Prairie Weather

Trump loses?

Trump belongs to the media, not America.  America and its corporate, largely right wing, media have been at war for so long that many of us believed America to be all over but for the shouting.  The latest Washington Post/AP poll shows America reviving and the media catching all hell.

It's about time.  It took the dubious candidacy of Donald Trump to wake us up.  There remain a few, though wide-spread, theories that Trump is a poseur, put there to reveal the sickness of our political system and, in particular of the political right and the media.  Whatever, but:

 ...If Donald Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination, he would start the general election campaign as the least-popular candidate to represent either party in modern times.

Three-quarters of women view him unfavorably. So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. ...

Head-to-head matchups show Hillary Clinton, as well as her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, leading Trump, often by double digits. Even his two remaining fellow GOP contenders this week backed away from earlier promises to support the eventual nominee. ...WaPo

"Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan," according to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. 

Okay, Obama  deserves a lot of credit for maintaining moral stature during the GOP's serious efforts to bury America in septic mud.  But the GOP deserves credit -- at least --for offing itself.  And Republicans were deep in the do-do even before Obama even began to surface as a candidate.  Congress, from 1994 onwards, has become headquarters for an embarrassment of bombasts.  Before that, Republicans wet themselves in Watergate and were all too eager to embrace the likes of Oliver North and Lee Atwater and that sweet guy,  the Ronald Reagan of Nicaragua and Iran-Contra. 

In contrast, Obama has behaved like a mensch and deserves a lot of credit for not losing his cool, but the Republican party was already angry and destructive by 1961 when our current president was born.

If it's any comfort to decent Republicans (no!  honest! there are quite a few!), Hillary Clinton isn't doing that much better than Trump in the "ugh" category.

A silver lining for Trump is that voters also feel antipathy for Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. The distaste for Clinton is not as strong as it is for Trump — 52 percent of voters see her unfavorably — but Clinton’s vulnerabilities, combined with Trump’s unpredictability, haunt many Democrats. ...WaPo

See GOPers flounder and crash! Watch the crack-up! Enjoy!

The Republican National Committee’s loyalty pledge died on Tuesday night. It was nearly eight months old.

At a town-hall-style event hosted by CNN, Donald J. Trump said he would not promise to support the eventual nominee if it was not him, despite a loyalty oath that he and 16 other candidates signed in September.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas also would not explicitly vow to back the nominee, in his case if it was Mr. Trump, saying only that Mr. Trump would not get that far. Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio was more explicit, saying that if the nominee was someone who “is really hurting the country and dividing the country,” then he just wasn’t sure. Pressed by the host, Anderson Cooper, on whether he was saying he thinks that’s what Mr. Trump is doing, Mr. Kasich declined to elaborate.

The reason the pledge existed in the first place was to prevent Mr. Trump walking out of the Republican contest and into a third-party candidacy. But the comments marked a fresh stage in the open warfare that has erupted in the past weeks, as Mr. Trump has moved closer to capturing the nomination of a party whose major leaders remain deeply troubled by his comments. The wounds in the party are becoming so deep that they may be impossible to heal in time for the general election campaign, no matter who the nominee is. ...NYT

Four is such a lonely number

For now, at least, unions are back in business.  Yesterday the Supremecons-minus-one lost a decision that would have significantly weakened unions had Antonin Scalia were still a member of the Court's team of radical justices.

The Supreme Court handed organized labor a major victory on Tuesday, deadlocking 4 to 4 in a case that had threatened to cripple the ability of public-sector unions to collect fees from workers who chose not to join and did not want to pay for the unions’ collective bargaining activities.

It was the starkest illustration yet of how the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia last month has blocked the power of the court’s four remaining conservatives to move the law to the right.

A ruling allowing workers to refuse to pay the fees would have been the culmination of a decades-long campaign by a group of prominent conservative foundations aimed at weakening unions that represent teachers and other public employees. ...NYT

The Times report underlines the efforts of big money to crippled unions and underlines the kind of bought-'n'-paid-for decisions that have come -- one could fairly assume -- from a Court whose "conservative" justices are hardly shy when offered fringe bennies like hunting trips and luxury travel.

Senate Republicans -- slow to even meet with the President's choice of Merrick Garland to join the Court -- began to hustle yesterday.

Senator Mark S. Kirk of Illinois on Tuesday became the first Republican to meet with Judge Merrick B. Garland and said he hoped the meeting would influence other Republicans to at least sit down with President Obama’s choice to fill a Supreme Court vacancy despite pressure from party leaders not to consider his nomination.

