Why won’t Rubio quit?

The New Neo Posted on by

Back when Rubio and Cruz were neck and neck and there was no clear frontrunner between them, I lamented that fact and pointed out that they were playing a game of Chicken that could be destructive to both and was helpful to Donald Trump’s candidacy.

But more recently the writing has been on the wall for Rubio, particularly since his abysmal showing in the March 8 primaries. I said subsequently that he should drop out but probably won’t, and now the calls for him to drop out have escalated and include most of his previous boosters.

His campaign is insisting he’s in it through Florida. But why? Here are some possibilities:

(1) He’s a delusional megalomaniac.
(2) He lives in an alternate universe where he has access to secret polling that runs counter to most of the other polls.
(3) He actually wants Trump to win the nomination, or at least wants Cruz to lose it.
(4) He continues to think if he can force a brokered convention he’ll be the winner, and is ignoring how bad he looks right now.
(5) He thinks Cruz has no chance to win even if he (Rubio) drops out, and therefore is staying in because he thinks that although it’s a longshot, it’s the only way that Trump might be defeated in the state.

I’ll go with Door 4. If it’s #5, I think it’s a short-sighted, self-serving misjudgment.

I am angry at Rubio. He was never my favored candidate (that was Walker, then Fiorina, then Cruz), but I was willing to support him when I thought he could be the frontrunner. Now I think he’s acting as a spoiler.

Did Trump’s campaign manager assault a Breitbart reporter ?

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump’s campaign has been dogged by violence and accusations of violence. For example, a black protester was apparently sucker-punched at a Trump rally. And a Trump supporter was threatened at gunpoint at his home by a trio of men over a pro-Trump sign.

Feelings are high, and I don’t think Trump is necessarily responsible for either incident.

But there are things for which he is responsible. For example, I’ve already written about one incident where Trump advocated violence against protesters at one of his rallies. He said:

…he’d like to punch a protester in the face and fondly recalled the “old days” when “guys like that” who disrupted a political rally would “be carried out on a stretcher.””¦

Those are “mere words,” but uttered by a presidential candidate at a rally such words certainly constitute encouragement, although not technically “incitement.”

And Trump is also responsible for his reaction to the behavior of his own campaign manager. This latest incident where Trump’s manager is alleged to have used physical force against Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields is highly disturbing and is the story du jour. You can read a lot about it at that link and decide for yourself.

Here’s the reporter’s statement, and here’s an article that attempts to describe what happened, according to witnesses. Here is one of those witnesses—Ben Terris, a reporter for the WaPo who corroborates Fields’ story.

My best guess is that campaign manager Corey Lewandowski did in fact jerk reporter Fields (a woman, by the way, although I think the offense does not depend on her gender and would still exist as an offense were it a man) away with excessive and unwarranted force, and that he did not know she was from Breitbart, a fact which complicated things for both Trump and Breitbart because the latter is one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. So the whole incident is being under-reacted to by Breitbart.

The official reaction from Trump’s spokesperson Hope Hicks is highly characteristic—insinuate that the reporter is lying and trying to get attention, and a denial that anything happened or that there were any witnesses (ignoring that WaPo story by Ferris, as well as this one, and the bruise on Fields’ arm). Hicks also insinuated that Fields may have “a larger pattern of exaggerating incidents” and that readers should “recall she also claimed to have been beaten by a New York City Police officer with a baton.”

Fields’ boyfriend tweeted back this photo, saying, “Michelle getting pushed down by police during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Trump campaign serial liars”:

fieldspolice

Sure doesn’t look fabricated to me.

[ADDENDUM: Breitbart (which, remember, has been one of Trump’s biggest supporters) has issued a new and stronger statement:

The Washington Post just published a very detailed, first-hand account from their senior reporter Ben Terris who is familiar with the campaign, the personalities involved, and was an eyewitness to the incident. We are disappointed in the campaign’s response, in particular their effort to demean Michelle’s previous reporting. Michelle Fields is an intrepid reporter who has covered tough and dangerous stories. We stand behind her reporting, her techniques, and call again on Corey Lewandowski to apologize.”

There’s also this commentary from Ace:

Breitbart.com obviously likes Trump a heck of a lot. And look how Trump is repaying that — by essentially humiliating them, not acknowledging at all the goodwill that Breitbart should have amassed with Trump.

