Jonathan Cohn:
This isn’t to say a Clinton and Sanders administration would be devoid of meaningful distinctions over policy and politics -- or that spirited debates over substance lack value. Sanders seems more inclined to appoint more aggressive watchdogs in the agencies regulating the financial industry, for example, while investing more political resources into building the Democratic Party at the grassroots. On foreign policy, where presidents have so much unilateral power, their substantive differences could be even more consequential. But even on national security, the gap separating Clinton and Sanders simply doesn't compare in scale to the gulf that would divide either Democrat from leaders in the Republican Party.
...
Here in 2016, it’s another story altogether. Barring a crisis that turns the political world upside down, it will be the sharp divergence between Democrats and Republicans, not the comparatively mild disagreements among Democrats, on which history turns in the next four years.
I think Hillary/Bernie supporters need to focus on this. With Ted Cruz and Donald Trump leading the GOP field, and November 2016 coming ever closer, D vs. R is where the substantive differences are.
Will that make anyone act differently between now and November? Not likely. But I’m saying it anyway because it’s true.
Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:
As the presidential primary moves into a more urgent and combative phase, there is growing acceptance among Republicans, including the Washington and financial elite, that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are the two candidates most likely to become the party’s nominee.
Their commanding performances at the sixth debate — along with their continued dominance in national and early state polls — has solidified the conclusion of many Republicans that the campaign is becoming a two-person contest.
Rubio and Christie can attack each other all they want. Neither will be the nominee. It’ll either be Trump or Cruz. And why is Jeb! still running? Anyone know?
If you need a reminder of the vast gulf between the two parties, here’s a foreign policy reminder:
Max Fisher:
The sailors, it turned out, had mistakenly wandered into Iran's waters, ran out of gas, and, to top it all off, lost radio contact. As an anonymous Pentagon official told the New York Times, "The Iran story is frankly embarrassing. We still do not know all of the facts, but these guys and gal apparently were just poor mariners."
And while the Pentagon was rightly upset with Iran's decision to publish photos of the sailors getting detained, all in all it appeared the US and Iran were able to quickly and peacefully defuse and end a situation that could have easily stretched on for days or spiraled into hostility.
But that did not stop the candidates at Thursday's debate from describing the incident as a disaster for the United States. They did not have any complaints about any harm to US interests or American lives; after all, there was none…
This isn't just campaign silliness. It has consequences. As the Washington Post's Dan Drezner shows, "toughness" as a foreign policy strategy isn't just ridiculous. It's dangerous:
All of these guys think that they’ll sound at least as tough as George W. Bush. The thing is, we already know how that movie played out. While Bush ostensibly demonstrated American resolve by invading and then surging in Iraq, North Korea developed a nuclear weapons capability, Iran accelerated its nuclear program, Russia invaded Georgia, China built up its soft power across the Pacific Rim, and Hugo Chavez expanded the Bolivarian bloc in Latin America. As a theory, the notion that any of these guys would deter Iran from doing what it did this week seems pretty laughable.
This is a movie we've seen before, and that the world has seen before. Even if Americans have short memories and are tempted back into a vision of reality TV–style foreign policy where it's all about imposing machismo and cost-benefit is for wimps, I have found, anecdotally but consistently, that no one outside of America has forgotten how it went last time. I don't know that they're going to have an easy time dismissing all this as empty campaign rhetoric, and I don't know that we should, either.
Ishaan Tharoor reminds us when the Bush II administration had their own detained servicemen crisis with China:
The incident was prompted after the two riverine command boats carrying the sailors from Kuwait to Bahrain drifted inadvertently into Iranian waters. Most sober Iran watchers saw reasons for cautious optimism in what followed — the situation, for example, was resolved far more smoothly and swiftly than a similar episode in 2007 involving British marines.
But amid the election cycle, there was little time for nuance, and Republican critics of the Obama administration continue to harp on what transpired as evidence of the White House's fecklessness and acquiescence to foreign adversaries.
Their rhetoric would sound a bit odd if transposed to an earlier moment when U.S. military personnel were detained following an altercation…
The episode, despite being far more tense and dragging out far longer than this week's imbroglio with Iran, was not that politically polarizing. The most outspoken language at the time came from a ranking Republican congressman Tom DeLay, who inveighed against "communist piracy" and the "deluded dreams of a despotic regime."
Opinion polls later that April showed a small bump in President George W. Bush's approval ratings.
It was startling to hear Ted Cruz use the already resolved issue in Thursday’s debate to score points. It reminded me, along with the rest of his debate performance, of how far from reality the GOP has drifted.
NY Times editorial on Flint and Rick Snyder:
Because of the state’s actions, some part of the water distribution system within Flint, possibly all of it, may need to be replaced at a cost that city officials estimate could be as high as $1.5 billion. And thousands of children with potential brain damage from lead poisoning may need monitoring, nutritional support and special education to mitigate the harm caused by this man-made disaster.
This was a catastrophe caused by failures at every level. A task force appointed in October by the governor put the primary blame on the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, whose director resigned in late December. According to the task force, the state health department apparently had early knowledge about elevated lead levels in the blood of children, but kept silent and did not warn the public. And one or more of the successive emergency managers appointed by Mr. Snyder to control spending in Flint signed off on bad decisions.
Micah Cohen:
How organized does the office seem? Are you greeted when you arrive, or can you wander around for a while unnoticed? Is the office active, bustling with people making phone calls and stuffing envelopes? Is there not only activity, but — as Nate put it when we were making these visits — direction? Do you get the sense that the campaign has a game plan?
Here’s what we found visiting the Republican candidates’ offices here this week (John Kasich and Carly Fiorina don’t seem to have any Iowa offices). When you’re stopping by a field office, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a fair or representative picture of a campaign, but the scenes we found jibed with other reporting on the campaigns’ ground operations. We’ve sorted the campaigns into tiers below.
Thanks for following along all week, and so long, Iowa!
Brian Beutler with more on the public option... er… option:
Sanders is going to have a harder time than he thinks picking a fight with Hillary over single payer, despite the concept’s popularity among rank and file Democrats. The difficulty enacting, then implementing Obamacare made a lasting impression on people at all levels of the party. Many of those same people like Obama quite a lot, are proud of Obamacare, and don’t want to devote themselves to a quixotic project of repealing and replacing it, even if it’s with a health system that’s superior to Obamacare in the abstract.
If Sanders proposes expanding Medicare to everybody (eliminating the private insurance system) without intervening steps, it’ll be perfectly fair for Clinton to point out that when Obamacare led to the cancelation of a tiny percentage of health plans nationwide, it was a political disaster, which the administration was forced to take dubious steps to mitigate. (Chelsea Clinton made an exaggerated and misleading version of this argument this week.) If Sanders instead proposes Medicare-for-all with a private market option, I imagine he’d have to be prepared to spend away a bunch of the savings a straight single-payer system would generate.
The way for Sanders to avoid these pitfalls is as it was back in 2009: propose a Medicare-powered public insurance option that consumers under 65 can buy into, and that’s robust enough that consumers will flock to it, while the private market adapts or withers on the vine over time. But if Sanders proposed something like that, I don’t think he and Clinton would have much to fight about anymore. The political beauty of the public option was its power to unite the incrementalists and the single-payer people in consensus. I don’t see why that appeal doesn’t still exist.