues because he doesn’t care where he stands on these issues. To him, it’s ‘we’ll figure it out when we get there.’ We cannot elect the dog that caught the car,” Rubio said, before pointing to his own plans on tax reform and entitlements, among others.
The Florida senator’s intensifying rhetoric toward Trump and increased direct attacks comes after Rubio unleashed on Trump in last Thursday’s Republican debate. It also comes ahead of Super Tuesday, when roughly a dozen states will cast votes, likely winnowing the field and showing the clearest picture yet of who has a viable path to the nomination.
“I’ve gotten a lot of emails and phone calls and texts after Thursday night’s debate — a lot of people saying thank you for finally standing up to the bully,” Rubio recalled, before describing Trump as more of a “big talker,” an attention-getting media manipulator and a “con man.”
“He’s done a good job of convincing people that he, a guy who has spent his life cheating the little guy, is somehow a champion for the little guy,” Rubio said. “But I’m not fighting for me. I’m not standing up for myself. I want you to understand, I’m trying to stand up for you.”
Rubio said the media wants Trump to win the GOP nomination “so they can descend on him like the hounds of hell. They will shred him to pieces, and then they will get Hillary elected.”
“We have a chance in this election to go in a different direction from the one we’re headed now, and it is the direction that I’m offering you,” Rubio told his supporters. “It is a direction that I ask you to vote for. It is not one that asks you to act on your fears and on your anxieties, for I know that they are real. It is a direction that asks you to embrace your hopes and your dreams for a better future.”
By Nolan D. McCaskill
A hoarse Marco Rubio amped up his anti-Donald Trump tour on Monday, vowing to lose his voice if he has to in order to win the Republican nomination, and scolding the mogul for his apparent reluctance to disavow white supremacists.
“You may not be able to tell, but this is not my normal voice,” Rubio told an Alcoa, Tennessee, crowd ahead of Super Tuesday, adding that his voice sounds as deep as Barry White’s. “We’ve been working hard for you, and if it means that by the end of tonight I don’t have a voice and I have to whisper how strongly I feel about the future of our country I’m willing to do it.”
Rubio's laser-focused attacks on Trump come as the real-estate mogul is embroiled in his latest controversy, after he declined to disavow the support of the Ku Klux Klan and former Grand Wizard David Duke on Sunday. On Monday, though, the businessman said he could hardly hear the question and blamed CNN’s “lousy earpiece.”
Rubio, labeling Trump unelectable after his vacillation regarding the KKK and Duke, said Republicans can’t afford to “nominate someone who refuses to criticize the Ku Klux Klan or distance himself from an avowed racist like David Duke.”
“I don’t care how bad the earpiece is, Ku Klux Klan comes through pretty clearly,” he added.
After ridiculing Trump on Sunday for his “small hands” and alleged spray tan, Rubio took a more serious tone as he continued to go after the billionaire’s record.
“As a candidate I have offered serious ideas and serious proposals, unlike Donald Trump, who won’t tell you where he stands on these issues because he doesn’t care where he stands on these issues. To him, it’s ‘we’ll figure it out when we get there.’ We cannot elect the dog that caught the car,” Rubio said, before pointing to his own plans on tax reform and entitlements, among others.
The Florida senator’s intensifying rhetoric toward Trump and increased direct attacks comes after Rubio unleashed on Trump in last Thursday’s Republican debate. It also comes ahead of Super Tuesday, when roughly a dozen states will cast votes, likely winnowing the field and showing the clearest picture yet of who has a viable path to the nomination.
“I’ve gotten a lot of emails and phone calls and texts after Thursday night’s debate — a lot of people saying thank you for finally standing up to the bully,” Rubio recalled, before describing Trump as more of a “big talker,” an attention-getting media manipulator and a “con man.”
“He’s done a good job of convincing people that he, a guy who has spent his life cheating the little guy, is somehow a champion for the little guy,” Rubio said. “But I’m not fighting for me. I’m not standing up for myself. I want you to understand, I’m trying to stand up for you.”
Rubio said the media wants Trump to win the GOP nomination “so they can descend on him like the hounds of hell. They will shred him to pieces, and then they will get Hillary elected.”
“We have a chance in this election to go in a different direction from the one we’re headed now, and it is the direction that I’m offering you,” Rubio told his supporters. “It is a direction that I ask you to vote for. It is not one that asks you to act on your fears and on your anxieties, for I know that they are real. It is a direction that asks you to embrace your hopes and your dreams for a better future.”
Plan to shatter
Democrats draw plan to shatter the GOP
Through a combination of messaging and the ascendance of Donald Trump, Democrats see a path to cutting into the GOP coalition.
By Kyle Cheney
Democrats are drawing blueprints for stealing GOP moderates from a rightward-driving Republican Party, saying the heist is key to scoring a White House win in November.
Democracy Corps’ Stan Greenberg, a prominent national Democratic pollster, released data Monday morning that suggest moderate Republicans — nearly a third of the GOP base — are being ignored by their presidential candidates. These Republicans don’t revile Planned Parenthood — in fact, many prefer the women’s health group to pro-life groups and candidates who take hard-line stances on abortion. They’re supportive of same-sex marriage. They’re not enamored of the NRA. They have less rigid attitudes about sex. They accept climate science.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Greenberg said. “They’re considered illegitimate within the Republican Party, and no one is speaking to them."
It’s a dynamic Greenberg said could drive those moderates toward Democrats this fall, and he wants his party to work to make that happen.
But while the GOP moderates may feel a break from their party, they're also hostile to Democrats, meaning that bringing them over would require a total rebranding of the Democratic Party in their eyes. In an online poll of 800 likely Republican primary voters, conducted from Feb. 11 to Feb. 16, Democracy Corp found that anti-Democrat attitudes are the most potent driver of Republican primary voters — and their antipathy for Hillary Clinton outweighs even their dislike for President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole, a feeling that cuts across ideology.
Still, the poll shows that GOP moderates may be pliable — and that Democratic efforts to corral GOP votes shouldn’t end with just looking for moderates. The results show that Catholic Republicans are similarly out of step with the Republican base. They’re less hostile to government regulation and generally agree that those making more than $250,000 a year should pay “a lot” more in taxes.
These tactics could be even more potent if Donald Trump is the nominee. The winning arguments, Greenberg says his research shows, include convincing these Republicans that Trump is an egomaniac, that he’s disrespectful to women, that he can’t be trusted with the nation’s nuclear arsenal, that he has no clean energy agenda and that he’s hostile to global trade.
The poll shows that Trump, more than his leading rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, would cause Republicans to rethink their party loyalty. About one in five say they would either not vote or are unsure whom they’d support — or even consider supporting a third-party candidate — if Trump is the nominee. Among Catholics and moderates, these figures jump even further.
Events even since the poll was conducted have highlighted this opening. Establishment Republicans have been in open conflict with Trump over his recent equivocation when asked to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. Stories have emerged describing Republican insiders' (so far fruitless) attempts to dislodge Trump's hold on the party. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse even suggested on social media that he'd look for a third-party conservative if the general election is Trump versus Clinton.
But Greenberg's research suggests moderate and Catholic Republicans might also cross party lines for other GOP nominees, reflecting discomfort with the party's rightward lurch. These same Republicans express sharp reservations about Rubio’s position on abortion, which doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest. In fact, after presenting poll respondents with Democratic arguments against all three leading candidates, more peel away from Rubio and Cruz than from Trump — and the most potent arguments centered on their hostility to same-sex marriage and abortion.
In addition, the Republican moderates and Catholics polled responded to some affirmative Democratic arguments — from moving past divisive social issues to encouraging infrastructure investment and cracking down on corporate greed.
The poll carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
While Democrats plot to take advantage of the GOP's internal tensions, Republicans are looking to do much the same, hoping that they can increasingly bring blue-collar, more conservative Democrats into their coalition by painting the party as lurching left and leaving traditional values behind.
Through a combination of messaging and the ascendance of Donald Trump, Democrats see a path to cutting into the GOP coalition.
By Kyle Cheney
Democrats are drawing blueprints for stealing GOP moderates from a rightward-driving Republican Party, saying the heist is key to scoring a White House win in November.
Democracy Corps’ Stan Greenberg, a prominent national Democratic pollster, released data Monday morning that suggest moderate Republicans — nearly a third of the GOP base — are being ignored by their presidential candidates. These Republicans don’t revile Planned Parenthood — in fact, many prefer the women’s health group to pro-life groups and candidates who take hard-line stances on abortion. They’re supportive of same-sex marriage. They’re not enamored of the NRA. They have less rigid attitudes about sex. They accept climate science.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Greenberg said. “They’re considered illegitimate within the Republican Party, and no one is speaking to them."
It’s a dynamic Greenberg said could drive those moderates toward Democrats this fall, and he wants his party to work to make that happen.
But while the GOP moderates may feel a break from their party, they're also hostile to Democrats, meaning that bringing them over would require a total rebranding of the Democratic Party in their eyes. In an online poll of 800 likely Republican primary voters, conducted from Feb. 11 to Feb. 16, Democracy Corp found that anti-Democrat attitudes are the most potent driver of Republican primary voters — and their antipathy for Hillary Clinton outweighs even their dislike for President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole, a feeling that cuts across ideology.
Still, the poll shows that GOP moderates may be pliable — and that Democratic efforts to corral GOP votes shouldn’t end with just looking for moderates. The results show that Catholic Republicans are similarly out of step with the Republican base. They’re less hostile to government regulation and generally agree that those making more than $250,000 a year should pay “a lot” more in taxes.
These tactics could be even more potent if Donald Trump is the nominee. The winning arguments, Greenberg says his research shows, include convincing these Republicans that Trump is an egomaniac, that he’s disrespectful to women, that he can’t be trusted with the nation’s nuclear arsenal, that he has no clean energy agenda and that he’s hostile to global trade.
The poll shows that Trump, more than his leading rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, would cause Republicans to rethink their party loyalty. About one in five say they would either not vote or are unsure whom they’d support — or even consider supporting a third-party candidate — if Trump is the nominee. Among Catholics and moderates, these figures jump even further.
Events even since the poll was conducted have highlighted this opening. Establishment Republicans have been in open conflict with Trump over his recent equivocation when asked to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. Stories have emerged describing Republican insiders' (so far fruitless) attempts to dislodge Trump's hold on the party. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse even suggested on social media that he'd look for a third-party conservative if the general election is Trump versus Clinton.
But Greenberg's research suggests moderate and Catholic Republicans might also cross party lines for other GOP nominees, reflecting discomfort with the party's rightward lurch. These same Republicans express sharp reservations about Rubio’s position on abortion, which doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest. In fact, after presenting poll respondents with Democratic arguments against all three leading candidates, more peel away from Rubio and Cruz than from Trump — and the most potent arguments centered on their hostility to same-sex marriage and abortion.
In addition, the Republican moderates and Catholics polled responded to some affirmative Democratic arguments — from moving past divisive social issues to encouraging infrastructure investment and cracking down on corporate greed.
The poll carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
While Democrats plot to take advantage of the GOP's internal tensions, Republicans are looking to do much the same, hoping that they can increasingly bring blue-collar, more conservative Democrats into their coalition by painting the party as lurching left and leaving traditional values behind.
Settle Suits
Scalia's Death Prompts Dow to Settle Suits for $835 Million
by Jef Feeley and Greg Stohr
Dow Chemical Co. said it agreed to pay $835 million to settle an antitrust case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death reduced its chances of overturning a jury award.
Dow, the largest U.S. chemical maker by sales, said Friday the accord will resolve its challenges to a $1.06 billion award to purchasers of compounds for urethanes, chemicals used to make foam upholstery for furniture and plastic walls in refrigerators.
The Midland, Michigan-based company disputed a jury’s finding it had conspired with four other chemical makers to fix urethane prices and asked the Supreme Court to take the class-action case on appeal. Scalia, one of the court’s most conservative members, had voted to scale back the reach of such group suits.
“Growing political uncertainties due to recent events with the Supreme Court and increased likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class-action suits have changed Dow’s risk assessment of the situation,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.
Scalia’s Absence
Scalia’s death is likely to make it harder for companies to get the five votes they need to overturn awards or get new restrictions on class actions. He had been a key voice for companies in challenging group suits at the Supreme Court.
Scalia wrote the 5-4 ruling in 2011 that said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. couldn’t be sued by potentially a million female workers. Two years later, Scalia was the author of a 5-4 ruling that freed Comcast Corp. from having to defend against an $875 million antitrust lawsuit on behalf of Philadelphia-area customers.
