Michigan Post-Mortem

The results from yesterday's primary election in Michigan are an indication that we are headed to another Bush v. Gore-type standoff in the fall. Trump won, and he won by double digits -- 36.5% to Cruz's 24.9% and Kasich's 24.3%. But added together, his opponents won nearly 300,000 more votes in the Wolverine State than the celebrity billionaire. This points to something that Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin noted in their post-election frontpager this morning, "Bernie Sanders Wins Michigan Primary; Donald Trump Takes 3 States." Trump's negatives are on the rise:

Even before the votes were counted Tuesday, there were new signs that resistance to Mr. Trump’s candidacy within his own party was growing. The number of Republicans viewing him unfavorably spiked to 46 percent in a Washington Post-ABC poll released Tuesday, the highest figure recorded in that survey since Mr. Trump entered the race last year.

This percentage will likely grow as next Tuesday's GOP Battle of Armageddon takes shape. The Republican strategy is to block Trump from running the table next Tuesday. If Trump manages to win in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, his chances of avoiding a brokered convention and cinching the nomination are great. To prevent this, the Republican Party is concentrating its anti-Trump attack in Florida and Illinois. The problem for the GOP is twofold: 1) Rubio has collapsed as a viable alternative; and 2) Ted Cruz remains the most dominant "next man up."

With the Rubio charade thankfully retired by voters in Mississippi and Michigan, I'm sure that Republican power brokers would love everyone to get behind Ohio governor John Kasich. But Ted Cruz blocks the way with his Super PAC millions.

So the dynamic -- Cruz a solid number two stifling the emergence of an acceptable mainstream alternative -- that has led to the rise of Trump remains in place. Barring a surprise showing from Kasich, Trump sweeps next week. Let the coronation begin.

On the Democratic side, Bernie won a solid come-from-behind victory in Michigan. He did it by outworking Hillary on the ground and, like Trump, by hammering home the message of how trade agreements backed by ruling elites like the Clintons gutted the industrial backbone of the country. According to Yamiche Alcindor and Patrick Healy in "Trade and Jobs Key to Victory For Bernie Sanders":

Mr. Sanders pulled off a startling upset in Michigan on Tuesday by traveling to communities far from Detroit and by hammering Mrs. Clinton on an issue that resonated in this still-struggling state: her past support for trade deals that workers here believe robbed them of manufacturing jobs. Almost three-fifths of voters said that trade with other countries was more likely to take away jobs, according to exit polls by Edison Research, and those voters favored Mr. Sanders by a margin of more than 10 points.

This is good news for Sanders going into next week's contests in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. (Bernie seems to be largely conceding Florida and North Carolina.) Hillary managed to win more delegates last night because she trounced Sanders in Mississippi. And even if Sanders manages to win all three industrial states next week, but Clinton continues to rack up lopsided wins in heavily African American Democratic districts, Hillary will likely come away with more delegates.

But that shouldn't be the thing that concerns us. After next week the remaining segments of Hillary's Dixie firewall are all finished and the calendar is much more favorable to Bernie. The march to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia will be weary and woeful for Hillary. She will arrive in the City of Brotherly Love exactly what she is -- a bloated political cadaver kept in a state of animation by untold millions in corporate cash.

The American people are in for a real treat this July. We will bear witness as the duopoly attempts to subvert the results of the primary election season.

"Never Trump" + Pitiful Turnout for Hillary = a Glimpse of November

Two must-read stories -- Nicholas Confessore's Beneath Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday Wins, Signs of Turnout Trouble and "‘Never Trump’ Movement Dealt Setback After Super Tuesday" by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman -- clearly show what is in store for us on our way to the November general election.

Confessore calls attention to the 900-lb. gorilla in the room: Clinton is not drawing voters to the polls in robust "Obama coalition" style. Yes, she is winning among African Americans, but black turnout is way down from 2012 and 2008. Hillary's people say the reduced numbers are due to a lack of excitement because her nomination is assured. Really? What about Bernie Sanders raising tens of millions of dollars month in and month out?

Anyhow, the Democrats can't win a general election at the current level of participation. And what is particularly troublesome for the DNC brain trust is that Trump is drawing voters to the polls like P.T. Barnum to a three-ring circus.

So what is to be done? The GOP has the answer. It is "Never Trump." The current plan, articulated by Martin and Haberman in their story, is to prevent Trump from winning in Ohio and Florida on March 15. The thinking is that without wins in Florida and Ohio, Trump will be unable to sew up the 1,237 delegates prior to the national convention in Cleveland. Republican elites will then broker the convention, raising up a candidate of their choice. If Rubio loses Florida, it won't be him. I'm thinking Paul Ryan will be the one, reprising the role he performed when Boehner resigned as House Speaker.

It is a long shot, but it has already begun in earnest with anti-Trump groups pledged to spend over $7 million on attack ads in Florida.

I am skeptical. Look at the record of Crossroads GPS over the years. But the word is that anti-Trump PAC ads cost The Donald a win in Iowa and helped Cruz triumph in Oklahoma and reduced Trump's margin of victory in Arkansas.

My takeaway from these two stories is that the Republican establishment appears at this point to be truly committed to Trump destruction. If this commitment remains even after the billionaire wins Ohio and Florida, then we will be looking at a general election where the Democrats and Republicans unite in a campaign to drive Trump's turnout lower the cadaverous Hillary. It is a picture of an upside down world, but that's the world we live in.

