Showing Up in Rural America

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

Jeff Bloodworth at The Liberal Patriot:

“Polarization is a by-product of Democrats. They don’t even try to compete in rural America.” Matt Barron should know. The principal at MLB Research Associates specializes in rural Democratic politics—and he sees a party that has quit rural America. The political consequences of this development are as obvious as they are profound.

The rural vote is where MAGA predominates. Donald Trump took 65 percent of the rural vote in 2020, up from 59 percent in 2016. Among rural whites, the Republican took an eye-popping 71 percent of the vote in 2020, a nine-point improvement over 2016. Around one fifth of Americans live in rural environs and small towns, but the GOP’s monopoly automatically puts around two dozen states with significant rural populations out of reach—and Democrats don’t even bother to compete for them.
...
The Democrats’ deep woes in rural America are recent. Historically, the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson was built upon rural America. By the 1930s, FDR successfully brought the urban working class and rural Americans together to make the Democrats into a dominant majority party. As recently as 1980, rural voters helped Democrats control nearly twice as many state legislatures as Republicans. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton took a bit more than half the rural vote. Heck, 43 percent of rural voters cast ballots for Barack Obama in 2008.

Obama never hoped to win the rural vote outright. But by reducing his margin of defeat in rural regions, he won key states and an electoral mandate. The first black major-party candidate performed three points better than John Kerry in 2004 in rural areas and won nine points more than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In retrospect, however, 2008 proved a strange inflection point. A rural Democratic state legislator complained to me, “The Obama people showed-up [in 2008] and then they left—there was no follow-up. Voters felt abandoned.”

Leading the way was Obama himself. In his first year in office, the president traveled to domestic events 43 times. Out of these 43 trips, he went to rural America just once. In conjunction with this was the substance of Obama’s agenda. Multiple analysts complained that Democrats have turned their backs on local issues; all politics became national because Democrats were mostly uninterested in knowing these local issues and campaigning on them. The political fallout was impossible to miss. During the Obama presidency, Democrats lost 13 Senate and 69 House seats, 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats, and 30 state legislative chambers, according to analysis from The Washington Post. The overwhelming majority of these losses came because of the party’s weakness with rural voters.

Prudence and Impeachment

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign and other scandals.

At The Hill, Lloyd Green writes that the Clinton impeachment holds lessons for those who would immediately impeach Trump.

Back then, Newt Gingrich, the ever priapic House Speaker, and his Republican congressional colleagues thought it a good idea to impeach Bill Clinton for being, well, ever priapic. For his efforts, Gingrich lost the speakership as his own “hobbies” became the focus of attention, and the Republicans managed to lose four seats in the 1998 midterm elections, despite the fact that they were the “out” party. President Clinton ended up the winner as he completed his term with a 65 percent approval rating, a number higher than every other president since Harry Truman.

Instead, the Democrats and the country would be better served by waiting for what the special counsel ultimately says and does about President Trump. Conceivably, Mueller could indict Trump, label him an unindicted conspirator much like Richard Nixon, or recommend that the House consider Trump’s impeachment. It also possible that Trump escapes legal jeopardy. The bottom line is that prudence is in order. There is plenty of time left on the clock.

In 2014, some Republicans talked about impeaching Obama. Democrats used such talk to raise money. 

Gingrich and Pardons

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

Face the Nation, October 13, 1996:

SCHIEFFER: Should--should President Clinton say flatly that he will not pardon anyone involved in Whitewater?

Rep. GINGRICH: You know, I--the notion that we're sitting here talking about whether or not a president of the United States would pardon people directly implicated in his potential breaking the law--I mean, it's so bizarre that I don't have a good answer for you. The Constitution provides for a very clear right of the president to pardon. Now it also provides for the Congress a very clear right to investigate a president. So I would guess that Clinton, in the end, will not pardon anybody because I don't think the country would tolerate it. I mean, I don't think he can buy Susan McDougal silence or Webb Hubbell silence with a pardon, because I think you'd then have just an outrage from the whole country. So...

Pardon? Indictment?

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

Charlie Savage reports at The New York Times:

President Trump has consulted his legal advisers about the possibility of pre-emptively pardoning his associates — and possibly even himself — to undermine the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, The Washington Post reported Thursday night. But on Friday, John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s new personal lawyer, denied to BuzzFeed that any such discussions had taken place.

