Laura Reston at The New Republic writes—How Ted Cruz Became the Next JFK:
Coming off a dismal showing in the New York primary, Ted Cruz found some inspiration in an unusual source on Tuesday night, likening himself not only to that familiar conservative icon, Ronald Reagan, but also to the closest thing liberals have to a patron saint. “Jack Kennedy looked forward instead of back to the first half century of world war,” Cruz told supporters at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia. “He knew that America could dream and build if we were set free—not tanks for war, but rockets for exploration.”
What could possibly have led Cruz, who’s run his entire campaign as the ultimate spokesperson for the Tea Party brand of “consistent conservatism,” to suddenly try fashioning himself as a new JFK? Simple: He can’t win the next crucial primaries running only as himself. In Maryland and Pennsylvania, the biggest states where Republicans vote next Tuesday, Cruz’s brand of “just say no” Republicanism is a hard sell.
But, please. This is Ted Cruz, the conservative firebrand who perturbs senators, actresses, and college roommates alike, a man so polarizing that Republican Representative Peter King told Morning Joe this week he would rather eat cyanide than live in a country that elected the Texas senator to the White House. You could hardly imagine someone further removed from handsome, charismatic, forward-looking JFK.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—2016’s scrambled coalitions:
To earn her delegate lead, Clinton has built a significantly different coalition in 2016 than she did in 2008. The most important and obvious shift is among African Americans, who formed Barack Obama’s base against her eight years ago and are now Clinton’s most loyal supporters. They will loom large in Tuesday’s primaries, particularly in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Clinton ran well behind Obama among voters under 30. She’s doing even worse among younger voters this year against Sanders.
She has done well among voters over 45, among those with a strong identification with the Democratic Party, and among the roughly one-third of primary voters who do not identify themselves as liberal (a group that includes many nonwhites). In her New York victory, she carried moderate and conservative Democrats by 2 to 1. But even where she has lost, this group has come her way. In Michigan, for example, she carried the non-liberals 52 percent to 43 percent.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Clash of the Injured Titans:
As The Wall Street Journal noted in a recent poll, Clinton’s unpopularity — as measured by poll respondents saying that they either have somewhat or very negative feelings toward her — hit a “dubious new record of 56 percent.”
The only problem for Republicans, however, is that “an astounding 65 percent” feel that way about the real estate developer, leading the paper to conclude that he and Cruz “may be the only two Republicans who could lose to Hillary Clinton.”
Exit polls in New York, where the real estate developer won by massive margins, revealed that even among Republican voters, 22 percent said that they would be scared of his presidency and another 14 percent said they’d be concerned about it.
Only 8 percent of Democrats said they’d be scared of a Clinton presidency, with 25 percent saying they would be concerned about it.
Kate Aronoff at In These Times writes—Why We Must Make Green Energy a Public Good:
Progressives have thus far latched on to an easy point of agreement with the Green Tea Coalition: Level the playing field and renewable energy will win the day. It’s a tempting argument, and the motley group going up against ossified utilities and their corporate allies is easy to root for.
But the private-sector solutions envisioned by conservative environmentalists leave much to be desired. If left to the free market, clean energy is likely to remain out of reach for many Americans. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 49 percent of U.S. households can’t access residential solar—either because they don’t own their own homes, or live in buildings that can’t host rooftop panels. Even for those that can, the upfront costs of rooftop solar installation are high—between $15,000 and $29,000 for a typical system.
Without robust public-sector solutions, the move away from fossil fuels could leave many behind. But done right, a clean-energy economy could also usher in a more equitable one, as Naomi Klein argues in her 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Germany holds lessons for U.S. organizers in this respect. The country’s social movements have for years demanded favorable market incentives, federal funding and ambitious climate goals. In 2015, Germany sourced more than 32 percent of its power from solar, wind, biomass and other renewables. Today, roughly half of the country’s renewables capacity is community-owned, breaking up the power of the country’s big utilities.
