PMC Commentary

New York and canaries

It's hard to read Quinnipiac's latest from New York without chortling.

Home-state Clinton leads (by 12 points) in the April 19 primary contest against Sanders, of course, but the chortling kicks in upon reading that Trump leads his primary opponents, Cruz and Kasich, by 36 and 37 points, respectively.

The chortling elevates to guffawing when one imagines New York, with its eponymous urban center's ethnic diversity and vastly white rural upstate expanses, as a national microcosm. And there, "women back Clinton 60 - 27 percent while men go 45 percent for Clinton and 41 percent for Trump," reports Quinnipiac. "She tops Trump 44 - 37 percent among independent voters."

The unbalances will only get worse — or rather, better — and not only in "blue" New York. Virtually the entire Electoral map will become awash in blue.

Why, I ask, would anyone other than Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan wish to tamper with this most perfect of storms? It's going to be beautiful. 

 

Newsmax now loves the lamestream media

What's interesting about the Washington Post's reporting that "Donald Trump would be the least-popular presidential nominee ever chosen by a major party in modern times"?

That "Trump's overall 67 percent unfavorable rating," as a WaPo/ABC News poll finds, "includes the dim view of three-quarters of women surveyed"? ... as well as "80 percent of young adults"? … and "85 percent of Hispanics"? … and "nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents"?

What's interesting is that ultraconservative Newsmax is re-reporting the story, virtually in full.

Interesting … and blessed … is modern conservatism's massive, eating-of-its-own schism.

 

Grownups against Bernie

In the magazine's endorsement of Hillary Clinton, Rolling Stone's co-founder Jann Wenner rebukes her primary opponent:

Every time Sanders is challenged on how he plans to get his agenda through Congress and past the special interests, he responds that the "political revolution" that sweeps him into office will somehow be the magical instrument of the monumental changes he describes. This is a vague, deeply disingenuous idea that ignores the reality of modern America….

I have been to the revolution before. It ain't happening.

That's my principal beef with Bernie Sanders. It's not what he wants to happen; it's how he so ambiguously promises that it can happen. As Mr. Wenner realistically observes, it just ain't gonna happen.

Sanders isn't so much campaigning as he is conning millions of good-hearted, well-intentioned voters, and I resent — deeply — the advantage he is taking of their good hearts and admirable intentions. In politics Sanders's rhetoric is excused by many as just so much populist fluffery and even exalted as high-minded idealism; in contract law he would be sued for the worst sort of grifting fraud.

Meanwhile, every passing fraudulent day alienates, quite possibly, another few thousand voters from the inevitable nominee, who will need every anti-barbarian vote to produce a maximum thrashing of the Trump-Cruz party.

It's that simple; the reason for Sanders to get out of the race (yes I know, he won't) is just this simple: His campaign is vastly counterproductive to the very highest ideal that is also politically realistic — that being a November annihilation of the barbarians, from the ticket's top to congressional seats. 

That's the grownup position. I don't say that to be insulting. I say it only because it's the incontestable truth, which, as they say, sometimes unavoidably hurts. And I'm delighted to relate that Wenner's magazine has also grown up:

Rolling Stone has championed the "youth vote" since 1972, when 18-year-olds were first given the right to vote. The Vietnam War was a fact of daily life then, and Sen. George McGovern, the liberal anti-war activist from South Dakota, became the first vessel of young Americans, and Hunter S. Thompson wrote our first presidential-campaign coverage. We worked furiously for McGovern. We failed; Nixon was re-elected in a landslide. But those of us there learned a very clear lesson: America chooses its presidents from the middle, not from the ideological wings. We are faced with that decision again.

For grownups, "that decision" is a damned easy one.

 

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The softer side of Trump-reporting

In its coverage of Donald Trump's latest obscenity, the NY Times once again demonstrates the soft bigotry of ho-ho euphemisms.

Trump's overt preference for the universal criminalization of abortion, reports the Times, "further elevat[es] Republican concerns that his explosive remarks about women could doom the party in the fall." Change "concerns" to "panic" and "could" to "will" and you have a more accurate assessment of internal reaction and the lowest of party expectations.

