Today in Campaign 2016
Did one of your former colleagues compare you to the Prince of Darkness and tell the world that you are the least agreeable “son of a bitch” that they’d ever had the misfortune of working with? No? Then you had a better day than Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was put on blast in a speech former House speaker John Boehner gave to college students that was equal parts fire and brimstone.
“Lucifer in the flesh,” Boehner told an audience at Stanford University last night, according to the Stanford Daily. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
In a week when we thought nothing could get more bizarre than vice presidential would-be Carly Fiorina bursting into song, today was really a feat of political imagination. Here’s a quick rundown of the biggest news from the campaign trail today:
- After Boehner’s “Lucifer in the flesh” comments (sidenote: We’re going to start giving this review about normal stuff and people: “How was brunch?” “It was Lucifer in the flesh. A miserable son of a bitch.”) the Texas senator distanced himself from the former House speaker, telling reporters in a news conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that he had only met Boehner a handful of times. “He allowed his inner Trump to come out,” Cruz added.
- Speak of the Devil and he doth appear: Donald Trump lucked out with today’s Luciferian news cycle, and picked up the endorsement of House transportation committee chair Bill Shuster to boot. Throw in the resigned endorsement of former Mitt Romney aide Ron Kaufman - who compared Trump to Ronald Reagan - and he’s got himself a party.
- While Trump is making nice with members of Congress and the Republican establishment, it seems like his two opponents for the Republican nomination can’t even go 24 hours without betraying one another. . A short few days after a strategic alignment between Cruz and Ohio governor John Kasich implied that the two would work together to deny Trump the nomination, and Cruz is already backing down from the deal. “I recognize that the media is all eager to talk about an alliance,” Cruz said in the same press conference. “There is no alliance.”
- Cut to John Weaver, a senior adviser to Kasich, tweeting this:
I can't stand liars.
— John Weaver (@JWGOP) April 28, 2016
- What could that be about?
- As for the Democrats, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton unveiled a literal “Woman Card” for her supporters, piggybacking on remarks made by Trump that she has characterized as sexist. (The cards are modeled after New York City’s MetroCards, but hopefully swipe easier.)
- Meanwhile, with his hopes of winning the Democratic nomination fading, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is hoping to make his mark on the Democratic party in another way - by reshaping the nomination process to allow non-Democrats to have their say.
That’s it for news from the campaign trail - tune in tomorrow for more up-to-the-second updates from the campaign.
White powder found at Trump Tower
White powder has been found in the mail room at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, according to New York’s ABC 7, citing a Trump campaign source.
The powder, discovered at roughly 8:15 pm in the fifth-floor mailroom of the mixed-use skyscraper, which houses the campaign headquarters of the Donald Trump campaign, as well as the headquarters of the Trump Organization and Trump’s penthouse residence.
The affected floor has been evacuated, and police, fire and emergency services are on the scene.
A movie trailer about the unlikely film depicting the first date between Barack Obama and his wife Michelle has dropped.
The film, Southside with You, is a romantic dramedy and focuses on the couple’s first date in 1989, which featured a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, a viewing of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and their first kiss outside an ice cream parlor. The film premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and has received positive reviews.
The film is scheduled to be released on August 26.
Cruz mailer: If Trump wins Indiana, nomination could be 'all but determined'
Gloom and doom is the attitude of the day over at the newly minted Cruz/Fiorina campaign headquarters, as the Texas senator’s campaign sends out a mailer to supporters warning them that if he loses the Indiana primary on May 3, billionaire frontrunner Donald Trump’s march to the Republican presidential nomination could be “all but determined.”
“In just five days, Hoosiers will cast their votes to determine which candidate will capture their 57 delegates. This is the single, biggest, most important day for our campaign so far,” Cruz writes. “Carly and I are barnstorming Indiana to capture every last vote – as we fight to win the GOP nomination. I can’t emphasize enough how important the vote in Indiana is going to be, and frankly, it could be the deciding factor. Friend, let me be blunt: I can’t win Indiana – and this nomination – if you don’t step forward right now.”
Cruz tells voters that “Indiana is absolutely pivotal,” and that “if Trump wins all the delegates in Indiana, his nomination could be all but determined.”
Perennial presidential candidate and former consumer advocate Ralph Nader told CNN today that Vermont senator Bernie Sanders should not drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, in part because Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton could be indicted.