A Quick Look at the Super Tuesday Results

The New York Times has an excellent page devoted to the outcome of yesterday's Super Tuesday primary, a Dixie-heavy set of eleven statewide elections. In the Republican contest, Trump won seven; Cruz did better than anticipated by winning three; and Little Marco cleared the tiny tot hurdle, set for him by an adoring establishment, by winning a single state, Minnesota. On the Democratic side, Hillary ran the table in the South -- except for Oklahoma -- while Sanders picked up wins in Vermont, Colorado, Minnesota and Oklahoma. A pretty feather for Clinton's cap is that she held on by 20,000 votes to win Democratic terra firma -- the land of Jack, Bobby and Tip -- Massachusetts. If Bernie had won in Massachusetts it would have been a powerful statement of the potency of his insurgent candidacy. As it turned out, basically a draw, with Hillary winning 45 pledged delegates to Bernie's 43, it illustrates the deep chasm in the Democratic Party, one me thinks cannot be bridged by November.

The only swing state to hold a primary election on Super Tuesday was Virginia. The results foretell a perplexing general election. The Republicans tallied 1,027,897 votes to the Democrats 784,392. Hillary ran strong with over half-a-million votes. Pundits will say that if you add Bernie's totals to Clinton's, toss in a hefty chunk of Rubio's and Kasich's votes, you come away with a walk-off Democratic home run in the Old Dominion. But I don't think you can slice and dice the vote predictably.

If Hillary has an advantage in any swing state it is Virginia with its multitude of government workers in the state's eastern suburbs. The question becomes how many Bernie backers vote Trump or third party. If Clinton wins a majority of Sanders' vote, I think she can carry Virginia because she will have many Rubio voters as well, and they out-polled Bernie in Virginia by 50,000 votes.

Trump Pros and Cons (The Cons Have It)

There are two ways to look at the ascendance of Donald Trump, one pro and the other con; both positions find expression in Jennifer Steinhauer's frontpager this morning, "Republican Race Puts Donald Trump and Paul Ryan on Collision Course."

The positive is that The Donald is destroying the current Republican Party. Look at what the reality television star has accomplished so far: He quickly asphyxiated the presidential candidacy of a truly baleful Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker; and he ruthlessly exposed the Bush dynasty as nothing more than a mirage generated by the heat produced by furiously spending tens of millions of dollars.

Trump has proven himself an avatar of the new media. According to Nicky Wolf, a reporter covering the U.S. presidential race for The Guardian who was interviewed yesterday on Democracy Now!, Trump is rewriting the playbook:

But I think Trump is also a uniquely 21st century social media phenomenon, too. He’s huge, to paraphrase him, on Twitter. He’s got this enormous following. He can reach more people with a tweet than almost every TV ad market in the country. Now, that’s something that Schwarzenegger never had and that Jesse Ventura never had, that Reagan never had. I think that changes the arithmetic of stuff a bit here. And he’s just so able to build this brand. It’s difficult to not see him as a pretty unique phenomenon now. And it’s amazing to watch. I mean, it’s just absolutely spectacular how he’s playing with the Republican Party like a cat with a mouse. It’s fantastic.

The reason it is fantastic is that Trump is trumpeting positions that are the direct opposite of GOP orthodoxy -- on trade, on Social Security, on Russia. These differences between Trump and the Republican congressional agenda are what Steinhauer highlights in her story. We can only hope that enough power brokers in the GOP establishment maintain their delusion that Trump can somehow be kept from the nomination. The idea that some of these dead-enders seem to be forming, now that it is apparent that Rubio has very little mojo, is of a brokered convention that produces Paul Ryan as the party's nominee. As Steinhauer explains,

Though most in the Republican establishment are hoping for the dust to settle and for Senator Marco Rubio to emerge as their nominee — his Capitol Hill endorsements stack up daily — some still murmur privately that in the event of Mr. Trump’s nomination, they would like to see Mr. Ryan emerge as a brokered nominee at the Republican National Convention in July.

This amounts to a nuclear option. The potential damage to the GOP is beyond comprehension.

That's why there is already a significant amount of noise emanating from Capitol Hill that all sounds like "Wait a second. We can work with Trump." According to Steinhauer,

Some Republican lawmakers say, though nervously, that there would be plenty of intersection between their agenda and Mr. Trump’s. His tax plan — which calls for large tax cuts for all Americans, especially the rich — is similar to Mr. Ryan’s. Mr. Trump, like Mr. Ryan, is all for repealing and replacing the current health care law, although he, unlike Mr. Ryan, has endorsed the individual mandate. 

“In a lot of ways, it might actually be conducive to getting things done to have someone with business sense in the White House,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, Republican of South Carolina and a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

Like Mr. Ryan, Mr. Trump also supports gun rights and a strong military, although Mr. Trump has broken with many Republicans with his criticism of the Iraq war. 

“All of the Republican presidential candidates would be better than Hillary Clinton,” said AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan. “And Speaker Ryan would be able to work with any one of them.” 

Some even argue that Mr. Ryan, who operated in lonely political waters before his party took over the House in 2011, will adjust to the environment and try to help Republicans in congressional races who, in many states, will be fighting for their lives. 

***

Congressional Republicans — especially senators up for re-election in swing states — have been terrified to criticize Mr. Trump by name because they need his voters, too, in primary and possible general election battles. White-hot fear is beginning to set in.

