A Good Summary of What's Behind Trumpism

Salena Zito writes at The Washington Examiner:

The public no longer has faith in big banks or big companies or big government. People cannot trust the banks because they create sham accounts to meet sales targets, or trust technology companies because they make shoddy cell phone equipment that blows up in our hands only to be replaced with another shoddy phone that blows up in our hands.

And the governing class has failed us miserably, from wars in the Middle East that never end, to a healthcare bill that erodes our income to the politicization of the once trustworthy institutions of the Pentagon, NASA and the Justice Department.

To them, the system is genuinely rigged, and the divide between the Ivy League educated and the state or trade school educated, between the haves and the have-nots, has become so deep that there is no bridge long or sturdy enough to connect them.

It is that very thing that explains why so many Americans are attracted to the deeply flawed candidacy of Donald Trump.

More Hacked Emails

Brian Flood reports at The Wrap:

A new batch of leaked emails from Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta posted to WikiLeaks today reveals a variety of new allegations, including the charge that Clinton vetted billionaires and businessmen who donated to her foundation as potential running mates.

General Motors CEO and chairwoman Mary Barra, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz were each considered as vice presidential candidates. All donated to The Clinton Foundation.

Podesta also organized the potential running mates into “rough food groups” that distinguished them by classifications such as race and gender. The recent leak also includes Clinton staffers pondering an Antonin Scalia replacement on the day he died, discussing the Justice Department’s investigation of Clinton and politicizing Black History Month, as well as Podesta calling Bernie Sanders a “doofus.”

At Politico, Blake Hounshell reports:

 Hillary Clinton’s aides debated whether to include a shoutout to Israel in an early version of her stump speech, ultimately concluding that it wasn’t worth the possible blowback from Democratic activists.

According to a hacked email chain that begins on May 15, 2015, Clinton’s top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, found himself at odds with the former secretary of state’s political advisers when he suggested adding “a sentence on standing up for our allies and our values, including Israel and other fellow democracies, and confronting terrorists and dictators with strength and cunning.”

“I though this was largely for her TP with public events not fundraisers. Do we need Israel etc for that?” communications adviser Mandy Grunwald responded.

“We def need the etc. I think good to have Israel too,” Sullivan replied.

Chief strategist and pollster Joel Benenson chimed in: “Why would we call out Israel in public events now? The only voters elevating FP [foreign policy] at all are Republican primary voters. To me we deal with this in stride when an if we are asked about FP.”

“She was Secretary of State,” Sullivan shot back.

“I'm w Joel,” wrote campaign manager Robby Mook. “We shouldn't have Israel at public events. Especially dem activists.”

Zachary Warmbrodt adds at Politico:

Hillary Clinton's campaign advisers disagreed about how tough the former Secretary of State should be when it came to the "revolving door" that circulates people between jobs in Washington and Wall Street, according to email conversations released by WikiLeaks.
The dispute arose in a string of August 2015 messages - unverified by the campaign - where aides provided input on an op-ed that Clinton planned to publish with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.).

The piece, which later ran on the Huffington Post, was written in support of a bill Baldwin had introduced in the Senate to slow the revolving door and restrict companies from giving bonuses to departing employees headed into government.

Top Clinton policy aide Jake Sullivan said he was worried that the thrust of the op-ed was "if you work in the private sector and come into government, you are an inherently suspicious character."

Campaign manager Robby Mook pushed back, suggesting that a tougher tone would help in the Democratic primaries.

"I don't think the average voter will be sensitive to alienating people who go in and out of government. My concern from a primary perspective is appearing to protect the status quo, which I think people will believe (with a bit of prompting from Warren and others) is corrupted," Mook said, likely referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts Democrat had been promoting the legislation as "as a bill any presidential candidate should be able to cheer for."

Sullivan conceded, "I know that I sound like I am protecting the plutocrats."

"But there is a line here," he added. "If we go across it we're just demagoguing."

Hillblazers

Shane Goldmacher reports at Politico:

Clinton calls them her “Hillblazers,” campaign bundlers who have given or raised at least $100,000 for her campaign. And she has erected an unparalleled and unprecedented infrastructure of 1,133 such people — nearly double the number of any past presidential candidate, including President Obama four years ago.