"Why should Bernie Sanders drop out?" -- Ralph Nader in an interview with @CarolCNN https://t.co/Hp7ytDHt0H
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) April 28, 2016
“Why why should Bernie Sanders drop out?” Nader, a former Green party nominee, asked CNN Newsroom. “There could be a scandal with Hillary Clinton. Those transcripts and closed door meetings with the big bankers and other corporations could be released.”
Asked what he would do in Sanders’ position, Nader dodged.
“Well, I would never have run in the Democratic Party, so that’s a question I cannot answer,” Nader said. “[Sanders] ran in the Democratic party and he’s doing very, very well. In fact, if independent voters could vote in those primaries this last Tuesday, he would have won them all.”
Following the passage of the so-called “bathroom law” in North Carolina and an anti-LGBT religious liberty law in Mississippi, similar laws have percolated throughout the country.
It’s the largest legal push against LGBT rights in memory, according to Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. She told the Guardian that in 2016 more than 150 such bills have been proposed across the nation, many in the south. “It’s politically driven,” she said. “Politicians are preying on people’s fears of the unfamiliar.”
On Wednesday, Tennessee governor Bill Haslam signed a bill into law that moves the argument in a new direction: it allows therapists and counselors to reject certain clients if the therapy goes against the practitioner’s “sincerely held principles”. It’s being widely interpreted as a loophole allowing therapists to reject gay, lesbian, transgender and other clients.
Haslam has since issued a written statement saying that’s a misinterpretation. “The substance of this bill doesn’t address a group, issue or belief system,” he wrote. “I believe it is reasonable to allow these professionals to determine if and when an individual would be better served by another counselor better suited to meet his or her needs.”
An unbound Republican delegate in Pennsylvania who had previously endorsed John Kasich appears to have resigned himself to the fact that billionaire Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee - and says he would never vote for Texas senator Ted Cruz.
“I would never vote for Ted Cruz,” former New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg told a local ABC affiliate in Manchester, New Hampshire. “I’d write in Paul Ryan or someone before I’d vote for Ted Cruz.”
“I presume Donald Trump is going to be the nominee,” Gregg, a two-term senator, said, before calling Cruz “a person of little character. He’s a demagogue’s demagogue and he shouldn’t be trusted with the responsibilities of the office.”
“I presume I’d vote for the Republican nominee if it is Trump, but Cruz should be nowhere near the presidency.”
John Kasich told spectators at an Oregon town hall event that Donald Trump’s hopes of swaying unbound delegates to support his bid for the Republican nomination are unfounded, and that if he wants to become the nominee, “he better get exactly what he needs.”
“When you have a 73% negative rating among married women and you think you are going to the convention, and you lose 15 straight polls to Hillary Clinton, and you get crushed in the electoral college, and we know that if you are the nominee, you’re going to lose the senate, the supreme court, the courthouse and the state house...” Kasich told the crowd, “I don’t think so.”
Trump has the support of 953 bound delegates and 41 unbound delegates, putting him at 994 total delegates, within striking distance of the 1,237 needed to clinch the Republican nomination. Neither Kasich nor fellow Republican hopeful Ted Cruz can feasibly acquire the necessary number of delegates to reach that threshold before the party’s convention in July.
An organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism has issued a statement urging billionaire Republican frontrunner Donald Trump to reconsider the use of “America First” as his “ill-advised” campaign slogan to describe his foreign policy doctrine.
“The most noteworthy leader of the ‘America First Committee’ was Charles Lindbergh, who sympathized with the Nazis and whose rhetoric was characterized by anti-Semitism and offensive stereotypes, including assertions that Jews posed a threat to the US because of their influence in motion pictures, radio, the press, and the government,” wrote the Anti-Defamation League in in a statement.
“The undercurrents of anti-Semitism and bigotry that characterized the America First movement – including the assumption that Jews who opposed the movement had their own agenda and were not acting in America’s best interest – is fortunately not a major concern today,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.
“However, for many Americans, the term ‘America First’ will always be associated with and tainted by this history. In a political season that already has prompted a national conversation about civility and tolerance, choosing a call to action historically associated with incivility and intolerance seems ill-advised.”
At an event in Oregon, Ohio governor and Republican candidate for president John Kasich told supporters that after Donald Trump’s electoral wipeout earlier this week, he had considered dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination.