“Class-actions is one of the areas where Justice Scalia’s absence is likely to have an impact,” said Gregory Garre, an appellate lawyer at Latham & Watkins in Washington and previously President George W. Bush’s top Supreme Court lawyer. “Companies will have to be careful what they ask for in seeking review, or at least face an added burden in prevailing at the court on class-action issues.”
‘Political Philosophy’
“Companies whose positions are based more on political philosophy than on interpretation of the law worry when the majority philosophy in sway at the court changes,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s business and law schools who teaches classes on mass torts and class-action cases.
“It is unlikely that any nominee will be as favorable to business as Justice Scalia was,” Gordon said in an e-mail. “The anti-business wing will carry more decisions.”
Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, a Republican, bowed out of consideration Thursday as Scalia’s replacement on the court. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has vowed that any nominee pushed forward by President Barack Obama won’t get a confirmation vote this year. McConnell says the next president should make the appointment.
‘Marginal Difference’
Some appellate lawyers say the court won’t change much on class actions, regardless who makes the selection.
“I think it’s only a marginal difference,” said Jonathan Hacker, who runs the Supreme Court practice at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington. “Overall I think most justices want to ensure that class-action procedures permit defendants to litigate their defenses fairly and don’t subject absent class members to unfair outcomes they can’t control or even influence.”
The settlement in the Dow case resolves the largest U.S. court award for 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That year, a federal-court jury in Kansas City, Kansas, awarded urethane purchasers $400 million in damages over claims that Dow engaged in price fixing. The judge in the case tripled the award to $1.2 billion as required by antitrust law.
The case started in 2005 with allegations that Dow plotted with BASF SE, Huntsman International LLC and Lyondell Chemical Co. in violation of federal law. Dow was the only company that refused to settle. The final judgment in the case was reduced to reflect $139 million in settlements with the other defendants before trial.
Dow’s Defense
Dow appealed the liability finding and award to a federal appeals court in Denver, which rejected its challenges to the class-action claims in September 2014. The company asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the lower court’s ruling.
Dow disputes that it was part of a price-fixing conspiracy even though it agreed to resolve the case. The jury award “was fundamentally flawed as a matter of class-action law,” the company said in its statement.
The Supreme Court has been holding Dow’s appeal while it considers similar issues in a Tyson Foods Inc. case. Tyson is seeking to overturn a $5.8 million wage award to workers at an Iowa pork-processing plant. The company argues that it was subjected to an improper “trial by formula” and that the class of workers included some who were fully compensated.
Tyson got a skeptical audience from the justices during arguments in November. The justices suggested they might issue a narrow ruling, potentially upholding the award while limiting its reasoning to the wage-and-hour hour context. The Dow appeal raised broader questions about group lawsuits, arguing the award violated both the Constitution and the federal courtroom rules that govern class actions.
In December, Dow and DuPont Co. agreed to a merger of equals, the largest combination ever in the chemical industry. The companies have a combined market value exceeding $106 billion, based on current trading.
The deal is scheduled to close by the end of this year, after which three separate companies focused on plastics, agricultural products and specialty materials will be spun off to shareholders.
The antitrust case is In re Urethane Antitrust Litigation, 04-md-01616, U.S. District Court, District of Kansas (Kansas City).
by Jef Feeley and Greg Stohr
Dow Chemical Co. said it agreed to pay $835 million to settle an antitrust case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death reduced its chances of overturning a jury award.
Dow, the largest U.S. chemical maker by sales, said Friday the accord will resolve its challenges to a $1.06 billion award to purchasers of compounds for urethanes, chemicals used to make foam upholstery for furniture and plastic walls in refrigerators.
The Midland, Michigan-based company disputed a jury’s finding it had conspired with four other chemical makers to fix urethane prices and asked the Supreme Court to take the class-action case on appeal. Scalia, one of the court’s most conservative members, had voted to scale back the reach of such group suits.
“Growing political uncertainties due to recent events with the Supreme Court and increased likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class-action suits have changed Dow’s risk assessment of the situation,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.
Scalia’s Absence
Scalia’s death is likely to make it harder for companies to get the five votes they need to overturn awards or get new restrictions on class actions. He had been a key voice for companies in challenging group suits at the Supreme Court.
Scalia wrote the 5-4 ruling in 2011 that said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. couldn’t be sued by potentially a million female workers. Two years later, Scalia was the author of a 5-4 ruling that freed Comcast Corp. from having to defend against an $875 million antitrust lawsuit on behalf of Philadelphia-area customers.
“Class-actions is one of the areas where Justice Scalia’s absence is likely to have an impact,” said Gregory Garre, an appellate lawyer at Latham & Watkins in Washington and previously President George W. Bush’s top Supreme Court lawyer. “Companies will have to be careful what they ask for in seeking review, or at least face an added burden in prevailing at the court on class-action issues.”
‘Political Philosophy’
“Companies whose positions are based more on political philosophy than on interpretation of the law worry when the majority philosophy in sway at the court changes,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s business and law schools who teaches classes on mass torts and class-action cases.
“It is unlikely that any nominee will be as favorable to business as Justice Scalia was,” Gordon said in an e-mail. “The anti-business wing will carry more decisions.”
Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, a Republican, bowed out of consideration Thursday as Scalia’s replacement on the court. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has vowed that any nominee pushed forward by President Barack Obama won’t get a confirmation vote this year. McConnell says the next president should make the appointment.
‘Marginal Difference’
Some appellate lawyers say the court won’t change much on class actions, regardless who makes the selection.
“I think it’s only a marginal difference,” said Jonathan Hacker, who runs the Supreme Court practice at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington. “Overall I think most justices want to ensure that class-action procedures permit defendants to litigate their defenses fairly and don’t subject absent class members to unfair outcomes they can’t control or even influence.”
The settlement in the Dow case resolves the largest U.S. court award for 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That year, a federal-court jury in Kansas City, Kansas, awarded urethane purchasers $400 million in damages over claims that Dow engaged in price fixing. The judge in the case tripled the award to $1.2 billion as required by antitrust law.
The case started in 2005 with allegations that Dow plotted with BASF SE, Huntsman International LLC and Lyondell Chemical Co. in violation of federal law. Dow was the only company that refused to settle. The final judgment in the case was reduced to reflect $139 million in settlements with the other defendants before trial.
Dow’s Defense
Dow appealed the liability finding and award to a federal appeals court in Denver, which rejected its challenges to the class-action claims in September 2014. The company asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the lower court’s ruling.
Dow disputes that it was part of a price-fixing conspiracy even though it agreed to resolve the case. The jury award “was fundamentally flawed as a matter of class-action law,” the company said in its statement.
The Supreme Court has been holding Dow’s appeal while it considers similar issues in a Tyson Foods Inc. case. Tyson is seeking to overturn a $5.8 million wage award to workers at an Iowa pork-processing plant. The company argues that it was subjected to an improper “trial by formula” and that the class of workers included some who were fully compensated.
Tyson got a skeptical audience from the justices during arguments in November. The justices suggested they might issue a narrow ruling, potentially upholding the award while limiting its reasoning to the wage-and-hour hour context. The Dow appeal raised broader questions about group lawsuits, arguing the award violated both the Constitution and the federal courtroom rules that govern class actions.
In December, Dow and DuPont Co. agreed to a merger of equals, the largest combination ever in the chemical industry. The companies have a combined market value exceeding $106 billion, based on current trading.
The deal is scheduled to close by the end of this year, after which three separate companies focused on plastics, agricultural products and specialty materials will be spun off to shareholders.
The antitrust case is In re Urethane Antitrust Litigation, 04-md-01616, U.S. District Court, District of Kansas (Kansas City).
GOP’s Frankenstein
Trump is the GOP’s Frankenstein monster. Now he’s strong enough to destroy the party.
By Robert Kagan
When the plague descended on Thebes, Oedipus sent his brother-in-law to the Delphic oracle to discover the cause. Little did he realize that the crime for which Thebes was being punished was his own. Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus. A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.
Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements, the persistent calls for nullification of Supreme Court decisions, the insistence that compromise was betrayal, the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition — that taught Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at? Was it not Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), among others, who set this tone and thereby cleared the way for someone even more irreverent, so that now, in a most unenjoyable irony, Cruz, along with the rest of the party, must fall to the purer version of himself, a less ideologically encumbered anarcho-revolutionary? This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.
Then there was the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks. No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers. Who began the attack on immigrants — legal and illegal — long before Trump arrived on the scene and made it his premier issue? Who frightened Mitt Romney into selling his soul in 2012, talking of “self-deportation” to get himself right with the party’s anti-immigrant forces? Who opposed any plausible means of dealing with the genuine problem of illegal immigration, forcing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to cower, abandon his principles — and his own immigration legislation — lest he be driven from the presidential race before it had even begun? It was not Trump. It was not even party yahoos. It was Republican Party pundits and intellectuals, trying to harness populist passions and perhaps deal a blow to any legislation for which President Obama might possibly claim even partial credit. What did Trump do but pick up where they left off, tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed?
Then there was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified. Has the president done a poor job in many respects? Have his foreign policies, in particular, contributed to the fraying of the liberal world order that the United States created after World War II? Yes, and for these failures he has deserved criticism and principled opposition. But Republican and conservative criticism has taken an unusually dark and paranoid form. Instead of recommending plausible alternative strategies for the crisis in the Middle East, many Republicans have fallen back on mindless Islamophobia, with suspicious intimations about the president’s personal allegiances.
Thus Obama is not only wrong but also anti-American, un-American, non-American, and his policies — though barely distinguishable from those of previous liberal Democrats such as Michael Dukakis or Mario Cuomo — are somehow representative of something subversive. How surprising was it that a man who began his recent political career by questioning Obama’s eligibility for office could leap to the front of the pack, willing and able to communicate with his followers by means of the dog-whistle disdain for “political correctness”?
We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the revolution.
There has been much second-guessing lately. Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time? But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power. Some of those Republican leaders and pundits now calling for a counterrevolution against Trump were not so long ago welcoming his contribution to the debate. The politicians running against him and now facing oblivion were loath to attack him before because they feared alienating his supporters. Instead, they attacked one another, clawing at each other’s faces as they one by one slipped over the cliff. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got his last deadly lick in just before he plummeted — at Trump? No, at Rubio. (And now, as his final service to party and nation, he has endorsed Trump.) Jeb Bush spent millions upon millions in his hopeless race, but against whom? Not Trump.
So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.
By Robert Kagan
When the plague descended on Thebes, Oedipus sent his brother-in-law to the Delphic oracle to discover the cause. Little did he realize that the crime for which Thebes was being punished was his own. Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus. A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.
Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements, the persistent calls for nullification of Supreme Court decisions, the insistence that compromise was betrayal, the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition — that taught Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at? Was it not Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), among others, who set this tone and thereby cleared the way for someone even more irreverent, so that now, in a most unenjoyable irony, Cruz, along with the rest of the party, must fall to the purer version of himself, a less ideologically encumbered anarcho-revolutionary? This would not be the first revolution that devoured itself.
Then there was the party’s accommodation to and exploitation of the bigotry in its ranks. No, the majority of Republicans are not bigots. But they have certainly been enablers. Who began the attack on immigrants — legal and illegal — long before Trump arrived on the scene and made it his premier issue? Who frightened Mitt Romney into selling his soul in 2012, talking of “self-deportation” to get himself right with the party’s anti-immigrant forces? Who opposed any plausible means of dealing with the genuine problem of illegal immigration, forcing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to cower, abandon his principles — and his own immigration legislation — lest he be driven from the presidential race before it had even begun? It was not Trump. It was not even party yahoos. It was Republican Party pundits and intellectuals, trying to harness populist passions and perhaps deal a blow to any legislation for which President Obama might possibly claim even partial credit. What did Trump do but pick up where they left off, tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed?
Then there was the Obama hatred, a racially tinged derangement syndrome that made any charge plausible and any opposition justified. Has the president done a poor job in many respects? Have his foreign policies, in particular, contributed to the fraying of the liberal world order that the United States created after World War II? Yes, and for these failures he has deserved criticism and principled opposition. But Republican and conservative criticism has taken an unusually dark and paranoid form. Instead of recommending plausible alternative strategies for the crisis in the Middle East, many Republicans have fallen back on mindless Islamophobia, with suspicious intimations about the president’s personal allegiances.
