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Showing posts with label 2016 presidential politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2016 presidential politics. Show all posts

Sunday, November 6, 2016

#Trump voters' enthusiasm has consistently swamped #Hillary's at Liberal #SoFL stronghold of #HollywoodFL during #EarlyVoting 2016

#Trump voters' enthusiasm consistently swamping #Hillary's at Liberal #SoFL stronghold of #HollywoodFL during #EarlyVoting 2016. #SoFL election snapshot

Whether they wanted to or not, the public met a gantlet of candidates and their supporters while waiting in line in Hollywood, FL. 
Above, a small part of the larger scene late Wednesday afternoon.

Since Early Voting started in Broward County two weekends ago, with the usual fanfare and the obligatory local Miami TV newscast LIVE stand-up shots of reporters talking over panning shots of candidates talking to and glad-handing lines of voters, I've been at the Broward County Early Voting site in Hollywood at the Hollywood Library -next to Hollywood City Hall- for several HOURS a day, for all but three days of the past 13.

 I've talked to several hundred voters, dozens of candidates for local, county and state office -as well as their spouses, family members- and several former elected officials who were there to vote early themselves or to show support for friends who were running.
People whose names most of you recognize
Here's a quick election snapshot of two weeks of distilled observations an conversations at a site that's located in one of the most Liberal areas of a very liberal county in battleground Florida.

 Some self-evident facts can be ascertained by anyone walking around with their eyes wide open, but some of this is what's below-the-radar, and seen thru the prism of someone who knows lots of the parties involved, as well as their reputation for being straight-shooters, not BS artists, of which South Florida is currently over-supplied with, thank you very much..

----





Friday was just the latest day of the past two weeks where in one of most Liberal cities in the battleground state of Florida, people didn't see a single sign all day at its biggest site: .

 The point currently being missed by many of my friends and members of the South Florida media, as well as people who Follow me on Twitter, is this: supporters aren't just doing this once in awhile, but rather are CONSISTENTLY outnumbering 's visible and identified supporters in a Liberal redoubt in a very Liberal county, Broward County.
and they are doing it EVERY DAY.

Even though there is a Hillary Clinton-Tim Kaine campaign office less than three blocks away to the east on Hollywood Blvd.

That routine and apathy creates a visceral mood, and it's one that is quickly picked upon by people with some degree of experience in reading a room for a living: politicians.
But here's the fact that can't be rebutted: local Democratic Party politicians and ex-pols tell me that they are privately very dismayed at the optics of what voters and the public at large are seeing there: thus far, voter enthusiasm is GREATER than 's in a traditionally Liberal South Florida stronghold.
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Monday, October 17, 2016

Why is Washington Post so reluctant to ask hard questions about Hillary Clinton that could well have been raised about her H.S. govt. aspirations -by even her friends- that are still dogging her now? Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1998 analysis of Hillary remains my go-to bible!

Why is Washington Post so reluctant to ask hard questions about Hillary Clinton that could well have been raised about her H.S. govt. aspirations -by even her friends- that are still dogging her now? Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1998 analysis of Hillary remains my go-to bible!


The Washington Post
Always running, always prepared: Hillary Clinton as a high school politician 
By Dan Zak 
October 17 at 11:54 AM 

PARK RIDGE, Ill. — Hillary Rodham was 16 when she first ran for president.

It was February 1964, her junior year of high school in this town of steeples and lawns on the rail line to Chicago. She was vice president of her class, and one of five students running to lead the student council for the next academic year. Student rock bands played in support of candidates in the hallways and cafeteria of Maine East High School.

“Stop mudslinging before it starts,” the school newspaper opined. “Keep this election clean!”

No girl had ever held the job before. “The boys would run for president, and the most popular girl would run for secretary,” says classmate Tim Sheldon, who was one of Hillary’s rivals and is now a retired judge in Elgin, Ill. Years later, in her memoir, Hillary recalled a boy telling her she was “really stupid” if she thought a girl could win.

But it was 1964, and she wasn’t even the only girl in the race.

Read the rest of the article at:













https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/hillary-clinton-high-school-years-always-running-always-prepared/2016/10/17/35dd9e4a-8c08-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html

The logical counter-point to this kind of gauzy and whimsical reporting-by-yearbook or scrapbook that the washington post has specialized in its Style section the last few decades is how real and modern -and menacing!- the Tracey Flick character portrayed by Reese Witherspoon was in the film adaption of "Election." 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Flick
That character didn't just plot and scheme, she practically leaped out of the screen, oozing sanctimonious personal ambition and a sense of entitlement!

