ELIZABETH DREW, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS
In the New York primary on April 19, both Trump and Hillary Clinton broke a string of recent losses with sweeping victories. Trump captured over 60 percent of the Republican vote to John Kasich’s 25 percent and with Ted Cruz coming in third at 15 percent; while Clinton, at 58 percent to Sanders’s 42 percent, claimed almost as large a share of Democrats. The outcome put each victor on the path to winning their party’s nomination, but Clinton is in a safer place than Trump—largely because of the delegate and nominating rules that he decries.
The Republican nominating contest has been proceeding on two levels for some time: there are the voting results in the primaries and caucuses that have attracted most of the press and public attention; and then there is the only recently-noticed actual allocation of delegates, which in some states doesn’t appear to reflect what happened in the primaries and caucuses. The Republican front-runner had been largely flying by the seat of his pants, focused on building up victories through his rallies and free television appearances, and writing frequent messages on Twitter. His staff lacked experience in national politics. He’d been relying on his gut and his brain, and doing an impressive job of it. But in the past couple of weeks he recognized that that wasn’t enough.
Despite his enormous success in the primaries, Trump had a big problem: neither he nor his small and isolated staff understood that he also needed to work the complicated Republican system of allocating delegates. Trump has to win the requisite 1,237 delegates, a majority, or come very close to that, before the balloting begins at the convention in Cleveland in July. The consensus is that if he doesn’t win on the first ballot at the convention, he’s finished. After the first ballot, the party’s very conservative base would then dominate the convention, and Trump isn’t the candidate of the party’s base. That would be the hyper-conservative Ted Cruz, senator from Texas—and Cruz has been successfully gaming the rules to pick up as many delegates as he could. While Cruz stands little chance of defeating Trump before the convention he may be able to prevent him from going to Cleveland with enough delegates to prevail.
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The rules can be used against Trump in important ways even if he has a sufficient number of delegates. Ben Ginsberg, a Washington lawyer and the reigning expert on Republican election rules, said in an interview, “Even if delegates are bound on the first ballot, they don’t have to support that candidate’s position on other matters including rules issues, credentials challenges, procedural floor votes, or the selection of a vice president.” That’s quite a lot that can go awry for the front-runner if he has a determined opponent.
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| New Donald Trump aide Paul Manafort (left) is being described as the 'polished insider |
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Recognizing his limitations (it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that he would), in the interval between Wisconsin and New York, Trump shook up his campaign and some experienced pros increasingly took over—including Paul Manafort, a lobbyist mainly for foreign governments who’d been active in the Ford campaign (which was a while back). Trump read from notes more than before and his speeches were shorter; his once-voluminous tweeting stream was reduced to a trickle. This suggested that he is in fact capable of learning—his adult kids, with whom he’s very close, also have a lot of influence on him. But such cosmetic changes shouldn’t be confused with a change in character.
Traditionally, the New York primary has its special flavor and this year didn’t fail. New York is where the politicians do their most intense pandering and the politics become rawer. Thus the debate in Brooklyn between Clinton and Sanders was rougher and edgier than earlier ones and laid bare more differences between them. Sanders wants to go immediately to a minimum wage of fifteen dollars while Clinton prefers to reach that level in stages because the jump to fifteen would be too high in many areas of the country; Sanders continues to stress that he raises his funds in small donations while Clinton is dependent on large ones and to lambaste her for the humongous amounts she received for her Goldman Sachs speeches (though his demand that she release the transcripts is a stunt; if she does, there’ll be a lot of hooting about the obligatory compliments about her hosts but there will be no deals found). The most loaded difference that came up in the debate was over how to deal with Israel and the Palestinians. Sanders, with little to lose, took the position—in New York—that the United States should be more even-handed in its treatment of the Palestinians and Israel.
The most interesting schism that’s developed in the Democratic campaign, though—and one that sometimes put Clinton in an awkward position—is the one between her husband’s administration and the current predilections of the Democratic Party, which has moved significantly to the left since his presidency. Bill Clinton’s “third way” of governing led to a crime bill that’s now unpopular because its harsh sentencing for minor crimes has created prisons overstuffed with black youths; a welfare bill that, as its Democratic critics warned at the time, cut back the welfare program harshly, to the point that though 15 percent of Americans are in poverty only 1 percent are receiving welfare assistance; his signing of the Defense of Marriage Act, which forbade gay marriage and was later ruled unconstitutional; and his support for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had prohibited commercial banks from participating in the business of investment banking. This repeal is considered a major factor behind the great recession of 2008. (This break with what he’d struggled for is part of what’s led Bill Clinton to sometimes seem a bit off his game as he’s campaigned for his wife; the other part, several reporters say, is that he’s simply not as fast on his feet as he was in his heyday; his presidency ended sixteen years ago.)
