2016 election
793 pieces tagged “2016 election”, newest first.
'Saturday Night Live' Donates to Hillary's Campaign
"Lean on me, when you're not strong, and I'll be your friend, I'll help you carry on." The Bill Withers song has been covered by countless artists, but the rendition of "Lean on Me" performed in a duet last weekend on the season premiere of "Saturday Night Live" had novel poignancy. It was sung by Kate McKinnon, the show's go-to impersonator of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and Mrs. Clinton herself.
Clinton's Leftward Tack on Immigration and Guns Has Risks for November
You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left. This strategy has risks, as Nixon, who lost the presidency once and won it once by narrow margins, understood. Your right- or left-wing stances in the primaries can hurt in the general.
Jindal Wants Everybody to Have 'Skin in the Game'
The governor's tax reform plan starts with a simple premise.
The 'New' Hillary
Hillary Clinton is borrowing from Richard Nixon, a man she worked to impeach while a staff member of the House Judiciary Committee in the early 1970s. Like Nixon, whose handlers successfully fooled a majority of voters by trotting out a "new Nixon" after his election defeats in 1960 and 1962, Hillary Clinton is trying to change her public image with voters, a majority of whom finds her "Unlikeable," to borrow from the title of Ed Klein's new book.
The Dogs That Aren't Barking in the 2016 Campaign
Sherlock Holmes famously solved the mystery of the Silver Blaze by noting the dog that didn't bark in the night. It strikes me that in this wild and woolly campaign cycle there have been numerous dogs not barking in the night, or in the daytime either. Start with the race for the Democratic nomination, which has not unrolled as predicted. Every observer knows Hillary Clinton's numbers have been falling and Bernie Sanders' numbers have been rising, leading her in Iowa and New Hampshire. Every observer is waiting to see if Joe Biden will run, perhaps in time for the Democrats' first debate two weeks from now.
GOP Can't Win in 2016 by Losing Now
Some Republicans in Congress will never learn. This time the GOP's hard-right conservative minority had dreams of shutting Washington down over Planned Parenthood's illegal profiteering in fetal tissue from its abortion business. They hoped to defund Planned Parenthood of its half-billion in annual federal dollars by attaching a measure that did exactly that to a larger spending bill. They thought their legislative trickery would force President Obama into vetoing the spending bill, thereby shutting down the government in Washington.
Is There Any Precedent in History for Donald Trump?
In November 1964 a crowd of 5,000 attended the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, then the longest suspension bridge in the world. Presiding were New York Mayor Robert Wagner, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and transportation and parks czar Robert Moses. Also in the crowd was a teenager named Donald Trump. Trump later told a New York Times reporter that he remembered that on that occasion no one mentioned the name of 85-year-old Othmar Ammann, designer of New York's famous bridges for more than 50 years. "I realized then and there that if you let people treat you how they want, you'll be made a fool," he told the Times. "I don't want to be anyone's sucker."
The Bobblehead Campaign
America's loopy left is enamored of someone who becomes cranky about bobblehead figurines. Sober Democrats are queasy about nominating Hillary Clinton, who has much to apologize for but no aptitude for apologies. Those Republicans who hope she is denied the nomination are perhaps imprudent. And even Republicans who recoil from Donald Trump's repulsiveness might want to defer the delicious pleasure of witnessing his apoplexy when he joins, as surely he will, the ranks of those he most despises — "losers." In 2011, Bernie Sanders said "we've got some very, very serious problems" because the Founding Fathers bobbleheads sold at the Smithsonian Museum of American History were made in China. He exclaimed: "A museum owned by the people of America — a museum which talks about our own history — cannot even have products manufactured in the United States by American workers?" In a hilarious video assembled by the high-spirited folks at Reason.TV, Sanders summons Smithsonian officials to his office to grovel and promise to mend their ways. Sanders' wrath did not produce a complete purge: The museum still sells imported gimcracks.
