On Friday, as Hillary Clinton was basking in the reaction to her marathon appearance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters that the hour between nine and ten o’clock on Thursday night, after the hearing finally finished, was the campaign’s best fund-raising hour yet.
.. Meanwhile, the campaign of the supposed Republican front-runner, Jeb Bush, was letting it be known that it was laying off people and slashing its payroll by forty per cent.
.. In virtually monopolizing media coverage and subjecting Bush to months of public criticism, the New York billionaire has transformed the dynamics of the G.O.P. race in a way that almost nobody anticipated—a point the managers of the Bush campaign acknowledged in an internal memo announcing the cost cuts. “We would be less than forthcoming if we said we predicted in June that a reality television star supporting Canadian-style single-payer health care and partial-birth abortion would be leading the G.O.P. primary,” the memo said.
.. If Bush were wowing the world with innovative and substantive policy proposals, his verbal shortcomings could perhaps be overlooked. But he isn’t. His tax-cutting economic plan, which he claims will increase G.D.P. growth to four per cent a year, is largely based on wishful thinking. His foreign-policy speeches are so vague that they’re hard to evaluate. On social issues, such as guns and abortion, he has said little to distinguish himself from the G.O.P. pack. In 2000, his brother George ran on the platform of “compassionate Conservatism,” which was his way of distinguishing himself from Newt Gingrich and other Republican bomb throwers. Jeb’s only memorable slogan is “Jeb!”
.. Indeed, it now appears possible that his entire campaign is based on two false premises.
The first is that Republican voters want a shift to the center.
.. The second shaky premise is the notion that Republicans are keen on restoring the Bush dynasty.
Enter the Age of the Outsiders
Some of these blows were self-inflicted. Democracy, especially in the United States, has grown dysfunctional. Mass stupidity and greed led to a financial collapse and deprived capitalism of its moral swagger.
But the deeper problem was spiritual. Many people around the world rejected democratic capitalism’s vision of a secular life built around materialism and individual happiness. They sought more intense forms of meaning. Some of them sought meaning in the fanaticisms of sect, tribe, nation, or some stronger and more brutal ideology. In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate.
.. The Democratic establishment no longer determines party positions; it is pulled along by formerly marginal players like Bernie Sanders.
.. But the big loss of central confidence is in global governance. The United States is no longer willing to occupy the commanding heights and oversee global order. In region after region, those who are weak in strength but strong in conviction are able to have their way. Vladimir Putin in Crimea, Ukraine and the Middle East. Bashar al-Assad crosses red lines in Syria. The Islamic State spreads in Syria and Iraq.
.. I only have space to add here that the primary problem is mental and spiritual.
Where Bernie and Hillary Really Disagree
Chris Hayes makes in his excellent book, Twilight of the Elites, between “institutionalists,” who want to make existing institutions function better and “insurrectionists,” who want to tear them down and start again.
Sanders is an insurrectionist. That’s why, asked about following the most transformational liberal president in a half-century, he didn’t say that America is moving in the right direction but has further to go. He said America needs a “political revolution.” He also said that, “America’s campaign finance system is corrupt.”
Hillary never talks that way. She acknowledges problems but she rarely indicts America’s core economic and political institutions. Consider the two candidates’ answers on financial regulation. Sanders said that, “Wall Street, where fraud is a business model, helped to destroy this economy and the lives of millions of people.” Thus, “we have got to break up” the banks. Hillary, by contrast, said that “Dodd-Frank was a good start, and I think that we have to implement it … We have to save the Consumer Financial Protection board.” Sanders, in other words, attacked the system; Hillary explained how it could be improved.
.. Progressives don’t just love him because his policy proposals are more left wing than Hillary’s. They love the fact that he calls America’s political and economic system corrupt, and that he refuses to play by that corrupt system’s rules: for instance, by raising money via a super PAC. That’s why being a “socialist” doesn’t hurt Sanders among many liberals. For many, “socialism” is just another way of saying you want to tear down the existing order and build something better in its place.
Martin O’Malley Rails at Democrats for Debate Schedule ‘Rigged’ to Aid Hillary Clinton
Mr. O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and mayor of Baltimore, questioned the decision to hold “four debates and four debates only” before the first four states finish voting.
“This is totally unprecedented in our party’s history,” Mr. O’Malley said. “This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before. Whose decree is it exactly? Where did it come from? To what end? For what purpose? What national or party interest does this decree serve? How does this help us tell the story of the last eight years of Democratic progress?”
.. While Mr. O’Malley has been deeply critical of the party for weeks over the debate schedule, this was a frontal attack on the party’s leadership from its own stage. Without endorsements or many major donors, Mr. O’Malley has little to lose.