HRC's Southern Firewall

In the 1988 campaign, Lee Atwater build a "Southern firewall" to ensure victory for George H.W. Bush even if he stumbled in Iowa and New Hampshire.  HRC is building her own firewall, as Patrick Healy and Amy Chozick report at The New York Times:

In interviews, advisers said the campaign was increasingly devoting staff members and money to win the South Carolina primary on Feb. 27 while laying the groundwork to sweep Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia on March 1. Those Super Tuesday states are highlighted in red on maps in the offices of Mrs. Clinton’s senior aides in Brooklyn.

The eight primaries will deliver several hundred delegates for Mrs. Clinton, advisers believe, toward the goal of more than 2,200 needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. The campaign is barraging superdelegates in the South with requests for support — sometimes even jumping the gun by sending pledge forms prematurely — in hopes of adding scores of these party leaders who can bring their votes to the Clinton column at the Democratic National Convention.

The Southern firewall also includes Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina, which vote through mid-March. If Mrs. Clinton wins big in the Michigan and Ohio primaries that month, her advisers and supporters believe, the nomination will essentially be hers (though crossing the total delegate threshold takes time).

Her firewall is different from Bush's, of course, as she is relying heavily on African American and (especially in Texas and Florida) Hispanic Democrats.  Sanders has little support among these voters.

Kasich the Politician

David Weigel writes at The Washington Post:

Donald Trump derides the “losers” who have captured America’s government. Onetime front-runner Jeb Bush attacks the reality show star as insufficiently conservative. Kasich is trying something else, telling voters that, yes, he’s a politician and a good one. Four years in the Ohio Senate, 18 years in Congress, five years as governor, most of them good.

Maybe this approach will work for Kasich. But he should choose his words carefully, heeding a lesson from forty years ago.

In 1976, Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) ran for president by openly proclaiming his skill and experience.  "I'm Birch Bayh," he said in his spots, "and I'm a politician."  The message failed badly.  On April 12, Newsweek reported:

And Bayh tried to counter this year's anti-politician sentiment by proclaiming that it would take a politician to solve the nation's problems, and that he was a good one. Somewhat lamely, his admen still say the theme was valid. But Roger Ailes, a commercial TV producer who worked on Nixon's 1968 campaign, says the Bayh strategy amounted to political suicide: "It was like going into a crowded room, announcing you have leprosy and then trying to shake hands with everyone."

It's probably good for Kasich to talk about his knowledge and experience, but he should probably avoid the p-word.

Clinton Favorables Drop

We must be cautious about early poll numbers, but it is worth noting high unfavorables for a public figure who has had near-universal name recognition for decades.  Gallup reports:

Dogged by continued scrutiny of her email practices as secretary of state, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's favorability with the American public has sunk to one of its lowest levels in Gallup's 23-year trend. Currently, 41% of U.S. adults say they have a favorable opinion of the Democratic front-runner, while 51% hold an unfavorable view.

Trump Flunks

Four years ago, Herman Cain showed that he lacked basic knowledge of Libya and other issues.

Eliza Collins reports at Politico:

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt found something Donald Trump doesn’t win at on Thursday — knowing his terrorists.

“I’m looking for the next commander-in-chief, to know who Hassan Nasrallah is, and Zawahiri, and al-Julani, and al-Baghdadi. Do you know the players without a scorecard, yet, Donald Trump?” Hewitt asked the 2016 Republican candidate, referring to the respective leaders of Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State.

“No," Trump said.

"You know, I’ll tell you honestly, I think by the time we get to office, they’ll all be changed. They’ll be all gone,” he said. “I knew you were going to ask me things like this, and there’s no reason, because, No. 1, I’ll find, I will hopefully find Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the pack.”

Trump said asking him who the key players are was a type of “gotcha question.”
“I will be so good at the military, your head will spin. But obviously, I’m not meeting these people. I’m not seeing these people,” Trump said.

TRANSCRIPT HERE 

Game Changers! Defining Moments!

Nate Silver sensibly cautions against breathless media coverage:

There were 68 purported “game changers” in the 2012 general election, most of which turned out to be irrelevant. But for the political observer trying to sift faux game changers from genuine twists in the campaign, the primaries present a couple of additional complications.

First, there are far more opportunities to be “surprised” in the primaries. Let’s start with the most basic stuff. In a nomination race, there might be a dozen or more candidates, instead of just two. And states vote one at a time, instead of all at once.

Furthermore, in a nomination race, there is an abundance of metrics by which you might judge the campaigns: national polls, Iowa polls, New Hampshire polls, favorability ratings, endorsements, fundraising, staffing, even crowd sizes and yard signs. Eventually, we’ll also be able to look at delegates, which can be counted in many different ways. For any of these metrics, you can report on the level of support (“Hillary Clinton is polling at 48 percent”), the trend (“she’s lost 4 percentage points since last month”), or even the second derivative (“she’s losing ground, but not as quickly as before”). Multiply 23 candidates3 by 10 metrics by three ways of reporting on those metrics, and you have 690 opportunities to be “surprised” at any given time.

