Trump's Staying Power

The week began with a frontpage acknowledgement in the "newspaper of record" (Michael Barbaro, Nate Cohn and Jeremy Peters, "Why Donald Trump Won’t Fold: Polls and People Speak") that Donald Trump is the front runner to win the GOP presidential nomination. After repeatedly dismissing the real estate mogul as a flash in the pan, a figure that would soon diminish in the polls after voters came to their senses, the organs of elite opinion have shifted their point of view to grudgingly accept that Trump's support is broad and comparatively deep:

In the command centers of Republican presidential campaigns, aides have drawn comfort from the belief that Donald J. Trump’s dominance in the polls is a political summer fling, like Herman Cain in 2011 — an unsustainable boomlet dependent on megawatt celebrity, narrow appeal and unreliable surveys of Americans with a spotty record of actually voting in primaries. 

A growing body of evidence suggests that may be wishful thinking. 

A review of public polling, extensive interviews with a host of his supporters in two states and a new private survey that tracks voting records all point to the conclusion that Mr. Trump has built a broad, demographically and ideologically diverse coalition, constructed around personality, not substance, that bridges demographic and political divides. In doing so, he has effectively insulated himself from the consequences of startling statements that might instantly doom rival candidates.

In poll after poll of Republicans, Mr. Trump leads among women, despite having used terms like “fat pigs” and “disgusting animals” to denigrate some of them. He leads among evangelical Christians, despite saying he had never had a reason to ask God for forgiveness. He leads among moderates and college-educated voters, despite a populist and anti-immigrant message thought to resonate most with conservatives and less-affluent voters. He leads among the most frequent, likely voters, even though his appeal is greatest among those with little history of voting.

That was from Sunday. Since then what we have seen is a circling of the wagons, as columnists decry Trump's divisiveness and analysts attempt to undercut the polling that puts Trump so clearly ahead in the hearts and minds of the citizenry of the "indispensable nation."

For an example of the latter, one can consult Nate Cohn's "There’s Evidence That Trump’s Polling Support Is Overstated." But really it is the headline of Cohn's article that is overstated. For after an interesting discussion of how election opinion polls work and agreeing with the hypothesis that Trump's national numbers are soft if looked at through the prism of repeat voters, Cohn concludes that "Over all, the data is consistent with the view that Mr. Trump’s support might be overstated by public polls. But he leads among voters who have participated in one or 12 elections. His challenge among likely voters isn’t necessarily unique. His lead might be modestly overstated, but it’s not a mirage." In other words, Trump is for real. (This is basically the gist of yesterday's frontpager by Trip Gabriel, "Test for Donald Trump: Turning Crowds Into Real Voters.")

Trump's Tuesday-night kerfuffle with Univision's Jorge Ramos offered an opening for tastemakers to cluck their tongues (see Michael Barbaro's "Testy News Conference Exchange Puts Donald Trump’s Quirks on Display"). And while this kind of public confrontation exposing Trump's pomposity might bear fruit in the future, I'm sure Trump will adapt and learn how to diffuse such standoffs.

Where Trump is vulnerable is how he has made his money. David Cay Johnston effectively skewers the Trump business model as being built on consorting with organized crime and refusing to pay subcontractors.

What will keep Trump in the contest is the public's disgust for the alternatives. In closing, keep this fact in mind from a story yesterday by Eric Lichtblau, "Bernie Sanders’s Success in Attracting Small Donors Tests Importance of ‘Super PACs’ ":

Super PACs supporting Mrs. Clinton have already raised more than $20 million, records show; on the Republican side, two super PACs backing Jeb Bush raised about $108.5 million.

Cold War 2.0/GWOT 2.0: The Obama Legacy

Twenty years from now, for those of us who will still be around, when we look back on the Obama presidency the major events of his administration -- the Great Recession, Obamacare, the budget battles with the House GOP -- will all be overshadowed by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's reboot of the Cold War with a capitalist Russia and his reboot of Bush II's Global War on Terror.

Tonight Obama addresses the nation about the kind of commitment his administration is willing to make to eradicate Islamic State, a jihadi group more extreme than Al Qaeda that Obama had dismissed until recently as a "JV" team and whose rise to power in northern Syria and Iraq was the direct result of policies the United States pursued to achieve the ouster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

All indications are that the commitment is going to be a lengthy and costly one, and that it will include airstrikes in Syria. Tim Arango provides a helpful overview, "Longtime Rivals Look to Team Up to Confront ISIS," of the jigsaw puzzle of issues brought on by the Arab Spring and the conservative reaction to it.

