I just watched Mitt Romney’s speech in which he lacerated Donald Trump. A few quick thoughts:
1. Romney has many admirable qualities, but he’s the worst possible leader of an anti-Trump movement. He’s the very symbol of what Trump supporters despise.
2. The quick consensus on Twitter seems to be that Romney made a mistake by not apologizing for the endorsement he received from Trump in 2012. It wouldn’t have been a big deal. At that time, Trump wasn’t spouting the hateful nonsense that he is today (or at least not as much of it). So why not just say it?
3. Is Romney a candidate? He says no, but of course he is. He essentially called for a brokered convention. If there’s a Draft Romney movement, do you really think he’d walk away? If there’s anything we’ve learned about Mitt over the past dozen years, it’s that he desperately wants to be president.
Jack Shafer of Politico puts into words what I’ve been inchoately thinking: Though the media surely have not covered themselves in glory by showering so much attention upon the candidacy of racist demagogue Donald Trump, it’s really not their fault that he’s leading the Republican field. Taking note of the epic negative coverage Trump has received, Shafer concludes:
If you were a conventional media observer, you might say that the Trump candidacy demonstrates not the power of the press, but—overwhelmingly, and to our chagrin—its relative powerlessness. But maybe that’s just what we want you to think.
Trump is a creation of the media, of course—but not of the news media. As Shafer observes, he’s been a fixture in the entertainment media for years on the strength of The Apprentice and his bestselling books.
I’d dial Shafer’s take back a bit. I do think the media are to blame for giving Trump way too many column inches (look it up, kids) and too much air time at the expense of the other candidates, and I don’t think the coverage has been as tough as it should have been until recently. But neither do I think the media had it within their power to derail the Trump Express.
Super Tuesday was newsworthy not so much because of what happened, but because it set the stage for what may prove to be cataclysmic events in the weeks and months ahead—especially on the Republican side.
To no one’s surprise, racist demagogue Donald Trump took another huge step toward becoming the Republican nominee, raising serious questions about the future of the party. Worcester’s own Charles P. Pierce, who writes a popular political blog for Esquire, compares the situation to the break-up of the Whig Party in the 1850s. In the Financial Times, Martin Wolf is even gloomier in a column headlined “Donald Trump embodies how great republics meet their end.”
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton hit her marks with ease. Bernie Sanders will soldier on, but as a left-wing protest candidate angling for a nice speaking slot at the party’s national convention rather than as someone who is actually running for president.
What follows is a round-up of commentary that will help you make sense of what comes next.
• The Republican crisis. Let’s start with a week-old piece whose relevance has only increased. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, fears that Trump would mount an independent candidacy if he didn’t get his way have been turned on their head. Now it’s conservative Republicans who may ask one of their own to run as an independent this fall against major-party candidates Clinton and Trump.
Such a candidate would likely come not from the Republicans’ minuscule moderate wing but from the right, the better to challenge Trump’s heterodox (and ever-shifting) views on Social Security, health care, and abortion rights. Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has said that he won’t support for Trump and might support an independent conservative.
So here’s an idea: Why not South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley? She’s certainly conservative enough, coming to prominence several years ago on the strength of her Tea Party support. She’s non-white and struck just the right tone on the Confederate flag following the Charleston shootings last year. In other words, she’s an ideal alternative to Trump, who took a disturbingly long time to disavow the support of Ku Klux Klan figure David Duke.
•Sanders faces reality. In the span of just a few weeks, Hillary Clinton has lurched from inevitable to teetering on the brink and then back to inevitable again—a media-driven phenomenon that we talked about on WGBH-TV’s Beat the Press last week.
So what went wrong with the Bernie Sanders campaign? Washington Postcolumnist Dana Milbank took a dive into the numbers and found that, though voters are angry, the anger is mainly on the Republican side. Milbank writes:
Americans overall have a dim view of where the country is headed: 36 percent think we’re on the right track, and 60 percent say we’re headed in the wrong direction, in the January Washington Post-ABC News poll. But break that down further and you find that 89 percent of Republicans think we’re on the wrong track. With Democrats, it’s reversed: Only 34 percent say we’re heading the wrong way.
Given those findings, Clinton’s decision to go all-in with her embrace of President Obama makes a lot of sense.
• A massive media fail. In Politico, Hadas Gold pulls together multiple strands in trying to explain why the media got Trump so wrong by treating him until recently as a laughingstock with no chance of winning the nomination. (Mea culpa.)
