That’s it for tonight - well, except for the Democratic presidential forum, which the Guardian will be loveblogging right... over... here.
Amber Jamieson follows the candidates on Snapchat so you don’t have to download it.
Every week we’ll do a little check in with what silly content candidates post to the messaging app, where their video and photos only stick around for a max of 24 hours. Some candidates (ahem, Trump) don’t use it at all, others (Sanders, Rubio, Carson, Clinton) post things daily, no matter how boring.
Bernie Sanders:
One clever thing about Sander’s Snapchat is that supporters can use two different Feel the Bern geofilters (special logos that can be placed on Snapchats depending on where they are geographically).
First, there’s the campaign headquarters:
Top Sanders snap of the week: entirely blurry photo of the candidate listening to music, looking more like grandpa sleeping on the couch.
Hillary Clinton:
New Jersey Senator Corey Booker spent the weekend stumping for Clinton in Iowa and he took over her Snapchat with multiple video selfies.
Including, a look at the campaign staffers’ snacks. Of course they are organic fruit and veggies with a granola bar.
Top Clinton snap of the week: Excellent DIY merch.
Marco Rubio:
Of the Republicans, Rubio is producing the most interesting and relevant (for a younger audience) Snapchat content, with hashtags, emojis and nice behind-the-scenes moments.
Top Rubio snap of the week: Acting just like one-of-the-guys, preferring to watch football rather than boring old presidential campaigning.
Ben Carson:
Carson’s Snapchat content this week featured the Christian concert Winter Jam heavily.
Top Carson snaps of the week: Excellent drawing of Yoda as a present for Carson from his “biggest fan” Adelaide. We’re going to hazard a guess that Adelaide is a child.
Other notable snaps
Jeb Bush went on a tour of a gun factory - note the antlers on that geofilter.
Martin O’Malley may have barely any supporters but he does at least have his own Snapchat geofilter.
Fox News is fighting fire with fire.
In a response to billionaire frontrunner Donald Trump’s latest salvo against Fox News host Megyn Kelly - in which Trump questioned “who ever even heard of her before the last debate?” - a spokesperson for the cable news channel expressed surprise that the real estate mogul would express such open and honest fear at being questioned by Kelly in Thursday’s upcoming presidential primary debate.
Trump had told told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he doubted Kelly could moderate the debate fairly, given their, well, complicated history on the debate stage. “I don’t think she can treat me fairly,” Trump said. “And I’m not a big fan of hers.”
Fox News’ response, courtesy of Mediaite:
Sooner or later Donald Trump, even if he’s president, is going to have to learn that he doesn’t get to pick the journalists - we’re very surprised he’s willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly.”
Burn.
One-third of all statistics are made up on the spot.* But when making up statistics, consider the subject matter before charging ahead into mathematical myths.
Take, for example, senator Ted Cruz, who in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show on January 12 stated that gun-control legislation in Australia was responsible for a “significant” rise in “the rate of rapes” in Australia.
The charge seemed unbelievable, in large part because it was, literally, un-believable.
The Washington Post’s fact checker has given Cruz’s statement a rare Four Pinocchios rating, after the second-place candidate told Hewitt that gun control had increased the rate of sexual assault in Australia:
And as you know, Hugh, after Australia did that [gun buyback program], the rate of sexual assaults, the rate of rapes, went up significantly, because women were unable to defend themselves.”
Background: After a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996 armed with a single semi-automatic weapon, the massacre triggered a wave of gun-control legislation in Australia. The legislation, which included bans on semiautomatic weapons, is frequently credited as the reason that Australia has not has a large-scale mass shooting in the nearly two decades since.
For obvious reasons, this gun grab is not popular with Cruz.
Check out the full takedown here.
*See what we did there?
The Guardian’s Ben Jacobs has an impressive shot of the crowd at Iowa’s Grinnell College that has turned out for Vermont senator Bernie Sanders:
Roughly 900 college kids #FeelingTheBern on the first day back from winter break in Grinnell pic.twitter.com/GFmS91PWPU
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) January 25, 2016
Every election cycle, political journalists on the trail in Iowa abandon their CrossFit and paleo diets at the historic Northside Cafe in Winterset, Iowa, dining on fried portobello mushrooms and breaded shrimp across the street from the Madison county courthouse.
This year, journos hungry for more than a scoop can now feast on the “TrumpBurger,” a sandwich that’s named after Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. The burger, Northside advertises, is suitably “all business.”
