Back then, if you had told Clinton’s campaign that she would be outraised by that Vermont socialist, that she would be losing younger Democrats, including young women, by landslide proportions, and that she would be facing a months-long slog through every primary—you would have been accused of smoking some of that now-legal-in-Colorado product.
.. And finally, however she wishes it were not so, however much she argues that she represents the future as America’s first prospective female president, Clinton still embodies the past, just as she did in 2008 when she lost to Barack Obama.
.. But when you look at the positions she has taken on some of the most significant public policy questions of her time, you cannot escape noticing one key pattern: She has always embraced the politically popular stand—indeed, she has gone out of her way to reinforce that stand—and she has shifted her ground in a way that perfectly correlates with the shifts in public opinion.
.. What was different about Clinton, however, was that in her October 2002 speech she said this about Saddam: “He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001.”
.. Again, plenty of Democrats were on record as opposing gay marriage in 2004—the year that voters in 11 states voted to ban the practice by significant margins. What’s striking about Clinton’s speech is the intensity of the language, the assertion that it is a “bedrock principle.” You might think that a conviction so strongly held would not be subject to “evolution,” much less shifting political winds. Not so, apparently—any more than a trade deal can be the “gold standard” one year and an unacceptable threat to American workers the next; or that a generation of potential “super predators” requires draconian crime laws one decade, while the next demands an end to such laws.
.. Another aspect of Clinton’s weakness is less an issue of personal liabilities than of a misapprehension on her part of what political space she occupies.
.. I don’t believe there’s any dissembling here; I think she really believes that a woman cannot possibly “exemplify the establishment.”
.. Bill Clinton was often credited with the observation that “every election is about the past versus the future.”
.. The answer, of course, is that 25 years in the most rarefied circles of political life, countless speeches—where an hour’s work earns you five years’ worth of a middle-class income—a multimillion dollar wedding for your only child, and friendships with every manner of celebrity does tend to make that “establishment” label fit.
.. But … if the discontent with the economy persists in the fall, or even deepens should the woes of China and Europe reach our shores, there is no Democrat more in the cross-hairs of an angry electorate than Clinton. Everything from her Wall Street financial links to her work as secretary of state become targets of opportunity.
Rubio’s Exit and the G.O.P.’s Spoiled Buffet
There are Republican traditionalists rooting for Trump over Cruz, and the thinking of some goes like this:
.. He’ll embarrass the party and roil the country but maybe not cost Republicans key congressional races. Besides which, he scrambles all rules and all precedents so thoroughly that you never know. Victory isn’tunthinkable, and better a Republican who’s allergic to caution, oblivious to actual information and altogether dangerous than a Democrat who’ll dole out all the plum administration jobs to her own party.
.. “Cruz is a disaster for the party,” one of them told me. “Trump is a disaster for the country.”
.. “If Cruz is the nominee, we get wiped out,” he added, with a resigned voice. “And we rebuild.” The party needs that anyway.
.. In fact, a few Republican traditionalists have insisted to me that a Cruz nomination and subsequent defeat would have a long-term upside. It would put to rest the stubborn argument, promoted by Cruz and others on the party’s far right, that the G.O.P. has lost presidential elections over recent decades because nominees like Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney weren’t conservative enough.
How an obscure committee could decide the GOP nomination
The convention’s 112-member Rules Committee wields enormous power to influence the outcome of the party’s nomination fight, including the authority to undo policies requiring most of the 2,472 convention delegates to abide by the will of the voters — freeing them to vote according to personal preference — or to erect all kinds of obstacles to Donald Trump’s nomination.
.. “By majority rule, they can do anything that they want,” said Barry Bennett, an adviser to Donald Trump who’s coordinating the mogul’s convention strategy. “They can throw out the chairman. You can throw out the RNC members. You can do anything.”
.. The committee doesn’t actually exist yet — and it won’t for months, at least until state-level primaries end in June.
But the campaigns are still working feverishly on a state-by-state basis to line up steadfast allies for delegate slots, and thus possible appointments to the rules panel.
.. Whichever campaign is most successful at getting its loyalists appointed could broker a set of rules that deny Trump a path to the nomination — or ensure that he has one.
.. “It’ll be a bloodbath,” said Tom Lundstrum, an Arkansas Republican who served on the convention Rules Committee in 2012 when rules changes surrounding Ron Paul supporters created a dust-up.
.. Trump’s campaign intends to appoint first-time delegates wherever it can, which means those delegates won’t be beholden to party traditions. But they’ll have little institutional knowledge of the rules process.
.. The simplest way to do it would be to manipulate the so-called eight-state threshold. That rule, rewritten in 2012 by Romney campaign allies, required any candidate eligible for the Republican nomination to win a majority of the delegates from at least eight states or territories. Back then, it prevented Ron Paul from sharing the stage with Romney
.. A more cataclysmic battle could occur over two other rules that have been widely accepted – in public – as unchangeable. One binds delegates to vote according to the outcomes of the state primaries and caucuses. The other permits states to award delegates on a winner-take-all basis.
.. Every delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention is a completely free agent, free to vote for the candidate of their choice on every ballot at the convention in Cleveland in July,” he wrote. “Every delegate is a Superdelegate!”
.. “I think if there was a way they could rig it, without hurting the RNC’s integrity — if there was a way they could rig it to make probably a Mitt Romney or a Jeb Bush or a Marco Rubio win — there’s a good chance they’d do it,” said Spies, the former RNC counsel.
Trump The Illusion-Shatterer
The secret fear lying beneath Rubio’s accurate depiction of Trump as a “con artist” is that Republican voters are easy marks. The Republican Party is constructed as a machine: Into one end are fed the atavistic fears of the white working class as grist, and out the other end pops The Wall Street Journaleditorial-page agenda as the finished product. Trump has shown movement conservatives how terrifyingly rickety that machine is and how easily it can be seized from them by a demagogue and repurposed toward some other goal.
.. When National Review, in a Clinton-era cover story, crowned Rush Limbaugh “Leader of the Opposition,” they were not wrong. This is what the Republican Party had become. Its leaders saw their interests perfectly aligned with conservative talk radio’s, which represented the views of the People.
Now it turns out that the People prefer Trump and Cruz. It turns out that the People were actually absorbing all that GOP anti-government, anti-elite rhetoric these past 35 years, and have now turned it on the Washington class that used that rhetoric so effectively to mobilize the People against liberals. This is such a shock to the Establishment Republican class because they really did believe their own story.
it is clear that the biggest problem is a widespread failure of French elites to look to the common good and offer a vision for the future. Similarly, since the Bush presidency collapsed under the failures of Iraq, Katrina, and the financial crisis, almost everybody who counts for something in the Republican Party has been implicated in a failure of imagination and a failure to seek or promote a vision and a governing agenda.
.. no Republican presidential candidate from 2008 onward had ever dared to say the Iraq War was in any way a failure.
.. These lower-skilled workers did not just lose their jobs — they lost their dignity.
.. Other laws, like the bailout and Obamacare, seemed to help the upscale and downscale, while doing nothing to improve middle America’s economic outlook or, in the case of Obamacare and the subsequent rise in health insurance rates, straining its resources even further.