Thus Obama is not only wrong but also anti-American, un-American, non-American, and his policies — though barely distinguishable from those of previous liberal Democrats such as Michael Dukakis or Mario Cuomo — are somehow representative of something subversive. How surprising was it that a man who began his recent political career by questioning Obama’s eligibility for office could leap to the front of the pack, willing and able to communicate with his followers by means of the dog-whistle disdain for “political correctness”?
We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the revolution.
There has been much second-guessing lately. Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time? But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power. Some of those Republican leaders and pundits now calling for a counterrevolution against Trump were not so long ago welcoming his contribution to the debate. The politicians running against him and now facing oblivion were loath to attack him before because they feared alienating his supporters. Instead, they attacked one another, clawing at each other’s faces as they one by one slipped over the cliff. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got his last deadly lick in just before he plummeted — at Trump? No, at Rubio. (And now, as his final service to party and nation, he has endorsed Trump.) Jeb Bush spent millions upon millions in his hopeless race, but against whom? Not Trump.
So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.
Did it to themselves..
Nobody Can Believe We're Here, But We're Here
Trump is really, truly blowing up our politics. It was a long time coming.
By Charles P. Pierce
Back before there was Ted Cruz, before there was Young Marco Rubio, even before anger and bigotry gave even vulgar talking yams the gift of speech, there was Congressman Bob Barr of the Seventh Congressional District of Georgia. When historians of the future write of the Great Penis Hunt of the 1990s, Bob Barr will be reckoned to be its Kit Carson. Bob Barr wrote a book that argued for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton before anyone ever had heard of Monica Lewinsky. In fact, in 1994, when Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first majority in the House of Representatives since 1946, it became an article of faith among the Republican leaders in the House that they would impeach Clinton over something—over Whitewater, or Travelgate, or Filegate, or the Rose Law Firm Billing records—simply because they had the votes to do it.
It didn't matter that there was nothing to any of those faux scandals. It didn't matter that there was no chance that two-thirds of the Senate ever would convict Clinton and remove him from office. It didn't even matter that they got whacked in the 1998 midterms by an electorate that quite openly was telling them to knock it off. What matters is that they could do it, and along came Monica Lewinsky, and so they did it because they had the votes to do it.
It was the first time—but not the last, God knows—that the Republican Party mistook hubris for principle. It was the first time—but not the last, God knows—that the Republican Party mistook emotional mulishness for courage. It was the first time—but not the last, God knows—that the Republican Party draped raw power politics in the unconvincing camouflage of high principle. It also was the first manifestation of how the news-entertainment complex, political nihilism, and the authoritarian instinct of a disciplined political cadre could come together to deform our politics simply because it was possible to do it. When that happened, Bob Barr had been standing there all along. But not even Bob Barr can quite comprehend how this witches brew that he and his colleagues first concocted in 1998 could have made inevitable the rise of He, Trump.
But it did.
"I'm as amazed as everyone else following this campaign cycle at Trump," said Barr. "But we all have to do everything we can to make sure he's not the nominee."
Barr had come to a windy plaza in downtown Atlanta on Saturday to stand in support of Tailgunner Ted Cruz, one of the purer products of an even more radical Republican congressional majority than the one that impeached Bill Clinton over a series of blowjobs. The talk around the campaign on Saturday was of the long and impressively detailed New York Times report of how impotent the largely imaginary Republican "establishment" had been in confronting the reality of He, Trump, and how that bungling had managed to make collateral damage out of every other Republican candidate. For example, there was the hilarious anecdote concerning a phone call between Young Marco Rubio and Chris Christie after Big Chicken had dropped out.
Mr. Christie had attacked Mr. Rubio contemptuously in New Hampshire, calling him shallow and scripted, and humiliating him in a debate. Nevertheless, Mr. Rubio made a tentative overture to Mr. Christie after his withdrawal from the presidential race. He left the governor a voice mail message, seeking Mr. Christie's support and assuring him that he had a bright future in public service, according to people who have heard Mr. Christie's characterization of the message.
Holy hell. The Christie family telephone must be three-quarters of the way to the Azores by now.
The problem with the Times piece is that it doesn't take into account two obvious factors that the Republican Party itself resolutely fails to confront: first, that the prion disease that has afflicted the party since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980s has gotten worse, not better, and second, that the party's three-decade courtship of the wild and the vile in our politics sooner or later was bound to leave the party open to a renegade campaign that was better at energizing that element than the cumbersome party machinery was. Anyone who thinks the Trump phenomenon is a sui generis explosion of eccentricity has forgotten the incredible collection of rodeo clowns over which Mitt Romney triumphed in 2012. Anyone who thinks He, Trump is unique in his rhetoric and his appeal never has read through Gingrich's old Thesaurus For Ratfckers that helped fuel his rise to the Speakership. And anyone who thinks Trump's brand of noisy, arrant bullshit is in anyway unique never has listened to a Cruz's stump speech, like the one he unlimbered in the windy Atlanta morning, and which always contains the following passage that has no more connection to actual reality than do Trump's fantastical Mexican drug mules slipping through the New Hampshire woods.
This election is not about one branch of government. It's about two branches of government. We are one liberal justice away from a five justice left-wing majority the likes of which this country has never seen. We are one justice away from the Supreme Court taking away our fundamental religious liberty, one justice away from the Supreme Court ordering 10 Commandment monuments taken down all over this country, one justice away from the Supreme Court striking down every restriction on abortion and mandating abortion on demand all over this country. We are one justice away from the Supreme Court reading the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights and taking away our right to keep and bear arms. We are one justice away from the Supreme Court ordering veterans memorials to be taken down all over this country, and we are not far away from the Supreme Court ordering the chisels to come outto remove the crosses and stars of David from the tombstones of our fallen soldiers.
Of all of the crocks in a campaign full of them, this one paragraph is the most energetically bubbling of them all. Forget that the worst this hypothetical Weatherman majority likely could to America's gun lovers is to re-establish the regime that existed prior to the Heller decision in 2008. Forget also that there will be no Supreme Court majority for "abortion on demand" or anything like it as long as Anthony Kennedy is alive and dithering. There is no conceivable chance that the Supreme Court will order religious symbols to be chiseled off the tombstones at Arlington. (I would note that Cruz does not mention the crescents that adorn the markers of Muslim service members who have died for his liberty.) It takes a lot of gall for someone like Ted Cruz to imply that someone else is conning the American people.
At least Young Marco Rubio is playing it for laughs these days. Speaking to a substantial crowd in the football stadium of a luxurious Christian academy in Kennesaw, Young Marco is continuing to work on new material before the next big robotics trade show.
So here's the one tweet he put out, he put out a picture of me having makeup put on me at the debate, which is amazing me to me, that the guy with the worst spray tan in America is attacking me for putting on makeup. Donald Trump likes to sue people; he should sue whoever did that to his face.
(In truth, Rubio's latest line of attack—that Trump is a "con-man" whose professed business acumen is merely the relentless search for his next pack of suckers—is both an effective and accurate one. It would have been even more effective in, say, November. And, anyway, The New York Times just handed Ted Cruz and his campaign a giant cudgel with which to belabor Rubio on his previous attempt to reform the immigration system. We will discuss Senator Chuck Schumer's going hat in hand to Roger Ailes at another time. Oh, yes, we surely will.)
I don't know what's the best measure of how we've fallen as a democratic republic. The fact that Rubio has decided to answer He, Trump's 10th grade insults with 7th grade comebacks, or the I'm-a-clever-dick grin he flashes every time he gets off one of these lunch-lady zingers. But there was something familiar about this one. Then, I remembered. It was a scene from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing.
Trump is really, truly blowing up our politics. It was a long time coming.
By Charles P. Pierce
Back before there was Ted Cruz, before there was Young Marco Rubio, even before anger and bigotry gave even vulgar talking yams the gift of speech, there was Congressman Bob Barr of the Seventh Congressional District of Georgia. When historians of the future write of the Great Penis Hunt of the 1990s, Bob Barr will be reckoned to be its Kit Carson. Bob Barr wrote a book that argued for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton before anyone ever had heard of Monica Lewinsky. In fact, in 1994, when Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first majority in the House of Representatives since 1946, it became an article of faith among the Republican leaders in the House that they would impeach Clinton over something—over Whitewater, or Travelgate, or Filegate, or the Rose Law Firm Billing records—simply because they had the votes to do it.
It didn't matter that there was nothing to any of those faux scandals. It didn't matter that there was no chance that two-thirds of the Senate ever would convict Clinton and remove him from office. It didn't even matter that they got whacked in the 1998 midterms by an electorate that quite openly was telling them to knock it off. What matters is that they could do it, and along came Monica Lewinsky, and so they did it because they had the votes to do it.
It was the first time—but not the last, God knows—that the Republican Party mistook hubris for principle. It was the first time—but not the last, God knows—that the Republican Party mistook emotional mulishness for courage. It was the first time—but not the last, God knows—that the Republican Party draped raw power politics in the unconvincing camouflage of high principle. It also was the first manifestation of how the news-entertainment complex, political nihilism, and the authoritarian instinct of a disciplined political cadre could come together to deform our politics simply because it was possible to do it. When that happened, Bob Barr had been standing there all along. But not even Bob Barr can quite comprehend how this witches brew that he and his colleagues first concocted in 1998 could have made inevitable the rise of He, Trump.
But it did.
"I'm as amazed as everyone else following this campaign cycle at Trump," said Barr. "But we all have to do everything we can to make sure he's not the nominee."
Barr had come to a windy plaza in downtown Atlanta on Saturday to stand in support of Tailgunner Ted Cruz, one of the purer products of an even more radical Republican congressional majority than the one that impeached Bill Clinton over a series of blowjobs. The talk around the campaign on Saturday was of the long and impressively detailed New York Times report of how impotent the largely imaginary Republican "establishment" had been in confronting the reality of He, Trump, and how that bungling had managed to make collateral damage out of every other Republican candidate. For example, there was the hilarious anecdote concerning a phone call between Young Marco Rubio and Chris Christie after Big Chicken had dropped out.
Mr. Christie had attacked Mr. Rubio contemptuously in New Hampshire, calling him shallow and scripted, and humiliating him in a debate. Nevertheless, Mr. Rubio made a tentative overture to Mr. Christie after his withdrawal from the presidential race. He left the governor a voice mail message, seeking Mr. Christie's support and assuring him that he had a bright future in public service, according to people who have heard Mr. Christie's characterization of the message.
Holy hell. The Christie family telephone must be three-quarters of the way to the Azores by now.
The problem with the Times piece is that it doesn't take into account two obvious factors that the Republican Party itself resolutely fails to confront: first, that the prion disease that has afflicted the party since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains in the 1980s has gotten worse, not better, and second, that the party's three-decade courtship of the wild and the vile in our politics sooner or later was bound to leave the party open to a renegade campaign that was better at energizing that element than the cumbersome party machinery was. Anyone who thinks the Trump phenomenon is a sui generis explosion of eccentricity has forgotten the incredible collection of rodeo clowns over which Mitt Romney triumphed in 2012. Anyone who thinks He, Trump is unique in his rhetoric and his appeal never has read through Gingrich's old Thesaurus For Ratfckers that helped fuel his rise to the Speakership. And anyone who thinks Trump's brand of noisy, arrant bullshit is in anyway unique never has listened to a Cruz's stump speech, like the one he unlimbered in the windy Atlanta morning, and which always contains the following passage that has no more connection to actual reality than do Trump's fantastical Mexican drug mules slipping through the New Hampshire woods.
This election is not about one branch of government. It's about two branches of government. We are one liberal justice away from a five justice left-wing majority the likes of which this country has never seen. We are one justice away from the Supreme Court taking away our fundamental religious liberty, one justice away from the Supreme Court ordering 10 Commandment monuments taken down all over this country, one justice away from the Supreme Court striking down every restriction on abortion and mandating abortion on demand all over this country. We are one justice away from the Supreme Court reading the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights and taking away our right to keep and bear arms. We are one justice away from the Supreme Court ordering veterans memorials to be taken down all over this country, and we are not far away from the Supreme Court ordering the chisels to come outto remove the crosses and stars of David from the tombstones of our fallen soldiers.