The best quote is from New Yorker editor David Remnick, who tells Gold, “The fact that so many of us, all of us, were wrong in predicting anywhere near the extent of his success so far, may be partly due to the fact we didn’t want to believe those currents could be appealed to so well and so deeply and successfully.”
• Two cheers for democracy. At National Review, the venerable conservative journal that recently devoted an entire issue to anti-Trumpism, Kevin D. Williamson writes that the two major political parties both produced better nominees before the rise of the modern primary-and-caucus system:
In our modern political discourse, we hear a great deal of lamentation about deals made in “smoke-filled rooms,” but in fact that horse-trading led to some pretty good outcomes. Vicious demagogues such as Donald Trump and loopy fanatics such as Bernie Sanders were kept from the levers of power with a surprisingly high degree of success.
• Why Rubio keeps losing. Marco Rubio finally won something—the Minnesota caucuses. But the Florida senator, a Tea Party favorite embraced by the party establishment, has consistently underperformed. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who on Super Tuesday won his home state along with Oklahoma and Alaska, now appears to be a more viable challenger to Trump than Rubio does.
Why did Rubio never rise to the moment? There were the robotic talking points, of course, as well as his seeming lack of any sort of core as he veered wildly from sunny optimism to telling a thinly veiled joke about the size of Trump’s packageover the weekend.
In Slate, Isaac Chotiner opines about all these things and more—and reaches the conclusion that Rubio’s meltdown in the New Hampshire debate, in which he panicked under a withering assault from Chris Christie, may have done lasting harm, even though he seemed to have recovered. Chotiner writes that “it’s possible the initial conventional wisdom about his debate performance was correct,” although he adds that it’s “wishful thinking” to believe that Rubio would otherwise be the front-runner.
• Christie’s hostage video. Chris Christie’s uncomfortable appearance with Trump on Tuesday night following his endorsement provoked an outburst of mockery on Twitter. Typical was this tweet from Adam Riglian:
Christie is introducing Trump with the enthusiasm of a man who knows he's ruined his life.
Yes, I read all of the New York Times‘ two-parter on Hillary Clinton and Libya. Is it damaging to Clinton? It depends on your perspective regarding the use of force.
On the one hand, the reporting shows that Clinton pushed hard to get us involved despite President Obama’s misgivings, thus helping to create the current disastrous situation. On the other hand, you could argue that the disaster flows directly from Obama’s tentativeness—letting himself be dragged into a conflict he didn’t want and then refusing to do what was needed to ensure stability.
For all the outstanding work the Times has done, I suspect that this won’t move anyone’s needle. If you’re a supporter of Clinton’s muscular approach to foreign policy, you’ll think this vindicates her. If you’re more inclined toward Obama’s non-interventionism (as I am), you’ll wonder why the president didn’t say no right from the start.
It’s been fun. But with Donald Trump increasingly looking like he might actually win the Republican presidential nomination, there are signs that voters—and the media—are ready to get serious.
First, despite a narrower victory in the Nevada caucuses than anyone would have expected a few months ago, Hillary Clinton may be poised to cruise to the Democratic nomination and leave Bernie Sanders in her rear-view mirror.
According to polling analysis conducted by Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight site, Clinton is virtually certain to win South Carolina this Saturday, as well as all seven of the 10 Super Tuesday states that the site is tracking—including Massachusetts, where Sanders is thought by some pollsters to hold a slight edge. (Among the states Five Thirty Eight is ignoring: Sanders’s home state of Vermont, where he’s a lock.)
Maybe this simply reflects the Clinton campaign’s natural strengths. But it may also represent a calculation on the part of Democratic primary voters that Clinton is more likely to beat Trump than Sanders is.
Second, the Michael Bloomberg media boomlet may be coming to an end. According to Michael Crowley of Politico, Bloomberg and the people around him believed he might stand a chance of winning as an independent against a couple of outsiders like Sanders and Trump—but that he has no stomach for running against Clinton.
“If he runs with Hillary in the race he could wind up being the guy responsible for making Donald Trump president and he doesn’t like Trump at all—I don’t think he wants to go down in history as being the guy who elected Trump,” Crowley quoted an anonymous master of the universe as saying.
So where does that leave us? With a little more than eight months to go until the November election, what we see may be what we get: a Democratic nominee whose strengths and weaknesses have been on public display for the past quarter-century versus a Republican nominee who spews hate toward Latinos and Muslims, advocates torture, and calls for the murder of terrorists’ families.
For Clinton, the risks in the months ahead are considerable, even if her nomination seems all but assured. She’s an effective fighter when cornered. But when events are moving her way, she has a tendency to let her foot off the gas and cruise, with predictably disastrous results.
