Mississippi and Michigan Primary Reflections

Yesterday's primary votes did nothing to slow down the Donald Trump juggernaut, but did seem to make it clear that Marco Rubio is to the point where exiting the race makes sense.  Another loss next week in Florida will seal his political coffin.   Frighteningly, that would leave the very scary Ted Cruz as Trump's leading opponent.  On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders' slim victory in Michigan will be enough to keep him in the race although most do no see him winning the Democrat nomination - or able to win in November were he to get the nomination.  A piece in the New York Times summarizes the status of both races.  Here are highlights:

The story is getting familiar: Donald J. Trump won the biggest contests of the night, as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas captured the most conservative state up for grabs. Hillary Clinton kept a clear upper hand in the Democratic race, but Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont proved he would not be driven away anytime soon.

Tuesday’s elections could have brought new clarity to the presidential primaries. Instead, they only seemed to confirm that both parties would probably settle their nominations by battling for delegates well into the spring.

Mr. Trump racked up several on Tuesday.   His successes in Hawaii, Michigan and Mississippi dealt a painful psychological blow to Republicans who had convinced themselves that his campaign was losing steam.   But Mr. Trump won, and he won big, with no obvious cracks in his support from disaffected, lower-income whites.

If Mrs. Clinton had crushed Mr. Sanders in Michigan, their contest might have been over in all but name. But his narrow win there ensures the fight will go on.

Yet in the bigger picture, the basic battle lines of the Democratic race have barely moved in weeks. In Michigan, Mr. Sanders dominated with young voters, independents and more affluent white liberals — his core constituencies all along.

The outcome in Michigan showed how difficult it could be for Mrs. Clinton to knock Mr. Sanders cleanly out of the race, but Mr. Sanders has still not attracted the kind of coalition that would make him a genuine threat to win the nomination.

It was a miserable, even disastrous night for Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. He finished fourth in Michigan and Mississippi, languishing in single digits and collecting no delegates from those states. He must fight for survival in his home state next week, where even an upset win might not rescue his campaign.

Mr. Rubio’s core problem is that he has claimed no distinctive space in the race. Exit polls showed that Mr. Cruz and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio have seized big pieces of the party’s right and left wings. Mr. Rubio has claimed no particular constituency at all.

While Mrs. Clinton won Democrats by 16 points, Mr. Sanders won independents, who made up less than a third of the electorate, by 42 points, according to exit polls.

There is nothing illicit about winning primaries with support from independents. But the collection of states that allow crossover voting have become a frustrating obstacle to Mrs. Clinton as she works to lock down the Democratic nomination, and a potentially crippling problem for Mr. Cruz as he tries to build a winning coalition against Mr. Trump.

The Koch Brothers' Top Operative Just Went to Work for Marco Rubio

While Marco Rubio continues to try to be all things to all the lunatic factions in the GOP base (some might say shamelessly prostitute himself to them), it increasingly appears that he is striving to sell his soul to the vulture capitalist faction of the Republican Party best represented by the Koch brothers - the very element in the GOP which has pushed failed GOP policies that have harmed the middle class.  As Mother Jones reports, Rubio just hired the top political operative of the Koch brothers.  As I have noted before, I don't like Rubio and view him as a lying empty suit.  Having just watched the Democrat town hall on CNN in South Carolina, I can't help but think that Hillary would eat Marcobit alive in a debate.  Here are highlights from Mother Jones:

Did Marco Rubio just pick up the biggest endorsement of all? Despite pledging nearly $900 million from their network of donors to fight the Democrats in the 2016 election, Charles and David Koch have been largely missing in action during the primary battle. But Politico is reporting today that their top political operative, Marc Short, is joining Rubio's campaign as a senior adviser.

It's not an actual endorsement by the Kochs, but nabbing Short is a big deal for Rubio. For the past few years, Short has served as the president of Freedom Partners, the nerve center of the Kochs' sprawling political operation. Freedom Partners has a lot of strengths, but the two biggest are arguably money and data. The group is organized as a membership-based organization, with Koch network donors kicking in a minimum of $100,000 per year—and many contributing much more than that. The group raised and spent at least $250 million during the 2012 election and almost $130 million in 2014. As the man at the forefront of the Kochs' vast political fundraising operation, Short may have the best Rolodex of donors in the world.

The second area where Freedom Partners has excelled is data—one of Short's specialties. Freedom Partners is an investor in i360 LLC, a sophisticated databank of voter information that has been augmented with personal information gathered by campaigns and commercial groups.

Short is a longtime political operative who got his start working for Colonel Oliver North's failed congressional campaign in 1994. He went on to a series of high-level staff jobs working for GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including serving as chief of staff for the House's Republican Conference. As the head of Freedom Partners since 2013, he surely has a good grasp on the money and the data. It remains to be seen whether Short's move to the Rubio campaign is a sign that the Kochs and their donors are lining up behind the Florida senator. But nonetheless this is very good news for Rubio.

Marco Rubio Self-Destructs

If Republicans come to their senses - admittedly a very big if - they ought to latch onto John Kasich, the lone truly semi-sane occupant of the GOP clown car.  Perhaps with his second place showing in New Hampshire and the hopeful demise of some of the lower placing GOP candidates Kasich can gather strength and move to challenge the know nothing lunacy of Donald Trump whose victory speech was little more than a string of sound bites bordering on gibberish.  The best news out of New Hampshire is the hopefully permanent self-destruction of Marco Rubio and less than top showing by the very scary Ted Cruz.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Rubio's welcomed collapse.  Here are excerpts:

Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio knows what he’s doing.

