Tag: 2016

Byron York: Democrats deep in the 2016 Kool-Aid. Me: thank God.

Bits like this make me smile.

But party insiders believe Democrats have a structural advantage regardless of who runs, due to demographic changes and the formerly red or purple states that have turned fully blue in recent years.

“Democrats start out with nearly a lock on 242 electoral votes, and Republicans start out with 102,” notes the second strategist. “They can win in a number of different ways, while Republicans have to win everything.” Beyond the numbers, Democrats believe deep down that today’s Republican Party is in such a mess that it will find a way to alienate voters no matter who runs on the Democratic side.

“There is a structural advantage for Democrats because Republicans just don’t get it,” says a third party insider.

…Because that is precisely the attitude that we had in 2005, and that the Democrats had in 1997, and that the Republicans had in 1991 after the First Gulf War, and so on, and so on.  In other words, it is the attitude of political junkies who forget that there are very few very Blue, or very Red, states.  Truth of the matter is, the big question in 2016 will be whether voters will or will not be sick of seeing the Democrats’ stupid faces every day in the White House section of the news*. This is whether or not the very bad candidate Hillary Clinton is the nominee, or the very bad and walking PR disaster Joe Biden is, or one of the rather parochial Democratic governors is, or one of their desperation candidates is.  2016 will be what we call a Return to Normalcy campaign in this business; the Democrats are not really positioned to win one of those.

Continue reading Byron York: Democrats deep in the 2016 Kool-Aid. Me: thank God.

Joe Biden(?) surrogates continue quiet internal war against Hillary Clinton surrogates.

Quiet, but deadly.

The decision to keep U.S. personnel in Benghazi with substandard security was made at the highest levels of the State Department by officials who have so far escaped blame over the Sept. 11 attack, according to a review of recent congressional testimony and internal State Department memos by Fox News.

Nine months before the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, State Department Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy signed off on an internal memo that green-lighted the Benghazi operation.

The December 2011 memo from Jeffrey Feltman — then-Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) — pledged “to rapidly implement a series of corrective security measures.” However, no substantial improvements were made, according to congressional testimony to the House oversight committee from Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom.

Make no mistake about this.  Fox News is not being leaked this information because the State Department is a hotbed of Republican moles; Fox News is being leaked this information because that network is the only one that can be relied upon to publish damaging information about the State Department under Hillary Clinton.  You can see this by the way that they’re going after Patrick Kennedy, who was SecState Clinton’s assistant (and possibly cutout); and possibly by the way that they’re bringing in the paper-trail CYA warnings by Jeffrey Feltman, who in retrospect may have been forced out of his State Department gig last year for not being a good fit with Clinton’s New Order.  Either way, the implication is that things were not going well for Team Clinton over at State, after all… and while most of the Democratic party might not care for that particular message getting out there’s at least one sub-group who would be; anybody who wouldn’t get a nice job during the Hillary Clinton administration. Continue reading Joe Biden(?) surrogates continue quiet internal war against Hillary Clinton surrogates.

Gov. Martin O’Malley (D, Maryland) and the joys of focus group testing.

He’s gotten himself a shiny new null statement:

 

God, I’d love to know what sequence of market research surveys created that Frankenstein’s Monster of a buzzphrase. Although I’ll just say this right now: if O’Malley thinks that trying the tired old I’m a pragmatist, not a liberal wheeze* is going to make up nationally for being soft on crime and against basic civil rights… heh.

Moe Lane

*I don’t expect liberals to agree with Liberal Fascism, but they should at least read it.

So Democrats want an easy 2016 nomination cycle for Hillary Clinton?

As my dear, departed father used to say – and, hopefully, still does – it’s good to want.

Many Democrats would no doubt dearly love an uncontested primary amounting to the stately coronation of [Hillary] Clinton. It would spare them a spectacle akin to, say, the 2012 GOP primaries, in which another prohibitive front-runner came out on top, but only after a grueling process of fending off a seemingly endless procession of challengers. It may never get that bad for Clinton…

Yeah, it would get that bad for Hillary Clinton, and for a reason that Tod Lindberg doesn’t bring up until the last paragraph: Vice President Joe Biden.  You see: I may think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President.  You may think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President.  The Democratic party’s base may think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President.  But Joe Biden doesn’t think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President, and he’s the guy with access to the state party organizations and leadership cadres and Rules Committees. Continue reading So Democrats want an easy 2016 nomination cycle for Hillary Clinton?