This is the negative: Trump is the right wing's Obama 2008, a shape-shifting Manchurian Candidate who is in fact loyal to the 1%. I think this is the correct interpretation, brought home to me one morning reading a Gail Collins column, "Trump Shows His Inner Rabbit," where she points out that Trump back-tracked on his most powerful statement during the last Republican debate, that Bush and Cheney lied to get us into Iraq:

In a dramatic highlight of the last Republican debate, Trump accused the Bush administration of deliberately deceiving the American public about the invasion. (“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none.”) It was a potentially historic moment: a top Republican candidate for president attempts to lead his party into a frank reappraisal of the Bush-Cheney administration’s inherent honesty.

Here we are, one week later: “I’m not talking about lying. ... Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.” 

Meanwhile, reporters continue to ask Trump supporters what the attraction is. And his fans say that he tells it like it is.

Trump is an agile performer whose gift is the ability to mesmerize an audience with an apparent spontaneity; this sponateity creates a facsimile of truthfulness.

It is of course nothing of the sort. It is bullshit. A Trump White House would preside over a large tax cut for the 1% and a big increase in military spending. It would be Reagan's first term all over again.

Let's see who Trump selects for a VP. My guess is a hawkish general a la Curtis LeMay, George Wallace's running mate in his 1968 independent presidential bid.

Who Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada?

As to be expected, The New York Times is tattooing the Sanders campaign as a sure loser following Hillary's solid victory on Saturday in the Nevada caucuses. Nevada was important for Bernie, and in many ways it seemed ready-made for his anti-establishment candidacy, given the state's higher-than-average union density and its long suffering since the 2008 financial meltdown. But Hillary beat him, and she beat him handily in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its heavy Latino population and its union casino workers.

And herein lies a mystery. Based on entrance and exit polling, Bernie won the Latino vote in Saturday's caucus by eight points. Then how is it that Hillary beat him by 11 points in Clark County? This has created a kerfuffle with number-cruncher Nate Cohn, "No, the Polling Doesn’t Prove Bernie Sanders Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada," rejecting the polls. Charles Blow summarizes in his anti-Bernie column, "Bernie Sanders Hits a Roadblock":

According to the entrance poll, Sanders also won the Hispanic vote, but this is where some prominent poll watchers took exception to the poll’s accuracy. 

The New York Times’s Nate Cohn tweeted: 

“Based on the results in Clark, the precincts in ELV, and the overall entrance poll error, I do not believe Sanders won the Hispanic vote.” 

ELV, or East Las Vegas, is the largely Hispanic part of Clark County, by far the most populous county in the state, where actual results showed Clinton winning handily. 

Nate Silver tweeted support for Cohn’s analysis: 

“We share @nate cohn skepticism about entrance poll finding that Clinton lost Hispanics in Nevada.”

I think this anomaly can be explained by a passage from the post-election dispatch written by Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy, "Hillary Clinton Beats Bernie Sanders in Nevada Caucuses":

Her support among labor also ran deep, even though the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 57,000 members, many of whom are Latino, declined to endorse a candidate. But on Thursday, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who also remained neutral, said in an interview he had spoken to D. Taylor, the head of the union’s parent group, to make sure its members could have paid time off to participate in the caucuses, a move that operatives in the state believed helped tip the race in Mrs. Clinton’s favor. 

She overwhelmingly defeated Mr. Sanders in the caucuses that were held at six major Las Vegas casinos, including Harrah’s, the Wynn and New York-New York, which heavily drew working-class minority voters.

Caucuses are not secret ballots. Leadership of the Culinary Workers Union, despite a professed neutrality, got time loss for its members to caucus for Hillary. The members did so, but many on the way in and on the way out identified as Bernie supporters. That is why there is a disconnect between the polling and the actual outcome in Clark County.

What does it all mean? Certainly not how Team Clinton is spinning the win this morning as somehow foreshadowing an inevitable triumph in the primary. Hillary won 19 delegates to Bernie's 14. That's it. Even Cohn sees the Nevada results as proof that the Sanders campaign has reason to hope he can diminish Hillary's advantage among people of color:

The actual election returns in Las Vegas’s Clark County hint at a different story. Analyzed neighborhood by neighborhood, they suggest that Mrs. Clinton might have won the Hispanic vote by a comfortable margin. She won about 60 percent of delegates in heavily Hispanic areas, a result that calls the finding of the polling into question.

There is not much evidence, though, that Mrs. Clinton won Hispanic voters by the sort of landslide margin that she did eight years ago. That’s a good sign for Mr. Sanders, who needs to make up for the huge swing among black voters, who have gone from uniformly for President Obama to uniformly for Mrs. Clinton.

So we need to take with a grain of salt Patrick Healy's frontpage headline this morning, "Delegate Count Leaving Bernie Sanders With Steep Climb." There is plenty within the guts of Healy's story which should give the Clintonistas pause:

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate. She is likely to win a delegate jackpot from the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas in the Southern-dominated Super Tuesday primaries on March 1, when 11 states will vote and about 880 delegates will be awarded. 

Since delegates are awarded proportionally based on vote tallies in congressional districts and some other areas, only blowout victories yield large numbers of delegates. And Mrs. Clinton is better positioned than Mr. Sanders to win big in more delegate-rich districts, like those carved out to ensure minority Democrats in Congress, where she remains popular.

