This over-the-top title, “Jeb Bush is completely toast: Donald Trump and Jake Tapper just ended all White House dreams” is actually supported by a fairly persuasive argument by Salon.com’s Amanda Marcotte. An excerpt:

…The blunt fact of the matter is that Clinton was Secretary of State when Osama Bin Laden was killed, and George Bush was president when Osama Bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans. Is Jeb Bush betting that Clinton is somehow too good to run campaign ads contrasting the picture of her in the situation room while American troops killed Bin Laden with pictures of his brother reading My Pet Goat while 3,000 Americans lost their lives to Bin Laden? She might be. Outside groups that are supporting her might not be. Either way, that’s not a bet I’d take, especially if Republicans keep flinging the word “Benghazi” around to express their belief that Democrats–and women–are incapable of keeping us safe.
Bush has clearly come up with his talking point to evade this issue, which he trotted out on CNN. “Does anybody actually blame my brother for the attacks on 9/11?” he asked, clearly hoping you’d think anyone who brings this up is basically a 9/11 Truther. The problem, for him, is there is a huge gulf between blaming George Bush for what happened and pointing out, accurately, that he didn’t keep us safe. The problem is that Jeb Bush keeps conflating the two.
…Bush’s answer to this problem, to try to make 9/11 about the aftermath, isn’t going to help him much. That’s because the aftermath was the failed Iraq War, which had nothing to do with 9/11. Imagine what Clinton could do with that. If Bush runs, expect her to repeatedly remind people that George Bush was too busy starting irrelevant wars to deal with Bin Laden, but that the Obama administration, with her as Secretary of State, actually got the guy who did this.

‘Never say never,’ as the saying goes, and there are no guarantees that crazy can’t happen in any election. But if Bush can somehow win the presidency after all of this, it will likely require the least attentive electoral majority in U.S. history.

House Select Committee on Benghazi
Democratic Staff Report: Results of Interviews Conducted by the House Select Committee on Benghazi:
No Evidence to Support Top Republican Allegations About Secretary Hillary Clinton
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report has been prepared on behalf of the Democratic Members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi to summarize the results of 54 transcribed interviews and depositions conducted by the Select Committee. The report concludes that none of the witnesses substantiated repeated claims that Republican Members of Congress and presidential candidates have been making about former Secretary.
Politicization of Benghazi Select Committee
When Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted on national television that Republicans have been using millions of taxpayer dollars to damage Secretary Clinton’s campaign for president, he crystallized in one moment the ground truth of this investigation. One week later, a self-described “conservative Republican” investigator publicly revealed that he had been fired from the Select Committee’s staff in part because he wanted to conduct an objective investigation and refused to go along with Republican leadership plans to use the Select Committee to “hyper focus on Hillary Clinton.” Then, last week Republican House Member Richard Hanna admitted during a radio interview: “This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton.”
Chairman Gowdy has denied these criticisms, stating: “I cannot say it any plainer than stating the facts, the Benghazi Committee is not focused on Secretary Clinton.” He has also argued that, “instead of listening to someone else’s words, why don’t you look at our actions?”
In fact, these remarkable and repeated Republican admissions are consistent with the actions of the Select Committee to aggressively target Secretary Clinton, while abandoning plans to conduct a more thorough, fact-based investigation of the attacks….
…Many of the Republican accusations [against Secretary Clinton] share common features: they claim Secretary Clinton took personal and knowing action to endanger the lives of the four Americans killed in Benghazi, they are based on no evidence or evidence that is unsubstantiated or distorted, they use extreme rhetoric that has no basis in fact, and they often make a direct link to Secretary Clinton’s bid for president.
For example, Carly Fiorina stated that Secretary Clinton “has blood on her hands,” Mike Huckabee accused her of “ignoring the warning calls from dying Americans in Benghazi,” Senator Rand Paul stated that “Benghazi was a 3:00 a.m. phone call that she never picked up,” and Senator Lindsay Graham tweeted, “Where the hell were you on the night of the Benghazi attack?”
In stark contrast to these baseless political attacks, the 54 individuals who have now been interviewed by the Select Committee have identified:
• no evidence that Secretary Clinton ordered the military to stand down on the night of the attacks;
• no evidence that Secretary Clinton personally approved or ordered a reduction of security in Benghazi prior to the attacks;
• no evidence that Secretary Clinton pressed the United States into supporting the United Nations campaign in Libya under false pretenses;
• no evidence that Secretary Clinton or her aides oversaw an operation at the State Department to destroy or scrub embarrassing documents; and
• no evidence that Secretary Clinton or any other U.S. official directed or authorized the U.S. Mission in Benghazi to transfer weapons from Libya to another country.
The evidence obtained by the Select Committee also corroborates previous testimony to Congress indicating that Secretary Clinton was deeply engaged during and after the attacks and took action to ensure the safety and security of U.S. personnel, even as intelligence assessments of the attacks changed more than once during this period.
Read the report HERE

