Buttload of Faith: the 2016 Presidential Primary Thread (Pt 2)

I don't see this current executive as any stronger than the prior ones, but I see right-wingers trying to assert that Obama's executive orders are somehow worse, more controlling and illegal. The right-wing arguments seem pretty weak on this

http://www.infowars.com/study-obama-has-issued-more-restrictive-executive-orders-than-past-six-administrations/

Figures compiled by the Federal Register also show that while Obama has issued 229 executive orders, to George W. Bush’s 292 and Bill Clinton’s 308, the total length of Obama’s orders equates to 1,086 pages.
Bush’s orders comprised 922 pages and Clinton’s just 781 pages.
“Not all executive orders are created equal,” said John Hudak of the Brookings Institution. “Some are quite forceful, making dramatic changes to policy. Others are more routine, housekeeping issues.”

So Cruz still doesn't know what he would replace Obamacare with....

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/30/uncomfortable-question-for-ted-cruz-on-obamacare-silences-the-room/?action=click&contentCollection=Americas&module=MostPopularFB&version=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

Mark never had health care until Obama care,” Mr. Valde continued. “What are you going to replace it with?”

Mr. Cruz expressed condolences and pivoted quickly to a well-worn answer assailing the health care law.

Mr. Cruz said “millions of Americans” had lost their jobs and their doctors as a result of the law, and that many had “seen their premiums skyrocket.”

He said he had often joked about a pledge by Mr. Obama that premiums would drop: “Anyone whose premiums have dropped $2,500, as President Obama promised, should vote for Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Cruz said. “I’ll take everybody else.”

Many in the room laughed.

Mr. Valde — who said in an interview later that he did in fact intend to caucus for Mrs. Clinton — pressed on.

“My question is, what are you going to replace it with?” he said.

hero

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CaBsYMuUcAASBXA.jpg

well i never

Genuinely not sure what the CDs are supposed to signify there.

"I don't see this current executive as any stronger than the prior ones, but I see right-wingers trying to assert that Obama's executive orders are somehow worse, more controlling and illegal. The right-wing arguments seem pretty weak on this"

i'm far from a right-winger, and i don't see the executive orders as "bad"- they're the only possible response to a fundamentally broken (and universally despised) legislature. i also don't see this as a partisan issue, but a long-term historical trend, particularly clear when you look at the leading candidates from both parties this year, all of whom exemplify, in various ways, a fetishization of autocracy. i don't think the notion that executive orders should be judged qualitatively as well as quantitatively is a bad point, either. combine the sweeping use of executive orders with the fairly novel (that i know of) claimed executive right to selectively enforce laws on the books and the long-term trend is definitely towards greater centralization of power in the executive.

as for whether the orders are unconstitutional, the court will be ruling on the issue this year, and i for one have very little doubt as to how they'll rule- i do not see this as an issue that will split the conservative majority. the only question is what the reaction will be to that ruling, and i genuinely have no idea myself.

tried to make a Mean To Hillary thing but hey who wants to see a Katha Pollitt cartoonface, ewwww

Genuinely not sure what the CDs are supposed to signify there.

I think the image is from South Park back in the days when a CD burner was part of one's system pretty routinely, they signify "this guy is sitting around at his computer all day" i.e. it's a joke one can't really make any more because the forum on which you're making it is certainly the internet and we're all the guy who wants the hot pocket

He uncharacteristically used one scripted line, citing a Bible verse from “two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians,” drawing some chuckles from the audience. Back on his plane, an angry Mr. Trump reviewed his page of notes and saw he copied “2 Corinthians” exactly as emailed from Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who suggested its usage in the Liberty speech.

With social and cable media highlighting his gaffe, Mr. Trump blamed it on a momentary lapse of listening to someone other than himself. “I’m self-funding my campaign; no one can tell me what to say or do,” Mr. Trump said. “I do better that way.”