Of all of the crocks in a campaign full of them, this one paragraph is the most energetically bubbling of them all. Forget that the worst this hypothetical Weatherman majority likely could to America's gun lovers is to re-establish the regime that existed prior to the Heller decision in 2008. Forget also that there will be no Supreme Court majority for "abortion on demand" or anything like it as long as Anthony Kennedy is alive and dithering. There is no conceivable chance that the Supreme Court will order religious symbols to be chiseled off the tombstones at Arlington. (I would note that Cruz does not mention the crescents that adorn the markers of Muslim service members who have died for his liberty.) It takes a lot of gall for someone like Ted Cruz to imply that someone else is conning the American people.
At least Young Marco Rubio is playing it for laughs these days. Speaking to a substantial crowd in the football stadium of a luxurious Christian academy in Kennesaw, Young Marco is continuing to work on new material before the next big robotics trade show.
So here's the one tweet he put out, he put out a picture of me having makeup put on me at the debate, which is amazing me to me, that the guy with the worst spray tan in America is attacking me for putting on makeup. Donald Trump likes to sue people; he should sue whoever did that to his face.
(In truth, Rubio's latest line of attack—that Trump is a "con-man" whose professed business acumen is merely the relentless search for his next pack of suckers—is both an effective and accurate one. It would have been even more effective in, say, November. And, anyway, The New York Times just handed Ted Cruz and his campaign a giant cudgel with which to belabor Rubio on his previous attempt to reform the immigration system. We will discuss Senator Chuck Schumer's going hat in hand to Roger Ailes at another time. Oh, yes, we surely will.)
I don't know what's the best measure of how we've fallen as a democratic republic. The fact that Rubio has decided to answer He, Trump's 10th grade insults with 7th grade comebacks, or the I'm-a-clever-dick grin he flashes every time he gets off one of these lunch-lady zingers. But there was something familiar about this one. Then, I remembered. It was a scene from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing.
Desperate Mission
Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump
By ALEXANDER BURNS, MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTIN
The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.
Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Mr. Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.
At a meeting of Republican governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter “to the people,” disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics.
The suggestion was not taken up. Since then, Mr. Trump has only gotten stronger, winning two more state contests and collecting the endorsement of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.
In public, there were calls for the party to unite behind a single candidate. In dozens of interviews, elected officials, political strategists and donors described a frantic, last-ditch campaign to block Mr. Trump — and the agonizing reasons that many of them have become convinced it will fail. Behind the scenes, a desperate mission to save the party sputtered and stalled at every turn.
Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears.
At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.
Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar.
The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite — he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association — landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself.
Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.
Former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, a top adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said the party was unable to come up with a united front to quash Mr. Trump’s campaign.
“There is no mechanism,” Mr. Leavitt said. “There is no smoke-filled room. If there is, I’ve never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has. This is going to play out in the way that it will.”
Resistance Runs Deep
Republicans have ruefully acknowledged that they came to this dire pass in no small part because of their own passivity. There were ample opportunities to battle Mr. Trump earlier; more than one plan was drawn up only to be rejected. Rivals who attacked him early, like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, the former governors of Texas and Louisiana, received little backup and quickly faded.
Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”
“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Mr. Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the extreme urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.”
No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.
Resistance to Mr. Trump still runs deep. The party’s biggest benefactors remain totally opposed to him. At a recent presentation hosted by the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch, the country’s most prolific conservative donors, their political advisers characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded business subsidies and government-backed health care, according to people who attended.
But the Kochs, like Mr. Adelson, have shown no appetite to intervene directly in the primary with decisive force.
The American Future Fund, a conservative group that does not disclose its donors, announced plans on Friday to run ads blasting Mr. Trump for his role in an educational company that is alleged to have defrauded students. But there is only limited time for the commercials to sink in before some of the country’s biggest states award their delegates in early March.
Instead, Mr. Trump’s challengers are staking their hopes on a set of guerrilla tactics and long-shot possibilities, racing to line up mainstream voters and interest groups against his increasingly formidable campaign. Donors and elected leaders have begun to rouse themselves for the fight, but perhaps too late.
Two of Mr. Trump’s opponents have openly acknowledged that they may have to wrest the Republican nomination from him in a deadlocked convention.
Speaking to political donors in Manhattan on Wednesday evening, Mr. Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, noted that most delegates are bound to a candidate only on the first ballot. Many of them, moreover, are likely to be party regulars who may not support Mr. Trump over multiple rounds of balloting, he added, according to a person present for Mr. Sullivan’s presentation, which was first reported by CNN.
Advisers to Mr. Kasich, the Ohio governor, have told potential supporters that his strategy boils down to a convention battle. Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire senator who had endorsed Jeb Bush, said Mr. Kasich’s emissaries had sketched an outcome in which Mr. Kasich “probably ends up with the second-highest delegate count going into the convention” and digs in there to compete with Mr. Trump.
Several senior Republicans, including Mr. Romney, have made direct appeals to Mr. Kasich to gauge his willingness to stand down and allow the party to unify behind another candidate. But Mr. Kasich has told at least one person that his plan is to win the Ohio primary on March 15 and gather the party behind his campaign if Mr. Rubio loses in Florida, his home state, on the same day.
In Washington, Mr. Kasich’s persistence in the race has become a source of frustration. At Senate luncheons on Wednesday and Thursday, Republican lawmakers vented about Mr. Kasich’s intransigence, calling it selfishness.
One senior Republican senator, noting that Mr. Kasich has truly contested only one of the first four states, complained: “He’s just flailing his arms around and having a wonderful time going around the country, and it just drives me up the wall.”
Mr. McConnell was especially vocal, describing Mr. Kasich’s persistence as irrational because he has no plausible path to the nomination, several senators said.
While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.
He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.
The Rubio Hope
There is still hope that Mr. Rubio might be able to unite much of the party and slow Mr. Trump’s advance in a series of big-state primaries in March, and a host of top elected officials endorsed him over the last week. But Mr. Rubio has struggled to sideline Mr. Kasich and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is running a dogged campaign on the right. He has also been unable to win over several of his former rivals who might help consolidate the Republican establishment more squarely behind him.
Mr. Rubio showed a lack of finesse in dealing with his fallen rivals’ injured egos.
Mr. Christie had attacked Mr. Rubio contemptuously in New Hampshire, calling him shallow and scripted, and humiliating him in a debate. Nevertheless, Mr. Rubio made a tentative overture to Mr. Christie after his withdrawal from the presidential race. He left the governor a voice mail message, seeking Mr. Christie’s support and assuring him that he had a bright future in public service, according to people who have heard Mr. Christie’s characterization of the message.
Mr. Christie, 53, took the message as deeply disrespectful and patronizing, questioning why “a 44-year-old” was telling him about his future, said people who described his reaction on the condition of anonymity. Further efforts to connect the two never yielded a direct conversation.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, made frequent calls to Mr. Christie once he dropped out, a person close to the governor said. After the two met at Trump Tower on Thursday with their wives, Mr. Christie flew to Texas and emerged on Friday to back Mr. Trump and mock Mr. Rubio as a desperate candidate near the end of a losing campaign.
‘Verging on Panic’
Efforts to reconcile Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, have been scarcely more successful, dating to before the South Carolina primary, when Mr. Rove reached out to their aides to broker a cease-fire, according to Republicans briefed on the conversations. It did not last.
Mr. Bush has been nearly silent since quitting the race Feb. 20, playing golf with his son Jeb Jr. in Miami and turning to the task of thank-you notes. In a Wednesday conference call with supporters, he did not express a preference among the remaining contenders. When Mr. Rubio called him on Monday, their conversation did not last long, two people briefed on it said, and Mr. Rubio did not ask for his endorsement.
“There’s this desire, verging on panic, to consolidate the field,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former supporter of Mr. Bush. “But I don’t see any movement at all.”
Mr. Rubio’s advisers were also thwarted in their efforts to secure an endorsement from Mr. Romney, whom they lobbied strenuously after the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.
Mr. Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.
Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly. After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.
Mr. Trump responded only with casual derision, dismissing Mr. Romney on Twitter as “one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”
Mr. Romney is expected to withhold his support before the voting this week on the so-called Super Tuesday, but some of his allies have urged him to endorse Mr. Rubio before Michigan and Idaho vote March 8. Mr. Romney grew up in Michigan, and many Idahoans are fellow Mormons.
But already, a handful of senior party leaders have struck a conciliatory tone toward Mr. Trump. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on television that he believed he could work with him as president. Many in the party acknowledged a growing mood of resignation.
Fred Malek, the finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the party’s mainstream had simply run up against the limits of its influence.
“There’s no single leader and no single institution that can bring a diverse group called the Republican Party together, behind a single candidate,” Mr. Malek said. “It just doesn’t exist.”
On Friday, a few hours after Mr. Christie endorsed him, Mr. Trump collected support from a second governor, who in a radio interview said Mr. Trump could be “one of the greatest presidents.”
That governor was Paul LePage.
By ALEXANDER BURNS, MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTIN
The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.
Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Mr. Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.
At a meeting of Republican governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter “to the people,” disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics.
The suggestion was not taken up. Since then, Mr. Trump has only gotten stronger, winning two more state contests and collecting the endorsement of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.
In public, there were calls for the party to unite behind a single candidate. In dozens of interviews, elected officials, political strategists and donors described a frantic, last-ditch campaign to block Mr. Trump — and the agonizing reasons that many of them have become convinced it will fail. Behind the scenes, a desperate mission to save the party sputtered and stalled at every turn.
Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears.
At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.
Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar.
The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite — he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association — landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself.
Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.
Former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, a top adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said the party was unable to come up with a united front to quash Mr. Trump’s campaign.
“There is no mechanism,” Mr. Leavitt said. “There is no smoke-filled room. If there is, I’ve never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has. This is going to play out in the way that it will.”
Resistance Runs Deep
Republicans have ruefully acknowledged that they came to this dire pass in no small part because of their own passivity. There were ample opportunities to battle Mr. Trump earlier; more than one plan was drawn up only to be rejected. Rivals who attacked him early, like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, the former governors of Texas and Louisiana, received little backup and quickly faded.
Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”
“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Mr. Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the extreme urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.”
No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.
Resistance to Mr. Trump still runs deep. The party’s biggest benefactors remain totally opposed to him. At a recent presentation hosted by the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch, the country’s most prolific conservative donors, their political advisers characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded business subsidies and government-backed health care, according to people who attended.
But the Kochs, like Mr. Adelson, have shown no appetite to intervene directly in the primary with decisive force.
The American Future Fund, a conservative group that does not disclose its donors, announced plans on Friday to run ads blasting Mr. Trump for his role in an educational company that is alleged to have defrauded students. But there is only limited time for the commercials to sink in before some of the country’s biggest states award their delegates in early March.
Instead, Mr. Trump’s challengers are staking their hopes on a set of guerrilla tactics and long-shot possibilities, racing to line up mainstream voters and interest groups against his increasingly formidable campaign. Donors and elected leaders have begun to rouse themselves for the fight, but perhaps too late.
Two of Mr. Trump’s opponents have openly acknowledged that they may have to wrest the Republican nomination from him in a deadlocked convention.
Speaking to political donors in Manhattan on Wednesday evening, Mr. Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, noted that most delegates are bound to a candidate only on the first ballot. Many of them, moreover, are likely to be party regulars who may not support Mr. Trump over multiple rounds of balloting, he added, according to a person present for Mr. Sullivan’s presentation, which was first reported by CNN.
Advisers to Mr. Kasich, the Ohio governor, have told potential supporters that his strategy boils down to a convention battle. Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire senator who had endorsed Jeb Bush, said Mr. Kasich’s emissaries had sketched an outcome in which Mr. Kasich “probably ends up with the second-highest delegate count going into the convention” and digs in there to compete with Mr. Trump.
Several senior Republicans, including Mr. Romney, have made direct appeals to Mr. Kasich to gauge his willingness to stand down and allow the party to unify behind another candidate. But Mr. Kasich has told at least one person that his plan is to win the Ohio primary on March 15 and gather the party behind his campaign if Mr. Rubio loses in Florida, his home state, on the same day.
In Washington, Mr. Kasich’s persistence in the race has become a source of frustration. At Senate luncheons on Wednesday and Thursday, Republican lawmakers vented about Mr. Kasich’s intransigence, calling it selfishness.
One senior Republican senator, noting that Mr. Kasich has truly contested only one of the first four states, complained: “He’s just flailing his arms around and having a wonderful time going around the country, and it just drives me up the wall.”
Mr. McConnell was especially vocal, describing Mr. Kasich’s persistence as irrational because he has no plausible path to the nomination, several senators said.
While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.
He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.
