We begin today's roundup with
Paul Krugman:
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had an argument about financial regulation during Tuesday’s debate — but it wasn’t about whether to crack down on banks. Instead, it was about whose plan was tougher. The contrast with Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who have pledged to reverse even the moderate financial reforms enacted in 2010, couldn’t be stronger. [...] If a Democrat does win, does it matter much which one it is? Probably not. Any Democrat is likely to retain the financial reforms of 2010, and seek to stiffen them where possible. But major new reforms will be blocked until and unless Democrats regain control of both houses of Congress, which isn’t likely to happen for a long time.
In other words, while there are some differences in financial policy between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, as a practical matter they’re trivial compared with the yawning gulf with Republicans.
Eugene Robinson writes about the strength of the Democratic field:
The main event was Clinton vs. Sanders, and what should worry Republicans is that the two leading Democrats spent so much of the evening on the issues Americans say they care about. To cite one representative survey, a recent CBS poll asked registered voters what they most wanted to hear the candidates discuss. “Economy and jobs” came in first at 24 percent, while “immigration” was a distant second at 11 percent and “foreign policy” third at 10 percent.
But what do Republicans talk about in their debates? Who is going to be toughest on illegal immigration, who is most opposed to President Obama’s foreign policy, who is most determined to defund Planned Parenthood. On the economy, they fight to establish who is most opposed to raising the minimum wage.
The GOP establishment candidates have no economic message to offer beyond the party’s standard prescription of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for businesses. That may be why the front-runners are Trump and Carson, who have never held public office and whose economic prescriptions are more populist.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone looks back at a time when Republicans supported gun control:
[M]odest gun control has not always been antithetical to the Republican Party – and certainly not to either Trump or Carson. In his 2000 book The America We Deserve, Trump backed an assault weapons ban and a 72-hour waiting period to buy a gun. As recently as 2013, Carson called for restrictions on urban ownership of AR-15 rifles.
In fact, Republican presidents from Richard Nixon – who wanted a federal ban on handguns – to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush all voiced support for gun control. George H.W. Bush was so furious at the National Rifle Association's extremism that he renounced his lifetime membership during his term in the White House. [...] The GOP and LaPierre may have flushed this common sense down the memory hole. But Rolling Stone has put together a video to remind us that zero tolerance for gun regulation is a new development in mainstream American politics.
The New York Times:
Mr. Obama’s decision to keep roughly 9,800 troops in Afghanistan next year — rather than drawing down to 1,000 troops by the end of 2016, as the White House had once intended — comes amid Taliban advances and other alarming changes in the region. While Mr. Obama’s shift is disturbing and may not put Afghanistan on a path toward stability, he has no good options.[...] The key to ending the Afghan war remains a negotiated truce between the government and the leading factions of the Taliban, which has entered into talks with the Kabul government in recent years, but has not been persuaded to join the political process. It would also require that Afghan leaders take far clearer and bolder steps to root out the country’s entrenched corruption and turn a hollow, dysfunctional government into a state Afghans start to believe in.
Whether those goals are attainable will ultimately depend on the competency and tenacity of Afghanistan’s leaders. President Ashraf Ghani, who has been in office for a little over a year, has been a marked improvement over his erratic predecessor, Hamid Karzai.
“In the Afghan government, we have a serious partner who wants our help,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday.
The administration must redouble efforts during its remaining time in office to ensure that help is rendered as a part of a coherent, realistic strategy that ultimately cannot depend on American troops scrambling to hold the country together.
Paul Waldman at The Week:
So now, after saying to the base, "Jeb's a guy who can get elected, what do you think?" and getting a resounding "No thanks" in reply, the establishment has turned its benevolent gaze on Marco Rubio. The billionaires love him, the strategists are talking him up, the press is on board, he's young and fresh and new and Hispanic — what's not to like? But so far, the voters aren't quite convinced. Though Rubio has always scored highly in approval from Republicans, he seems like everyone's second choice, and he hasn't yet broken out of single digits. Most Democrats will tell you that though he has some liabilities, Rubio is the one they really fear, but that hasn't earned him too much support (at least not yet) among Republican voters.
Perhaps the reason is that at the end of eight years suffering under a president from the other party, emotions are too raw and resentments too deep for that kind of pragmatic thinking. In that way, Republicans in 2016 are in a position similar to that of Democrats in 2008 at the end of George W. Bush's two terms. I'm sure more than a few Republicans would like to find the candidate who can make them feel the way Barack Obama made Democrats feel then: inspired, energized, and full of hope that a new era was really dawning, one in which all their miseries would be washed away and they could show the world how great things could be if they were in charge.
That Obama was not just a vessel for their feelings but also a shrewd politician capable of running a brilliant general election campaign was a stroke of luck. So far, Republicans haven't found someone who can be both.
And, on a final note,
Catherine Rampelli writes about family leave:
If we bothered to look at what other countries are doing, or even what some U.S. states are doing, we might learn from them.
We might learn that there are different ways to set up a paid family leave system, some of which are better than others. For example, paying for leave through a social insurance system (as we do with unemployment insurance) seems preferable to placing the cost burden entirely on employers. And finding ways to encourage fathers to also take parental leave — both so they’re more active parents and so employers are less likely to discriminate against women in the hiring process — is a worthy goal.
Right now, paid family leave is a fantasy for millions of hardworking U.S. parents. As literally every other country (except Papua New Guinea) has shown, it needn’t stay that way.