Breitbart asked for the most minor of concessions that would save its own face (they have a responsibility to protect their reporters), and Trump responded by calling the reporter’s truthfulness into question, and calling into question a previous claim of having been hit with a police baton.

This requires Breitbart, in return, to issue another press release.

I imagine Team Trump’s next move will be to demand Michelle Fields apologize to “Mr. Trump.”

Trump doesn’t seem to care about how he treats his strong allies. Humiliating them, making them appear impotent.

Something to keep in mind, going forward. It’s not just his opponents he treats contemptuously — it’s his allies, too…

Anything that could hurt “Mr. Trump’s” brand must be destroyed.

I’ve been studying Trump’s life and his favorite m.o.’s from long before this campaign season, and this is exactly how I’ve noticed that Trump has rolled for many decades. Probably for his entire life.

Don’t ever expect it don’t change.]

Obama and the shaky red line

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”]

I actually have come to the point of such skepticism about the press that I take nearly everything I read there with a grain of salt. But with that caveat, here’s an extremely lengthy article (and this post will only scratch the surface of what’s in there) that describes Obama’s second-term Middle Eastern foreign policy.

The first thing I see is an attempt by writer Jeffrey Goldberg to disassociate potential Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton from what Obama did while she was his Secretary of State, and the second thing I see is how juvenile and simplistic Obama, his advisers, and their motto seem to be:

Obama’s reticence [to intervene in Syria after drawing a red line] frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad ”¦ left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and”‰”˜Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ”˜Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro”“stupid shit?’”‰” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would “hug it out” on Martha’s Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)

Later on, Goldberg also seems to be trying to rehabilitate Biden, too, from his association with Obama.

Here’s what happened when Obama changed his mind and decided not to intervene:

…[T]he president told his national-security aides that he planned to stand down. There would be no attack the next day; he wanted to refer the matter to Congress for a vote. Aides in the room were shocked. Susan Rice, now Obama’s national-security adviser, argued that the damage to America’s credibility would be serious and lasting. Others had difficulty fathoming how the president could reverse himself the day before a planned strike. Obama, however, was completely calm. “If you’ve been around him, you know when he’s ambivalent about something, when it’s a 51”“49 decision,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But he was completely at ease.”

Not long ago, I asked Obama to describe his thinking on that day. He listed the practical worries that had preoccupied him. “We had UN inspectors on the ground who were completing their work, and we could not risk taking a shot while they were there. A second major factor was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament.”

The third, and most important, factor, he told me, was “our assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it.”

The fourth factor, he said, was of deeper philosophical importance. “This falls in the category of something that I had been brooding on for some time,” he said. “I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless.”

Obama knew his decision not to bomb Syria would likely upset America’s allies. It did. The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, told me that his government was already worried about the consequences of earlier inaction in Syria when word came of the stand-down. “By not intervening early, we have created a monster,” Valls told me. “We were absolutely certain that the U.S. administration would say yes. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be different today.” The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who was already upset with Obama for “abandoning” Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, fumed to American visitors that the U.S. was led by an “untrustworthy” president. The king of Jordan, Abdullah II””already dismayed by what he saw as Obama’s illogical desire to distance the U.S. from its traditional Sunni Arab allies and create a new alliance with Iran, Assad’s Shia sponsor””complained privately, “I think I believe in American power more than Obama does.”

There’s much much more.

My own analysis of what happened is a bit different. I think that Obama never meant what he said when he drew that red line, because I think that he is constitutionally (in the personal, and not the Constitutional, sense) incapable of acting in an aggressive military manner with any real force. It goes against his entire approach to foreign policy, which is that he is the withdrawal president. He is here to decrease our military involvement, not to increase it. Bombings must be antiseptic and have almost no chance of collateral damage (or any real success), with the single exception of drone attacks on a terrorist here and there. It is perfectly okay to betray allies; he’s done it many times before. Maybe it’s even good; after all, they shouldn’t rely on us.

What he hadn’t done before was to draw a red line, and my guess is that almost as soon as it was drawn he regretted it and was looking for an out. He found one.

In addition, the king of Jordan was spot on: Obama does not believe in American power, or in using it. Obama is also determined to make sure that, as a result of his presidency, the American people and the world don’t believe in it, either.

Bernie Sanders wins in Michigan

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t covered the Democratic race much, because I continue to assume that Hillary will be the nominee.