“We need rational, adult, open-minded consideration of the constitutional process,” said Mr. Kirk, who is perhaps the most endangered Senate Republican up for re-election this fall. “He’s been duly nominated by the elected president of the United States to fill a vacancy which we know exists on the court.” ...NYT

The Washington Post explains how the 4-4 split led to this outcome.

Conservative groups direc

tly asked the court to overturn the 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which favored the unions. That ruling said states could allow public-em­ployee unions to collect fees from nonmembers to cover the costs of workplace negotiations but not to cover the union’s political activities. More than 20 states allow the fees.

During oral arguments, it appeared that the conservative groups would get their wish. Scalia had actually been the best hope for unions beyond the four liberal justices. But his questions seemed to make clear that he sided with the challengers.

When the court is evenly split on a case, it affirms the decision of the appeals court that considered the case. In this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said it was bound by the Abood decision and turned down the challenge. ...WaPo

The Wall Street Journal sees this decision as a temporary setback.

Conservative groups said they were disappointed with the ruling, though not surprised by the deadlock following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. They voiced optimism that similar pending cases could wind their way up to the high court. The National Right to Work Foundation said its staff attorneys have five cases working their way through courts to seek an end to mandatory union dues and fees.

“The issue is not going away and could return to the High Court soon,” said Patrick Semmens, the group’s vice president, in a statement. “We fully expect the constitutionality of forced unionism to be back before the Supreme Court before too long.” ...WSJ

And now the ball is back in the Senate's mitt.  Or back on Mitch McConnell's long s*it list.

ORANGE CITY, Iowa — Chuck Grassley isn’t changing his mind on whether Merrick Garland should be confirmed to the Supreme Court this year. But he’s convinced he will have to vote on Garland anyway.

In a series of town halls in northwest Iowa this week, the Judiciary Committee chairman predicted that Senate Democrats ultimately will use a parliamentary maneuver to force a vote on Garland — a rare move that would amount to a major affront to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who controls the Senate floor.

“There’s nothing we can do about it. Under the rules of the United States Senate, that resolution can be offered anytime,” Grassley told reporters after a Tuesday town hall here, referring to a procedural maneuver called a motion to discharge. “A Republican could offer it.”

The Judiciary Committee chairman candidly acknowledged that the maneuver would put Republicans in a difficult position politically. ...Politico

Nasty thought: We can expect "more of the same." For the foreseeable future..

Jeffrey Frank writes this week at the New Yorker about our political mess and what we might see if we were to look beyond November '16.  Maybe that's because what lies ahead doesn't appear to be better than what we're experiencing now.

Sanders, who turns seventy-five in September, and Clinton, who will be sixty-nine in October, haven’t had much to say about the nation’s future Democratic leaders, perhaps because those leaders haven’t made their presence felt. Trump, who will be seventy in June and carries on with insults and self-inflation (“I alone can solve,” he tweeted after the weekend terrorist attack in Lahore, Pakistan), seems mostly to be accelerating the combustion of the present Republican Party, with not much thought for what might come next. The face of the party’s next generation might belong to the forty-five-year-old Cruz, if not for the complication that, were his Republican colleagues to vote on the matter, he would win a contest for most loathed. Perhaps the most dispiriting thing about this year’s Presidential race, which has sunk to repellent depths because of the Trump-Cruz contest, is the unvoiced promise of more of the same in the years ahead. ...Frank,NewYorker

America could take a bolder step towards "diversity" and actually embrace an additional political party or two  -- maybe Cleaner Democrats representing reformers and progressives along with Sane Republicans who are against religious fanaticism here at home and builders of an economic system that favors everybody, not just those who are already privileged.

Slow motion suicide

When the Democratic party falls into pieces, there's a certain political logic to the split:  Right vs. Left.  But not the GOP.  Republicans, Jonathan Chait argues, do it their own way.  Or so would seem given the current crack-up.

Oddly enough, the polarizing candidate occupies the center of the remaining presidential field, with one opponent on his right (Ted Cruz) and another on his left (John Kasich). Nor is the party splitting along geographic lines, given that Trump has won states in every region. Instead, the divide runs high-low, splitting conservatism as an idea from conservatism as an instinct.

The policy content of the primary fight has receded almost entirely. ...Chait,NYMag

"Visceral loathing" is how Chait describes the attitude of outraged Republicans who have to deal with or compete against the current front-runner.  It comes very close to what some of us on the left feel about Hillary Clinton.  Her ties to Big Money outstrip those of any other candidate, whether we're talking Wall Street or the defense industry or, say, pharmaceuticals and health sectors.  The Center for Responsive Politics has the numbers.  

Don't forget:  pretty much all "sectors" of  Big Money contributors want a seat at the pork roast table.  They may lean Republican, but they also invest also in Democrats who (they evidently believe) are more likely to win.  