Let me offer fair warning: the way things are going, by 2016…

…we (‘we’ being the GOP) will probably be more or less given the Presidency by the American electorate.  This bald statement will annoy, amuse, bemuse, confuse, enrage, and/or challenge a goodly number of my colleagues, readers, and/or lurkers, regardless of partisan identity: when it comes to the dueling visions of history, virtually the entire political blogosphere seems to have signed off on the Great Man theory.  And there are, perhaps and forgive me for saying this, personal reasons for some to feel this way.

For example, the thought that maybe Barack Obama didn’t win the election in 2008 because he was just that devastatingly powerful is, in its way, equally subversive to both the Left and the Right’s narrative.  Many on the Left don’t want to hear that they picked to lead them a schlub who can’t run the government, and many on the Right don’t want to hear that they lost to one.  but he is, and he can’t, and by 2016 the electorate will be as tired of seeing his face and the people that he hangs with as the 2008 electorate was of seeing Bush’s face and the people that he hung out with*.

Continue reading Let me offer fair warning: the way things are going, by 2016…

Naw, Bobby Jindal isn’t even *thinking* of running in 2016.

Nah, not at all.

Not Bobby.

Continue reading Naw, Bobby Jindal isn’t even *thinking* of running in 2016.

BTW: Marco Rubio’s running for President.

Or is at least angling for a VP slot in 2016. From The Corner:

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida says the Senate’s fiscal-cliff compromise, which passed the upper chamber early Tuesday, was a political mistake.

“I just couldn’t vote for it,” Rubio told reporters. “I ran, just two years ago, on the idea that I wanted to be part of solving the long-term problems this country faces. Time and again, we’re given choices here that don’t involve that.”

Via Hot Air Headlines.  Of the other four GOP holdouts… oh, I am a cynical evil giraffe this morning.  Suffice it to say that these Senators have their reasons, and that I expect that Mike Lee’s and Rand Paul’s are ones that I would actually like.

#rsrh QotD, Bidenmentum* edition.

All right, I admit it: I briefly stopped reading this TNR piece (H/T: Hot Air Headlines) in order to quote from it, because the excerpt was just too good to pass up.

TYPICALLY AT this point on the political calendar, a sitting vice president scrupulously downplays his interest in ascending to the top job. The thought of course consumes him, but actually discussing it strikes him as breathtakingly gauche. Vice presidents as varied as Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, and Al Gore all gamely hewed to this script.

And then there is Joe Biden.

…Yes. Yes, there is. Continue reading #rsrh QotD, Bidenmentum* edition.

Clinton in 2016?

That’s what the Telegraph thinks, at least. Hard to say whether the British paper’s distance from the situation help or hurts its judgment, but they’ve found an interesting poll:

A recent poll by the Clarus Research Group found that Hillary Clinton had a 75 per cent approval rating compared to 51 per cent for the man who defeated her in their epic battle for the Democratic nomination.

[snip]

The woman who was one of the most polarising figures in American politics now has a glowing 65 per cent approval rating among Independents and healthy 57 per cent among Republicans.

Even sworn enemies on the Right marvelled at her toughness in refusing to concede to Obama until the bitter end in the summer of 2008 and now view her as more hawkish than the president.

(Poll here: H/T Hot Air Headlines.) Just off the top of my head: being ‘more hawkish than the president’ isn’t exactly hard, and while the VRWC is sympathetic towards the way that her primary opponent’s campaign apparatus used a largely gender-based attack strategy against her last year I predict that said sympathy will evaporate like dew in August if she ever becomes the Democratic nominee for President*.  That may not matter, given that a 65% approval rating among independent voters (almost double that of her boss) is enough to make any thoughtful politician stop with her coffee cup halfway to her lips.

Lastly: man, aside from SecState Clinton and Bush appointee SecDef Gates, those are wretched numbers for independent voters across the board.  Although VP Biden’s are arguably just ‘awful.’

Moe Lane

*Nothing personal, Madame Secretary.  Strictly business.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.