First Debate: Trump Gives Ammo to Anticorporate Populists

Last night, 10 candidates took part in a prime-time debate, while 7 were in the happy hour debate.

When Chris Wallace asked about his companies' bankruptcies, Trump inadvertently gave ammunition to the critics of corporate America.  Expect Bernie Sanders to quote these lines:

Excuse me, what am I saying? Out of hundreds of deals that I've done, hundreds, on four occasions I've taken advantage of the laws of this country, like other people. I'm not going to name their names because I'm not going to embarrass, but virtually every person that you read about on the front page of the business sections, they've used the law.

The difference is, when somebody else uses those laws, nobody writes about it. When I use it, they say, "Trump, Trump, Trump." The fact is, I built a net worth of more than $10 billion. I have a great, great company. I employ thousands of people. And I'm very proud of the job I did.

Again Chris, hundreds and hundreds of deals. Four times, I've taken advantage of the laws. And frankly, so has everybody else in my position.

Mike Allen sums up:

Marco Rubio helped himself the most. He was disappointed he didn’t get a foreign-policy question, where he was primed to shine. But he had several adult moments, including our fave: “[I]f this election is a resume competition, then Hillary Clinton’s gonna be the next president, because she’s been in office and in government longer than anybody else running here tonight. .. This election better be about the future, not the past. ... If I’m our nominee, we will be the party of the future.”

John Kasich and Carly Fiorina bask in pundit love. The Trump bubble will burst: His “F” answer to Megyn Kelly’s clever question put him on the wrong side of women.
Reporters thought Jeb was jittery, flat. His camp says the mission was to appear “presidential, aspirational. Conservative Record + Optimistic Vision. Took tough Qs that could’ve bogged down (Common Core, Trump) and instead hit his conservative record (that lots of people don’t know about) and an optimistic vision for how the country can grow economically.”
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EXCLUSIVE – FRANK LUNTZ narrative from his dial-group results in Cleveland last night: “[W]e hosted 23 Republican voters, 20 of whom were undecided ... Being Donald Trump made him the front-runner, but tonight his act wore thin. He lowered the level of political discourse, and participants were really disappointed. The theme from our session: Dump Trump. ... Bush ... finished at the back of the pack in almost every question we asked. ... His dial scores were flat, and participants felt he lacked the passion they want ...

“Who showed they are best prepared to be president on day one? Ted Cruz ... scored well ... because of ... intelligence and courage. ... Which candidate would you choose to have a beer with? Marco Rubio ... [W]omen ... universally found him ‘attractive.’ ... Was there a candidate you would want to teach your kids’ junior high civics class? Ted Cruz. ... Which candidate would you hire to run your company? Donald Trump. ... Who was in the minors, but earned a call to the majors? Carly Fiorina.” Frank’s 2-pager http://bit.ly/1Usof5d

Burying the "Next in Line" Myth

There is a common assumption that the Republicans nominate the candidate who is "next in line." By any important metric, that candidate is Rick Santorum.  In the 2012 GOP nomination contest, he got the second-highest number of delegates (267).  He got the second-highest number of votes in primaries (3.9 million).  He also led Romney in national polls for a time in February 2012.

And yet he has not scored well enough in the polls to make tonight's prime-time debate.  He is laying off staff, and shows no signs of resurgence.

Let us bury the "next in line" theory.  It rests on half a dozen examples, which hardly make for an iron law.  As we point out in After Hope and Change, the "next in line" candidate for the 2000 nomination was Steve Forbes, who had scored surprisingly well four years earlier but who could not even come close to George W. Bush.  In 2012, the Republican who was next in line was arguably Mike Huckabee, who had won more delegates than Romney in 2008.  He did not even bother to run.

Trump and Autism

In The Politics of Autism, I mention the rise of autism as an issue in presidential campaigns.

Emily Willingham writes at Forbes:

Donald Trump is leading the GOP field in polls of Republican voters. This fact has some grabbing the popcorn, others tearing out their hair, and still others shaking their heads at the state of US politics today. But if you’re among the one in four adults in the US with a mental health condition, if you have an interest in children’s health, or if you love an autistic person, then you might view Trump as more troubling than bemusing or amusing.

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Eight years ago, Trump was evidently convinced that vaccines cause autism—or at least, vaccines as administered according to the recommended schedule. He decided in 2007, he said at the time, to have his son administered “one shot at a time” in what he described as “a very slow process.” He also said that his “theory is the shots” are responsible for autism.

Trump seemed to have been under the impression that a children gets a dozen or more vaccines at once, perhaps from a quart-sized syringe with a pump on it, given his comments at a 2007 press conference:

When a little baby that weighs 20 pounds and 30 pounds gets pumped with 10 and 20 shots at one time, with one injection that’s a giant injection

Seven years later, he still seems to have thought that the injections are “massive” and that children being immunized against infectious disease are being treated like horses. Here is the vaccine schedule for children ages 0 to 6 years. Here is the vaccine schedule for horses. Here is how vaccines have changed over the years, now having far fewer of the components that trigger the immune system while still being effective.