... 

The only limitation explicitly stated in the Constitution is a ban on using a pardon to stop an impeachment proceeding in Congress, and the only obvious implicit limitation is that he cannot pardon offenses under state law.

But some legal scholars think a president cannot pardon himself, either, because it would be a conflict of interest.

In August 1974, four days before Mr. Nixon resigned, Mary C. Lawton, then the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, issued a terse legal opinion stating that “it would seem” that Mr. Nixon could not pardon himself “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

But she did not explain what transformed that principle into an unwritten legal limit on the power the Constitution bestows on presidents.

Other legal specialists have come out the other way. In a 1998 House Judiciary Committee hearing about the proposed impeachment of Mr. Clinton, for example, Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who is now the chairman of that panel, stated, “The prevailing opinion is that the president can pardon himself.”

There is no definitive answer because no president has ever tried to pardon himself and then been prosecuted, which would give courts a chance to weigh in. If Mr. Trump did purport to pardon himself, and was later indicted anyway, it could create an opportunity for the Supreme Court to resolve the question.

Charlie Savage reports at The New York Times:

A newfound memo from Kenneth W. Starr’s independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton sheds fresh light on a constitutional puzzle that is taking on mounting significance amid the Trump-Russia inquiry: Can a sitting president be indicted?

The 56-page memo, locked in the National Archives for nearly two decades and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, amounts to the most thorough government-commissioned analysis rejecting a generally held view that presidents are immune from prosecution while in office.

“It is proper, constitutional, and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting president for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties,” the Starr office memo concludes. “In this country, no one, even President Clinton, is above the law.”

Inheriting a Mess

Trump just said: "I inherited a mess. At home and abroad. A mess.... no matter where you look, a disaster... we'll take care of it. I just wanted to let you know- a mess."

• And at home, we were facing a financial crisis that just about every credible economist said had the potential to plunge us into another great depression, an economic crisis that was producing stagnant wages, falling incomes, and a shaken middle class, and a deficit crisis that was saddling our children with a mountain of debt. That's what we inherited when we came in. -- Barack Obama, September 29, 2010.
• "We inherited a recession. The first three quarters of my Presidency were negative growth. That means it's a recession." -- George W. Bush, August 24, 2002
• "Now they want to hold us accountable for all the messes that we inherited from them. At least we can hold them accountable for the decisions they've taken in the last 21 months." -- Bill Clinton, November 7, 1994
• "Who can remember any other time in this country when we faced double-digit inflation, a trillion-dollar debt, 21 1/2-percent interest rates, and the highest peacetime tax burden in our history, all at the same time? Yet, that's exactly the situation that we inherited 20 months ago." -- Ronald Reagan, October 6, 1982
• "I said 2 years ago that we would remove fraud, waste, and corruption from the Government, and we are doing it-not overnight; it took a long time to create the mess that we inherited and we can't eliminate it in 1 year." -- Jimmy Carter, September 27, 1978
• "Why have they [prices] gone up? Very simply: because the previous administration, over a period of years, had spent far more than the tax system would produce with full employment. And when you do that, when you have runaway spending in Washington, you have runaway prices at home. And I say, let's get the big spenders out of Washington and get the savers into Washington." -- Richard Nixon, October 19, 1970 
• The times demand that all of us solve problems which at times appear to some of us to be unsolvable, problems that we inherited, problems that are thrust upon us by years of injustice and years of neglect. -- Lyndon Johnson, June 10, 1968

1988 and 2016

Larry Sabato writes:

The remarkable thing is that Obama was unable to transfer enough of this popularity to Clinton, his chosen successor, despite the dramatic improvement in the devastated economy he inherited in January 2009. Consider the 1988 election as a comparison: According to Gallup, Ronald Reagan had a 51% approval rating in late October 1988, but the incumbent was a key factor — maybe the key factor — in Vice President George H.W. Bush’s 53%-46% victory over Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Sean Trende and David Byler write about the South at RealClearPolitics:

...Clinton ran well ahead of Obama in Mega Cities (and there are quite a few in this region), though she “wasted” a lot of these votes in Atlanta. Everywhere else was a bit of a disappointment. She only tied Obama in large cities (though this is still ahead of Bill’s performances in the region), but ran behind Obama (and Bill) everywhere else. In large towns, she ran about even with Michael Dukakis, and in rural counties and small towns, she ran behind Dukakis by significant amounts. Again, rural counties and towns don’t cast a lot of votes standing alone, but they do add up.

