World Affairs Discussion Group: caucus

Shame on your guys, I'm discussing politics more at work now than with my friends and family. :) Just don't tell my boss please. I'm trying to limit it to 45 min/day haha, but Trump doesn't make it easy. Here are some snippets FYI:

it seems like a lot of qualifications are negative this year: not-Trump vs. not-establishment; not-Clinton vs. not-"socialist."
Like what some conservative voices are saying, the GOP needs to be about more than being against Obama and progressive programs. What are they going to do for Americans?

So far I've heard:
-get Mexico to build a border wall
-defeat ISIS somehow
-bring back waterboarding
-get Putin to behave somehow
-de nuclearize Iran and NK somehow
-lower taxes and fewer regs
-tariffs on China
-get China to stop hacking us somehow
Yeah I think with the Republican complaints that Obama has been too weak/passive on foreign policy by the more hawkish candidates, it's hard to get support for more restraint/withdrawal, even when that is the soundest course of action for the US. Rand tried to reinvent himself as a "hawk libertarian" and he failed in both respects.

So now it's a la mode to wave the big American phallus around and be the strong global cop again. I suppose it's been a sufficient number of years since the Bushie neocons left DC in shame, so their ideas are making a comeback with weak memory conservatives?
Well, if you're compiling a list of Rubio's qualifications, you should probably include his stint in the Florida House of Representatives, including serving as speaker.

And I'm hardly the first person to observe that his main resume line items of:
- State legislature
- Non-tenured teaching position at a university
- First term US Senator
do sound rather reminiscent of another recent presidential candidate. (Rubio did them in a different order, of course, and no amount of educational egalitarianism is going to make me treat FIU as being in the same league as the University of Chicago, but still.)
To be a little tongue-in-cheek, I have not been that impressed with some of the speakers/majority leaders in the CA Legislature, so in comparison I am not sure how prestigious the SOTH of FL is. :)

And at least Obama was also editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Maybe that is why Rubio repeated himself so much at the debate; from his FIU days he's used to rehashing the same basic facts to his distracted students until they get it? :)
I clearly don't put Bush on the Obama/BillC intelligence level. However maybe he wasn't the bumbling moron that some critics painted. He was just really living in a bubble and surrounded by enablers, so based on the slanted info he was fed, he really believed that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators and Katrina wasn't a big deal.

But the fault's on him for not being more inquisitive/skeptical, and hiring a "team of rivals" to make sure that he was getting diverse viewpoints and info. Powell was the only non-Evangelical non-Neocon he had, and he seemed to get over-ruled a lot. Plus he didn't really make much of a stink/protest on key controversial decisions, I guess trying to be the good soldier and all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haQzdW7hg4A
Heh yeah - Jeb embodies "pathetic" at this point. I almost feel sorry for him, but then I remember Florida 2000 (and that he is the #1 fan of the Dubya foreign policy). Even his campaign logo looks juvenile and desperate. And yet he's raised as much $ as Clinton, driven by his family's network and establishment/pro-business cred I guess.

Imagine what it must be like to be one of his grassroots supporters (they must need heroin too)! This Sam. Bee segment captures that.

His debate exchanges with his BFF Trump remind me of this sheltered rich kid, who always was the center of attn and got his way (which he is), now sent off to boarding school and has to deal with the big, bad bully from NYC.
I haven't laughed this hard in a long time:

http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/donald-trump-signs-a-baby-621618243755

Maybe it was the cutaway to Talladega Nights?
I think that you're grotesquely misrepresenting Nate's position, not just in that article but since Trump announced, which I read as "early polls don't tell you very much, so let's wait until something actually happens before going off the Trump end":
1. Many voters aren't paying much attention yet.
2. Even those voters who are paying attention have a high likelihood of changing their minds between, say, August, and whenever they actually participate in a primary or caucus.
3. It's very hard to interpret polling results in a very crowded field. Sixteen candidates simply give you too many degrees of freedom.
4. It's practically pointless to look at national polls early in the nomination process, because the early voting states play a massively disproportionate role in determining the outcome.
The above are generic to all early polling for a nomination contest and they explain why it would have been foolish to expect, say, Herman Cain to win the nomination based on strong early polling when he was the 2012 not-Romney du jour.
Add to all of the above the simple empirical fact that no one like Trump has ever won or come close to winning either party's nomination. The social scientist should at least be open to the possibility that that fact isn't an accident and that such candidates (or potential candidates) may face hurdles which aren't immediately obvious.