“She could effectively end the race in less than two weeks’ time on Super Tuesday,” said David Wasserman, a top analyst for The Cook Political Report, who has been closely tracking the delegate race. 

Of course, politics is unpredictable, as this cycle’s presidential campaign has demonstrated. Mrs. Clinton will face questions about her candidacy, including the outcome of an F.B.I. investigation into the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Mr. Sanders has shown an ability to create grass-roots excitement in surprising places.

Still, while Mrs. Clinton is far from reaching 2,383 delegates, she is poised to create the sort of mathematical quandary for Mr. Sanders that she faced in 2008. That winter, Barack Obama used an 11-state winning streak to establish a lead of 100 delegates that Mrs. Clinton was never able to surmount. While a similar streak is unlikely this year, advisers to Mr. Sanders concede that Mrs. Clinton could generate a significant delegate lead now that she has momentum from her Nevada win. But they say they are not out of the running. 

“The Clintons can get a delegate lead quicker than we can, and they have a way to gut out the delegate fight,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders. “We have to turn victories in state after state into big momentum that can change the numbers.” 

Mrs. Clinton already has a huge lead over Mr. Sanders in support from superdelegates — elected officials and party elders who each count toward the magic number of 2,383. But superdelegates could switch candidates if Mr. Sanders is the overwhelming choice of regular voters. 

For now, Mrs. Clinton is focused on building her lead among so-called pledged delegates — those awarded proportionally by congressional districts from primary and caucus results. Mr. Sanders is aiming to score wins in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere. Small margins of victory keep delegate allocations roughly even. A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.

The support for Bernie is not going to evaporate. It is hardcore. It provides a solid foundation of funds and grassroots all across the country. For example, I attended a "Labor for Bernie" rally yesterday at 4 PM -- this is 4 PM on a Sunday afternoon, a time when a lot of people are doing grocery shopping and getting ready for the work week -- and the hall was packed. More chairs repeatedly had to be hauled in to accommodate the overflow. Several state legislators were in prominent attendance. This is not a Howard Dean type of movement that is going to suddenly collapse. This is a long haul operation of people who want to tear down a system that is multiplying wars and planetary destruction faster than most can track.

The fight is just getting started. What happens, as Healy alludes, when the FBI comes back with evidence of wrongdoing? How about the transcriptions of those Goldman speeches? Hillary's corpse might appear reanimated but the stench is still there.

As for Trump, only the most committed dead-enders can deny the obvious: After Super Tuesday the GOP nomination will be Trump's.

The fantasy being peddled by Republican apparatchiks is that the race will turn into a two-way contest between Rubio and Trump, and Trump, who has never proven that he can muster much more than 30%, will fall to the more centrist candidate. This is all summarized in Nate Silver's "Trump Optimists And Trump Skeptics Are About To Go To War."

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes Cruz is going to get out the race, and he is not. He's got too much money.

New Hampshire

What we are witnessing now in the Clinton campaign, in the media monopoly that backs her, and among her campaign surrogates is mounting panic. We saw it with Bill Clinton rambling on about Sanders' deceit and misogyny to a less-than-overflowing crowd at a New Hampshire junior high school. It was also on display when Gloria Steinem, feminist museum piece, dismissed as cock chasing the large advantage Bernie Sanders enjoys among young women.

It is pathetic. But it is not arbitrary or capricious. It is a centralized decision by Team Hillary to go negative in the run up to the primary today in an attempt to keep Sanders from a double-digit win.

Here is the CNN New Hampshire polling snapshot from yesterday:

On the eve of New Hampshire's presidential primaries, a new CNN Poll of Polls finds both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are holding on to substantial leads in their respective races, but each faces an opponent whose support is on the rise.

Sanders' 54% to 40% advantage over Hillary Clinton is down slightly from a 55% to 37% lead in the previous Poll of Polls. No public polling has found Clinton in the lead in New Hampshire since November.

Trump tops the GOP field with 31%, well ahead of Marco Rubio's 15%. Rubio has picked up four points since the previous New Hampshire Poll of Polls, the biggest change in the averages in the last week. Ted Cruz follows with 13%, John Kasich at 11% and Jeb Bush at 10%. This pack of four -- Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush -- has been jockeying for second place in the state for some time. The fifth candidate often included in the group, Chris Christie, has generally seen his support dwindle, and now stands well behind, dropping two points in this week's Poll of Polls to an average of 5%. Carly Fiorina ties Christie at 5% and Ben Carson rounds out the group with 3%.

Politics is not rocket science. Certain things are known to work, one of them is negative campaigning. It doesn't drive support to your candidate; it drives down the support for your opponent, particularly if your opponent is buoyed by idealistic, young, first-time voters who still believe a better world is possible. Going on the attack, accusing your opponent (and, by association, his supporters) of dishonesty and base intentions, is the equivalent of a blow to the face. Most people can't take being hit in the face. So these voters stop participating. I saw it up close in the heady days post-Nader 2000. Once idealistic young Greens figured out that people despised them and that the foundation of politics was conflict and quid pro quo they melted away, back to their lives as spectators.

The goal for Hillary is to keep Sanders' margin of victory in the single digits and then claim victory based on that result. The template here is what Slick Willie did in New Hampshire in 1992 against Paul Tsongas. Clinton came in second, losing by eight points; but he did better than expected and dubbed himself "The Comeback Kid," which the media monopoly dutifully gobbled up.