... 

From 1988-1996, the Democrats’ coalition was well balanced. Bill Clinton basically took the Dukakis vote, and tacked on 10 points across the board. But beginning with Al Gore, the distributions are increasingly skewed toward the mega cities. The gains there are significant, but they aren’t enough to offset the losses in rural areas.

...'
As of 1988, the Democrats had a robust coalition in the South. They showed strength across Appalachia, in the “black belt” (named for the fertile soil), and in the Rio Grande Valley. Southern Louisiana (Catholics) and Arkansas outside the traditionally red northwest portion of the state were blue. Republicans, by contrast, were strong in the historically Republican areas of southeastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina. They also held the cities, as metro areas like Miami, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Northern Virginia were all purple-to-red.

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In summary: In 2009, we identified the outlines of what would become a Democratic problem: weakness among traditionally Democratic voters in rural areas and towns. In 2016, this weakness became significant enough that it overwhelmed Democratic strength in urban areas in two states that President Obama had won. As we saw above, this is significant, because while urban areas are growing, they are growing at a slower rate than many analysts seem to appreciate.

And the Midwest:

As you can see, the Massachusetts governor performed well in the region, especially in the western division. This is in part because of the farm recession, but as we’ll see, it wasn’t limited to this. We note Democratic strength in eastern Ohio, which is part of Appalachia, along the Lake Erie coast (reflecting the strength in old industrial cities), in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and in the Balkans (a rural, yet ethnically diverse section of southeastern Kansas). But in general, it is difficult to identify any particular home for the Democratic Party here. Democrats perform well in all sorts of places. This helped Dukakis carry Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, while coming close in South Dakota, Missouri and Illinois.

...

 Again, the Democratic decline in rural areas is apparent, although Clinton performed worse than any Democrat since 1988 in almost every area (and worse even than Dukakis in rural and small-town areas)...

As late as 1996, Bill Clinton ran strong in [Ohio portion of] Appalachia, and dominated in the industrial Northeast and along Lake Erie. The state had strong east/west and north/south splits that gradually disappeared over the course of the decades. In 2016, Democrats ran strong in Lucas (Toledo), Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Summit (Akron), Athens (Ohio University), Franklin (Columbus) and Hamilton (Cincinnati) counties. Again, these are significant prizes. But the drop-off in rural areas and the towns looks much like it does in the southern region, with Clinton running almost 15 points behind Dukakis in the rural areas, and about 10 points behind him in the towns...

During the summer, Dukakis told Slate's Isaac Chotiner:

My first convention was in Los Angeles in 1960 with Jack Kennedy. [Laughs.] So I go back a long way. We had a very good convention in 1988 and this was a very good convention. But my demise demonstrates pretty clearly that you can have a great convention and get beat.

The People Don't Like Trump

Gallup reports:

President-elect Donald Trump approaches Inauguration Day with a significantly lower favorable rating than his three immediate predecessors received when they were presidents-elect. Trump's 40% favorable rating is roughly half of what Barack Obama enjoyed before his inauguration in 2009 (78%) and is much lower than the pre-inaugural ratings for George W. Bush (62%) and Bill Clinton (66%).

The latest findings were collected in a Jan. 4-8 Gallup poll.

Of the four most recent incoming presidents, Trump is the only president-elect whose unfavorable rating outweighs his favorable score; a majority of 55% of Americans hold a negative view of Trump, compared with 18% who did so for Obama, 26% for Clinton and 36% for Bush. Gallup has asked favorable and unfavorable ratings for key figures in this format since 1992, so only comparisons to Clinton, Bush and Obama are available.

Trump's latest favorable rating -- along with his post-election November and December ratings -- remains slightly higher than during the course of the presidential campaign, when it never rose above 38%, including 34% in the week before the election. The three previous presidents-elect also saw improvement in their images after winning the election. Obama's favorable image increased 16 percentage points, Clinton's rose 15 points and Bush's seven points between Gallup's final pre-election poll and its last pre-inauguration poll in prior transfers of power.