The Times' above formulation could be dismissed as a journalistic misdemeanor — a cordial softening of the harshness of what everyone knows (everyone but the Trumpeteers), a reluctance of straight reporting to forecast electoral outcomes, a kind of "Gentleman's C" in the increasingly competitive world of blunt journalism. What follows, however, is an unpardonable, reckless disregard of the Trump camp's actual reaction to "Republican concerns."

Continues the Times: "Hours later, Mr. Trump recanted his remarks, essentially in full, a rare and remarkable shift for a candidate who proudly extols his unwillingness to apologize or bow to 'political correctness.'"

The Trump camp's actual reaction? — "in full"? From the Associated Press: "'My position has not changed,' Trump argued in [two] statements released by his campaign."

And, naturally, The Donald took to Twitter, first retweeting Susan,

… who had retweeted Carol,

Still, all in all, and perhaps with Trumplike inscrutability, I shall now praise the NYT's ho-ho euphemistic inclinations. Trump, the paper goes on to report, is "facing a difficult test in Wisconsin." Bravo, I say. One is certainly free to characterize a 10-point deficit before the advent of excruciating "Republican concerns" as "difficult," and I'm happy the NYT does. For others might more accurately say "impossible" or even "ruinous." And that could be bad, in that that could lend to Trump's darkening atmosphere.

I have been fearful of late that increasing scrutiny and accurate journalistic portrayals of Mr. Trump and his political standing might well diminish his otherwise unbeatable odds in Cleveland. That's the nut of my worry. 

Notwithstanding my feverish conviction that the GOP would be utterly insane to hand in any "democratic" way its presidential nomination to Trump, I even more feverishly believe that the GOP needs Trump to take the party all the way, to the absolute bottom, in the fall. Hence any euphemistic softening of Trump's troubles, I'm all for.

 

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Wisconsin? I'll say Sanders (regrettably).

RealClearPolitics's Wisconsin polling average has Clinton up, over Sanders, by 1 point.

I don't buy it. Nor do I buy today's FiveThirtyEight estimation: "According to our latest polls-plus forecast, Hillary Clinton has a 64% chance of winning the Wisconsin primary." Just three days ago, FiveThirtyEight gave "Clinton an 84 percent chance at winning the primary." That's quite a "winning" drop.

I do smell another Michigan upset: Wisconsin is overwhelmingly white, and its primary is open. On the fuzzier side of forecasting, the Clinton camp has taken to talking up the all-consuming importance of New York, which suggests its internal polling fails to mirror the RealClearPolitics average.

If I'm correct in my olfactory suspicions, it will at least keep things interesting on the Democratic side of this year's political ledger. That's the upside — a kind of voyeuristic one — to this seemingly endless Clinton-Sanders contest. And from where I sit, it's the only upside.

Because a detached, dispassionate view of this race tells me that Bernie Sanders is approaching the point of causing irreparable harm to the barbarians' worst nightmare — that being the far more electable Hillary Clinton — what with passionate celebrity wingnuts appearing on popular cable-news programs and encouraging likeminded wingnuts to go politically postal.

I distrust political passion, as did Lincoln. "Reason — cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason" was that to be properly sought both in the law and in politics, according to Abe, and it was that which he practiced. Bernie Sanders inspires the alternative, and it's causing too many of his adherents to lose their grip on reality.

 

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Trump and global panic

The Hill reports that our obsession with all things Trump is far from globally unique:

The questions about Trump are "almost all-consuming," said Richard Mintz, the managing director of Washington-based firm The Harbour Group, whose client list includes the governments of Georgia and the United Arab Emirates.

After a recent trip to London, Abu Dhabi and Beijing, "it’s fair to say that all anyone wants to talk about is the U.S. presidential election," Mintz added. "People are confused and perplexed."

In The Hill piece there's also this beaut of an understatement: "Multiple … lobbyists said they have had trouble framing the implications of a Trump presidency for their overseas clients."

I'd recommend to these lobbyists that they play around with an interactive Electoral map, and then simply show the results to their clients. Playing around is what I was doing moments ago, and this was my best-guess, and rather liberally Trumpist, scenario:

In plain words, not to worry. The lobbyists need not trouble themselves with conceiving "the implications of a Trump presidency," since the impossibility of the second rules out the first.