Fiorina a Rising Conservative Star: Some Folks Need to Deal With It
Recently some detractors and uninformed people have called Carly Fiorina's conservatism into question. While I'm unaffiliated with any campaign and uncommitted to any candidate, I do think it's imperative to state Ms. Fiorina has more than earned her conservative stripes. First and foremost, Carly's pro-life credentials are outstanding and she's proving it consistently on the campaign trail. As the hideous Planned Parenthood videos have circulated, no candidate has been more vocal in calling for defunding Planned Parenthood than Carly. In spite of the national media's refusal to cover the videos, Fiorina forced the issue onto the national agenda with a powerful, moving indictment of Planned Parenthood in the CNN debate.
Walker Withdrawal Shows Changes in Republican Contest
Scott Walker's abrupt withdrawal from the Republican presidential race Monday afternoon shows how different, in ways noticed and unnoticed, this campaign cycle is from those of recent years. One obvious difference is the size of the Republican field — 17, before Walker's withdrawal and Rick Perry's withdrawal 10 days before. That has made debates unwieldy and has placed a premium on somehow emerging from the scrum. Walker didn't. He spoke for just seven minutes in the two-hour Fox News debate on Aug. 6 and the three-hour CNN debate (in which he was asked just three questions) on Sept. 16. It was not a format that favored Midwestern reticence.
Double Suicide: The Presidential Campaign of 2015
For the GOP, this has all been a godsend, an opportunity to amplify the case being made every day by the Democrats themselves against their own stewardship. Instead, the Republicans spent the summer attacking each other — the festival of ad hominems interrupted only by spectacular attempts to alienate major parts of the citizenry. The latest example is Ben Carson, the mild-mannered, highly personable neurosurgeon and one of two highest-polling GOP candidates. He said on Sunday that a Muslim should not be president of the United States.
Donald Amongst the Eggheads
Hold on to your toupees, the conservative intellectuals are in a stew. One candidate in the race for the Republican presidential nomination is not playing by the rules. He is rude and crude and having a very good time of it. Oh, and by the way, he is leading the field by a lot. He has 29 percent of the vote among Republicans, according to an NBC online survey the other day. His next closest opponent is Dr. Ben Carson, with 14 percent, and after that Carly Fiorina, with 11 percent. Both, incidentally, are new to politics, as is the target of the conservative intellectuals' wrath, Donald Trump. Interestingly, the intellectuals are markedly out of touch with the conservative rank and file.
Carly Fiorina: Major Leaguer
To invoke a baseball metaphor, Carly Fiorina has been called up from the minors to the major leagues. After her widely praised debate performance last week, she can expect "fastballs" to be thrown at her head, not only by some of her Republican opponents, but by Democrats. It has already started. The first pitch at Fiorina is the number of jobs lost during her tenure as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. While some say she is technically correct that the company's income grew while she ran it, thousands of people lost their jobs, as did many others during the 1990s economic downturn in the technology industry. There is a good answer for this beyond the technical one she has been giving and it can be grafted into an argument about the need to reduce the size and cost of the federal government.
The Quiet Counter-Revolution Gets Louder: Essential Lessons for the GOP
For some years, below the surface, a quiet counter-revolution has been advancing in the base of the Republican Party and in the country in general, while the party's establishment elites in Washington have continued on with business as usual, seemingly oblivious to the unrest of the rank and file, as if fly-over red state voters could be taken for granted. This counter-revolution was conceived and undertaken to change the trajectory of America's departure from its founding principles — to bring reform to the GOP rather than to overthrow the party. In short, the hope was to reverse Republican establishment diffidence about out-of-control, unaccountable government and its attendant crony corruption.
Scoring the Great Debate
I didn't watch CNN's telecast of the Republican debate because I was there in person. For some reason — maybe it was my last name — I was able to score three second-row seats at the Reagan Library for the two debates. More than 20 million people around the world tuned in, apparently making the three-hour debate CNN's highest rated show ever.
The Long Debate
It was a long debate. "The Sound of Music" with Julie Andrews clocked in at three hours. The CNN debate in Simi Valley, Calif., ran longer than that. It became an endurance contest between a lot of politicians used to East Coast time. By the time they were done, it was after 11 p.m. What we learned along the way was that Carly Fiorina is ready for prime time. In Ohio, Fiorina sat at the kids' table debate. CNN actually shifted its polling requirements a bit to accommodate for the rise of Fiorina after that first debate. It was to the network's credit that they did so.