Getting Away with Gaffes

Last night, 14 of the 17 GOP candidates took part in a New Hampshire candidate forum airing on C-SPAN. It illustrates an important point about early campaign events: second-tier candidates can get away with gaffes that would stir a lot of controversy if he or she were in the top tier. John Kasich said that "law-abiding, God-fearing" undocumented immigrants should be able to stay in the country. A literal reading of that statement suggests that atheist immigrants would be out of luck. That's probably not what he meant, and it's unlikely that many people will obsess about it. But if Bush had made such a comment, social media would be lighting up.

Something similar happened four years ago, before Gingrich had his first surge. In a Las Vegas debate, he said: "And I, frankly, would be really worried if somebody assured me that nothing in their faith would affect their judgments, because then I'd wonder, where's your judgment -- how can you have judgment if you have no faith? And how can I trust you with power if you don't pray?" Even though he was suggesting a religious test for office, few people paid attention at the time.  

Biden in 2016?

Amy Chozick reports at The New York Times:

For months, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been telling crowds, the news media, and anyone else who will listen that she “always thought this would be a competitive race.”
But she did not, at least until this past weekend, seriously anticipate the competition would include Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Biden has not yet announced whether he will join the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, but reports over the weekend that the 72-year-old former Delaware senator was seriously exploring a bid reignited discussion among Mrs. Clinton’s advisers about what his potential candidacy would mean for the contest ahead.

At The Daily Beast last October, Lloyd Green noted some problems for Biden:

But it’s not just Biden placing loyalty over competence that makes him who he is, his tropism toward plagiarism, or even his tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. It’s Biden’s willingness to turn a blind eye in the face of his family members trading on Biden’s job as vice president for fun, profit, and disgrace that completes the picture.

Take Hunter Biden, the veep’s younger son. Just last week, it was reported that the 44-year-old Hunter was discharged from the Navy after testing positive for cocaine. But here’s the thing. To get into the Navy, Hunter needed a separate waiver on account of his prior drug use. History does repeat itself.

And then there’s that matter of Hunter and Ukraine. Back in May, Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private natural-gas producer, announced that Hunter had joined its board. To which the White House could only reply, “Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president.”

And then there’s James Biden, the vice president’s brother, who made a go at winning public-housing contracts in Iraq. As reported in the waning days of the 2012 presidential campaign, after Joe became vice president, James joined New Jersey-based Hill International as its executive vice president.

So what? So this. Hill’s business is managing construction projects in the Middle East and the United States, and lo and behold, six months after James joined Hill in 2010, the company won a $1.5 billion contract to build at least 100,000 affordable homes in Iraq. Talk about coincidence.

Or not. According to published reports, the State Department, then run by Hillary Clinton, and the Iraqi government were instrumental in Hill winning the contract. Also at the time, Biden was Obama’s point person on Iraq, and like Klain, who is no expert on public health, James Biden was no maven on public housing.

The Meh Economy

At Politico, Ben White reports on 2.3 percent economic growth in the second quarter:

“It’s good that the economy actually grew rather than contracted in the second quarter, but the fundamental story is still very much the same,” said Megan Greene, chief economist at Manulife Asset Management. “Businesses are not investing, and we can continue to expect closer to 2 percent rather than 3 percent growth. And this is now the weakest expansion we have had in 70 years.” 

It’s the kind of “meh” economy that will offer the Republican nominee a clear window to argue that Clinton will offer only more of the same policies favored by President Barack Obama that have left the electorate sour and pessimistic. The Commerce Department also reported Thursday that the economy grew only at a 2 percent rate between 2012 and 2014, a 0.3 percent decline from previous estimates and further evidence that this has been the weakest recovery of the modern era.In addition to the soft gross domestic product figures, a popular measure of consumer confidence maintained by Bloomberg dropped the most in five months on Thursday, highlighting how uncertain people are about their own financial situation.

Kochworld Gears Up

Matea Gold reports at The Washington Post:

Already, roughly 1,000 full-time staffers are working for Koch network organizations such as AFP, Concerned Veterans for America and the Libre Initiative — more than double the number four years ago, according to officials. 

“One of the biggest things we learned and shared with our investors is that we can’t parachute in the last couple months of an election cycle with a bunch of activists into a new state and expect to have the same impact that President Obama had by staying in those states for four years and being invested in the community,” said Marc Short, president of Freedom Partners, the nonprofit business chamber that serves as the funding arm of the network.
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The [i360] operation is similar to one run by Data Trust, a private data company that has an exclusive list-sharing agreement with the RNC and provides data to independent groups. 

The parallel efforts have created tension between the Koch network and party officials, who have worried that the RNC will lose valuable voter information when campaigns decide to work exclusively with i360. 

The friction broke out into the open in June, when RNC Chief of Staff Katie Walsh told Yahoo News that it was “very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data when, why and how.”