Bloomberg:
Two-time presidential candidate Rick Perry became the first to drop out of the unprecedentedly crowded 2016 Republican field on Friday, the latest sign of how devalued political experience has become in a race where anti-establishment candidates have surged ahead.
The former Texas governor, a once-formidable fundraiser who had the most executive experience in the field, pulled the plug on his latest White House bid a little more than three months after entering the race, taking a few parting shots at front-runner Donald Trump as he made his exit.
"We have a tremendous field of candidates," Perry said at the Eagle Forum in St. Louis, Missouri. "I step aside knowing our party is in good hands."...
Perry, who called Trump "a cancer" on the Republican Party earlier this summer, didn't mention him by name as he exited the race, but the references were unmistakable.
"We cannot indulge nativist appeals that divide the nation further," Perry told his audience in St. Louis. "The answer to our current divider-in-chief is not to elect a Republican divider-in-chief."
MSNBC:
In a hypothetical general election match-up, leading Democrat Hillary Clinton would trounce Trump 69%-22% among Latino voters. Against Vice President Joe Biden, who has not yet said whether he plans to run, Trump would still perform poorly – 71% to Biden’s 20%...
As speculation over a potential presidential bid from Biden has grown stronger in recent weeks, the latest poll suggests he may be more popular than Clinton if he formally entered the race. In head-to-head match-ups against Republican candidates, Biden beats out Clinton with slightly stronger support and by higher margins against Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Biden 50%, Rubio 42%
Biden 50%, Bush 42%
Biden 54%, Cruz 39%
Compared to Clinton:
Clinton 50%, Rubio 44%
Clinton 49%, Bush 45%
Clinton 52%, Cruz 41%
More politics and policy below the fold.
ABC News:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had the right to delete personal emails from her private server, the Justice Department told a federal court.
Lawyers for the government made the assertion in a filing this week with the U.S. District Court in Washington, part of a public records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that seeks access to Clinton's emails.
Clinton, the former secretary of state and front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has been dogged by questions about her use of a private email account for government business.
So Clinton hasn't done anything illegal. Sorry, conservatives. get another talking point.
Politico:
Despite a barrage of bad headlines, lagging poll numbers and mounting evidence that she's in a dogfight with Bernie Sanders, Democratic insiders overwhelmingly think Hillary Clinton would win Iowa and New Hampshire if the contests were held this week.
Speaking of talking points...
Politico:
Buoyed by the success of his nuclear deal with Iran, President Barack Obama is preparing to move aggressively on other long-delayed priorities, including a major climate change summit this winter and his elusive quest to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
The National Security Council’s directorate of strategic planning has been quietly building an agenda of action items for the closing year of Obama’s presidency, in a White House that sees its work as far from complete, administration officials say.
That's some lame duck we got there.
David Weigel:
Yet the tax plan, more than anything Bush has done so far, will test whether the Republican base has moved on from the supply-siders. Bush's would-be validators all supported the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts of Bush's brother; Moore even promoted the low-tax wisdom in a 2004 campaign manifesto, Bullish on Bush. Republicans successfully defended most of those tax cuts in standoffs with Obama; the data have not been so kind to them. As Jonathan Chait pointed out, the major difference was in the packaging of the George W. Bush cuts and the Jeb Bush cuts. The former president said that his cuts were the best way of spending a surplus; the former Florida governor, campaigning in a post-budget surplus era, downplayed its total cost of between $1.2 trillion and $3.4 trillion.
Ramesh Ponnuru, conservative:
Three of the Republican presidential candidates have produced comprehensive plans for tax reform: first Marco Rubio, then Rand Paul and now Jeb Bush. The plans have some common features that set them apart from what Mitt Romney offered four years ago. They're also all vulnerable to one of the attacks that helped to sink Romney.
Here are a few important takeaways...:
Democrats won't have to adjust their talking points much. It's not just the Republican playbook on taxes that has been fairly consistent since the early 1980s: Democrats, too, have had a consistent response, which is that Republican tax cuts recklessly increase deficits and are tilted toward the rich. They can and will make the same charges about these plans. All of them, as we've seen, would increase the deficit unless coupled with spending cuts.
All of them would also ensure that the top 1 percent comes out way ahead.
Politico:
The latest numbers underscore the cruel turn of events for Walker, who caught fire earlier this year with his plainspoken style and his track record of taking on and triumphing over the unions in Wisconsin. He has since tanked due to series of fumbles and a lackluster performance both on the campaign trail and in last month's first GOP debate.
The POLITICO Caucus, a weekly bipartisan survey of the top activists, last week named Walker the biggest loser of the summer in the Republican field, with 56 percent of insiders in Iowa saying the governor had lost the season.