 

Trump: America's "problem" is questions

The Washington Post, on last night's town hall encounter between CNN's Anderson Cooper and bizarro world's Donald Trump:

"It’s the argument of a 5-year-old!" Cooper admonished [Trump] after he said Ted Cruz was responsible for starting the ugly and unpleasant exchange about the two candidates’ wives that dominated the news cycle last week.

"Excuse me. You would say that," Trump responded. "That’s the problem with our country."

A few days ago I heard the Post's Dan Balz note in an MSNBC interview that attempting to parse most any Trumpian sentence would be one helluva nightmarish task. Which is true. Yet even Trump's easily parsable ones can be more baffling than his characteristic gibberish. What's "the problem with our country"? A journalist's objection to an infantile argument.

Continues the Post:

Cooper continued to press him.

"Excuse me — no no, no," Trump responded again.

By our count, Trump said "excuse me" 18 times over the course of the one-hour event.

And there you have it — Trump's real rhetorical magic: the simple, excuse-me, excuse-me dismissal of any direct question or noted objection, such as "answering" a question about nuclear weapons and ISIS by raising the quite possibly unrelated issue of Jeb's "low energy." It's so simple it's brilliant — long practiced by pols, but not this simply or brilliantly.

 

The WSJ: Trump's new mouthpiece

This being just days before Wisconsin's primary, I just now tried to imagine a more Trump-supportive headline from the Wall Street Journal, which came up with this:

GOP Establishment in Wisconsin Unites Against Trump

I was unsuccessful.

 

The GOP: democracy is nuts

That was fast.

Already it's goodbye yesterday's Lewandowski story, a looped video-taped saga of never-before-witnessed brutality, good for maybe 48 hours of cable-news frenzy. Hours later The Donald cut short even that circumscribed drama by telling CNN's Anderson Cooper that he can no longer promise to support a non-orangutan nominee.

This fresh blockbuster story was as unexpected as Hitler's war machine rolling into Russia. Trump is a man of his word — for the duration of his laying it out there. Five minutes later he might well swing to new verbal terrain. He calls it strategic unpredictability; others call it improvisational incoherence. Last night it was simply good timing, since it bumped his campaign manager's criminal problem from the front page.

Still, Trump's timing may have been forced. Just prior to revoking his pledge to support whomever his party nominates, that party was delightfully engaged in some nominating-convention-rules skulduggery.

All four early appointees of the rules committee for this year’s Republican convention told Politico they … took issue with a [2012] rule … requiring a candidate to win a majority of delegates in eight states to be eligible for the party’s nomination….

If the committee scraps the requirement entirely, it could open the door to multiple candidates, possibly even some who never entered the primaries, competing for the party’s nomination at a brokered convention.

In which July case, it could be goodbye Corey Lewandowski's Donald Trump.

I can sympathize with the latter's disgruntlement about this, even while sympathizing with the scarcely exotic yet somewhat undemocratic principle that nominating conventions should not be suicide pacts. In 2016's case it would be only somewhat undemocratic indeed, since most Republican voters will have voted against, not for, Trump. Why then should the GOP be saddled with a strategically unpredictable, improvisationally incoherent orangutan?

For the Republican Party these may not be times that try men's souls, since the party is soulless; however they are times that try insiders' patience with a suicidal base. In short, for the GOP, these times call for party bosses — a little lesson in party survival that Democrats learned decades ago, and thus superdelegates were born.

At the questionable extreme of this philosophical principle of rational bossism is none other than the Republican Party's most infamous rules committeeman, Curly Haugland, who charmingly informed Politico: "They’ve created these goofy, bogus primaries out of whole cloth"; adding, in Politico's paraphrase, "that conventions are largely irrelevant if the party’s delegates are meant to slavishly follow the results of primaries and caucuses."

In Haugland's defense, all he's really saying is that microcosmic democracy can be very very nuts, especially when one begins with an already insane party. And honestly, who can argue with that?

 

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A SurveyMonkey on #NeverTrump backs

From the NBC News/SurveyMonkey tracking poll:

Donald Trump now holds 48 percent support of registered Republicans and Republican-leaners….

