The Weekly Sift

After South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley gave the official Republican response to the State of the Union address, the media focused all its attention on the anti-Trump implications of her call to “resist [the] temptation” to “follow the angriest voices”, particularly where immigration was concerned.

But I was more interested in where she went from there: If the GOP is going to be more than just a megaphone for anger and fear, it needs to present a positive vision for America’s future. In other words, it needs to compete for the hope-and-change vote that Barack Obama monopolized in his 2008 landslide. So Haley laid out this hopeful program for the next Republican presidency, which I quote in full:

If we held the White House, taxes would be lower for working families, and we’d put the brakes on runaway spending and debt.

We would encourage American innovation and success instead of demonizing them, so our economy would truly soar and good jobs would be available across our country.

We would reform education so it worked best for students, parents, and teachers, not Washington bureaucrats and union bosses.

We would end a disastrous health care program, and replace it with reforms that lowered costs and actually let you keep your doctor.

We would respect differences in modern families, but we would also insist on respect for religious liberty as a cornerstone of our democracy.

We would recognize the importance of the separation of powers and honor the Constitution in its entirety. And yes, that includes the Second and Tenth Amendments.

We would make international agreements that were celebrated in Israel and protested in Iran, not the other way around.

And rather than just thanking our brave men and women in uniform, we would actually strengthen our military, so both our friends and our enemies would know that America seeks peace, but when we fight wars we win them.

Growth, jobs, education, better health insurance, liberty, the rule of law, stronger diplomacy, and seeking peace but winning wars when we’re forced to fight them — what’s not to like? That’s a far more attractive vision than the Great Wall of Mexico, or invading ISIS’ godforsaken desert, or bombing Iran, or watching a special police force round up and expel 11 million Hispanic immigrants.

My only argument with Haley (other than the issues she leaves out completely, like climate change, voting rights, the environment, racial justice, and so on) concerns the Republican policies that are supposed to produce these wonderful outcomes. And that’s why I think her litany needs some line-by-line annotation. Let’s start at the top:

If we held the White House, taxes would be lower for working families,

Maybe. But the tax cuts proposed by all Republican candidates focus their benefits on the rich. As was true of the Bush and Reagan tax cuts, anything working families get is just shiny wrapping on a package addressed to the wealthy.

Typically Republicans deny that their tax cuts will explode the deficit, but they always do, and then the next step is to seek cuts in programs working families count on, like Social Security and Medicare. (That small tax cut you get will be eaten up pretty quickly if you have to support your aging parents.) The following chart is from 2012, so the right side is a little out of date, but the general point is still valid.

No party could openly propose: “Let’s slash rich people’s taxes and make up the difference by cutting Social Security and Medicare.” But that is the Republican agenda. They will pass it by breaking it in two: First pass huge tax cuts that mainly benefit the rich, and then treat the resulting deficit as an emergency no one could have foreseen. Working people will have to “sacrifice” their Social Security and Medicare benefits to deal with the “emergency” created by the tax cuts.

and we’d put the brakes on runaway spending

As this chart from the libertarian Cato Institute shows, federal spending has been fairly level during the Obama administration, after increasing sharply under Bush.

and debt.

Republican candidates do propose cutting spending on things like food stamps, but after accounting for increased defense spending, the net spending cut is typically far smaller than the tax cut. So the deficit is likely to jump sharply during a Republican administration (after falling under Obama), as it did when Reagan and Bush cut taxes.

We would encourage American innovation and success instead of demonizing them,

Listening to Haley, you might imagine Democrats spouting absurdities like, “Damn that iPhone!” or “What good is this Internet fad anyway?” — which we never do. Her statement only contacts reality after you realize that innovation and success is a euphemism for billionaires. Democrats haven’t “demonized” billionaires, but we have been (correctly) pointing out that billionaires soak up just about all of America’s economic growth, leaving little for anyone else.

so our economy would truly soar and good jobs would be available across our country.

The theory that making the rich richer will produce growth and good jobs for everyone is known as trickle-down economics. In the history of humankind it has never worked, for a simple reason: When the poor and middle class have more money, they buy things that somebody needs to produce, creating new jobs and industries. But when the rich have more money, they bid up the prices of limited goods like stocks, Van Gogh paintings, and beachfront property, inflating speculative bubbles that eventually pop and damage the economy the rest of us depend on.

We would reform education so it worked best for students, parents, and teachers, not Washington bureaucrats and union bosses.

No one has gone after teachers’ unions harder than Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. The benefits of this to students and parents are virtually invisible, and teachers are undeniably worse off. Sam Brownback’s Kansas exemplifies another Republican approach to education: When his tax cuts for the wealthy didn’t produce the economic boom he promised (because trickle-down economics doesn’t work), he made up the deficit by cutting money for public schools.

But Republican education reform would definitely benefit one group: corporations who want a bigger chunk of the education market.

We would end a disastrous health care program, and replace it with reforms that lowered costs and actually let you keep your doctor.