“I thought about, ‘Should I keep going? Should I carry on? What is this all about?’” Kasich said. But in the end, it came down to a conversation with his wife.
“I was down home yesterday for a short time, and things were a little bit crazy... and I saw my wife carrying some clothes from the upstairs bedroom down into the closet in the basement and I said, ‘here, lemme grab some of that,” Kasich said.
“And I said, ‘what do you think, sweetie? I’m inclined to keep going.’ She looked at me, she said - just simple words because she’s not a politician - she said, ‘The people need a choice, and if you don’t give ‘em a choice, who will?’”
“And so I’ve decided to keep going,” he concluded, to loud applause.
Updated
In an interview with Politico, a former high-ranking member of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign has compared billionaire Republican frontrunner Donald Trump to party icon Ronald Reagan, and said that Trump will win the nomination.
“You could sense a more growing sense of reality that, in fact, Trump is going to be the nominee,” said Ron Kaufman, a former advisor to Romney and one of the main engineers of his presidential campaign in 2012. “He was a populist more than a conservative,” Kaufman said of Reagan. “He was a western populist; Trump is an eastern populist.”
Romney returned to the national stage years after his loss with a blistering indictment of Trump, dubbing the frontrunner “a phony” and “a fraud” in an address in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Poll: Republican party's favorability drops to lowest point since 1992
A survey of 2,008 American adults conducted by the Pew Research Center has found that the public’s negative opinion of the Republican party has spiked to levels not seen in nearly a quarter-century.
Only 33% of the American public has a favorable view of the Republican party, while nearly two-thirds - 62% - say that they have an unfavorable view of the party. It’s an increase in negative views of the party from last October, when a still-not-great 58% told Pew Research Center that they viewed the Republican party unfavorably.
The frustration with the direction of the party has even passed on to card-carrying members of the party, only 68% of whom view the Republican party positively. By comparison, the Democratic party is viewed positively by 88% of its members. Just 28% of independents view the Republican party favorably.
Donald Trump’s big foreign policy speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC yesterday has received a cold reception from the editorial board of the New York Times, which derided the address as failing to exhibit “much grasp of the complexity of the world, understanding of the balance or exercise of power, or even a careful reading of history.”
In an editorial titled Donald Trump’s Strange Worldview, the Grey Lady’s editorial board summed up a potential “Trump Doctrine” as: “When one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when one’s experience is limited to real estate deals, everything looks like a lease negotiation.”
This unilateral approach makes for good television, but this is the real world, in which other nations have agendas, too. Mr. Trump says he is ‘going to be working very closely with our allies in the Muslim world, all of which are at risk from radical Islamic violence.’ But how will he gain cooperation for his ‘unpredictable’ war on the Islamic State while enforcing a ‘pause’ that prevents Muslims from entering this country, and forcing those living here to register themselves?
How does one ‘apply leverage on China necessary to rein in North Korea,’ while slapping a trade-killing tariff on Chinese imports? It’s correct that many of our NATO allies aren’t paying their agreed-upon share of its costs - but what happens to the United States’ overseas bases if we ‘walk?’
The editorial concludes that Trump has failed to demonstrate “any willingness to learn or to correct his past errors. For someone who claims he is ready to lead the free world, that is inexcusable.”
Texas senator Ted Cruz fired back at former House speaker John Boehner for comments comparing the Republican presidential hopeful to “Lucifer” after his announcement of Carly Fiorina as his running mate.
Cruz said he was surprised and claims to have never worked with the speaker. Boehner also said that although he gets along “with almost everyone ... I have never worked with a more miserable son-of-a-bitch in my life.”
Caitlyn Jenner has put billionaire Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s promise to allow transgender people to use whichever bathroom they feel most comfortable in at Trump Tower to the test. The result: no problem.
In a Facebook video posted this morning, the Olympic gold medalist and reality television star used the women’s room at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City without complications.
Transgender Americans received an unlikely endorsement from Trump when he told NBC’s Today show that transgender people should be allowed to choose the bathroom they use, and promised Jenner that she could use a restroom of her choosing at Trump Tower any time she wanted.
Hillary Clinton is fundraising off of Donald Trump’s comments regarding her gender by giving donors physical “Woman Cards” - which more-than-vaguely resemble New York City’s MetroCard.
“Woman Cards” swipe a lot easier than MetroCards, in our experience.