Even after all this time and all the self-evident examples both good and bad of who Hillary Clinton really is and what she believes in, the Washington Post, rather curiously in these types of breezy profile pieces that regular Post readers like me have come to expect at predictable times in an election news cycle, still seems reluctant to ask a hard-but-fair question about her and the premise of her current candidacy: 
Why are the logical questions that could have well been fairly raised about Hillary's candidacy in High School, by even her friends and supporters -her lack of charisma, authenticity and a consistent inability to make even people who plan to vote for her feel comfortable with her, and around her- still dogging her now?

Especially since it's been clear for so long that she intended to run?

Why, given her unique and unchallenged access to the sorts of resources and people that nobody else in the country can match, has she NOT done enough to actually change that dynamic, even a little bit, except for occasionally changing her political consultants? 
It's a mystery.

In the opinion of not only myself but many other people I know and respect who have a much-closer observation point, she actually seems to have regressed, and is doing retail politics even more poorly now than when she ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2006, in what was her second personal campaign.

That answer is surely not contained in any of her own books, nor in this article.
It might be time for me to again re-read the amazing 1998 book by Elizabeth Wurtzel,
Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, a book, below, which I believe has the single best analysis and dissection of Hillary Clinton and her persona that I've ever read.


 Certainly light years ahead of the conveyor-belt of sycophantic utterings about Hillary from media pals and protectors that have circulated in the news stream for the past twenty years, leaving younger voters grasping for something that's real and meaningful.

I actually attended Elizabeth Wurtzel's book reading/discussion of Bitch on June 27, 1998 at the then-extant Olsson's Books at Metro Center, in Washington, D.C.

I arrived at the event early because I was very motivated and knew in advance: 
a.) It would be fascinating because Wurtzel was so damn interesting herself, and articulate and intelligent that very few Beltway media types ever actually area once you get to know them. (I speak from experience on that.) Wurtzel always seemed to be speaking in full and convincing phrases in interviews in ways that seemed intoxicating to me, almost like she was reading well-rehearsed lines filled with bite, but which comes natural to some people who are very sure of themselves and the facts.
b.) Even by DC's usual literary standards, I knew it was sure to be packed because of the large amount of buzz and controversy about her and the book that had preceded her, and no doubt as well by her publisher for choosing to use a fetching photo of her -the cover?- to promote the event in the DC CityPaper.

Trust me, I was not alone in thinking even before she ever walked into the room that Elizabeth Wurtzel had ample intelligence, good looks and breezy, knowing attitude to spare and to slay any dragons that dared appear at the bookstore. I was not wrong.

 I can assure you, once she was introduced and began filling the air with clever and inventive analysis and some occasional zingers, she positively sizzled in every way.
There were many more men in that bookstore personally energized and turned-on by her and what she was saying than you can possibly imagine now in reading my words here.

For myself, I kept thinking that Wurtzel, someone who clearly was using to people projecting onto them all sorts of their own imagery (or baggage) was more like a contemporary version of a combination of Lauren Bacall in her first film, 1944's To Have and Have Not, below, plus Katharine Hepburn in the 1942 film, Woman of the Year. 
Pretty good company!


Karen Lehrman's April 19, 1998 review of Bitch in the New York Times:
I Am Woman, Hear Me Whine 
Elizabeth Wurtzel celebrates women who are a pain in the neck.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/19/reviews/980419.19lehrmat.html


I'll re-read Elizabeth Wurtzel's chapter on Hillary Clinton and report back here soon!

 But to give you a taste, watch Elizabeth Wurtzel discuss her book on C-SPAN on June 27, 1998 https://www.c-span.org/video/?105509-1/bitch-praise-difficult-women

A gentle reminder for you newcomers to the blog or any by-now-angry Hillary acolytes: I was a vocal supporter of Bill Clinton for President in 1991, long BEFORE he ever announced for the presidency. As my friends and family can tell you, I even planned on running as Clinton delegate to the 1992 DNC before the Virginia Democratic Party HQ down in Richmond even knew what it was doing, so could only tell me to "hold tight" until I heard back from them when I asked what the procedures were.