Lucia Graves at The Guardian writes—President Hillary Clinton would be historic. Let's not lose sight of that:
Another exciting plot twist came this week when Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, announced that his boss is currently mulling a number of womenon her VP list. It’s a move that, if realized, would shatter the glass ceiling not once, but twice. Yet that it comes as such a surprise that Clinton has multiple qualified women she’s considering underscores how far from representative government the US is.
There are just three Democratic women governors Clinton might choose from. Women, though they make up more than half of the population, hold just 104 of 535 seats in Congress, and for minority women the numbers are considerably worse. There have been just two women of color elected to the Senate – ever – and only one black woman in the history of the institution: Carol Moseley Braun in 1992.
That Veep talk has turned so quickly to progressive favorite Elizabeth Warren, who still hasn’t even endorsed Clinton, is evidence mostly of a shallow bench.
Many of Clinton’s feminist detractors will tell you they want a woman president, just not this woman. But if not this woman, which woman, and how long are they willing to wait?
Mark Landler at The New York Times Magazine writes—How Hillary Became a Hawk:
As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.
“Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy establishment,” says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. “She believes, like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the importance of the military — in solving terrorism, in asserting American influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, ‘All you need to deal with terrorism is N.S.A. and C.I.A., drones and special ops.’ So the C.I.A. gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously hawkish and shun using the military.”
Unlike other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.
Sir Richard Branson writes—The hardline approach to drugs must end:
The declaration of the UN general assembly special session (UNgass) on drugs agreed this week is long on rhetoric and short on substance. Many key issues are missing. It does not call for an end to criminalization and incarceration and capital punishment for drug-related offenses. It fails to request the World Health Organization to review drug scheduling. It does not explain how to ensure treatment for users and says nothing about regulation.
The UNgass declaration is out of step with mounting evidence and with public sentiment. Rather than offer practical solutions based on science, it doubles down on the status quo. It comprehensively fails to acknowledge harm reduction and regulatory innovations – many of them successful – taking place around the world. It does not go nearly far enough.
Part of the reason UNgass failed to deliver is because the process was fatally flawed from the beginning.
John Nichols at The Nation writes— The Most Focused and Effective Democratic Messenger We Have Is Elizabeth Warren:
She did not just note the Republican contender’s bellyaching. She put it in perspective.
“Are you kidding me? We’re supposed to pity him because trying to be the leader of the free world is hard?!” Warren wrote on Facebook and Twitter. “I’ve got two words for you, Ted: Boo hoo.”
Then she let rip:
Know whose health is limited? Workers with no paid leave who can’t stay at home when they fall ill or have to care for sick kids. Know whose sleep is limited? Working parents who do everything they can to save money but stay up at night worrying about how do get their kids through college without getting crushed by debt. Know who gets no personal time? People who work two minimum wage jobs to support their families. Know who gets no family time? Moms with unfair schedules who drop their kids off at daycare and drive halfway across town only to find their work hours have been cancelled.
And Ted Cruz? He opposes mandatory paid family and medical leave and calls it “free stuff.” He voted against student loan refinancing. He’s says the minimum wage is “bad policy” and he’s done nothing to try and help workers struggling with unfair work schedules.”
As for the “constant attacks” of a campaign season, Warren wrote: “And know who’s facing constant attacks, Ted? Hardworking American immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks, women. They’re facing the GOP’s constant attacks. They’re facing YOUR constant attacks.”
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—The 8 A.M. Call
So what do we know about their economic policy skills?
Well, Mrs. Clinton isn’t just the most knowledgeable, well-informed candidate in this election, she’s arguably the best-prepared candidate on matters economic ever to run for president. She could nonetheless mess up — but ignorance won’t be the reason.
On the other side, I doubt that anyone will be shocked if I say that Mr. Trump doesn’t know much about economic policy, or for that matter any kind of policy. He still seems to imagine, for example, that China is taking advantage of America by keeping its currency weak — which was true once upon a time, but bears no resemblance to current reality.
Jessica Kozik writes—Fracking Exec Reportedly Admits Targeting the Poor, Because They Don’t Have ‘The Money To Fight’:
On Monday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported accounts of unusually candid comments by an oil and natural gas industry executive, Terry Bossert, at a Pennsylvania Bar Institute gathering in Harrisburg this April.
