“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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Paul Krugman: Remembrance of Booms Past

If Hillary Clinton wins in November, Bill Clinton will occupy a doubly unique role in U.S. political history — not just as the first First Husband, but also as the first First Spouse who used to be president. Obviously he won’t spend his time baking cookies. So what will he do?

Last week Mrs. Clinton stirred up a flurry of comments by suggesting that Mr. Clinton would be “in charge of revitalizing the economy.” You can see why she might want to say that, since people still remember the good times that prevailed when he was in office. How his role might be defined in practice is much less clear. [..]

First of all, it really was a very impressive boom, and in a way it’s odd that Democrats don’t talk about it more. After all, Republicans constantly invoke the miracles of Saint Reagan to justify their faith in supply-side economics. Yet the Clinton-era expansion surpassed the Reagan economy in every dimension. Mr. Clinton not only presided over more job creation and faster economic growth, his time in office was also marked by something notably lacking in the Reagan era: a significant rise in the real wages of ordinary workers.

But why was the Clinton economy so good? It wasn’t because Mr. Clinton had a magic touch, although he did do a good job of responding to crises. Mostly, he had the good luck to hold office when good things were happening for reasons unrelated to politics.

Robert Kuttner: The Libertarian Party Could Provide Insurance for Hillary Clinton

Two former Republican governors are running for president and vice president on the Libertarian line. They are Gary Johnson, former New Mexico governor, and William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts. The Libertarian Party holds its nominating convention in Orlando, Florida, over Memorial Day weekend.

The Libertarian Party could play the spoiler role in 2016 for Donald Trump, just as Ralph Nader did in 2000, but this time helping to tip the election to the Democrat. [..]

Unlike the typical third party candidates, Johnson and Weld are experienced mainstream politicians. Johnson, a former construction company entrepreneur, served two terms from 1994 to 2002, winning both elections by ten points. Weld was a highly popular and moderate governor of the Bay State. He won re-election by the largest margin in state history in 1994.

Polls are notoriously unreliable on third-party campaigns, especially this early in an election year, when low name recognition understates appeal. But it looks as if the Libertarians could easily take 5 to 10 percent of the total vote and more in key states. Almost all of this will come at the expense of Donald Trump.

Joe Cirincione: Why the Right Wing Is Angry That We Blocked War With Iran

Neoconservatives are furious that their efforts to trick the country into another unnecessary war in the Middle East failed.

They spent tens of millions of dollars in an orchestrated campaign to kill diplomacy with Iran. They lost. The nuclear agreement with Iran is in place and working. It has prevented an Iranian bomb and prevented a new war.

They can’t stand it. Over the past few weeks they have launched a wave of attacks on those they hold responsible for thwarting their plans: the Obama Administration, independent experts and advocates, and the hated “liberal media.”

It is logical for opponents of the nuclear agreement with Iran to want to see their failure as the result of evil spin masters. Many of them supported the invasion of Iraq. Many were part of the campaign to generate support for that war. Opponents of the Iran agreement may assume that the Obama Administration copied the Bush playbook. Or the “White Propaganda” operations used by the Reagan administration’s Office of Public Diplomacy to sell support for the wars in Central America in the 1980’s.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.: Fighting phony ‘populism’

From the coverage of the 2016 campaign over the past six months, you would think that American workers battered by economic change have finally won their moment in the political sun.

After all, Donald Trump is said to be the paladin of white, blue-collar men, and Bernie Sanders speaks unabashedly about the working class, a term many have (wrongly) written off as an antique concept out of 1930s black-and-white movies.

But media interest in policy initiatives that would benefit those who are struggling is scarce. It’s far more interesting, apparently, to cover the latest poll about an election that’s still a long way off, or to wax eloquent about a kerfuffle at a Democratic state convention in Nevada.

We had an objective test of this last week when the Obama administration announced much-needed new rules on overtime pay.

One of the insidious trends costing workers a lot of income has been the fake reclassification of even relatively low-paid employees as “managers,” which deprived them of overtime pay.

Heather Digby Parton: Win or lose, the damage is done: The party of Lincoln is officially the party of Trump

This past weekend had some bad news and some good news for the Democrats. The bad news is the race has tightened substantially since the last of Donald Trump’s  competitors dropped out and he became the presumptive nominee. The latest ABC/ Washington Post poll shows Trump in the lead with 46% to Clinton’s 44%, an 11 point shift toward Trump since March. Other polls show similar movement toward the GOP nominee. The good news, however, is that among attributes people usually associate with leaders, particularly presidents, attributes like temperament, knowledge, experience, personality Clinton gets much higher marks. Unfortunately at this moment in time more Americans would prefer to have an unstable, know-nothing demagogue for president than one who they believe is more capable and qualified. I’m not sure what that says about our country but it says something important about the Republican Party.

This polling should not be overstated. Trump is getting a standard bump from winding up the primary as Republican partisans, tired from the battle, accept the outcome. Clinton is still in a hard-fought contest with Bernie Sanders who at this point is planning to contest all the way through the convention. That plan may change after the primaries are finished but in the meantime the poll results probably show a weaker front-runner than if she were alone in the race. [..]

At this point, it doesn’t matter if Trump wins or loses the election as far as the future of the GOP is concerned. Most of the leadership and the voters are on board  — they own him and he owns them. The party of Lincoln is now officially the party of … Donald Trump.