To his credit, as we've gotten closer to and further into the actual primaries and caucuses, he's started placing more weight on the polls, pretty much exactly as he said he would last summer.
I'm honestly more scared of Trump than Cruz, on the grounds that the latter is a particularly loathsome manifestation of a disease from which American politics has long suffered. The former may be a wholely new ailment.

My main hope of being right in my prediction may now rest on the avalanche of negative advertising that's coming Trump's way. So here's to the super PACs; may their aim not falter.
Yeah, speaking of profitable - Trump claims that he has self-funded much of his campaign, but in actuality he's made loans to businesses that he controls. He barely buys ads (gets free pub from the media), and has contracted Trump enterprises for catering, merch, and facilities. I guess this fiasco did start out as a shameless cash grab + ego stroking, as Eric mentioned last year!

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/donald-trump-fec-fundraising-214838

Wow, this is shaping up to be a really politically impactful year: https://www.yahoo.com/politics/what-does-justice-scalias-death-mean-for-pending-000410173.html

Do you think Obama will be able to confirm a nominee before he vacates the WH, or will the GOP filibuster?
Yeah, the GOP supposedly packed the SC debate audience with pro-establishment types who were obviously hostile to Trump and more friendly to Bush and Rubio (esp. Bush). Yet Trump still has a huge lead in the polls there.

Trump proclaimed the undeniable facts that:
- 9/11 occurred while Bush was president
- No WMDs were found in Iraq
- Abortions aside, Planned Parenthood does have other positive impacts for its clients
- The Iraq War was a mistake, considering hindsight and alternative actions available at the time (some holdouts still disagree with this)
So of course he got gang-tackled by his rivals and booed by the crowd.
I guess that embodies the crisis in the GOP that x previously described. Those blindly loyal to the Establishment's record, and those who think the Establishment's led conservatism astray - and they need a fresh approach (even if it's xenophobic and unrealistic).

A follow up to Trump's Bush criticisms. Maybe US memory is fairly short-term; it's been almost a decade since W was in the WH. Some folks forget (or don't want to acknowledge) what a truly historically disastrous presidency it was - almost across every important dimension of national leadership. AFAIK, Bush only really made noteworthy contributions to fighting AIDS; the rest of his job performance was lackluster at best or wildly inept/detrimental to the national interest at worst.

He and the financial crisis (which his admin. failed to avoid even though there were warning signs) were the top reasons why an inexperienced half-black guy with a Muslim name succeeded him (not to take anything away from the great accomplishments of the Obama campaign, but conditions played a major role) - that is how fed up America was. Alas, in 2016 we're still fed up, but conservatives are mad about Obama "ruining everything" (even though conditions have greatly improved in many areas that conservatives supposedly care about: economic indicators, gov't spending, etc.). And progressives are mad about the rigged game and inability for supposedly liberal leaders to do anything about it (even Obama couldn't usher in a movement/revolution, hence the rise of Sanders).

http://theweek.com/articles/606035/why-donald-trumps-vicious-attack-george-w-bush-brutally-effective--brilliant

But Trump is not just running against Bushism. He's running against what it's a symptom of — the certain kind of insider sophistry that he says defines the political class. That's why he was onstage at all last night. That's why he's in first place now. And that's why he's more at home in the GOP than so many want to admit.

To understand how that could possibly be, understand what he's not arguing.

The typical critique of politics today is that the ruling class has been corrupted by privilege. There's too much money in politics; there's too much of a cult of access; the tropes go on and on. Trump's not saying that. Instead, he's saying, the ruling class has been corrupted by foolishness. The problem isn't that "the politicians" have vanished behind the velvet rope. It's that they've vanished up their own rear ends. Obsessed with themselves, they have forgotten who they are. They have lost their way — and ours.

If Bush thinks he can win in 2016, he is COUNTING on America forgetting who he is ("Wah wah, I'm tired of that meanie Trump making fun of my family!" Well don't they deserve it, Jeb?). And that is not a very sound strategy. But hey, strategy is not exactly the Bushes' forte.
Yeah the blame can't fall solely on Bush's shoulders; his cabinet/appointees was mostly comprised of Siths and/or imbeciles like Cheney, Rummy, Ridge, Condi (a smart academic but imbecile leader), etc. And remember that Bush wanted that unqualified quack Harriet Miers to be on the SCOTUS? That shows his judgment - everyone from TX is A-OK!