Mr. Perkins said: “I gave him the reference as you would find it in any English Bible.”

xp That makes sense - I can see the South Park guys thinking "This guy just burns CDs and leave them around, that's what they do, on the internet".

ugh:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/10/06/struggle-for-soul-democratic-party-pits-wall-street-backed-think-tank-against-elizabeth-warren/pYk3SXRnZDmpi7C7N4ZpXN/story.html?event=event25#comments

Is the guy's mom just off-screen to the right in that one room apartment?

...i actually do have stacks of burned cds laying around my computer desk, although i suppose if i'd cleaned off my desk at some point in the last decade i wouldn't...

the fairly novel (that i know of) claimed executive right to selectively enforce laws

Relatedly, the general consensus on US v. Texas is the opposite of yours - a comfortable reversal (that is, federal government upheld).

x-post to a fundamentally broken (and universally despised) legislature

Despised but I don't see it as "fundamentally broken." Or are you suggesting gerrymandering and demographics will forever leave House and maybe Senate in one stubborn party's hands, and presidency in another's. Stubborn Republicans keep pushing same old ideas without a veto-proof majority now, while in the past during Reagan and Bush years they could get some Dems to sign off on their ideas be they tax cuts for rich or Iraq. Bipartisanship for its own sake is not necessarily good.

"It is the opposite of novel - executive discretion to enforce or not is extremely broad, and especially in an area like immigration."

i'm not even talking about immigration, necessarily, though that's part of it. there's also things like the federal ban on marijuana, where the administration is giving states a great deal of leeway. as in the case of immigration, i am broadly in agreement with the position of the executive branch on the issue, but i disagree with the notion that individual states can "opt out" of obedience to federal law.

interesting to hear the consensus on us v. texas. i confess i haven't been following the case terribly closely- has it been argued yet? do they think kennedy will join the liberal bloc on that one?

re: legislature being fundamentally broken- i don't mean simply the presidency being in the hands of one party and the legislature in another- that seems to be more or less par for the course in the american system. the main twist here is that the party in control of the legislature is itself fundamentally broken and ideologically bankrupt, and the social, economic, and political structure of the country right now tends to encourage this outcome. specifically what outrages me most is the ongoing attempts to exert power over the executive by refusing to raise the debt limit unless their demands are met. that's not good governance, that's some dr. evil shit right there. a group with that sort of destructive power, the will to use it, and a lack of good judgment or principle ought to have that power stripped from them.

the parties are much more ideologically coherent now. alot of bipartisan governing was born out of southern yellow dog dems or liberal northeastern republicans. 30-40 years ago you could have a democrat like larry mcdonald in congress who was further to the right than ronald reagan. nowadays the most liberal republicans are generally still to the right of the most conservative democrats. the move toward ideological purity tests and threat of being primaried (which obv conservatives have been far more successful at than progressives) has only amplified the trend. i'd also argue that a reduction in a certain kind of hamiltonian corruption eg pork has reduced the mechanisms thru which government in the past was made possible.

Sure - it's clear that not being "conservative" enough is a the kiss of death for a Republican... so yeah, the purity thing is there, but I don't know if that makes them ideologically coherent. I mean, just look at these primaries! It's been said many times before but there's really no strong reason on paper why xenophobia, apocalyptic religious mania, big-government subsidies for corporations, small-government views of regulatory agencies, military might, turn-back-the-clock culture war stuff, the death penalty, etc., etc., would all go together. In the America that we have, they happen to line up with a lot of the same demographics and you can win elections by bundling them all together as "conservative," but it's not like they all stem from the same intellectual tradition, or that one logically leads to the others or anything. They've been effectively welded together, but they're not coherent.

american two-party democracy encourages coalition parties, and this has been the case since at least the start of the third party system in ~1860. in some senses the coalition of parties around, say, 1900 made more sense than the current coalition (militaristic imperialism, for instance, seems a more logical complement to a vision of an interventionist "big government" than it does to a government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub), and in some senses it did not. the issue here is that one of the current coalition parties has developed, as one of its core tenets, the refusal to compromise. i'd argue that this is an intrinsically toxic trait for a coalition party to possess.