Signs are that Hillary's negativism is paying off. But it looks like it's too late to keep Bernie from a double-digit win. Nate Cohn has a good New Hampshire rundown this morning in "New Hampshire Should Answer a Lot of Key Questions":

The race may have tightened since the last debate. The five polls released after the debate last week showed Hillary Clinton faring seven points better, on average, than a prior batch of polls. On the other hand, those prior polls showed her behind by an average of 15 points, so there may be some “reversion to the mean” at play — it might be that the five previous polls were unrealistically good for Mr. Sanders, not that Mrs. Clinton actually gained. 

It would be tough to dismiss a huge Mr. Sanders victory simply by saying he’s well known in Vermont. That’s certainly true compared with the rest of the country, but it seems like a stretch to argue that the average New Hampshire voter should be extremely predisposed toward Mr. Sanders. 

Ninety percent of the New Hampshire Democratic electorate isn’t in the Burlington, Vt., media market, and the state’s most populous area — the southeastern section — is also the area farthest from Vermont. It was also Mrs. Clinton’s strongest area in 2008. Whether Mr. Sanders can beat here there, or at least do better than Barack Obama did in 2008, could offer real insight into the extent of Mr. Sanders’s appeal.

Bernie wins New Hampshire. The only way the narrative gets difficult is if he beats Hillary by only a few points. But whether it is nine points or 13, I don't think it makes much difference going into Nevada and South Carolina. The race really begins in Nevada. We will know how much mojo Bernie has based on how he does there. Hillary beat Obama in Nevada in 2008.

The same metric applies to Trump in New Hampshire. He has led there for a long time by a wide margin. If he wins in a squeaker, following his disappointing performance in the Potemkin village of American democracy, the Iowa caucuses, then his path to the Republican nomination becomes a trail of tears. But the New Hampshire narrative for the last week has been all about Marco Rubio. Chris Christie bitch-slapped him repeatedly Saturday night during the Republican debate hosted by ABC, and Rubio didn't look good handling it.

I watched the debate; it's the first GOP performance I have seen. What struck me is how threadbare the whole affair appeared. It reminded me of employees who have worked together for decades trapped in the company break room sniping at each other; that, or hungover fraternity brothers arguing in the filth of the kitchen the morning after a big house party. Trump looked tired. Ben Carson came off as an imbecile. Chris Christie, a bully. Marco Rubio, a hot young stupid ambitious chick in "come-fuck-me" pumps. Jeb Bush, a manikin. Ted Cruz, the second coming of Tricky Dick Nixon. John Kasich, probably the best of the bunch, but no one you would ever want to vote for anyway. ABC framed the debate like a sporting event with shots of the candidates walking through halls like boxers with their entourages on the way to the ring or footballers coming out the tunnel. Marco Rubio even had earbuds draped over his Oxford, reminiscent of so many athletes you see dismounting the team bus with their Beats headphones.

My preference for the #2 slot in the GOP New Hampshire primary, ahead of Kasich or Bush at #3, is Chris Christie. The guy is a toxic force, a lethal debater, extremely unappealing, a blowhard. Christie at #2 would shake things up.

Iowa Post-Mortem: GOP's Boy Wonder Appears, Trump Actually Does Quite Well and Signs of Clinton Meltdown

The tendency will be to say the big takeaway from the Iowa caucuses is that Donald Trump shit the bed, coming in second as he did to the vile Ted Cruz, and not necessarily by a minute margin either with the Texan champion of the GOP Tea Party makeover beating the Manhattan real estate mogul 27.7% to 24.4%.

But that is not my takeaway. My takeaway is that the Iowa caucuses offered a smorgasbord for Republicans, giving every significant segment of the fractured party a reason to crow. For starters, evangelicals proved once again that victory for a GOP candidate in Iowa is dependent on their faith-based network. Cruz joins Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012) as winner of the caucuses thanks to the Christian vote. And as Huckabee and Santorum managed to linger on after Iowa without ever dominating the race again, so too will be the fate of Ted Cruz.

For the party establishment, Iowa delivered the joyful verdict that Marco Rubio is indeed a player. Rubio came in third, just a little more than a point behind Trump. For months Rubio has been puffed as the future of the party, the bright, new face of the GOP, and he came through after really only spending January in the Hawkeye State. Reince Priebus must be tickled pink this morning. If Rubio performs well again next Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary, while Bush, Kasich and Christie underperform, the pressure from on high will be for the also-rans to get out of the race and fall in behind Norman Braman's page-boy.

For Donald Trump, all is not lost. In fact, I would say, if not "mission accomplished," then "one helluva job." An all-time record was established for participation in a Republican Iowa caucus, with 46% showing up to his/her first caucus (roughly equal to Bernie's draw in the Dem caucuses, though not up to the 57% Obama drew in 2008). And Trump had basically no ground game to speak of. This is from the frontpager in today's New York Times, Jonathan Martin's "Ted Cruz Wins Republican Caucuses in Iowa":

Turnout was about 185,000, a record, according to Edison Research, which conducted entrance polls at precincts across the state. Mr. Trump’s success had been expected to hinge on whether he could mobilize his supporters. But the turnout was not enough to deliver him a win, even though 46 percent of those who turned out were participating in a Republican caucus for the first time. 

Instead, Mr. Trump paid the price for building only a rudimentary political organization in the state: The brew of energy and anger powering his candidacy did not fully translate into votes.