But last night’s Michigan win by Bernie Sanders is very much worth commenting on:

He won the Michigan primary over Hillary Clinton, 50 percent to 48 percent, when not a single poll taken over the last month had Clinton leading by less than 5 percentage points. In fact, many had her lead at 20 percentage points or higher. Sanders’s win in Michigan was one of the greatest upsets in modern political history.

Both the FiveThirtyEight polls-plus and polls-only forecast gave Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance of winning. That’s because polling averages for primaries, while inexact, are usually not 25 percentage points off.

So there are two “interesting” things going on here. The first is that Sanders won, and the second is how far off the polls were, and in particular how consistently they were off. The polls being off is far less upsetting than the fact that a socialist could do so well.

But in a way I understand it. I agree with everyone who says that, although Sanders is a socialist—and it’s astounding that a socialist can do that well at this point in America and shows how far the Gramscian march has advanced even since Obama had to hide his socialism just a few short years ago—Sanders is a relatively honest broker compared to Hillary. That probably accounts for at least some of his support. But not enough to explain its extent.

It also does not account for the fact that in a match-up against any of the GOP candidates (at least at this point) Sanders does quite well. A sobering look at what this country has become.

The terrorist stabbings in Israel continue

The New Neo Posted on by

Horrific violence continues in Israel as part of the stabbing intifada:

American veteran and Vanderbilt University student Taylor Force was stabbed to death, and his wife seriously injured.

Force, a graduate student in management, was on a trip to Israel with a university group. He was also a graduate of West Point who had served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is highly and bitterly ironic.

The perpetrator was shot dead by police, but only after he had injured ten people. The attack on Force was one of several occurring on the same day. Another attack featured this grisly detail:

An Israeli man who was stabbed multiple times Tuesday afternoon in a terror attack in Petah Tikva managed to remove the knife from his neck and use it to stab and neutralize his attacker, aided by the store owner, police said.

The attacker, a Palestinian, died a few minutes later, police said.

The victim, later named as Yonatan Azarihab, an ultra-Orthodox man of about 40 who suffered multiple stab wounds to his upper body, was hospitalized in moderate condition.

A headline in CNN about the attacks puts scare quotes around “terrorist.” But at least that’s an improvement on the one in the International Business Times, which reads: “Israel: Three Palestinians shot dead as US vice president Joe Biden arrives for talks.”

Those nasty, vicious Israelis, shooting Palestinians for no reason.

Carly Fiorina endorses Ted Cruz

The New Neo Posted on by

It doesn’t surprise me.

Cruz adds this:

“This race, I believe, will end up one-on-one between me and Donald Trump because Donald and I are the only two that have any path to getting to 1237 delegates.”

“And head-to-head with Donald Trump, we win,” Cruz claimed. “The polling yesterday showed we beat Donald head-to-head by 13 points. And so if you don’t believe Donald Trump is the best nominee for Republicans, if you recognize as 65-70 percent of Republicans do that Donald loses to Hillary in the general, then I would encourage Republicans even if you were supporting another candidate to come, join Carly, join the millions of conservatives who are coming together, unifying behind our campaign.”

I think he is correct. The question is whether it will come to pass.

It’s clear that Cruz wants to win outright, and realizes how bad a brokered convention could and probably would be. He also realizes that his only chance of a straight win is if the others drop out, and that they are unlikely to do so in time (particularly Kasich). That’s why he needs voters to realize this and unite behind him, even if the others don’t drop out.

Reflections on yesterday’s primaries

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday Trump did well, in the 30s and 40s (except for Idaho, where he fell to the 20s). This is the pattern he has established. The difference between earlier primaries and more recent ones is that Ted Cruz has broken away from the pack and is a strong and fairly consistent #2.

It also continues to be clear that the number of people not voting for Donald Trump is greater than the number of people voting for him. And it’s become even more starkly apparent, now that Cruz has gotten closer and closer to Trump—winning in Idaho and edging out Kasich in Michigan, which is impressive because Michigan does not represent Cruz’s natural constituency—that Rubio and Kasich must drop out and yet it’s unlikely that they will drop out before March 15 and perhaps even after.

To those of us who want Cruz to be the nominee rather than Trump (and “want” is a mild word for it), their perseverance is one of the more frustrating aspects of a very frustrating primary season.