Arango tries to pluck out the hopeful pieces, like the U.S. working with Iran to beat back ISIS, but the overall message is that war is going to be a staple of the Greater Middle East for a long time. You have Qatar and Turkey at war with the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and Egypt; you have Sunni battling Shia; you have Turkey paranoid about PKK attacks from a generously armed Kurdistan; you have jihadis attacking jihadis attacking the Syrian Arab Army; you have jihadis -- Nusra, ISIS, even the "moderate" Free Syrian Army -- working together to attack the Lebanese Army which is underwritten by Saudi Arabia, a country that also funds the Salafi terror groups.

Into this maelstrom jets the Hogarthian U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with his faithful slave Michael Gordon. Court scribe Gordon has a helpful article in today's paper, "John Kerry Arrives in Iraq for Talks on Joint Strategy Against ISIS," in that it makes perfectly clear the future the Obama administration envisions for Iraq, which is less a unitary state and more a Confederate States of the Tigris and Euphrates.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the formation of a government the other day but because all the sticky issues -- those pertaining to the Kurds: oil rights, boundaries, budgetary allotments; and those pertaining to the Sunnis who want to lead the ministries of defense and interior -- have been tabled for a later date.

That is why Kerry is in Baghdad. He comes with a proposal for federalizing Iraq. (What the U.S. is seeking to prevent in Ukraine by launching Cold War 2.0, it is trying to apply to Iraq by launching GWOT 2.0, a kind of schizophrenia that only makes sense according to the rules of the Great Game.)

One major initiative to roll back ISIS’ gains in Iraq, American officials said, is the establishment of national guard units that would be recruited locally and given the main security responsibilities in their home areas.ontinue reading the main story

Continue reading the main story

In an echo of the Sunni Awakening, in which Iraqi tribes made common cause with American forces to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq, some of the national guard units would be drawn from local tribes. But unlike the Awakening, the soldiers would formally be part of Iraq’s security structure and would be trained on Iraqi military bases. Reporting to local governors, they would also receive salaries and pensions from the government.

The plan is intended to rebuild the fighting capability that the Iraqi government lost after much of its army faded away in the face of ISIS’ onslaught.

The decentralization of security responsibilities is also intended to ease sectarian tensions by giving Sunnis more control over their own affairs and reduce the need for the largely Shiite army to be deployed on their territory.

It would also replace the ad hoc arrangements regarding paying Awakening members that eventually led to its demise. 

“The people of Anbar will take on ISIL,” the State Department official added, using an alternative name for ISIS. “The people of Nineveh will take on ISIL in Nineveh, and they will have assistance from the national army when they need it.” 

“One thing Abadi has said repeatedly,” the official added, “is that he is not going to use “military units from the south and go into areas in the north and west” to fight ISIS. 

But the plan still requires assistance from the United States or other nations in training and advising the Iraqi military that would back up the local forces. And it requires a major effort to enlist Sunnis in the new national guard units, persuade them to pledge loyalty to the Iraqi government and equip and train them so they would be a credible fighting force. 

“So the core principle in Iraq of what comes after ISIL is now pretty well laid out,” said the State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity under the State Department’s protocol for briefing reporters. “It’s going to be a very difficult, long road to get there.”

“It’s going to be a very difficult, long road to get there.” -- No kidding. In the American proposal, backed no doubt by the Saudis, Iraq will become a series of Bantustans topped by a powerful unitary Kuridstan in the north. Maybe Iraqis are tired enough of war that they will accept the fool's gold the U.S. is offering. But I doubt it. The Sadrists are strong nationalists. This means there is more chaos coming.

But don't expect any leadership from a feckless U.S. Congress. All indications are Congress will avoid any new vote on an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF). This is a great quote reported yesterday by Jonathan Weisman, Mark Landler and Jeremy Peters, "As Obama Makes Case, Congress Is Divided on Campaign Against Militants":

Democratic leaders in the Senate and Republican leaders in the House want to avoid a public vote to authorize force, fearing the unknown political consequences eight weeks before the midterm elections on Nov. 4. 

“A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later,’ ” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who supports having an authorization vote. “It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”

We're about to relaunch decades-long commitments to warfare, the Imperial Presidency completely triumphant, and Congress is too scared to even schedule a vote. This is not what democracy looks like.

Paying the Price of the Bush Years

Federal employees return to work this morning. The deal that Obama signed into law after midnight was put together in the Senate. It is the same as outlined on this blog a few days ago, minus the one-year delay in the reinsurance tax on health plans. (CNN provides the text of the actual bill.)

What does it accomplish? Basically nothing. The splinter of a bone tossed to the GOP in the form of an income verification requirement for individuals who receive a subsidy to purchase health insurance has been dismissed as meaningless by the White House. The House-Senate budget conference to be concluded by December 13 that the new law mandates will likely be a failure due to the Republican's ban on raising new revenue.

