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Tag: 2016 presidential candidate
#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Looks Back At 2016’s Political Train-wreck

#EndorseThis: Seth Meyers Looks Back At 2016’s Political Train-wreck

The astute Seth Meyers offers “a closer look” back at the political train-wreck of 2016 — beginning with Donald Trump’s pouting refusal to accept the results of the Iowa Republican caucus (because Ted Cruz cheated, albeit without Russian help). The Late Night host reviews amusing moments we might have forgotten, following a year we may well prefer to forget: from Clinton’s awkward appeal for the youth vote to the trashy insult contest between Marco Rubio and Trump that concluded with the latter advertising his genitalia.

Meyers clearly feels special affection for Ben Carson, Trump’s clueless nominee for housing secretary, whose long, strange political trip culminates in a remarkable moment when he abruptly breaks off a live TV interview to go find his luggage. And Vice President Joe Biden sums up the entire fiasco with a pithy head-slap.

7 Things You Should Know About Martin O’Malley

7 Things You Should Know About Martin O’Malley

Martin O’Malley, the ambitious former governor of Maryland and former mayor of Baltimore, is expected to announce his run for the presidency Saturday. The key to understanding him is his unshakeable belief in the dignity of all human beings. That conviction underpins his politics, and has made him both an object of admiration and a target for skepticism. For those who may not be familiar with O’Malley, who is sure to shake up the Democratic field, here’s a primer on this progressive politician.

1. He’s been a hotshot in politics for a long time.

Esquire named him “The Best Young Mayor in the Country” in 2002, and three years later, Time called him one of America’s “Top 5 Big City Mayors.” That same year, BusinessWeek said he, along with Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel, was one of five new stars of the Democratic Party.

2. He’s not Tommy Carcetti.

Tommy Carcetti, the fictional Baltimore councilman who eventually becomes mayor and then governor in the iconic show The Wire, might be how many people outside Maryland first heard of Martin O’Malley. While there are some parallels — most notably when it comes to O’Malley’s record on crime — many elements of Carcetti are very clearly fictional, and have even contributed to negative rumors during O’Malley’s first campaign for governor.

3. He’s had national ambitions for a long time.

Back in 2007, just a couple of months into his tenure as governor, his bigger aspirations were spelled out in a Washington Post piece: “It’s the worst-kept secret in Maryland that the governor has national ambitions,” said House Minority Leader Anthony J. O’Donnell, while Senate president Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. said, “I think it comes into play in everything he does, quite frankly. He’s very much like Bill Clinton in being slow and deliberative and calculating in everything he does.”

Even 10 years earlier, when he was a city councilman, there was speculation about what he would do next.

4. He’s a longtime supporter of the Clintons. He’s even jammed with them.

A proud Irish-Catholic (he graduated from Catholic University), he spent many years performing in a Celtic rock band as an extracurricular activity outside his government work. He played guitar on a presidential delegation returning from Northern Ireland in 2000, which cemented his relationship with the Clintons (Bill being a musician himself). In fact, in an interesting twist, he was one of the first to endorse Hillary Clinton in 2008.

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5. He’s against the death penalty.

Right after taking office as governor, he testified to the Maryland legislature that the death penalty is “inherently unjust” and an affront to “individual human dignity,” although most of his arguments were pragmatic, rather than moral, in nature.

He told Rachel Maddow in 2009, “Time will prove that the death penalty is inconsistent with sound policy. It’s expensive. It does not work. It is not a deterrent. It takes money away from things that do save lives. …I believe it’s fundamentally at odds with some of the most important founding principles of this republic, namely our belief in the dignity of every individual.”

During his tenure, Maryland repealed the death penalty.

6. Although he’s a devout Catholic, he’s deviated from some fundamental Catholic positions, like on abortion and homosexuality.

This has angered some Catholics, with one calling on him to either renounce his faith and leave the Church or call himself “a dissenting Catholic” and abstain from communion.

Yet O’Malley doesn’t see any contradictions in his beliefs: “I found that the passage of marriage equality actually squares with the most important social teachings of my faith, which is to believe in the dignity of every person, and to believe in our own responsibility to advance the common good. Part of that advancement means changing laws when they are unjust, when they are not applied equally to all people,” he told The Des Moines Register.