The Rubio Hope
There is still hope that Mr. Rubio might be able to unite much of the party and slow Mr. Trump’s advance in a series of big-state primaries in March, and a host of top elected officials endorsed him over the last week. But Mr. Rubio has struggled to sideline Mr. Kasich and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is running a dogged campaign on the right. He has also been unable to win over several of his former rivals who might help consolidate the Republican establishment more squarely behind him.
Mr. Rubio showed a lack of finesse in dealing with his fallen rivals’ injured egos.
Mr. Christie had attacked Mr. Rubio contemptuously in New Hampshire, calling him shallow and scripted, and humiliating him in a debate. Nevertheless, Mr. Rubio made a tentative overture to Mr. Christie after his withdrawal from the presidential race. He left the governor a voice mail message, seeking Mr. Christie’s support and assuring him that he had a bright future in public service, according to people who have heard Mr. Christie’s characterization of the message.
Mr. Christie, 53, took the message as deeply disrespectful and patronizing, questioning why “a 44-year-old” was telling him about his future, said people who described his reaction on the condition of anonymity. Further efforts to connect the two never yielded a direct conversation.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, made frequent calls to Mr. Christie once he dropped out, a person close to the governor said. After the two met at Trump Tower on Thursday with their wives, Mr. Christie flew to Texas and emerged on Friday to back Mr. Trump and mock Mr. Rubio as a desperate candidate near the end of a losing campaign.
‘Verging on Panic’
Efforts to reconcile Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, have been scarcely more successful, dating to before the South Carolina primary, when Mr. Rove reached out to their aides to broker a cease-fire, according to Republicans briefed on the conversations. It did not last.
Mr. Bush has been nearly silent since quitting the race Feb. 20, playing golf with his son Jeb Jr. in Miami and turning to the task of thank-you notes. In a Wednesday conference call with supporters, he did not express a preference among the remaining contenders. When Mr. Rubio called him on Monday, their conversation did not last long, two people briefed on it said, and Mr. Rubio did not ask for his endorsement.
“There’s this desire, verging on panic, to consolidate the field,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former supporter of Mr. Bush. “But I don’t see any movement at all.”
Mr. Rubio’s advisers were also thwarted in their efforts to secure an endorsement from Mr. Romney, whom they lobbied strenuously after the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.
Mr. Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.
Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly. After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.
Mr. Trump responded only with casual derision, dismissing Mr. Romney on Twitter as “one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”
Mr. Romney is expected to withhold his support before the voting this week on the so-called Super Tuesday, but some of his allies have urged him to endorse Mr. Rubio before Michigan and Idaho vote March 8. Mr. Romney grew up in Michigan, and many Idahoans are fellow Mormons.
But already, a handful of senior party leaders have struck a conciliatory tone toward Mr. Trump. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on television that he believed he could work with him as president. Many in the party acknowledged a growing mood of resignation.
Fred Malek, the finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the party’s mainstream had simply run up against the limits of its influence.
“There’s no single leader and no single institution that can bring a diverse group called the Republican Party together, behind a single candidate,” Mr. Malek said. “It just doesn’t exist.”
On Friday, a few hours after Mr. Christie endorsed him, Mr. Trump collected support from a second governor, who in a radio interview said Mr. Trump could be “one of the greatest presidents.”
That governor was Paul LePage.
US Went Fascist
How the US Went Fascist: Mass Media Make Excuses for Trump Voters
Trump's racism and xenophobia violates America's core beliefs — yet the media and many Americans are okay with it.
By Juan Cole
The rise of Donald Trump to the presumptive Republican standard bearer for president in 2016 is an indictment of, and a profound danger to, the American republic.
The Founding Fathers were afraid of the excitability of the voters and their vulnerability to the appeal of demagogues. That is the reason for a Senate (which was originally appointed), intended to check those notorious hotheads in Congress, who are elected from districts every two years.
But it isn’t only the checks and balances in government that are necessary to keep the republic. It is the Fourth Estate, i.e. the press, it is the country’s leaders and it is the general public who stand between the republic and the rise of a Mussolini.
The notables have been shown to be useless. Donald Trump should have been kicked out of the Republican Party the moment he began talking about violating the Constitution. The first time he hinted about assaulting the journalists covering his rallies, he should have been shown the door. When he openly advocated torture (“worse than waterboarding”), he should have been ushered away. When he began speaking of closing houses of worship, he should have been expelled. He has solemnly pledged to violate the First, Fourth and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution, at the least. If someone’s platform is unconstitutional, it boggles the mind that a major American party would put him or her up for president. How can he take the oath of office with a straight face? The party leaders were afraid he’d mount a third-party campaign. But who knows how that would have turned out? Someone with power needs to say that Trump is unacceptable and to define him out of respectable politics, the same way David Duke is treated (Trump routinely retweets Duke fellow-travellers).
Then there is the mass media. As Amy Goodman has pointed out, corporate television has routinely pumped Trump into our living rooms. They have virtually blacked out Bernie Sanders. Trump seems to have connived to have 10 or 15 minutes at 7:20 every evening on the magazine shows. Chris Matthews of Hardball obligingly cut away to Il Duce II’s rants and gave away his show to him on a nightly basis.
Not long ago, extremely powerful television personalities and sportscasters were abruptly fired for saying things less offensive than Trump’s bromides. Don Imus was history for abusive language toward women basketball players. But Trump’s strident attack on Megyn Kelly as a menstruating harridan was just allowed to pass. Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder was fired by CBS for saying African-Americans were ‘bred’ to be better athletes. But Trump issued a blanket characterization of undocumented Mexican labor migrants as rapists, thieves and drug dealers. Of course this allegation is untrue.
I watched the Nevada caucus coverage on MSNBC and was appalled at the discourse. One reporter tried to assure us that Trump voters were not actually voting for racism and bullying politics, they were just upset. But polling in South Carolina demonstrated that Trump voters were significantly to the right of most Republicans on some issues. In South Carolina, 38 percent of Trump voters wished the South had won the Civil War, presumably suggesting that they regretted the end of slavery.
Another MSNBC reporter helpfully explained that Trump voters feel that “political correctness” has gone too far. But what does Trump mean by “political correctness”? He means sexism and racism. So what is really being said is that Trump supporters resent that sexist and racist discourse and policies have been banned from the public sphere. There is ample proof that Trump’s use of “political correctness” identifies it with sexist and racist remarks and actions.
Yet another asserted that “some of” Trump’s positions “are not that extreme.” Exhibit A was his praise for Planned Parenthood. But he wants to outlaw abortion, i.e. overturn the current law of the land, which is extreme. (A majority of Americans support the right to choose, so he is in a minority).
Chris Matthews explained to us that people hoped he would do something for the country rather than for the government.
But Trump has made it very clear that he is not interested in a significant proportion of the people in the country. He is a white nationalist, and his message is that he will stand up for white Christian people against the Chinese, the Mexicans and the Muslims. Just as Adolph Hitler hoped for an alliance with Anglo-Saxon Britain on racial grounds (much preferring it to the less white Italy), the only foreign leader Trump likes is the “white” Vladimir Putin. That he won the evangelical vote again in Nevada is helpful for us in seeing that American evangelicalism itself is in some part a form of white male chauvinist nationalism and only secondarily about religion.
By the way, the idea that Trump won the Latino vote in Nevada is nonsense. In one of a number of fine interventions at MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out that something on the order of 1,800 Latinos voted in the Nevada GOP caucuses, of whom perhaps 800 voted for Trump, i.e. 44 percent of this tiny group. Trump lost the vote of even this small group of hard right Latinos, since 56 percent of them voted for someone else.
There are 800,000 Latinos in the state of Nevada (pop. 2.8 million). In 2012, 70 percent of Latinos voted for Barack Obama, while Mitt Romney got 25 percent. My guess is that Trump can’t do as well among them as Romney did.
It has been a dreadful performance by the press and by party leaders. They are speaking in such a way as to naturalize the creepy, weird and completely un-American positions Trump has taken.
This is how the dictators came to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Good people remained silent or acquiesced. People expressed hope that something good would come of it. Mussolini would wring the laziness out of Italy and make the trains run on time.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked by a lady after the Constitutional Convention what sort of government the US had, he said, “A Republic, Madame, if you can keep it.”
You have to wonder if we can keep it.
Trump's racism and xenophobia violates America's core beliefs — yet the media and many Americans are okay with it.
By Juan Cole
The rise of Donald Trump to the presumptive Republican standard bearer for president in 2016 is an indictment of, and a profound danger to, the American republic.
The Founding Fathers were afraid of the excitability of the voters and their vulnerability to the appeal of demagogues. That is the reason for a Senate (which was originally appointed), intended to check those notorious hotheads in Congress, who are elected from districts every two years.
But it isn’t only the checks and balances in government that are necessary to keep the republic. It is the Fourth Estate, i.e. the press, it is the country’s leaders and it is the general public who stand between the republic and the rise of a Mussolini.
The notables have been shown to be useless. Donald Trump should have been kicked out of the Republican Party the moment he began talking about violating the Constitution. The first time he hinted about assaulting the journalists covering his rallies, he should have been shown the door. When he openly advocated torture (“worse than waterboarding”), he should have been ushered away. When he began speaking of closing houses of worship, he should have been expelled. He has solemnly pledged to violate the First, Fourth and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution, at the least. If someone’s platform is unconstitutional, it boggles the mind that a major American party would put him or her up for president. How can he take the oath of office with a straight face? The party leaders were afraid he’d mount a third-party campaign. But who knows how that would have turned out? Someone with power needs to say that Trump is unacceptable and to define him out of respectable politics, the same way David Duke is treated (Trump routinely retweets Duke fellow-travellers).
Then there is the mass media. As Amy Goodman has pointed out, corporate television has routinely pumped Trump into our living rooms. They have virtually blacked out Bernie Sanders. Trump seems to have connived to have 10 or 15 minutes at 7:20 every evening on the magazine shows. Chris Matthews of Hardball obligingly cut away to Il Duce II’s rants and gave away his show to him on a nightly basis.
Not long ago, extremely powerful television personalities and sportscasters were abruptly fired for saying things less offensive than Trump’s bromides. Don Imus was history for abusive language toward women basketball players. But Trump’s strident attack on Megyn Kelly as a menstruating harridan was just allowed to pass. Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder was fired by CBS for saying African-Americans were ‘bred’ to be better athletes. But Trump issued a blanket characterization of undocumented Mexican labor migrants as rapists, thieves and drug dealers. Of course this allegation is untrue.
I watched the Nevada caucus coverage on MSNBC and was appalled at the discourse. One reporter tried to assure us that Trump voters were not actually voting for racism and bullying politics, they were just upset. But polling in South Carolina demonstrated that Trump voters were significantly to the right of most Republicans on some issues. In South Carolina, 38 percent of Trump voters wished the South had won the Civil War, presumably suggesting that they regretted the end of slavery.
Another MSNBC reporter helpfully explained that Trump voters feel that “political correctness” has gone too far. But what does Trump mean by “political correctness”? He means sexism and racism. So what is really being said is that Trump supporters resent that sexist and racist discourse and policies have been banned from the public sphere. There is ample proof that Trump’s use of “political correctness” identifies it with sexist and racist remarks and actions.
Yet another asserted that “some of” Trump’s positions “are not that extreme.” Exhibit A was his praise for Planned Parenthood. But he wants to outlaw abortion, i.e. overturn the current law of the land, which is extreme. (A majority of Americans support the right to choose, so he is in a minority).
Chris Matthews explained to us that people hoped he would do something for the country rather than for the government.
But Trump has made it very clear that he is not interested in a significant proportion of the people in the country. He is a white nationalist, and his message is that he will stand up for white Christian people against the Chinese, the Mexicans and the Muslims. Just as Adolph Hitler hoped for an alliance with Anglo-Saxon Britain on racial grounds (much preferring it to the less white Italy), the only foreign leader Trump likes is the “white” Vladimir Putin. That he won the evangelical vote again in Nevada is helpful for us in seeing that American evangelicalism itself is in some part a form of white male chauvinist nationalism and only secondarily about religion.
By the way, the idea that Trump won the Latino vote in Nevada is nonsense. In one of a number of fine interventions at MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out that something on the order of 1,800 Latinos voted in the Nevada GOP caucuses, of whom perhaps 800 voted for Trump, i.e. 44 percent of this tiny group. Trump lost the vote of even this small group of hard right Latinos, since 56 percent of them voted for someone else.