Hello @NorthsideCafe, Iowa! Just received your menu! The @realDonaldTrump burger sounds amazing!! #Trump2016 pic.twitter.com/KZdQNTiX9l
— Daniel Scavino Jr. (@DanScavino) January 25, 2016
“For the man who likes to ham it up for the cameras, it’s stacked with half a pound of ham, but don’t worry - it’s piled on top of our famous no-nonsense all-beef all-American monument third-pound burger,” the menu (mouthwateringly) details.
The burger also has shredded cheese “as Trump continues to shred the competition in the polls,” and tops the sandwich off with grilled onions “for all the tears from political pundits who can’t figure Trump out.”
Sabrina Siddiqui reports from the ethanol-subsidied cornfields of Iowa, where freshman senator Joni Ernst stumped for Marco Rubio at a midday event - but whatever you do, don’t mistake it for an endorsement:
“I am not endorsing,” Joni Ernst declared Monday shortly after taking the stage to a standing ovation against the backdrop of red, white and blue signs bearing Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s name.
But standing inside a ballroom before a crowd of roughly 200, the optics of the popular home state senator appearing alongside Rubio just one week before the Iowa caucuses had all the trimmings of a formal stamp of approval.
Introducing Rubio as a “good friend” and someone “near and dear” to her heart, Ernst quickly delved into an impassioned pitch for why the Florida senator was qualified to be the next commander in chief. Invoking her experience in the US military, Ernst lauded in particular Rubio’s emphasis on national security.
“Those boots that are on the ground fighting for our values, those are the boots that I wore. Those are the boots that so many Iowans have worn,” she said. “And those are the boots that Marco Rubio understands. He knows what it means to keep our country safe.”
The Iowa senator added that Rubio, a father of four, was dedicated to maintaining the American Dream.
“He wants to make sure that we have an America we are going to be proud of. I’ve seen him fight that for his children, for my children, and for your children as well,” she said.
Ernst’s appearance was the latest in a string of positive news for Rubio’s campaign here over the last 48 hours, with the senator gaining endorsements from two local newspapers, the Sioux City Journal and the Des Moines Register - the latter the state’s largest.
Rubio said he was “grateful” to have Ernst by his side, weaving her own narrative into his stump speech to highlight their commonalities. Both of them were underdogs in their respective Senate races, he said, taking on more establishment-friendly candidates.
“She wasn’t supposed to win, she wasn’t supposed to run,” Rubio said, adding he was “proud” to have supported her in a competitive five-way primary in 2014.
Speaking of Ted Cruz...
Republican frontrunner and living monument to avarice Donald Trump has called for the Canadian-born Texas senator to either settle the issue of his constitutional eligibility for the presidency or leave the race.
It's time for Ted Cruz to either settle his problem with the FACT that he was born in Canada and was a citizen of Canada, or get out of race
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2016
The tweet was sent in the wake of a pair of recently released Fox News polls that show the real estate tycoon with double-digit leads in both Iowa and New Hampshire, with Cruz trailing in both states.
With only a week until the Iowa caucuses - and three days before the final pre-primary Republican presidential debate - Trump’s doubling down on Cruz’s eligibility apparently seeks to further push what appears to have been a successful strategy. But as a certain president’s monologue at a certain White House correspondents dinner showed us in 2011, overplaying the birther card has been a dangerous move for Trump in the past...
Heidi Cruz, wife of US senator and Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, was asked if she’s “sleeping with an immigrant” during an interview with an Iowa radio station.
While speaking with local radio station 1400AM KVFD in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Cruz was asked the poorly worded question in regards to assertions by Donald Trump - and others - about her Canadian-born husband’s constitutional eligibility for the Oval Office, as discovered by Buzzfeed News.
After calling the subject of the question “one of those ridiculous things,” the interviewer asked Cruz to “please respond to the fact of whether you’re sleeping with an uh-uh-uh-uhm an immigrant.”
Cruz, in a display of good-natured restraint that likely serves her well in the offices of Goldman Sachs, laughed the question off.
“There was a funny post on the Internet that the Canadians said, ‘don’t worry he’s 100% American,’ so I think that can partly settle the question,” Cruz answered.
“This is not hotly contested in the law,” she continued. “There’re a few liberal professors out there who are trying to stir this up, but there is a definition of a ‘natural-born citizen,’ and Ted fits that definition. He was born to an American mother in a foreign country.”
Cruz also echoed her husband in citing the putatively foreign birth of former candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain, who “had the exact same circumstance.”
