Chris Cillizza:
Sorry, Ben Carson, you weren’t misquoted about a Muslim president. That’s ridiculous.
Amid a giant uproar over his comments on "Meet the Press" that he would be uncomfortable with a Muslim being elected president, Ben Carson is trying to recast what he said by using that most-convenient of scapegoats: the media.
Carson insisted Tuesday that he was talking about radical forms of Islam, not the religion more broadly. “It’s on the record on NBC. On 'Meet the Press.' Did anyone pick up on that? Of course not, because that wasn’t the juicy story,” he said at an event in Ohio.
In the words of Warner Wolf, let's go to the videotape! (Or, more accurately, the transcript.)
Yes, we get that the right loves it. All the sweeter to watch him go down because of it.
Jill Lawrence:
Amateur Hour
We get it, Republicans. You're mad as hell. You're sick of the "professional political class." You've put two CEOs and a neurosurgeon at the top of national and New Hampshire polls. Because why not?
Listen to Joel Arends, chairman of Veterans for a Strong America, explain why his group has endorsed Donald Trump. He wants a president with "courage," and he doesn't think experienced politicians have any. "It's time to consider somebody else," Arends said at a Trump rally in Los Angeles. "It's time to say to ourselves, do we really need a former governor?" "No," the crowd roared. "Do we need a current senator?" "No!" "Do we need a reformer businessman?" "Yes!"
One caution: Politics is not as easy as it looks. Two of the professional outsiders in the GOP nomination race don't even seem aware of the old saw that it's a game of addition, not subtraction. Trump started out alienating Hispanics and other immigrants, then moved on to women. Now he and fellow GOP hopeful Ben Carson are competing to see who can be most offensive to voters who are Muslim. That's a lot of groups and people! Who will be next?
More politics and policy below the fold.
Jonathan Martin:
When Ben Carson said on Sunday that he would not want to see a Muslim elected president, he did not just reignite a volatile conversation about the role of Islam in American life — he also exposed another fissure between many Republican leaders and elements of the party’s grass roots.
In the years since President George W. Bush sought to separate the Islamic extremists behind the Sept. 11 attacks from the millions of practitioners of what he called a religion of peace, many in his party have come to reject the distinction.
It is hardly the only point of disagreement between Republican leaders who are determined to reorient the party to win in a changing country, and activists who are uneasy about what they see as threats to their way of life. But the debate over Islam is particularly worrisome for Republicans because it so vividly highlights the vacuum that has been created by the absence of a unifying leader who can temper the impulses of the rank-and-file.
“The conservative movement needs a pope,” said Matt Lewis, a conservative writer. “Whether it was William F. Buckley writing the Birchers out of the movement or George W. Bush using his voice and office to speak out about Islam, we need people who, like them, will take leadership positions.”
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld:
Why I Still Think Fiorina Was a Terrible CEO
She can diss me all she wants on live TV, but personal attacks won’t take her from colossal business failure to leader of the free world.
Charles Blow:
The media has a new darling in the Republican presidential disaster pageant: Carly Fiorina.
She dominated, “dropped the mic,” “owned the stage” and of course she did it all while “standing in a pair of 3½-inch heels for three hours.”
This amount of drooling should come with a year’s supply of bibs.
It is true that she found a way to effectively engage and combat the Republican front-runner, something her male counterparts had struggled to do. Good for her.
But before the fawning frenzy spins out of control, let’s take a breath and an honest look at whom it is that is being cheered.
Katherine Miller:
The Realities Of Joe Biden Running For President
We demand authenticity, but what happens when we get it?
Campaigns don’t always handle authenticity so well, and neither do the media nor Twitter, in avenues that go beyond politics, and in ways that have always existed, but are probably accelerated by the current intensity of the news landscape. Sometimes the candidate (or the athlete or the actress) becomes a little too authentic. The issue isn’t that this person is fake; it’s that this person has said the incorrect thing at the incorrect time. These conditions benefit a certain kind of person: someone who is controlled, but feels authentic.
Biden isn’t that. He is someone who speaks about loss in a precise and striking way; he is also someone who tells the president something’s a big fucking deal. National politics offer a risky proposition: Your personality can sometimes be flattened by the process (Mitt Romney), or by a moment (Rick Perry), into a narrow set of traits. But who can know beforehand whether that will happen or in which direction?
This is a very good piece.
Olivia Nuzzi:
Carly Fiorina Is the New Mitt Romney
A former CEO gets taken to the woodshed for job cuts—and loses an election. Sound familiar?
Carly Fiorina has a Mitt Romney problem.
Fiorina, like Romney, is a wealthy former CEO from an affluent Republican family. Like Romney, she entered the Republican presidential contest assuming that her record running a large company would be one of her greatest assets. But she may be about to learn that her opponents have little trouble turning that record into her greatest liability.
Arkansas Online:
A Republican state legislator unveiled a website Monday to promote a movement to draft the state's freshman U.S. senator, Tom Cotton, to join a crowded GOP field seeking the White House in 2016.
"There are many fine candidates currently in the race," Charlie Collins of Fayetteville said on the home page of the website, callingcaptaincotton.com. "This isn't about them. This is about the need for a battle-tested leader to give us hope and keep our country safe."
The captain in the domain name refers to Cotton's rank when he was in the U.S. Army. Cotton served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Collins said Monday that he is pursuing the draft movement on his own with some help with the technology part of it.
Jenna Johnson:
9 things I learned about Scott Walker on the campaign trail — and why they mattere
4) Money has long been a problem for the Walker family.
Unlike many candidates for president, Walker lacks personal wealth. As a young state lawmaker, he made less than $40,000 per year. When he became the Milwaukee County executive in 2002, he kept a campaign promise to return much of his salary, a total that he says reached $375,000 by 2010. As governor, Walker was paid nearly $148,000 per year, in addition to free housing in the governor's mansion, taxpayer-provided vehicles and other perks. He also received a $45,000 advance for the 2013 book he wrote about his fight with the unions.
But financial disclosures revealed that Walker has tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, including a large balance on a card with an interest rate of more than 27 percent. His two sons have taken on at least $100,000 in student loan debt and have yet to graduate from college. It's clear that unlike some candidates in the race, Walker could not afford to absorb any potential debt of a presidential campaign. Several donors said Monday night that fear of debt was a driving factor in Walker's decision to so suddenly step out of the race.
Joe Nocera:
Business wonk that I am, my favorite moment in last week’s Republican debate came when Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump got into a spat over which of them had the lousier track record as business leaders.
“The company is a disaster,” scoffed Trump, referring to Hewlett-Packard, the iconic technology company Fiorina ran from 1999 to 2005. Trump continued: “When Carly says the revenues went up that’s because she bought Compaq. It was a terrible deal, and it really led to the destruction of the company.”
Fiorina responded by focusing on how Trump ran his three Atlantic City casinos into the ground. “You ran up mountains of debt, as well as losses,” she said, “using other people’s money, and you were forced to file for bankruptcy not once, not twice [but] four times, a record four times.”
They’re both right. Fiorina’s tenure at HP was indeed a disaster, and Trump’s casino interests did indeed file for bankruptcy multiple times. Now that Trump and Fiorina are number one and number two in a recent poll — oy! — it’s worth taking a closer look at their business records.