The “disaster” of ObamaCare continues to exist mainly in the conservative fantasy world. In reality, the percentage of American adults without health insurance has dropped from 16% when Obama took office to under 9% today, is still dropping, and would have dropped much more if Republican governors hadn’t refused to expand Medicaid. Predictions that ObamaCare would “kill jobs” have not proven out.

The Republican replacement for ObamaCare is also a fantasy. Six years after the Affordable Care Act became law, Republicans have still not agreed on an alternative, and no GOP presidential candidate has anything more than the barest sketch of a plan. Any claims about what such “reform” would do are meaningless until enough details get specified that outside experts can analyze the program’s costs and individual families can tell whether or not they’re covered. Those details are still a long way off, and may never arrive.

We would respect differences in modern families,

Would they? I think the vagueness of this claim speaks for itself. No Republican candidate will openly say, “I respect gay or lesbian couples who get married and raise children” or “I respect transgender Americans.” Large parts of the Republican base would be offended if a candidate said, “I respect blacks and whites intermarrying.”

but we would also insist on respect for religious liberty as a cornerstone of our democracy.

Americans’ freedom to worship the deity of their choice has not changed during the Obama years. But in conservative rhetoric, religious liberty has expanded well beyond any previous meaning, to become code for conservative Christians controlling the behavior of others. No one has been able to explain how this expanded religious liberty can be granted to non-Christians, particularly atheists or Muslims, so the Constitution’s guarantee of “the equal protection of the laws” is out the window.

We would recognize the importance of the separation of powers and honor the Constitution in its entirety. And yes, that includes the Second and Tenth Amendments.

But what about the 14th Amendment? After Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices undo the recent decision legalizing same-sex marriage — as numerous candidates have promised — how will gays and lesbians receive the equal protection of the marriage laws? And conservative legal arguments against birthright citizenship — another guarantee of the plain language of the 14th Amendment — are far more convoluted than any alleged “judicial activism” of liberal judges.

It has also become common for Republicans to get misty-eyed talking about the sacred writ of the Constitution, and then demand drastic changes with their next breath.

We would make international agreements that were celebrated in Israel and protested in Iran, not the other way around.

When President Obama and Secretary Clinton got the world to agree to harsh sanctions on Iran — which forced them to bargain seriously about their nuclear program for the first time — I doubt the Iranians celebrated. And I can’t help wondering: who would these agreements Haley is talking about be with? Actual agreements require compromise. If you want to dictate terms to other countries, you have to defeat them in war first. Is that the plan?

And rather than just thanking our brave men and women in uniform, we would actually strengthen our military,

Actually she means instead of thanking our brave men and women in uniform. Republicans are good at starting wars, but not so good at taking care of the people who fight them.

so both our friends and our enemies would know that America seeks peace, but when we fight wars we win them.

The last Republican administration started two wars and won neither of them. And yet, the last eight years have seen no Republican soul-searching or new approaches to foreign policy. (The exception is Rand Paul, who has barely any support.) If a Republican wins the presidency in November, expect to see the Pentagon and State Department led by the same people who invaded Iraq and had no plan for what to do next.

In short, I would love to see the eventual Republican nominee run on a positive vision for America rather than on anger and fear. But it would be even more wonderful if the candidate offered proposals that stood some chance of achieving that vision. That’s something neither Haley nor any other Republican has yet attempted.

I started 2015 with clear expectations about how I’d cover the campaign. But by Fall, I had to back up and try to answer a more fundamental question than the ones I ‘d been addressing: WTF?

Back in January, I had it all laid out.

I figured that for the first half of the year I’d resist the temptation to speculate about who was and wasn’t running, whether Clinton and Bush were inevitable nominees or not, and what the earliest Iowa polls meant (because they probably didn’t mean anything). Presidential politics has a way of crowding out all other political thought, and I wasn’t going to play that game.

By summer, I’d be looking at the candidates one-by-one, and cutting through the media’s endless horse-race coverage to focus on where each one wanted to take the country. I figured I’d have to sort through all sorts of tax-and-budget schemes, education plans, environmental positions, programs for giving more or fewer undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, and so forth. I’d have to argue that both global warming and racism are real, tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, privatization doesn’t work, the market isn’t going to fix inequality by itself, and so on. Different faces, different specifics, but basically the same philosophical battle the country has been having for decades.

Instead, we’re talking about throwing 12 million people out of the country, and banning Muslims from coming here at all. We’re discussing what fascist means, and whether one of our front-runners qualifies. A sizable chunk of the country believes that Planned Parenthood has a lucrative business in harvesting fetal organs, and wants to shut down the government (or maybe start shooting people) to put a stop to it.

In short, things didn’t go the way I expected.

The divergence started simply enough: Large numbers of candidates got into the race so early that I had felt I had to start covering them at the end of March, when I wrote my introduction to the Republican primary process. Shortly afterwards, I started my 2016 Stump Speeches series, which was intended to focus on each candidate’s implicit or explicit answer to the question: “Where does America need to go and why am I the person to lead us there?”

In retrospect, that looks ridiculously naive.