While Clinton and her advisers like to tout her small online donors, it is these bundlers in more than 40 states and four foreign countries who form the true backbone of her financial operation. Combined, this elite $100,000-and-up club has amassed a minimum of $113 million for Clinton and the Democratic Party — and the actual figure is likely far, far higher than that. (The biggest bundlers typically collect millions for campaigns.)
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Among her bundlers are celebrities (Will Smith) and sports stars (Earvin “Magic” Johnson), Hollywood directors (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and corporate executives (Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg), Wall Street-types (Marc Lasry), media executives (Haim Saban and Anna Wintour) and members of Congress, including her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, who helped raise more than $100,000 for Clinton before he joined the ticket in July. The Clinton campaign said 45 percent of its bundlers are women.

There are also federal lobbyists, from whom the Democratic Party under Obama refused to accept money, a prohibition that has since been rolled back.

Via Wikileaks:

And when Saban wrote to Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, on March 15 of this year to say he was “very happy…relieved” at their recent primary victories, Mook wrote back: “Thank YOU for making it possible!!”

Saban and his wife have given a combined $10 million to Clinton’s super PAC, and hosted that $5 million evening at their Beverly Hills home for Clinton’s campaign in August 2016.

Wikileaks, Clinton, Sanders

The New York Times reports on the latest batch of stolen Clinton emails on WikiLeaks:

The Clinton camp seemed unprepared for the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders. 

For all the planning, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides appeared blindsided by the popularity of Senator Bernie Sanders’s populist message in the Democratic primary. Concern over Mrs. Clinton’s economic message seemed to reach a breaking point after Mrs. Clinton lost to Mr. Sanders by 22 percentage points in the New Hampshire primary.
“Message needs to be more positive, upbeat, hopeful,” an adviser wrote to Mr. Podesta. “Bernie is saying we can change the world. Her msg is ‘No, we can’t’ because …”
The adviser expressed particular concern about young voters gravitating to Mr. Sanders’s promise for revolution. “Bernie’s ads feature young ppl saying why they are voting / supporting him,” she wrote. “Hillary’s ads need to be young people — all under 45 and a smattering of older ones — validating her. 

But the campaign did get a heads-up later from a D.N.C official about some of Sanders’s efforts.

In January, Donna Brazile, a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, passed on an email from Mr. Sanders’s African-American outreach team about how it was planning to host a Twitter-related event.

“Thank you for the heads up on this, Donna,” responded Adrienne Elrod, one of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides.

Ms. Brazile, a longtime party operative, later replaced Debbie Wasserman Schultz on an interim basis as D.N.C. chairwoman on the eve of the party’s national convention, a change that came after leaked emails revealed that Democratic officials had conspired to harm Mr. Sanders’s bid for the party’s nomination.

Clinton’s team was keenly aware of how vulnerable her Wall Street ties made her appear next to Sanders.

Her aides decided in January that she should avoid talking about Wall Street at an event in Nevada during her primary fight with Mr. Sanders.

“Don’t know that it is most effective contrast for her,” wrote Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director. “Seems like we are picking the fight he wants to have.”

Clinton, Trump, Insider, Outsider

The New York Times reports:

In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.

The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had they become public.

Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.

In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

Gold for Trump, right?  Not exactly.

In 2013, Trump wrote:

I think we've all become aware of the fact that our cultures and economics are intertwined. It's a complex mosaic that cannot be approached with a simple formula for the correct pattern to emerge. In many ways, we are in unchartered waters.

The good news, in one respect, is that what is done affects us all. There won't be any winners or losers as this is not a competition. It's a time for working together for the best of all involved. Never before has the phrase "we're all in this together" had more resonance or relevance.

My concern is that the negligence of a few will adversely affect the majority. I've long been a believer in the "look at the solution, not the problem" theory. In this case, the solution is clear. We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability.

Insider Poll

At The Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney reports on a poll of Washington elites showing Clinton ahead of Trump 62-22 percent.

