Politics: All the Latest Headlines from Real Clear Politics

Go Ahead, Play the Woman Card
Jill Filipovic, New York Times
FOR all his purported business acumen, it seems the woman card may not be as valuable as Donald J. Trump thinks: In Maryland on Tuesday, Representative Chris Van Hollen beat Representative Donna Edwards in the Democratic primary race for the Senate seat to be vacated by Barbara Mikulski. In her concession speech, Ms. Edwards railed against the hypocrisy of a party that relies on black female votes but has sent only one black woman to the Senate. “What I want to know from my Democratic Party is, when will the voices of people of color, when will the voices of women, when will the voices…

How Donald Trump Beats Hillary Clinton
Michael Walsh, New York Post
Absent an alien invasion, the zombie apocalypse or the sudden re-annexation of California by Mexico, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president. It’s time to move on to the real question: Can he beat Hillary Clinton? You’re darn right he can. This runs contrary to conventional wisdom, of course. Then again, conventional wisdom also said (a) that he wouldn’t run, (b) that establishment candidates like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Rick Perry would crush him in the primaries and (c) that the Republican electorate would never accept a social liberal who donates…

Will Romney, Ryan & Haley Save Republicans in Cleveland?
Hugh Hewitt, Examiner
The previous installments in the Brokering a convention series can be found here.Cleveland’s Terminal Tower was still beaming off the display of red, white and blue Rock & Roll Convention of an elephant-opposite-a-guitar logo as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan seated themselves in the studios of Lake Effect Media on the 40th floor of Cleveland’s landmark property, next to a third, still empty chair. Their surprise and still somewhat-surprised guest sat off set, in a green room closed to media and waiting for the call to the set. America Rising CEO…

How Democrats Became the Party of Rich Elites
Thomas Frank, In These Times
The Democratic Party was once the party of the New Deal and the ally of organized labor. But by the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it had become the enemy of New Deal programs like welfare and Social Security and the champion of free trade deals. What explains this apparent reversal? Thomas Frank—best known for his analysis of the Republican Party base in What’s the Matter with Kansas?—attempts to answer this question in his latest book, Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine
As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by…

Obama’s Economy Is Bad; Clinton’s Would Be Worse
Reince Priebus, RealClearPolitics
On Thursday we learned the American economy expanded at an anemic rate of just 0.5 percent in the first three months of the year. It was the worst showing in two years and the third straight quarterly decline in economic growth. The millions of Americans who continue to struggle in the Obama economy have been held hostage by this persistently weak growth. In fact, not only is the so-called “recovery” the weakest since the 1930s, Obama is on pace to become the first U.S. president in history to have never presided over a full year of growth averaging at least 3 percent. Add in the…

U.S. Decline Is Campaign Hype, Not Reality
Albert Hunt, Bloomberg
As in any U.S. national election without an incumbent president, the candidates are painting a not very pretty picture: The country is “going to hell,” bluntly asserts the Republican front-runner Donald Trump. The Democratic challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders, isn’t much kinder and even Hillary Clinton is starting to focus more on challenges than successes.

What Trump Must Do If He Wants to Win
Salena Zito, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
As the crow flies, the distance from this former industrial town hugging the Ohio border to Indiana, site of this week’s presidential primary contest, is just over 250 miles. That’s about the number of delegates that Donald Trump needs to win the Republican nomination on the first ballot. After the primary bloodbath in Pennsylvania last Tuesday, Indiana isn’t even a must-win for Trump. Barring a meteor slamming into planet Earth, he will be the nominee.

Cruz’s Support Fades as Key Vote in Indiana Looms
Jeremy Peters, New York Times
Even as Donald J. Trump trounced him from New Hampshire to Florida to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz could reassure himself with one crucial advantage: He was beating Mr. Trump in the obscure, internecine delegate fights that could end up deciding the Republican nomination for president. “This is how elections are won in America,” Mr. Cruz gloated after walking away with the most delegates in Wyoming last month.

How the Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts Middle East
Robin Wright, The New Yorker
In the Middle East, few men are pilloried these days as much as Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes, a British diplomat, travelled the same turf as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), served in the Boer War, inherited a baronetcy, and won a Conservative seat in Parliament. He died young, at thirty-nine, during the 1919 flu epidemic. Picot was a French lawyer and diplomat who led a long but obscure life, mainly in backwater posts, until his death, in 1950. But the two men live on in the secret agreement they were assigned to draft, during the First World War, to divide the Ottoman…

Does Erdogan Want His Own Islamic State?
Mustafa Akyol, Al-Monitor
Parliament Speaker Ismail Kahraman unexpectedly sparked controversy in Turkey when on April 25 he declared that Turkey’s new constitution should forgo mention of “secularism” and instead be a “religious constitution” referencing God. His words reignited Turkey’s always tense “secularism debate,” which has been amplified since 2002 when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power. Kahraman’s remarks led to protests in a number of cities, a call by the main opposition leader for him to resign and allegations by secular pundits that the…

Curt Schilling–After the Tweets
Marion Dreyfus, American Thinker
We’re here to listen to Curt Schilling in his first interview since being cashiered from sport-TV titan ESPN. Curtis Montague Schilling, long loved as a former Major League BoSox rightie pitcher and a baseball color analyst for ESPN, universally known as “Curt”, is also a former video game developer, and sometime entrepreneur.

Barack Obama, Comedian in Chief
Dean Obeidallah, The Atlantic
No U.S. President has been a better comedian than Barack Obama. It’s really that simple. Now that doesn’t mean that some modern-day presidents couldn’t tell a joke. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton excelled at it. But Obama has transformed the way presidents use comedy—not just engaging in self-deprecation or playfully teasing his rivals, but turning his barbed wit on his opponents.

President Obama’s Lame Duck Economy
Kevin Williamson, National Review
On the matter of Barack Obama and the performance of the U.S. economy, the aptest metaphor is anatine: We aren’t swimming in gold like Scrooge McDuck, and we haven’t blasted the beak off our face with a shotgun like Daffy Duck, but instead limp along like what the president is: a lame duck. Spare me the technicalities about how President Obama isn’t officially a lame duck until after the election; we aren’t officially in recession, either, but 0.5 percent annualized growth — the most recent figure — is close enough.

GQ’s Condescending Melania Trump Profile Goes Too Far
Howard Kurtz, FOX News
It only takes until the second paragraph of GQ’s profile of Melania Trump for the condescending tone to break through. The Donald’s wife, at their wedding, wore “a $100,000 Dior dress that laborers’ hands had toiled upon for a legendary 550 hours, affixing 1,500 crystals.” Message: She’s a wealthy trophy wife who shies away from politics and doesn’t have much to say. A good mom, but not much more. Take this blind quote from a supposed friend: “She’s smart for the things she’s interested in, like jewelry. She’s not stupid,…

Why I Blame TV for Trump
Campbell Brown, Politico
My friends in the TV news business are in a state of despair about Donald Trump, even as their bosses in the boardroom are giddy over what he’s doing for their once sagging ratings. “It feels like it’s over,” one old friend from my television days told me recently. Any hope of practicing real journalism on TV is really, finally finished. “Look, we’ve always done a lot of stupid shit to get ratings. But now it’s like we’ve just given up and literally handed over control hoping he’ll save us. It’s pathetic, and I feel like hell.”…

For Pence and Others, It’s Not Resignation; It’s Fear
Noah Rothman, Commentary
Finally, after nearly a week of public pressure on Indiana Governor Mike Pence to publicly endorse Ted Cruz ahead of his state’s critical primary, the Hoosier State governor appeared to buckle under. In an unmistakably meek and tepid manner, the Indiana governor went to great lengths so that no one could call his expression of support for the beleaguered Texas senator “full-throated.” Prior to his almost apologetic confession that he would be voting for Ted Cruz, Pence expressed great admiration for Donald Trump. The Indiana governor commended the reality television star for…

Clintonism Screwed the Democratic Party
Paul Rosenberg, Salon
Hillary Clinton today promotes herself as a “reformer with results,” and she’s relied on a widespread impression that she and Bernie Sanders aren’t really that far apart on major issues. After the last round of primaries in the Northeast, she expressed it again: “Because whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there’s much more that unites us than divides us. We all agree that wages are too low and inequality is too high, that Wall Street can never again be allowed to threaten Main Street, and we should expand Social Security, not cut or…

Clinton’s Key: Here Come the Swing Voters
Will Marshall, The Daily Beast
The nominating contest grinds on, but the Acela primary set the stage for a general election faceoff between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Trump’s solid majorities mean that GOP voters, in their inscrutable wisdom, have spoken, choosing a political neophyte who’s never held any public office, has no discernable governing philosophy, and whose campaign consists mainly of bigoted outbursts and vicious personal attacks on anyone who gets in his way.

How Republican Leaders Made Their Peace With Trump
Byron York, DC Examiner
With Donald Trump heading toward what more and more Republicans believe will be victory in the GOP primaries, an increasing number of party figures â?? none fans of Trump originally â?? are making their peace with the idea of Trump as their nominee. Some are even working out an argument, at least in their own minds, that Trump has a plausible chance to defeat Hillary Clinton in a general election.There have been brief establishment flirtations with Trump in the past. But those flirtations ended when Trump said something outrageous or the campaign took some (brief) anti-Trump turn, most…

How to Measure Prosperity

Although Flawed, Kasich, Clinton Offer Best Choices

Rescue the Supreme Court From Limbo

The Climate Police Escalate

25,060 Lawyers Cost Taxpayers $26.2 Billion Since 2007
Adam Andrzejewski, Forbes
New counts show the number of federal lawyers now exceed the individual public payrolls of twelve states or the top seven largest private law firms in the USA – combined. It’s Uncle Sam, Esq. This week, we released our OpenTheBooks.com Snapshot Oversight Report – Lawyered Up, Federal Spending on General Attorneys from FY2007-FY2014. We mapped an army of lawyers larger than a combat division. Yet, in a sense, the lawyers have more firepower. As Mario Puzo cautioned in The Godfather, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

At Yale, a Right That Doesn’t Outweigh a Wrong
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, NY Times
Yale made a grievous mistake this week when it announced that it would keep the name of an avowed white supremacist, John C. Calhoun, on a residential college, despite decades of vigorous alumni and student protests. The decision to name residential colleges for Benjamin Franklin and Anna Pauline Murray, a black civil rights activist, does nothing to redeem this wrong.

Melissa Click (Accidentally) Outed the Campus-PC Gestapo
Carrie Lukas, NY Post
Melissa Click may not know it, but since being fired by the University of Missouri she’s already taken up another important role: unintentional destroyer of college campuses’ PC edifice. Americans first met Assistant Professor Click in video clips taken last year during the campus protests roiling Mizzou. In one, Click called for some “muscle” to remove a journalist attempting to cover the protest. Another showed Click cursing at police officers.