“We heard Range Resources say it sites its shale gas wells away from large homes where wealthy people live and who might have the money to fight such drilling and fracking operations,” stated an attendee. [...]
That's not news, although industry executives have never made their agenda this explicit. In a 2014 investigative report for In These Times, Hannah Guzik found that oil and gas operations in California are disproportionately located in poor and minority communities. An analysis by the nonprofit FracTracker Alliance conducted for the article determined that the 5 million Californians living within a mile of an oil or gas well had a poverty rate 32.5 percent higher than that of the general population. A related analysis for the Natural Resources Defense Council found that the majority of people living near wells in California are people of color.
Joshua Holland at The Nation writes— If You’re Going to Accuse a Democratic Campaign of Election Theft, You Should Offer Some Evidence:
Last week, I attempted to debunk allegations of widespread election fraud by the Clinton campaign that have been swirling around on social media. My argument was an appeal to common sense: If Hillary Clinton entered the race with a very large lead in the national polls and an enormous amount of support from Democratic Party activists and elected officials, as she did, and then quickly built up a significant lead in pledged delegates, as she did, then at no time since the start of the race, regardless of how unscrupulous her campaign might be, would there be any rational motive for risking infamy by rigging the vote. You don’t need to cheat when you’re winning.
That didn’t sit well with Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis, whose earlier piece for The Free Press, “Is the 2016 election already being stripped & flipped?,” I had mentioned briefly in the column. They’ve now published a lengthy broadside accusing me, and The Nation, of not being able to handle the truth when it comes to “election theft.” (It’s an odd charge, given that my Nation colleague Ari Berman has done some of the best reporting in the country on vote suppression.)
Chris Lehman at The Baffler writes—Hillary's Courtiers:
The Sanders campaign was provoked by Clinton’s appropriation of this pundit talking point on (where else?) “Morning Joe,” where she gleefully suggested that the doddering, detail-challenged revolutionary lacked the policy chops to bark out commands in the Oval Office. Sanders then answered in kind, suggesting that a bought-and-sold mouthpiece of Wall Street and the foreign policy establishment such as Clinton was not ideally cut out to do the people’s business, and presto: a new blizzard of headlines announcing that this policy lummox from Vermont had the temerity to suggest that Hillary Clinton—of all people!—wasn’t qualified for the nation’s highest office.
The rapt attention to this insipid campaign feuding was more than another instance of let’s-you-and-him-fight campaign coverage. One of the signal frustrations for our pundit class, after all, has been the countless ways in which Donald Trump’s insurgent run at the GOP nomination has defied their airy declamations about the fundamental unseriousness and ephemeral appeal of the Trump candidacy. Trump has been not just a long and painful ideological rebuke to the Republican political establishment; he’s been a crassly confrontational affront to the punditocracy’s civil religion of meritocracy. So once the leading lights of our commentariat were at last granted the opportunity to stage a bona fide battle royale about commander-in-chief credentialism on the Democratic side of the aisle, they were going to brandish their own gate-keeping claims like a coat of arms at Agincourt.
There’s a crippling irony at the heart of all this: The term “meritocracy” was actually coined by a card-carrying British socialist, Michael Young, to lambaste the rise of a degree-laden knowledge class at the expense of a disenfranchised working class in a dystopian future. Meritocracy was never intended to characterize the placid upward ascent of striving achievers via impartially administered intelligence tests and elite advanced degrees—or the vacuous posturing over who is or isn’t qualified for maximum presidential leadership—that our political press finds so endlessly delectable. No, as Young made clear, the rise of the meritocracy was but the prelude to a violent and cataclysmic uprising of the meritocrats’ dismally exploited servant class.
In other words, the leading lights of the American punditocracy, by doing their meritocratic best to dispel the last vestiges of a socialist uprising in the party of the meritocratic power elite, have unwittingly re-enacted the plot of Young’s satirical dystopian prophecy, The Rise of the Meritocracy.