Apparently President Obama’s track record is shaping up as a real asset for Democratic presidential contenders. Associated Press reports, “You would expect in a Democratic primary field when people are crossing a broad ideological spectrum that they might be critical of the incumbent no matter who the incumbent is,” Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake said. “But I think Democrats demonstrated that across the spectrum it’s good to run with the president rather than against him.”
NYT columnist Paul Krugman has the response to GOP disinformation specialists trying to discredit Denmark’s example, which was spotlighted in the first Democratic presidential debate.
Here’s an important lesson for Democratic campaigns to absorb: Generate sharable content. “Successful social-media strategists understand that viral opportunities are fleeting. The window of opportunity often disappears minutes after an event. Successful rapid responses appear to be spontaneous, but most are carefully constructed and planned…Campaigns’ social-media teams should have a strong enough understanding of their candidates key talking points on every issue to successfully pre-write mounds of copy – hundreds of pre-vetted tweets and graphics which only require small tweaks before their timely post. Given Clinton’s vast resources and unparalleled access to the lead strategists and tools that defined Obama’s 2012 campaign, it is no surprise that her campaign employed a top-notch strategy to amplify her message. It is, however, surprising that neither Bernie Sanders nor Martin O’Malley generated shareable content on their Facebook pages during the debate – a huge opportunity squandered…Whenever her campaign tweeted issue specific messaging, it included a shortened URL, which linked to a trackable sign-up page. This will allow the campaign to identify these potential donors and volunteers by the issues that brought them into the campaign and ultimately use that data to buy targeted programmatic advertising buys and send super targeted emails to these voters in the future. More impressively, each link led to an issue specific landing page, thus potentially increasing the user’s engagement and likelihood of signing up. This data-driven approach was pioneered by the Obama campaign and is sure to pay big dividends down the road.” — from Reed Scharff’s “The candidate winning on social media” at CNBC.com.
The Communications Workers of America have launched a “Voting Rights Denied Story Project,” collecting accounts of voter suppression across the U.S. Story and link to reporting form here. I would urge the CWA to collect this testimony from everyone, not just their members, as a much-needed public service.
House of Reps Benghazi committee chair Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, was caught in a false allegation that former Secretary of State Clinton outed a classified source, which the C.I.A. then denied was classified, reports Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times. Committee member Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD) explains: “Unfortunately, the standard operating procedure of this select committee has become to put out information publicly that is inaccurate and out of context in order to attack Secretary Clinton for political reasons,” Mr. Cummings said in a letter to Mr. Gowdy. “These repeated actions bring discredit on this investigation and undermine the integrity of the select committee and the House of Representatives.”
Lawrence Lessig explains the rationale for his presidential candidacy at The Atlantic.
The Clinton campaign clearly places a lot of value in building campaign infrastructure. “Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent more than twice as much as any other presidential candidate on campaign staff, more than three times as much on office space and millions of dollars more on advertising, according to reports filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.,” report Nicholas Confesssore, Maggie Haberman and Sarah Cohen at The Times.
…while Patrick Healey reports “Bernie Sanders Uses Smaller Crowds to Push Back Against ‘Radical’ Label,” also at The Times.
Not much good cam come from this — unless some of the proceeds benefit good causes.

