“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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New York Times Editorial Board: The Donald Trump Pygmalion Project
Tuesday’s primaries in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware and Rhode Island could bring Donald Trump close to securing the delegates he needs to win the Republican presidential nomination, though probably not all the way there. After a series of missteps, he seems to realize that he needs to improve the style and substance of his campaign among both Republicans who resist him and the electorate at large.
That’s why Mr. Trump has hired a Henry Higgins to work on his comportment. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s new campaign chief and an old-guard Republican strategist, has eclipsed the abrasive Corey Lewandowski and his nonnegotiable “Let Trump Be Trump” approach. Mr. Manafort’s ambition is to turn this Eliza Doolittle into a candidate more acceptable to decent society, in time for the general election. [..]
Mr. Trump knows that to do well in Tuesday’s primaries he still needs those “motivated voters” who want him to say what other politicians won’t. Yet the Trump on the stump is the true man. However copiously applied, cosmetics cannot obscure his brutish agenda, nor the narcissism, capriciousness and most of all, the inexperience paired with intellectual laziness that would make him a disastrous president.
Dean Baker: Scamming the Country’s Veterans: Efforts to Privatize VA Health System
There are few areas where there is more bipartisan support than the need to provide adequate health care for the country’s veterans. While many of us opposed the war in Iraq and other recent military adventures, we still recognize the need to provide medical services for the people who put their lives at risk.
This is why it is especially annoying to see right-wing groups invent scandals around the Veteran Administration’s hospitals in order to advance an agenda of privatizing the system. If there was a real reason to believe that the current system is badly hurting our veterans, and that they would be better cared for under a privatized system, then it would be reasonable to support the transition.
But this is the opposite of the reality. All the evidence suggests that a privatized system would make worse any problems veterans now face in getting care — and it is likely to cost more money.
Richard North Patterson: The GOP’s Eve Of Destruction
The set up is a novelist’s dream, a party chair’s nightmare — a mortally wounded presidential candidate reeling toward the nomination, guaranteed in November to drag the party and its candidates into an open grave. And this nightmare has a sequel: maddened by defeat, the party’s factions scrape against each other to create a devastating political earthquake, shattering all hope of resurrection.
Such is the all too real world of Reince Priebus.
The protagonist of his sleepless nights is, of course, Donald Trump. By now, one need not catalog the ignorance, truculence, misogyny and racism which will doom Republicans in the fall. But these fatal flaws have given Trump a base of support among primary voters as obdurate as granite. He has become the bone in the GOP’s throat which cannot be dislodged.
Lucia Graves: Bernie Sanders is right: poor people don’t vote and it’s a problem
Bernie Sanders said something he wasn’t supposed to say: that poor people don’t vote. Although it’s true that voter turnout is inversely correlated with income, all anyone wanted to comment on was that Sanders looked defensive and deflated on Meet the Press, where he made the statement on Sunday. Lost was the fact that this is a truth we should be struck by, ashamed of even, and should do more about. [..]
He said: “Poor people don’t vote. I mean, that’s just a fact. That’s a sad reality of American society”. He also noted that “80% of poor people did not vote” in the 2014 election.
On the airwaves he was chided for acting like an analyst rather than a candidate and for bringing his campaign down to reality in all the wrong ways. Fact-checkers immediately aimed to set the record straight only to discover that Sanders claim was “mostly true” or even, looked at comprehensively, totally correct.
What Politifact found was this: “In 2014, about 75% of people who made under $10,000 and about 69% of those who made under $30,000 didn’t vote. If we look at financial insecurity, however, Sanders is right on the money.”
Jeb Lund: Ted Cruz and John Kasich’s plan to stop Trump is months too late – and hypocritical
In nearly simultaneous statements Sunday night, Ted Cruz and John Kasich announced plans to coordinate their campaigns to play to each other’s regional strengths and, hopefully, deny Donald Trump enough delegates to become a first-ballot nominee.
This bold plan takes us from a status quo where Trump might reach the 1,237 delegates required to become the Republican party nominee, with his opponents mathematically eliminated, to one in which Trump might reach the 1,237 delegates required, with his opponents still mathematically eliminated. The most Cruz and Kasich’s plan can do is wreck the Republican party.
The GOP reflexively blames Washington gridlock and electoral failure on co-opted candidates and the perversions of the political process thwarting the will of the people. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has spent the last two weeks successfully castigating the Republican delegate process as a rigged game. His opponents’ brightest idea was to jointly announce their plans to rig it even more.
That is a kind of plan. Then again, so is burning down your house to collect the insurance money.
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