Identity Politics

John Judis writes at TPM:

Bill Clinton did not practice identity politics in 1992; nor did Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Nor have most Republicans. Some liberals have charged that Trump’s campaign was based on “white” identity politics. I consider that to be a case of either grammatical sloppiness or projection. Trump did have a following among fringe groups that extol and defend whiteness, and liberal cryptographers were able to find occasional twitter statements and the like that spoke to these groups, but Trump’s campaign was thematically centered on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Its appeal was nationalist. When I explained this to one interviewer, he responded, “But nationalism is a form of identity politics.” That’s a misuse of the term. It’s allowing “identity” to go on a linguistic holiday. Is a concern about global warming planetary identity politics?

In Clinton’s case, even when she tried to sum up her campaign thematically, she invoked identity politics. “Stronger together” and “inclusivity” conjured up an image of the different groups gathered together and stronger together than they were by themselves. I am not going to repeat arguments here that this kind of identity politics is not a path to a Democratic majority – the results are clear in Clinton’s failure to defeat a remarkably flawed Republican opponent. In this brief note, I just want to make clear that it’s not an adequate response to the critics of this politics to say, as the editors of Vox do, that all politics is identity politics.

Clinton, Then and Now

Todd S. Purdum writes at Politico:

By 2016, spurred by anger at Wall Street, and at Washington gridlock and business as usual, the Democratic Party had moved well to the left of the one Bill Clinton had inherited in 1992. And while Hillary Clinton recognized the change intellectually, she seemed unable to catch up to the practical realities of its political implications for her campaign. She embraced bold approaches on hot-button issues like immigration and gun control that would have been shocking for a Democrat in her husband’s day, and accepted what was arguably the most liberal Democratic Party platform in history, but that never seemed to be enough to satisfy younger voters, especially. “People thought she’d been conceived in Goldman Sachs’ trading desk,” says one veteran Clinton aide, noting the irony that this was millennial voters’ jaded view of a woman often seen in the 1990s as reflexively more liberal than her husband.

“Part of the problem is that there have just been lots and lots of changes in America in the past 25 years,” says Elaine Kamarck, who was a senior domestic policy adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There were just a lot of cultural issues that were relevant for Bill that were gone by the time Hillary’s campaign came along, because by and large they’d been resolved or defused.”

Town and Country

At The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein writes of the urban-rural political split:

Bill Clinton was the last Democratic nominee to demonstrate wide appeal across that divide: In both 1992 and 1996, he carried nearly half of America’s 3,100 counties. But since then, Democrats have retreated into the nation’s urban centers. In 2000, Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote, but carried fewer than 700 counties. In 2012, President Obama squeezed even more advantage from the biggest places: He carried 86 of the nation’s 100 largest counties (including the District of Columbia), winning them by nearly 12 million votes combined. That allowed him to win comfortably, although he carried only about 600 of the remaining 3,000 counties, and lost them by nearly 7 million votes combined.

This year, Hillary Clinton pushed that model just past the breaking point. Pending final results, she now leads in 88 of the nation’s 100 largest counties (including D.C.). Suffering a slight decline in African American support, Clinton did not quite match Obama’s vote margins in some crucial metropolitan areas, particularly Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.

But overall, she delivered a dominant performance in most urban centers and many affluent white-collar suburbs. She held Trump to less than one-fourth of the vote in such mega-counties as Manhattan, Cook (Chicago), and Los Angeles; expanded on Obama’s margins in growing Sunbelt cities such as Miami, Charlotte, and Houston; and utterly routed Trump in thriving new economy centers like Austin, Silicon Valley, and Seattle. At latest tally, Clinton won the nation’s 100 largest counties by fully 12.6 million votes—an historic lead certain to widen with many more West Coast ballots yet to count.

No Fortune 100 CEOs Give to Trump

Rebecca Ballhaus and Brody Mullins report at The Wall Street Journal:

No chief executive at the nation’s 100 largest companies had donated to Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through August, a sharp reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies supported GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

During this year’s presidential primaries, 19 of the nation’s top CEOs gave to other Republican candidates, including former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of campaign donations.

Since then, most have stayed on the sidelines, with 89 of the 100 top CEOs not supporting either presidential nominee, and 11 backing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. A total of 66 CEOs sat out the 2012 campaign, according to the Journal’s calculation.

Is Trump Pulling a Clinton Trick?

Trump is refusing to release his tax returns, at least for now, and Mitt Romney says that the only explanation is that they contain a "bombshell of unusual size."

