On Tuesday morning, Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, went considerably further. “Normally I do not comment on what’s going on in the Presidential election. I will take an exception today,” Ryan told reporters. “This is not conservatism. What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for. And more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for. Not only are there many Muslims serving in our armed forces, dying for this country, there are Muslims serving right here in the House, working every day to uphold and to defend the Constitution.”
.. I’d go further than that. I’d say that Trump, from his early dust-up with Fox’s Megyn Kelly onward, has been playing the networks like a fiddle. And until now, the networks have generally been happy to be played.
.. But let’s not kid ourselves: commercial factors are also at play. The networks are competing against each other. A Trump interview generates ratings, and ratings generate advertising dollars.
That gives Trump great leverage. When he wants some publicity for his latest wheeze, he can usually have his pick of broadcast venues. When he threatens to boycott a particular show, or even an entire network, as he has done on several occasions, it is a consequential matter for the folks running the networks. Often, they buckle to his demands.
I was especially curious about the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which I’d never heard of. Going to its website, I discovered that it’s yet another of the dozens of trade groups and associations dedicated to protecting Wall Street’s interests in Washington. Others include the Financial Markets Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, the Global Financial Markets Association, the Institute for Financial Markets, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, and the Securities Industry Finance Markets Association. All of these organizations have powerful boards, sizable budgets, and considerable influence, yet no one is watching them.
.. From the Times I learned that the fund-raisers Singer hosts in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side can net more than $1 million a session, and I read in The Wall Street Journal that he was instrumental in the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012. In a detailed profile of Singer in Mother Jones, Peter Stone noted that Elliott Management has frequently been called a “‘vulture fund’ because a chunk of its profits comes from buying distressed companies’ or countries’ debt at a steep discount.” In 2012 a subsidiary of the firm, seeking to extract full payment from Argentina for some bonds on which it had defaulted, had an Argentine naval vessel impounded in a Ghanaian port. In 2004, Singer contributed $5,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s war record, badly damaging his presidential bid.
.. From Paul Blumenthal at The Huffington Post I learned that four hawkish-on-Israel billionaires—Singer, Sheldon Adelson, Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus, and Seth Klarman, the head of the private investment house Baupost—gave a combined $11.5 million to anti-Iran groups from 2011 through 2013 (while also giving $115 million to Republican Party Super PACs in the 2012 and 2014 elections).
.. As secretary, Duncan filled many top positions with people with ties to both Broad and Gates.*
The policy implications of all this were nicely summed up in an interview I found on YouTube with Stanley Katz, a professor of public affairs at Princeton and a longtime student of nonprofits. These megafoundations, he said, “have been able to leverage their resources in such a way that their policies have been adopted by state boards of education, local boards of education, and the federal Department of Education.” The result is that “the K–12 policy of these megafoundations is pretty much the K–12 policy of the United States of America.” It’s an illustration, Katz said, of how in today’s America private money can buy public policy.
With help from an allied group that is airing television ads in Iowa, Mr. Rubio is seeking to raise doubts on the right about Mr. Cruz’s toughness on national security — a potentially fatal vulnerability, should Mr. Rubio succeed, amid heightened concerns about terrorism. More quietly, he is trying to muddy the perception that Mr. Cruz is a hard-liner on immigration, asserting that Mr. Cruz supports “legalizing people that are in this country illegally.”
.. Their stances on core policy issues are actually quite similar: Each toes the conservative line on taxes, abortion and guns. But they are making the most of where they diverge: Mr. Rubio’s more moderate posture on immigration, and Mr. Cruz’s effort to chart a middle course on national security between hawks like Mr. Rubio and more libertarian-minded Republicans like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
.. And they are working to sow doubts about Mr. Cruz’s convictions on immigration, an issue on which Mr. Rubio is vulnerable because of his leadership role in the failed effort to push through legislation that would have offered a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Aides to Mr. Rubio have quietly pushed reporters to question Mr. Cruz about how he defines amnesty — an effort to undermine Mr. Cruz with hard-liners by exposing his unwillingness to call for mass deportations.
.. Mr. Rubio, though, has a very different view of how the campaign is to be won. While he is stepping up his appearances in the early nominating states, his aides believe that garnering positive news coverage, especially in the widely viewed debates, is most crucial to early success, which then begets subsequent wins.
.. “More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t go to Iowa.”
More important, probably, is the denial inherent in the conventions of political journalism, which say that you must always portray the parties as symmetric — that any report on extreme positions taken by one side must be framed in a way that makes it sound as if both sides do it. We saw this on budget issues, where some self-proclaimed centrist commentators, while criticizing Republicans for their absolute refusal to consider tax hikes, also made a point of criticizing President Obama for opposing spending cuts that he actually supported.