However, were it to become a two-person race, that’s no guarantee that Cruz would beat Trump. But I suspect he would. It would at the very least be a good thing to get a chance to see what would actually happen between the two, mano a mano—the outsiders slugging it out, with contrasting styles and history. I’d like to see one of them (Cruz, obviously) win it outright rather than go to a brokered convention, which I believe would cause even more lasting enmity among the various wings of the GOP than we’ve already seen so far—and that’s a lot of enmity.

Although I strongly believe that Rubio and Kasich are hurting Cruz a great deal, they might also be serving the function of getting us to a brokered convention by siphoning just enough votes away from Cruz and/or Trump to keep either of them from gaining the requisite number. If you think the fight has been bitter and heated so far, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet compared to a brokered convention.

[NOTE: How do they decide the number of delegates each state receives? I noticed that in the Hawaii caucuses there were about 13,000 participants, and in Michigan there were around 1,300,000 voters (with around 90% reporting), or about 100 times that. And yet Michigan only gets about three times as many delegates as Hawaii. What’s up with that?

That link I just gave has a handy chart that tells a lot about the primaries in each state and how delegates are awarded. It seems to me that states with larger Republican populations should get proportionately more delegates than they actually get.]

Three primaries, one caucus

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP, with later updates at bottom]

Here we go again.

Caucus in Hawaii, primaries in Idaho, Mississippi, and Michigan. The last two are open, which I assume favors Trump. I expect him to do well, although Kasich will give him a run for his money in Michigan—at least, according to polls.

UPDATE 9:00 PM

Both Michigan and Mississippi have been called for Trump, as expected. The Michigan results are looking to be similar to Trump’s in a lot of other states, at about 37-38% with 15% precincts reporting so far. Kasich has been approximately 10 points behind. Mississippi only has 2% reporting so far, but Trump is getting 51.8 of the vote to Cruz’s 34.3%. If that holds up, it would be by far Trump’s best showing in any state. Both states are open primaries—although Michigan is called “closed,” voters can choose a new party as they arrive to vote, so it actually functions as a completely open primary.

UPDATE 9:22 PM

Cruz continues to dominate Rubio, whose support in these two states is very low, less than 10% in Michigan and less than 5% in Mississippi, at least at the moment.

All of today’s states have proportional delegate awards, so the actual delegate count may not really change all that much. It’s those winner-take-all states that have the most influence.

What would it take to impeach and convict a president?

The New Neo Posted on by

Asked Daniel in Brookline:

I have often wondered what it would take to get a President impeached.

Granted, the Constitution deliberately set a very high bar ”” which is why all of three Presidents in U.S. history have been impeached, and none convicted. Still ”” what would it take?

One glib answer is “a Republican president”. But no, that’s not the answer either ”” or we would have seen serious attempts to impeach George W. Bush, who was probably the most reviled Republican president in my lifetime. (I don’t think he deserved to be impeached, by any stretch of the imagination”¦ but the desire was certainly there.)

Once politicians liked to say that they were safe, unless caught with a dead girl or a live boy. I don’t think either would suffice anymore.

I would submit that it’s not about the offense. An offense is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition.

One thing it would take could be a situation where a majority of representatives in the House and 2/3 of the senators are from the opposition party from the president, but we are unlikely to have that wide a split government. But if we did, the members of the opposition party in Congress could always find something in a president’s behavior to call a “high crime or misdemeanor.” Otherwise, it would take a party with enough members to whom principles are more important than party. Although I think that is slightly more likely to happen with Republicans than with Democrats in Congress, it’s highly unlikely with either party.

The impeachment part is easy, if there’s a majority of the opposite party. The 2/3 Senate bar is much higher, and purposely so. But to answer Daniel’s question, Watergate plus the Republican Party of 1974 was enough to do it, because so many leading Republicans turned on Nixon and informed him that, if he didn’t resign, he would be impeached and almost certainly convicted. Watergate was the proximate cause of Nixon’s resignation, but there is no doubt in my mind that if it had been committed by a Democrat of the time, that president would have served his full term without much threat. And if it all happened today, I’m not sure that present-day Republicans would act the same way Nixon’s Republicans did.

What about the 9/11 terrorists’ families?

The New Neo Posted on by

I wanted to call attention to something I discussed in the comments section yesterday.

In all the brouhaha about what Donald Trump said about “targeting” terrorists’ families, it hasn’t been much emphasized that he made a blatant factual error during the debate. First, let’s look at the March 3 debate transcript:

BAIER: Even targeting terrorists’ families?