Echelon Insights conducted a scientific survey of 400 Washington elites: all those sampled live in the D.C. area, are registered voters, read or watch the news daily, and are employed with incomes of at least $30,000.
...

Clinton won the support of nearly one in five Republican insiders in the poll. And the same proportion of Republicans said they would support a minor candidate, not vote, or were still undecided. This is about triple the support Clinton gets from Republicans in the rest of the country — a recent Reuters poll showed her pulling in only 6 percent of Republicans nationwide.
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Most of the insiders polled (53 percent) said free trade was “generally good” for the U.S. or “an unmitigated good.” Nineteen percent agreed with the statement that free trade has “been more harmful than beneficial.” The remainder were either unsure or see free trade as a wash.
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About half of the respondents (49 percent) said the 2016 elections didn’t change their view of their connection with the rest of America, while 28 percent said the election made them feel more out of touch. Only 19 percent said it made them feel more in touch with the rest of the country.

The Insiders Always Win

Rich Galen writes at Mullings:

Here's the dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about: None of this will matter.

If Clinton wins the big story will not be out outsiders will now have a seat at the table. The big story will be how long it takes the Obama people to put their stuff into cardboard boxes and clear out for a return to the Clinton people.

Even if Donald Trump were to win and he made good on his promise to put business leaders into Cabinet posts it wouldn't make history. John F. Kennedy, for instance, put Robert McNamara, president of the Ford Motor Company, in as Secretary of Defense.

No less than T.E. Lawrence, known to us as Lawrence of Arabia, learned a hard lesson after World War I. He thought he and his Arab allies had created a new order in the Middle East. But, he wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

"When we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew ...  We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace."

The reality is, it takes people who know how to operate the levers of government to operate the levers of government.

Official Washington may blink a couple of times, but it will quickly recover, thank Republican and Democrat primary voters kindly, and return things to status quo ante.

Cosmopolitans and Traditionalists, Court and Country

Sean Trende writes about a cosmopolitan/traditional divide that corresponds roughly to outsiderism and insiderism:

Where this becomes relevant – indeed, I think this is crucial – is that the leadership of the Republican Party and the old conservative movement is, itself, culturally cosmopolitan. I doubt if many top Republican consultants interact with many Young Earth Creationists on a regular basis. Many quietly cheered the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decisions. Most of them live in blue megapolises, most come from middle-class families and attended elite institutions, and a great many of them roll their eyes at the various cultural excesses of “the base.” There is, in other words, a court/country divide among Republicans.

This has been exacerbated by the crack-up of the Clinton Coalition and the rapid transformation of the Democratic Party into an aggressively culturally cosmopolitan institution (think Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry to Barack Obama). This change pushed out many of the Jacksonians that formed the backbone of the party for 150 years, creating an influx of lower-middle-class/working-class voters, in turn swelling the ranks of the cultural traditionalists among the Republicans.

...
Which brings us to Trump. If there is anything positive I can say about Trump it is this: He gets this cosmopolitan/traditionalist divide, and he is the only candidate who lands foursquare with the traditionalists.

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Take Trump’s speech announcing his candidacy. David Byler and I had no idea what we were onto when David text-mined Trump’s speech and found that his announcement was the only one out of the 15 candidates’ announcements that sounded different. We (and others) took this as a sign of Trump’s quirkiness and a reason Trump wouldn’t last. But we clearly missed the boat. It was actually one of the most important data points of the campaign, and it has a lot to do with why Trump has been successful.

The Unloved Establishment

Nancy Benac writes at AP:

In 1967, the now-gone National Observer took note of the overuse of the term "establishment" and wrote: "If someone wishes to complain about something but hasn't a very clear idea of what, all he needs do is blame the problem on the 'establishment' and people will sagely wag their heads." William Safire included that quote in his Political Dictionary, along with this one from Newsweek in 1987, referring to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush: "Bush's native political tribe — the Eastern-establishment wing of the GOP — is nearly extinct today."

(Nearly three decades later, the tribe lives on: The establishment label is weighing down Jeb Bush, son of one President Bush, brother of another and grandson of a senator.)
GOP pollster David Winston says the word establishment is being redefined in this campaign as a synonym for the status quo, which carries heavy baggage in a time of voter discontent.