what comprises this coalition in 2016?

by ideologically coherent i mean that previously the parties were rooted in geographical factors and history as much as (and honestly probably more than) any shared ideology. ignoring this history is how you get nro types nowadays saying that actually democrats opposed the civil rights act and republicans supported it. there's some truth to that statement - the biggest opponents to civil rights legislation during the sixties were indeed democrats - but it's still fundamentally dishonest; when you remove party labels and exchange it for political ideology it doesn't hold up - liberals and progressives supported civil rights legislation and conservatives opposed it, either out of open bigotry or thru hemming and hawing adherence to conservative 'principles' (cf goldwater in 64 and buckley's 'why the south must prevail'). w/ these southern dems there were still some roots in new deal principles, if only the ability to point at a hospital or highway built helped reelection efforts. as identity politics became a larger factor in democratic party politics and the conservative movement took firmer root in the south you have the gop become competitive in senate and house races in the eighties to winning them during the nineties (w/ as many or more yellow dog dems switching parties esp following the 94 election)(and not really having to change their ideological stripes much) to winning statehouses and governor's mansions this century.

we can argue that shared ideology is now rooted in part on geographical factors, as the data about the GOP's most fervent constituency has shown (i.e. poor rural white voters). And they still want government help so long as it doesn't go to Mexicans and other people not like them.

this isn't to say that the democratic party label in the south was basically meaningless or purely a vestige of civil war grudges. zell miller became a cartoon on the national stage and ppl wondered exactly how the hell this guy was a democrat but the hope scholarship, for all that is decidedly not progressive about it (funded by lottery), is still far more progressive a program than you'll ever see from any of the republican governors that will control this state until well after i die. nevermind a similar expansive classic liberal program, i can't imagine you'll even see a restoration of what hope was under miller and barnes before perdue and deal eroded and chipped away at it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDTAR36WMAAS90J.png:large

HIV?

"And they still want government help so long as it doesn't go to Mexicans and other people not like them."

they do and they don't - cf the govt better keep it's hands off my medicare. and yeah shared ideology is rooted in geographical factors (praying to god gabbneb doesn't fly into that opening to drop some more poli sci he picked up from a book you can buy at walgreen's). just that a realignment that started w/ nixon's southern strategy (or arguably thurmond switching parties in 64) has now settled firmly into place. there's the lbj quote about losing the south for thirty years and while this kinda came true w/ presidential elections (exceptions made when relatively conservative dems from the south were on the ticket) it took much longer for it to happen downticket. when it did it wasn't because of any mass shift in the ideology of southerners, the back country of alabama and mississippi weren't filled w/ hillbilly whitaker chambers and irving kristols who'd had the scales fall from their eyes.

xp ha

lines go between members of congress who vote together, nodes are colored by party affiliation. details here http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123507

There's probably a campaign slogan in here somewhere for Clinton ("Fighting for the 8% of America That Dislikes Me Less Than the Other Guy").

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/30/donald-trump-is-the-least-favorably-viewed-presidential-candidate-since-at-least-1992/?tid=sm_fb

heh, last line of abstract - "Yet, a group of representatives continue to cooperate across party lines despite growing partisanship." - could almost be the last line of the synopsis of some ya novel adaptation. shailene woodley as susan collins, josh hutcherson as joe manchin in THE PAGE RUNNER.

Been arguing a lot with a few Hillary supporters lately, who don't seem to understand that me not liking her is not necessarily the same as wanting Sanders, let alone Trump, to win. I don't know if it's their ignorance of history, or my misplaced focus on the past (for example, on how she responded to Bill's bimbo eruptions, if not her legislative history, which to be fair is not radically different from Obama's or Sanders, except on a few conspicuous issues), that explains why no one seems to understand why I would have any reservations with Clinton. I still get a lot of people insisting she is really accomplished, with a big emphasis on Iran sanctions and a speech on women's rights in China. And the biggest reason I get for not supporting Sanders is that he can't get elected, which seems a ... tautology? Or at least a fear tactic.