“Romney’s father ran for president; he was born in Mexico on a ranch in Mexico,” Cruz said. “McCain was born in Panama and not on the base - not on the American base in Panama. He was born in a hospital in Panama City. He ran for president.”
“There is no case here,” Cruz added.
Listen to the exchange here:
Updated
Woody Guthrie wrote scathing lyrics about his landlord, Donald Trump's father
Woody Guthrie, the American bard and friend of the worker, who said he was not a communist necessarily “but I been in the red all my life,” had Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, as a landlord in Brooklyn... and Guthrie wrote lyrics decrying what he said was the elder Trump’s racism.
Would this be the place on Mermaid Avenue? Must be? The New York Times writes:
Mr. Guthrie, in writings uncovered by a scholar working on a book, invoked “Old Man Trump,” as he suggested that blacks were unwelcome as tenants in the Trump apartment complex, near Coney Island.
Here’s part of one song, but if you’re interested you ought just to click through.
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project
Updated
Rick Perry, the long-serving former governor of Texas, has endorsed Ted Cruz, the US senator from Texas, for president of the United States. Perry called Cruz “the most consistent conservative” in the race.
Perry briefly ran for president this cycle himself. He lasted until last September.
“Of those individuals who have a chance to win the Republican primary, at this juncture, from my perspective, Ted Cruz is by far the most consistent conservative in that crowd,” Perry told Politico. “And that appears to be down to two people.”
Who’s the other guy?
Updated
Here’s a rather big-gish boost for the Trump campaign, a sign of coalescing establishment support: a top aide to Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, a party leader and immigration hard-liner, has joined the Trump campaign.
The Washington Post’s Robert Costa has the scoop:
Months ago, Sessions appeared at a Trump rally in Mobile, Ala., going so far as to don a “Make America Great Again” hat. Now the aide most often at his side is joining Trump.
Miller will work alongside Sam Clovis, Trump’s national campaign co-chairman and chief policy adviser, drafting white papers and assisting the candidate with debate preparations.
Read the full piece here. (thx @bencjacobs)
Ted Cruz is now facing attacks on a new front: for imitating Homer Simpson, writes Guardian politics reporter Ben Jacobs:
In a sequel to a television ad now appearing on Iowa airwaves, a pro-Mike Huckabee superPAC is now attacking both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz on the radio.
While the new spot includes an audio clip of Trump mocking disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it also includes an excerpt from a 2015 video made for Buzzfeed in which Cruz performs imitations of characters from the Simpsons.
In particular, the Huckabee ad captures a clip where Cruz as Homer Simpson refers to the pig as “a magic animal.”
The ad continues to say that Cruz and Trump do not live up to the legacy of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan, with the narrator claiming “we’re not electing a loudmouth for president.” It then goes on to extol the virtues of Huckabee and his record as Arkansas’s governor.
Hucakbee, who won the Iowa Caucuses in 2008, is currently in 8th place in the state, according to Real Clear Politics’ polling average.
Any who doubt Donald Trump’s ground game in Iowa had better take account of the veteran operative who is running it, reports the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs:
Regardless of whether they love Donald Trump’s rebellious message or loathe his crude rhetoric, Republican operatives across Iowa feel confident that the party’s frontrunner for president could live up to his polls – he has Chuck Laudner in his corner.
Laudner is a veteran of countless Iowa Republican campaigns, including Rick Santorum’s shock victory in 2012, and has joined Trump as state director for Iowa. With a gruff manner, flat-top buzzcut and a wad of chewing tobacco wedged in his lower lip, Laudner resembles nothing so much as a minor league baseball manager annoyed by his players’ failure to just hit the ball and run.
The top Trump operative is as averse to the limelight as his boss is fond of the cameras. But behind the scenes, Iowa Republicans are already looking warily towards the political machine Laudner has built.
“Some folks might question the Trump organization, but all I know is this,” top Iowa GOP political operative Grant Young told the Guardian. “When Chuck Laudner does Chuck Laudner things, watch out. He is one of the best.”
Read the full piece here:
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has snagged the endorsement of the lawyer for the family of Walter Scott, the African-American man shot dead by a white police officer in South Carolina last April after a traffic stop for a non-functioning brake light, reports the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino:
The lawyer, Justin Bamberg, a state representative, had previously endorsed Hillary Clinton. On Monday, Bamberg withdrew his endorsement for Clinton and formally backed Sanders, commending the senator’s “bold” vision for the country.
