Watching primary and caucus returns from Arizona and Utah on Tuesday night, one Republican candidate’s performance was reminiscent of an episode of the TV show about a zombie apocalpyse, The Walking Dead. I wrote about it the next day at New York:

Donald Trump won Arizona and all of its 58 delegates, while Ted Cruz won Utah and its 40 delegates. The third candidate still in the field, John Kasich, won no delegates, and his big psychological victory was finishing a very poor second place in Utah over Trump in what may very well be America’s preeminent Trump-hating jurisdiction. He also managed to “finish fourth in a three-man race” in Arizona by trailing the zombie candidacy of Marco Rubio (who did better in early voting than Kasich did in early voting or on election day).
In popular mythology, when you get bit by a zombie you soon zombify yourself. The Arizona showing by Kasich seems to consign him to the ranks of the walking dead. Even before last night, there were signs in every direction that the Ohioan had worn out his welcome with, well, just about everybody in the GOP. His refusal to give Ted Cruz a clean shot at Trump in Utah greatly annoyed Mitt Romney, who can hardly be expected to promote Kasich’s interests if the contested convention they both want actually materializes. But as Robert Draper explained on Monday in The New York Times Magazine, it’s hard to find much of any “insider” base of support for the man:

[M]ost party insiders to whom I’ve spoken flatly reject a draft-Kasich movement. Partly this is because he hasn’t earned it. To date he has triumphed only in his home state — which was not a huge surprise, given that he won all 12 of his previous elections (for State Senate, Congress and governor) there. Kasich was something of an absentee candidate in the South and has underperformed in the North and the Midwest outside Ohio. His fund-raising abilities are not especially impressive: He has raised $15.3 million thus far, not much more than the $14.2 million that Marco Rubio raised in the last quarter of last year alone …
Perhaps just as important, conservatives — particularly in the G.O.P. commentariat — do not see Kasich as one of them … As governor, Kasich expanded Medicaid benefits in his state, against the wishes of a Republican-controlled Legislature. He also embraced Common Core educational standards and today favors a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants. All of these constitute apostasies to movement conservatives.
But there’s a third layer of resistance to Kasich, one with which Cruz can identify: Many Beltway Republicans don’t like him.

Yeah, the dirty little secret of the Kasich campaign all along has been that the actual candidate behind his relentlessly upbeat campaign has a long-standing reputation in Washington and Columbus as a nasty piece of work. Republicans who know this are understandably a mite irritated at Kasich’s little lectures on how to emulate the sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
But if Kasich really has little support in the Republican Establishment, how about his occasional claim of being a big brawling anti-Establishment figure himself, fighting the good fight out there in the Ohio badlands? Roll Call‘s Stu Rothenberg, who certainly knows a Beltway insider when he sees one, had great sport with the idea of Kasich the Outsider in a recent column:

Kasich … often refers to his service in the House but insists that the establishment fears him.
Just don’t look behind the curtain, because if you do, you will see that Kasich’s supporters and advisers include party establishment types like consultant Charlie Black, former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber, long-time party strategist Stu Spencer, former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu and New Hampshire veteran GOP operative Tom Rath.
There is nothing wrong with that team, except that it was the establishment before anyone was complaining about “the establishment.”

And that gets us to the strategic anomaly of the Kasich campaign. The one thing we know right now with a high degree of certainty is that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are going to arrive in Cleveland ranked first and second in bound delegates, together holding a sizable and perhaps an overwhelming majority. How exactly does it transpire that these delegates (yes, there will be some disloyal-to-the-candidate party hacks among them, but not really that many) will on some second or third or fourth ballot settle on the candidate they’ve both regularly trounced in the primaries and who epitomizes the veteran elected official RINOs their supporters despise? Is the “year of the outsider” in the GOP really going to produce a nominee who’s been in public office for 27 years, dating back to the Carter administration?

I don’t think so.

One of the most unusual things about this unusual presidential cycle is the disconnect, especially on the Republican side, between campaign money and candidate performance. I discussed this topic in connection with Donald Trump’s strange candidacy at New York.

[C]andidates other than front-runner Donald J. Trump have spent a lot more money on themselves and against him than he’s had to expend, enabling him to pose as the guy too rich (and too popular with small donors) to be vulnerable to “bribery.” This was exemplified by the failed effort by Marco Rubio and an assortment of conservative groups to take down Trump in Florida. Anti-Trump “independent” ads alone in the Sunshine State cost an estimated $35.5 million. Total spending by Trump and his supporters for the entire campaign nationwide is at $25.8 million.
Trump’s difference-maker financially, of course, has been his massive advantage in “earned media” (or what used to be called “free media,” because it’s provided by media coverage free of charge). MediaQuant, a firm that measures and values unpaid media coverage, estimates that Trump has harvested nearly $1.9 billion in earned media this cycle. That’s about twice as much as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush combined have received, and within shouting distance of being twice as much as the two Democratic candidates combined as well.
But general-election campaigns are a lot more expensive than primaries. So it’s not surprising that Trump has hedged on repeating his “no special-interest contributions” pledge beyond the Republican Convention in July, and CNN is reporting that he’s already planning a big fund-raising blitz for the general election.
At The American Prospect, Eliza Newlin Carney puts all this together and suggests that total campaign costs are about to become too high for Trump to perpetually surf earned media to victory:

So far, Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary political ride, fending off millions worth of hostile attacks, prevailing against opponents who out-organized and outspent him, and sparing himself the punishing grind of high-dollar fundraisers. He’s also gotten considerable political mileage out of his claim to be above the big money fray. It remains to be seen whether Trump can continue playing by his own rules, or whether he will be forced to get his hands dirty in the messy business of campaign financing–and answer for it to voters.

But there are two factors that undercut this possibility. For one thing, Trump could liquidate some of his assets (estimated independently as having a value of about $4.5 billion) and self-finance to a considerable extent. And for another, this long nominating contest season in both parties is shortening the general-election campaign and the time and cost of any “air war.” Additionally, earned media is much easier to come by in presidential general elections than any other mode of politics, sometimes dwarfing paid media even when there’s not a wildly entertaining and galvanizing figure like Donald Trump in the fray. So it might make sense for Trump to wait and see if he even needs to spend a lot of money.

If he doesn’t, that means the news media’s fascination with Trump is still paying him dividends.

Many Republican Establishment figures are excited if nervous about the possibility of denying Donald Trump and Ted Cruz their party’s presidential nomination via the first “contested convention” since 1976, and the first multi-ballot convention since 1952. But the two candidates are making it clear they cannot both be shut down, as I discussed today at New York:

There’s a big problem with such scenarios, however, and it transcends the unilateral threats Donald Trump is making about the disturbances and defections his followers might generate if he is denied the nomination. A more basic reality is that together Trump and Cruz are likely to command a solid majority of delegates going to Cleveland, even if neither of them has a majority on his own. And if they choose to deny any other candidates a shot at the nomination, they can almost certainly do so.
Their most direct means of control is via convention rules. And as Politico‘s Kyle Cheney reports today, the two camps are already talking about working together to make it a “two-man race” to the very end:

Advisers to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz say there’s no way they’ll allow John Kasich to even compete at a contested national convention — let alone prevail.
Trump and Cruz are betting that their dual dominance in the delegate hunt will permanently box out the Ohio governor, who has no mathematical path to the nomination and is openly pursuing a floor fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
And their aides say Kasich won’t even make it to the floor.
“There is virtually zero chance he can even be nominated,” Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican national committeeman who’s advising Cruz on his convention strategy, told POLITICO. “It’s a two-man race.”
Their confidence is rooted in the fact that Trump and Cruz are nearly certain to control the lion’s share of the 2,472 delegates participating in the July convention. Together, they’ve earned more than 1,000 delegate slots to Kasich’s 136. And those delegates will ultimately approve the rules that govern a contested convention.

One possible means for excluding Kasich is the famous 2012 rule, enacted to thwart a discordant Ron Paul faction in Tampa, that a candidate must have a majority of eight delegations in hand before her or his name can even be placed in nomination. That would take care not only of Kasich (barring some late-primary pyrotechnics) but any dark horse as well. But the more abiding reality is that a convention makes its own rules, and so long as Trump and Cruz control a majority and continue to work together to force a “two-man race,” they can do so.
That’s probably true even if there are a significant number of “false flag” delegates who don’t really support the candidate to whom they are bound on the first ballot. They are free to vote as they wish on procedural matters such as the rules. But it’s hard to imagine there will be enough of them to overcome the combined forces of loyal Trump and Cruz delegates. And for that matter, if you had to figure who will be most successful in “stealing” delegates prior to Cleveland, it will probably be Cruz with his well-organized campaign, not the inchoate forces of the anti-Cruz/anti-Trump Establishment.

So Establishment fantasies of nominating Kasich or Paul Ryan or anyone else other than Trump or Cruz may be as unlikely now as this whole cycle might have seemed a year ago.

As we all continue to mull the greater meaning of Donald J. Trump, it’s generally assumed he’s built a cult of personality for himself, and not any sustainable movement or point of view beyond a crude authoritarianism. But at least one left-of-center writer thinks otherwise. I discussed the topic at some length at New York, beginning with an observation about Thursday night’s subdued Republican candidate debate:

With the volume turned down, the emptiness and incoherence of Donald Trump’s approach to public-policy issues becomes especially clear. He’ll make good deals and will be lethally inclined toward America’s enemies (including, for the moment, global Islam, it seems). Even on the one topic where he seemed to have a new thought — supporting the deployment of ground troops to fight ISIS — no reason was given for the change in position, other than a sort of gut feeling it would be necessary to “destroy ISIS.”
Everyone understands that Trump is exploiting a rich and very real vein of public sentiment, centered in but not limited to white working-class folk who may have voted Republican in the past but never shared the economic and foreign-policy views of the business and movement-conservative elites who run the GOP. Some optimistically view this Trump constituency as an addition to the Republican coalition; I think it’s mostly elements of the existing coalition that are threatening to leave unless the party changes. Either way, does this all go away if Trump loses or gets bored and goes back to different modes of brand promotion?
You might think so, but a certain erudite if occasionally cranky polymath and thinker, New America’s Michael Lind, believes there’s something we can call Trumpism, and it’s the future of conservative politics. Here’s how Lind boils it down in a piece on Trump as “the perfect populist” at Politico:

It remains to be seen whether Trump can win the Republican nomination, much less the White House. But whatever becomes of his candidacy, it seems likely that his campaign will prove to be just one of many episodes in the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national populist movements, such as the National Front in France and the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain. Unlike Goldwater, who spearheaded an already-existing alliance consisting of National Review, Modern Age, and Young Americans for Freedom, Trump has followers but no supportive structure of policy experts and journalists. But it seems likely that some Republican experts and editors, seeking to appeal to his voters in the future, will promote a Trump-like national populist synthesis of middle-class social insurance plus immigration restriction and foreign policy realpolitik,through conventional policy papers and op-eds rather than blustering speeches and tweets.

Now, that’s a fascinating prospect, isn’t it? The entire conservative policy and messaging edifice, the product of hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and many years of development, employing God knows how many thinkers, researchers, gabbers, and writers, replaced by an infrastructure devoted to making Trumpism not just a brand or an epithet but a whole way of thinking about public life.
Where this would all come from is a mystery. The Trump campaign itself is a strange assortment of personal retainers, hired guns, and the occasional public figure reeking of brimstone after climbing aboard Trump’s bandwagon out of what appears to be sheer opportunism. When you look at a guy like Sam Clovis — the intellectually well-regarded Iowa “constitutional conservative” who abandoned Rick Perry’s sinking ship last summer and signed on with Trump as “senior policy adviser” — you see someone who’s probably winging it as much as the Donald himself. So the question abides: Does Trump represent anything larger than himself (not that he could imagine it!)? Is he the harbinger of some “national populist” movement that will kick conventional conservatism to the curb, or just (like many right-wing demagogues before him) the vehicle for the occasional rage that seizes people furious with change?
It’s hard to say…. If Trump is somehow elected president, the challenges of actual power may domesticate him and make him a real Republican. Without question, the prestige of the presidency and its vast patronage inside and outside government would stimulate the kind of interest in developing Trumpism that Michael Lind expects. If he wins the Republican nomination but then loses the general election, it’s far more likely the right will turn the whole Trump phenomenon into an object lesson about the consequences of irresponsibility and ideological laxity.
And if Trump can’t even make it to Cleveland and seize the nomination with all of the things working in his favor at present, he’ll become just another loser, and no more likely to become the founding father of a new ideology than Rick Santorum. So don’t hold your breath waiting for the development of Trumpism until and unless Trump takes the oath of office as president. But then we’d have more things to worry about than the future shape of center-right thinking, wouldn’t we?

Democrats need to work hard to make sure it does not come to that.

In all the talk about Trump battling the Republican Establishment, a major source of confusion is the failure to understand that there are actually two Republican Establishments that hate Donald Trump but can’t quite agree on a strategy to stop him. I wrote about this topic at New York earlier this week:

The day after Super Tuesday, Mitt Romney (as the immediate past nominee of a nongoverning party, he would have once been called the “titular head” of the GOP) laid out the Republican Establishment’s game plan for stopping Donald Trump.

If the other candidates can find some common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism. Given the current delegate selection process, that means that I’d vote for Marco Rubio in Florida and for John Kasich in Ohio and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state.

Everybody outside TrumpWorld was onboard, right? Wrong. Especially following the March 5 caucuses and primaries, when he solidified his second-place position in delegates, Ted Cruz and his backers made it clear they believe the most efficient method of stopping Trump is for Republicans to unite behind his own candidacy. It’s Marco Rubio’s “anti-Trump consolidation” theory adopted by another candidate now that Rubio is struggling to survive. And thus with most of the Republican Establishment digging under the sofa cushions for funds to help Rubio beat Trump in Florida, Team Cruz was up in the air in the Sunshine State running anti-Rubio ads.
Was this a rogue action by a candidate not exactly known in the Senate as a team player? Perhaps. But more fundamentally, the strategic rift in the anti-Trump coalition is the product of two very different Republican Establishments: that of self-conscious movement conservatives, who find a Cruz nomination either congenial or acceptable, and the non-movement-party Establishment, which is as hostile to Cruz as it is to Trump.
The conservative-movement Establishment can be found in organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and opinion vehicles like National Review magazine. Their basic mark of distinction is that they view the GOP as a vehicle for the promotion and implementation of conservative ideology and policy position rather than as an end in itself. They are virulently anti-Trump (as evidenced by National Review’s recent special issue attacking the mogul) for all the reasons most Republicans (and for that matter, Democrats) evince, but with the additional and decisive consideration that Trump has violated conservative orthodoxy on a host of issues from trade policy to “entitlement reform” to the Middle East. Members of this Establishment do not uniformly support Ted Cruz; some are fine with the equally conservative (if far less disruptive) Marco Rubio, and others have electability concerns about the Texan even if they like his issue positions and his combative attitude toward the Republican congressional leadership. But suffice it to say they are not horrified by the idea of a Cruz presidency, and many have concluded his nomination is an easier bet than some panicky Anybody But Trump movement that at best will produce the unpredictable nightmare of a contested convention even as Democrats (more than likely) unite behind their nominee. RedState’s Leon Wolf neatly expressed their point of view yesterday:

Maybe you preferred someone who is a better communicator than Cruz or who stood a better chance of beating Hillary in the general. Sorry, but for whatever reason, your fellow voters have ruled each of those candidates out, and Rubio’s collapse this weekend pretty much put that nail in the coffin. It’s now a choice between guaranteed loser Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who might actually win.

From the movement-conservative perspective, it’s not Cruz who’s going rogue but instead elements of the party Establishment (including the members of Congress who conspicuously hate Ted Cruz) that cannot accept that it has lost control of the GOP this year and is insisting on a contested convention as a way to reassert its control behind closed doors in Cleveland. Party Establishmentarians are often conservative ideologically, too, but are dedicated to pragmatic strategies and tactics at sharp odds with Cruz’s philosophy of systematic partisan confrontation and maximalist rhetoric. And they are highly allergic to risky general-election candidates.
But there’s a fresh crisis in the party Establishment after the March 8 contests in four states, wherein Trump won Michigan, Mississippi, and Hawaii, Cruz won Idaho, and Marco Rubio won — maybe, it hasn’t been totally resolved yet — one delegate in Hawaii and absolutely nothing else. And new polls of Florida are beginning to come in that don’t look promising for Rubio. Even as party Establishment and even some conservative-movement Establishment folk pound Trump with negative ads, there are signs of panic. Most shocking, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, normally the most reliable of party Establishment mouthpieces and a big-time neoconservative booster of Rubio’s foreign-policy positions, publicly called on the Floridian to drop out of the race and endorse Cruz in order to stop Trump.
We’ll soon see if the divisions between the two Republican Establishments will quickly be resolved by the surrender of party types like Rubin. Some may instead try to reanimate Rubin or switch horses to Kasich, who has a better chance than Rubio to win his own home state next week. Still others may make their peace with Trump, or resolve to spend the rest of the cycle focused on down-ballot races.

In any event, time’s running out for the anti-Trump coalition.

The 11th Republican candidates’ debate of the cycle was another gift to Democrats for its gutter tone and substantive emptiness. It was also remarkable from a strategic point of view since it showed a new anti-Trump cabal in action, and then at the end displayed its members promising to support Trump as the nominee. I wrote about the event’s significance at New York:

Rarely has a presidential candidates’ debate so closely reflected the overall state of the race as the 11th Republican gabfest held in Detroit tonight. After Super Tuesday, Marco Rubio called for emergency collective action by the remaining contenders to stop the “con man” Trump without adjudicating for the present which of them would win the prize. Mitt Romney confirmed the cabal and its everyone-take-their-best-shot strategy in a big speech today. It’s beginning to sink in that this strategy almost certainly depends on a “contested convention,” the first for Republicans in forty years.
The candidate most blessed by this development was John Kasich, who almost overnight has gone from being an annoying impediment to the consolidation of anti-Trump and anti-Cruz votes behind Marco Rubio to a valued collaborator who might knock off the Donald in winner-take-all Ohio. And tonight, as Rubio and Cruz (and the Fox moderators) focused the most extended fire of the entire campaign on Trump, Kasich was left alone to devote his entire debate performance to the recitation of his record and message to Michiganders — a state where he needs to do reasonably well on Tuesday as a springboard to Ohio on March 15.
As a starting point for the anti-Trump collective-action cabal, tonight’s debate was probably about as good as it gets. For long, long minutes Rubio beat up on the Donald as a con man and Cruz savaged him as a crypto-Democrat, the two lines of attack regularly reinforced by the moderators and converging in the impression that Trump’s a terrible gamble, even for the people who are most attracted to him. From long experience during this campaign, it would be foolish to assume the debate damaged Trump’s standing significantly. But if it didn’t, perhaps the man is indeed bulletproof. He did seem uncharacteristically flustered at times.
It’s unlikely Rubio — who for the second debate in a row got into long insult-laden cross-talk exchanges with Trump — or Cruz helped themselves that much. But again, in the collective-action scenario, they’re like crime bosses who’ve agreed to rub out a common opponent while recognizing that they will have their own reckoning down the line. Meanwhile, Kasich was either smart or lucky enough to ignore the carnage and speak for himself, though if he loses Ohio, he will be dumped from the convention cabal unceremoniously for failure to bring delegates to the table.
One very important moment occurred at the very end of the debate, when the candidates were asked if they’d reaffirm the “loyalty pledge” they all took late last summer, promising to support the ultimate Republican nominee. It was framed initially as a specific challenge to Rubio, who has been promoting the #NeverTrump meme and treating the mogul’s potential nomination as an unendurable violation of Republican principles. Indeed, Trump has noticed that and has openly suggested he might not feel so inclined to observe the loyalty pledge and forswear an independent candidacy if the other candidates drop their own pledges. But all the candidates backed away from loyalty-pledge brinkmanship tonight and promised the ultimate collective action to prevent the horror of another Democratic president. For Rubio, “never” apparently doesn’t mean what it says.
Trump may have missed a strategic opportunity to make his own renewal of the loyalty-pledge contingent on not having the nomination “stolen” from him by some Establishment skullduggery in Cleveland. But as the front-runner — for now — he may have figured he could afford to be magnanimous.

He’s a “con man,” conventional Republicans are saying of Trump.. But they are also making it clear he is their con man.

At some point between last week’s Republican presidential candidate debate and the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, something profound and not very-well-understood happened to the GOP contest: Marco Rubio replaced Donald Trump as the rebel breaking all the rules. I wrote about this today at New York:

After yesterday’s Super Tuesday contests confirmed the pecking order of Republican presidential candidates, the third-place finisher, Marco Rubio, continued his recent pattern of threats to do everything within his power to stop first-place finisher Donald Trump. Having already crossed the Rubicon (Rubio-con?) by associating himself with the meme #NeverTrump, thereby abrogating his “loyalty pledge” to support the Republican nominee, Rubio’s posturing as a GOP “unity candidate” is more bizarre than ever. Yet he shows no signs of changing course and is now hinting at some sort of monstrous convention cabal to stop Trump if voters refuse to do so. If he fails, then presumably he will take a walk or support an independent or third-party bid, unless the word never has changed its meaning.
Such is the passion for this freshman senator in Republican Establishment and mainstream-media circles that it is taking a long time for the commentariat to realize it’s Rubio, not Trump, who is at present undertaking a hostile takeover bid for control of the GOP. David Graham of The Atlantic registered the surreal nature of Rubio’s Super Tuesday speech in Miami last night:

[W]hen Rubio came out to speak, early in the night, he once again struck the same triumphant pose he has employed time and again, as his campaign finished second or third in contest after contest. “When I am president of the United States, we will not just save the American dream, we will expand it to more people than ever!” he said.
The most telling moment in his speech, however, came a few moments later. “Five days ago, we began to explain to the American people that Donald Trump is a con artist,” Rubio said, alluding to the onslaught of opposition research, insults, and barnyard jokes he has directed at the GOP frontrunner, starting with Thursday’s debate. Why did that take so long, though? It may have been too late to save the Republican Party from Trump, and if it wasn’t, it may have been too late to save Rubio. His case as the Trump alternative depends not on beating Trump outright, but on depriving him of an outright victory with delegates ahead of the Republican convention, then wresting the nomination from him there.

One of the subthemes of this odd presidential cycle has been the oversold idea that party elites can impose their will on sheeplike primary voters whenever they choose. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Rubio began benefiting from a cascade of elected-official endorsements, and many observers concluded that the party was “deciding” on him as its choice. But unless voters rather than elites quickly consolidate behind a non-Trump candidate, all this talk of fighting the winner of many primaries up to and including the convention could expose the ugly reality that the Establishment is trying to revoke the franchise because they don’t like the results….
If Rubio and his friends decide that either bossing a convention to the “right” result or bailing (as the #NeverTrump meme clearly threatens) on the GOP altogether are where their current efforts are heading, then the rest of us should stop treating Trump as the guy who is elevating his ego and ambition above his party’s prospects for ultimate victory. In what may be turning into a fight between elites and voters, in November the voters will have the final word.

As we all wonder exactly how far Donald Trump will go to offend Establishment Republicans, and how far Establishment Republicans will go to stop him, a disreputable voice from the past is suddenly heard. I wrote about it this week at New York:

Twenty-five years before Donald Trump’s hostile-takeover bid for the Republican Party, an outlandish figure in Louisiana exploited racial tensions, hard economic times, and the estrangement of blue-collar whites to throw a huge scare into the political and civic leadership of his state and his country. In the first round of Louisiana’s 1991 all-parties “jungle primary,” former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke trounced the chosen gubernatorial candidate of his Republican Party and an incumbent governor who had recently joined the GOP. At one point he seemed about to win a runoff against the ethically tarnished three-term former governor Ed Edwards. It was being called “the Race From Hell.”
Louisiana’s business community, fearful of an economic boycott and global opprobrium, decided to say “no” to Duke. At the same time, opposition researchers figured out that while white Louisianans were willing to overlook the white sheets in the candidate’s closet, they weren’t so forgiving when confronted with photos showing him in full Nazi regalia while he was a grad student at LSU (an image Edwards shrewdly brought up during a debate, saying he had been working on welfare reform “back when you were still goose-stepping around Baton Rouge”). And finally, the national Republican Party, led by President George H. W. Bush, decided to disavow Duke, who lost decisively in the runoff thanks to heavy minority voting, a massive Edwards financial advantage, and a broad coalition that found its emblem in that greatest of all bumper-sticker slogans: VOTE FOR THE CROOK. IT’S IMPORTANT.
So when Duke came out of the woodwork this week (after doing some federal prison time, around the same time Ed Edwards did, in fact) to encourage what’s left of his fan-base to support Trump, he was just another white supremacist excited by Trump’s willingness to “tell it like it is” when it comes to the dusky threat of immigration. At his very worst, Trump is not much like Duke at his very best. But Duke’s example should serve as a reminder to Trump that there are limits to what the people running and financing his party will endure. Maybe they’ll finally find Trump’s Achilles heel, just as their predecessors finally found Duke’s.

Or maybe they’ll instead swallow their concerns and come to terms with Trump just as Chris Christie did today.

I was reading a BuzzFeed post by Ben Smith on how Hillary Clinton just had to run a nasty general election campaign because she had nothing positive to build on when I just snapped at the idiocy of it all. I made an effort to contextualize “negative campaigning” at New York:

Smith is suggesting that going negative (or “comparative”) is the ugly person’s ugly alternative to the positive, inspiring kind of campaign Americans want and deserve.
But this year, at least, campaigning on the unicorns you will ride to Happyland on the cheers of millions of previously unheard Americans is, arguably, offering an illusion, if not a lie. That is indeed what Hillary Clinton keeps saying about Bernie Sanders’s message that he is uniquely capable of overcoming gridlock by conjuring up a mass movement that we’ve never seen before. Whether you agree with Clinton on that or you don’t, there is far less doubt about what Republicans will be able to accomplish if they win the White House while hanging on to control of Congress (and if the former happens, the odds of the latter are very high). A single executive order and a single (if big and very fat) budget-reconciliation bill could wipe out much of the Obama legacy in a matter of weeks. And that’s before you even get to executive-branch and judicial appointments — including perhaps multiple SCOTUS nominations — and the GOP’s own “positive” agenda of high-end tax cuts, tight money, “deregulated” fossil-fuel use, harassment of abortion and contraception providers, restricted voting rights, and (depending on the nominee) global unilateralism and adventurism.
This year’s Republican nomination contest is creating a vast storehouse of ripe targets for Democrats in a general election. Should they reject it all because it’s “negative?”…. I don’t think so.
Truth is, Bernie Sanders is just as likely as Hillary Clinton to “go negative” in a general election, and with good reason: His entire agenda depends on arousing so much popular anger at conservative perfidy that a “political revolution” — currently a complete nonstarter — becomes feasible. Even if Team Sanders has little but disdain for “centrism,” it will realize that even in this era of polarization, there are enough swing voters out there to justify a major effort to make sure Republicans can’t “occupy the center” themselves. And that means painting a lurid picture of what the country will look like if President Trump or Rubio or Cruz is allowed to stride into the White House at the head of an angry mob of activists who are infuriated they haven’t been allowed to turn the policy clock back to 1933.
No matter how much both parties talk about Barack Obama this year, he won’t be on the ballot in November and thus this cannot entirely be a referendum on his tenure in office. That makes it a “comparative” election almost by definition. If your opponent looks like a ravening wolf at the door, saying so early and often might be the best way in the current environment to make yourself look pretty.

As the saying goes, it has the added advantage of being true.

Last week I offered some advice to Democrats based on what I perceived to be a weakness exhibited by Sen. Bernie Sanders. This week I’ll do the same with a mistake by the campaign of Hillary Clinton, as I explained at New York:

Those who read this brief “campaign news” story from the New York Times‘ Jason Horowitz early Thursday morning may have missed its significance:

Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager, sat at the head of a conference table in the New York office of Clinton donor and Wall Street investor Marc Lasry, according to accounts from people in the room. Joining them for the state-of-the-race conversation over coffee were members of the campaign’s finance steering committee, including Maureen White, the former Democratic National Committee finance chairwoman, Alan Patricof, Michael Kempner, Robert Zimmerman, Betsy Cohen, Jay Snyder and others.
Mr. Mook told the donors that the outcome in Nevada, a state he ran for Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 campaign, was hard to predict and that, depending on turnout, Mrs. Clinton could win by a lot or win or lose by a tiny margin, according to several donors who requested anonymity to discuss the private meeting. But Mr. Mook stressed that the map leaned in Mrs. Clinton’s favor as the race moved to South Carolina, where he was confident she would win, and that she would do well on March 1, when more states voted.

I’m guessing the Times’ ruthless editors took out “Sadly missing the irony” at the beginning of the next sentence:

The collected fundraisers, who for years have bundled checks for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, listened approvingly as Ms. White, who seemed especially frustrated, expressed bewilderment that the campaign’s mobilization of grassroots support had been eclipsed in the news media by Bernie Sanders’s criticism of Mrs. Clinton as the establishment candidate representing big money …
Donors also voiced some frustration with the lack of media scrutiny of Mr. Sanders, who they said was essentially getting a pass. They pressed Mr. Mook to demonstrate that the Vermont senator’s policy proposals were entirely implausible promises and that his responses to essentially all substantive questions drew on excerpts of his stump speech and rants about the “millionaires and billionaires.”

And here’s the kicker:

One donor also asked Mr. Mook to go after the youth vote. With a straight face, attendees said, the operative took the suggestion under advisement.

Yuk Yuk. Yeah, wish we had thought of that.
Now, anyone who has ever worked for an organization that depends significantly on the largesse of rich and self-important people is familiar with the kind of “input” briefing the Clinton campaign conducted here. It’s mostly a courtesy, and, as in this case, it’s mainly an opportunity for donors to bitch and moan and kvetch and play the amateur political consultant, all the while reminding the unfortunate staffers “briefing” them that they help pay the bills. I’m sure their “advice” to Mook — including the brilliant suggestion that Clinton go after the youth vote — went in one of Mook’s ears and out the other, if indeed he was listening instead of taking peeks at his cell phone. The real problem that should have been anticipated — along with the advisability of meeting in a union hall or the back room of a chain restaurant instead of in a donor’s office on Wall Street — is that some of the donors involved would of course run straight to the Times with the story in order to share with the world their important role in Team Clinton. Robby Mook left Nevada at a critical moment to come brief me, the leak advertised. Suddenly a boring and probably meaningless meeting turned into big oppo fodder for the Bernie Sanders campaign.
And Sanders’s people took the cue. Here’s an excerpt from a Facebook post by the campaign:

Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie 2016 said, “One of the biggest differences between our campaigns is that Bernie’s campaign does not take its marching orders from Wall Street and big money donors. It’s shameful that the Clinton campaign is parroting attacks at Sen. Sanders that The New York Times has documented come right from her big money backers. Now we are beginning to get a glimpse into what goes on in all those closed door meetings with Wall Street interests.”

I doubt that’s the case, but it’s not like the Clinton campaign can come out and say, This was a dog-and-pony show with no impact on our campaign. So they’ve fed one of the central talking points of the entire Sanders campaign and can only hope it’s a one-day story that everybody forgets.

That may be true, but it’s a bet no campaign can afford to lose. Just ask Bruce Braley, a 2014 Senate candidate from Iowa who never recovered from a video posted by a friend that showed him asking Texas trial lawyers to help him keep “Iowa farmer” Chuck Grassley from chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Optics matter.