Within the Republican Party, Winston says, the anti-establishment camp is divided between candidates who want to work within the existing system to change things (Bush, Rubio, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, etc.) and those who want to completely disregard it (Trump, Cruz).

"There are some folks who are trying to create a distinction here that Washington is so broken that you just have to go beyond it and not deal with the consequences," says Winston.

Democratic pollster Peter Hart, for his part, sees the anti-establishment sentiment playing out as anger against the "power elite." Voters are "looking for candidates who represent an ability and a willingness to stand up to those who control our lives," he says.

And Dan Balz ties this sentiment back to the data on the middle class:

Trump’s campaign slogan is not just “Make America Great” but “Make America Great Again.” He summons a time when the middle class was prosperous and incomes were rising. This was a time when the lack of a college degree was not the impediment to a more economically secure life that it has become — and a time when white people made up a higher share of the population.

Whatever happens to Trump’s candidacy over the coming months, the conditions that have helped make him the front-runner for the GOP nomination will still exist, a focal point in a divisive debate about the future of the country.

GOP Senators Favor Rubio Over Cruz

Burgess Everett and Seung Min Kim write at Politico:

Ted Cruz has built his Senate career and presidential campaign on his willingness to stick it to the Republican establishment. And now that he’s gaining momentum in the primary, his many GOP nemeses in Congress are returning the favor by quietly coalescing behind Marco Rubio.

Senior Republican senators who’ve clashed with Cruz for years have had nothing but nice things to say about Rubio even as he’s dissed — and largely ditched — his day job in the Capitol. Just this month, Rubio has racked up endorsements from nine members of Congress, compared with two for early GOP front-runner Jeb Bush. More House endorsements for Rubio are set to roll out in December, according to campaign sources, and several GOP senators said privately they expect their colleagues to get behind Rubio once the GOP field thins.
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Mainstream elected Republicans now see Cruz as a bigger threat than Donald Trump or Ben Carson to clinch the nomination — but equally damaging to their party’s chances of winning the White House and keeping the Senate next fall. Rubio would be a much stronger general election standard bearer, they believe.

“Marco is a true next-generation conservative,” said Steve Daines (R-Mont.), one of three senators who endorsed Rubio in November. “Every time there’s a debate, his stock goes up.”

Cruz winning the nomination "could happen with the angry situation we have out there” among the GOP electorate, said one Republican senator who hasn't endorsed in the race but does not want Cruz.
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Cornyn, Thune and Coats have not endorsed in the presidential primary, and lawmakers interviewed for this story said many senior Republicans do not want to embarrass long-shot presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham by endorsing Rubio while the South Carolina senator is in the race. They’re also aware that endorsements from top GOP lawmakers at this point in the primary wouldn’t help Rubio’s cause with the Republican base.

The Conservative Solutions Super PAC portrays him as an outsider who took on the establishment:

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.

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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.”

HRC, Jeb, and Wall Street

Reuters reports:

Jeb Bush is leading the U.S. presidential campaign by at least one measure: financial support from Wall Street. 

The former Florida governor who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination received more financial backing than any competitor - Democrat or Republican - from employees of the major Wall Street banks between July and the end of September, campaign filings released on Thursday show. 

Employees from Bank of America (BAC.N), Citigroup (C.N), Credit Suisse (MLPN.P), Goldman Sachs (GS.N), HSBC HSBCUK.UL, JPMorgan Chase JPN.N, Morgan Stanley(MS.N) and UBS UBSAG.UL gave Bush a combined $107,000. He also received the maximum-allowed $2,700 from billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman. 

The sums are miniscule compared to Bush's total haul for the quarter of $13.4 million. But his popularity among financiers is starkly different from his standing in the multitude of national polls. 

Bush, seen as a moderate in the crowded Republican field where 14 candidates are competing for the nomination, trails Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, three candidates who have never held elected office, in every major poll.

The second most popular candidate on Wall Street according to giving patterns is Democratic front-runner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She took in nearly $84,000 from employees of the same banks.

Old Insiders Back Kasich

At Politico, Anna Palmer reports that John Kasich is running as an insider with insider support.