“The question to ask is not what Secretary Clinton did to lose my endorsement,” Bamberg told reporters on Monday. “It’s what Senator Sanders did to gain it.”
Bamberg said he hadn’t given Sanders a “fair shake” at first, but he’s since been impressed by what the self-described Democratic socialist has to offer.
“Bernie represents bold new leadership and is not afraid to challenge the status quo or the conventional way,” Bamberg said.
“People have said that Bernie’s ideas are unachievable; that they are impossible,” Bamberg said. “We live in the greatest country on Earth. We are a country that his proven time and time again that with innovation, hard work and pure heart all things are achievable and attainable. We put a man on the moon … Don’t tell me that we cannot change the way politics exists in this country.”
Updated
Mother Jones’s Russ Choma reports on a heinous fundraising ploy carried out in the name of – but with no actual connection to – the Ben Carson campaign:
A political action committee with a track record of questionable tactics is attempting to use the recent death of a Ben Carson campaign volunteer to raise money. The group has no connection to Carson’s presidential effort, and a spokesman for the retired neurosurgeon who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination tells Mother Jones that the Carson team was “disgusted and appalled” by the ploy.
On Sunday, the Sacramento-based Defenders of Freedom and Security PAC sent out an email blast urging recipients to donate whatever they could and to join its email list to “help Ben Carson carry the baton of freedom to the next generation!” The message, which includes language suggesting that donations will be used to directly support Carson’s presidential bid, begins with a not-very-subtle attempt to grab potential donors by their heartstrings: “The Carson campaign dealt with a tragedy this week when a student campaign worker died tragically in a car accident in Iowa.”
Read the full piece here. (thx @bencjacobs)
Updated
'It's really hard': Sanders comforts tearful minimum-wage earner
Here’s a Trump commercial that compares his ability to build skyscrapers and golf courses favorably with the Obama administration’s handling of the Bergdahl affair.
By the logic of this ad, the most prolific real estate developer should be president. By the logic of this ad, squeezing percentages in buying dirt has anything at all to do with weighing competing interests of national security and the military ethos of leaving no soldier behind. By the logic of this ad, airplanes with your name on them are awesome.
“It’s time for a president who understands the art of the deal,” is the tagline.
Preview: Democratic candidates' forum
How excited is everyone for tonight’s Democratic candidates’ forum in Des Moines, Iowa, airing on CNN at 9pm ET, with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley participating?
We will be covering the forum live, right here. The last time they did this was on 6 November in South Carolina (read our live coverage). This time the proceedings will be held at Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium with host Chris Cuomo, whose brother the New York governor has endorsed Clinton.
“Forum” means no cross-talk among the candidates. In fact they will not appear onstage simultaneously except perhaps briefly for a photo op to conclude the spectacle. It’s not a debate.
As we thought last time, it could seem a waste to bring the candidates together and not let them debate. But then we were surprised at how the format allowed the candidates to air some substantive policy differences. They get solid questions and solid time to answer them. What’s not to like?
For a sense of what we might be looking forward to this time, here’s a reminder of what went down at the last forum:
- Memorable moments included a Clinton answer about the Defense of Marriage Act, the Bill Clinton administration’s support for which she insisted was part of a strategy to forestall a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
- Sanders, the Vermont senator, defended his vote to allow guns to be carried on Amtrak trains, saying doing so was the same as carrying a gun in checked luggage on an airplane.
- Sanders hit out at Clinton a little bit, most sharply over the Keystone XL pipeline, an issue that was for him, he said, “a no-brainer” unlike “some unnamed candidates”.
- O’Malley had a series of applause lines, touting his record on same-sex marriage and gun control and saying of the Black Lives Matter anti-police-violence movement: “I think almost all of their agenda can get done.”
Updated
Donald Trump is an unlikely economic hero for the voters of Iowa, explains opinion writer Richard Wolffe:
Other Republican candidates attempt to sound like agricultural experts, pandering to rooms supposedly full of farmers by expressing their undying love of ethanol and their undying hatred of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Trump, in contrast, spent several precious minutes at a recent rally explaining to his loyal fans how you could make a fortune buying and selling parcels of land the government was obtaining through the powers of eminent domain.
It didn’t matter that nobody inside the gym at Muscatine high school (“Home of the Muskies”) was likely to follow his lead. It didn’t even matter that this extended discussion was a rebuke to an attack ad aired by his arch-rival in Iowa, Senator Ted Cruz.
All that mattered, on the economically struggling banks of the Mississippi, was that Trump knows how to make money.
Read the full piece here:
Updated
Barack Obama briefly played pundit in an interview released on Monday, commenting on an “untested” Bernie Sanders, the “wicked smart” Hillary Clinton, and an “unrecognizable” Republican party.
“There’s no doubt that Bernie has tapped into a running thread in Democratic politics,” Obama told Politico in a podcast, saying that thread asked: “Why are we still constrained by the terms of the debate that were set by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago?
“You know, why is it that we should be scared to challenge conventional wisdom and talk bluntly about inequality and, you know, be full-throated in our progressivism?”
But although Obama said he understood Sanders’ appeal, he downplayed any similarities between his upstart 2008 campaign and the 73-year-old senator’s surprise popularity with diverse and young voters.
“I think Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose,” Obama said.
Read the full piece here:
Updated
Choke Alert
.@HillaryClinton has coughing attack at West Des Moines event, may be unable to finish remarks.
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) January 25, 2016
Clinton just had a cough attack mid-speech at Jewish Federation Greater Des Moines. "You do talk a lot in this campaign," she said to laughs
— Monica Alba (@AlbaMonica) January 25, 2016
She took a lozenge out of her pocket and asked president of federation to say a few words while she recovered voice https://t.co/Rc6LkbKBhJ
— Monica Alba (@AlbaMonica) January 25, 2016
Updated
A nice turnout in Pella, Iowa, for Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley:
Really good crowd, probably 70 here in Pella, to hear @MartinOMalley. #iacaucus pic.twitter.com/Yd5QwAE1iG
— Sarah Beckman (@SarahBeckman3) January 25, 2016
He’s said he would build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it, deport some 11m undocumented migrants, institute a religious test at the nation’s borders... but could this be Trump’s most outlandish claim yet?
"Trump said he would solve the Arab-Israeli conflict in two weeks." https://t.co/yUVkJJzfv2
— Miriam Elder (@MiriamElder) January 25, 2016
Can we stop pretending billionaire Michael Bloomberg – who is reportedly exploring an independent presidential run – has a chance to win any national election, let alone this one? He is the perfect storm of everything that voters find repugnant.
For progressives and the large swaths of the public who are sick of the very wealthiest concentrating their power, he is a plutocrat; the ultimate creature of Wall Street, who relentlessly defended and befriended the largest and wildly unpopular major banks after they tore down the economy, and resisted any effort to tax the wealthiest 1%.
To Republicans – from whom he would have to steal large chunks of votes to win – his stances on gun control and social issues are far too liberal garner any support among the conservative rank and file beyond those who work at Goldman Sachs. He is radioactive to supporters of both parties.
Yet here he is again.
Read the full piece here:
Updated
Nobody could accuse Erika Andiola or César Vargas of joining Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign because they fantasized about working in the West Wing. As “Dreamers”, young immigrants protected by presidential action, his Latino outreach directors keenly feel the limits that bound their ambitions.
Not only will the young Mexicans be barred from voting for the Vermont senator as he campaigns for the Democratic nomination this spring, they will also be blocked from the polls in November, after devoting more than a year of their lives to the election. And should Sanders win the nomination and the presidency, they will also be prohibited from following him into the White House.
“Only US citizens get to work at the White House,” Vargas said ruefully, speaking in the bustling Sanders headquarters in Burlington, Vermont. “But that’s what this campaign is all about for us – we cannot vote, but we do have a voice.”
Three hundred miles away in downtown Brooklyn, a similar dynamic is playing out in Hillary Clinton’s headquarters. Clinton’s core team may be approximately 10 times bigger than Sanders’ 30 people – she has about 300 packed into the entire floor of an office block – but here too a “Dreamer” can be found at the pulsing heart of the operation.
Her name is Lorella Praeli, and she leads the team seeking to move the massive Hispanic electorate to help put Clinton in the White House. Unlike her counterparts in the Sanders camp, she could taste life in the West Wing should her boss win.
Read the full piece here:
Further reading:
Updated
Joe McGinniss’s book The Selling of a President is widely regarded as a peerless look inside the inner workings of a presidential campaign. It paints a warts-and-all picture of the neurotic, unhinged politician – one Richard Nixon – that the world came to know in greater depth after the scandal that ended his career. It was also a cautionary tale for any politician who ever thought about giving a journalist almost unlimited access to their campaign.
That warning went unheard by the group running Anthony Weiner’s disastrous mayoral bid in 2014, and documentary fans should rejoice for it. The resulting film is a riveting excursion into fear and loathing on the campaign trail. The film caused a stir before its premiere because of the access the team got to not only Weiner but also his wife, Huma Abedin, who is Hillary Clinton’s top aide.
The couple’s relationship dominates much of the action. Their marriage was already strained following Weiner’s 2011 resignation from the US House of Representatives, following leaks to the press that he sent sexts to several women. (It’s tested after Weiner again succumbs to temptation and sends more explicit pictures.) The film puts their relationship under an unflinching microscope. We see them in their kitchen, feeding their child and having increasingly tense conversations.
The documentary team of Josh Kreigman and Elyse Steinberg do more than focus on the pics, though. Weiner is presented as a passionate career politician, a leader who took on the Republicans who tried to block healthcare assistance for 9/11 first responders. He’s clearly a gifted orator who knows what makes people tick – but just can’t seem to stop himself from ruining the hard work he’s done to rebuild his reputation.
Read the full piece:
The other day in Manhattan, Hillary Clinton supporters met for lunch at the home of the media executive Geraldine Laybourne. A group of 50, mostly women, was determined to generate excitement for Clinton’s campaign for president. They were frustrated to see her lagging again among younger voters, and their invited speaker was Kenyatta Cheese, a young Obama campaign veteran and internet impresario.
The debate sparring that night between Clinton and Bernie Sanders over who belongs to the establishment was another reflection of how perilous it is to be an insider this American political season. And it is galling for politically seasoned women to watch Sanders caricature Clinton as an establishmentarian worshipping at the altar of Goldman Sachs. “When you are in the White House, you’re going to be connected to the establishment,” says Sarah Kovner, who served in the Clinton administration and was at Laybourne’s lunch. “That’s just a fact.”
Sanders put Hillary Clinton on notice last summer, when no one was paying him much heed. “All over this country,” he declared, “ordinary people, working people, elderly people are moving in our direction because they do want a candidate to take on the establishment.”
During that most recent Democratic debate in South Carolina, I read texts about Clinton by some students at Harvard, where I teach, and talked to some afterwards. Although Clinton’s difficulties with young voters have been much written about, their comments revealed a more acute ennui.
“Hillary, can you excite us?” asks Osaremen Okolo, a 21-year-old African-American who supports Clinton but “misses feeling fired up” as she was for Barack Obama and as some of her friends feel about Sanders.
“Young people like Bernie because he sounds like a revolutionary,” she says. But Okolo prefers Clinton’s experience and positions on issues like equal pay for equal work and criminal justice reform. “Hillary sounds pragmatic, which can come across as stuffy to young people. Her experience can almost count against her.” She adds: “Sanders seems bold, even if none of his ideas can happen.”
Read the full piece here:
It is an unlikely-looking spot from which to plot a revolution. The third-floor suite in Burlington that serves as the national headquarters for Bernie Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaign in fact looks more like a small-town law office: surprisingly busy for a Friday evening, perhaps, but hardly the den of communist sympathisers some Democratic opponents claim it to be.
In contrast to his frontline base in a faded mall in Iowa, from where Sanders is threatening to upstage Hillary Clinton in next week’s Democratic caucus, the prosperous streets here in Vermont’s biggest city are buzzing with, well, capitalism – a legacy, say locals, of regeneration during the senator’s tenure as mayor in the 1980s.
...Instead, the mood inside the Sanders headquarters as they prepare for the biggest week of their political careers is a very Vermont mixture of surprise and quiet satisfaction....
Read further:
Everybody always talks about how everybody who knows him hates Ted Cruz for being a creepily transparent Uriah Heepish cauldron of hypocrisy, intelligence and ambition.
But then you see video of Cruz as a young man, and you think, huh, seems like an alright guy:
Video of an 18 year-old Ted Cruz emerges on YouTube... his aspirations? "To take over the world" https://t.co/jYFZu4qrYv
— Will Rabbe (@WillRabbe) January 23, 2016
“Aspiration, is that like sweat on my butt?” he says.
high school student Ted Cruz wanted to run for President pic.twitter.com/Y8ZmgIj4jM
— Robert Caruso (@robertcaruso) January 25, 2016
Not sure “Bernie’s Yearning” sounds like something one would want to eat. But then again neither really does “Chunky Monkey.”
Update: The ice cream depicted below is neither produced nor sanctioned by the company Ben and Jerry’s. It is instead a solo project of company co-founder Bennett “Ben” Cohen. We’re still not eating it.