Anyway, some questions for you numbers people. Any clues how many Sanders supporters will flat out not vote for Clinton? Or how many independents or otherwise not Democrats would vote for Sanders? Or whether or not Clinton's support among women is as sure a thing as some might suppose?

x-post--the party in control of the legislature is itself fundamentally broken and ideologically bankrupt

But frustratingly for Dems, the Republicans' bankrupt ideology still gets them control of Congress, and a majority of state governorships and legislatures. Plus 46% or so the vote in presidential elections

Been arguing a lot with a few Hillary supporters lately, who don't seem to understand that me not liking her is not necessarily the same as wanting Sanders, let alone Trump, to win. I don't know if it's their ignorance of history, or my misplaced focus on the past (for example, on how she responded to Bill's bimbo eruptions, if not her legislative history, which to be fair is not radically different from Obama's or Sanders, except on a few conspicuous issues), that explains why no one seems to understand why I would have any reservations with Clinton. I still get a lot of people insisting she is really accomplished, with a big emphasis on Iran sanctions and a speech on women's rights in China. And the biggest reason I get for not supporting Sanders is that he can't get elected, which seems a ... tautology? Or at least a fear tactic.

Anyway, some questions for you numbers people. Any clues how many Sanders supporters will flat out not vote for Clinton? Or how many independents or otherwise not Democrats would vote for Sanders? Or whether or not Clinton's support among women is as sure a thing as some might suppose?

it's pretty hard to know at this point since this race is so weird. I think if sanders were running against a romney type candidate it would be easy for a ton of centrist dems to defect. if he were running against trump, some blue collar voters would but the democrats would still win on net defections.

his relatively high favorables right now aren't what they would be once he was 'introduced to the public' by the gop machine. whereas everyone knows Clinton and aren't gonna be forming a new opinion on her.

overall dems are way better at not screwing their own party but there hasn't been a serious candidate in recent history comparable to sanders. he genuinely is left of a lot of dem voters.

last week of polls out of iowa has been pretty rough for him

Man, that South Park ep is from '06, when dvd-R were still a thing and World of Warcraft was big enough that they incorporated it into an episode. I like that the dude still has an Okama Gamesphere plugged in. Dreamcast 4 lyfe

@ balls - yeah, that's all true, and I know that history quite well... just think that "ideological coherence" is still a misnomer. What you're describing I suppose is the degree to which one's agreement with a party's platform is predictive of one's party membership and not derailed by other associations or loyalties. Not sure what the best term would be, but "ideological coherence" to me suggests we're talking about whether the coalitions definining a party share enough common ground for the party to make sense as anything other than an expedient.

The splits between Trump, Cruz-Carson, and Bush-Kasich-Christie, to me suggest a very strained coalition to me - like if we had a multiparty system and these guys all formed a government together, we'd be talking about it as a Frankenstein's monster likely to fall apart as soon as it hits the first piece of legislation around which their ideologies DON'T cohere. This is kinda true on the Dem side too but that looks more like a grand coalition imo - center right party aligning with the social democrats to wall out the conservatives, liberals and fascists. It also has a clear-ish enough line around its social and cultural politics for it to be obvious why remaining Kasich types don't just turn to Clinton (a la Reagan Democrats), which everyone expects they would in the unlikely event of a Trump nomination.

don't think anyone gets to say 'unlikely event of a trump nomination' anymore

honestly I have five bucks that says the party will not let trump have the nom nom nom