For all his talk of turning around the Buckeye State on the campaign trail, Kasich is a creature of Washington and has drawn a slew of former colleagues and K Streeters who have signed onto his steering committee to give him a financial lift.
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New Day for America — the super PAC supporting Kasich — raised more than $11 million before he officially announced his bid. The group doesn't have to report its next haul until January. New Day for America spokeswoman Connie Wehrkamp said the group's "fundraising continues to be steady."

New Day for America has already aired an ad touting Kasich's experience in New Hampshire, a vitally important primary for the Ohio governor. The group plans to double its buy in October, bringing the total amount spent by New Day for America and New Day Independent Media Committee to $6.5 million from July through the end of October, according to a source familiar with the effort. The super PAC is building out its grassroots infrastructure with a staff in New Hampshire and has also had volunteer call operations in Ohio making contacts with voters in the Granite State since mid-August.
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Kasich, who is in fourth place in the ClearPolitics Granite State poll with 9 percent, was endorsed Friday by former Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey of New Hampshire.
“Right now we’re focusing on raising money in the campaign fund and we think we are doing a good job,” said Bob Rusbuldt, co-chair of Kasich's steering committee. “The governor is in this for the long haul and we’re going to have the resources to do that.”
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Rusbuldt, CEO of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America, and Tiberi, a former Kasich staffer, are leading the Ohio Republican's roughly 50-person steering panel. It is filled with a retinue of Washington politicos, including former Reps. Bob Walker (R-Pa.), Pete Hoekstra (R-Pa.), Dan Burton (R-Ind.), Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), Jim Walsh (R-N.Y.) and Chris Shays (R-Conn).

At a time when Republicans say that they value new ideas over experience, does it really help Kasich that so many of his key backers are old Washington insiders?

Ages:

• Humphrey 74
• Walker 72
• Hoekstra 61
• Burton 77
• Bachus 67
• Walsh 68
• Shays 69 

Crossroads GPS v. Udall and Landrieu

Crossroads GPS goes after Mark Udall and Mary Landrieu as Washington insiders who back Obama and Obamacare.

Reform Conservatism

At The New York Times Magazine, Sam Tanenhaus writes of Yuval Levin and other conservative reformers:

Levin and company, who do have the policy mentality, will happily fill in the blanks. In the wake of Cantor’s defeat, April Ponnuru said she was still hearing from legislators interested in connecting with the ideas of the YG Network, and she had more events scheduled to spread the word. Rubio volunteered to speak at one such event in late June. He, too, shrugged off Cantor’s defeat. “I don’t think Eric Cantor lost because he gave a few speeches advocating reforms,” said Rubio, who seems to understand that being elected as an insurgent — riding the crest of a movement — doesn’t mean he has to govern as one. American politics is the story, in large part, of outsiders who became skilled insiders, not by selling out but by growing into the demands of the office. It happened to Barry Goldwater and also to Reagan. It might happen again. When I spoke with him, Rubio also stood by his own antipoverty proposal, acknowledging it would not save any money but suggesting it might in the long run since it would lift many out of poverty. This is exactly the case Lyndon Johnson and Democrats made generations ago. “Our debt isn’t driven by discretionary spending on poverty programs,” Rubio said. “We’re not going to balance the budget by saving money on safety-net programs.”

It is hard to imagine the Republican candidate who will say this in a closely contested Red State primary in 2014 or during a presidential race in 2016. But some politicians say otherwise, including Levin’s own favorite senator, Mike Lee, the Tea Party firebrand from Utah, who stood by Ted Cruz’s side during the October shutdown but also has adopted the reformers’ middle-class agenda as well as its idioms

Outsiders, Insiders, and the Tea Party

At The Washington Examiner, David Drucker notes how Tea Party outsiders morph into insiders:

In the four years since the Supreme Court struck down fundraising regulations that effectively gave the Democratic and Republican parties a monopoly on large-scale political activity, a collection of Tea Party-affiliated organizations has arisen in Washington that competes with the GOP for campaign contributors, money and influence -- and over what legislation to push and which candidates to nominate.