I think it’s a consensus judgment that former Sen. Jim Webb didn’t turn in a particularly good performance in the first Democratic presidential debate, showing himself on issue after issue as being out of step with his party, and a bit grouchy to boot. But some efforts to make Webb out as a symbol of a whole generation of superannuated Democrat went too far, in my judgment, as I discussed at Washington Monthly:

At TNR Elspeth Reeve reminded us that Webb was in some circles touted as the “It Guy” in 2007 after his boffo response to Bush’s State of the Union Address. I think she overstates it a bit; I was on a liberal list-serve back then in which the idea of Webb being Obama’s or Clinton’s running-mate was regularly discussed, and generally found lacking.
But it’s Reeve’s argument that Webb represents the entire pre-Obama Democratic preoccupation with white working-class and/or southern white voters–including the political strategy of both Clintons–that really gives me pause. After cataloguing, rather over-generally, post-2004 Democratic angst about their inability to connect with “rednecks,” Reeve makes this retroactive judgment:

Today, it’s clear that liberals did not have to change. They had to wait. It wasn’t new ideas that fixed Democrats’ problems. It was demographics, and a cultural shift in their direction. In between the era of Nascar angst and this election is the Obama administration. But the bridge between the old view and the new one is Hillary Clinton
.
In Tuesday’s debate, though, Hillary Clinton highlighted her proposals that would undo some of her husband’s signature legislation, including his draconian 1994 crime bill. She talked about “reforming criminal justice,” saying “we need to tackle mass incarceration.”
In 2008, Hillary was downing shots of whiskey with voters. Compared to Obama, she boasted, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” Now Clinton seeks to hold on to Obama’s coalition. This August, she met with Black Lives Matter activists and tried to explain her husband’s record. “I do think that there was a different set of concerns back in the ’80s and the early ’90s,” Clinton said. “And now I believe that we have to look at the world as it is today, and try and figure out what will work now.”

If this is all you had to go by, you wouldn’t know that Bill Clinton showed remarkable and sustained strength among African-American voters, despite Ricky Ray Rector and welfare reform and the 1994 Crime Bill (which was not, BTW, “signature” Clinton legislation; it was signature Biden legislation that contained some benign signature Clinton priorities like 100,000 cops deployed in community policing strategies and an Assault Weapons Ban and the Violence Against Women Act). Remember his reputation as “the first black president?” That didn’t come out of nowhere.
I also have to express some reservations about the underlying suggestion that an interest in appealing to white working class voters is inherently disreputable or involves a morally dubious choice. These voters were obviously central to the progressive coalition from the 1920s through the 1970s; Since then, and even now, Democrats have had reason to believe a segment of this part of the electorate is open to their appeals without any sacrifice whatsoever of the party’s commitments to nonwhite voters. And while HRC is indeed trying to “hold onto Obama’s coalition,” if she slips at all the votes necessary to win have to come from somewhere. Maybe they will come from professional women. But she might want to stay in practice downing a shot and a beer.

I’d add to that last observation the equally important point that it would be nice if Democrats could make a comeback in downballot contests which determine control of the U.S. House and of state governments. Doing that while happily writing off white working class voters will not be easy.