There is an alternative explanation, however.  Suppose Trump is trying to hype the expectation that his taxes reveal something hugely wrong, even though they don't.  As he continues to stonewall, the speculation will keep mounting.  And then when he finally releases them, any problems or anomalies will look pretty small in comparison with what his critics are suggesting.

If this scenario unfolds, credit should go to the original author of this trick: Bill Clinton.  In 1998, he had to manage expectations about video of his grand-jury testimony.  Howard Rosenberg reported at The Los Angeles Times:

For days there had been breathless reports throughout TV, based on anonymous sources, about the coming video showing Clinton folding under pressure like a rattled and red-faced Capt. Queeg. He was depicted by some even as angrily halting the grand jury proceedings from time to time when the questions hit too close.

The president did get a little testy occasionally, as did at least one of his questioners. But lose his cool and bring out the ball bearings? Whatever else Clinton was on the video, he was none of that.

Thomas DeFrank and William Goldschlag reported at The New York Daily News:

In part that may have been due to some clever White House damage-control work. One source said that Clinton spinners had leaked reports that the President was enraged by the questions of Starr's lawyers and stormed out of the room at one point in hopes of making Clinton's steadier demeanor seem more palatable by contrast. "I guess the expectation didn't live up to the spin," the source chuckled.

The lesson for Trump critics:  do not raise extravagant expectations about what the tax returns may contain. Trump may be playing you just as Clinton played his GOP critics in 1998.

Clintonism Is Dead. Long Live Clinton.

Lloyd Green writes:

Yesterday marked the end of Clintonism, circa 1992; that is, the impulse to tack to the center while paying homage to law, order, and markets. To win, Clinton had to squirm away from the 1994 crime bill, and hoped the voters would forget about the fact that her husband left the campaign trail in 1992 as Arkansas governor to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a self-lobotomized cop killer.

The world had changed, and time had moved on. Instead of Bill trashing Sister Souljah, Hillary 2.0 paid homage to Rev. Al Sharpton, singing the tax-dodging and race-baiting Reverend’s praises all with little hope of snagging his pre-primary endorsement. But then again, Clinton, unlike Sanders, always knew it was all about the “W.” For Clinton, winning was everything.

The Jewish vote took a hit on Tuesday. According to the exit polls, Jews made up just 12 percent of the electorate. Religious “nones” now outnumbered Jewish voters by more than two to one. To put things in perspective, just eight years earlier the Jews cast 17 percent of Democratic ballots, while in 1980 the figure was 38 percent. The three “Is” of New York politics—Ireland, Israel and Italy—have been supplanted by hot sauce and Hamilton.

Some things don't change.  In All  Too Human, George Stephanopoulos said:

As I wrote and rewrote, I came to see how Clinton's shamelessness is a key to his political success, how his capacity for denial is tied to the optimism that is his greatest political strength.  

Hillary Clinton has tried to apply this lesson, at least as far as denial goes. Trump has mastered it.

From Sister Souljah to Emily Litella

Two news reports illustrate the evolution of the Democratic Party and racial politics since 1992.

Amy Chozick reports at The New York Times:

Former President Bill Clinton said Friday he regretted drowning out the chants of black protesters at a rally in Philadelphia the day before, when he issued an aggressive defense of his administration’s impact on black families. His reaction thrust a debate about the 1990s into the center of his wife’s presidential campaign, one that has focused heavily on issues of race and criminal justice.

“I know those young people yesterday were just trying to get good television,” Mr. Clinton said Friday of the Black Lives Matter protesters who interrupted him Thursday in accusing Hillary Clinton of being responsible for black deaths. “But that doesn’t mean that I was most effective in answering it.”

It was a remarkable reversal for Mr. Clinton, who has had to campaign for his wife in an era when the signature policies of his administration have been repudiated both by Mrs. Clinton and her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

None of those issues has been more central to the 2016 campaign than the 1994 crime bill, which created tougher penalties for nonviolent drug offenders, erected dozens of new prisons and deluged American cities with more police officers.

In June 1992, Gwen Ifill reported at The New York Times:

Aggressively rebutting the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. Bill Clinton said today that he would not "back down on what I said" at the conference of the Rainbow Coalition last weekend about remarks attributed to a rap performer.

