Thursday Open Thread [8.13.15]

IOWA–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—CNN/ORC: Trump 22, Carson 14, Walker 9, Cruz 8, Fiorina 7, Huckabee 7, Rubio 5, Bush 5, Paul 5, Kasich 2, Christie 3, Jindal 2, Perry 1, Santorum 1, Graham 2

So this poll continues to confirm Trump’s survival of the Meghan Kelly incident, the collapse of the Walker, Rubio and Bush campaigns (wow!), the continued rise of Carson, Fiorina and Cruz.

IOWA–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—CNN/ORC: Clinton 50, Sanders 31, Biden 12, O’Malley 1, Webb 1, Chafee 0

MICHIGAN–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—Fox 2 / Mitchell: Trump 20, Fiorina 15, Bush 12, Carson 12, Rubio 10, Cruz 8, Kasich 8, Walker 4, Huckabee 4, Christie 4, Paul 2

Carly! This poll confirms that Scott Walker is done, just when I saw a Scott Walker bumper sticker on a sedan on Concord Pike yesterday.

Matt Taibbi: “In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump.”

“The irony is that this was supposed to be the year when the Republicans opened the tent up, made a sincere play for the Hispanic vote, and perhaps softened up a bit on gays and other vermin. But then the lights went on in the race and voters flocked to a guy whose main policy plank was the construction of a giant Game of Thrones-style wall to keep rape-happy ethnics off our lawns. So much for inclusion!”

“In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process. He’s taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.”

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post interviewed Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004. He says Dean had a better chance to win the nomination in 2004 than Sanders does in 2016.

THE FIX: How much of what Howard Dean was experiencing in 2003 do you see in Sanders right now? Is there a key strain that runs from the Dean campaign directly through the Sanders bid?

Trippi: I see more big differences than similarities between the Dean and Sanders campaigns. It starts with the structure of the race. We faced three establishment Democrats not one. John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and John Edwards were three strong candidacies that were splitting the vote and donor support of the party establishment in 2003. So when we started to move we actually took the lead in national polls and in each of the key states.

Sanders faces a completely different problem. No one is splitting the party establishment with Hillary. She has it all to herself. When we were at 30 percent we had the lead. Sanders gets to 30 percent and he is still 25 points behind. The second structural difference in the race is born out of a similarity. Yes they both come from Vermont, a state that is mostly white. But Dean did not face in Kerry, Gephardt or Edwards any candidate that had a significant advantage or following in the African American community. In fact in poll after poll, Dean attracted more than his fair share of the black vote. Had we faced a Kennedy or a Clinton that would not have been the case. Sanders is going to have a much more difficult time overcoming Hillary’s advantage in the African American community and that is eventually going to be a big problem as the campaign turns to South Carolina and beyond. In fact if he can’t solve it, he can’t win.

Well, he might win New Hampshire. But that might be it.

Matthew Dickinson agrees:

[A]t the risk of inciting more ire, let me raise two more cautionary flags for Bernie supporters. The Boston Herald poll also indicates that the race in NH remains very fluid with fully 60% of respondents saying they could change their mind, and only 30% saying they are following the race very closely. As I found out in my stint on Mantle’s show, Bernie supporters are out in force this early in the race. It remains to be seen how support plays out as more people begin paying attention to the race an attitudes begin to firm. It may be that questions of viability will loom larger in the polling. Most of the respondents – 65%, to be precise – to the Herald poll still believe Clinton is going to win the Democratic nomination. Remember, Bernie’s big electoral test of viability is not going to be New Hampshire or Iowa – it’s going to be South Carolina, Nevada and the more racially diverse states that come later in the nominating process. In that vein, I was on the phone with a reporter today discussing why Bernie has yet to gain traction with the #BlackLivesMatter crowd. I’ll have more to say about that in a later post. For now, keep those critical comments coming but, please, don’t shoot the messenger!

I will have another post later today where I finally lay out my feelings about Clinton v. Sanders, and I expect to be condemned everywhere and set aflame.

Dan Diamond:

For the first time in more than 50 years of surveys, the CDC on Wednesday reported that more than 90% of Americans — 90.8% of us, to be specific — have health insurance.

Until now, no major survey had ever found that the uninsured rate in America has hit single digits.

The data comes from the National Health Interview Survey, which the CDC has been conducting for more than 50 years. The questions have sometimes changed, but until this year, the answers haven’t: More than 10% of respondents, and sometimes as many as 18% of Americans, have reported that they’ve been uninsured.

#ThanksObama.

Van Jones:

Over the years, many black leaders have asked the populists to include specific remedies for our specific ills. We have done this politely and behind closed doors. Often we would hear that their “progressive economic policies” would disproportionately help black folks, so we should be fine with our community’s needs never being addressed by name.

It was infuriating. Sometimes, it seemed some Democratic politicians were happy to publicly name and embrace every part of the Democratic coalition — immigrants rights defenders, womens’ rights advocates, environmentalists and champions of LBGT equality. But not black people.

At least, not explicitly — and certainly not comfortably. We were just supposed to sit there and hope that race-neutral rhetoric and race-neutral proposals might somehow fix our race-specific problems. I starting calling this dubious strategy “trickle-down justice.”

Today’s young activists simply are not having any of it. In case anyone missed the memo after Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston, here it is: the Obama era of black silence on issues that matter to us is over. And the entire Democratic Party needs to sit up and take notice.

It’s the holdover of the Democratic Party’s fear of being the Democratic Party that took hold in the 70’s after southern racists, who were once Democrats, became Republicans after we passed the Civil Rights Act. We couldn’t publicly acknowledge that African Americans are a constituent of our party and their concerns are our concerns, and thus we have specific policies to address African American problems, because that might piss off Southern or Midwestern whites who once were Democrats. And then when Obama became our party leader and later President, the CW was that it would be unseemly if an African American explicitly used his power and bully pulpit to help his own people.

Demographics are such now that the Democratic Party can win national elections easily without even being on the ballot in the South now. So Fuck the South. Fuck racist whites. As for ending the Obama Era of Silence, I think that is over. In fact, I am not precisely Obama ever himself adhered to the Obama Era of Silence. Hell, remember the beer summit early in his Presidency? That was the result of Obama speaking up on racial injustice where he saw it.