We begin today's roundup with
The New York Times and its take on the GOP field's foreign policy bluster:
Republicans have long employed the Democrats-are-weak trope. But it’s harder to make that case after 16 years of Democratic presidents who did not hesitate to intervene forcefully when they thought it necessary — Bill Clinton in Bosnia and in Yugoslavia in defense of Kosovo and Mr. Obama in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and with prolonged drone strikes along the Pakistan border.
But as many people now realize, leadership in today’s multipolar world depends not just on a large army and the threat of force but also on the president’s ability to present America’s democracy as a plausible alternative to repression and radicalism and to wield all the tools at his disposal, including diplomacy, to achieve the nation’s goals. President George W. Bush’s swaggering approach to leadership and his headstrong use of force, especially in his first term, led to the disaster that still imperils Iraq today.
So far, the Republican candidates have offered mostly vague, disjointed ideas, mostly on the Mideast and disconnected from a coherent strategy and even sometimes from reality.
The Washington Post writes that Donald Trump's immigration plan to deport all undocumented immigrants "would wreak havoc on society":
Despite his nativist rhetoric, Mr. Trump may grasp the staggering economic and social havoc that mass deportation would wreak. Hence his offhand comment, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he’d “bring them back rapidly, the good ones.”
According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 87 percent of the United States’ undocumented immigrants — some 10 million people — have no serious criminal record. If those turn out to qualify as Mr. Trump’s “good ones,” what purpose would be served by deporting them only to “bring them back rapidly”?
What Mr. Trump proposes is nothing less than manufacturing a humanitarian upheaval on a scale rivaling the refugee crisis in Syria. Notwithstanding his cavalier rhetoric, there’s no evidence Americans would tolerate such a mass uprooting of people who have planted deep roots in this nation.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Also at The Washington Post, David A. Fahrenthold, Jenna Johnson and Max Ehrenfreund analyze how Donald Trump is driving the immigration debate:
The ideas once languished at the edge of Republican politics, confined to think tanks and no-hope bills on Capitol Hill. To solve the problem of illegal immigration, truly drastic measures were necessary: Deport the undocumented en masse. Seize the money they try to send home. Deny citizenship to their U.S.-born children.
Now, all of those ideas have been embraced by Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, who has followed up weeks of doomsaying about illegal immigrants with a call for an unprecedented crackdown.
Ryan Cooper compares the foreign policies of Jeb and George Bush:
This strategic incoherence is characteristic of the Bush approach. Could we make nice with Iran or Assad to fight ISIS, even temporarily? Nope, we must confront all three simultaneously! He mentions Egypt and Saudi Arabia as key allies, but does not mention the disastrous Saudi intervention going on in Yemen right now, despite the fact that the chaos there has created a major opening for al Qaeda. There is no sense of prioritization, just a random list of bad guys.
Jay Bookman at The Atlanta Journal Constitution dives into poll numbers:
[I]f you were to pick the three candidates who appeal to those Republicans deeply frustrated with their party’s leadership and performance in Washington, who would you choose? I think you would pick Trump, Carson and Cruz. They happen to be the three leading the Fox poll, and together, they pull 47 percent of the total.
Conversely, the three candidates most favored by the party leadership and big-money donors are Bush, Marco Rubio (at 4 percent, down from 13 percent in April) and Scott Walker (6 percent, down from 12 percent in April). Together, the establishment favorites now pull just 19 percent of the GOP primary vote, considerably less than Trump by himself.
That, more than the performance of any individual candidate, is the news out of the poll. That’s how deep the disenchantment runs among Republican voters who believe their leaders have grossly over-promised and under-delivered. As I wrote last week, “the realization is sinking in that they are being played, that the base has been promised many many things that the party has no intent or capability of delivering.”
Meanwhile,
Eugene Robinson thinks Hillary Clinton should apologize for her email troubles:
If you accept the job of secretary of state, you inevitably surrender some of your privacy. Any public official’s work-related e-mails are the modern equivalent of the letters, memos and diaries that fill the National Archives. They tell our nation’s history and belong to all of us. Even if your name is Clinton, you have no right to unilaterally decide what is included and what is not.
So I wish Hillary Clinton would be respectful enough to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” I wish she wouldn’t insult our intelligence by claiming she only did what other secretaries of state had done. None of her predecessors, after all, went to the trouble and expense of a private e-mail server. [...]
If Clinton now has political problems because of the e-mails — or, potentially, even legal trouble — it’s her own doing.
Turning back to the Republican field,
Kristen Soltis Anderson explains why all the electable Republicans are losing:
The most recent CNN poll asked Republicans to say which candidate best represented their values. Atop the pack? Ben Carson at 14 percent, followed by Donald Trump at 12 percent, Mike Huckabee at 11 percent and Ted Cruz at 10 percent.
But on the question of who “has the best chance of winning in the general election?” Trump actually increases to 22 percent, while Carson, Cruz, and Huckabee all fall out of the top tier, replaced by Jeb Bush (16 percent), Scott Walker (11 percent) and Marco Rubio (9 percent). Republican voters may be aware of Trump’s apostasy on things like single-payer health care yet still think he’s the guy with the big, terrific, huge plan to take out Hillary Clinton next year.
So what should make Republican leaders nervous isn’t that voters are experimenting with a rebellious choice: It might be that they also genuinely think he’s electable, too.