This is more than 20 points higher than his second-place competitor, Ted Cruz — who now enjoys 27 percent support.

That should read, Trump enjoys 48 percent and Cruz holds 27 percent — but it's enjoyable any way one dices it. Just as enjoyable is this:

A majority — 57 percent — of registered Republicans and Republican-leaners … say that Trump should win the Republican nomination for president if he wins a plurality (but not necessarily a majority) of delegates.

In my passion for a Trump nomination I quite agree with these Republicans and Republican-leaners, even though their delegate-plurality-vs.-delegate-majority argument is as sound as Trump's position on tariffs, taxes, or foreign policy. Like so many Republicans, I simply want Trump as the GOP nominee, and I really don't care how he gets there.

The issue does inspire an interesting debate. Were I a Republican and part of whatever is left of the party's tattered establishment, I'd argue the opposite: that a plurality means nothing at a party's nominating convention, and that only through horse-trading on second, third and so-on ballots can a candidate achieve what should be a legitimate majority — whether or not the achieving candidate entered the convention with the most delegates. My daughter, for one, is horrified by this concept; she argues, in her youthful democratic innocence, that whoever enters Cleveland with the most votes — the most voters' votes, not delegates — should be the party's nominee. Trump, then, in my daughter's formulation, would be a shoo-in, thus her formulation definitely has its appeal. I, on the other hand, can't shake my old-school admiration of party bosses, in the absence of any delegate majority, determining who should head their party's ticket.

I can see both sides. But damn, even though I'm no longer a smoker, I'm still intrigued by smoke-filled rooms.

 

Lewandowski's first

One can say this much for The Donald: Every day, his campaign brings some new low and some fresh hell to the annals of American politics.

Politico's not-so breaking newsy headline:

Trump campaign manager charged with misdemeanor battery

In literary form, the story of the Trump campaign would never have been commercially successful as believable farce. Only real Republican politics can be this extraordinarily weird — and successful. 

 

Exorcising Republican pols

This morning I listened to CNN's Carol Costello interview Wisconsin Congressman Reid Ribble, in which she asked the Republican pol what he thought of his party's turmoil. Well, well, he conceded, for the moment his party is in a spot of "disarray." He added, however, that this is but typical of the Republican Party's love of internal "debate."

There is just nothing Republicans love more than digging into "ideas," discussing their merits and sorting them out, said Ribble.

This is one of those oft-uttered fallacies that always makes me wonder if the utterer genuinely believes the fallacy he's uttering, or is he uttering it only for publicly consumed hornswoggling?

After all, where was the GOP's love of internal debate when much-needed healthcare reform was winding its tortured way through Congress? Where was the love of ideas when President Obama was attempting to craft an intelligent, Keynesian stimulation of a (Republican-) shattered economy? Where was Republicans' love of intellectual tussle when Obama, almost single-handedly, was rescuing the American auto industry?

One could go on — easily. For indeed when, throughout the past seven years, have Republicans offered anything but mindless and monolithic opposition to every Obama initiative? Which of Obama's proposals or presidential triumphs weren't assaulted by predetermined, altogether unthinking Republican malice as either strong-willed socialist despotism or weak-minded Democratic incompetence?

Just where the hell has all this Ribbled love of internal debate or intraparty competition of ideas been? The self-evident answer is that it has suffered a disgraceful absence.

But it still leaves me wondering: Do at least some of the Ribbles of the GOP's rhetorical horseshit really believe in their proffered fallacy? I honestly can't say, since we're dealing with devilishly dishonest minds, in which there is often mixed, as William Peter Blatty reminded us, a smidgeon of truth.

 

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Hillary, Bernie, and big money

Politico:

Hillary Clinton’s biggest super PAC [Priorities USA] has already reserved $70 million in TV ads after this summer’s conventions in battleground states, but the group is preparing for an even earlier assault on Donald Trump — possibly while he is still busy battling his fellow Republicans to secure his party’s nomination.

Priorities has nearly $100 million in banked cash and pledges, and I'm delighted it does. Without question Citizen United — the monstrous jurisimprudence that created Priorities USA — is the most disgraceful Supreme Court decision since Bush v. Gore, in that it unquestionably conflicts with the democratic concept of one voter-one vote. Yet this conflict, like so many others in the American political system, is an irrepressible one — which is to say, as a real conflict, it must be countered realistically.