I was also a member of the DLC when I was living and working in Washington, even to the point of often hauling soda and various snacks around Capitol Hill for our occasional meetings from Oklahoma Congressman Dave McCurdy's office when he was in charge.

And did I mention that my best friend is from Hope, Arkansas, birthplace as well of... well, you know who.
Just saying...

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Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Setting the record straight as #NeverTrump Rick Wilson engages in some selective historical revisionism right before our eyes to continue his anti-Trump machinations. #Rejected!

Setting the record straight as #NeverTrump Rick Wilson engages in some selective historical revisionism right before our eyes to continue his anti-Trump machinations. #Rejected!

 These three tweets of mine are in reverse-chron order:











What follows is what I hope will prove to be some useful context to better help you understand my tweets of this afternoon about voluble #NeverTrump's Rick Wilson attempts to engage the news media in some selective historical revisionism.

 Roll Call 
The Downfall of a Pragmatic Republican 
How the late Bob Bennett's ouster from the Senate foreshadowed Trump 
Posted at May 10, 2016 5:00 AM
By Niels Lesniewski

The death of the much-admired former Utah Sen. Robert F. Bennett just hours after Donald Trump effectively secured his party's presidential nomination reminded official Washington of the first visible stirrings of the unrest that Trump has now ridden to the top of his party.  

Before there was Trump’s "beautiful wall," or oath to make America great again, there was this: Bennett, a party stalwart with a reputation for pragmatism and deftness at the pork-barrel politics that made compromise possible, brought to tears at a 2010 nominating convention as he realized that his own party was ousting him after 18 years in the Senate. 

See the rest of the story at:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/downfall-pragmatic-republican


The Roll Call article concerns arrogant, condescending & patronizing longtime Utah Senator Bob Bennett, who, by almost any reasonable objective, was easily one of the least-liked people in D.C. for years in large part because of how badly he treated people, whether they were Congressional staffers, members of the news media, Capitol Police, other Senators or the general public.
Unlike what the article would have you believe, Bob Bennett was NOT a prince of a fellow, he was a prick of a fellow.

 I'm not exaggerating when I say that Sen. Bob Bennett was perhaps more genuinely loathed by more people on Capitol Hill than anyone I ever met between the 15 years I lived and worked in the D.C. area between 1988 and 2003. And trust me, there are many more legitimate contenders to that crown than you dear readers can possibly know, many of them people who, while no longer on the Hill, per se, are still part of the Washington firmament, either as lobbyists, Think Tank 'thinkers" or at supposed non-profits.

And that's regardless of party or ideology, since many Republican members and staffers I knew pretty well literally got a cold chill down their spine whenever they spotted Bennett coming towards them.
And did you forget that I knew who Julian Epstein was years before he became a regular face on MSNBC in the '90's after the Lewinsky scandal broke?
Now there was a guy who was loathed in a non-partisan way by a lot of people on Capitol Hill! 
And with good reason!!


Eventually, after 18 years in the Senate, enough average Utah GOP voters had had quite enough of Bob Bennett and his grating personality, sanctimonious ways and know-it-all persona to say "No thanks, we'll take it from here." 
Unlike the Beltway media, I was not at all surprised when news came that he had come in third place in the 2010 Utah GOP Convention, and was thus denied renomination to the Senate he had come to think was his birthright. 




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bennett_%28politician%29

So, given that, dig this bit of selective historical revisionism from Wilson we get from Roll Call:
But it was six years ago that he became the first victim of the first strike of what has lately become a full-blown “civil war inside of the Republican Party,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican political strategist and media consultant.
“That was the rumblings, the preview of the beginning of the first act,” Wilson said. “Now we’re in the second, and it’s getting much louder, much uglier, deciding whether we’re going to be a conservative party or a nationalist, populist party in the image of Donald Trump. And it’s a very hairy moment for conservative Republicans.”
But it was six years ago that he became the first victim of the first strike of what has lately become a full-blown “civil war inside of the Republican Party,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican political strategist and media consultant.
“That was the rumblings, the preview of the beginning of the first act,” Wilson said. “Now we’re in the second, and it’s getting much louder, much uglier, deciding whether we’re going to be a conservative party or a nationalist, populist party in the image of Donald Trump. And it’s a very hairy moment for conservative Republicans.”
- See more at: http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/downfall-pragmatic-republican#sthash.kVe84Dpi.dpuf
Here's the reality: Bob Bennett was very rich, tall, enjoyed using that size differential of his to intimidate people, loved using political power to get what he wanted, and had a grand sense of entitlement that was completely out of proportion to anything he had ever actually accomplished while in office in 18 years.