Trump, Cruz-Carson, and Bush-Kasich-Christie - ignoring to an extent trump and carson, if only cuz their ideologies aren't consistent enough day to day to be coherent, the rest of these guys (and pretty much the rest of the field) are all w/in a pretty narrow range ideologically. rubio gets touted as a moderate somehow lately but he was very much a tea party conservative base hero, felling the rino candidate in a primary just like cruz. christie was a god to the tea party until he hugged obama, one reason the romney campaign vetted him for veep was as a way to shore up mitten's conservative bonafides (they opted for pual ryan instead). kasich and bush only come off moderate as a result of their political longevity, their politics are still very conservative, their moderate positions are to the right of reagan. there are some heresies floating amongst them and some shades of difference between their stances but on most issues they're largely on the same page. if you compare them to a nominee field from 1980 or 1968 or 1952 etc the amount of ideological variety is nil. they're conservatives.

re: unlikely events: I'm not convinced anything has meaningfully changed since all the other times it's been said. To recap: very high negatives (implying low ceiling) and barely-consolidated field of opponents (suggesting race will look very different as field finally shrinks). No one has voted yet, he faces huge structural disadvantages... maybe it's not unthinkable, but I stand by "unlikely."

Going forward, I wonder what it will mean that there is so much talk (relatively speaking) about the Dems not "letting" Sanders get the nom, or the GOP not "letting" Trump get the nom. Less voter turnout? More voter turn-off?

It is definitely unlikely at this juncture

Xp

it just depends on your definition of 'unlikely'. I don't think it's greater than a 50% chance. but I don't think the guy who has been leading the polls for months straight and continues to lead in the polls has a significantly lower than 50% chance at the nomination, *esp* given the 2nd choice options gop voters have.

They're conservatives, yes, obviously, but my point is that that word conceals a substantial range of ideological difference even if all segments of the party have drifted rightwards. Bracketing out Carson and Trump is cheating - they're not THAT all over the map, and it seems clear enough which (substantial and apparently semi-durable) voting blocs they're appealing to... and why Jeb and company do not overlap with them!

I didn't mention Rubio, but I would also have slotted him in a Venn diagram w/ Cruz and Carson (where he shares Tea Party w Cruz, and the other two are working evangelical territory). Even the concept of a "RINO" suggests that this big tent of "conservative" conceals subsets which at the very least hold meaning for the people inside the tent.

Yeah, it's not 1980, but it's still a coalition, and one showing its divisions more clearly even than say, 96 or 00. We're still looking at Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, and Gary Bauer, trying to sell themselves as the leaders of the same party, and stuck doing so through the limited vocabulary afforded by Iowa Caucus questions, aka "but where do you stand on ethanol?" They're all conservatives but what that means in theory, politics and policy does not add up to coherence.

Trump *is* the second choice though - or more like fourth or fifth! The majority of Republicans don't want to vote for him, even as a backup. He leads by pluralities, not majorities, and they shrink when we look at states where the campaign has actually been happening. If the field hadn't been a clown car from the get-go, most of his "months straight" would look like Bill Bradley, mired in the 20s, and with his performance since December coming off as a surge that might (but probably won't) stick around for a while. Of course, since it IS a clown car, he's positioned to win some states, but maybe not.

Basically, the clown car effects, and the impossibility of judging whether Trump's unconventional GOTV tactics will actually GOTV, are making it really hard to say what this race would/will look like as a more familiar three- or four-person contest. Tomorrow may at least clear up the GOTV question a bit.

I'm also thinking about the polling in places like, say, Wisconsin... which admittedly doesn't vote for a while and doesn't have tons of polls to go on, but which nonetheless shows a much weaker lead for Trump - a place in fact where Rubio-plus-nobodies is a clean first place over Trump and Cruz. Rubio's whole plan must be to survive the first few primaries not looking like a failure (and, hopefully, swing a fluke win in one of them - which is not the MOST likely outcome, but is definitely not out of the question, even in Iowa), stay in the thing, absorb the bottom-tier candidates' supporters as they drop out, and win a long war of delegate accumulation. In this sense, the most important thing might end up being the order in which other candidates drop out - if the most Trump/Cruz-oriented alternatives bail first, it might increase the perception of Rubio as a distant third-place just based on the composition of the early states.