Senator Ted Cruz has little patience for campaign pranks:
A young man asked @SenTedCruz to sign a copy of the Communist Manifesto as a joke. Here's what Cruz wrote. pic.twitter.com/8VW5H2XHOb
— Ben Gittleson (@bgittleson) April 28, 2016
Bernie Sanders is scheduled to hold a campaign event in Springfield, Oregon, this afternoon - here’s the livestream:
Updated
With a poll showing nearly half of Republican female voters don’t plan to support Donald Trump, his nomination looks disastrous for a party trying to reinvent itself, writes the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino:
For the Republican women who have spent the past few years working to broaden the appeal of the Grand Old Party, Donald Trump arrived on the scene like a wrecking ball, tearing down the foundations they had laid over the past few years to try to create a more diverse and open party.
With his penchant for bluster and disdain for political correctness, there are few slices of the American electorate the billionaire businessman has yet to offend. But one group in particular poses a real problem for Trump, should he become the nominee, and for the party, should it win the presidency and keep control of Congress in November – and that group happens to make up 51% of the population.
“General election women voters think he’s abhorrent,” said Katie Packer, the chairwoman of Our Principles PAC, which opposes Trump. “They think he’s a sexist. They think he doesn’t respect women, and doesn’t really view women in any real way beyond their physical appearance.
“If the party leadership embraces Donald Trump as the general election nominee than I think it will damage our party for a generation.”
Donald Trump may have just coined a new word: “Effectuate.”
The importance of defeating Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, is paramount, Trump tells the audience in Indiana, “so we can really effectuate all of the things and get our country really going again.”
UPDATE: We stand humbled.
Updated
“I would never use the word ‘bribe.’ Some people would say bribes the delegates - I would never say a thing like that,” Trump says of opponent Ted Cruz’s relationship with potential convention delegates. Still, there’s a risk that in the second and third ballots, delegates who have been “bribed” into supporting Cruz. “Why? Because they like to have good meals - which I’m not doing.”
But, he cautions the audience, “It doesn’t mean anything if we win on the first.”
Trump: 'I will be so much better to women than Hillary Clinton'
“Nobody respects women more than Donald Trump,” says Trump, who two nights ago said that Hillary Clinton’s only asset as a candidate is her “woman’s card.”
I will be so much better to women than Hillary Clinton. So much better. On health care issues. And on the protection of our country... we are in an evil world right now... and I’m going to protect our country.
Trump: if I'm president, Apple will make product in US
Trump has been boasting about how as president he would return manufacturing to the United States:
We’re gonna have a time, if I win, where Apple is going to make its product in the United States.
Is that a threat, or a promise? Trump has repeatedly called for taxes on companies, such as once-Indiana-local Carrier, that move their manufacturing centers overseas.
Trump says he did not want to take too much time off after his quintuple victories of this Tuesday because he knew “Lyin’ Ted” was at work in Indiana:
I didn’t want to take too much time because I know you’ve got him back here lyin’ like hell, so I said better get back here.
Gosh they hate him, don’t they? Representative Peter King says the Cruz-Lucifer comparison drawn Wednesday by former House speaker John Boehner is an insult – to Lucifer:
.@RepPeterKing : @tedcruz gives Lucifer a bad name: https://t.co/qc50OgRZn6 pic.twitter.com/C4L7ceQC1B
— POLITICO (@politico) April 28, 2016
The Guardian’s Ben Jacobs is conducting an informal online poll about whether the Labour Party or the Grand Old Party is nearer to absolute collapse.
You have to vote to find out what the crowd thinks. We will remark only that it’s not even close:
Which political party is closer to the point of absolute collapse today?
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) April 28, 2016
Trump fills world leaders with fear: 'It's gone from funny to really scary'
Dangerous, foolish, irrational, scary, terrifying, irresponsible, a clown, a disaster. These are just some of the words used to describe the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency by politicians, diplomats and analysts around the world, write the Guardian’s David Smith and Julian Borger:
As the businessman gave his first major policy address since becoming frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday, Guardian correspondents in Washington and around the globe asked the international community whether it was prepared for the swaggering billionaire to occupy the White House.
Many said they still cannot believe the nation that elected its first black president just eight years ago will now rush to embrace a man who has offended Mexicans, Muslims and others. The possibility that Trump might actually win fills great swaths of the planet with dread – with the apparent and notable exception of Vladimir Putin’s Russia – with concerns over everything from trade to the nuclear trigger.
While Trump was delivering his speech in Washington, outlining a doctrine of naked self-interest that would “shake the rust off America’s foreign policy”, the heads of all the major UN agencies gathered in Vienna, Austria, for a strategy session with secretary general Ban Ki-moon, now in his last eight months in office.
Read the full piece here.
Revealed: inside the tug-of-war to run Donald Trump's California campaign
The story behind the Republican frontrunner’s California operation sheds new light on the internal power struggle that has rocked the campaign in recent weeks, writes Guardian west coast bureau chief Paul Lewis:
Tim Clark was asked if he was interested in running Donald Trump’s campaign in California earlier this month. “Interested?” he recalls telling an emissary for the Republican frontrunner. “You bet I’m interested. I’m about to fall out of my chair.”
Clark could have been forgiven for assuming the job of Trump’s state director in California – the most delegate-rich primary contest, and the one likely to determine the outcome of the 2016 Republican race – would involve being thrust into the billionaire’s inner circle.
Yet more than two weeks into the role, Clark has still not met with Trump or even spoken with him on the phone. “I haven’t talked to him,” he conceded, when pressed over the extent of his communications with Trump. “There’s been, you know, email traffic and things like that.”
The fact Trump has yet to talk to the strategist in command of the all-important California primary contest may say more about the frontrunner’s centralized presidential campaign than it does about Clark.
On the other hand, it turns out Clark was not an uncontroversial pick.
Stuart Jolly, who until recently was Trump’s national field director, said he considered Clark for the role but decided he was not qualified enough.
“I had already ruled him out,” he said.
Read the full piece here:
Here’s “the next president of the United States, Mr Donald J Trump,” somebody says over the PA. Indeed he materializes. Live video feed is in the previous block.
Trump is talking about Bobby Knight who has yet to appear. Trump says Knight, a “tough” “winner”, called him out of the blue and told him if he ever ran for president he had Knight’s support.
Here’s Knight in a legendary moment from 1985:
Updated
A live stream of Donald Trump’s imminent Bobby Knight-inflected rally in Evansville is here:
Trump mocks Cruz-Fiorina partnership – video
On Wednesday, Donald Trump questioned why Ted Cruz would announce a running mate when he is supposedly ‘mathematically eliminated’ from the presidential race. Trump was speaking at a rally in Indianapolis after Cruz announced earlier in the day that former technology executive Carly Fiorina was his pick for vice-president
“Picking a running mate when he has almost no chance of becoming the Republican party nominee is just the sort of desperate move I’ve come to expect from Ted Cruz,” says Guardian comment writer Cindy Casares – “but that’s another column. Today I want to focus on Carly Fiorina and that creepy song she sang to Cruz’s daughters on live television.
You want to talk about playing the woman card? If Fiorina were a man, we’d all be calling for To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen just about now, because that song was the stuff of little girls’ nightmares.
Read the full piece by clicking through, and judge for yourself below:
The Cruz-Fiorina – ticket? experiment? – is already out with merch. Get ’em while they last! (While supplies last, we mean, of course.)
Get your Cruz-Fiorina gear today! https://t.co/boEvqMy9YO pic.twitter.com/64j4KVRUq6
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 28, 2016
From the comments / our first comment!
We apologize for not having had the comments section activated earlier. We just dropped down to take the measure of the conversation and discovered there was no conversation. But we’re open for business now – and thanks to Ross Perot for bravely going first:
Updated
Next up, rally-wise, is Donald Trump in Evansville, Indiana. He’ll be joined by state hero Bobby Knight, a notoriously hot-tempered but effective former college basketball coach. We’ll have a live video feed for you shortly.
Bobby Knight is the guy who once said the following of handling stress: "I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.''
— Sabrina Siddiqui (@SabrinaSiddiqui) April 27, 2016
Heading to rally with Bobby now! See you soon!pic.twitter.com/dWSSOEctZn
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 28, 2016
The Cruz-Fiorina event in Fort Wayne is up and running. Here’s that video feed again:
Cruz says Boehner let slip 'inner Trump'
CNN’s Teddy Schleifer captures Cruz’s lengthier response to Boehner’s “Lucifer” insult:
CRUZ: "If I have said 50 words in my life to John Boehner, I'd be surprised."
