Politix Update: Republicans Turn To Cruz As Savior As Concerns Turn To Panic

THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF VIOLENT CRIMINALS ARE DEMOCRATS. ~ TED CRUZ (November 30, 2015)

The Anybody But Trump Express has been gaining steam as panic -- and I mean abject, white-knuckled panic -- over the possibility that a foul-mouthed billionaire upstart could back into the presidential nomination spreads through the Republican Party leadership, and the Mister Anyone of the moment is Ted Cruz. 

Put yourself in the position of a Republican factotum. 

You've paid your dues and worked mighty hard to erase the nightmarish memory of Election Night 2012 when Karl Rove melted down before millions of viewers on Fox News over his disbelief that Barack Obama had carried Ohio despite that call by his own network. And as the long night wore on, it became obvious that you and your pals had deluded themselves into believing that Mitt Romney was going to kick the president's Kenyan ass. 

Here it is nearly a year before Election Night 2016 and you have that same sinking feeling. 

Four years of hard work, as well as heartburn from eating too many pigs in a blanket at fundraising dinners, is going down the electoral toilet because Donald Trump, who has not paid his dues, dammit, has descended deus ex machina from his Fifth Avenue penthouse to out-jive a field of promising presidential prospects with an astonishing succession of inflammatory statements that not only threaten to hand the election to That Woman, but deal a grievous blow to down-ticket Republican candidates, as well, squandering the party's Senate advantage, or worse. 

"If he carries this message into the general election in Ohio, we'll hand this election to Hillary Clinton — and then try to salvage the rest of the ticket," said Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, where Senator Rob Portman, who has paid his dues, is facing a tough re-election fight. 

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The factotums well understand that Cruz is the Mister Anybody of the moment by default. 

While the senator from Texas has paid his dues, he's an arrogant jerk of the Eddie Haskell School, is loathed by his Senate colleagues, is fond of using Nazi analogies in his solipsistic rants, and has a habit of being caught flat-out lying, like his Democrats-as-violent-criminals screed, although if Donald Trump has done anything positive for the GOP it has been to show that candidates can say just about anything and get away with it.  (How else to explain Chris Christie's modest resurgence?) 

But while Cruz is playing the long game, as the pundits put it, is perhaps the smartest (which is to say craftiest) candidate in the field, has plenty of dough to make it through the primary season and is working to build a broader coalition of supporters, he has a very big problem. 

Although Cruz is . . . uh, cruising in Iowa, where he is now nipping at Trump's fashionable heels, the corn-fed, flannel-shirted folks with high cholesterol levels who reliably turn out for that state's first-in-the-nation caucus every four years are unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole, and every other primary state has a smaller share of conservative voters who are drawn to him than Iowa. 

So while Cruz's message resonates with the Republican Party's base, more mainstream voters are less likely to be in the thrall of a candidate whose vision of America should a Democrat be elected president is of coat hanger-wielding abortionists lurking on every street corner, a separation between church and state so absolute that Christians are persecuted, gun possession of any kind is outlawed, homosexuality runs rampant, recreational drug use is condoned, Spanish joins English as an official language, and flag burning is seen as an act of patriotism.  Trump almost seems moderate by comparison, and in some respects he is.

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How then does Cruz broaden his appeal and break out?   The short answer is that he's probably out of luck. 

For one thing, the GOP base is a lot smaller than you might think.  Nate Silver, the preeminent political tea-leaf reader who correctly picked the winner in all 50 states in 2012, cheered Trump haters in pointing out the other day that there are not enough Republicans for Trump to merely avoid fading:

"Right now, [Trump] has 25 to 30 percent of the vote in polls among the roughly 25 percent of Americans who identify as Republican. (That's something like 6 to 8 percent of the electorate overall, or about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.)"

As the rest of the field consolidates, Trump will need to gain additional support to win the nomination. Silver says that might not be easy, since some of the things Trump says and does that appeal to a faction of the Republican electorate may alienate the rest of it. Trump’s favorability ratings are middling among Republicans and godawful among the broader electorate.

"But there’s another, more fundamental problem. That 25 or 30 percent of the vote isn’t really Donald Trump’s for the keeping. In fact, it doesn’t belong to any candidate. If past nomination races are any guide, the vast majority of eventual Republican voters haven’t made up their minds yet."

Substitute Cruz for Trump in Silver's analysis and it's obvious that Cruz has a numbers problem.  To which I will add that the folks who believe the moon landings were faked have sealed themselves in the Fox News bubble that helped doom Romney and don't believe a damned word that the mainstream media spouts.  (Which come to think of it, might not be so dumb after all.).