This lack of ground game will not be a problem in the upcoming primary states. Trump is unsinkable; his loss to Cruz is of very little importance. What should be very troubling to Trump is the emergence of Rubio as a candidate with comparable heft. As long as Rubio remains in the frame, come convention time the party will do everything in its power to deliver the nomination to him.

When it comes to the Democratic results in Iowa, the tie between Hillary and Bernie is almost as good as a victory for the Sanders camp. Clearly the Clintons were anticipating a victory and the spate of "Go home, Bernie; you're a fringe candidate after all" stories to follow. Now the opposite is happening. Take the opening to this morning's frontpager by Patrick Healy, "Little Separates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in Tight Race in Iowa":

The close results were deeply unnerving to Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as well as her advisers, some of whom had expressed growing confidence in recent days that they had recaptured political momentum after weeks when Mr. Sanders was drawing huge crowds and rising in the polls. The Clintons had appeared optimistic at rallies over the weekend, thanking Iowans for their support as much as urging them to turn out to vote.

The close vote means that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are likely to split Iowa’s share of delegates to the Democratic convention, and Mr. Sanders will be able to argue that the Iowa result was a virtual tie.

The Clinton team was counting on its huge, well-trained army of volunteers, covering all of Iowa’s 1,681 voting precincts, to counter the enormous enthusiasm of voters who jammed into events to hear Mr. Sanders. But his well-financed Iowa organization was able to convert the energy of his crowds into voters on Monday night, as he drew huge numbers of first-time caucusgoers, young people and liberals who responded to his rallying cry against the nation’s “rigged economy.”

The virtual tie between the two candidates instantly raised the stakes for their next face-off, the primary next Tuesday in New Hampshire. Mr. Sanders holds a solid lead in polls there and has the advantage of being from Vermont; candidates from neighboring states have won the state’s primary in recent decades, and Mr. Sanders is admired in the state.

Clinton advisers said late Monday night that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were discussing bringing on additional staff members to strengthen her campaign operation now that a pitched battle may lie ahead against Mr. Sanders. The advisers said they did not know if a significant staff shakeup was at hand, but they said that the Clintons were disappointed with Monday night’s result and wanted to ensure that her organization, political messaging and communications strategy were in better shape for the contests to come.

Even more damning is Clinton beat reporter Amy Chozick's "Tight Democratic Race in Iowa Unnerves Clinton Campaign." Campaign manager Robby Mook appears to be headed for the chopping block:

Even before Mrs. Clinton finished her brief remarks to her supporters late Monday night, discussions were underway among her outside advisers and donors about the need to bring in longtime Clinton aides and diminish the role of Robby Mook, her young data-driven campaign manager. Asked about such discussions, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the campaign, grew irritated. “Are you serious?” he said tersely to a reporter. 

Next to a commanding five-point win, Bernie could not have asked for anything more. Mook is the guy who was saying from the outset Hillary could return the Obama coalition to the polls. I'm sure at this point Slick Willie has put his foot down and told John Podesta to get serious.

The Opium of the White Masses: OxyContin and Donald Trump

Wife and husband Anne Case and Angus Deaton have published a paper, "Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century," that has provided grist for the commentariat the last couple of days. On Sunday, conservative columnist Ross Douhat weighed in with "The Dying of the Whites," while yesterday liberal lion Paul Krugman stepped into the ring with "Despair, American Style." The abstract to the Case-Deaton paper reads as follows:

This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population. We comment on potential economic causes and consequences of this deterioration.

Krugman is right to compare what is going on now in the U.S. for whites to what happened in Russia after collapse of the Soviet Union:

Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.

Sadly, for aging white America, the savior waiting in the wings is no Vladimir Putin; he is, as Douhat remarks, Donald Trump:

Yet here, too, Deaton and Case’s data is somewhat confounding, because if economic stress were all, you would expect the mortality crisis to manifest itself more sharply among black and Hispanic Americans — who have consistently higher unemployment rates than their white neighbors, and lag whites in wealth by far.

But in fact the mortality rate for minorities in the U.S. continued to fall between 1999 and 2013, mirroring the trend in Europe, and the African-American death rate in particular fell hugely. Amid the stresses of the dot-com bust and the Great Recession, it was only white Americans who turned increasingly to drugs, liquor and quietus. 

Why only them? One possible solution is suggested by a paper from 2012, whose co-authors include Andrew Cherlin and Brad Wilcox, leading left and right-leaning scholars, respectively, of marriage and family. 

Noting that religious practice has fallen faster recently among less-educated whites than among less-educated blacks and Hispanics, their paper argues that white social institutions, blue-collar as well as white-collar, have long reflected a “bourgeois moral logic” that binds employment, churchgoing, the nuclear family and upward mobility.

But in an era of stagnating wages, family breakdown, and social dislocation, this logic no longer seems to make as much sense. The result is a mounting feeling of what the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher calls white “dispossession” — a sense of promises broken, a feeling that what you were supposed to have has been denied to you. (The Donald Trump phenomenon, Dreher notes, feeds off precisely this anxiety.)

The Walmarting of America, the blasting to smithereens of towns and small cities by big box outlet stores, the offshoring of U.S. industrial capacity, a political class that suckles exclusively on the corporate tit, all this and more explains the rise in morbidity in less-educated whites. If they can put away their Budweiser and OxyContin long enough to make it to the polls, Donald Trump will be the next POTUS.