The last two-and-a-half weeks accomplished nothing and resolved very little. The New York Times editorial board said "The only things Republicans achieved were billions of dollars in damage to the economy, harm to the nation’s reputation and a rock-bottom public approval rating." This standoff was about the internal politics of the Grand Old Party. Speaker Boehner played a game where he gave the Tea Party enough rope to hang itself hoping that it would sate the fire eaters in his caucus for the next go-round. As Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker describe it in this morning's story, "Republicans Back Down, Ending Crisis Over Shutdown and Debt Limit":

Two weeks of relative cohesion broke down into near chaos on Tuesday when Republican leaders failed twice to unite their troops behind a last-gasp effort to prevent a default on their own terms. By Wednesday, House conservatives were accusing more moderate Republicans of undercutting their position. Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a leading Republican voice for ending the fight, said Congress should have passed a bill to fund the government without policy strings attached weeks ago. 

“That’s essentially what we’re doing now,” Mr. Dent said. “People can blame me all they want, but I was correct in my analysis and I’d say a lot of those folks were not correct in theirs.”

Good analysis in today's paper is provided by Jeremy Peters' "Losing a Lot to Get Little." Peters is skeptical that the Tea Party has learned anything:

“We managed to divide ourselves on something we were unified on, over a goal that wasn’t achievable,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. “The president probably had the worst August and early September any president could have had. And we managed to change the topic.” 

The question so crucial to the Republican Party’s viability now, heading into the 2014 Congressional elections and beyond, is whether it has been so stung by the fallout that the conservatives who insisted on leading this fight will shy away in the months ahead when the government runs out of money and exhausts its borrowing authority yet again. 

It is not an abstract question. The deal reached Wednesday would finance the government only through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. Some top Republicans suggest that this confrontation, one some of the most conservative Tea Party-aligned Republicans have been itching for since they arrived, ended so badly for them that it would curb the appetite for another in just a few short months. 

*** 

Speaker John A. Boehner’s strategy always involved a gamble that his members would come away from this clash chastened. He intentionally allowed his most conservative members to sit in the driver’s seat as they tried in vain to get the Senate to accept one failed measure after another — first to defund the health care law, then to delay it, then to chip away at it. His hope was that they would realize the fight was not worth having again.

The worry among many Republicans is that the Tea Party flank will not get the message, mainly because their gerrymandered districts are so conservative they do not have to listen. 

Some fear that history is repeating itself. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in which the Republicans lost the popular presidential vote for the fifth time in six elections, the party tried to regroup. Its establishment warned that it had to stop being so shrill, so exclusionary and so narrowly focused on issues that alienate large chunks of voters who might otherwise think about being Republicans. 

Certainly, the budget fight showed that Congressional Republicans have divergent ideas about how to heed that advice.

Like a cradle-bound baby fondling his excrement, we're doomed early next year to some form of a repeat of this October's nauseating, self-indulgent Republican identity crisis. We're paying the price of the Bush years. So frightened by the rise of Obama and the discrediting of the GOP brand after the brazen lies that led to the Iraq War and the collapse of Wall Street, Republican sachems felt the need to lie down with the kooks and the Birchers. At this point there is no indication that there will be any change of direction in 2014.

Absent Tea Party Surrender Government Headed for Shutdown

Judging from the coverage this morning, it looks like Senate majority leader Harry Reid is not going to buckle in the showdown with the Tea-Party-led House Republicans. Good. This needed to have happened at the end of last year following Obama's landslide election win and the GOP's pathetic showing in November.

There are still scenes left to play out in this drama as it unfolds today in D.C. Absent a bargain of some sort the government will shut down tomorrow. Here -- this is from Jeremy Peters and Jonathan Weisman's story this morning, "Senate Action on Health Law Moves to Brink of Shutdown" -- is what we can expect today:

Republican lawmakers said on Sunday that the House leadership had one more card to play, but that it was extremely delicate. They can tell Mr. Reid he must accept a face-saving measure, like the repeal of the tax on medical devices, which many Democrats support, or they will send back a new amendment that would force members of Congress and their staffs, and the White House staff, to buy their medical insurance on the new health law’s insurance exchanges, without any subsidies from the government to offset the cost. 

Republicans expressed certainty that for all the discomfort a shutdown would inflict on Capitol Hill, Democrats would not risk it to protect their own benefits.