It happened in 2008, when she found her voice and transformed herself into an effective presidential candidate only after Barack Obama had taken what proved to be an insurmountable lead.
It happened again last fall, when her triumphant congressional testimony on Benghazi and a strong performance in the first Democratic debate seemed to ensure an easy ride for her. Instead, she reverted to her default setting—bland, overly cautious—and let Sanders become the second biggest story of the campaign after Trump.
Why does this keep happening? My guess is that Hillary, unlike Bill, doesn’t particularly care for politics and prefers to draw into herself except when she’s facing an existential threat.
Barring something completely unforeseen (and I would never rule out such a thing), Sanders will be little more than an irritant moving forward. As that perspicacious political observer Richard Nixon put it the other day, “Sanders is no longer a wolf at Mrs. Clinton’s door. At worst he’s a dog who won’t shut up.”
But Clinton is also likely to look a lot more formidable in the afterglow of Super Tuesday next week than she is in the fall, even if Trump is her opponent. Among other things, her private email server—which, to my mind, she has never adequately explained—is liable to keep coming up as an issue. Trump will go after the Clintons with everything he’s got, something he gave us a taste of recently when he trotted out victims of Bill’s sexual harassment.
In a Washington Post opinion piece, Harvard’s Danielle Allen came very close to comparing Trump to Hitler (personally, I think Berlusconi is a more apt analogy) and urged Republicans to stop Trump before Clinton is the only person left standing in his way. Allen wrote:
Republicans, you cannot count on the Democrats to stop Trump. I believe that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and I intend to vote for her, but it is also the case that she is a candidate with significant weaknesses, as your party knows quite well. The result of a head-to-head contest between Clinton and Trump would be unpredictable.
Whether Clinton prevails over Trump will depend at least in part on the press doing its job. The false equivalence of trying to cover the campaign from the exact midpoint between Clinton’s moderate liberalism and Trump’s dark rantings is not what our democracy needs.
The media, which has done so much to enable Trump’s rise (as that noted critic Newt Gingrich pointed out Monday), must hold him accountable for his ugly anti-American rhetoric, a business record rooted in “good old-fashioned bullying,” and his utter lack of relevant experience to be president.
If nothing else, it’s been an interesting campaign. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
A little over a month ago I predicted that Jeb Bush would win the Republican nomination. I wasn’t joking, but I knew my prediction had little chance of coming true. I figured that (1) it should come true, given Bush’s status as the most plausible adult in the Republican field and (2) if he somehow pulled it off, I’d look like a genius.
Well, so much for that. Looking forward, it requires no predictive powers to observe that the nominee will be Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio—in other words, a hate-mongering fascist or a hard-right Tea Party favorite. (Frank Bruni usefully reminds us that Rubio’s views are no more mainstream than those of his Canadian colleague).
Washington Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin lost it during Trump’s victory speech:
This is an embarrassment to the party and the country. He shouts about the wall and winning. Here comes President Hillary
— Jen "Denial Dooms Democracy " Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) February 21, 2016
Later she recovered and started tweeting optimistically about Rubio. Well, we’ll see, won’t we?
Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger at the Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards in 2013. Photo (cc) by the Atlantic Council.
Henry Kissinger is back in the news thanks to Bernie Sanders, who went after Hillary Clinton at Thursday night’s debate for taking Kissinger’s advice. “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Sanders said, to which Clinton replied: “I listen to a wide variety of voices that have expertise in various areas.” (I am not doing the full exchange justice. Click here for the debate transcript and search for “Kissinger.”)
In following the debate on Twitter, I was surprised at the extent to which people seemed bemused that Sanders would bring up someone who hasn’t served in public office for 40 years. Yet Sanders’s critique certainly struck me as relevant. To this day, many observers refer to Kissinger as a war criminal for his actions as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. And, frankly, the case against him is strong, particularly with regard to the Nixon administration’s secret war in Cambodia and its role in the overthrow and assassination of Chile’s elected socialist president, Salvador Allende.
In 2001 the late journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote a 40,000-word, two-part article for Harper’s that was later published as a book called The Trial of Henry Kissinger. I wrote about Hitchens’s polemic for The Boston Phoenix, summarizing Hitchens’s evidence in some detail and comparing it to what other Kissinger biographers had found. My conclusion: a bit simplistic but compelling nevertheless.
So how closely associated is Hillary Clinton with Henry Kissinger? Certainly there’s an element of guilt-by-association in Sanders’s accusation, which is his M.O. Count me as among those who are tired of Sanders’s constant insinuations that anyone who takes campaign contributions from Wall Street is by definition corrupt.
