Presumptuous Politics : Mar 7, 2016

Monday, March 7, 2016

CPAC Cartoon

CPAC Accomplishment 2012

Money Pours In as Move to Stop Donald Trump Expands

A Bunch of Idiots?

Republicans hoping to halt Donald J. Trump’s march to their party’s presidential nomination emerged from the weekend’s voting contests newly emboldened by Mr. Trump’s uneven electoral performance and by some nascent signs that he may be peaking with voters.

Outside groups are moving to deploy more than $10 million in new attack ads across Florida and millions more in Illinois, casting Mr. Trump as a liberal, a huckster and a draft dodger. Mr. Trump’s reed-thin organization appears to be catching up with him, suggesting he could be at a disadvantage if he is forced into a protracted slog for delegates.

And vote tallies on Saturday made clear that Mr. Trump has had at least some trouble building upon his intensely loyal following, leaving him increasingly dependent upon landslides in early voting.

In Louisiana, where Mr. Trump amassed a lead of more than 20 percentage points among those who cast votes before Saturday, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas effectively tied him among voters who cast their ballots on Saturday.

Marco Rubio in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, on Saturday, a day before winning the primary there. Credit Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo for The New York Times

“Trump has to worry about the consistent late-voter rejection of his candidacy,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate.

Mr. Trump’s losses to Mr. Cruz in Kansas and Maine on Saturday, coupled with closer-than-expected victories in Louisiana and Kentucky, have heightened the prospects for a two-man race, though many Republican leaders eye Mr. Cruz warily.

As his rivals have despaired over the race’s vulgar turn, Mr. Trump struck a subdued tone, by his standards, as returns came in late Saturday night. He aborted his first attempt to take the stage and left the room after asking reporters if the race in Kentucky had been called.

When he finally did speak, some of his usual bombast was missing, even as he insisted that it was time for Senator Marco Rubio to quit the race and that Mr. Cruz cannot win more moderate northeastern or coastal states.

“Donald Trump was uncharacteristically low energy,” Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, said in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” taunting Mr. Trump with the insult Mr. Trump had employed against Jeb Bush. Yet despite the renewed optimism of his opponents, the path to deny Mr. Trump the nomination remains narrow and arduous.

Mr. Cruz’s emergence as the most credible alternative to Mr. Trump has proved both a boost and a complication for those seeking to derail the New Yorker. Mr. Cruz has tried to undercut calls for a contested convention to deny Mr. Trump the nomination, which Mr. Cruz says would yield a “manifest revolt” among voters. But Mr. Cruz has done little so far to threaten Mr. Trump’s lead in the delegate race.

Much of Mr. Cruz’s late-breaking support on Saturday seemed to come at the expense of Mr. Rubio, not Mr. Trump. And the Cruz campaign’s message of ideological purity and religious faith is a less natural fit for many of the delegate-rich Midwestern and coastal states that remain on the map.

“Saturday proved that Trump can be contained and even beaten,” said Scott Jennings, a longtime Republican strategist, who looked ahead to this summer’s Republican convention in Cleveland. “The question is whether the field is going to allow for it moving forward. The most likely scenarios remain that Trump gets enough before Cleveland, or nobody does. The latter moved a little closer to realistic Saturday.”

Mr. Rubio’s path is much less certain, despite his lopsided victory in Puerto Rico on Sunday. Even his supporters said that the results on Saturday seriously undercut the premise of his bid: that he is the only candidate who can unify the Republican Party and defeat Mr. Trump.

“Look, I’m supportive of Marco; I’m very hopeful,” said Mel Martinez, the former senator from Florida, who had supported Mr. Bush. “But it’s a great concern that time has kind of caught up with this whole thing.”

The Stop Trump forces are beginning to pour money into television ads, with a particular focus on the big states voting on March 15. Four different groups have reserved at least $10 million in airtime in Florida so far, according to trackers of media spending. That number is expected to grow, but television stations in Florida are already awash in such ads.