Writing in Nation of Change, C. Robert Gibson has a post “Six Reasons Sanders Actually Won the Debate Despite What Pundits Claim,” featuring statistical evidence from: Online polls of a half-dozen news organizations, including CNN, Time and Fox News; Facebook and twitter mentions; Google searches; a fund-raising uptick; and CNN, Frank Luntz and Fusion focus group picks.
However, respected poll analyst Mark Blumenthal, along with co-authors Ariel Edwards-Levy, Natalie Jackson and Janie Valencia, cite a Clinton win in a new HuffPo/YouGov poll that indicates 55 percent of registered Democratic voters picked Clinton as the winner, with 22 percent for Sanders. However, note the authors, “The difference between candidates disappears if Democratic-leaning independents are included with Democratic voters. Among this larger group, 46 percent say their opinion of each candidate improved.” Further, an “NBC/Survey Monkey poll finds similar result – Allison Kopicki and John Lapinski: “Hillary Clinton’s performance in Tuesday night’s debate resonated strongly among members of her party, with more than half–56%–saying [Clinton] won the debate.” The authors add “Instant online polls are informal and unscientific. The results rely on a self-selecting group of respondents with no regard to political affiliation, age, country, or even whether the person doing the responding actually watched the debate. Respondents, meanwhile, don’t have even the slightest motivation to be objective…Like tracking new Twitter followers or Google searches, the online surveys provide an interesting snapshot of the mood of a particular slice of the Internet, but they’re mostly for entertainment (for the reader) and traffic (for the outlet). No one should mistake them for the scientific surveys done by professional pollsters.”
Daily Kos Elections explains why the U.S. Senate race in PA may be competitive after all.
In Charles Pierce’s Esquire post, “Ted Cruz Has the Look of a Dangerously Unhinged Charlatan,” he writes “Ed Kilgore is absolutely right about what Tailgunner Ted Cruz is up to out there on the stump, where he is sitting inside a powder magazine, playing with a blowtorch and giggling like a child.​..There’s no third alternative. Simply put, unless every other candidate on the stage in a couple of weeks loudly and forcefully distances themselves from this kind of, then the Republican Party is not worth the sneeze that at this point would blow it to hell.”
I agree.
Whatever else can be said about the Sanders campaign, generating articles like this one enriches America’s political dialogue significantly.
Blog for Our Future’s Terrence Heath makes an excellent point in his post, “Democratic Debate Proves Movements Matter.” To all of those progressive activists laboring in social change movements, your efforts to make a significant difference, and they are well-reflected in the first Democratic presidential debate.
At The Nation Joan Walsh explains why progressives should be very pleased about the quality of the Democratic debate, and she also highlights some of the differences in policies.
Keep it up guys!

The already excellent Washington Post coverage of the first Democratic presidential debate gets even better with two columns by E. J. Dionne, Jr. and Harold Meyerson.
It’s not as simplistic as the “Bernie is pushing Hillary to the left” meme, although that is also quite likely. Dionne does a particularly good job of describing the unique and historic contribution of Senator Sanders to the Democratic presidential campaign and to America’s political dialogue in general:

…For the first time in the modern political era, Americans got to watch leaders of a mainstream political party debate the relative merits of capitalism and democratic socialism. And for once, socialism was cast not as the ideology that produced a brutal dictatorship in the old Soviet Union, but as a benign and, yes, democratic outlook that has created rather attractive societies in places such as Denmark and Sweden.
Whatever happens to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) candidacy, he will deserve credit for having widened our political horizons…We now have a more realistic sense of the choices before us: Sanders’s unapologetic democratic socialism, Clinton’s progressive capitalism and the Republicans’ disdain for government altogether. Guess who occupies the real political center?

The consequences of the Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party have been enormously favorable, explains Dionne. “Democrats are far more united than Republicans, who are in a shambles. Democrats are the party of what the political consultants like to call kitchen-table issues — family leave, higher wages and kids being able to afford college — while Republicans are the party of ideology and abstractions.”
Dionne also credits Clinton with a highly skilled presentation. “She maintained her good mood and big smile in the face of repeated challenges from CNN’s questioners, deploying the classic Clinton strategy of insisting that the campaign is about what the voters need, not what the media and the GOP want to talk about.”
Even better, Clinton got a very deliberate lift from her leading Democratic adversary in the campaign. “This is where her most important victory came, with a key assist from Sanders. The sound bite played over and over was created when Sanders agreed with Clinton by asserting: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.” Some sleazy media tried to spin it as a diss, but anyone paying attention understood it as an impressive display of Democratic solidarity, which worked beautifully in the wake of Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s blundering admission that the email fuss is all about hammering down Clinton’s poll numbers.
Dionne notes the reference by Sanders to Denmark’s example of a thriving social democracy in which government plays a more active role in securing decent living standards for all citizens. Meyerson elaborates on the creative synergy in the dialogue between the two candidates on the advancement of such social democratic ideals in the U.S.:

…The relationship between the European social democracy that Sanders extols and the American progressivism that Hillary Clinton champions is complicated and at times symbiotic, with clear areas of overlap and difference…The European social democratic belief in citizens’ rights extends deeper into the economic realm — particularly the workplace — than American liberalism’s does.

He puts the differences between the policies that define northern European social democracy and American progressivism into a current context:

The great irony of Northern European social democracy is that it has produced perhaps the world’s most successful capitalist economies. The Swedish full-employment policy that so intrigued Bill Clinton, for instance, made workers confident that they could get jobs with at least comparable pay if their companies failed, thereby eliminating popular resistance to shuttering moribund industries and incubating new ones. The German economy — by any measure the most successful of any advanced capitalist nation over the past decade — confers on employees considerable say in company policy by giving their representatives half the seats on corporate boards. It is also home to the world’s most successful small and medium-size businesses, the Mittelstand, the kind of small manufacturers whose numbers have diminished in the United States as Wall Street has pressured our big retailers and manufacturers to offshore their suppliers.
The crucial distinction between Europe’s social democrats and the Democratic Party in the United States is that the former have institutionalized worker power to a far greater degree than have our Democrats, who are quintessentially a party of both capital and labor. This has mattered most particularly in the post-1970 era of globalization. While the major corporations of all Western nations have gone global, those in Northern Europe have, as a result of the power that workers wield, retained the best jobs in their home nations and still identify themselves with their home countries. The vast majority of U.S. corporations, by contrast, identify themselves as global, seem content to offshore jobs and don’t invest much, if anything, in training workers for highly skilled jobs here. That’s not because U.S. corporate chief executives are less patriotic than their European counterparts, but because social democratic parties have vested workers with the power to constrain corporate conduct, and crafted policies that favor their home nations’ economies through, for instance, increased public investment. They have limited the size and sway of finance, whose demand for profits accords no special status to the notion of a “home country.”

Meyerson acknowledges that Clinton also wants to expand worker rights in the context of liberal capitalism and he credits Sanders with having the understanding that empowering workers is an essential requirement for Democratic advancement. Meyerson concludes with the powerful insight that “In the United States, liberalism advances only when radicalism is bubbling, which is why Clinton and Sanders need each other, and why the Democrats need them both.”
The Democratic coalition would lack this synergy if either Clinton or Sanders were not running for president. Their campaigns are complimentary and reinforcing to each other. Both candidates have also elevated the Democratic dialogue by treating each other with respect.
Meyerson and Dionne have done a fine job of putting the candidacies of Clinton and Sanders in clearer perspective, especially in relation to each other. Most of the other traditional media reporters and columnists will no doubt continue with the cage-match framing, which misses the larger point — that Sanders and Clinton benefit tremendously from their synergistic campaigns, as do the Democratic Party and American politics.

Amidst all the inevitable talk about who “won” and “lost” in last night’s first Democratic presidential debate, it should not be forgotten that the cause of Democratic unity had a pretty good evening despite some serious media provocation to support the ever-ready “Democrats in Disarray” meme. I wrote about this today at TPMCafe:

When the first Democratic presidential debate got underway last night, you got the immediate impression that the CNN organizers were determined to dash the expectation that it would be a less fractious event than the network’s Republican debate last month. Moderator Anderson Cooper, normally the most irenic of talking heads, got in touch with his inner Jake Tapper and began barking harsh criticisms at the candidates. But with few exceptions during the long contest, the five donkeys on the stage did not rise to the bait, and as a result the event often turned into Democrats versus CNN.
That was made most obvious by the signature moment of the debate: Bernie Sanders shouting at Cooper that the American people are “tired of hearing about [HRC’s] damn emails.” As a stand-in for the media hounds insisting on maximum coverage of the damn emails, Cooper gamely tried to press the issue, to no avail.
For their own part, the candidates did not go after each other much at all (HRC challenging Sanders’ gun record was an exception, as was Chafee calling HRC unqualified by her poor judgment on Iraq–his campaign’s one attention-grabbing talking point)….
[T]here just wasn’t the sense of a party in crisis that Republicans have projected again and again in the two debates, the two “undercard” events, and many exchanges on the campaign trail. Virtually no GOP presidential candidates have a kind word to say about their party’s leadership in Washington. Even challenged directly to distinguish themselves from Barack Obama, the five candidates were careful not to criticize him. In the Republican field, one candidate has called another a “egomaniacal madman”; another routinely calls several of his rivals “losers”; and the candidate most beloved of party elites is disliked by a majority of rank-and-file voters. There’s nothing like that on the Democratic side at present.

We’ll see how long it lasts, but without question, Democrats are for the most part minding their manners, and remembering the big picture.

At WaPo’s The Daily 202 James Hohman and Elise Vlebeck present a persuasive round-up arguing that Clinton won the first Democratic Debate. An Excerpt:

..This morning’s clips are, by far, the best Clinton has enjoyed all year. From nonpartisan reporters to thought leaders across the spectrum, there was a near consensus that Hillary won.
The Post’s Karen Tumulty, in an A1 analysis, says that Hillary’s self-assured performance “showed that she remains the person to beat.”
…Liberal activist Van Jones on CNN: “Hillary Clinton was Beyoncé. She was flawless.”
Conservative Post columnist Charles Krauthammer on Fox News: “She was competent. She wasn’t afraid. She was aggressive.”
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni: “I never doubted that Hillary Clinton had many talents. I just didn’t know that seamstress was among them. There were moments … when she threaded the needle as delicately and perfectly as a politician could.”
New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler: “Clinton staked out the sweet spot between aspirational and pragmatic politics, when she dubbed herself ‘a progressive, but … a progressive who likes to get things done.'”
Vox.com editor-in-chief Ezra Klein: “Clinton reminded a lot of Democrats that they want her debating the GOP nominee next year.”
Mother Jones Washington editor David Corn: “HRC folks should hope for a Clinton-Bush general. Compare her performance to his.”
The Atlantic’s James Fallows: “HRC had her best two hours of the past two years.”
The Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey highlights Clinton’s disarming sense of humor: “During a commercial break, it took her longer to return to the stage from the bathroom, a fact she attributed to her gender. ‘It takes me longer,’ she said. When asked late in the debate what would distinguish a Clinton presidency from the current administration, she answered simply: She’s a woman.”
Post columnist Dana Milbank: “Clinton was a head shorter than her rivals when they lined up on stage for Sheryl Crow’s version of the National Anthem. … But after that moment, she towered over them.”
The Fix’s Chris Cillizza: “Clinton was confident, relaxed and good-natured. … She also smartly turned at least three questions into broad-scale attacks on Republicans, effectively playing the uniter role for the party — and winning a ton of applause in the process.”
New York Times political correspondent Jonathan Martin: “Strong night for Hillary – will calm Dem nerves & tamp down Biden buzz. She helped herself a good deal, was elevated by comparison.”
“Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd: “Clinton was easily the most polished and prepped candidate on stage. Wasn’t even close. But Sanders isn’t going anywhere.”

Hohman and Vlebeck did an impressive amount of work in putting together their case for a big Clinton win and show why the post still rules the MSM when it comes to political coverage. They have other insights to share in their Daily 202 post, which is likely to be the most widely-read take on the first Democratic presidential debate.