Trump Needs a Miracle + Blows Against the Empire

This morning, the first post-convention Monday in the long march to the general election in November, is a good indication of why it will take a miracle for Donald Trump to win the White House. Stories with the most prominent placement are "Donald Trump’s Confrontation With Muslim Soldier’s Parents Emerges as Unexpected Flash Point" and "How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump." The former plays up Trump's bigotry and divisiveness; the latter, the new McCarythism. The media will tattoo Trump and the Trump campaign every day for the next three months. Trump will be unable to whittle down his disapproval rating and narrow the gender gap. Because the media monopoly has gone all in for Hillary, Trump is effectively in a box; absent the miraculous, there he will stay.

Then there is the issue of the daunting electoral map. Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman in "Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go" outline the harrowing journey ahead for The Donald. Basically he has to run the table on the big swing states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida -- and hold North Carolina. Problem is, Trump is woefully underfunded at this point, not to mention that he has alienated a large part of the GOP machine. Even assuming a richly-funded, well-organized campaign, Trump's task ahead is Herculean. Given that he is having trouble raising money -- and it doesn't look like he is going to bankroll himself -- and his campaign infrastructure is skeletal, once again, a miracle is called for.

Nate Cohn limned the contours of this miracle in "Donald Trump’s Path: What Map Should Democrats Fear the Most?" Trump runs the big swings as well as the little swings -- Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire -- and ends up tied 269-269 with Hillary. The election gets dumped into the House of Representatives where Paul Ryan anoints Trump il Duce. Far-fetched? Absolutely.

True, Trump has proven he is a real wild card and not one to be counted out, but I think as we get deeper into August his limitations are going to catch up with his campaign and Hillary will get back to her four-to-five-point lead.

While we are hypnotized stateside with the Trump circus, the U.S. Empire is about to absorb some big blows:

1) Some sort of rapprochement is underway between Russia and Turkey. Putin and Erdogan are to meet next week in St. Petersburg. Turkey appears convinced that the U.S. had a hand in the recent coup attempt.

2) The jihadis are surrounded in Aleppo. Pro-jihadi think tankers are already licking their wounds and looking for some sort of silver lining. That silver lining appears to be "Just wait until Hillary gets here."

3) Italy is on the verge of a full-blown banking crisis. Renzi is on the ropes. Another anti-EU party, M5S, is looking strong.

4) Britain will likely continue to trod a rocky road as it becomes apparent that Theresa May plans on screwing the white working class that voted for Brexit.

Get ready. Crisis time approaches.

Super Tuesday

It was a depressing weekend. The Clinton margin of victory among blacks in South Carolina, even greater than what she racked up in Nevada, is a death knell for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, as Nate Cohn explains in "Hillary Clinton’s Winning Numbers in South Carolina Suggest Sweep in South":

[Hillary] has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The result positions Mrs. Clinton for a sweep of the South in a few days on Super Tuesday and puts the burden on Mr. Sanders to post decisive victories elsewhere. If he does not — and the polls, at least so far, are not encouraging — Mrs. Clinton seems likely to amass a significant and possibly irreversible lead.

For Mrs. Clinton, the path to the presidential nomination is straightforward: fight Mr. Sanders to a draw among the nonblack voters who dominate the party’s contests in many Northern and Western states, and win by huge margins among black voters, who represent about a quarter of Democratic voters nationally. They represent the majority of Democrats in the South, which will play a crucial role on Super Tuesday.

The results in South Carolina — as well as in Nevada, where Mrs. Clinton also won black voters by a wide margin — suggest that she can count on big wins in six Super Tuesday states where black voters represent an above-average share of Democratic voters: Alabama, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia. The polls say the same thing.

As a result, the Sanders campaign has effectively conceded the South on Super Tuesday. The campaign is not airing advertisements there, according to NBC News data. It’s instead concentrating resources in five states with far fewer black voters and far fewer delegates: Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts and Vermont. It is a strategy that aims to maximize Mr. Sanders’s chance of winning states, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent Mrs. Clinton from running up huge delegate leads from the South.

The likelihood of a Clinton landslide in the delegate-rich South means that Mr. Sanders can’t compensate with a few narrow, feel-good wins outside the South. The thing to watch on Tuesday night is whether Mr. Sanders can win by big — even double-digit — margins in states like Minnesota or Massachusetts. The margins matter, because delegates are awarded proportionally in the Democratic nomination contest.

Even this might not be enough in a place like Minnesota or Massachusetts, depending on whether one assumes that Mr. Sanders has an advantage in caucus states like Minnesota or a state bordering Vermont like Massachusetts. If Mrs. Clinton has an advantage among Hispanic voters, in addition to black voters, then the burden on Mr. Sanders would grow even more to dominate with white voters in states like Massachusetts or Minnesota.

The polling, at least for now, says Mr. Sanders is not positioned to win by these sorts of margins. He’s in a tight race in Massachusetts. He’s in a tight race in Oklahoma, a state with a below-average black population and a large number of working-class Democrats. There is not much polling in Colorado or Minnesota, but there isn’t much evidence of a blowout there or in neighboring Wisconsin.

I think Cohn's analysis is on the money. Hillary has proven herself Obama's equal in winning a huge percentage of the black vote. And while it is true that Bernie wins a majority of white voters, though apparently not in South Carolina, it is more a split than a landslide. Absent a bombshell like an indictment, Hillary's path to the nomination seems safe.

Hence, the low feeling this weekend. Particularly after reading the massive two-parter by Jo Becker and Scott Shane (The Libya Gamble: "Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall" and "A New Libya, With 'Very Little Time Left' ") about the disastrous Hillary-backed coup of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary's fingerprints are all over the destruction of North Africa, the Middle East and now Europe.

The good news though is she going to have great difficulty winning a general election against Trump. Cohn is too busy lining out the limitations of Bernie's campaign to note the weakness of Hillary's. For starters, Democratic turnout has been less than the GOP so far. Trump broke records for turnout in South Carolina and Nevada. This has to be very troubling for Team Clinton. For the winning formula of the Obama coalition to work, Hillary will need not only the constituency groups -- blacks, Latinos, youth -- but she will need juiced turnout by those constituents. Hillary has the blacks, but so far she does not have young people and there is no evidence that she is winning the Latino vote by a significant margin. Most importantly, Hillary is not inspiring new voters to come to the polls the way Trump is. Read Matt Taibbi's excellent "How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable" and ask yourself, "How does Trump lose any of the big swing states to Hillary?"

One possible answer is found in "Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump" by Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Johnathan Martin. The GOP will campaign against Trump in the general:

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

The article also limns Republican plans to steal the nomination from Trump at the convention.

Maybe the GOP will incinerate itself. We can only hope. One thing is for sure: If Hillary does as well tomorrow as is generally predicted, Bloomberg will not run. The elites will all line up with Hillary, and it will be Hillary vs. the world.

Bloomberg Floats Independent Presidential Run Once Again: Growing Acceptance by 1% that Hillary's Candidacy Doomed

More proof of the doomed nature of Hillary's presidential run is The New York Times story that appeared yesterday ("Bloomberg, Sensing an Opening, Revisits a Potential White House Run" by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman) reporting that billionaire media mogul and former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg is considering an independent run for the White House. Troubled by the rise of Trump and Cruz on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left Bloomberg says he will spend $1 billion of his vast personal fortune to win the presidency; he will make a decision by March.

Having recently finished reading Theresa Amato's Grand Illusion, a book that explores the many significant barriers to an independent or third party presidential bid in the United States, Bloomberg will need to spend a hefty chunk of his earmarked $1 billion just getting on the ballot in enough states -- not even all 50 -- to guarantee a majority of votes in the Electoral College.

Historically the raison d'être of independent or third party presidential runs is issue based. In the last 25 years, for example, we have had Ralph Nader's left progressive Green Party challenge and Ross Perot's deficits -- budget and trade -- jeremiad. Bloomberg, in this upside down world we live in, would be launching a first -- an independent presidential campaign in defense of a failed status quo. (An argument could me made that John Anderson's independent run against Carter and Reagan in 1980 was a precursor.)

The point I want to make here is that there will be no Bloomberg volunteers ready for mobilization because he is not leading with any issues other than "None of the above." The 1% is not going to sign up to gather signatures on street corners in Dallas to get Bloomberg on the ballot in Texas. Possibly he could lasso some soccer moms if he comes forward with something bold on guns, or maybe some suburban conservationists if he talks up renewable energy. But until that happens he is going to have to pay for absolutely everything. One billion U.S. dollars cannot buy the White House if you are peddling snake oil that the rubes have already sampled to their detriment.

The big takeaway of the Burns and Haberman article is that the Establishment, the 1%, the ruling elite -- pick your label -- is beginning to accept the obvious: Trump is going to win (a must-read on the GOP's coming to acceptance about Trump is Friday's "Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? Republicans Argue Over Who Is Greater Threat" by Jonathan Martin, backed up by the story about longtime Iowa senator Charles Grassley appearing at a Trump rally yesterday) and Hillary cannot win a general election against Trump, and she might not even be able to fend off Sanders in the primary.