Two from the American Future Fund, which has spent $2 million so far in Florida and Illinois, show decorated veterans assailing Mr. Trump as a poseur on military matters. Michael Waltz, a retired Special Forces colonel, blisteringly calls Mr. Trump a draft dodger and, effectively, a coward. “Donald Trump hasn’t served this country a day in his life,” he says. “Don’t let Trump fool you.”

And a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, Tom Hanton, bluntly questions Mr. Trump’s toughness: “Trump would not have survived the P.O.W. experience. He would have been probably the first one to fold.”

Separately, Club for Growth Action, an arm of the anti-tax group that was the first to run ads in Iowa against Mr. Trump, has placed $2 million in commercials attacking him in Illinois on top of $1 million in Florida.

A third group, Our Principles PAC, which was created to defeat Mr. Trump, has reserved $3.5 million in Illinois and Florida and is also sending direct mail to voters’ homes in Florida. A group supporting Mr. Rubio, Conservative Solutions, is spending several million dollars in Florida as well.

The deluge of negative messages from a patchwork of groups — highlighting claims by angry customers of Mr. Trump’s defunct educational company and his history of shape-shifting positions — already appears to have hurt Mr. Trump’s cause.

In conversations with some of his allies, who insisted on anonymity to relay those private talks, Trump campaign aides have expressed concern about the money being spent against him on television. The Trump campaign has no pollster, so it is governed by public polling and what the candidate himself observes while watching cable news.

This off-the-cuff approach, and a string of self-inflicted wounds — refusing to clearly and immediately reject the support of the white supremacist David Duke, boasting about his sexual endowment on the debate stage and withdrawing from the Conservative Political Action Committee’s conference over the weekend — have fueled days of unfavorable coverage of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

“Trump has total disdain for the professional political class,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist. “He thinks they’re all about making money. Pollsters are hacks. Organization doesn’t matter. Their idea of a political organization is taking phone calls from some elected officials who wanted to endorse and making it work in the schedule. And that’ll catch up with you eventually.”

Still, members of the Republican establishment have been left to grapple with what was once unthinkable: rallying around Mr. Cruz, a senator who built his reputation bashing them.

“Some hope with Ted, no hope with Donald,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on “Meet the Press,” summarizing the party’s dim view of its remaining options. Neither, he suggested, would be likely to expand the Republican tent: “We’re in a demographic death spiral.”

Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Graham joked about murdering Mr. Cruz on the Senate floor.

And yet, Mr. Graham said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cruz after Super Tuesday — part of efforts by the Cruz campaign to reach out, discreetly, to donors and party officials who might be interested in rallying around him.

With Mr. Rubio faltering badly across the board on Saturday, Mr. Cruz is moving to compete aggressively in Florida. He has also weighed the merits of a significant push in Ohio, the home state of Gov. John Kasich.

Both states are winner-take-all, and the Cruz campaign insists it would only dedicate substantial resources if it thought it could win outright. But the effort is risky: It could boost Mr. Trump, if Mr. Cruz diminishes his non-Trump rivals without a victory.

The Cruz campaign says it can reach the requisite delegate threshold of 1,237 without winning Florida or Ohio, thanks to its superior organization in later-voting states, many of which are closed to non-Republicans.

But several party strategists have disputed this math, even if the contests on March 15 force some of Mr. Cruz’s competitors from the race.

A moment of reckoning for Mr. Rubio will come Tuesday in Michigan, a state that has concentrations of the kinds of voters he performs well with: professional, younger, highly educated and upper-income. But a poll released on Sunday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed Mr. Rubio trailing Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump received 41 percent, followed by Mr. Cruz at 22 percent, Mr. Rubio at 17 percent and Mr. Kasich at 13 percent.

Despite this, some Michigan Republicans say that Mr. Kasich may emerge as the state’s establishment choice. And in a race that has often felt like a reality television show, Mr. Kasich secured an apt endorsement on Sunday: that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will replace Mr. Trump as the host of “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Correction: March 6, 2016
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the location of a Conservative Political Action Committee conference. It was in National Harbor, Md., not Alexandria, Va.