If the Tea Party caucus is willing to settle for this -- a repeal of the tax on medical devices -- then there is a chance a deal could be reached. It would be unfortunate because it would maintain the GOP penchant for budgetary brinkmanship as a negotiating tactic, and it would guarantee further drama on down the line as the House Republicans continue their attempts to nibble away at Obamacare. But it's not clear that the Tea Party is willing to set its sights so low. Tea Party Republicans feel as if they have already given up a lot over the weekend by agreeing to a one-year delay in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act rather than its de-funding.

And on the other side of the aisle I think it has finally dawned on the Democratic leadership, and quite possibly even the conciliator-in-chief, that negotiating with the House Republicans in the face of threats to shut down the government or default on the sovereign debt is a losing proposition.

Even if a deal is struck today that avoids a government shutdown tomorrow, rest assured that an even larger conflict is coming our way in a couple of weeks with the vote to raise the debt ceiling. That's why my thinking from last week -- that a shutdown would be avoided -- has changed.

I now think that it has dawned on the Democrats that it's better to have the House GOP shutter the government in the near term, thoroughly discrediting Republicans to a broad majority of the public and thereby undercutting them going into a debt-ceiling standoff.

Barring a complete capitulation by the Tea Party -- or turnabout by Speaker Boehner to allow a clean bill without any anti-Obamacare chicanery -- the federal government is headed for a shutdown.

Anti-War Sentiment Remains Strong

As time moves on and we get closer to a vote in Congress on an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) Obama and his war cabinet are running up against two major impediments to an attack on Syria. First, public opinion is dead set against the folly of another military campaign. Charles Blow, a staunch Obama liberal, in an opinion piece this morning, "The Era of Disbelief," traces the post-9/11 history that has delivered the electorate's current anti-war "hive mind." It is backed up by a Jeremy Peters story, "Obama Faces Barrier in His Own Party on Syria," that captures the absence of any solid bloc of support in the Democratic caucus for Obama's warmongering. Elijah Cummings, former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and current member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says Obama's got more work to do in convincing the public.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, who represents a district that includes parts of Baltimore and has not decided how he stands on attacking Syria, said the pressure from his constituents to oppose the president’s plan is unmistakable. When he visited a grocery store on Wednesday, he said, almost a dozen people told him they thought intervening in Syria was a bad idea. None of them expressed support. 

“If you’ve got 95 percent of them saying one thing, it becomes far more difficult to go against them,” he said, adding that the president needed to make a more forceful and convincing case to the public if he wanted Congressional consent for an attack. “As a good friend of his and someone who supports him, I think he’s got to help the Congress help him.”

Which brings us to the second major impediment to a rush to war: the press is starting to do its job. If the administration's bum rush, which began this past Sunday with Secretary of State John Kerry's appearance on cable news and has been going non-stop backed by a steady stream of support from allied intelligence services, has yet to make a dent in anti-war sentiment then it is unlikely, given a growing skepticism in certain segments of the fourth estate for some of Kerry's pronouncements, that any new revelations of Syrian regime barbarity will make a difference. As an example of the press beginning to examine some of the incongruities of Obama administration's case against the Assad government, see Colum Lynch's "U.S. dismisses U.N. inspections in Syria of alleged chemical weapons sites":

Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. inspector who headed the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, said he finds it “ironic” that the Obama administration finds itself on similar ground as the Bush administration, which also decided to bypass the work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq. 

“It’s odd that they are dismissing the United Nations,” he said. 

“By going through the U.N., you subject yourself to the vagaries of that schedule,” Duelfer said. “Certainly it will take time for inspectors to develop results of the analysis of these samples. But the utility of that is it is seen as credible in the international community.” 

Duelfer acknowledged that it’s possible that U.N. inspections could provide a muddy picture of what happened in Syria. Some of the evidence, according to diplomatic officials, may point to exposure of Syrian security forces — Russia and Syria could claim that it proves rebel forces used chemical weapons, but British, French and American officials could contend that it was the result of misfired rockets hitting the government’s own troops. 

Still, Duelfer disputed the U.S. contention that it is too late to collect credible evidence. The science of inspections, he said, has advanced so that traces of chemical weapons agents can be obtained years after an attack.

Then there is today's story by C.J. Chivers, "Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West," which directly addresses the lie told by Kerry in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing the other day that the moderate elements of the opposition are on the rise. Hopefully Chivers' piece will get some play on the big search engine news pages.

The warhawks backed by their cheerleaders in the media waxed mightily the last three-four days. Things started to shift yesterday thanks to stubborn anti-war sentiment in the United States. With Obama likely to take a drubbing at the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg, support for the administration's warmongering will continue to wane. Keep a skeptical watch out for breaking news of incendiary claims as the warhawks realize that they don't have the votes in the House for the AUMF.