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) April 28, 2016
Cruz just blasting the former speaker of the House:
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) April 28, 2016
"What Boehner is angry with is the American people holding him accountable."
Cruz denies alliance with Kasich
Earlier this week, the Ted Cruz and John Kasich campaigns released simultaneous statements describing coordinated efforts in the upcoming states of Indiana, Oregon and New Mexico. The deal was, supposedly, that Kasich would stay away from Indiana while Cruz stayed away from the other two, allowing a sole candidate to go head-to-head with Trump.
Neither candidate publicly made a statement about the alliance, which some Indiana voters have been reported as finding too cute by half. But Kasich undercut the supposed alliance a bit by saying that if people in Indiana want to vote for him, they should.
And now Cruz flatly denies there was ever an alliance, reports CNN:
Cruz: "John Kasich made the decision, in his own political self-interest, to withdraw from Indiana."
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) April 28, 2016
Cruz did not respond to a question just now about whether he was similarly "pulling out" of Oregon & New Mexico. https://t.co/VoEYg5aihG
— Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) April 28, 2016
At which Kasich’s chief strategist uses the L word:
I can't stand liars.
— John Weaver (@JWGOP) April 28, 2016
For what it’s worth, Kasich is campaigning today in Oregon, which will divide its 28 delegates proportionally on 17 May, while Cruz has a whole week of Indiana events planned.
Updated
Obama: GOP candidates peddling economic 'fantasy'
Barack Obama has accused the Republican presidential candidates of defying logic and peddling “fantasy” in telling voters they can cut taxes and government regulations, balance the budget and produce economic growth.
“If you look at the platforms, the economic platforms of the current Republican candidates for president, they don’t simply defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy,” Obama said, in an extensive and at times surprisingly frank reflection on his economic legacy in an interview with the New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.
The president admits some economic missteps in the interview, including a failure to initiate a significant infrastructure spending project and to sufficiently boost wages. While the economy has grown during the Obama presidency and unemployment has been cut in half, a near-record number of Americans have dropped out of the workforce and real median incomes have fallen, while wealth and income inequality have grown.
In other words, the economy is working for some but not working for others. Obama admits as much in the interview:
I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we’d be growing a percentage or two faster each year ... We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did. And those things keep me up at night sometimes.
The president’s main contention, however – made with an insistence that he feels no personal frustration about the matter – is that the political discourse has left the public with an inaccurately dim view of his stewardship of the economy, which when he took office was suffering from the housing meltdown, growing unemployment, a credit crisis inside the country’s biggest banks and the looming potential failure of giant insurance companies.
Culprits for the erosion of this discourse, in the president’s view, include the Republican party, which has incessantly repeated that the economic recovery since 2008 has been too slow, while stubbornly refusing to take part in any plan out of the White House to speed the recovery, especially any plan that includes tax hikes. Blame is shared by the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, in the view of the president, who dismissed the GOP campaign-trail economic platforms as implausible.
“Slashing taxes particularly for those at the very top, dismantling regulatory regimes that protect our air and our environment and then projecting that this is going to lead to 5% or 7% growth, and claiming that they’ll do all this while balancing the budget,” Obama said. “Nobody would even, with the most rudimentary knowledge of economics, think that any of those things are plausible.”
He continued:
If we can’t puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy — if we can’t describe that effectively, then we’re doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.
Obama counts among his regrets a failure to set up a big infrastructure spending project, he told Sorkin:
The fact of the matter is, is that our failure in 2012, 2013, 2014, to initiate a massive infrastructure project — it was the perfect time to do it; low interest rates, construction industry is still on its heels, massive need — the fact that we failed to do that, for example, cost us time ... It meant that there were folks who we could have helped and put back to work and entire communities that could have prospered that ended up taking a lot longer to recovery.
The president does not suffer from an unfairly grim assessment of his own performance, however.
“I actually compare our economic performance to how, historically, countries that have wrenching financial crises perform,” Obama said. “By that measure, we probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history.”
Read the full New York Times interview here.
Updated
Cruz welcomes Boehner's 'Lucifer' gibe
Cruz-Fiorina is addressing reporters before their Fort Wayne event. Cruz has welcomed John Boehner’s calling him Lucifer, tweeting, “tell me again who will stand up to Washington?”