Romney touts Cruz wins over Trump, will not reject GOP nod if drafted at convention

Choker?

Mitt Romney said Sunday that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz winning two primary states this weekend proves the Texas senator can stop front-runner Donald Trump, but declined to rule out his own White House scenario.
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and the Republicans' 2012 presidential nominee, repeated remarks from last week, telling “Fox News Sunday” that he wouldn’t launch an eleventh-hour campaign for president. But he declined to reject being “drafted” at the GOP convention in July to be the party’s general election candidate.
“It would be absurd to say that if I were drafted I’d say no,” Romney said. “We have four strong people running for the nomination. One of them will be the nominee.”
Romney has occasionally weighed in on the 2016 GOP race. But he emerged in full force Thursday when he gave a speech in which he called Trump a “phony” and urged voters to instead back an establishment candidate like Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
“It was a big night for Ted Cruz,” Romney said Sunday about the Texas senator's Saturday wins in the Maine and Kansas caucuses. “That’s because people are starting to take a better look at Donald Trump.”
Romney returned to his argument that Trump touts being a successful New York real estate magnate and billionaire businessman. However, he has a long list of businesses failures including a commercial airline and his Trump University real estate school, Romney said.
“He’s not the real deal,” Romney told Fox. “He’s a phony.”
Still, Romney was pressed to explain why he accepted Trump’s 2012 endorsement and acknowledge that all of Trump’s business flops didn’t happen after 2012.
“Sixty-one million people voted for me,” Romney said. “I don’t think all 61 million should be president of the United States.”

Rubio wins Puerto Rico GOP primary

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on Sunday won the Republican primary in Puerto Rico, his second victory in the 2016 race, according to the Associated Press.
Rubio won the Minnesota GOP Caucus on Super Tuesday and is struggling to keep his campaign alive through March 15, when his home state holds a primary in which the winner takes all 99 delegates.
Twenty-three delegates were up for grabs in Puerto Rico. Rubio was the only candidate in the four-man GOP field to campaign on the island, whose residents cannot vote in the general election.
The first-term senator trails front-runner Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, in the 2016 GOP race.
Rubio had at least 70 percent of the vote with most precincts reporting, followed by Trump, Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Florida is widely considered a must-win for Rubo, considering that losing one's home state could be debilitating for a presidential campaign.
The Puerto Rico win should help Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, rally South Florida's big Latino voting bloc.

Sanders turns up attacks on Clinton at feisty debate, Dem front-runner fights back