7. He passed the DREAM Act. 

O’Malley has long been a supporter of immigrant rights, and he has referred to undocumented immigrants as “new Americans.”

In 2011, he signed legislation that let Maryland residents get in-state tuition regardless of their immigration status, as long as they met certain requirements. Despite a Republican-led state referendum on the issue, residents approved the DREAM Act that O’Malley championed.

“By speaking in humanitarian terms, O’Malley is helping to reframe the discussion, and forcing fellow Democrats to clarify their positions,” wrote John Nichols in The Nation.

“We are not a country that should send children away and send them back to certain death,” O’Malley said at a 2014 National Governors Association meeting in Nashville. “I believe that we should be guided by the greatest power we have as a people, and that is the power of our principles. Through all of our great world religions, we are told that hospitality to strangers is an essential human dignity.”

Photo: A guitar-playing, devout Irish Catholic who is favor of abortion and gay marriage, abolishing the death penalty, and passed the DREAM Act. Meet Martin O’Malley. Gregory Hauenstein via Flickr

It’s ‘Very Obvious’ That Bobby Jindal Will Run For President, And Even More Obvious That He Will Lose

It’s ‘Very Obvious’ That Bobby Jindal Will Run For President, And Even More Obvious That He Will Lose

The 2016 presidential election is still a political lifetime away, but according to Senator David Vitter (R-LA), there is already at least one candidate running.

During a Sunday appearance on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers, Senator Vitter said it is “very obvious” that Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will run for president in 2016. Vitter declined, however, to endorse his fellow Louisana Republican.

“I like Bobby, I respect his leadership, I agree with all of his political values. But I haven’t thought about what I would do or wouldn’t do personally” Vitter said. “I do think he’ll run. I think he’s been running. And I think he’ll be a meaningful and significant candidate.”

When asked whether he thinks Jindal wants to be president, Vitter quickly responded, “Oh yeah. I think that’s very obvious to everybody who has been paying attention.”

Jindal has spent the past year acting like someone planning a presidential campaign; although he has deflected questions about his White House ambitions, he has taken several trips to the early caucus state of Iowa, and eagerly courted the national media with his various plans to improve the Republican Party’s image. Most memorably, he responded to Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election with an attention-grabbing (but substantively empty) directive to his colleagues to stop being “the stupid party.”

There is one major barrier blocking Jindal’s presidential ambitions: Pretty much everybody hates the job that he’s done as governor. Although Louisianans initially supported the 42-year-old Baton Rouge native — he cruised to re-election in 2011 with 66 percent of the vote — his approval rating took a deep dive in 2013 as his economic plans took root. Voters strongly disapprove of his budget cuts, his emphasis on privatizing state-run public hospitals, and especially his plan to eliminate state income taxes while increasing sales taxes, which would amount to a tax cut for the top 1 percent of Louisianans, while raising rates for the bottom 80 percent of the state. By August, Jindal’s approval rating had fallen to just 28 percent in a Public Policy Polling survey, making him the least popular governor in America according to the liberal pollster. As it turns out, even Republicans aren’t particularly fond of Tea Party government in practice.

There are other reasons to doubt Jindal’s prospects in a national campaign; his career has been marked by a series of odd controversies (including a supposedly cancer-curing exorcism), and his rhetorical skills leave much to be desired (generally presidential candidates would hope to avoid comparisons with Kenneth the page).

Recent surveys have shown his numbers inching upwards — a November Southern Media & Opinion Research poll found him at an improved, but still weak 42 percent — but there is pretty much no data suggesting that the Republican Party is about to catch Jindal fever. According to a December 18 PPP poll, just 3 percent of Republicans want Jindal to be their presidential nominee, placing him last among the nine candidates included in the poll.

So unfortunately for Democrats, even if Vitter is right and Jindal does run, the Louisiana governor is probably not going to be the Republican presidential nominee. And given that Vitter notoriously despises his Pelican State colleague, and rarely misses an opportunity to take a passive-aggressive swipe at him, there’s a good chance that the senator knows it too.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons