We begin today's roundup with The Washington Post's
Dana Milbank who likens the GOP 2016 primary race to a clown car:
In the oversold Republican primary situation, a candidate is likeliest to get attention when there’s a screw-up, such as Jeb Bush’s five attempts last week to answer a simple question about Iraq, or the borderline racist questions posed to Cruz by Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News.
Graham has potential to break out of the pack by saying some truly zany things. Last month, the 59-year-old bachelor spoke of having no offspring to pay into Social Security. “How do you fix that?” he asked. “Well, Strom Thurmond had four kids after he was 67. Do I have any volunteers?” He then added, “One guy raised his hand, but he didn’t understand the question.”
In Iowa over the weekend (with a dozen other GOP presidential wannabes), Graham declared that instead of going to court to deal with American citizens who are terrorists, “I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you.”
Monday on CBS, King thought she had caught Graham in another such outrage when she asked him what needed to be done in Iraq and Syria.
Taegan Goddard at The Week looks at the possibility of a brokered convention in 2016:
what makes this election so interesting isn't just the sheer number of candidates. It's that it could remain undecided until the GOP's national convention in the summer of 2016. With so many candidates splitting the vote, it's quite possible that no candidate gets a majority of delegates by the end of the primary season.
Now, it's true that political junkies like me hope for a brokered convention every four years — one where backroom deals ultimately decide the eventual nominee. (Read more about brokered conventions here.) Each time, our dreams are ultimately foiled by one candidate who gains momentum through the primary season, causing the others to drop out.
But this year may be different for three unique reasons...
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg looks at Marco Rubio's campaign and foreign policy message:
Rubio is trying to run as the foreign-policy candidate. Yet he claims “the world has never been more dangerous than it is today,” which isn't remotely close to being true. Granted, the Florida senator’s other big campaign theme (intended, presumably, as a slap at Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and all other candidates older than him) is that the 20th century is over. But presumably that doesn’t mean everyone should forget the Nazis and Communists. Does it?
Besides, "safe" as a foreign-policy goal -- one so important that "nothing matters" without it -- is bizarre. Taken seriously, it suggests that other U.S. values and interests should always be sacrificed if they are even slightly in conflict with safety.
Jamalle Bouie at Slate adds his take on the analysis on the GOP's age problem:
Right now, the GOP is a mass vehicle for ideological, small-government conservatism, which Republicans pursue across all branches of government across the entire country. Gov. Rick Scott’s agenda in Florida looks a lot like Gov. Scott Walker’s in Wisconsin, which in turn will influence any Republican who becomes president in 2016. And this conservatism is fueled by the older, white base of the Republican Party which disdains liberal priorities and liberal voters—from union members to immigration activists—with terrible ferocity.
What happens when those voters disappear from national electorates, as they will over the next decade? And what happens if the next cohort of Republican voters—their children and grandchildren—have more liberal views on social issues and the economy? Does movement conservatism survive as the dominant ideological force in the Republican coalition? Or will new Republican voters—from young white transplants to states like Arizona to upwardly mobile Latino immigrants in Georgia—adopt and change conservatism to meet their needs?
Paul Krugman at The New York Times:
Surprise! It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.
But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.
Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.
On a final note, The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Jay Bookman calls out the GOP of blocking NASA funding:
House Republicans, unhappy that NASA keeps producing evidence that they do not wish to hear about manmade climate change, are taking action. They argue that it is not NASA’s mission to study the Earth from the vantage point of space; it is NASA’s mission to look from Earth outward into space, and they are trying to rewrite the agency’s budget to reflect those priorities. In their recently passed budget, they propose to slash $300 million to $500 million, a cut of close to 30 percent, from NASA’s Earth science budget. [...] Those who know the history of science know that we’ve been through this process many, many times before. More than 400 years ago, for example, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was telling us inconvenient truths about the sky and the Earth that those in power at the time did not want to hear.