To top it off, Bob Bennett was pushy and nasty to people whom he thought simply had to sit back and take it, take whatever he chose to dish out.

In that respect, Bob Bennett was completely UNLIKE former Florida Senator and Governor Lawton Chiles, a man I respected since I was a teenager precisely because of how well he treated all people, regardless of who they were, and how very hard he worked to do his job to the best of his ability. #diligent

(I've detailed this before on the blog but for some of you newcomers to the blog, here's a quick history lesson connecting me and former U.S. Senator and Florida governor Lawton Chiles. 
I first met and campaigned with Sen. Chiles in 1976, when he ran for re-election the first time. 
In fact, he and I were even filmed together one Saturday morning for about thirty minutes by the-then WCKT-TV, Channel 7 -the then-NBC-TV affiliate for Miami- as he and I walked door-to-door campaigning in a  middle-class North Miami Beach neighborhood just a few blocks away from the Dade County Carter-Mondale HQ, which was located in a strip mall behind the much-beloved and iconic Krispy Kreme donut shop on N.E. 167th Street and N.E. 6th Avenue. 
I picked up some donuts afterwards and ate them when the news segment with me came on! :-)

Many years later, in Washington, before he finally made the decision to run for governor, I had the good fortune to get to know Sen. Chiles and his wife Rhea a lot better, and to come to genuinely appreciate their many remarkable and sterling qualities. 
Many of those conversations with him came on the sidewalks between his Senate office and The Florida House embassy that the two of them had founded for Floridians visiting Washington.
Located right across the street from the U.S. Supreme Court, on East Capitol Street, it's a much-beloved institution among many Floridians who travel a lot to and from Washington, and is a place I personally have spent what seems like hundreds of hours at over the years. 
If not more... Plus, it's where I first had my photograph taken with then-Senator Bob Graham and THE Mickey Mouse. Really.)


Two years after Bennett's ouster, with Republican leaders in Washington still refusing to do what American voters wanted, most especially Tea Party voters, though Sen. Richard Lugar's personality and style were much more refined and professorial than Bennett's, he too was eventually rejected by generations of Indiana voters after serving 36 years in the Senate. Why?
Because he'd increasingly come to be perceived by voters as someone who was permanently disconnected from the pressing concerns of average Indiana citizens and Small Business owners.

As someone who actually lived in Indiana for over four years while Lugar was representing the state in Washington, I can tell you that Lugar eventually LOST the benefit of the doubt he had enjoyed with Hoosier voters for well over four decades, after becoming perceived -rightly I believe- as part of the permanent Washington establishment, not part of the group of hard-working citizen lawmakers assembled in D.C. trying to actually reform government and make it more accountable to American voters.

I believe that's why Lugar lost in a landslide, as I detailed in my last blog post about Richard Lugar, on May16, 2012: "Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM"
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/richard-mourdock-precursor-or-anomaly.html

That a leading #NeverTrump leader like Rick Wilson -who is NOT identified as such in the Roll Call story by the way- tries to imagine that Bob Bennett's defeat presaged Donald Trump's rise this year, is so self-serving and transparent that it is simultaneously funny AND quite telling. 
But probably not in a way I'm sure that Wilson would appreciate.

Some of us who were living and working in DC then and who were pretty observant about how certain powerful people treated other people who weren't powerful or influential -just regular people- haven't forgotten what a complete boor and jerk Senator Bob Bennett was for many years.
Though Bob Bennett and his irksome personality were not on my to-do list when I woke up this morning, I'm happy to take some time here now to set the record straight and remind you of what the #truth is.

Dave 

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Wednesday, January 20, 2016

That troubling Trump supporter as "authoritarian" poll you're hearing about today - More proof that U.S. presidential polling is biased, unreliable and full of ideoological traps designed to prove... "something." But showing something once in a poll is not PROOF, just a one-time result. Reliable polling is getting the same/similar results over and over consistently thru objective means





The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter 

And it’s not gender, age, income, race or religion.