...
None of this is to imply that nominations are all that easy to forecast. And some things this year have been genuinely surprising. In particular, that there are 17 Republican candidates, including a dozen or so who have traditional credentials for the White House, is unprecedented. If you want to develop a theory about how “this time is different,” figuring out how to explain the size of the Republican field (and how it might affect the race) seems like a good starting point.

Here is another difference:  a presidential race costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and very, very few people can pay for one out of pocket. Trump is worth about $4 billion.  Although he is "merely" the 405th richest person in the world,he could meet the cover charge.  It is highly unusual for such a person to seek a presidential nomination. Mitt Romney and Steve Forbes are both wealthy, but neither is in the billionaire range -- and neither could have afforded to pay his own way through the November election.  Perot is a billionaire but he ran as an independent.  One has to go back to Nelson Rockefeller in 1968 to find a nomination candidate in Trump's league -- and Rocky ran in the pre-reform era.

Why the paucity of billionaire contenders?  For starters, there aren't that many billionaires:  only about 536 in the United States, most of whom have no political ambitions.  They play more as funders than candidates.

Clinton Courtiers

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote:

The great men close to the throne of an absolute monarch flatter their master's passions and willingly bow to his caprices ... In absolute monarchies the king may often have great virtues but the courtiers are always vile.

At Politico, Annie Karnie sifts through Clinton emails and finds lots of flattery from the likes of former White House counsel Lanny Davis:

“I hate to email you too much and to ask you for any favors,” his email began. “I feel as if I am taking advantage of a great privilege that you allow me to send you a personal email every so often.” He adds, “Aside from Carolyn, my four children, and my immediate family, I consider you to be the best friend and the best person I have met in my long life.”

A former lower-level staffer, David Helfenbein, who worked for Clinton since his teenage years, wrote to her when he left the State Department: "You are one of a kind — there is no other one like you, and there never will be. I truly believe that the world needs you in whatever capacity that you are in.”

The article says that Cheryl Mills was something of an exception -- but even she played the flattery game.  Hannah Allam and Anita Kumar report at McClatchy:

And interlaced through all the media correspondence were compliments – reading more like sycophancy in many cases – to let one of the most powerful women in the world know that her reputation as a warrior with a compassionate streak was intact. This came through prominently in the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

Clinton received compliment after compliment on how she handled the disaster under intense media scrutiny (“Your idea to focus on the girl rescued from the rubble in Haiti wove it all together,” one diplomat wrote of public remarks). Clinton also dispatched her closest aides, such as chief of staff Cheryl Mills, to handle the press.

Mills shared positive feedback she received about her own performance in an NPR interview on Haiti.

Clinton shot back: “And well-deserved. You’re a rock star!”

“At the foot of the master I learned,” Mills replied.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article33234408.html#storylink=cpy

Crime Is Back

In 1992, the Democratic ticket touted its toughness on crime:

MALE NARRATOR: They've sent a strong signal to criminals by supporting the death penalty.
[TEXT: Support the death penalty.]

At Breitbart, Lloyd Green writes:

Murder is up in New York City, New Orleans, D.C., Baltimore and Chicago, just to name a few Deep Blue hot spots.

For Democrats that’s a nightmare. Barack Obama is our President, but he’s their guy, and the cities are their base. Hope and change weren’t supposed to be so bloody, and so dystopic. Yet, sadly they are.

The bad old days have returned, and this surge in death and mayhem guaranties that crime will be a 2016 campaign issue. For the Republicans, the fraying urban landscape is an opportunity in the making. Heck, the GOP and the U.S. have seen this movie before.

In 1968, Richard Nixon rode the riots of Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Wilmington, Delaware – the heart of what was then New Deal America – to the White House. Nixon, the Republican nominee, defeated a sitting Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, as the Democrats failed to win a third consecutive term in office.

Twenty years later, in 1988, George H.W. Bush rallied from 17 points behind, and beat Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Bush ads railed against weekend furloughs from prison for convicted murderers and rapists, and Dukakis never knew what hit him.

Right now, it looks like Donald Trump and the Republicans are poised to make the most of the latest spasm of violence, and make no mistake, Trump understands the potency of crime as an issue. He’s not just talking about illegal immigration, Trump is addressing street crime and urban life.

...
For the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition, that’s a hard lesson to absorb. You see, the laws that got tough on crime — laws enacted by President Bill Clinton, and then-Senator Joe Biden back in the day — are now the targets of the Democratic base’s ire. When prospective Democratic nominee Martin O’Malley gets booed for saying that all lives matter, our nation has a problem.

Over the past half century, crime has helped elect two Republicans as president. In 2016, crime may elect a third.