Still, this New York Times piece by Amy Chozick makes clear that Clinton didn’t just accidentally bump into Kissinger one night at Zumba class. Chozick points out that when Clinton reviewed Kissinger’s book World Order for The Washington Post, Clinton wrote: “Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” Clinton continued: “He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.”
I don’t think we have to worry that Clinton will be giving the 92-year-old Kissinger an office at the White House if she is elected president. Still, Sanders has identified not just a political problem for Clinton but a substantive one. She needs to address it.
It’s a little after 11 p.m. With the all-important question of whether Jeb Bush will finish third or fourth in New Hampshire still unanswered, allow me to anticipate two names we’re going to be hearing in the days ahead: Michael Bloomberg. And Joe Biden.
In fact, it’s already started. And the results of the first-in-the-nation primary guarantee that it’s only going to intensify.
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, is the more plausible of the two names given that he’s letting it be known he’s considering an independent run. The New Hampshire results make it more likely, not less, that he’ll keep gearing up for a possible campaign.
Consider what the Democrats did to themselves. Everyone was expecting Bernie Sanders to beat Hillary Clinton. But he handed her such an unexpectedly crushing defeat that she can’t help but emerge as a damaged candidate. She’s still likely to win the nomination as the campaign moves on to states with substantial African-American populations. But she’s looking more vulnerable than ever in November, provided the Republicans manage to choose a nominee who is recognizably of the human species.
Oops. Donald Trump also won big tonight. Although he fell considerably short of a majority, he got about 35 percent of the vote, far ahead of second-place finisher John Kasich. The Iowa winner, Ted Cruz, an extremist much loathed within his own party, was running third, just ahead of Bush. Marco Rubio, who seemed to be emerging as a contender until his circuit board malfunctioned at last Saturday’s debate, faded to fifth.
So the Democrats are stuck with a diminished Hillary Clinton or, less likely, a 74-year-old left-winger who—if conventional wisdom means anything at all anymore—probably could not win a general election. And Trump, detested by a majority of the public, may be on a glide path to the Republican nomination.
Of course, the conventional wisdom also holds that an independent can’t be elected president. But if the Democrats and the Republicans both nominate candidates who are unacceptable to the broad middle of the electorate that decides elections (and yes, I realize that the broad middle is a lot smaller than it used to be), then surely there is an opening for someone like Bloomberg, a moderate with a reputation for competence. Yes, he’s dour, uncharismatic, and has a well-deserved reputation for nanny-statism. But it’s precisely those non-scary qualities that could make him a viable alternative.
And the media are stoking a Bloomberg run. The veteran media critic Jack Shafer wrote for Politico earlier today that “as Bloomberg works his way through the editorial food chain and breaks through the primary election news, I’m certain reporters will be setting themselves on fire to convince their editors to assign them to Bloomberg.”
Count me as someone who thinks Bloomberg might actually be able to defeat Sanders and Trump, if that’s what it comes to.
Which brings me to a Biden candidacy, a far less likely possibility. Unlike Bloomberg, Biden has declared pretty definitively that he wouldn’t enter the race. It’s also too late logistically for him to enter the Democratic primaries.
But Biden would make some theoretical sense if the race between Clinton and Sanders ends in a muddle, or if the email controversy in which Clinton is embroiled leads to legal trouble. In either case, so this line of thinking goes, the Democratic National Convention might turn to a respected non-candidate like Biden as the nominee.
Is this going to happen? Almost certainly not. A brokered convention is a quadrennial fantasy, but it is almost impossible under the modern primary system. Still, if you search Google News for “Biden 2016,” you’ll find that plenty of people are giving the idea some thought.
For my purposes, what matters isn’t what is going to happen. Rather, it’s what you’ll be hearing from the media as the two major parties, suffering from self-inflicted wounds, limp ahead. New Hampshire not only didn’t settle anything. It left us with a race that won’t be settled for some weeks to come.
I come today not to bury Marco Rubio, but to take pulse of the media landscape to determine whether the pundits are going to bury him. And the answer is yes. Yes they are.
The establishment choice for the Republican nomination, bolstered by a better-than-expected performance in the Iowa caucuses last Monday, ran into a wrecking ball named Chris Christie at Saturday night’s presidential debate. Judging from the media reaction, Rubio’s status as a serious candidate may effectively be over.
It started even before the debate ended, when the venerable journalist James Fallows of The Atlantictook to Twitter and called Rubio’s meltdown the “most self-destructive debate performance since Quayle ’88 and Stockdale ’92.”