Carson's moment in the spotlight is fast fading. And it appears that with the two main contenders for the establishment GOP crown on the threshold of mutually assured destruction, The Donald is once again in the catbird seat.

Authoritarianism in Turkey and the United States + Islamic State Responds to Russia

Turkish president Recep Erdoğan's strategy of tension appears to have paid off. His Justice and Development Party (AKP), confounding pollsters who predicted another dead-heat election, has won a majority in parliament. It took the shredding of a ceasefire with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and sowing divisions in Turkish society that will not be bridged anytime soon, but it guarantees that Erdoğan will remain in power for the foreseeable future and that he will take a crack at revision of the constitution to formalize an executive presidency. Right now the presidency is mostly a ceremonial post, which necessitates that Erdoğan rule through cut-outs like prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu report in "Erdogan’s Party in Turkey Regains Parliamentary Majority":

With 99 percent of the votes counted, according to the state broadcaster TRT, the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., captured 49.3 percent of the popular vote, giving it a solid majority of 316 seats in Parliament.

The victory for the A.K.P. came at great cost to the cohesion of Turkish society. Critics say Mr. Erdogan’s divisive rhetoric, by denigrating opponents as terrorists or traitors, helped polarize the country. And a government crackdown on dissent in the lead-up to the vote, with mobs attacking newspaper offices and a recent raid on a media conglomerate opposed to the government, raised concerns abroad about Turkey’s commitment to democracy.

Erdoğan's raids on and closure of opposition media has an approximate parallel in the United States. The Republican National Committee (RNC), following the CNBC-hosted GOP debate last Wednesday, pulled a debate scheduled for February that was to be televised by NBC News and Telemundo. The feeling among the Republican presidential candidates, as well as the RNC, is that questions from the moderators have been hostile. The candidates are seeking to have more control over the process. To that end, they convened in Alexandria, VA in an attempt to articulate a negotiating position towards the networks.

As Ashley Parker notes in "Republican Campaigns Meet in an Effort to Alter Debates":

They emerged with a modest list of demands, including opening and closing statements of at least 30 seconds; “parity and integrity” on questions, meaning that all candidates would receive similarly substantive questions; no so-called lightning rounds; and approval of any graphics that are aired during the debate.

The campaign representatives also moved to take the Republican National Committee out of the debate negotiating process, calling for the campaigns to negotiate directly with the TV networks over format, and to receive information about the rules and criteria at least 30 days before each debate.

Ben Ginsberg, a top Republican lawyer and debate negotiator who was invited to serve as a facilitator at the meeting, is drafting a letter — without the R.N.C.’s input — that the campaigns plan to send to the networks within 48 hours. Mr. Ginsberg called the committee immediately after the meeting to convey the group’s next steps.

It is hard to generate any sense of outrage on behalf of the corporate networks or the sidelined RNC. The media monopoly and the national duopoly central committees are working hard to make sure that the candidates who have raised the most corporate cheddar are waved through to the general election. This means Hillary, and now, with the approval of billionaire investor Paul Singer, Marco Rubio.

Nonetheless, the orchestrated Republican attacks on the liberal bias of the corporate mainstream media reek of authoritarianism.

Sadly, as Erdoğan proved again yesterday, authoritarianism works. It is just in the case of the CNBC debate brouhaha authoritarianism is being used against the font of authority, the mainstream corporate media. So who knows how this is all going to play out in the GOP primary.

I think it is pretty safe to say that the corporate mainstream has successfully circled the wagons around Hillary. With the phony challenge of a Biden bid successfully surmounted, her first debate performance hailed as a commanding victory and the Benghazi committee hearing rapidly receding in her rear-view mirror, Hillary is all set to roll up Sanders come Super Tuesday.

A triumphant Erdoğan means that Europe will come a-calling again in search of a solution to the refugee crisis, a crisis which promises to grow more acute. Turkey's election in June, the one that failed to deliver Erdoğan his majority, was purported to be a referendum of Turkish disapproval of the war in Syria. Now that Erdoğan is in possession of his majority I would imagine that Turkish support for jihadist networks in Syria and attacks on Kurds will be amplified.

The downing of a Russian charter jet in Egypt is clearly the work of jihadists. Islamic State in the Sinai is claiming responsibility. Yet the West is putting up a smokescreen, saying that it couldn't be a jihadist group because such groups don't possess surface-to-air missiles. Poppycock. No such hedging was indulged when it came to blaming Novorossiyan forces for the downing of MH17. What we have here is a reprisal for Russia's forceful entry into the war in Syria.

Russia's reply should be interesting. For what it is worth, if I were a ruling member of the House of Saud, I would be nervous.

The "Moderate" Counterfeit: Syria and the U.S.

I have noticed an interesting parallel: The use of the term "moderate" in glaringly different contexts but for the same basic purpose, to mock up support where there really isn't any to speak of. Call it the "moderate" counterfeit.