The groups, including the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the Senate Conservatives Fund, have moved aggressively to kill legislation they oppose and oust incumbent Republicans they deem insufficiently conservative.

Like the national Republican Party, which they deride as the “GOP Establishment,” they have become an establishment of their own, a confederation of well-financed Tea Party groups that support a web of sister organizations and employ a legion of political professionals who live and work inside the Beltway. Having a leadership class in Washington is an awkward contradiction for a once-decentralized movement that represented the grassroots of middle America against the entrenched interests of a GOP elite mainly based in Washington.

Jon Fleischman, a conservative activist in Orange County, Calif., and persistent critic of the national Republican Establishment, said some — though not all — of the conservative groups in Washington suffer from the same problems as the GOP. To his mind, they are headquartered in the capital, driven by a few people at the top, promote whatever policy agenda suits them and fail to take the time to understand what the grassroots want from government.

“There are groups that I think started with good intentions that have gone native,” Fleischman said. “I have a concern that there are organizations in D.C. today that used to be the outside groups and now they’re the inside groups. I worry that others could follow that path, and that’s why I stay vigilant."

Clinton, Obama, and Change

Andrew Kohut writes at Politico:

Here’s the potential problem: Demographics notwithstanding, views of Clinton among Democrats correlate strongly with views of Obama. No fewer than 71 percent of Democrats who hold a highly favorable view of Obama feel the same way about Clinton. And the converse is true: Democrats who are unenthusiastic about the president are also unenthusiastic about Clinton—just 29 percent rate her very favorably.

And Clinton faces another potential challenge: the desire for change that divides the Democratic base between populists and centrists, given that she was married to one centrist Democratic president and worked for another [Obama -- a centrist?] The appeal of populism among Democrats in 2016 cannot be discounted. Sixty percent of Democrats continue to say their finances are not in good shape, even as many of them see the stock market and real estate values having recovered. Little wonder that a September Pew survey found 62 percent of Democrats saying that regulation of financial organizations has not gone far enough, compared with just 32 percent of Republicans who hold that view.

In 2008, Obama was the "change" candidate while Clinton was the "experience" candidate.  In Epic Journey, we explained:

A 2007 survey asked Democrats which was more important to their candidate choice: experience or the ability to bring about change. Only 26 percent chose experience while 73 percent wanted change.47 If Democrats valued freshness over familiarity, Obama was the one.

So in 2008, Obama beat her by being the outsider.  In 2016, Obama could drag her down by reinforcing her image as an insider.

Democrats and Wall Street

Previous posts have discussed insiderism and outsiderism.  At The Daily Beast, Lloyd Green writes:

Just weeks before de Blasio’s New Year’s Day inaugural address, Hillary Clinton pocketed at least $400,000 at two Wall Street events by saying, “Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy—it needs to stop.” In 2008, Wall Street accounted for nearly 20 cents of every dollar raised by Barack Obama. The securities industry was the No. 2 donor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, trailing behind law firms but ahead of lobbyists in donations.

Reid even took in more than $112,000 in contributions from Weitz & Luxenberg, law firm of Sheldon Silver, the ethically challenged speaker of the New York State Assembly and even better, de Blasio’s newest friend.

...

During Clinton’s 2000 run for the U.S. Senate, New York Democrats were all doing their damnedest to stroke the bankers who commuted to Wall Street from New York’s tony suburbs, such as Chappaqua, which Clinton calls home, and which Clinton bought with a handout, er hand, from Terry McAuliffe, crony capitalist par excellence and Virginia’s new governor.

Clinton didn’t comment on the repeal of the .45 percent commuter tax in 1999, as she was mulling her Senate run. And Silver was instrumental in its repeal. The tax repeal costs New York City $500 million annually.

Early in the aughts, Wall Street whistled, and neither Clinton nor de Blasio barked. No, instead they brought Wall Street its slippers, coffee, and newspaper.

Outsiders v. Insiders

NBC reports

America has met the enemy, and it is Washington.

That was the message from a focus group of 11 Cincinnati-area voters, who issued a scathing and impassioned indictment Wednesday of Washington, D.C., and everyone in it -- from lawmakers to the president and, most strikingly, a political system that makes them feel powerless to change it.