Virtuous stump speeches attended by the idealistically amassed won't counter the coming right-wing formidability of Citizens United. The right may be splintered for now, and its big money, on whole, may be opposed to the party-destroying obscenity of Donald Trump. But with reasonably high confidence we may also suspect that, in time, the right will reunite and let loose; the boodle will flow into ultraconservative super-PAC coffers and the airwaves will overflow with anti-progressive slime.

Against which, nominee Bernie Sanders would stand virtually, though virtuously, undefended. His small-donor fundraising may seem impressive in its live-off-the-land, state-by-state, primary-and-caucus offensive operations. It would be dwarfed and humiliated, however, by the right's concerted, billionaire onslaughts.

A bit like Bogart in The Big Sleep, Sanders may grieve over the stench of big political money on long winter evenings. The pertinent question nonetheless remains: So what? The stench is real, and in 2016, it is ineradicable.

This is but one of the many unpleasant realities in American politics with which the Sanders campaign and its reverent supporters choose to simply not grapple. They avert their eyes — and minds — from the savage potential of big money in the impending general-election campaign, just as they avert all attentiveness to the equally savage prospect not of anti-progressive slime on the airwaves, but of far more powerful, and easily sellable, anti-socialist propaganda.

Such deliberate obliviousness to such immovable political realities just baffles the bejesus out of me. Whenever these, or other, realities are pointed out to Sanders supporters, the cry goes up that the objector is opposed to real, fundamental, and of course virtuous change. Yet how, I ask, is approaching the political battlefield as presently arranged commensurate with, or tantamount to, a stuffy, cold-hearted defense of the corrupt "status quo" or sinister "establishment" thinking?

It may be regarded by some as an objectionable peculiarity of our political system that real change comes after general elections, not before. Thus, it follows, actually winning the 2016 general election is the supreme objective. And one does that with ghastly big money — not exalted ideals.

 

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Bernie, out: one more time

On "Hardball" tonight, Chris Matthews put up a few wise words from David Plouffe, some of which I reproduce below:

How can Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner and close to presumptive nominee lose five of the six last contests? Doesn’t that suggest the race could somehow be changing and Bernie Sanders now has a shot?

Negative….

I believe Hillary Clinton has zero chance of not being the Democratic nominee.

Plouffe explains the why of the "zero." His explanation also implicitly explains why Bernie Sanders is now seen as a net negative by those of us more interested in crushing the right's barbarians than watching the left fight internally.

This is not the time for that, since this year portends Democrats' best possible shot at electorally slaughtering the right, from state houses to White House. Sen. Sanders should be expending his considerable talents in energizing the young and idealistic in opposition to the wretched scourge of modern Republicanism — and not the very establishment that is singularly capable of taking Republicanism down.

After the joyous slaughter, Sanders will of course be free to resume his attacks on by-then President Clinton and the Democratic establishment. Indeed, such post-election attacks would be salubrious, and welcome. For the moment, however, they are merely counterproductive — to Sanders's own left.

I trust this brief post explains why all the irritation, to repeat myself, by those of us more interested in crushing the right's barbarians than watching the left fight internally.

 

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A puzzling mea culpa

The former communications director of the now-defunct Make America Great Again Super PAC pens a mea culpa that will leave you wondering why she bothered, although it won't leave you wondering how such a disheveled mind got a high-ranking position with a such an aimless super PAC:

I am now taking full responsibility for helping create this monster — and reaching out directly to those voters who, like me, wanted Trump to be the real deal….

I don't think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I don’t even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all….

What was once Trump's desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks….

You can give Trump the biggest gift possible if you are a Trump supporter: stop supporting him.

He doesn't want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House.

Which is all he can say when he loses the White House by almost historic proportions, which even he has to know is inevitable. So why should his supporters stop supporting him?

What am I missing? … Where's the national threat? … Where's the "irreparable damage"? … What's to lose?

Nowhere is any of this explained by the former communications director of the former Make America Great Again Super PAC — a classic organizational study in Not Thinking Things Through.