.@benandjerrys disavows @BernieSanders ice cream; says it's not involved; co-founder @YoBenCohen doing it on his own https://t.co/ouZOdVc4gG
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) January 25, 2016
.@benandjerrys debuting "Bernie's Yearning…Political Revolution Inside". Awaiting FEC complaint. pic via @YoBenCohen pic.twitter.com/KPOqBFW1IS
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) January 25, 2016
Updated
David Axelrod, the engineer and adviser behind Barack Obama’s two presidential victories, is beating himself up for having made fun, early on, of the Trump presidential candidacy.
Axelrod should have seen Trump’s appeal, he writes in the New York Times, because Trump’s candidacy has strong parallels with Obama in 2008:
Here’s the gist. Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.
Is Trump the next Obama? Seems kind of like a triple bank shot of political analysis. But proof of Axelrod’s political chops sits in the White House.
Updated
Trump derides Sikh protester's 'hat'
Time to take out the trash round up the latest unsettling scenes from the Donald Trump campaign choo-choo.
On Sunday, a Sikh man who had the guts to stand up at a Trump rally and unfurl a sign reading “Stop Hate” got the full Trump treatment. The crowd, which appears transplanted from a Manila cockfight, jeers and gestures from the bleachers as the man is led out.
Then Trump piles on, focusing on the man’s religious garb. “Naw, he wasn’t wearing one of those hats, was he?” Trump says, adding somewhat incoherently:
And he never will! And he never will. And that’s OK. But we’ve got to do something, because it’s not working.
Click through below for video of the incident:
Trump throws out Sikh protester at rally and mocks him: "He wasn't wearing one of those hats was he?" https://t.co/BC4m7jGym0
— Sunny Hundal (@sunny_hundal) January 24, 2016
On Saturday, Trump bragged to the media about how loyal his supporters are. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump said.
Is he wrong?
Update Ha:
@TheRickWilson A Trump supporter mocking what's on anyone else's head, or not on any else's head, is truly rich. #CatToupeeCandidate
— RubioRepublican (@TheEggface) January 25, 2016
Updated
Lots of folks on the Twits are pointing out that these American heroes drawn here none of them was perfect. But how do you take Barry [BORN IN CANADA] Blitt’s art on this week’s New Yorker cover?
This week's cover, “Bad Reception,” by Barry Blitt: https://t.co/jio12cgaUs pic.twitter.com/W92pYZXSjd
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 25, 2016
Updated
The Imperial Presidency
This correction, man. pic.twitter.com/PtxyrLN9nV
— Whitney Elizabeth (@_whits_) January 25, 2016
You’ve lived long enough to watch your crowning achievement of bringing democracy to Iraq be destroyed by a Democratic president who withdrew American troops just as things there were shaping up. You’ve done the Errol Morris documentary. You’ve published a memoir.
What’s left to do? Solitaire app, of course.
Donald Rumsfeld, the two-time US secretary of defence who presided over the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has released a video game, Alex Hern writes:
The game, initially released as an iOS app, is based on a version of solitaire favoured by Winston Churchill. The variant uses two decks of cards rather than one, 10 rows of cards instead of seven, and an extra pile of six cards called “the Devil’s Six” for the player to work into their strategy.
Nice touch on the Rumsfeld Solitaire game. When you complete a level, it says "Greeted as Liberator!"
— Prof. Jeff Jarvis (@ProfJeffJarvis) January 25, 2016
Rumsfeld himself had become a fan of the physical version of the solitaire variant after he first played it in the 1970s. It was taught to him by Belgian statesman André de Staercke, who had in turn, Rumsfeld claims, been taught it by Churchill himself.
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The Iowa caucuses, explained
One week till Iowa. What’s a caucus? How are the Democratic caucuses different from the Republican caucuses? How many precincts are there? [Hint: 1,681]
Are any of these votes actually binding? Do the peculiarities of caucusing host any kernel of hope/fear that polling showing Donald Trump crushing in the state may not correspond in a direct way, when the time comes, with actual voting results?
Read more!
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N.B.: Federal government offices are closed today on account of snow.
.@USOPM says federal offices will remain closed tomorrow. Latest updates: https://t.co/XVGZBf0Qcz pic.twitter.com/PfA90AGKhp
— Mark Berman (@markberman) January 24, 2016
How did everyone survive the blizzard?
Newt stew pic.twitter.com/5mvYgSC3NN
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 25, 2016
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Obama plays down Sanders, pumps up Clinton
This Monday morning has delivered a true politics must-read in the form of Politico’s Glenn Thrush’s interview with Barack Obama.
Obama says Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has ‘luxury’ of being long shot:
Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose,” he said. “I think Hillary came in with the both privilege – and burden – of being perceived as the frontrunner… You’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before – that’s a disadvantage to her.”
Obama compares Clinton in 2008 to Ginger Rogers: ‘backwards in heels’:
“She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” he said. “She had to wake up earlier than I did because she had to get her hair done. She had to, you know, handle all the expectations that were placed on her.”
Obama says Clinton started off ‘rusty’:
She is better in “small groups” than big ones, he remarked, and he agreed that her first campaign appearances showed her to be “rusty” — comparing them to his God-awful first debate of the 2012 campaign. “[S]he’s extraordinarily experienced — and, you know, wicked smart and knows every policy inside and out — [and] sometimes [that] could make her more cautious, and her campaign more prose than poetry,” he told me.
Read the full piece here.
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Hello and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. One Week Till Iowa. Is the Republican party about to nominate Donald Trump for president? These races can see lots of movement right at the end as voters start to focus on the race and the field winnows. So let’s check on the polls in the Hawkeye State-- GOOD GOD.
Trump’s up another five points in polling averages in Iowa on the strength of back-to-back CNN and Fox News surveys showing him leading Texas senator Ted Cruz by 11 points. Trump gained 15 points on Cruz in the Fox poll after Cruz started attacking Trump earlier this month, the Washington Post points out.
For an extra boost, a Trump Iowa rally at the weekend featured the very senior Republican senator from the state, Chuck Grassley. It wasn’t an endorsement, mind you. But here’s a snapshot: the establishment and The Donald.
We’ll know more soon! Here’s what else is happening on this Monday morning in politics, and some of what you may have missed over the weekend.
Obama pseudo-endorses Clinton
In an interview with Politico, Barack Obama “couldn’t hide his obvious affection for [Hillary] Clinton or his implicit feeling that she, not [Bernie] Sanders, best understands the unpalatably pragmatic demands of a presidency he likens to the world’s most challenging walk-and-chew-gum exercise,” Glenn Thrush writes.
[The] one thing everybody understands is that this job right here, you don’t have the luxury of just focusing on one thing,” Obama said.
There’s a lot more in the interview and we’ll take a closer look later.
Bloomberg said to weigh presidential run
If you had a Forbes-estimated $36bn and you saw a presidential race shaping up between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders … well, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, “sensing an opening”, is thinking about running for president, again, the New York Times reports.
Can we fast-forward to when Bloomberg's executive order to ban large sodas and salted pretzels is taken up by SCOTUS?
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) January 23, 2016
Des Moines Register endorses Clinton, Rubio
Iowa’s most influential news rag has taken its stand. Discouragingly for Clinton, the Register is bad at picking Democratic nominees – it picked her back in 2008, too! But there are countervailing signs that the paper can in fact boost candidates. We report, you decide.
Clinton also picked up the Boston Globe endorsement in the 9 February primary in New Hampshire, just across the border from Beantown.
Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly to co-host GOP debate Thursday
Remember when we were wondering whether Trump’s fighting with Fox News would endanger his election chances? That turns out not to have been a strong line of analysis. Anyway, Fox News has declined to accede to Trump’s demand that host Megyn Kelly, whom Trump attacked in August, sit out Thursday night’s debate. Kelly will host, Fox says.
Tina Fey did Sarah Palin endorsing Trump on Saturday Night Live on Saturday. Night.
Here’s where some of the team is deployed today:
Dan Roberts and Ben Jacobs are in Iowa, preparing for a big Democratic candidate forum in Des Moines at 9pm ET. It’s technically not a debate as they take turns on stage, but it’s in effect their last big live TV moment to convince voters before caucus day next Monday.
Sabrina Siddiqui is in Iowa to watch freshman senator Joni Ernst stump for Marco Rubio for president in a midday event – it’s not an endorsement, endorsement fans, but like Grassley’s greeting of Trump, it assuredly Means Something – and then Sabrina switches buses to catch a Clinton rally.
Ben Jacobs and Dan Roberts will catch up with Bernie Sanders in Grinnell, Iowa, this afternoon, and Dan has a piece coming from his weekend trip to Sanders campaign headquarters in Burlington, Vermont.
Dan Roberts is going to see former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee recreating at a firing range in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at noon.
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