By Matthew MacWilliams
1/17/2016
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533
It's not so surprising that such an ideological survey would first appear in Politico.
But it naturally leads to the questions not asked or mentioned, like...well...
Question: What's the one trait that predicts whether you're a Hillary supporter?
Answer: They are NOT interested in that answer.

(Though it once was, "And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama.")
 
Politico is no more interested in revealing that than they are in knowing and publicly disclosing whatever the supposed one magic trait about supporters of Bernie Sanders is.
Especially if that were to be something like, oh, people who despite saying very liberal and progressive things in front of strangers and the news media, when it comes down to it, do NOT want to live near people who are similar to them, which is the most plausible answer one can infer from facts like Sanders' support being strongest in almost entirely 100% White enclaves around the country, something Hillary is currently exploiting in South Carolina with its large Black population.

In case you did not know, the only state in the U.S. with a lower percentage population of minorities than the state Sanders represents, Vermont, is Maine.
I know because I checked it out via the latest census info a few months ago, and even found similar numbers on ye olde Wikipedia, though the latter says Montana instead of Maine, two states that could not otherwise be more dissimilar from one another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_African-American_population

It doesn't bother me, per se, that people with particular biases have opinions and want to sound off on them, since everyone is free to believe whatever they want, however crazy or different from my own POV it might be. After all, it's a long campaign...
But what I hate seeing and find troublesome is the way this story is already being played up nationally as evidence of... well, "something."
But all it really is is a SINGLE snapshot in time.

It's like predicting the Miami Dolphins making the NFL playoffs every year based on them frequently beating the Patriots the past few years when they have been one of the best NFL teams. 
But in those years when they do beat the Patriots -almost always at home- they STILL fail to make the playoffs, don't they? (This year proved that all over again!)
 
Experienced football fans who have some real knowledge and historical perspective, like political junkies with the same qualities, know that one result is often an outlier. 
What you need to see is consistency (of effort) and results.  
Results plural.

Right now it's a theory that will not be PROVEN until it can be successfully replicated in multiple objective polls. And the article doesn't even have any links to check the poll numbers and questions yourself.  
WTF?

We seem to be at the point where someone who wants the public to believe something in particular about a candidate, and try to be seen as above reproach, and merely relying on cold hard numbers, can write something ascribing far-reaching significance...after just one poll.
Well, it doesn't seem like anything resembling polling Best Practices to me.

And now that you think about it, if this sort of designed poll is such a great thing, how come we never heard from the U.S. news media about the results of the same designed poll in 2008 and what it supposedly "said" about Hillary's supporters?
Why am I only hearing about it eight years later?
Here's more irony. T
oday, hours after seeing lots of tweets about the above, I saw this:




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Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Some quick thoughts re Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report, his unique role in D.C., his feelings about tonight's GOP debate in Las Vegas, and the 2016 presidential campaign thus far... @CharlieCookDC






The National Journal
What’s on the Line in Las Vegas - For some of the Republican wannabes, Tuesday’s debate could matter a lot.
Charlie Cook, December 14, 2015

As we get older, some of us ac­cu­mu­late pet peeves. For me, this is one: when journ­al­ists write of an up­com­ing event as tan­tamount to a turn­ing point in the his­tory of civil­iz­a­tion, or at least since the in­ven­tion of sliced bread. In polit­ics, many im­port­ant events shape elec­tions, and a suc­ces­sion of events big and small make up what we call the cam­paign. For some of the can­did­ates, Tues­day night’s Re­pub­lic­an de­bate in Las Ve­gas, sponsored by CNN and Face­book, is crit­ic­ally im­port­ant; for oth­ers, even a strong per­form­ance would likely be too little, too late. There are likely to be no ad­di­tion­al events between now and the first week of Janu­ary—noth­ing that’s planned, any­way—that can change the dy­nam­ics of this race.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/126039





I first met Charlie Cook of the eponymous Cook Political Report in 1992, when I had a 5-6 month gig at Roll Call newspaper in DC in-between some interviews I was having for some fulltime jobs at trade associations and law/lobbying firms, starting in the spring before the 1992 General Election that Bill Clinton won. 

This was in the pre-Internet era when Doug Bailey's The Hotline was faxed daily to eager subscribers aroung the Beltway and the country, and their most-eagerly anticipated 'coverage' in the 15-20 pages we'd print out were whatever crazy smart or crazy cruel thing that Mary Matalin had said in defense of President Bush or against Bill Clinton and the Democrats, and she pulled no punches, much to everyone's delight and constant amazement in the office. 
(If only Twitter had existed then!)

This was back when Roll Call was co-owned by Arthur Levitt before President Clinton nominated him to be SEC Chairman, and the paper was edited by James "Jim' Glassman. 
Which is to say, before it was owned by The Economist, and before The Hill existed.

Charlie's then-independent Cook Political Report was then-located in the same office around the corner from DC's Union Station as us, a few blocks north of the Senate side of Capitol Hill. 
It's while there that among other things, that I first met future Washington state's U.S. Senator Patty Murray months before she won her Senate primary and before her consultant's "mom in tennis shoes" ad campaign became a bit of a national thing via CNN.

That came about because a colleague in the Washington state Senate had once, foolishly, said she was “just a mom in tennis shoes. Go home. You can’t make a difference.”
Then as well as now, sometimes, left to their own devices, your opponents create your golden opportunity.

So, naturally, given all this, we were all VERY curious what Murray would wear for her first appointment with Charlie, which we all knew in advance would be crucial to her, and if positive,would likely have a tidal wave effect on DC PACs and the Beltway Dem money crowd IF she impressed him and his staff.

Surprise! She made a point of wearing sneakers with her smart professional outfit, looking like most of the women I'd just seen on the Metro train a few minutes before, wearing some sort of Anne Klein II thing. 
Murray's now the highest-ranking woman in the Senate.

 In large part because of his amiable personality and disposition towards fairness -and his remarkable lack of a large ego despite his renown- as well as his zeal for facts and analytics, and his crazy memory for arcane facts, Charlie is probably the most-universally respected person I ever met in my 15 years in DC from 1988-2003.

Dave 


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Monday, July 15, 2013

More bad MSM analysis of Marco Rubio 2016 and immigration reform that includes the usual convenient forgetting of facts/polls that disagree with the central thesis of both La Raza and the GOP Consulting Class. Wow, this is getting tiresome! Jill Lawrence in National Journal: The Myth of Marco Rubio’s Immigration Problem; what's NOT a myth is Miami Herald's recent censorship of criticism of Rubio over immigration reform, esp. Ryan Lizza essay






My comments are after the frustrating column in Beltway Conventional Wisdom at bottom.

 I know I can't be the only former Democrat who voted for Marco Rubio for U.S. Senate
in the 2010 Florida primary and general election who will publicly admit that he's unqualified
to be President or Veep in 2016, and who also think he's wrong on immigration.
The one thing I know that GOP pollster Whit Ayres can't seem to accept is that Marco Rubio can't possibly do anything in the future politically without votes from voters like me.
If voters like me ever turn on him for good...

-----
The National Journal
The Myth of Marco Rubio’s Immigration Problem
He’s taking heat for supporting a path to citizenship. 
But almost every other GOP 2016 prospect does too.
By Jill Lawrence
July 15, 2013 | 6:00 a.m.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is losing altitude with some conservatives because he’s the Republican face of immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Yet he’ll have a lot of company in the 2016 field if he runs for the GOP presidential nomination.
In fact almost every Republican weighing a 2016 race – from Jeb Bush and Chris Christie to Paul Ryan and Bobby Jindal – favors some path to citizenship like the one in the comprehensive reform bill passed by the Senate, or is open to a variation of it.
Read the rest of the column at:

This is unintentionally funny, that is, if you think biased or uneven reporting is funny, given  that like a 1,001 of these media pieces on Marco Rubio the last few weeks,  The  National Journal's Jill Lawrence never actually talks to a serious and articulate person who is actually against Schumer-Rubio and who can make the case that there is a lot everyone can agree on and it's precisely THOSE policies of agreement that should be done FIRST on immigration 
reform, and the Gang of Eight prescription of a path to citizenship is NOT one of things that a majority of Americans agree.

But when confronted with that fact and numerous polls in all parts of the country showing this,
Rubio and the rest of the Gang, along with their various sycophants and proxies in the news media, Think Tanks and the Beltway GOP Consulting Establishment, esp. those with a tie to big-time corporate Agribusiness, want to grab their football and run home -and sulk.

And send email to supposedly-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks about how unfair it all is that some voters in the country, especially the active GOP grassroots, are openly resistant to the demands of the GOP Beltway Crowd that this should be rammed thru or swallowed whole, despite the fact that its own supporters clearly haven't read it all and even now still can't explain all its ramifications to well-prepped reporters with a straight face.
Which, last time I checked, is what one of the public's principal criticisms of Obamacare were.
Correctly as we all know now.

Of course, like all those other pieces on Marco Rubio that have run the past few weeks that are almost always largely pro-Rubio -even if they do feel the occasional need for PR purposes to rap his knuckles or take him to task for some element of his amnesty position that doesn't please La Raza, Univision or the Democratic left- Jill Lawrence's 
conscious choice to NOT speak to someone smart and knowledgeable about what's going-on like Mickey Kaus, who can make that logical and persuasive counter-argument that includes Border protection, and do it in an interesting and informative way, Lawrence makes it much-easier for her to write her column.
And in the end, isn't that what's really most important to her?!









The one person she does quote a lot, GOP consultant Whit Ayres, seems to me to be laboring under one very large false illusion, and it's a sign of how disconnected so much of the GOP Consulting Class is that this can happen without someone who knows him grabbing him by the lapels and snapping him out of zombie-like trance chanting counter-intuitive nostrums about why it's correct for this bad piece of legislation to get passed the way he and the GOP Establishment want -expecting any new-ish group of voters in the future to be "thankful" to the GOP for passing it is preposterous and shows no understanding of either human or voting behavior in this country.

 But then what are we to make of this?
It’s not a given that Republicans will lose if they stay the course. Those who are well funded, strong in their convictions, and persuasive on the stump might just prevail. Defiance might be worth a try, since the stakes are kind of big: constructive governance and the future of the Republican Party.
Funny, Jill Lawrence herself wrote that.
But she didn't write it within the context of the immigration story, even though it would be true, perhaps more so than any other issue.

 Nope, she wrote this back in March, and the title that The National Journal came up for that tells you everything you need to know about the way she views the world, making her piece today seem all the more predictable:

Republicans Need to Think for Themselves, Even in Election Years
The GOP will never get fixed if its candidates keep running scared from primary challenges
By Jill Lawrence
Updated: May 30, 2013 | 12:31 a.m., March 4, 2013 | 11:22 a.m.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/republicans-need-to-think-for-themselves-even-in-election-years-20130304

 Call me crazy but my intuition based on actually paying attention to what happens in this country is that those future new permanent residents-turned voters will walk into the voting booth in their town's city hall or rec center or Senior's Center and calmly vote against Ayres' GOP candidates and not think about it twice.

Meanwhile, Ayres will still be trying to talk his failed candidates off a ledge by rationalizing the bad decision he made, as if that will do any good to his defeated candidates, after-the-fact, like they were sacrifices to appease the PC media gods.
And the candidates will remind him that he never said anything BEFORE th election about them being sacrifices, since they were paying him full-price.

It's all so very predictable, even without benefit of my handy Time Machine, but as usual, instead of someone with moxie like Kaus, who isn't afraid to fire back, it's pro-amnesty Establishment GOP Ayres whom Lawrence decides to make the conscience of her piece, which is why he'll still keep getting quoted in the future, no matter how wrong he is and illogical his analysis proves to be for years in retrospect.

This situation with Ayres is the precisely the sort of thing that, whatever else is wrong with American sports and the sports media punditocracy these days, and there's a lot, it shows that it is much more self-correcting than the world of political consulting and broadcast/print punditry.

Sometime, like a MLB pitcher with an un-hittable fastball who never learned to adapt and develop any other consistent pitches in crucial situations that could get strikes and not be hit in the air, a pundit just loses their honed intuition.
That's it -the end. 

An Ayres could not last for very long on Fox Sports game day coverage of the NFL or even ESPN/ABC's stranglehold of college football game day coverage, by consistently being wrong about what happened and what will happen next.
But because Ayres has been inoculated by a member in good standing of the MSM, he'll continue to be able to sound-off on politics with reporters from outlets all over the country with no idea of his poor judgment and analysis.
It's our New Normal.

And if you still haven't read the great Ryan Lizza essay on Rubio and the Gang of Eight's bill that the Miami Herald consciously prevented from ever being publicly mentioned in print by their reporters or in their blogs, as I wrote about last month a few times, see:

 The New Yorker
GETTING TO MAYBE
Inside the Gang of Eight’s immigration deal.
BY RYAN LIZZA
JUNE 24, 2013
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