Fresh off a series of weekend victories in state caucuses, Bernie Sanders turned up the heat on Hillary Clinton at Sunday’s debate in Flint, Mich., sharply challenging her economic credentials and suggesting her gun control stand would ban guns in America. But the Democratic front-runner fought back, blasting him for voting against the auto bailout, dismissing him as a “one-issue candidate” and hitting him once again for his stance on guns.
The Vermont senator reached back to the 1990s as he went after Clinton’s support for “disastrous trade agreements” like NAFTA. His rhetoric was notably more pointed and, reflecting the tension in the race, Sanders even cut her off at times as she tried to speak over him.
“Excuse me, I’m talking,” Sanders snapped, during one feisty exchange on the economy.
But Clinton pushed back, and defended the country’s economic progress during her husband’s administration.
“If we’re going to argue about the ‘90s, let’s try to get the facts straight,” she said, touting the jobs and income growth that came with the era.
Sanders also tried to cast Clinton as soft on climate change, while declaring he unequivocally does not support fracking. Clinton maintained she has the “most comprehensive plan to combat climate change.”
The clashes came after Sanders won the Maine Democratic caucuses, adding to wins the night before in Nebraska and Kansas — by far the most successful two days of his campaign.
But Sanders remains significantly behind in the race for delegates, with Clinton having won more – and more valuable – state contests, as well as enjoying the overwhelming support of so-called “superdelegates.” Sanders is looking for a game-changer as the race heads next to states like Michigan this coming Tuesday, and Ohio and Florida the week after that.
Sanders cited his most recent wins at the end of Sunday’s debate, in arguing he would be the better candidate to go up against Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
He began to joke he’d give his “right arm” to run against the billionaire businessman and then cited polls saying, “Sanders versus Trump does a lot better than Clinton versus Trump.”
But while Sanders said he’s “exciting” working-class and young voters, Clinton pointed to the raw numbers.
“There’s only one candidate [in either primary campaign] who has more votes than [Trump], and that’s me,” Clinton said. “I will look forward to engaging him.”
With the CNN-hosted debate held in Michigan, the state’s economic and crime problems were front and center.
On gun control, the two candidates sparred sharply, with Clinton using the Sandy Hook massacre to make a point about holding gun makers responsible for crimes – and Sanders arguing that position would effectively mean an America without guns.
The dispute started when Sanders defended his past support for a bill to help protect gun manufacturers and sellers from lawsuits. He said if gun sellers and makers are held liable in many of these cases, “What you’re really talking about is ending gun manufacturing in America.”
Clinton countered that no other industry in America has “absolute immunity,” and invoked the Sandy Hook mass shooting.
The Democratic rivals were most heated when talking about their respective records on the economy. Sanders went after Clinton over what he called “disastrous trade agreements” like NAFTA.
She countered by pointing out he opposed the auto industry bailout. He tried to describe it as the Wall Street bailout, and got a little feisty when she started to speak over him.
“Excuse me, I’m talking,” he said. “Your story is for voting for every disastrous trade agreement.”
Clinton then called him a “one-issue candidate.” And on the auto bailout, she said, “If everybody had voted the way he did, I believe the auto industry would have collapsed, taking 4 million jobs with it.”
“My one issue is trying to rebuild a disappearing middle class. That’s my one issue,” Sanders said.
Meanwhile, at the top of the debate, Clinton and Sanders momentarily set aside their differences, to lament the plight of the people in the host city of Flint, and call for the governor’s resignation over the toxic water crisis.
Sanders said there’s “blame to go around” but Republican Gov. Rick Snyder should resign.
Clinton echoed the remarks, saying, “Amen to that.”
“The governor should resign or be recalled,” she said, while also calling on the federal and state governments to send more money to the city.
The city’s water crisis started when the city switched to the Flint River in 2014 while under a state-appointed emergency manager. While the state has taken much of the blame, officials with the city and federal government – as well as the state – have also resigned.
Clinton faced Sanders on the debate stage as she fights to shake her lone primary rival, who keeps notching just enough primary and caucus wins to keep his campaign alive, and a threat to her bid.
Sanders rode to victory in Maine in part on a huge turnout — Sanders beat Clinton by a ratio of nearly 2-to-1. The turnout was so big Sunday that some voters had to wait in line for more than four hours in Portland.
The victory gives Sanders a total of three victories over the weekend to Clinton’s one, in the Louisiana primary.
The results from Maine Sunday aren't binding, but will be used to select a slate of delegates to the state convention, where national delegates will be elected. Maine will send 25 delegates and 30 superdelegates.
On Super Tuesday last week, Clinton won seven states to Sanders’ four. She maintains a sizeable delegate lead – which before the Maine contest stood at 1,121 to 481. It takes 2,383 delegates to win the nomination.
But Sanders, even by winning lower-profile contests, has managed to at least demonstrate lingering weaknesses in the front-runner’s campaign as he draws an enthusiastic response in the grassroots-driven caucus states. Sanders sees upcoming Midwestern primaries as a crucial opportunity to slow her momentum by highlighting his trade policies – though Clinton has led in the polls in Michigan.
“Geographically, we’re looking good,” Sanders said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We have a path.”
Sanders acknowledged his campaign has yet to connect with African-American voters, which hurt him badly in his South Carolina loss last month to Clinton.
However, he told ABC, “I think you’re going to see those numbers change.”