Tell me again who will stand up to Washington? Trump, who's Boehner's "texting and golfing buddy," or Carly & me? https://t.co/qvYPSaTEV7
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 28, 2016
First Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina presser taking place now. #CruzCrew pic.twitter.com/ISM4eWN9NN
— Ron Nehring (@RonNehring) April 28, 2016
Cruz’s Twitter has been retweeting people celebrating the Boehner dig as an endorsement:
This is the biggest Ted Cruz endorsement ever. https://t.co/U5ODfoq9e7
— Michael Berry (@MichaelBerrySho) April 28, 2016
And current speaker Paul Ryan stays far away from the Lucifer talk:
"I have a much better relationship with Senator Cruz" @SpeakerRyan says, when asked about Boehner's comments on Cruz
— Deirdre Walsh (@deirdrewalshcnn) April 28, 2016
Ted Cruz is scheduled to pop up for a campaign rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana, any time now. Surveil this live video stream if you’d like to see the man John Boehner calls “Lucifer in the flesh” in action
Boehner calls Cruz 'Lucifer in the flesh'
Texas senator Ted Cruz has scored what is indisputably the strongest non-endorsement of the 2016 cycle.
Former House speaker John Boehner told a Stanford University crowd on Wednesday evening that Cruz is “Lucifer in the flesh”. Boehner continued, according to a Stanford Daily report:
I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son-of-a-bitch in my life.
Lucifer! Miserable son-of-a-bitch! Not to put too fine a point on it.
In fact Boehner has called Cruz “Lucifer” before, and for good measure deemed the senator a “jackass” for his role in the government shutdown of 2013. Cruz held what must have been frustrating sway, for Boehner, over the Tea Party wing of the House as Boehner tried to cobble together various coalitions to keep the government funded and avoid crashing the debt ceiling and pass a border security bill, among other efforts.
As for Cruz nemesis Donald Trump, Boehner said they had played golf together for years and that they are “texting buddies.”
Cruz has not issued a reply to the former Ohio congressman’s assessment. He might say that Boehner, who spent 30 years in Congress and was known for having a comfortable relationship with lobbyists, represents everything that is wrong with the Republican establishment.
Say what you will about Cruz, it's truly impressive to be so right wing that John Boehner thinks you're a living manifestation of Satan
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) April 28, 2016
Updated
Hello and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. Texas senator Ted Cruz created some electricity on Wednesday evening with his announcement that, should he win the Republican presidential nomination, the bumper stickers would read Cruz-Fiorina, as in Carly, the former tech executive (and presidential candidate).
Fiorina made a punchy appearance with Cruz in Indianapolis culminating in a lullaby she sang to Cruz’s kids:
The challenge for Cruz-Fiorina is to inspire Republican primary voters in Indiana, which will award 30 delegates to its statewide winner this coming Tuesday in a contest billed as a last stand for the #NeverTrump movement. Fiorina was up early on Thursday to argue that Donald Trump, who is leading in the (scant) polls in the Hoosier state, is just the same as Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton:
I put them in the same category because they are the same category. They’re two sides of the same coin ... I do think for some of us, principles matter, and convictions matter, and policies and principles matter.
.@CarlyFiorina: On the one hand, you have Cruz and Fiorina. On the other hand, you have Trump and Clinton. https://t.co/TsCOk2GN8n
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) April 28, 2016
It has been reported that Fiorina, early in the primary process, was uniquely capable of getting under the skin of Trump, who was advised to ignore her but mostly could not. He’s on Twitter this morning not ignoring her, in fact:
Lyin' Ted Cruz, who can never beat Hillary Clinton and has NO path to victory, has chosen a V.P.candidate who failed badly in her own effort
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 28, 2016
Trump holds events in Evansville, Indiana, and Costa Mesa, California, today, while John Kasich is in Portland and Medford, Oregon, and Bernie Sanders is in Springfield, Oregon.
Did you catch Trump’s big foreign policy speech on Wednesday? Did you have the nagging sense that it didn’t make sense and may in fact have been packed with internal contradictions abetted by an absence of any real detail? You weren’t imagining things, writes Dan Roberts:
And here’s a curveball story: a top Cruz campaign operative in Virginia has visited Syria and turns out to be a Bashar Assad apologist:
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Updated
1. Lyin' Ted lies again! Denies deal with Kasich.
2. I liked Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr. President 100x.. make that 1000x.
3. Some do it for 2 bits. Some for $500,000. But everyone has a price.