It continued on CNN, where conservative commentator Matt Lewis called Chris Christie’s devastatingly effective takedown of Rubio “a murder-suicide.”
And it carried over to Talking Points Memo, with liberal analyst Josh Marshall opining that Rubio’s “flailing will be a key subject of discussion for the next two days. And that’s a terrible way to close. It’s hard to overcome an echo chamber effect in a febrile news environment over 48 hours.”
In case you missed it (and if you had something better to do on a Saturday night, I salute you), Christie went into full New Jersey bully mode and mocked Rubio’s inexperience, sneering that Rubio was unable to speak in anything other than “a memorized 25-second speech.”
Rubio got flustered, challenged Christie to little effect—and then, incredibly, came back with one of his memorized lines not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. To wit: “This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
The lead debate stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and, I’m sure, numerous other papers this morning referred prominently to Rubio’s self-destruction. Worse, the Florida senator became a viral sensation—and not in a good way.
A parody Twitter account, @RubioGlitch, made its debut, with each tweet ending, “He knows exactly what he’s doing.” On both sides of the Atlantic, commentators compared Rubio’s performance to a famous scene from The Stepford Wives. “Like Paula Prentiss, he got stuck in malfunction mode,” wrote my Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a presidential debate historian, at The Huffington Post.Added Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian: “It looked like that sequence from the 1970s thriller The Stepford Wives, when a software glitch reveals that a human-like character is in fact a robot.”
Several commentators have pointed out that the Rubio-Christie exchange came early, and that Rubio regained his composure after that. But ABC inflicted three hours of debate-related TV on us (the actual debate was closer to two and a half hours), and I’ve got to believe that the first hour drew by far the most viewers. Besides, whatever lasting impressions people form will come from after-the-fact media coverage.
The one note of caution I could find was from Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight, who wrote that, bad as Rubio looked, voters may not agree with the pundits:
Political reporters are in the “fog of war” phase of the campaign where our reactions aren’t necessarily good matches for those of voters at home. Some of the reason we reporters thought Rubio’s answer was so awful is because it confirmed some of our gossip about Rubio, namely that he tends to give pat, repetitive answers. But we tend to be more sensitive about that stuff, because we watch every debate from start to finish, and then we see lots of the candidates’ stump speeches and town halls on top of it. There’s a fine line between a candidate who seems stilted and repetitive and one who seems “on message” instead.
Rubio was by far the biggest story coming out of Saturday’s debate, but there were other stories as well. John Kasich turned in a fine performance, and for once post-debate commentary was swinging his way. He was ebullient during a CNN interview in the spin room. (Of course, he’s always ebullient.)
As conservative as Kasich is, the Republican Party has moved so far to the right that he is regularly dismissed as a RINO (a Republican in Name Only). But Kasich may be perfectly positioned to do well in New Hampshire, as independents who are turned off by Hillary Clinton and wary of Bernie Sanders may choose a Republican ballot instead. It’s hard to see Kasich doing well after New Hampshire, but Tuesday could be a good day for him.
I’ve made it to the 750th word of this piece without mentioning Donald Trump, the frontrunner. I thought he got away unscathed. Yes, I’m appalled at his full-throated endorsement of torture (“I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and I’m even more appalled that no one seemed to care. But the other candidates, other than Jeb Bush, didn’t challenge him all that much.
And when Bush went after Trump on eminent domain, Bush won on substance but Trump won on style, attacking the “donors and special interests” he claimed had packed the debate hall and were booing him. “The move was classic pro-wrestling—like Vince McMahon baiting the crowd,” said Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard. “And it was so crazy that it kind of worked.”
As for Ted Cruz, he may have won Iowa, but it seems unlikely that he’ll do as well with New Hampshire voters, who have not been kind to evangelical candidates in the past. In response to the dirty tricks his campaign engaged in to sway Ben Carson’s supporters in Iowa, Cruz has settled on a characteristically cynical tactic: apologize for his campaign’s claims that Carson was dropping out of the race while claiming that they really believed it to be true. Cruz had to misrepresent CNN’s reporting in order to pull it off, but whatever.
The downfall of Marco Rubio is what we’ll be talking about this week. A candidate can survive many things, but mockery is not one of them. The next few days are going to be telling, but I really think it may be over for him. Which means that what’s left of the Republican establishment is going to have to come up with another alternative lest it get stuck with Trump or Cruz.
I recently predicted that Bush would win the nomination based on nothing other than the process of elimination. On Saturday, Rubio may have gotten himself eliminated.