yeah but the rinos have largely, where possible (which is most places it's possible for the gop to win anyway), been driven out. arlen specter died, richard lugar got primaried out. to an extent these kind of purification cycles become narrower and narrower but twelve years ago when ppl were speculating on jeb's presidential prospects (he was the 'smart one' after all) nobody listed 'not conservative enough' as a potential liability (whereas it was an obv potential factor for mittens and giuliani).

right now if i had to bet and you gave me the choice of trump vs the field i'd take the field (tbh w/ any bet where it's early enough that 'the field' is an option take 'the field', this was true when tiger woods was tiger woods, it's true w/ golden state now, and it's sure as hell true w/ trump who's nowhere near tiger or golden state). if i had to pick one specific candidate though i'd take trump. the paths to victory for anyone else just require too many things to go just right. man i hope he doesn't though. that whole field is filled w/ maniacs i don't want anywhere near the white house but trump is like something out of an alternate history.

fwiw the des moines register poll has trump and clinton winning iowa. trump has a... huge lead in new hampshire as well. no republican who wasn't already the sitting president has won both iowa and new hampshire (though tbf romney only lost iowa by 34 votes).

Thing is, if there actually is predictive value in these early-state primaries, it would be predictive value for basically typical races - the role they serve is to help reveal, from a three-to-five-person field, if there's a candidate who manages to appeal to these distinctive Republican constituencies, and moreover, which one(s) just have the basic logistical stuff down. The clown-car field (and the Citizens United system that sustains it) means that we're not really looking at that at all. They're not meaningless contests, of course, but I don't think they can perform the same "here's who passes the smell test" function. At least, the results they deliver won't be definitive.

In 2000, Steve Forbes took second place in Iowa (with 30.5%!) and it was still basically the doom of his candidacy because in a field of that size, for GWB to take it with 41% confirmed that this was a race with a front-runner, and even being a billionaire goober pouring all your hopes into one state you couldn't wrest it away. In 2016, Cruz could win Iowa with 25% or so, and then strike out from there on out as comparatively moderate states swing Rubio and meanwhile voters generally discover that the more they get to know him the more he seems creepy, off and totally weird. Put another way, I just think winning Iowa with a 25%-ish plurality can't be as meaningful in terms of a candidate's prospects for Super Tuesday as winning Iowa with a 40%-ish plurality. It worked out for Dole just fine, but I think there the real action was elsewhere and it's only hindsight that confirms the importance of a strong Iowa finish.

yeah new hampshire and iowa matter obv, it's for bullshit narrative reasons but bullshit narratives have an impact, iowa made carter and it definitely helped make obama. at the same time they can easily mean nothing in the long run (that 'no gop in an open race has won both' factoid is weird cuz it's not like there haven't been gop races w/ clear and obv frontrunners). i've always thought south carolina was at least as important and historically arguably more important than iowa or new hampshire. the gop voters there are more reflective of the base of the party and more reflective of the voters in the super tuesday or this year the sec primary shortly after. w/ dems it's the first state w/ a significant black voter base. sanders winning iowa or new hampshire are necessary and helpful but wouldn't be nearly as significant as him winning south carolina. south carolina has been a fluky outlier before, w/ jesse in 88 and newt in 12, but much more often iirc it's served as the first real demonstration of the state of the race. which is a shame as historically south carolina has been the great seed of evil in american history.

"But frustratingly for Dems, the Republicans' bankrupt ideology still gets them control of Congress, and a majority of state governorships and legislatures. Plus 46% or so the vote in presidential elections"

and this is the root of the problem. somebody still has to run the country, and it's not as if the democrats necessarily endorse autocratic methods, but the lack of internal republican party discipline (significantly aided, as a poster upthread mentioned, by boehner's anti-corruption initiatives), and the fact that the republican party these days is almost wholly defined by a negative vision, makes autocratic rule by the national executive basically necessary. worse, this sort of rule seems more acceptable to the electorate than rule with the advice and consent of the legislature, as the two leading presidential candidates for the republican party are themselves autocrats.