Individual Republican voters are less practical.  Their votes come from a series of shared fantasies.

Ronald Reagan brought down communism by telling Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall; global warming is fake or overrated; the Bush tax cuts did not cause a deficit problem, etc. ...Chait,NYMag

Of course, the result is an America based on fantasies.  Fantasies have enormous appeal.  But they are not a reliable foundation for building a future you'd want to live in -- or even for merely gaining the respect of grown-ups.

The true source of the schism is between Republicans who intellectualize conservative impulses and those who do not. The strongest demographic predictor of Republican support for Trump is education, with college-educated Republicans far less likely to support him than those without degrees. He epitomizes low-brow, reality-show values, making himself a kind of one-man cultural wedge.

But there is more to Trump’s high-low divide than that. The conservative movement has succeeded for decades by channeling racial resentment, nationalism, and authoritarianism into traditional policy proposals that can be justified in white papers on foreign policy, welfare, crime, taxes, and so on. Trump has made a mockery of this whole process, substituting boundless faith in his personality for a policy architecture constructed over generations. Conservative intellectuals understand and care about these ideas. They have articulated serious reasons for, say, restricting immigration levels, but Trump grasps the embarrassing reality that most Republican voters are driven by base animus toward immigrants. The rupture he’s opened does not divide one set of ideas from another. Trump has simply pitted the Republican brain against the Republican brain stem. ...Chait,NYMag

Meanwhile, Trump is still out there, embarrassing his Party. Daniel McCarthy writes at American Conservative that "conservative Republicans™ somehow maneuvered themselves into a position of being too hardline for moderates and non-ideologues, but not hardline or ideological enough for the right. Trump, on the other hand, appeals both to the hard right and to voters whose economic interests would, in decades past, have classed them as moderates of the center-left—lunch-pail voters.

What’s even more remarkable is that movement conservatives, who have been given plenty of warning, ever since 2006, that their formula is exhausted, keep doing the same thing over and over again: they’ll dodge right, in a way that right-wingers find unsatisfactory but that moderates find appalling; then they’ll weave back to the center, in a way that doesn’t fool centrists and only angers the right. Immigration—which was another of George W. Bush’s stumbling blocks, lest we forget—has been the issue that symbolized movement-conservative Republicanism’s futility most poignantly. It’s not even clear that most GOP voters agree with Trump’s rhetorical hard-line on immigration—they just like it better than the two-faced talk of the average Republican politician.

Trump has a plethora of weaknesses, as general election polls amply demonstrate. But just look what he’s up against within the Republican Party: that’s why he’s winning. I should have recognized that last summer, but I thought voters would never break their habit of preferring “electable” candidates. It turns out that voters have much more capacity to learn and adapt—even if only by trial and error—than Republican elites do. ...McCarthy,AmCon

The McGovern problem

The failure of George McGovern had a major impact on a generation of Democrats, who believed they'd faced a painful reality about the limits of idealism in American politics. ... But it would be a shame if we disqualified every honest politician, or forever disavowed the judgment of young people, just because George McGovern lost an election four decades ago. ...MattTaibbi,RollingStone

Don't blame McGovern.  And don't fall into the trap of believing the Democratic party will win only if they move toward the political center.  That's what buys you the bought-'n'-paid for Hillary.

Is Hillary really doing the most good that she can do, fighting for the best deal that's there to get for ordinary people?

Or is she just doing something that satisfies her own definition of that, while taking tens of millions of dollars from some of the world's biggest jerks?

I doubt even Hillary Clinton could answer that question. She has been playing the inside game for so long, she seems to have become lost in it. She behaves like a person who often doesn't know what the truth is, but instead merely reaches for what is the best answer in that moment, not realizing the difference. ...MattTaibbi,RollingStone

I think Hillary does know the difference.  I don't believe she's a good progressive who's just playing to the middle and counting on looking pragmatic.  But most of all, she's one of those candidates who, as Taibbi points out, "who promise they can deliver change while also taking the money, mostly just end up taking the money."

Sanders has money,  too.  It's where that money comes from...

But Hillary is a more practical choice?  A tougher opponent to the likes of Trump and Cruz?   Not according to the numbers. Mahablog has this:

...The argument assumes that only Hillary Clinton can beat Trump or Whatever in November. Personally, I suspect any reasonably presentable vertebrate could beat Trump in November, and Cruz, too. Current “head to head” polls, for whatever they are worth, have Clinton beating Trump by an average of 11.2 points, a factoid that has been splashed robustly all over social media as “proof” that Clinton must be supported.

But the same polls have Sanders beating Trump by 17.5 points.  Likewise, Sanders does better than Clinton against Cruz.