2016 election
793 pieces tagged “2016 election”, newest first.
Biden on Running: 'I Just Don't Know'
It's getting late in the game for such equivocation.
Ben Carson, a Superior Outsider
While Jeb Bush feuds with Donald Trump and others kowtow to him, only one candidate is seriously gaining on him. Ben Carson is now tied with Trump in one Iowa poll and is close in others. His rise suggests that it's possible to catch the populist wave roiling Republican politics and yet not be an obnoxious braggart. Ben Carson is a superior outsider to Donald Trump.
Joe Biden's Yuck Factor
Next week, as rumors swirl of his possible entry into the 2016 presidential race, Vice President Joe Biden will appear on liberal comedian Stephen Colbert's new late-night CBS show. The host is a professional clown. The VIP guest is a political clown with more baggage than the Kardashians during Paris fashion week. Setting aside the past plagiarism, fabulism, K Street cronyism, chronic gaffes and the stagnant aroma of 4-decades-old Beltway entrenchment, though, Biden's two biggest cultural liabilities currently on the table (and everywhere else) are his grabby paws: Groper One and Groper Two. Seriously, those two troublesome tentacles need to be wrapped in yellow caution tape and stamped with a trigger warning. Joe's yuck factor is no joke.
Donald Trump's Appeal Is Based on Yesterday's News
Aside from the court-ordered dribbling out of Hillary Clinton's classified-material-filled emails, the big presidential campaign news of the summer has been the boom for Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. Trump has risen from 3 percent in the polls (when he announced on June 16) to where he now stands at 26 percent — 14 percent ahead of any other candidate. Trump is drawing support from a constituency that in many ways resembles that amassed by another celebrity candidate who defied the usual political rules, Ross Perot in 1992. Like Perot, Trump runs better among whites than blacks, among men than women, among non-college graduates than college grads, in the suburbs and countryside than in big cities. Like Perot, he does not run especially strong among traditionally religious voters.
Obama Wins; America Loses, Servergate Gets Serious, Poll Position
[Wednesday], Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski became the 34th senator to support the Iranian nuclear deal. Her support gives President Obama the votes needed to sustain his veto of a congressional resolution disapproving the deal. That means this terrible deal will likely go into effect. This is a hollow victory for Obama and the deal's supporters. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 66% of likely voters believe that the deal should not go into effect unless Congress approves it. But that isn't going to happen because most members of Congress will not vote for this bad deal. And it is a bad deal.
Why Clinton Remains, Yes, Inevitable
Unless she's indicted, Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination. That kind of sentence is rarely written about a major presidential candidate. But I don't see a realistic third alternative (except for one long-shot, below). Clinton is now hostage to the various investigations — the FBI, Congress, the courts — of her emails. The issue has already damaged her seriously by highlighting once again her congenital inability to speak truthfully. When the scandal broke in March, she said unequivocally that she "did not email any classified material to anyone." That's now been shown to be unequivocally false. After all, the inspector general of the intelligence community referred her emails to the Justice Department precisely because they contain classified material.
President Obama's Peculiarity
This week I am filing a world exclusive! Remember, you read it here first! For years I have maintained a team of investigators sedulously trailing our president. They have studied pictures of him. They have inquired of photographers and camera crews who employ both still and video cameras to cover the president. My investigators have interviewed White House journalists, occasionally White House employees and, of course, White House visitors and even tourists. All have been asked the same question: "Have you ever seen the president's shadow?"
Iran's Shopping Spree, Act of Love, Bashing Boehner, Forgotten Already
Advocates of the nuclear treaty with Iran, including President Obama, have repeatedly claimed that the agreement strengthens moderates and will change Iran's behavior. They are wrong. [Monday], Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, chief of Tehran's top clerical body, said that the United States remains Iran's "number one enemy" and that the nuclear treaty changes nothing.
Eric Cantor: Poster Boy of the Beltway GOP Crapweasels
Ooouuuch. My sides are still aching after last week's comical announcement by GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush that he had snagged the coveted endorsement of notorious electoral reject Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader kicked to the curb by disgusted voters in Virginia's 2014 primary election. Newsflash to GOP elites: Getting Cantor's support is not like landing a prized marlin. It's like hooking one of those hideous bottom-feeding blobfish named the world's ugliest creature. Inside the Beltway, The Washington Post reported, "Cantor remains well-liked and respected in the Virginia business community and among the Republican donor class in the commonwealth."