Maybe you saw this interview of FNC's Megyn Kelly tearing into Cheney on his record as VP, and why should anyone listen to him now when he was so wrong so often while in office? I think FNC/Ailes has also reflected the GOP schism we've been discussing - on one hand they are part of the establishment, but on the business side, they need to embrace the TP/Trump sentiment that the old-GOP is the problem. FNC is hilarious because a lot of their programming insinuates that the MSM is the problem, yet they are also representatives of the MSM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-MeX4CbgGo
I'm curious to know where you got that impression, since it's at odds with what I'd thought and what I believe is the conventional wisdom (i.e., that Bush has been, until the past week, primarily focused on attacking Rubio). There's a link in the 538 piece you liked which shows Right to Rise spending about half again as much on attack ads against Rubio as against Trump (and about as much on attacking Kasich as on attacking Trump). If you have a very strong stomach, you can watch the ads for yourself at the Political TV Ad Archive. The recent ones are very anti-Trump, now that Bush has decided that he needs to take Trump seriously, but, if you look at the ads that Right to Rise was running in the run up to Iowa and New Hampshire, you could be forgiven for thinking that Marco Rubio was the Republican front-runner.

In general, I'd say that a big part of the stamina shown by the Trump phenomenon is the fact that the non-Trump candidates have been individually rational but collectively irrational in attacking him. I think that they're each averse to doing the dirty work (and suffering the attendant backlash) and are still hoping to attract the largest share of the current Trump supporters once Donald drops out. (This is obviously Cruz's strategy; note little ill he's said of Trump throughout, even as Trump actually started to attack him; he sees each Trump voter as a potential Cruz voter and is doing everything in his power to keep from alienating them.)

This is, of course, one of the things that can happen in a very crowded field and its why this sort of contest is very unpredictable. In its own amusing and ironic way, it's a market failure, as each candidate tries to free-ride on the attack ads that they hope the other guy's Super PAC is going to take out on Trump. (As a side note, I'd be curious to see what new regulations the RNC tries to impose on the nomination process in 2020, to correct the perceived failures of 2016. The free market may be good enough for me to buy my health insurance and my ground beef in, but it's clearly not good enough for choosing a GOP presidential nominee.)
I'm curious to know where you got that impression, since it's at odds with what I'd thought and what I believe is the conventional wisdom (i.e., that Bush has been, until the past week, primarily focused on attacking Rubio). There's a link in the 538 piece you liked which shows Right to Rise spending about half again as much on attack ads against Rubio as against Trump (and about as much on attacking Kasich as on attacking Trump). If you have a very strong stomach, you can watch the ads for yourself at the Political TV Ad Archive. The recent ones are very anti-Trump, now that Bush has decided that he needs to take Trump seriously, but, if you look at the ads that Right to Rise was running in the run up to Iowa and New Hampshire, you could be forgiven for thinking that Marco Rubio was the Republican front-runner.

In general, I'd say that a big part of the stamina shown by the Trump phenomenon is the fact that the non-Trump candidates have been individually rational but collectively irrational in attacking him. I think that they're each averse to doing the dirty work (and suffering the attendant backlash) and are still hoping to attract the largest share of the current Trump supporters once Donald drops out. (This is obviously Cruz's strategy; note little ill he's said of Trump throughout, even as Trump actually started to attack him; he sees each Trump voter as a potential Cruz voter and is doing everything in his power to keep from alienating them.)

This is, of course, one of the things that can happen in a very crowded field and its why this sort of contest is very unpredictable. In its own amusing and ironic way, it's a market failure, as each candidate tries to free-ride on the attack ads that they hope the other guy's Super PAC is going to take out on Trump. (As a side note, I'd be curious to see what new regulations the RNC tries to impose on the nomination process in 2020, to correct the perceived failures of 2016. The free market may be good enough for me to buy my health insurance and my ground beef in, but it's clearly not good enough for choosing a GOP presidential nominee.)
Yeah it's also ironic that the democratic systems we established in Iraq and Afghanistan are a lot more purely democratic than ours, and the legislatures in those nations have diversity requirements so they get a higher % of women/minorities than the US Congress (there are pros and cons to quotas of course). Yes, it's easier to create a "fair/pure" system when you build it from scratch and don't have 200 years of biases/inertia/baggage, and by no means are Iraq and Afghanistan's gov'ts the envy of the world, but just to make a point. :)