"I bragged on the Rainbow Coalition and its programs," Mr. Clinton told reporters as he entered a radio station, defending his speech at the conference. "I criticized divisive language by Sister Souljah. If Jesse Jackson wants to align himself with that now and claim that's the way he felt, then that's his business."

Democratic Campaign Gets More Heated

Alan Rappeport and Yamiche Alcindor report at The New York Times:

After weeks of subtle sniping, the frustration first boiled over at a rally in Philadelphia on Wednesday night when Mr. Sanders took issue with recent criticism over his understanding of financial regulation policy and assailed Mrs. Clinton from multiple angles. And he intensified the attacks Thursday, saying of Mrs. Clinton, “People might wonder about your qualifications when you supported virtually every trade agreement, trade agreements which have cost the American worker millions of decent paying jobs.”

The attacks represent a sharpening of Mr. Sanders’s tone as he comes off a string of six straight victories but heads into a more daunting challenge in Mrs. Clinton’s home state, New York, where polls show him lagging behind and he faces tough scrutiny from New York City’s unforgiving tabloids.

At the Philadelphia rally Wednesday night, he first raised the issue of Mrs. Clinton not being qualified to lead the country, citing donations to the “super PAC” supporting her.

“She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote-un-quote, not qualified to be president,” Mr. Sanders said. “Let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton, I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds.”

He added: “I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you supported the Panama free trade agreement.”

WND reports:

Former President Bill Clinton unloaded on the Obama administration and Black Lives Matter protesters during a campaign event Thursday for his wife in Pennsylvania.

Clinton took a veiled jab at Obama’s handling of world affairs, saying, “Unlike when I was president, a lot of things are coming apart around the world now. We like to just think about our economic issues, but you have to worry about a collapse in Europe dragging back the American economy. You have to worry about the largest number of refugees since World War II. And all this stuff comes home.”

Ben Kamisar reports at The Hill:

Former President Bill Clinton repeatedly defended himself from criticism about his support of his controversial crime bill from a series of protestors during a rally for his wife’s presidential campaign. 

The protestors interrupted the president’s stump speech, shouting criticism of his support of the 1994 crime bill that raised mandatory minimum sentences, with one holding up a sign that said “Clinton crime bill destroyed our communities.” 

Clinton pivoted away from his typical stump speech and launched into a series of arguments about ways the crime bill did help the black community.

"You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter," a visibly heated Clinton exclaimed. "Tell the truth."

In 1994, he said, “I talked to a bunch of African-American groups -- they think black lives matter. [The groups said] to take this bill because people are being shot in the street by gangs. We had 13-year-old kids planning their own funerals,”  Clinton said. 

“Whose lives were saved that mattered?” 

Iowa, Psychology, and Arithmetic

My article today in Fox and Hounds:

The Iowa story is about psychology, not arithmetic.

Iowa sends 44 pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, 30 to the Republican National Convention. In each case, the state accounts for only about one percent of the total number of delegates.

About 171,000 Democrats and 180,000 Republicans took part in the caucuses. Although news stories are talking about high levels of participation, the combined total of 351,000 adds up to just 18 percent of Iowa’s 1.9 million active registered voters. Or to put the matter into a California perspective, Iowa caucus turnout was about 20 percent less than the number of San Diego County residents who cast ballots in the not-very-exciting 2014 gubernatorial primary.

Iowa is neither representative nor predictive. In contrast to America’s growing ethnic diversity, 87 percent of Iowans are non-Hispanic whites. Only three non-incumbent victors in the caucuses – Jimmy Carter in 1976, George W. Bush in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 – have gone on to win the general election.

So why are commentators and political operatives getting so excited about such a bad bellwether? After months of unreliable polls and unfounded speculation, the Iowa caucuses represent the first official event of the nomination process. With no other “real” numbers to go on, observers assign outsized significance to the Iowa results.

This significance, in turn, depends less on winning delegates than on beating expectations. Cruz, Trump, and Rubio all got similar numbers of delegates (8,7, and 7), but Cruz and Rubio were the “winners” because they did better than the pundits expected. Trump had been the putative favorite, so he was the “loser” – or in Trumpian terms, a huge, disgusting, pathetic, sad loser.

On the Democratic side, the results are a statistical dead heat, meaning that Clinton and Sanders will come away with about the same number of convention delegates. Because Clinton has a tiny numerical advantage (as of early Tuesday morning anyway), her supporters are declaring victory. But because polls and pundits had previously put Clinton ahead, Sanders is claiming bragging rights.