A passage in the Burns and Haberman piece that captures the freak-out currently underway in Establishment circles is the quote from corrupt power broker and Clintonista Ed Rendell, the guy who as Philadelphia District Attorney prosecuted no one for the bombing of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue that destroyed a city block:

Edward G. Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania and a past Democratic National Committee chairman, said he believed Mr. Bloomberg could compete in the race if activist candidates on the left and right prevailed in the party primaries.

“Mike Bloomberg for president rests on the not-impossible but somewhat unlikely circumstance of either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz versus Bernie Sanders,” said Mr. Rendell, a close ally of Mrs. Clinton’s who is also a friend of Mr. Bloomberg’s. “If Hillary wins the nomination, Hillary is mainstream enough that Mike would have no chance, and Mike’s not going to go on a suicide mission.” 

In a three-way race featuring Mr. Sanders and Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Rendell said he might back the former New York mayor. 

“As a lifelong Democrat, as a former party chairman, it would be very hard for me to do that,” he said. “But I would certainly take a look at it — absolutely.”

This is a former head of the DNC saying he will not back the party's nominee for president. What does that tell you about party leaders' faith in democracy? It should tell you that they don't have time for it.

It seems like every presidential election cycle for the last 12 years we go through this "Bloomberg might run as an independent" kabuki. Mike Bloomberg is a smart guy who knows how to read the polling he no doubt commissions for himself. He has never run as a independent for president because he can't win. He is a billionaire solidly of the billionaire class. His natural constituents are the elites who already control the duopoly, not the rank-and-file voters who have abandoned Bush and are making haste to abandon Clinton.

Republicans are spinning a Bloomberg independent candidacy as great for the GOP, just as they did at first when Perot decided to run in 1992. Now it is conventional wisdom that Perot elected Clinton.

Bloomberg will not run if Hillary holds on and wins the Democratic primary. He very well might run if Sanders wins, though the fact that the GOP appears now to be coalescing around Trump might keep him on the sidelines.

If it does end up being Bernie vs. Trump/Bloomberg, that is a bonanza for the Sanders camp. Bernie will be the only candidate able to say that he is not a billionaire.

The real problem for Hillary going forward is now that she has gone negative she is in a box. Read Brent Budowsky's "As Sanders Soars, Clinton Goes Negative — A Bad Move":

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) may be poised to win both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, and as Sanders soars, rival Hillary Clinton is making the worst possible move of launching an all-out attack against him, which is the same mistake she made when she attacked Barack Obama in 2008. 

For some time, I have strongly advised people close to the Clintons to not go negative against Sanders. Clinton needs to inspire voters about why she should be president, not become a negative candidate who reminds voters of the kind of politics they want to end.

Remember — and this is a key point — that when Clinton attacks Sanders for the vision and programs he believes in, she is attacking the large numbers of Democrats and independents who believe in what Sanders believes and favor the same changes and reforms that he promotes.

The Clinton attack against Sanders is the worst possible move for her and for Democrats. Because Clinton has low ratings for trustworthiness, whereas Sanders's ratings are high, a Clinton attack against Sanders will backfire.

Even worse for Clinton, the problem is that she has never articulated an uplifting and exciting reason for voters to back her, and her negative attack against Sanders will drown out any positive message she may have, if she has one.

Clinton's attacks against Sanders sounds strangely similar to her attacks against Obama in 2008. She is charging — among many things — that Sanders does not offer a realistic program, which is both condescending and wrong and an insult not only to Sanders, but to the large number of Democrats who are with Sanders.

What a presidential candidate should do is offer a panoramic vision of how America can become better, mobilize support for that vision, seek an election victory with a mandate, and then negotiate with Congress from strength and make the compromises that must ultimately be made to win the most dramatic possible reforms. That is what important presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy did. That is what Sanders is doing.

What a presidential candidate should not do is identify with the status quo and oppose dramatic change even before the first ballot is counted and attack the change candidates as naive or unrealistic. This is what Clinton is doing with her negative attacks against Sanders.

Hillary has locked herself into a 50%+1 election scenario. This might be enough for her to muddle through in the Democratic primary based on a lack of familiarity with Sanders in red states as well as Clinton's advantage with super-delegates, but it guarantees a loss in the general against anybody but Cruz or Bush, and those two are not going to win the Republican primary.

At this point, with Iowa a little more than a week away, I am starting to think Hillary might not be the Democratic nominee.