I am not sure if it's more or less comforting that Congressmen make up the majority of superdelegates. They are assumed to be more informed re: political-gov't affairs, but they already wield disproportionate power as legislators - doesn't that violate the separation of powers that they can affect who sits in the exec. branch too?
Yeah it's also ironic that the democratic systems we established in Iraq and Afghanistan are a lot more purely democratic than ours, and the legislatures in those nations have diversity requirements so they get a higher % of women/minorities than the US Congress (there are pros and cons to quotas of course). Yes, it's easier to create a "fair/pure" system when you build it from scratch and don't have 200 years of biases/inertia/baggage, and by no means are Iraq and Afghanistan's gov'ts the envy of the world, but just to make a point. :)

I am not sure if it's more or less comforting that Congressmen make up the majority of superdelegates. They are assumed to be more informed re: political-gov't affairs, but they already wield disproportionate power as legislators - doesn't that violate the separation of powers that they can affect who sits in the exec. branch too?
Don't get me wrong, Cruz scares me, too. But he scares me in the he'd-be-a-terrible-president way, whereas Trump scares me in the him-being-president-would-have-terrible-effects-for-the-entire-political-system way.

In other words, we could be rid of Cruz in 4 to 8 years; hopefully, he wouldn't have done much more permanent damage in that time than George W. Bush did. If Trump wins, though, I feel like that, ipso facto, would be permanently damaging, almost irrespective of what he did as president.
While I love the fact that we're getting articles about delegate allocation rules and imagining a race that continues until the last primary is over, I can't help but feel like Cillizza is assuming his hypothesis and then declaring it true. I agree that, if Donald Trump wins every state where he is currently leading in the polls and gets 30% of all the proportionally allocated delegates, then he will win the nomination. But whether he's able to do that is precisely the question; dressing it up with discussion about the delegate allocation rules doesn't change the fact that the article is essentially saying that, if circumstances don't change, they'll remain the same.
Yeah I suppose Cruz is a known quantity (basically W but smarter and meaner, and at least Congress generally hates him so they wouldn't let him steamroll his agenda).

But with Trump, lord knows WTF will happen to US culture and politics overall, as Eric said. I think already he's kicked off huge alarms within the media and GOP, and they are likely reconsidering their standard modes of operation. The GOP establishment partly created the current angry conservative anti-gov't ultra-nationalist Tea Party movement (like an attack dog to do its bidding that broke free of its leash), so now their choice is either to (a) join/embrace/encourage them or (b) set up campaign rules/safeguards to avoid a repeat of 2016 (similar to the Dems' superdelegates I guess?). Clearly (b) is not very democratic, but it's preferable to (a) at the moment.

However, do we know what % of America truly support Trump/Cruz/Tea Party agenda? They only have like ~40 Reps and ~4 Senators, right? That's why they are extremists, they have limited numbers. Maybe 20% of voters at best? But then how many moderate GOPs or independents would side with them vs. Hillary?
One man's opportunist is another man's demagogue.

That said, my feeling is that the classic win-the-nomination-at-the-extremes-then-move-to-the-center formula is going to get less and less useful as more and more pervasive and universally available media combines with the modern obsession with authenticity to prevent candidates from making such a move. It's already much harder than it used to be to tell every group of voters exactly what they want to hear, because what you say to any one of them has a high likelihood of making it to all of them (e.g., Mitt Romney and the 47%).

Obama did a reasonably successful job of threading this needle in 2008, emphasizing his opposition to the Iraq War in the primaries, then leaning toward the center against McCain; but he was an unusually disciplined candidate, who kept his options for the general election open even in the difficult slog of the 2008 campaign for the nomination. To say that Trump is not as disciplined as Obama seems inadequate to the magnitude of the difference.

But then again, I've been making a habit of underestimating Trump's appeal ever since August. This may just be the latest repetition of that same refrain.
I agree that that's the consensus, but, at this point, we need to at least give a hearing to x's previously articulated hypothesis that Trump may have succeeded (perhaps inadvertently) in bringing a new and ugly element into the GOP coalition.

Technically, I suppose that it's an element which had already existed, but he's proved capable of tapping it for many more votes than had previously been thought possible and has really brought it to the forefront. It may even turn out that this group (whom I'm thinking of as the alienated and embittered, but who might well think of themselves in less pejorative terms) takes over the dominant role in the GOP coalition, previously the province of the Chamber of Commerce/libertarian light/establishment wing of the party, which occasionally shared the reins with the social conservative/evangelical wing. We already saw a foretaste of this with the Tea Party, but the Tea Party never actually managed to take over the party or set the agenda in anything other than amped up distaste for Obama and all his works.