There are 800,000 Latinos in the state of Nevada (pop. 2.8 million). In 2012, 70 percent of Latinos voted for Barack Obama, while Mitt Romney got 25 percent. My guess is that Trump can’t do as well among them as Romney did.
It has been a dreadful performance by the press and by party leaders. They are speaking in such a way as to naturalize the creepy, weird and completely un-American positions Trump has taken.
This is how the dictators came to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Good people remained silent or acquiesced. People expressed hope that something good would come of it. Mussolini would wring the laziness out of Italy and make the trains run on time.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked by a lady after the Constitutional Convention what sort of government the US had, he said, “A Republic, Madame, if you can keep it.”
You have to wonder if we can keep it.
Oscar Speech
Chris Rock Just Gave a Brilliant and Brave Oscar Speech About Hollywood Racism
By Edwin Rios
In his searing opening monologue for the 88th Academy Awards—what he dubbed the "White People's Choice Awards"—comedian Chris Rock relentlessly roasted Hollywood's racism, in a year criticized for only nominating white actors.
"We want opportunity," he said. "We want black actors to get the same opportunities as white actors. That's it." Watch the full clip above.
It was, in fact, a year marked by stellar performances from actors of color, including Michael B. Jordan, Abraham Attah, Idris Elba, Teyonah Parris, O'Shea Jackson, Ava DuVernay, and David Oyelowo. And Chris Rock, without pulling any punches, called the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences out on it: "If they nominated a host, I wouldn't even get this job."
He went on: "Is Hollywood racist? You damn right Hollywood’s racist," Rock said. "Hollywood is sorority racist: We like you Rhonda, but you're not a Kappa."
Since its list of nominees was unveiled in January, the Academy has been criticized for its failure to nominate a single minority actor for the second year in a row. The move fueled outrage from celebrities, with some like Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Will Smith refusing to attend this year's ceremony. There was also an online campaign using the hashtag #OscarSoWhite. (One bright spot: Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, who is vying to become the first director since Joseph Mankiewicz to win best director for the second year in a row for The Revenant.)
In response to the criticism, the Academy vowed to change its membership rules to boost diversity among voters. (This could take a while: A recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that Oscar voters are currently 91 percent white and 77 percent male.) The film industry's diversity problem comes down to, in part, a creative pipeline problem, largely made up of white guys. Research shows film studios may be throwing away millions of dollars for their failure to embrace diversity.
It was the talk of the night, as actors took to the marathon of pre-show red carpet interviews to raise awareness, not just about diversity, but also sexual assaults on college campuses, and clergy sexual abuse.
By Edwin Rios
In his searing opening monologue for the 88th Academy Awards—what he dubbed the "White People's Choice Awards"—comedian Chris Rock relentlessly roasted Hollywood's racism, in a year criticized for only nominating white actors.
"We want opportunity," he said. "We want black actors to get the same opportunities as white actors. That's it." Watch the full clip above.
It was, in fact, a year marked by stellar performances from actors of color, including Michael B. Jordan, Abraham Attah, Idris Elba, Teyonah Parris, O'Shea Jackson, Ava DuVernay, and David Oyelowo. And Chris Rock, without pulling any punches, called the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences out on it: "If they nominated a host, I wouldn't even get this job."
He went on: "Is Hollywood racist? You damn right Hollywood’s racist," Rock said. "Hollywood is sorority racist: We like you Rhonda, but you're not a Kappa."
Since its list of nominees was unveiled in January, the Academy has been criticized for its failure to nominate a single minority actor for the second year in a row. The move fueled outrage from celebrities, with some like Spike Lee, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Will Smith refusing to attend this year's ceremony. There was also an online campaign using the hashtag #OscarSoWhite. (One bright spot: Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, who is vying to become the first director since Joseph Mankiewicz to win best director for the second year in a row for The Revenant.)
In response to the criticism, the Academy vowed to change its membership rules to boost diversity among voters. (This could take a while: A recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that Oscar voters are currently 91 percent white and 77 percent male.) The film industry's diversity problem comes down to, in part, a creative pipeline problem, largely made up of white guys. Research shows film studios may be throwing away millions of dollars for their failure to embrace diversity.
It was the talk of the night, as actors took to the marathon of pre-show red carpet interviews to raise awareness, not just about diversity, but also sexual assaults on college campuses, and clergy sexual abuse.
This Isn't Flint
Weird Ailments, Toxic Water, Dismissive Officials—and No, This Isn't Flint
The environmental justice disaster you've never heard of.
By Julia Lurie
Earlier this month, Esther Calhoun of Uniontown, Alabama, stood before the US Commission on Civil Rights in Washington, DC, describing some of the unlikely ailments that have been plaguing her and her neighbors these past few years. "I am only 51 years old and I have neuropathy," she said. "The neurologist said that it may be caused by lead, and it is not going to get better."
This is not a story about contaminated water in Flint, Michigan. Calhoun was talking about coal ash—a toxic byproduct of burning coal that has quietly become one of America's worst environmental justice problems. The ashes are typically laden with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other toxins, and multiple studies have found that the waste tends to be stored in low-income, minority communities. In Uniontown, where 90 percent of residents are black and about half live below the poverty line, an uncovered coal ash landfill sits "directly across the street from peoples' homes, and from yards in which their kids play," says Marianne Engelman-Lado, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.
Coal is slowly on the way out in the United States, but our existing coal-fired power plants still generate roughly 130 million tons of coal ash each year. That's more than 800 pounds for every man, woman, and child in America. The regulations on disposal of coal ash are weak, to say the least, making the experiences of Calhoun and her neighbors far from unique. Here's a quick primer to get you up to date on an environmental nightmare that shows no signs of going away.
Wait, wasn't there some big coal ash disaster fairly recently? Yep. Coal ash made national headlines in December 2008, when a dam at the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee ruptured, releasing more than 1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash slurry onto the surrounding 300 acres. A wave of sludge destroyed homes, inundated ponds and streams, and formed "ash bergs"—heaps that floated down the nearby Emory River. Tests of local waterways after the breach turned up arsenic, a human carcinogen, at 149 times the level deemed safe for drinking water. Four million tons of ash were recovered and carted to an uncovered landfill in Uniontown, where Calhoun and others continue to feel its effects. There have been other recent spills, too, including a 2011 breach that contaminated Lake Michigan and a 2013 spill into North Carolina's Dan River.
What is coal ash like? It includes "fly ash"—powdery particles that easily become airborne—along with courser, sludgy material that sinks to the bottom of coal furnaces. The ash is sometimes dumped in uncovered landfills, which allows the lighter particles to blow over residential areas in the vicinity. Sometimes it's used for "beneficiary" purposes: mixed into topsoil or employed as a structural fill during construction projects. In other cases, it's mixed with water and stored in unlined pits, or "ponds," from which toxins can get into the groundwater. "Due to the mobility of these metals and the large size of a typical disposal unit, metals, especially arsenic, may leach at levels of potential concern," EPA representative Barry Breen told members of Congress in 2009. According to the agency's data, residents living near a disposal site have as much as a 1 in 50 chance of developing cancer from drinking arsenic-contaminated water.
What has the EPA done about all of this? Not a whole lot. In fact, coal ash was used in the construction of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC, which houses the EPA. Six years after the massive Tennessee spill, the agency adopted rules stipulating how the waste should be handled. But states aren't required to adopt those rules. According to a 2014 joint report by Earthjustice and Physicians for Social Responsibility, "Some states allow coal ash to be used as structural fill, agricultural soil additive, top layer on unpaved roads, fill for abandoned mines, spread on snowy roads, and even as cinders on school running tracks."
Is my neighborhood contaminated? There are more than 1,000 active ash landfills and ponds around the country, not to mention hundreds of "retired" sites, and about 200 locations where spills are known to have contaminated the surrounding water and air. The EPA has found that low-income, minority communities are disproportionately affected—1.5 million people color live within the catchment zone of a coal ash storage facility. Earthjustice created the map of contamination sites below, with the caveat that the sites it depicts are "likely to be only a small percentage of the nation's coal ash-contaminated sites in the US. Most coal ash landfills and ponds do not conduct monitoring, so the majority of water contamination goes undetected." (This map is best viewed on a computer, not a mobile device.)
Is there a solution? "This is a relatively easy problem to solve," notes Lisa Evans, a senior lawyer for Earthjustice. "We've always known how to dispose of coal ash." The tried and true EPA method consists of placing the dry ash into an enclosed, secure (lined) landfill so that it can't leach into the soil or escape into the air. Of course, this costs more than simply dumping the stuff into open ponds or landfills next to the power plant, particularly since it sometimes involves moving the coal ash to hazardous waste facilities off-site. But the human cost of improper disposal is far greater. As Evans puts it: "You have a lot of people hurt, and a lot of environmental damage for pennies on the dollar."
The environmental justice disaster you've never heard of.
By Julia Lurie
Earlier this month, Esther Calhoun of Uniontown, Alabama, stood before the US Commission on Civil Rights in Washington, DC, describing some of the unlikely ailments that have been plaguing her and her neighbors these past few years. "I am only 51 years old and I have neuropathy," she said. "The neurologist said that it may be caused by lead, and it is not going to get better."
This is not a story about contaminated water in Flint, Michigan. Calhoun was talking about coal ash—a toxic byproduct of burning coal that has quietly become one of America's worst environmental justice problems. The ashes are typically laden with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other toxins, and multiple studies have found that the waste tends to be stored in low-income, minority communities. In Uniontown, where 90 percent of residents are black and about half live below the poverty line, an uncovered coal ash landfill sits "directly across the street from peoples' homes, and from yards in which their kids play," says Marianne Engelman-Lado, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice.
Coal is slowly on the way out in the United States, but our existing coal-fired power plants still generate roughly 130 million tons of coal ash each year. That's more than 800 pounds for every man, woman, and child in America. The regulations on disposal of coal ash are weak, to say the least, making the experiences of Calhoun and her neighbors far from unique. Here's a quick primer to get you up to date on an environmental nightmare that shows no signs of going away.
Wait, wasn't there some big coal ash disaster fairly recently? Yep. Coal ash made national headlines in December 2008, when a dam at the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee ruptured, releasing more than 1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash slurry onto the surrounding 300 acres. A wave of sludge destroyed homes, inundated ponds and streams, and formed "ash bergs"—heaps that floated down the nearby Emory River. Tests of local waterways after the breach turned up arsenic, a human carcinogen, at 149 times the level deemed safe for drinking water. Four million tons of ash were recovered and carted to an uncovered landfill in Uniontown, where Calhoun and others continue to feel its effects. There have been other recent spills, too, including a 2011 breach that contaminated Lake Michigan and a 2013 spill into North Carolina's Dan River.
What is coal ash like? It includes "fly ash"—powdery particles that easily become airborne—along with courser, sludgy material that sinks to the bottom of coal furnaces. The ash is sometimes dumped in uncovered landfills, which allows the lighter particles to blow over residential areas in the vicinity. Sometimes it's used for "beneficiary" purposes: mixed into topsoil or employed as a structural fill during construction projects. In other cases, it's mixed with water and stored in unlined pits, or "ponds," from which toxins can get into the groundwater. "Due to the mobility of these metals and the large size of a typical disposal unit, metals, especially arsenic, may leach at levels of potential concern," EPA representative Barry Breen told members of Congress in 2009. According to the agency's data, residents living near a disposal site have as much as a 1 in 50 chance of developing cancer from drinking arsenic-contaminated water.
What has the EPA done about all of this? Not a whole lot. In fact, coal ash was used in the construction of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC, which houses the EPA. Six years after the massive Tennessee spill, the agency adopted rules stipulating how the waste should be handled. But states aren't required to adopt those rules. According to a 2014 joint report by Earthjustice and Physicians for Social Responsibility, "Some states allow coal ash to be used as structural fill, agricultural soil additive, top layer on unpaved roads, fill for abandoned mines, spread on snowy roads, and even as cinders on school running tracks."
Is my neighborhood contaminated? There are more than 1,000 active ash landfills and ponds around the country, not to mention hundreds of "retired" sites, and about 200 locations where spills are known to have contaminated the surrounding water and air. The EPA has found that low-income, minority communities are disproportionately affected—1.5 million people color live within the catchment zone of a coal ash storage facility. Earthjustice created the map of contamination sites below, with the caveat that the sites it depicts are "likely to be only a small percentage of the nation's coal ash-contaminated sites in the US. Most coal ash landfills and ponds do not conduct monitoring, so the majority of water contamination goes undetected." (This map is best viewed on a computer, not a mobile device.)