A week ago, the youthful senator from Florida was in great shape. His surprisingly strong finish in the Iowa caucuses left him with a clear chance to consolidate mainstream Republican support — and a path to the GOP presidential nomination.

But in just a few minutes Saturday night, Rubio undid everything he had worked for during the past year — really, the past five years. His singularly disastrous debate performance, in which he repeated irrelevant, canned phrases, caused would-be supporters to flee for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and other more stable candidates.

Typically, Iowa and New Hampshire serve as proving grounds for the candidates. Voters there scrutinize the contenders, who rise and fall in the polls as various candidates gain and lose the status of front-runner. But Trump’s celebrity short-circuited the process. With Trump dominating the coverage and the polls, Iowa and New Hampshire failed to fulfill their traditional vetting roles. 

Rubio was one who never got the scrutiny. And when he emerged, blinking, into the spotlight after Iowa, voters found an empty suit. Watching him campaign last week, I wrote: “Rubio’s strong Iowa finish has brought new attention — and overcapacity crowds — in New Hampshire. But the would-be supporters are greeted by a robot.”

He had seemed to be a good debater — but with 10 or more candidates crowding the stage in early debates, he didn’t have to go far beyond canned lines. On Saturday, exposed to withering attacks from rival Chris Christie, a former prosecutor, Rubio suffered what was perhaps the most memorable lapse at the presidential level since Edmund Muskie appeared to weep in the New Hampshire snow in 1972.

The reviews were savage, and then, on Monday night, RubioBot malfunctioned again.

Exit polls left little doubt that Rubio’s glitches ruined his prospects in New Hampshire. Two-thirds said the debates were important, and of the nearly half of GOP voters who made choices in the last few days, Kasich did far better than Rubio.

The results also left Republicans, once again, without a consensus alternative to Trump — and with dwindling hope of finding one. Had Rubio received scrutiny earlier, voters might have been able to find a candidate who didn’t wilt in the spotlight. But Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t serve their functions this time. Trump got in the way.

The GOP - the Time Loop Party

If one watches and listens to the Republican presidential candidates, you can close your eyes and in many respects what you hear being said bears little difference from what one heard 36 years ago.  Other than tax rates, the goal is to return to the 1950's or perhaps early 1960's before the country began to rapidly change with both the sexual revolution and the acceleration of a much more diverse demographics.  That world is gone forever, yet the GOP continues to cling to the same mantras that have been proven wrong by experience and objective fact over and over ago.  A column in the New York Times looks at this disconnect from reality which seemingly is only getting worse as the GOP increasingly looks as if it is one huge insane asylum.  Here are column excerpts:

By now everyone who follows politics knows about Marco Rubio’s software-glitch performance in Saturday’s Republican debate. . . . .  Not only did he respond to a challenge from Chris Christie about his lack of achievements by repeating, verbatim, the same line from his stump speech he had used a moment earlier; when Mr. Christie mocked his canned delivery, he repeated the same line yet again.

In other news, last week — on Groundhog Day, to be precise — Republicans in the House of Representatives cast what everyone knew was a purely symbolic, substance-free vote to repeal Obamacare. It was the 63rd time they’ve done so.

Mr. Rubio’s inability to do anything besides repeat canned talking points was startling. Worse, it was funny, which means that it has gone viral. And it reinforced the narrative that he is nothing but an empty suit. But really, isn’t everyone in his party doing pretty much the same thing, if not so conspicuously?

The truth is that the whole G.O.P. seems stuck in a time loop, saying and doing the same things over and over. And unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” Republicans show no sign of learning anything from experience.

Think about the doctrines every Republican politician now needs to endorse, on pain of excommunication.

First, there’s the ritual denunciation of Obamacare as a terrible, very bad, no good, job-killing law. Did I mention that it kills jobs? Strange to say, this line hasn’t changed at all despite the fact that we’ve gained 5.7 million private-sector jobs since January 2014, which is when the Affordable Care Act went into full effect.

Then there’s the assertion that taxing the rich has terrible effects on economic growth, and conversely that tax cuts at the top can be counted on to produce an economic miracle.

This doctrine was tested more than two decades ago, when Bill Clinton raised tax rates on high incomes; Republicans predicted disaster, but what we got was the economy’s best run since the 1960s.

Oh, and there’s also the spectacular failure of the Kansas experiment, where huge tax cuts have created a budget crisis without delivering any hint of the promised economic miracle.

But Republican faith in tax cuts as a universal economic elixir has, if anything, grown stronger, with Mr. Rubio, in particular, going even further than the other candidates by promising to eliminate all taxes on capital gains.

Meanwhile, on foreign policy the required G.O.P. position has become one of utter confidence in the effectiveness of military force. How did that work in Iraq? Never mind: The only reason anybody in the world fails to do exactly what America wants must be because our leadership is lily-livered if not treasonous. And diplomacy, no matter how successful, is denounced as appeasement.

So how did this happen to the G.O.P.? In a direct sense, I suspect that it has a lot to do with Foxification, the way Republican primary voters live in a media bubble into which awkward facts can’t penetrate. But there must be deeper causes behind the creation of that bubble. 

[Rubio] he wasn’t the only person on that stage spouting canned talking points that are divorced from reality. They all were, even if the other candidates managed to avoid repeating themselves word for word.

As I note repeatedly, one of the deeper causes of the descent of the GOP into insanity is the party's embrace of the Christofascists - who are by definition living utterly detached from reality.  That sickness has now spread across the GOP as sane and rational people have fled the party and ugly elements such as white supremacists have replaced them.