This (i.e., Trump voters setting the GOP agenda) is my nightmare, in a nutshell, and it's why I see Trump as potentially worse than Cruz. Fully realized, it could lead the GOP to become a slightly less well behaved version of the French Front National, which I'd see as a disaster.

I still think that the above is a very low likelihood event, but I'm thinking about it now, having dismissed it out of hand four months ago.
maybe Trump is a flu that the US just has to get out of our system; we learn our lesson and then we get immunity for a while. Nationalism/fundamentalism is a chronic issue that revisits societies now and then due to various factors. What's strange to me is that I can understand why extremists rise in shattered economies like Greece, but things are going pretty well in the US now (based on many macro indicators - though obviously we still have employment/affordability/econ. security issues in many places). Is it all media hype or the irrational frustration that some white men feel that they are "losing America"? When the zealots harm the economy, that is usually when the mainstream kicks them out. At least Trump doesn't hear the word of god in his ear, unlike Cruz. Already the Chamber-of-Commerce type GOP has declared war on the TP/Trump/Cruz, but I wonder if they would back a Dem over the TP (Lindsey Graham mentioned this).

Haha we sure have put all our hopes with that bumbling man-child Rubio (he kinda reminds me of Quayle, and W)!
It's funny how likability/trustworthiness is such an important decision factor for many folks. As a lifelong "progressive", I might agree with half of Clinton's platform or more, but I just can't stand her personally (for reasons that I can only partially articulate). I don't think this is sexism (I love Warren, Gillebrand, Waters, etc.), but it's just her, and her manner of politicking. Maybe it's also cuz Hillary is rather hawkish, like Feinstein who I also dislike. But sure, I'll vote for her over any of the GOP, unless she does something really dirty to sink Sanders.

You're likable enough, Hillary. https://youtu.be/Mx_Uk_VffcY?t=37

Well, Hillary was inevitable in 2008 also, so nothing is for sure. I think her campaign realizes that this time though, and the close calls with Sanders in IA and NV should be further evidence to not get complacent.
To be very narrow-mindedly specific, that's net favorability, meaning that Germans have a slightly more positive than negative view of the US. (And meaning that the average German's view of the United States is a bit more favorable than the average view expressed on this thread.) The source for Tim's data, BTW, is the research that that Pew does on international attitudes, and I think it's generally thought to be the best source for how the US is perceived by the outside world. They've got a number of other interesting questions, too.

For his part, Taibbi is typically hysterical and hyperbolic, but I don't find his contempt all that interesting or instructive. It beggars belief that he actually thinks that the US political class (a group which has pretty cheerfully welcomed Jesse Ventura, Sonny Bono, and Barack Obama) is somehow the "most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised". If he really thinks that, he needs to get out of the house and visit a real oligarchy.

On the other hand, once I got about two thirds of the way through the article, he started talking about something that I did find interesting (not least because it agrees with what I already think and is therefore, ipso facto, very well thought out and persuasive. The choice quote from the article, from my perspective, is

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.

This observation (which I think aligns neatly with my favorite concept of dirigibility as an essential element of democratic government) and the surrounding paragraphs hit the nail precisely on the head about the degree to which the post-Nixon Republican Party has relied on the not at all obvious coalition between business elites (the Chamber of Commerce wing) and frustrated and anxiety-filled White Middle America, in both their religious and nativist flavors (these are the Reagan Democrats that Ted Cruz says he'll win away from Hillary Clinton, as if they hadn't been voting Republican for a generation). In a lot of ways, this is an alliance between the people who are scared by the modern world (and especially the globalized, post-rich world manual labor economy) and some of the people who are most conspicuously profiting from it. That coalition has profited the Republicans well over the past 40 years, but has left them talking out of both sides of their collective mouth on a whole host of issues. This seems like something that can't go on forever and we may be witnessing one of the threads unravel, with Trump gleefully tugging on the thread.
Yeah exactly! What frustrates me about the rank-and-file GOP is that the things that bother them are partly/mostly driven by the capitalistic conservative elites of their own party:
- Globalization (which can be/is a net good, but not when it concentrates the benefits to a select few)
- Increasing economic pressures on the middle class
- An unstable world with many ambiguous security threats
And then the propagandists shift the blame to the War on Christmas, War on Cops, War on X, global-warming-is-a-hoax, abortion, and other crap so the rank-and-file blame liberals instead. I appreciate that Trump (and Paul) were at least calling out this hypocrisy re: war on drugs, Iraq, and wealth inequality - even if they wouldn't really do much about it as presidents (well maybe Paul would try to reduce our military footprint and reform the justice system and drug laws).

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