Is there a solution? "This is a relatively easy problem to solve," notes Lisa Evans, a senior lawyer for Earthjustice. "We've always known how to dispose of coal ash." The tried and true EPA method consists of placing the dry ash into an enclosed, secure (lined) landfill so that it can't leach into the soil or escape into the air. Of course, this costs more than simply dumping the stuff into open ponds or landfills next to the power plant, particularly since it sometimes involves moving the coal ash to hazardous waste facilities off-site. But the human cost of improper disposal is far greater. As Evans puts it: "You have a lot of people hurt, and a lot of environmental damage for pennies on the dollar."
IC 1805
Stars are forming in the Soul of the Queen of Aethopia. More specifically, a large star forming region called the Soul Nebula can be found in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia, who Greek mythology credits as the vain wife of a King who long ago ruled lands surrounding the upper Nile river. The Soul Nebula houses several open clusters of stars, a large radio source known as W5, and huge evacuated bubbles formed by the winds of young massive stars. Located about 6,500 light years away, the Soul Nebula spans about 100 light years and is usually imaged next to its celestial neighbor the Heart Nebula (IC 1805). The featured image appears mostly red due to the emission of a specific color of light emitted by excited hydrogen gas.
Remembering NASA Astronauts
Remembering NASA Astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett
Fifty years ago, the Gemini program was teaching NASA what it needed to know to be able to send crews to the moon. Astronauts were learning to walk and work in zero gravity. Pilots were practicing rendezvous maneuvers and docking spacecraft. Many of the Gemini crews included astronauts who would reach lunar orbit or walk on the lunar surface: Armstrong, Aldrin, Stafford, Young and Cernan, to name just a few.
Two astronauts who were part of Gemini, and who might well have gone on to the Moon, never got the chance. Elliot See and Charles Bassett II, who were scheduled to fly Gemini IX in 1966, died when their T-38 training jet crashed at St. Louis's Lambert Field. They were the second and third casualties (after Theodore C. Freeman) of NASA's astronaut program. To say they've been forgotten would be an overstatement. But they haven't been as well-remembered as other astronauts, and on the 50th anniversary of their deaths, their stories are worth recalling.
See, a 38-year-old Texan, had been a flight engineer and test pilot for the General Electric Company. He joined NASA in September 1962, part of NASA's second astronaut class (the "Next Nine", following the "Original Seven"). He worked with the teams developing guidance and navigations systems and was named backup pilot for Gemini V, then command pilot for Gemini IX.
Bassett, 34, joined the third astronaut class after being a U.S. Air Force pilot. On the ground, he worked with the teams conducting astronaut training and simulations; Gemini IX would be his first assignment.
On Feb. 28, 1966, See and Bassett left Ellington Field in a T-38 training jet for St. Louis. They were planning to spend several days working in the rendezvous simulator at the McDonnell-Douglas facility where their Gemini capsule had only recently been completed. They were accompanied, in another T-38, by their backup crew, Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan. The weather in St. Louis was poor for flying: overcast and raining with low clouds and limited visibility.
"As the aircraft descended through the overcast, the pilots found themselves too far down the runway to land. See elected to keep the field in sight and he circled to the left underneath the cloud cover. Stafford followed a missed approach procedure and climbed straight ahead into the soup to 600 meters, intending to make another instrument approach. He landed safely on his next attempt. Meanwhile, See had continued his left turn. The aircraft angled toward McDonnell Building 101, where technicians were working on the very spacecraft See and Bassett were scheduled to fly. Apparently recognizing that his sink rate was too high, See cut in his afterburners and attempted a sharp right turn; but it was too late. The aircraft struck the roof of the building and crashed into a courtyard. Both pilots were killed."
An investigative board chaired by astronaut Alan B. Shepherd attributed the crash to weather and pilot error on See's part in choosing to keep his plane so low. See and Bassett are buried near each other in Arlington National Cemetery.
For the first time, NASA replaced a mission's primary crew with a backup crew. Stafford and Cernan completed the Gemini IX mission, which became the first flight on which crews attempted and succeeded on three rendezvous attempts. They would later fly together on Apollo 10, testing the lunar module around the moon in advance of Apollo 11.
Fifty years ago, the Gemini program was teaching NASA what it needed to know to be able to send crews to the moon. Astronauts were learning to walk and work in zero gravity. Pilots were practicing rendezvous maneuvers and docking spacecraft. Many of the Gemini crews included astronauts who would reach lunar orbit or walk on the lunar surface: Armstrong, Aldrin, Stafford, Young and Cernan, to name just a few.
Two astronauts who were part of Gemini, and who might well have gone on to the Moon, never got the chance. Elliot See and Charles Bassett II, who were scheduled to fly Gemini IX in 1966, died when their T-38 training jet crashed at St. Louis's Lambert Field. They were the second and third casualties (after Theodore C. Freeman) of NASA's astronaut program. To say they've been forgotten would be an overstatement. But they haven't been as well-remembered as other astronauts, and on the 50th anniversary of their deaths, their stories are worth recalling.
See, a 38-year-old Texan, had been a flight engineer and test pilot for the General Electric Company. He joined NASA in September 1962, part of NASA's second astronaut class (the "Next Nine", following the "Original Seven"). He worked with the teams developing guidance and navigations systems and was named backup pilot for Gemini V, then command pilot for Gemini IX.
Bassett, 34, joined the third astronaut class after being a U.S. Air Force pilot. On the ground, he worked with the teams conducting astronaut training and simulations; Gemini IX would be his first assignment.
On Feb. 28, 1966, See and Bassett left Ellington Field in a T-38 training jet for St. Louis. They were planning to spend several days working in the rendezvous simulator at the McDonnell-Douglas facility where their Gemini capsule had only recently been completed. They were accompanied, in another T-38, by their backup crew, Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan. The weather in St. Louis was poor for flying: overcast and raining with low clouds and limited visibility.
"As the aircraft descended through the overcast, the pilots found themselves too far down the runway to land. See elected to keep the field in sight and he circled to the left underneath the cloud cover. Stafford followed a missed approach procedure and climbed straight ahead into the soup to 600 meters, intending to make another instrument approach. He landed safely on his next attempt. Meanwhile, See had continued his left turn. The aircraft angled toward McDonnell Building 101, where technicians were working on the very spacecraft See and Bassett were scheduled to fly. Apparently recognizing that his sink rate was too high, See cut in his afterburners and attempted a sharp right turn; but it was too late. The aircraft struck the roof of the building and crashed into a courtyard. Both pilots were killed."
An investigative board chaired by astronaut Alan B. Shepherd attributed the crash to weather and pilot error on See's part in choosing to keep his plane so low. See and Bassett are buried near each other in Arlington National Cemetery.
For the first time, NASA replaced a mission's primary crew with a backup crew. Stafford and Cernan completed the Gemini IX mission, which became the first flight on which crews attempted and succeeded on three rendezvous attempts. They would later fly together on Apollo 10, testing the lunar module around the moon in advance of Apollo 11.
Wrongometer again for GOP
The POLITICO Wrongometer
Our policy reporters truth-squad the Republican debate.
Cruz plays it loose with phone encryption
Ted Cruz sided with the FBI in its encryption dispute with Apple in the San Bernardino terrorist case because he said the government only wanted access to one phone, not to create a backdoor into all phones. But you can’t have one without the other. Legally speaking, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged, under questioning from a House subcommittee, that the case could set a precedent. Technologically speaking, Apple says the capability the FBI wants (disabling the device’s self-destruct after a certain number of wrong password attempts) does not exist and would have to be created specially; if Apple did so, the same could be done toward unlocking any phone.
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Trump was for toppling Muammar Qadhafi—before he wasn’t
Ted Cruz took Donald Trump to task for what he called competing statements about whether he supported the toppling of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi in 2011. Trump stuck to his guns, insisting that the air war that led to Qadhafi’s death by an angry mob was a mistake that created a vacuum now filled by Islamic militants, including followers of the Islamic State – some of whom were the target of U.S. airstrikes last week. But in 2011, as pressure was building to stop Qadhafi from slaughtering civilians seeking to topple him, Trump said on his video blog that it was past time to remove the dictator from power.
“It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped,” Trump said at the time. “We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”
— Bryan Bender
How big is the deficit? Not as big as Trump thinks.
“Because of the horrible omnibus budget that was approved two weeks ago, [the debt] is going to be $21 trillion,” Donald Trump said, after noting that it is $19 trillion today. Is the deficit really going to be $2 trillion next year? Nope. The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent budget projections, from January, incorporate the omnibus budget deal and project a deficit of $544 billion in 2016 and $561 billion in 2017.
— Danny Vinik
Trump passes judgment on a cease-fire that isn't
As the foreign-policy portion of the debate gained momentum, Donald Trump argued that the new cease-fire deal in Syria is “meaningless,” “not working” and people are not abiding by it. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical it will be effective, but not yet: it doesn't take effect until Saturday.
— Nahal Toosi
Trump says he "can't" release tax returns. He can.
Trump repeatedly said he “can’t” release some of his tax returns because he’s being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. However, there’s no legal restriction on him doing so. Tax returns are confidential by law and can’t be released by the IRS, but a taxpayer can release his or her forms publicly if he or she sees fit. And of course, some of Trump’s returns are not under audit. At this point, he hasn't released those either.
— Josh Gerstein
Trump says Samuel Alito signed a bill that he didn't sign—and wasn't a bill
Trump: “I have a sister who's….a brilliant judge. [Cruz]'s been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court, with my sister, signed that bill. So I think that maybe we should get a little bit of an apology from Ted.” Trump’s description of the “bill” signed by Alito and his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, appears to refer to a court opinion issued in 2000 by the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals when Alito was a member of that court. That decision struck down New Jersey’s Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Alito was part of the three-judge panel that considered the case, but he did not sign Barry’s majority opinion upholding the law. “I do not join Judge Barry's opinion, which was never necessary and is now obsolete,” Alito wrote. It is true that Alito reached the same result Barry did, but he did not endorse her opinion and officially disclaimed it.
— Josh Gerstein
Trump overstates insurance premium increases, by a lot
Under Obamacare, are health insurance premiums going up "25, 35, 45 percent and more," as Donald Trump says? There are examples of individuals whose costs rose when they had to buy more comprehensive plans. But overall premium increases have been more modest in the last few years than they had been in the recent past. The Kaiser Family Foundation has a state-by-state list of how premiums changed in the Obamacare market, and last year the average increase was 4 percent. Tonight's debate is being held in Texas, and the survey shows that in Houston, premiums only rose 2.4 percent – and they actually dropped by 1 percent after subsidies were taken into account.
— Joanne Kenen
Americans pay the highest taxes? Not close.
“We have the highest taxes in the world—corporate tax, personal tax,” Donald Trump said. He’s right that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate, although that is just in the developed world. But he’s wrong about personal taxes. The top income tax rate for Americans is 39.5 percent, far lower than Sweden’s 57 percent top tax rate or Denmark’s 55.6 percent tax rate.
Of course, Americans pay other taxes besides the federal income tax—there’s the payroll tax, the capital gains tax and state and local taxes. But overall, the U.S. tax burden is quite low compared to other countries. According to the OECD, total taxes in the U.S. amounted to 26 percent of GDP in 2014. That’s lower than just about every other developed country, except for Mexico, Chile and France. For example, taxes in France amount to 45.2 percent of GDP and in Denmark amount to 50.9 percent of GDP. So no, U.S. taxes are nowhere close to highest in the world.
— Danny Vinik
Trump "won most" of the Trump University lawsuit? Hm.
Marco Rubio called Trump University a “fake school” that only left students with a “cardboard cutout of Donald Trump.”
"There are people that borrowed $36,000 to go to Trump University and they are suing him now,” Rubio said.
In response, Trump said he “won most of the lawsuit" and that Trump University "actually did a very good job.” It's unclear what case Trump was talking about. In reality, there are still two pending lawsuits against Trump University, which didn’t grant degrees but ran real estate seminars. A civil trial in the fraud case filed by former students that’s been playing out in federal court in San Diego could come sometime after May 6, which is the scheduled date of the last pre-trial conference. In fact, Trump is on the witness list. A separate suit filed against Trump University by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in 2013 is also still ongoing. While critics have accused Trump University of misleading students about its results, Trump's attorneys have said the accusations are without merit.