What the Other GOP Candidates Can Learn From Trump
According to polls, the No. 1 thing Donald Trump's fans like about him is that he "tells it like it is." I think his fans are wrong about this. But that's a column — actually a lot of columns — for another time. It is true, however, that there is something refreshing about the way Trump talks. It's not actually candor, though lots of people mistake it for that. Rather, he's unfiltered. The one thing you can be sure of is that he hasn't consulted with a political consultant about how to talk. He doesn't worry what the liberal editors at The New York Times or The Washington Post — or, for that matter, the conservative editors at National Review — think of him.
A Revealing Clue
Even those of us who are not supporters of either Donald Trump or Jeb Bush can learn something by comparing how each of these men handled people who tried to disrupt their question-and-answer period after a speech. After Bush's speech, hecklers from a group called "Black Lives Matter" caused Bush to simply leave the scene. When Trump opened his question-and-answer period by pointing to someone in the audience who had a question, a Hispanic immigration activist who had not been called on simply stood up and started haranguing.
Poll Position, Lives Matter
New polling out of Iowa is sending shock waves throughout the political establishments of both parties. A Des Moines Register poll of likely caucus goers finds Bernie Sanders surging to within seven points of Hillary Clinton. Thirty percent of Iowa Democrats back the Vermont socialist compared to 37% for Clinton. Fourteen percent of Democrats back Vice President Joe Biden. Pollsters note that Hillary has lost one-third of her support and see another potential upset in the making. Among young Iowa Democrats, Sanders beats Clinton by 23 points. He leads among likely first-time caucus goers by 12 points. It was this kind of enthusiasm that Obama successfully channeled to overcome the Clinton machine in 2008.
Let's See More of Hillary Now, to See Less of Her Later
Hillary Clinton shows signs of anger and desperation and pops out of her shell with shrill and extreme rhetoric. She should be nervous, with both the feds and rivals breathing down her neck. But she's no more effective at scaring her attackers than any other turtle under siege. She should retreat back inside, where at least her handlers can pretend she's presidential — and inevitable. Her bunker mentality leads to unforced errors, such as irately exclaiming to Congress regarding Benghazi, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" But the more rattled she is the more she'll emerge.
Another Impossible Thing May Happen: Change in Partisan Alignments
In my last column, I looked at the possibility of two impossible things — impossible things in the sense used by Alice and the Red Queen — happening in the already turbulent 2016 presidential cycle. Here I'll look at another: the possibility that the partisan division lines that have endured with little change for two decades might suddenly shift and change. This has happened before. History teaches two lessons pointing in opposite directions: Partisan divisions can stay the same for a long time. And they can change suddenly and without much warning.
Donald Trump, Eminent-Domain Abuser
Supporters of Donald Trump relish the prospect of a president who knows how to "get things done," and won't bore them with details or principles. They like hearing Trump tout the stop-at-nothing aggressiveness of his business dealings, as in this description, in a CNN interview, of how he acquired the Doral golf resort in Miami: "I didn't sit down and say 'let's do a 14-point plan.' I went in and got it. I took it away from so many people." Trump boasted of his prowess at a rally in Michigan on Aug. 11. "You have to be able to do certain things" if you want to be successful, he crowed. I "beat the hell out of people.... I know how to get things."
Caesarism Comes to the Republican Party
Among a very long list of harms inflicted upon the United States by Barack Obama and his party, perhaps the worst was Caesarism. Obama relished the worship of millions in 2008. From his star turn at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was treated not as a political candidate, but as a savior. Progressives fell into a swoon, typified by Newsweek editor Evan Thomas' 2008 comment, "I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above — above the world; he's sort of God." Now, a similar kind of unreasoning adulation is greeting (improbably enough) Donald Trump. Fred Barnes reports that a focus group of Trump supporters is swept up in a kind of worship, too: "He's not just their favorite candidate. Their tie to him is almost mystical. He's a kind of political savior, someone who says what they think."
Trump Is All Talk
Donald Trump is the first talk radio candidate. Everything he says on the primary trail sounds just like what you can hear on conservative talk radio every day. When he's riffing about the failures of the political class in Washington, calling for an end to birthright citizenship or handling a media heckler like Jorge Ramos at a press conference, Trump is talking straight to the hearts and minds of the talk radio demographic. He's not much of a conservative, or much of a Republican, for that matter.
Two Impossible Things That Could Happen in 2016
"One can't believe impossible things," Alice objected. "I daresay you haven't had much practice," the Red Queen replied. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." You may be reading this sometime after breakfast, and six is a pretty large number of impossible things. But looking at developments in the 2016 campaign, I can see two impossible things — impossible in the sense that almost every pundit (including me) ruled them out — that might happen in the weeks and months ahead.
Bush's College Plan Even Worse Than What He Recently Decried
Not the way to win over conservatives.