In the first context, the World War in Syria, the term "moderate" anchors the main fiction of U.S. foreign policy there, that Syria is convulsed by a civil war in which a bloodthirsty dictator, Bashar al-Assad, propped up by authoritarian allies in Iran and Russia, slaughters a "moderate" civil opposition who is looking to a benevolent Uncle Sam for support. That is the cover story. What is really going on is that Syria is being invaded by foreign jihadist mercenaries, bankrolled by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Despite spending half a billion dollars to form a "moderate" fighting force to combat ISIS in northern Syria, the Pentagon came up empty. You would think that this would spur a Congressional investigation or two and possible some heads would roll. But actually nothing of the sort will happen; in fact, the Pentagon is looking for a $100-million increase in the program in next year's budget. According to this morning's "Foreign Policy - Situation Report" by Paul McLeary and Adam Rawnsley,

Missiles for all my friends. Not all train and equip programs are created equal. While the effort by U.S. Special Forces to train a Syrian force of about 5,000 “moderate” fighters by the end of this year has flamed out, the Washington Post takes a look at the other, more successful U.S. train and equip program in Syria -- the CIA's supply of TOW missiles to rebels.

The missiles have been so successful on the battlefield that the rebels have taken to calling it the “Assad Tamer.” The program has been going on for several years, and during the recent Russian-backed offensive by Syrian forces, rebels have been posting videos of the missiles taking out Syrian tanks and armored vehicles. While a significant capability, the Raytheon-made missiles -- coming mostly from the 13,000 purchased by the Saudi government in 2013 -- have so far been unable to significantly change the situation on the ground, as Syrian forces continue to push rebels out of their positions in Idlib, Hama, and Latakia provinces.

Not dead, just less oversight! The Pentagon’s scuttled training program may be gone, but the effort lives on. Despite insisting for months that every single Syrian fighter needed to be vetted by U.S. forces before being issued weapons, White House and Pentagon officials on Friday said that actually, the opposite is true. On a call with reporters, Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, said only the leaders of various trusted rebel groups will be vetted, and they’ll be trusted to pass out U.S.-supplied weapons and supplies to their troops as they see fit. “We have been working with these groups for months,” she said, and the United States will now “build on that and work with groups on the ground who are already fighting ISIL and provide them some equipment.” She wouldn’t comment on the kinds of equipment specifically, other than to say it will not include “higher-end” weapons like anti-tank rockets and ground-to-air missiles.

The original program may be dead, but like all good Pentagon initiatives, the funding stream lives on. The Pentagon has asked for $600 million to fund it in the 2016 budget, and Capitol Hill appears willing to go along, despite Republican and Democratic lawmakers having recently called the training effort “a joke,” a “total failure,” and “a bigger disaster than I could have ever imagined.”

Hard to believe. But there it is. The fiction of a vibrant "moderate" opposition and the necessity of a well-funded program in the Pentagon to support it is too important for something as disposable as the truth.

Another context where "moderate" is used to anchor an Oz-like fictitious social construct is in the 2016 presidential race. "Moderates" are the wellspring of the "mainstream" candidacies of Jeb Bush and Hillary. ("Moderates" written without the quote marks -- apparently the fiction of moderates on the battlefield in Syria can be designated in quotation as an Obama administration contrivance, but moderates in the U.S. electorate much be vouchsafed as legitimate; hence, no quote marks.)

To get a sense of how the term "moderate" is used in the context of the 2016 presidential primary contest, let us turn to the Gray Lady's principal electoral tea-leaves reader, Nate Cohn ("Why Marco Rubio’s Chances Are Rising"):

A lot has changed since April, when Marco Rubio announced his presidential bid. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was the top candidate of mainstream conservative activists and donors. Jeb Bush seemed like a fund-raising juggernaut with natural appeal to the party’s moderate voters, who play an underrated role in the Republican primary process. Mr. Rubio, a broadly appealing candidate but the top choice of few, looked boxed out.

Today, Mr. Rubio isn’t blocked. Instead, he has a big opening. 

Mr. Walker dropped out of the race, and Mr. Bush does not look nearly as strong as it seemed he might. Mr. Bush hasn’t won many endorsements, he isn’t faring well in the polls, and his impressive fund-raising reflects a narrow base of strong support from wealthy super PAC donors, not wide support by party elites.

As Cohn lines out, Bush's oasis of mass moderate support turned out to be a mirage. This doesn't stop Cohn from pressing on to claim an opportunity for the ridiculous Rubio to tap the same "oasis" of "moderate" support.

The same can be said for Cohn's recent think-piece ("Joe Biden: No Money, Weak Polls, but Still Clinton’s Toughest Rival") where he buttresses Hillary's front-runner status, with, yes, you guessed it, her appeal to "moderate" voters:

Among nonwhite voters, [Hillary] leads Mr. Sanders in a one-on-one contest by a huge margin of 71 percent to 16 percent. 

Similarly, she leads among moderate voters by a margin of 63 to 23 points. The race is closer among whites and liberals, but she still takes a slight lead among both groups in a head-to-head contest with Mr. Sanders.

Mr. Sanders said earlier this year that he thought he had a chance to break into Mrs. Clinton’s coalition by winning support from working-class voters. Perhaps he can. But his opponent is a candidate with universal name recognition, tremendous backing from party elites and considerable financial and organizational resources. These factors make her far less vulnerable than other candidates to perceptions of momentum — in which voters who don’t follow the campaign very closely can flock to someone who seems to be gaining.

At the end of the quote, the underlined portion, you get the real definition of "moderate" in the U.S. electoral system -- someone who is basically ignorant and who will vote for the candidate with the greatest name recognition and the largest number of commercials on television.

While in years past -- when there was at least a modicum of hope in the future -- this would be plenty to win an election, now, things are different. Look at Jeb Bush. There are few "moderates" these days.