— Kimberly Hefling
Rubio overstates Trump's fine
"You're the only person on this stage that's ever been fined for hiring people to work on your projects illegally. You hired some workers from Poland .... He hired workers from Poland and he had to pay a million dollars or so in a judgment," said Marco Rubio to Donald Trump. Rubio was right that Trump settled a lawsuit alleging that he hired Polish workers illegally in New York City. But there is no reason to think he paid $1 million, as Rubio claimed.
The lawsuit was filed in 1983 on behalf of Polish demolition workers who Trump hired to clear the ground for the future Trump tower, according to a 1999 article in the New York Daily News. “The workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, sweated through round-the-clock shifts and some even slept on the floors of the building they were demolishing,” the article said. Trump was accused of hiring the non-union Polish workers to skirt contributions to union benefit funds. A New York federal judge ruled against Trump, and the workers’ lawyer at the time expected a judgment of $1-2 million, according to the New York Times. But the judgment was later reversed on appeal. Trump settled the case for an undisclosed amount before retrial.
— Brian Mahoney
Rubio prematurely declares ethanol's demise
"Ethanol will phase out. It is phasing out now. By 2022 that program expires by virtue of the existing law, and by that point it will go away," said Marco Rubio. It won't. The Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires refiners to mix specified amounts of ethanol and other biofuels into gasoline, does not phase out in 2022. That's when the annual targets set by Congress in 2007 end, and EPA is given greater discretion to set the annual mandates — but the program itself continues indefinitely. Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe recently backed a measure that would sunset the RFS after 2022.
— Alex Guillén
How much winning? Maybe not this much winning.
Trump claimed he won the Nevada caucuses not just among Hispanics but in every category. Not so. According to CNN, Marco Rubio won among 17- to 29-year-olds and people who said electability matters most and the next president should be experienced in politics. Cruz won among voters who said the most important quality was that the candidate “shares my values."
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Trump's China is a lot more successful than actual China
Is the U.S. "losing $500 billion a year to China"? That's how Trump put it, but if ever starts negotiating he might want to check his starting position. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. trade deficit with China was $366 billion in 2015.
— Danny Vinik
How much did Trump inherit?
Rubio said if Donald Trump hadn’t inherited $200 million he’d be selling watches in Manhattan. Sick burn, but wrong. Trump’s father was reportedly worth $200 million when he died, Trump is one of five siblings, so his share was only $40 million. However, Trump’s comeback line that all he got was a $1 million loan isn’t true either.
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Cruz thinks deportees can't come back
“Existing law says those who have been deported cannot come back into the country, that's the law,” said Ted Cruz. It’s more complicated than that. True, it’s not easy for someone who’s been deported from the United States to get a visa to return. But it’s not impossible. According to guidelines from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, someone who’s been deported in the past may have to wait a certain number of years before being eligible to apply for entry. It could be five years, 10 years or 20 years depending on the specific circumstances. Those convicted of certain crimes may never be let back in.
— Nahal Toosi
Trump, the only hirer?
On defense over allegations of staffing his projects with immigrants, Trump shot back that he’s the only one on stage who ever hired anyone. It’s funny, but indefensible, even if you set aside the campaign staff that all the candidates obviously hired. Kasich, besides everyone he hired as governor of Ohio, worked at Lehman Brothers between his time in Congress and the governor’s mansion. Carson would almost surely have been involved in hiring as director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Cruz makes Texas a little too big
Ted Cruz made a home state pitch to start the debate, noting his promises to 27 million Texans back during his first Senate campaign. He's rounding pretty far up—by about a million. The Census shows just over 26 million people in Texas when Cruz was first elected in 2012.
— Darren Samuelsohn
Our policy reporters truth-squad the Republican debate.
Cruz plays it loose with phone encryption
Ted Cruz sided with the FBI in its encryption dispute with Apple in the San Bernardino terrorist case because he said the government only wanted access to one phone, not to create a backdoor into all phones. But you can’t have one without the other. Legally speaking, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged, under questioning from a House subcommittee, that the case could set a precedent. Technologically speaking, Apple says the capability the FBI wants (disabling the device’s self-destruct after a certain number of wrong password attempts) does not exist and would have to be created specially; if Apple did so, the same could be done toward unlocking any phone.
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Trump was for toppling Muammar Qadhafi—before he wasn’t
Ted Cruz took Donald Trump to task for what he called competing statements about whether he supported the toppling of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi in 2011. Trump stuck to his guns, insisting that the air war that led to Qadhafi’s death by an angry mob was a mistake that created a vacuum now filled by Islamic militants, including followers of the Islamic State – some of whom were the target of U.S. airstrikes last week. But in 2011, as pressure was building to stop Qadhafi from slaughtering civilians seeking to topple him, Trump said on his video blog that it was past time to remove the dictator from power.
“It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped,” Trump said at the time. “We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”
— Bryan Bender
How big is the deficit? Not as big as Trump thinks.
“Because of the horrible omnibus budget that was approved two weeks ago, [the debt] is going to be $21 trillion,” Donald Trump said, after noting that it is $19 trillion today. Is the deficit really going to be $2 trillion next year? Nope. The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent budget projections, from January, incorporate the omnibus budget deal and project a deficit of $544 billion in 2016 and $561 billion in 2017.
— Danny Vinik
Trump passes judgment on a cease-fire that isn't
As the foreign-policy portion of the debate gained momentum, Donald Trump argued that the new cease-fire deal in Syria is “meaningless,” “not working” and people are not abiding by it. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical it will be effective, but not yet: it doesn't take effect until Saturday.
— Nahal Toosi
Trump says he "can't" release tax returns. He can.
Trump repeatedly said he “can’t” release some of his tax returns because he’s being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. However, there’s no legal restriction on him doing so. Tax returns are confidential by law and can’t be released by the IRS, but a taxpayer can release his or her forms publicly if he or she sees fit. And of course, some of Trump’s returns are not under audit. At this point, he hasn't released those either.
— Josh Gerstein
Trump says Samuel Alito signed a bill that he didn't sign—and wasn't a bill
Trump: “I have a sister who's….a brilliant judge. [Cruz]'s been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court, with my sister, signed that bill. So I think that maybe we should get a little bit of an apology from Ted.” Trump’s description of the “bill” signed by Alito and his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, appears to refer to a court opinion issued in 2000 by the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals when Alito was a member of that court. That decision struck down New Jersey’s Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Alito was part of the three-judge panel that considered the case, but he did not sign Barry’s majority opinion upholding the law. “I do not join Judge Barry's opinion, which was never necessary and is now obsolete,” Alito wrote. It is true that Alito reached the same result Barry did, but he did not endorse her opinion and officially disclaimed it.
— Josh Gerstein
Trump overstates insurance premium increases, by a lot
Under Obamacare, are health insurance premiums going up "25, 35, 45 percent and more," as Donald Trump says? There are examples of individuals whose costs rose when they had to buy more comprehensive plans. But overall premium increases have been more modest in the last few years than they had been in the recent past. The Kaiser Family Foundation has a state-by-state list of how premiums changed in the Obamacare market, and last year the average increase was 4 percent. Tonight's debate is being held in Texas, and the survey shows that in Houston, premiums only rose 2.4 percent – and they actually dropped by 1 percent after subsidies were taken into account.
— Joanne Kenen
Americans pay the highest taxes? Not close.
“We have the highest taxes in the world—corporate tax, personal tax,” Donald Trump said. He’s right that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate, although that is just in the developed world. But he’s wrong about personal taxes. The top income tax rate for Americans is 39.5 percent, far lower than Sweden’s 57 percent top tax rate or Denmark’s 55.6 percent tax rate.
Of course, Americans pay other taxes besides the federal income tax—there’s the payroll tax, the capital gains tax and state and local taxes. But overall, the U.S. tax burden is quite low compared to other countries. According to the OECD, total taxes in the U.S. amounted to 26 percent of GDP in 2014. That’s lower than just about every other developed country, except for Mexico, Chile and France. For example, taxes in France amount to 45.2 percent of GDP and in Denmark amount to 50.9 percent of GDP. So no, U.S. taxes are nowhere close to highest in the world.
— Danny Vinik
Trump "won most" of the Trump University lawsuit? Hm.
Marco Rubio called Trump University a “fake school” that only left students with a “cardboard cutout of Donald Trump.”
"There are people that borrowed $36,000 to go to Trump University and they are suing him now,” Rubio said.
In response, Trump said he “won most of the lawsuit" and that Trump University "actually did a very good job.” It's unclear what case Trump was talking about. In reality, there are still two pending lawsuits against Trump University, which didn’t grant degrees but ran real estate seminars. A civil trial in the fraud case filed by former students that’s been playing out in federal court in San Diego could come sometime after May 6, which is the scheduled date of the last pre-trial conference. In fact, Trump is on the witness list. A separate suit filed against Trump University by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in 2013 is also still ongoing. While critics have accused Trump University of misleading students about its results, Trump's attorneys have said the accusations are without merit.
— Kimberly Hefling
Rubio overstates Trump's fine
"You're the only person on this stage that's ever been fined for hiring people to work on your projects illegally. You hired some workers from Poland .... He hired workers from Poland and he had to pay a million dollars or so in a judgment," said Marco Rubio to Donald Trump. Rubio was right that Trump settled a lawsuit alleging that he hired Polish workers illegally in New York City. But there is no reason to think he paid $1 million, as Rubio claimed.
The lawsuit was filed in 1983 on behalf of Polish demolition workers who Trump hired to clear the ground for the future Trump tower, according to a 1999 article in the New York Daily News. “The workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, sweated through round-the-clock shifts and some even slept on the floors of the building they were demolishing,” the article said. Trump was accused of hiring the non-union Polish workers to skirt contributions to union benefit funds. A New York federal judge ruled against Trump, and the workers’ lawyer at the time expected a judgment of $1-2 million, according to the New York Times. But the judgment was later reversed on appeal. Trump settled the case for an undisclosed amount before retrial.
— Brian Mahoney
Rubio prematurely declares ethanol's demise
"Ethanol will phase out. It is phasing out now. By 2022 that program expires by virtue of the existing law, and by that point it will go away," said Marco Rubio. It won't. The Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires refiners to mix specified amounts of ethanol and other biofuels into gasoline, does not phase out in 2022. That's when the annual targets set by Congress in 2007 end, and EPA is given greater discretion to set the annual mandates — but the program itself continues indefinitely. Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe recently backed a measure that would sunset the RFS after 2022.
— Alex Guillén
How much winning? Maybe not this much winning.
Trump claimed he won the Nevada caucuses not just among Hispanics but in every category. Not so. According to CNN, Marco Rubio won among 17- to 29-year-olds and people who said electability matters most and the next president should be experienced in politics. Cruz won among voters who said the most important quality was that the candidate “shares my values."
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Trump's China is a lot more successful than actual China
Is the U.S. "losing $500 billion a year to China"? That's how Trump put it, but if ever starts negotiating he might want to check his starting position. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. trade deficit with China was $366 billion in 2015.
— Danny Vinik
How much did Trump inherit?
Rubio said if Donald Trump hadn’t inherited $200 million he’d be selling watches in Manhattan. Sick burn, but wrong. Trump’s father was reportedly worth $200 million when he died, Trump is one of five siblings, so his share was only $40 million. However, Trump’s comeback line that all he got was a $1 million loan isn’t true either.
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Cruz thinks deportees can't come back
“Existing law says those who have been deported cannot come back into the country, that's the law,” said Ted Cruz. It’s more complicated than that. True, it’s not easy for someone who’s been deported from the United States to get a visa to return. But it’s not impossible. According to guidelines from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, someone who’s been deported in the past may have to wait a certain number of years before being eligible to apply for entry. It could be five years, 10 years or 20 years depending on the specific circumstances. Those convicted of certain crimes may never be let back in.
— Nahal Toosi
Trump, the only hirer?
On defense over allegations of staffing his projects with immigrants, Trump shot back that he’s the only one on stage who ever hired anyone. It’s funny, but indefensible, even if you set aside the campaign staff that all the candidates obviously hired. Kasich, besides everyone he hired as governor of Ohio, worked at Lehman Brothers between his time in Congress and the governor’s mansion. Carson would almost surely have been involved in hiring as director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
— Isaac Arnsdorf
Cruz makes Texas a little too big
Ted Cruz made a home state pitch to start the debate, noting his promises to 27 million Texans back during his first Senate campaign. He's rounding pretty far up—by about a million. The Census shows just over 26 million people in Texas when Cruz was first elected in 2012.
— Darren Samuelsohn
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)