Despite a weak statistical basis, the perceptions coming out of Iowa do have some real-world consequences. Campaign contributors and political leaders pay close attention, so the “winners” pick up money and organizational support while the losers face pressure to exit the race. Indeed, even before bedtime last night, Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat Martin O’Malley dropped out. Others will soon follow suit.

As more states hold primaries and caucuses, the focus will shift from symbolic outcomes to the actual delegate totals that will determine the nominees. In the end, contests will be about arithmetic, not psychology

Rubio: Insider, Outsider

In the 1992 election, James Ceaser and Andrew Busch wrote in Upside Down and Inside Out:"The outsider appeal," they wrote, "resonates with fundamental elements of the American tradition that can be traced back to certain themes of the revolutionaries, the anti-federalists, the Jeffersonians, and the Jacksonians."  William Jefferson Clinton pulled off the feat of running as an insider and outsider at the same time. He came from a modest background (though not quite as modest as he claimed), was governor of a poor state, and challenged party orthodoxy.  At the same time, he was a Rhodes Scholar with a Yale law degree who had been courting party elders ever since a college internship with Senator J. William Fulbright.

Patrick O'Connor and Byron Tau writes at the Wall Street Journal:

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio likes to remind GOP primary voters of the long odds he faced running for the Senate in 2010.

“Everybody in the Republican establishment came forward and said, ‘You can’t run, it’s not your turn, you’ve got to wait in line,’ ” Mr. Rubio told the crowd at a recent campaign stop in early-voting Iowa.

The underdog narrative helps Mr. Rubio cast himself as a political outsider to a party desperate for change. But it glosses over a basic fact: The 44-year-old Florida senator has spent the bulk of his working life in politics, reared by the party whose leaders he occasionally campaigns against.

This tension between Rubio the insider and Rubio the outsider cuts to the heart of his biggest challenge in the Republican primary—positioning himself as a bridge candidate, while some of his rivals specifically target evangelicals and tea-party conservatives and others focus on rallying the establishment.

...
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst recently polled Republican primary voters and found they move fairly fluidly between the top four candidates—Messrs. Trump, Carson, Cruz and Rubio. However, the Florida senator served as a link between the outsiders and the establishment contenders, such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

“Rubio shares a lot of support with Trump, Carson and [former Hewlett-Packard Co.Chief Executive Carly] Fiorina and with establishment candidates, like Bush and Christie,” said Mia Costa, one of the researchers on that poll. “He’s well-positioned to pick up supporters from both camps.”

Refugee Politics

Margaret Talev reports at Bloomberg:

Most Americans want the U.S. to stop letting in Syrian refugees amid fears of terrorist infiltrations after the Paris attacks, siding with Republican presidential candidates, governors, and lawmakers who want to freeze the Obama administration’s resettlement program.

The findings are part of a Bloomberg Politics national poll released Wednesday that also shows the nation divided on whether to send U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State, an idea President Barack Obama opposes, and whether the U.S. government is doing enough to protect the homeland from a comparable attack.

Fifty-three percent of U.S. adults in the survey, conducted in the days immediately following the attacks, say the nation should not continue a program to resettle up to 10,000 Syrian refugees. Just 28 percent would keep the program with the screening process as it now exists, while 11 percent said they would favor a limited program to accept only Syrian Christians while excluding Muslims, a proposal Obama has dismissed as “shameful” and un-American.

David A. Graham writes at The Atlantic:

Between April and October of 1980, amid an economic downturn, Fidel Castro announced that Cubans who wanted to leave could do so. It precipitated a mass exodus toward the United States. Around 125,000 Cubans fled the island in the Mariel boatlift. The question was what to do with them once they arrived. After all, huge infusions of refugees are often unwelcome, and rumors that the “Marielitos” included many released criminals made many Americans even less welcoming.

In May, President Jimmy Carter informed Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, then nearing the end of his first term in office, that 20,000 of the immigrants would be housed temporarily at Fort Chaffee in northwest Arkansas. Clinton backed the move by his fellow Democrat publicly, but was privately furious: “How could you do this to me? I busted my ass for Carter. You’re gonna get me beat.” Once they’d arrived, the resettlement process ground to a halt, and in June, a riot erupted, and Clinton called out the National Guard. Several months later, as he’d predicted Clinton lost his bid for reelection to Frank White, a first-time candidate for office. In the same election, Carter lost the White House. The story turned out happily for Clinton, who defeated White in 1982 and went on to become president, but Carter and Clinton reportedly still dislike each other.

