Elias Isquith:
For the Republican Party in general, politically speaking, [the improving economy] was inconvenient — but not a disaster. Just as nature seeks to fill a vacuum, whichever party is not in control of the White House seeks to attack the president where he’s weakest. For Obama’s first term, that area was the economy; for his second term, it’s been foreign affairs. And since the GOP of the post-9/11 years has been much more effective at coming up with reasons to kill Muslim people than it has at fiscal stewardship, moving back to attacking Dems for being soft on terror was in many regards more comfortable, anyway.
For Paul, though, the story has been different. Because if a Rand Paul presidential campaign was going to be a real thing in a way his dad’s campaigns never were, it would require a political environment with “small government” issues front-and-center and “national security” issues pushed-off to the side. It’d require a GOP primary environment in which the name John Galt was much more resonant than, say, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Paul was never going to persuade the entire GOP caucus to become non-interventionist, of course. But he needed at least some of them to feel like domestic policy was so much more important that some foreign policy heresy could be accepted.
Well, that didn't happen. And it's not going to happen. So forget those "Rand comes closest to Clinton" polls. Rand won't be the nominee. And, btw, his supporters are the ones that don't always turn up to vote.
ABC:
The latest Republican presidential candidate to enter the race, war hawk Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently had harsh words for fellow senator and GOP primary opponent Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., over the NSA domestic surveillance program.
Still, if it came down to it, Graham says he would pick Paul over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton if the two faced off in the general election come 2016.
“Well, when I came out of my coma, I would support Rand Paul,“ Graham told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on “GMA” this morning. “I mean, it would be devastating, I think, for our party to nominate Rand Paul as our nominee on national security, in particular. But if he wins the primary process, I will support him.”
Graham represents a segment of the Republican party that (despite the noise they make) is more comfortable with Hillary than Rand in the WH. Fancy that.
DMR:
Paul bests the field in attracting moderate Republicans, independents who intend to attend the Republican caucuses (21 percent, all but double any other contender), and likely GOP caucusgoers who are under 45. Paul, who has said the GOP "can have people on both sides" of the same-sex marriage issue, has inherited many of the liberty movement conservatives who supported his father, then-Texas U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, in his Iowa caucus races in 2008 and 2012.
But Rand Paul has seen his favorability rating in the poll drop by 9 percentage points since January, more than for any other GOP contender.
The
smart money is still on Jeb in the primary (and Hillary in the general), but he hardly looks like a front runner. (Odds converter
here.)
Meanwhile two new polls out Tuesday (ABC/WaPo and CNN) suggest Hillary's numbers are coming back to earth (but she still leads). But perhaps the best take away is this, from WaPo:
The survey tested Clinton against Bush in a possible general-election matchup. Among registered voters, she led 47 percent to 44 percent, within the poll’s four-point error margin among voters. Two months ago, she had a 12-point lead over Bush in that hypothetical ballot test. When asked to predict who would win such a contest, however, 55 percent predicted Clinton and 39 percent said Bush.
Why is that important?
This is why:
Most pollsters base their election projections off questions of voter intentions, which ask “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” By contrast, we probe the value of questions probing voters’ expectations, which typically ask: “Regardless of who you plan to vote for, who do you think will win the upcoming election?”
We demonstrate that polls of voter expectations consistently yield more accurate forecasts than polls of voter intentions.
Just for fun,
here's a look back at nonscientific predictors of the 2012 election, from Hollywood mask sales to school children predictions.
Meanwhile, don't miss Mitch McConnells major failure with NSA refoms:
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell failed in the end to convince his caucus to support him on a last-ditch effort to eke out even a small victory in a contentious, months-long battle over government spying that has left a bruise on his young tenure at the helm of the upper chamber.
Here's a
Nick Bunker piece on the decline of publicly held companies and the reasons for.
The stock market and the health of publicly traded companies are often treated as key indicators of the state of the U.S. economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits a new high and the financial press celebrates. Looking only at the status of stock markets is a problem, however, because the distribution of stock ownership is highly unequal in our society. And this isn’t the only problem with using the performance of public companies as proxies for the broader economy. The declining number of companies listed on stock markets over the past two decades—a fall of almost 15 percent—may well mean that public companies are playing a different kind of role in the U.S. economy.
Dan Diamond answers a
Charles Krauthammer opinion column on doctor retirements and electronic health records (EHR) with some data:
It’s true that doctors — especially older ones — are frustrated about the shift to electronic health records.
And understandably so! EHRs have added a burden to a busy workday. The added value of digitized data isn’t always obvious. There’s evidence they hurt productivity.
As a journalist, I’ve heard these complaints over and over again from doctors. And as a patient, I’ve witnessed doctors’ anger firsthand.
A few years ago, I was in the office of a middle-aged neurologist, one of the greatest diagnosticians I’ve ever met. It was a routine check-up, but he spent more time looking at his computer screen than at me.
“This gets in the way of patient care,” he groused, his eyes locked on the screen.
“Why don’t you hire a medical scribe?” I asked the doctor. “Someone who can keep the notes while you see patients?”
He swiveled around and scowled. “The hospital doesn’t want to pay,” he said, as his eyebrows scrunched. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.”
But that doctor didn’t go anywhere. He’s got kids in Ivy League colleges and a D.C.-area household to fund. He’s got years invested in building a practice. And walking away from that will take more than frustration over a computer system.
In fact, the real reason why doctors are quitting is less dramatic: They’re aging.