"They're indicting the president, they're indicting Congress," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the two-hour session exclusively for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, in conjunction with NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.

"It is a sense that the system doesn't work, and they don't have an answer, but they know what they hate."

These voters -- who described themselves as independents who tend to lean one way or another -- assailed the distrust, gridlock, weak leadership and callousness from a government they said seemed indifferent to solving problems. And, they added, they felt "helpless" to punish the lawmakers responsible.

"We have a political class now," said Jerry Laub, a 54-year-old casino card dealer who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. "They're above us."

At Politico, Democratic consultant Doug Sosnik writes:

One biproduct of all of the anger toward the political class is the disapproval ratings of both political parties. The late October NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed the Republican Party with a 22 percent positive rating and a 53 percent negative one. Although Democrats are doing better, they are also underwater, with a 37 percent positive rating and a 40 percent negative one.

Due to recent Supreme Court rulings, power and money has flowed away from both parties. With this increasingly decentralized party structure, political entrepreneurs are increasing dominating the debate, making the parties less important in the political process.

There is clearly an opening for a third party in our country. While most of the focus is at the presidential level, there is a long-term opportunity to build this movement from the bottom up, state-by-state. This could take several years to grow, but as the country continues to move further and further away from the two-party system, this slower build is more likely to ultimately metastasize into an effective national movement. This third party will most likely be led by community-based leaders who are focused on getting things done to improve people’s lives rather than by professional politicians interested in their own agenda.

There are, of course, daunting barriers to third parties:  first-past-the-post elections, the electoral college, campaign finance rules, and (in California), an electoral process that effectively bars third parties from the general election ballot.

The ballot box has traditionally been the place where Americans’ voices their discontent. But the political system has built-in safeguards through reapportionment and redistricting that will limit the vulnerability of most incumbent elected officials. These lines will not be redrawn until the beginning of the next decade, forestalling the massive desire for change that is building in our country.

This all suggests that the period of turmoil and dissatisfaction that we have been experiencing for the past 10 years could well continue through the end of this decade. However, underneath this turmoil you can see the shape of an emerging populist movement that will, in time, either move the politicians to action or throw them out of office. The country is moving toward new types of leaders, those who will be problem-solvers and build institutions that are capable of making a difference in people’s lives.

Addressing Inequality

In an AEI speech this week, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) expressed a clear understanding of a major GOP problem:

For the Party of Lincoln to indulge in the politics of privilege is a corruption of everything we are supposed stand for.

To rescue the nation – and ourselves – from this crisis of unequal opportunity, the Republican Party must return to its own truest self.

Not simply on behalf of those Americans who have fairly worked their way up the ladder of success – but for those still climbing and especially those clinging to the lowest rungs.

For a political party too often seen as out of touch, aligned with the rich, indifferent to the less fortunate, and uninterested in solving the problems of working families, Republicans could not ask for a more worthy cause around which to build a new conservative reform agenda.

And so, the great challenge to the Republican Party is to craft such an agenda that is at once more responsive to the inequality crisis plaguing American society today, and more consistent with our true, conservative principles.

The core of that agenda should be restoring equal opportunity – the natural, God-given right to pursue happiness – to the individuals, communities, and institutions from whom it has been unfairly taken.

This new agenda should ultimately address the ongoing problems of immobility at the bottom of our economy, insecurity within the middle class, and cronyist privilege at the top.

Pew data drive home the point:

The public sees clear winners and losers as a result of the government’s economic policies following the recession that began in 2008.

In the public’s view, the beneficiaries of these policies are large banks and financial institutions, large corporations and wealthy people, according to a survey conducted earlier this month. Sizable majorities say government policies have helped all three at least a fair amount – 69% say that about large banks and financial institutions, 67% large corporations and 59% wealthy people.

DN_Winners_LosersMeanwhile, fewer than a third say policies implemented by the government following the recession have helped the poor, middle class and small businesses. Roughly seven-in-ten say government policies have done little or nothing to help the poor (72%), the middle class (71%) and small businesses (67%).

There has been little change in these perceptions since the question was last asked in July 2010.