The Fort Chaffee story is largely forgotten by the general public, but it’s a good bet that some governors haven’t forgotten its political lessons.

Dynasts

At The Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery has some observations on dynasty candidates:

By the time that he or she faces the voters, a dynast may inherit as many as three generations of aides and retainers, 30 years or more removed from each other, and with different, sometimes clashing views. Ted Kennedy in 1980 had Jack people from 1952-60, Bobby people from 1964-68, and his personal aides from the Senate; Jeb Bush has Bush 41 and Bush 43 people, as well as his own people from Florida; Hillary has her staff from the State Department, her staff from the Senate, the people she worked with when she was first lady, as well as what remains of Bill’s original Arkansas mafia. Light-years apart, they often have different issue agendas and fail to merge smoothly. Time may be lost in dealing with their arguments. And then, there are problems with famous relations, both dead and living. If they look too big, they can make you look smaller; if all too human-sized, then there are things to explain.

HRC's Bummer Summer

Anne Gearan, Karen Tumulty, and Dan Balz write at The Washington Post that HRC was hoping for a fresh start this year.

But two dynamics have crystallized this month, suggesting the New Hillary is hobbled by old weaknesses. Once again, worried supporters see signs of a bunker mentality in response to bad news about her e-mail server and other controversies, and they see a candidate who can seem strangely blinkered to the threat posed by a lesser-known challenger.

“A lot of the people who were hired by the campaign were new to the Clintons,” said a prominent Democrat who counts both Hillary Clinton and former president Bill Clinton as friends. “I kind of assumed it would be different. But it hasn’t changed.”

That Democrat and other supporters requested anonymity in order to discuss the shortcomings of a candidate whom they still overwhelmingly support and think can win the White House. Several supporters said that while no one is pulling the fire alarm, they see worrisome patterns emerging.

Among them: insularity, rigidity and a sense that the operation is tone-deaf to changes happening around it.

Alexis Simendinger writes at RCP:

Her communications patterns were years in the making: As a New York senator, she conducted official Senate work using a private email, transferred that address to the State Department, set up a personal server with a new clintonemail.com address and steered clear of federal records rules that applied to the employees she supervised. When this was uncovered as part of GOP-led probes of the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans, Clinton, her aides and her legal advisers attempted to control the communications in her possession, declined to relinquish one server (and there may be more than one involved), while assuring the State Department, congressional investigators, and the public that no classified information was sent or received through her system, the complete details of which she has not described. Thus far, Clinton has been pushed to release 30,000 work-related emails, having acted with aides’ assistance to destroy 31,000 self-described personal communications. And this week she capitulated to the FBI and turned over at least one server, which she said in March contained “personal communications from my husband and me.” The server is blank, according to a lawyer representing the company that turned it over to the FBI. The intelligence community’s inspector general informed lawmakers that highly classified references and communications not marked as classified improperly slipped through Clinton’s server system and still pose a security risk. 

Political scientist Charles Lipson writes at RCP:

I assume the Department of Justice will be lethargic. Under Eric Holder, the Obama Justice Department was the most politicized since John Mitchell cleaned the Augean Stables for Richard Nixon. The department is still packed with political appointees, but Holder’s successor, Loretta Lynch, has a good reputation from her days as a prosecutor. She may well play this straight. If so, then she would start with the IT guy and Clinton’s assistants and try to roll them up, as you would in a normal criminal probe. My guess is she will do that only if she gets a wink and a nod from a White House ready to sink Hillary.

Politicized or not, the DOJ will be increasingly boxed in by the FBI and intelligence community investigations. Normally, when the intelligence community finds classified materials in unauthorized locations, it seeks felony prosecutions. Gen. David Petraeus was sunk for keeping his own personal calendars in an unlocked drawer at home. The calendars were deemed classified, even if they lacked an official stamp. President Clinton’s CIA Director, John Deutsch, lost his job and security clearance for using his portable computer at home. It had classified material on it. Those violations are trifling compared to Hillary Clinton’s exposure.