Eugene Robinson:
That was quick. Strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and cue the balloon drop. Better yet, Democrats could skip the whole primaries-and-convention thing and let Hillary Clinton get to work on picking a running mate.
Barring the political equivalent of an asteroid strike, it’s over. The slick video Clinton released Sunday was both campaign announcement and acceptance speech. I’m tempted to say the Democratic presidential nomination is hers to lose, but I have trouble imagining any plausible way she could lose it.
Jonathan Chait:
Unless the economy goes into a recession over the next year and a half, Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election. The United States has polarized into stable voting blocs, and the Democratic bloc is a bit larger and growing at a faster rate.
Of course, not everybody who follows politics professionally believes this. Many pundits feel the Democrats’ advantage in presidential elections has disappeared, or never existed. “The 2016 campaign is starting on level ground,” argues David Brooks, echoing a similar analysis by John Judis. But the evidence for this is quite slim, and a closer look suggests instead that something serious would have to change in order to prevent a Clinton victory. Here are the basic reasons why Clinton should be considered a presumptive favorite:
...
The argument for Clinton is that she's the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics.
Here's the current
Oddschecker, with Hillary in the lead (
use this converter for implied probability. Hillary's 11/10 odds is at 47.6%, Jeb's at 22%, Rubio's 8%) and Marco Rubio leading Scott Walker.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Ariel Edwards-Levy:
The state of the 2016 Democratic and Republican primaries couldn't look more different. The Republican field is crowded with more than a dozen potential candidates, each at 15 percent or below in the polls. Meanwhile, the Democratic primary is effectively dominated by Hillary Clinton, who's coasted along with support from nearly 60 percent of the party since as early as 2013.
This isn't just the case in the presidential race -- the Democratic establishment, which largely avoided contentious primaries in the 2014 midterms, has rallied behind frontrunners in a number of upcoming downballot races as well.
"[T]he biggest difference among Republicans and Democrats might be the temperament of their voters," National Journal's Alex Roarty wrote earlier this year. "Polls show that the GOP's restive tea-party wing simply doesn't trust its congressional leaders and, by extension, the candidates they try to anoint in Senate and House races. Democrats feel differently."
Are Democrats really happier with their party's choice of candidates? Yes, a HuffPost/YouGov poll finds, although it doesn't mean that they consider themselves more in step with their party, or that they're necessarily more inclined to rally around a frontunner.
NY Times on the congressional 'win' on the Iran deal:
The essence of the legislation is that Congress will have a chance to vote on whatever deal emerges with Iran — if one is reached by June 30 — but in a way that would be extremely difficult for Mr. Obama to lose, allowing Secretary of State John Kerry to tell his Iranian counterpart that the risk that an agreement would be upended on Capitol Hill is limited.
As Congress considers any accord on a very short timetable, it would essentially be able to vote on an eventual end to sanctions, and then later take up the issue depending on whether Iran has met its own obligations. But if it rejected the agreement, Mr. Obama could veto that legislation — and it would take only 34 senators to sustain the veto, meaning that Mr. Obama could lose upward of a dozen Democratic senators and still prevail.
CSM:
There was no surprise in President Obama’s announcement Tuesday that he will remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Mr. Obama’s decision in December to seek a full normalization of relations with Cuba virtually guaranteed that he would move to rescind a designation that places a number of financial and diplomatic restrictions on US interaction with Cuba.
But beyond that political reason for the move was the simple reality, in the eyes of many Latin America and US foreign policy experts, that Cuba had no place being on the list and hasn’t acted in a manner justifying the 1982 designation for decades.
In other words, Rubio is out of step with reality.
Moyers and Co.:
In his latest book, Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney López writes about the subtle, racially coded messages politicians use — “dog whistles” — to harness below-the-surface racial tensions to get elected and to advance policies that are often contrary to voters’ self-interest.
“Think about a term like ‘welfare queen,’ or ‘food stamp president,’” Haney López told Bill. “On one level, like a dog whistle, it’s silent. Silent about race — it seems race-neutral.” But on another level it has a shrill blast “that can be heard by certain folks … a warning about race and a warning, in particular, about threatening minorities.”
We asked Haney López, a law professor at University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow at the research and policy center Demos, to walk us through some examples of political TV ads aired during the last three decades in which “dog whistle politics” are on display.
Robert J Samuelson:
Discontent with the income tax has ebbed. To buttress the point, Bowman cited intriguing survey data. A recent Gallup Poll found that only 1 percent of Americans rated taxes the nation’s top problem. In a Pew poll, respondents ranked “reforming” the tax system 16th out of 24 problems. Indeed, Gallup reports that roughly half of Americans think their income-tax burden is about right...
The implications? For Republicans, the political punch of income-tax cuts is less powerful, because the benefits would go mainly to a relatively small segment of the electorate — upscale taxpayers. And “tax reform” is a long shot: Too many constituencies have a stake in the existing system.