For another thing, the distance Cruz would have to travel from hugging the party's base to espousing views only slightly to the right of Clinton that might appeal to more voters is far, far greater -- think parsecs compared to light years -- than when John McCain and Mitt Romney attempted the same feat against Barack Obama, and Cruz presumably won't have the ball and chain of a running mate like Sarah Palin or a proclivity to accidentally speak his mind like Mister 47 Percent.

Cruz's coalition-building efforts don't seem to be panning out, at least not yet. 

The latest Huffington Post polling average has Trump solidifying his lead at 34.4 percent with Marco Rubio at 14.6 percent, Dr. Ben Carson at 13.9 percent and Cruz at 13.4 percent. Same for the latest Quinnipiac University national poll with Trump still comfortably in the lead with 27 percent.  Rubio is second at 17 percent, while Carson has dropped from second into a third-place tie with Cruz at 16 percent, who is up from 13 percent in a previous poll.  

(The Quinnipiac poll shows Clinton increasing her lead over Bernie Sanders by a 60-30 percent margin, and both beat Trump easily in head-to-head matchups.)

When it has seemed opportune, insider Cruz has sought to align himself with outsider Trump, who has attracted support from some moderates in traditionally Democratic states, but evangelicals make up most of Cruz's support because they like his religious right message and the people he hangs with, including Kevin Swanson, a pastor who advocates executing gays and lesbians. 

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To paraphrase Colin Powell, the leaders of the Republican Party bought it, they broke it, now they own it -- and they're scared to death of Trump. 

The New York Times describes the state of play this way:

"Many leading Republican officials, strategists and donors now say they fear that Mr. Trump’s nomination would lead to an electoral wipeout, a sweeping defeat that could undo some of the gains Republicans have made in recent congressional, state and local elections  . . . Some of the highest-ranking Republicans in Congress and some of the party's wealthiest and most generous donors have balked at trying to take down Mr. Trump because they fear a public feud with the insult-spewing media figure."

The fear of challenging Trump won't go away unless there is a credible alternative to him who can be a sop for the angry constituency party leaders have nurtured through their thinly veiled nativism and anti-Obama miasma, but more candidates would have to quit the race for a viable Anybody But Trump to emerge and that is not happening with the top tier candidates not just hunkering down, but increasing the intensity of their attacks on each other. 

While Rubio is widely considered by the punditocracy to be the most electable candidate in the field because of his overall moderation, he may not even win a primary.  Then there's Jeb Bush, the odds-on favorite to win the nomination going into the fray, who is polling in the low single digits and in 8th place in one national poll.

Meanwhile, Ward Baker, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, all but concedes Trump is capable of winning the nomination in a confidential memo urging candidates to mimic Trump by adopting many of his tactics, issues and approaches, including the way they dress and how they use Twitter. 

"Trump has risen because voters see him as authentic, independent, direct, firm, — and believe he can’t be bought," Baker writes. "These are the same character traits our candidates should be advancing in 2016." 

Panic?  Did I say panic?

It still seems early in the game until you look at the election calendar.  The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary are barely 60 days away, a month later some 16 states will have voted, and nearly two thirds of Republican delegates will have been awarded by the end of March.

This means that the longer Republican leaders take to call out Trump, the more their passivity becomes an endorsement of their worst nightmare.

Politix Update is written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click HERE for an index of previous Politix Updates.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  USED WITH PERMISSION.

When There's Nothing Else To Say About Mass Shootings In America . . .

I can’t bring myself to write about it again, so I’ll hand off to my friend Will Bunch, who writes:  

"Today’s news is stunning and heartbreaking -- just as it was heartbreaking in Newtown, or just last Friday when three people were murdered in a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, or when our fellow citizens were slain at the movie theater, or in their workplace or college classroom,or place of worship. I pray for the departed and for all of their loved ones.

"Beyond that, I don't know what else to say. I really don't. I've written this same damn blog post too many times, and I'm sick of it. How many ways can you say the same thing? This afternoon, I reviewed a decade of Attytood posts about mass shootings. All of what I wrote then is just as valid today."

It's sadly evident that Americans and too many of their so-called leaders are okay with "the new normal."

Cannibals, Whaling, Human Sacrifice & The True Story Of 'Moby-Dick'

WHEN MOTHER WENT OFF THE DEEP END

IMAGE: WIKIMEDIA

When Kids Go Splat

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH © STEVE HIRSCH

Politix Update: Missing Dubya (Or When A Cracked Skull Is Preferable To Paralysis)

There may be no better manifestation of the depths to which the Republican Party has fallen, its loudest voices spewing hatred as party leaders cower at their feet of clay, that otherwise sane people find themselves missing George W. Bush.

I do not happen to be one of those people.  Historians have been hard at work in assessing the 43rd president's legacy since he returned home to Texas seven years ago, and about the best they can come up with is that he was likable and his frat boy smirk hid a quiet dignity.  This is because almost everything Bush did -- or was told to do, as was often the case -- was disastrous, and when Republicans acknowledge that they miss him, it's like saying that a cracked skull is preferable to paralysis. 

The wave of Dubya Nostalgia is attributable to three things:

* He's kept his head down, refused to criticize President Obama (at least not directly), and is doing penance through charitable work and by churning out cute paintings of puppies.

* He's not Donald Trump. 

* He never blamed Islam for the 9/11 attacks and rise of Al Qaeda, and by extension ISIS, as do all the candidates in a Trump-driven campaign in which rhetorical excess has drowned out what little substance there was to begin with.

This begs a question that is being whispered by some establishment Republicans: Might Dubya not talk to the candidates -- you know, like man-to-man, or something -- and tell them to wise the eff up if they want their party to have a fighting chance on the national stage?

This is a non-starter.

Beyond the fact that few of the candidates seem capable of listening to reason, there is the reality that the GOP is in such dire straits because of Bush.  The guy crashed the economy, failed to prevent 9/11 despite having ample warning, and went to war in the wrong country, which became an incubator for jihadists.

But as awful as all that was, that's not what bugs today's GOP. 

The big problem is that Bush is viewed as having betrayed the ultra-conservative cause, which led to the Obama presidency and the demon spawn of the Affordable Care Act, the legitimization of gay marriage and other assaults on common decency, which was the gasoline that ignited the party's hard-right lurch into obstructing instead of leading, scoring purity points with its followers instead of helping govern, and always overplaying its hand. 

Besides which, they've figured out -- or rather Trump has led the way in showing -- that they can say just about anything and get away with it, so why should they listen to some has-been puppy painter?

MORE SHOCKING CLINTON EMAILS!!!

I had the misfortune to get a trim on a morning this week when Laura Ingraham was gifting the world with one of her patented rants on Fox News, which is always on at my barber shop.  Her subject was the release of the latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails from when she was secretary of state, and Ingraham reliably trotted out the usual right-wing talking points: Clinton is a very bad person who lies constantly and hides stuff.  

Well . . . well, after arriving back at the shack freshly coiffed, I was anxious to see what Politico, The New York Times and other usual mainstream media suspects had to say about the 7,800-page trove.  To my non-surprise, the reports I read bore no resemblance to Ingraham's blast. 

Politico was so underwhelmed by the banality of the emails that its lead paragraph read:

"Hillary Clinton is no stranger to freewheeling political analysis, gestures of indulgent flattery and myriad tech woes, as the latest batch of emails released by the State Department shows." 

And The Times noted that:

"A trove of Hillary Clinton's emails released by the State Department . . . shows efforts by aides to solicit advice for a concussion she sustained in 2012 and illustrates Mrs. Clinton's personal difficulty with technology."

I've said it before and it bears repeating again: Fox News is a gift that keeps on giving . . . to the Democratic Party. 

Fox has created a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves into believing that the U.S. is more conservative than it actually is.  The consequence is that the GOP has dutifully responded by running radical conservatives representative of the influential network's viewers, not the true state of the electorate.  Fox played an important role in Mitt Romney's defeat in 2012 and it will play a role in a Republican defeat next year. 

Oh, about that "difficulty with technology" bit: 

One email shockingly revealed that on a Sunday afternoon in October 2012, Clinton emailed senior adviser Philippe Reines with the subject line "Stupid question," asking him on what channel she could find Showtime so she could watch the latest episode of Homeland that evening.

"If you have Comcast, it's channel 339 or 340 (one is HD and one isn't) If you don't have Comcast, I can look it up," Reines responded, to which Clinton wrote back, "You won't be surprised to hear I'm not sure."

Who was it who famously said that those who do not remember cable channels are condemned to repeat forgetting them?

Politix Update is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen, for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.  Click HERE  for an index of previous Politix Updates.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  USED WITH PERMISSION.

This Just In: John F. Kennedy Is Still Alive (But In My Dreams, Not In Yours)

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2009)

I can remember some but by no means all of my dreams, which are seldom erotic, rarely nightmarish and more often than not mundane, frequently involving people and places that I have known, although the people are in places different than where I have known them, while the places are conglomerations of, say, a big old farmhouse where I once lived, a rustic high street bookshop in England and a coastal fishing village in Japan. These nocturnal journeys usually have soundtracks, sometimes music that I recently listened to with no apparent connection to the dream and seems to have been selected by some mad deejay. My dear departed parents make cameo appearances in some of my dreams, less so my siblings and children, and only rarely the woman who has to put up with me as I toss and turn my way through these somnambulations, which I am able to interrupt to have a drink of water from a bedside glass or a shuffle off to the loo for a piddle, and then continue. Oh, and I always dream in color.

Having gotten those preliminaries out of the way, I am happy to report that John F. Kennedy is still alive. Or at least he was in a dream of several parts and epic length I had that was more unusual than usual for several reasons, including it being partially in the third person; that is, unlike my usual modus, I could occasionally see myself as opposed to being inside myself looking out onto the dreamscape.

This dream opened on a balcony above an old and rather ornate Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool, possibly at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South where I played water polo as a young man before living in that farmhouse and visiting that bookstore and fishing village. The occasion had the feel of a graduation or some other ceremony just ended. Everyone in the knot of a dozen or so people was dressed formally as would seem to befit such an occasion, and the center of attention was Mr. Kennedy, who by my reckoning is now a ripe 98 years old. He was shaking hands, back slapping and handing out really big Cuban cigars. I had several friends with me, but who they were was not revealed. There also were pair of elderly and diminutive identical twin butlers in evening coats and white gloves hovering nearby.

(I would like to pause for a moment to thank the folks who do the lighting and cinematography for my dreams. The results are fabulous -- a texturally rich but slightly gauzy look reminiscent of a Baz Luhrmann movie.)

If you're wondering what Mr. Kennedy would look like as a nonegenarian, the answer is an even puffier version of his late brother Teddy, but with the same steely yet warm gaze and incredible greenish-gray eyes that met my baby blues when we shook hands on an airport tarmac a few weeks before the 1960 presidential election. (He was 44, I was 13.)

The dream Mr. Kennedy took my hand, his as firm as it had been at the airport, and introduced me to several of his companions with effusive praise. Unfortunately, that part of the dream was interrupted by a water break, so I suppose I'll never know about what or why I was so great.

(If you, like me, think there may be a connection between spicy food and vivid dreaming, I would like to again pause to let you know that my pre-dream evening meal consisted of a bowl of pasta with a homemade clam sauce generously imbued with chili and poblano peppers. Ta-da!)

The over-the-pool formalities concluded and a big Cuban cigar tucked into a pocket of my waistcoat, we were escorted out a door by the bookend butlers onto an ivied university-like campus. Things get a little hazy here (it's a dream, okay?) but a door was opened to an outsized English estate car, possibly a custom Bentley shooting brake, with wood side paneling and a cavernous back deck. I was beckoned inside.

One of the butlers slipped behind the wheel, his bald head barely visible over the seatback, while his companion rode shotgun. Mr. Kennedy, his companions and my friends were nowhere to be seen. Sitting on the spacious back deck with legs crossed, as it was suggested that I also do, were several children that I didn't recall seeing at the pool and some older lasses whom I did. As noted, my dreams are seldom erotic, but I did eye one of the women with a lust that was not just in my heart.

"Off we go!" announced the butler driver as he hit the starter and the estate car charged out onto a wide boulevard under a full moon no doubt arranged by my dream lighting guy. Kaboom! We were suddenly riding very fast through New England farm country and the occasional picture-postcard town. At some point after a piddle break and brief announcement to my then stirring bed mate that I was having the most amazing dream, it shifted into its final phase as the other butler declared "Here we go," or words to that effect. The estate car burst through a covered bridge, hurtled down a lane bordered by fieldstone fences and slowly lifted off, gaining altitude as I awoke.

Now here's where things get really interesting: The soundtrack to my dream was not something that I had recently heard, but rather something that I had wanted to hear and had left next to the stereo with that intention. Holy cripes! The very same music -- Santana's "Eternal Caravan Of Reincarnation/Waves Within" from the Caravanserai album -- came on the radio station that I was listening to as I wrote this the morning after. A marvelous piece of music but with no apparent connection to the dream. Natch.

If that wasn't a hoot, dig this: I decided to write out a draft of my dream as a text document before cutting and pasting it into this blog post. I have a blank document hanging around on the computer for such exercises and typically wipe this template clean after using it, but failed to do so last time. And so when I double-clicked on the template it came up with the text still intact from the last time. It was a quote from John-freaking-Kennedy that I had used after Barack Obama's victory in November 2008. It goes like this:

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."

What does all of this mean? I really don't have a clue, but your thoughts are welcome.

PAINTINGS © KEVIN WRIGHT

Politics Update: Evangelicals

One of the mysteries of this expectation-defying election season is why so many evangelicals support Donald Trump, a thrice married philanderer whose religious bona fides are nonexistent.  Well, the mystery has been solved: Evangelicals, or some of them anyway, are just as cynical and resentment ridden as Trump's other supporters.

Thought For The Day

FROM MARIE CLAIRE AUSTRALIA via MARIANNE COSTANTINOU