The sheer shrewdness of Bernie Sanders’s campaign has startled observers who, when Sanders first announced his candidacy, shrugged him off as a protest candidate—and the evidence is that that’s what Sanders himself thought then. But though he’s done far better than just about anyone expected, he isn’t a real threat to Hillary Clinton’s nomination, and his complaint that he was put at a disadvantage by the fact that the southern states voted early skates too close to saying that blacks shouldn’t play such a large part in the Democratic nomination. Sanders’s fervent base has grown remarkably and he turned out record crowds in New York—27,000 in Washington Square last week and 28,000 in Brooklyn on Sunday. But it didn’t grow enough to catch up to Clinton, whose victory in New York brought her 139 delegates to Sanders’s 106.
There can be no doubt that the Sanders campaign has changed Democratic Party politics, among other things pulling Clinton to the left and creating a movement that will be around after the election. The Clintons are quite obviously annoyed that Sanders is sticking around when it’s evident that he cannot get the required 2,383 delegates. Sanders has reached that point that some outsider candidates, especially those with large and enthusiastic backing, do when they’ve been surprisingly successful—they begin to hallucinate that they can still win and to see their campaign as an end in itself. To be the head of a movement is intoxicating. I’ve not doubted for some time that Sanders wants to take his movement to the Democratic convention, to be held in Philadelphia shortly after the Republicans meet, and make demands about the platform and the program. And even if the oft-irascible Sanders is the soul of grace in conceding to Clinton, many of his followers will likely be another story. (A recent poll showed that forty-one percent of Sanders’s backers said they dislike Clinton.)
In fact, American voters are likely to be presented next November with two candidates who are largely disliked. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had Clinton’s net negative approval rating at 56 percent and Trump’s at 65 percent—both extraordinarily high numbers. Cruz has a net negative rating of 49 percent. (The only candidates more liked than disliked are Kasich, with a net positive of 12 percent, and Sanders, with a net positive of 9 percent.)
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The Republican establishment is desperate. First they reckoned that all Jeb Bush had to do was announce he was running and the nomination would be his. When Bush flopped, their hopes were transferred to the youthful, melodramatic Rubio, but they either didn’t notice Rubio’s essential shallowness or didn’t think voters would catch on. And then, when Rubio went after Trump, his juvenility was exposed for all to see. Ultimately, the idea that the convention would crown House Speaker Paul Ryan the nominee crashed into the reality that it makes no sense for Ryan—or, if they really thought about it, for the party. The passion for Ryan was yet another sign of how out of touch the establishment is with the base. (Ryan is an advocate of much that the base rejects: tax cuts for the wealthy, cutting back on entitlements, and free trade.) Ryan would be a candidate on the ash heap of a bitterly divided party with most of Trump’s followers irreconcilable. That left Cruz.
The strangely persistent idea of the “white knight” riding to the rescue of the party at its convention is more myth than reality. The last time anything resembling a white knight won the nomination of either party was when the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952—but Stevenson had met with the approval of the party hierarchy as well as its base, and one of his champions was the retiring president, Harry Truman. A nominee who hasn’t run yet begins from a standing start; very long odds are he has no staff that’s savvy about the workings of national politics (though this can be supplied, there remain the gaps in the candidate’s own experience), no fund-raising mechanism, and little preparation on the issues. That someone could win the presidency with only the convention as his springboard is a fairly nutty idea.
Of the three remaining Republican contenders, Kasich is probably the strongest general election candidate, appealing as he does beyond the strict conservatism of the party base—but that’s made it particularly difficult for him to win the primaries and caucuses. That Kasich could be the best bet isn’t based simply on the polls that indicate that he’s the only Republican who could defeat Clinton but also on the facts that he’s the most experienced of them all and is a popular two-term governor of the electorally-crucial state of Ohio. But the establishment seems to have figured that Kasich, who thus far has won only his home state, wouldn’t go down well with the delegates—whereas Cruz would.
In all the tumult of this year, people have taken their eye off the longstanding fact that the nominating faction of the Republican Party is made up of Evangelicals and highly conservative activists, a fact that can cause problems for the Republican candidate in the general election. Both John McCain and Mitt Romney had to torque themselves between the nominators and the general electorate and it didn’t work out in either case. Before them, George W. Bush cultivated the Evangelicals to win the nomination. (In the first debate, in Iowa, his reply to the question of “Who is your favorite political philosopher or thinker?” was “Jesus.” Five of the six candidates mentioned God or Christ in the debate.) The Cruz candidacy is premised on the belief—thus far, from Goldwater to Buchanan, proven to be a myth—that there are millions of conservatives out there waiting for a candidate who’s to their taste.
The fact that some Republicans, such as Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham, have hugged Cruz even though they heartily dislike him is a testament to how alarmed they are by Trump. But Cruz might be almost as much an election disaster, not least for his wildly conservative positions—no exceptions for abortions; a flat tax (the same unspecified tax rate for people of all income brackets) and abolishing the IRS—a sure applause-getter; a return to the gold standard; and using nuclear weapons in the Middle East that could make the sand “glow.”
And so, though each likely final candidate—if it’s Clinton and Trump or Clinton and Cruz (assuming that those are the alternatives)—will have a clump of strong supporters, most people will be casting their ballot for the one they dislike less. That’s not the healthiest start to the next presidency.