The Hill:
A Voter Gravity poll released Friday shows Fiorina with 22 percent support among Granite State GOP primary voters. She has a 4-point edge over her nearest competitor, bigwig billionaire Donald Trump, who has 18 percent support.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson nets 10 percent support, with the poll finding no other Republican White House hopeful cracking double digits in the first-in-the-nation primary state.
Fusion:
Compared to other Republicans, Donald Trump used to be an outlier on guns. He wrote that he supported a ban on assault weapons in his 2000 book “The America We Deserve.” In a 2012 interview with the Washington Times, a reluctant Trump told the interviewer that he owns several weapons, “but I don’t talk about it.”
But on Friday, Trump’s presidential campaign released a policy paper that pulls a 180-degree reversal on the assault-weapon ban and puts his overall stance on guns squarely in line with today’s NRA-cowed Republican party.
“Gun and magazine bans are a total failure,” Trump wrote regarding the proposal he once supported.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Ryan Lizza:
Which of the candidates has done that this year? Trump—and, to some extent, Bernie Sanders—has provided a plot and fared well. Trump has identified a clear problem to which many Republican voters respond: America doesn’t “win anymore.” And he has offered a simple solution that only he can provide: Trump “will make America great again.”
The fact that the problem and solution are laughably vague is a virtue. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forgettable exactly because she has insisted on promoting a myriad of highly specific solutions to very concrete problems before she has laid out the one big problem she wants to solve. (In fact, it’s not so different from how Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign of “hope and change” crushed Clinton’s campaign of policy white papers.) Mamet argues that a politician “who promises drama and then delivers only social concern” rarely excites the public. That’s why it’s “essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic—i.e. non-quantifiable.” He recites a long list of slogans from recent American history, to which Trump’s could easily be added: “Peace with Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride.” The less detail, he argues, the more engaged the audience will be: “A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.”
Trump realized all of this and he has had a great first act. But Wednesday night’s debate suggested that he has no plan for a second act. First acts are famously easy to pull off. “It has often been remarked that anyone can write a good first act,” Mamet notes. “When the curtain goes up, we’ve got your attention. So we dramatists don’t have to do anything for a while. Later, either the plot will kick in or the audience will start yawning and eating popcorn.”
Elizabeth Goitein:
Many news reports and commentators have suggested that “information is classified by [its] nature” (as Sean Davis writes in the Federalist), even if no agency or official has classified it yet. These accounts treat “classified” as a quality rather than an action — one that is inherent, immutable and self-evident. If information is sensitive enough, it’s classified, no matter what.
When it comes to “original classification” — the initial decision to classify information — that portrayal is simply wrong. Under the executive order that governs classification, the 2,000-plus officials who have this authority “may” classify information if its disclosure reasonably could be expected to damage national security. The determination of harm is often highly subjective, and even if an official decides that disclosure would be harmful, he or she is not required to classify.
Michael Hiltzik:
It's time for Carly Fiorina to apologize to Planned Parenthood [UPDATED]
Columbus Dispatch quotes John Kasich:
"I look at our friends in the Latino community as people that ought to be voting Republican. I mean, they're very strong family. We could all learn a little from them about the importance of family, couldn't we? Because they are great, they are God-fearing, hard-working folks. And a lot of them do jobs that they're willing to do.
"That's why, in a hotel, you leave a little tip, you know?"
Philip Bump:
The first question Donald Trump took at an event Thursday night in New Hampshire was a doozy.
"We have a problem in this country: It's called Muslims," the questioner began, going on to state that President Obama was himself Muslim. "We have training camps, growing, where they want to kill us. That's my question: When can we get rid of them?"
Trump's response met with immediate backlash. He didn't correct the questioner's incorrect assertion about Obama's religion and, further, suggested that his administration was "going to look at that." Trump's campaign insisted that the "that" they'd be looking at wasn't getting rid of Muslims -- but rather, those alleged training camps.
Which is itself a weird proposition.
The idea that there are 22 (or, in some iterations, 35) terrorist training camps in the United States appears to stem largely from a 2005 report from the National White Collar Crime Center, a nonprofit organization that receives federal funding. The report, "Identifying the Links between White-Collar Crime and Terrorism," focused on a group called Jamaat Ul Fuqra and the ways in which it used white-collar crime to fund its activities.
Politico:
What Is Hillary’s Greatest Accomplishment?
Carly Fiorina dared Democrats to name it. 20 top Dems accepted the challenge.
WaPo with some analysis of Bernie Sanders' chances moving beyond NH:
With non-whites comprising almost half of Barack Obama’s electoral coalition in 2012, Bernie Sanders must make serious inroads with minority voters to have any chance of becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.
Many of the news stories that oversell Sanders’s chances suggest that this could actually happen. Obama, they point out, was losing African American support to Clinton by wide margins in polls conducted during the summer and fall of 2007 before going on to overwhelmingly win the black vote in the primaries. Or as the Huffington Post’s lead political story on Sunday put it, “He [Sanders] does have time on his side. This time in 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama had yet to engage black voters in his campaign against Clinton, with many expressing skepticism toward his candidacy.”
Even setting aside Barack Obama’s unique potential to appeal to African American voters as a historic racial figure, this frequent comparison of Senator Obama in 2007 and Senator Sanders in 2015 is deeply flawed. Just looking at the data from eight years ago shows how much better positioned Barack Obama was in the summer months of 2007 to surpass Hillary Clinton with black voters than Bernie Sanders currently is.
Interesting read, even if you don't buy the argument.
Still HuffPost says celebrities are Feeling The Bern:
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Lil B and comedian Will Ferrell are all feeling the bern.
All three were included on a list of 128 celebrities that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced had endorsed him on Friday. The list also included screenwriter Adam McKay, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and actor Jeremy Piven.