TRUMP: Well, look, you know, when a family flies into the World Trade Center, a man flies into the World Trade Center, and his family gets sent back to where they were going — and I think most of you know where they went — and, by the way, it wasn’t Iraq — but they went back to a certain territory, they knew what was happening. The wife knew exactly what was happening.

They left two days early, with respect to the World Trade Center, and they went back to where they went, and they watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center, flying into the Pentagon, and probably trying to fly into the White House, except we had some very, very brave souls on that third plane. All right?

…I have no problem with it.

Trump’s statement about 9/11 and the 9/11 terrorists’ wives is nonsense. Note that his statement during the debate about this was actually a repeat of something he had said back in December. It is either a lie or an error. Either Trump has no idea what he’s talking about on this subject, or he does know and assumes his supporters don’t know and he’s saying what they want to hear. Plus, this was all researched and pointed out for him back in early December, so he either didn’t see the correction or doesn’t care:

There is no support for Trump’s claims, as the report states that virtually all of the hijackers were unmarried.

“None of the 9/11 terrorists could have ”˜sent their wives home’ before the attacks because, as you suggest, none of them brought female companions to the United States,” said Philip D. Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission (and who is not affiliated with any campaign). “All, or nearly all, of the hijackers were unmarried, as far as we know. We did elaborate a bit about the story of one Lebanese hijacker, Ziad Jarrah [who was on United 93], and his German girlfriend.”

The report makes a distinction between the “muscle hijackers,” who were to restrain or overcome crew members or others, and hijackers who trained to pilot the aircraft. Regarding the muscle hijackers, the report says: “The muscle hijackers came from a variety of educational and societal backgrounds. All were between 20 and 28 years old; most were unemployed with no more than a high school education and were unmarried.” (Page 231 of the report.)

Only one of the muscle hijackers ”” Abdul Aziz al-Omari ”” is listed as being married: “Omari had graduated with honors from high school, had attained a degree from the Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University [in Saudi Arabia], was married, and had a daughter.” But there is no indication the wife ever traveled to the United States. (Page 232.)

Among the pilot hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi (who piloted United Flight 175) was married: “When Shehhi, while still in the UAE in January 2000, held a belated wedding celebration (he actually had been married in 1999), a friend of his was surprised to see that he had shaved off his beard and was acting like his old self again.” But again, there is no indication that his wife ever traveled to the United States.

…What could account for Trump’s strange notion that the hijackers were married and shipped their wives home just before the attacks? Perhaps he is conflating reports of Saudi nationals leaving the United States after the attacks.

Here’s the story on the Saudi nationals. By the way, Bin Laden had a huge family, and most had long ago disavowed him.

If I were ruler of the RNC and I designed the primaries…

The New Neo Posted on by

…they would be great, they would be beautiful.

Or, at least better. I think.

These would be the rules:

(1) Only Republicans vote. A voter’s party has to be declared some fixed amount of time before the primary in each state. Each state can set the amount of time, but there would be a minimum amount of time they could not shorten. I’m open to suggestions on what that amount of time would be.

(2) No winner-take-all primaries, or at least fewer of them, and only towards the end of the line. Or, if it’s winner-take-all, the winner has to get more than 50% of the vote.

(3) No early voting. Absentee voting according to the usual absentee rules.

(4) Fewer debates. If there are a lot of candidates, the maximum number on stage is six or seven. Every candidate gets the same question. No “so-and-so-said-such-and-such-about-you” questions designed to pit one against the other. If a candidate is attacked in another’s statement, the attacked person gets a one-minute rebuttal and the other gets 30 seconds after that.

(5)If no candidate has reached the delegate threshhold for winning the nomination, there is a run-off election where (as before) only Republicans vote. First numbers 2 and 3 have a runoff if they are within 5 (or perhaps 10?) points of each other. Then the winner of that runoff has another runoff with the number one person. This ought to make sure that the nominee is the person with the most support in the party.

I’ve long been very dissatisfied with the primaries, long before Trump. The number of candidates, and the problem of vote splitting if there are too many in a particular category, have long bothered me. That’s what the runoffs are for.

The more I think about it, though, the harder creating a good design seems to be. The order in which the states vote is another problem, one a lot of people have long complained about. But unless the votes all happen on one particular Primary Day, I’m not sure how to remedy that. But there’s no question that the early-voting states get the lion’s share of the influence.