Democrats. On the Democratic side, I sort of did what I intended. I confess to ignoring Martin O’Malley, even though I’ve seen him twice and he seems like a competent guy. But he never convinced me that he brought anything special to the race, in policy, in message, or in electability.

Chafee and Webb were gone before they caught my attention. Biden didn’t run. Lawrence Lessig tried to run, and his exclusion from the process is an interesting and disturbing story I’ll get around to telling eventually. That left Clinton and Sanders.

I covered Sanders’ announcement speech and a later speech he gave at the conservative Christian Liberty University. It was easy for me to like Bernie and his message, but less easy to imagine him leading the party to victory. I know the polls don’t detect that problem yet, but I find myself wondering what completely bogus issues the Republicans will be able to throw at him if they start seeing him as something more than just a tool to use against Hillary. (I lived through 1988, when Bush the First was able to completely dumbfound Mike Dukakis by making a serious issue out of the Pledge of Allegiance. You never forget an experience like that.) Coming from the relatively pristine political environment of Vermont, is Bernie ready for that? Can he keep his composure when he’s waist-deep in bullshit? I have serious doubts.

Hillary strongest argument, from my point of view, is that she has endured everything the GOP could throw at her for more than 20 years. (The all-day Benghazi hearing in October was a microcosm of their inability to beat her down.) But what did I think of her as a person and what could I believe about her as a president? Is better-than-a-Republican all I can say about her?

So I did my homework. I pulled three Clinton speeches into one article, and added the insight I got from reading three books by her and two about her. After spending that much time listening to her author’s voice, I kind of get Hillary now, in a way that I don’t think most of her critics on the left do. If God tasked me with picking our next president, I’m sure I could find somebody I liked better. But I’ve gotten to be OK with Hillary. I will probably vote for Bernie in the primary to send a message, but when Clinton is nominated — as I expect her to be — I’ll have no problem with that. Given that we live in a you-can’t-always-get-what-you-want world, Hillary will do fine.

Republicans. With the Republicans, though, my project broke down. I started out diligently analyzing the speeches and proposals of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, and even Ben Carson.

And then, suddenly, we were in the Year of Trump, and any hope of a sensible, substantive discussion on the Republican side went away. It wasn’t just Trump; it was also what everyone else thought they had to do to compete with him. There was a chunk of the electorate energized by Trump, and suddenly everyone had to try to reach it.

I characterized one Republican debate as “Three Hours in Bizarro World“, but basically all of them have been that way. Fact-checking them has been pointless, because the distortions, lies, and mis-statements of fact have not been isolated incidents that can be picked out and corrected. The Republican campaign is happening in a completely different reality from the one I live in.

The NYT’s Patrick Healy nailed something important:

One of the most striking takeaways from the first two Republican debates and Tuesday’s first Democratic debate is that the two parties do not just disagree on solutions to domestic and foreign policy issues — they do not even agree on what the issues are.

That’s the root cause of the country’s polarization: People who want to solve a problem can usually find a way to compromise their solutions. But you can’t compromise about whether something’s a problem or not. If one side is discussing climate change while the other is trying to decide how big a wall to build on the Mexican border, what’s the compromise?

Eventually, I stopped trying to explain that Ben Carson’s “tithe” tax plan wouldn’t work, or why Jeb Bush’s claims about his economic record in Florida don’t stand up to scrutiny. I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but by the Fall I was trying to answer a more fundamental question: What the fuck?

Instead of mapping out policy differences, I found myself describing the difference between hucksters (Trump) and crackpots (Carson). I looked at models of fascism, and discussed how the Trump campaign did or didn’t fit them. I tried to figure out what leadership means to me, and what kind of leader we should be looking for. I traced the history of freedom rhetoric, and why it so often runs counter to rights. And whether it qualifies as fascist or not, how the Trump electorate has been building for years, and is the logical culmination of Republican politics.

I end this political year with more humility. I thought I knew what it meant to cover a presidential campaign, and it turns out that this year I didn’t. It’s not about taxes or infrastructure or education or drone strikes any more. Maybe someday it will be again, but for now I’ve still haven’t gotten past “What the fuck?”

I think I’ll be working on that question for a considerable chunk of the year to come.

We’re still almost two months away from the Iowa caucuses, but it already seems like the 2016 presidential campaign has been going on forever. Pundits started speculating about it even before all the 2014 races were decided. And although I resisted that temptation as long as I could, I’ve been writing about it since the spring. So I think it’s time to take a step back and assess both how the campaign is going and how I’ve been doing at covering it.

Before I do that, though, I need to set up the proper expectations. I’ve been covering the campaign as a Democrat. (The claim I make is only that The Weekly Sift is honest, not that it’s unbiased or non-partisan.) So my coverage of the Democratic race centers on my own decision as a New Hampshire voter about who I’m going to support in the primary. Conversely, my coverage of the Republican race is sizing up the opposition:  Who are we likely to face in the general election? What forces are brewing in the Republican electorate, and how can we counter them?

With that distinction in mind, I’ll discuss each party individually.

Democrats. Clinton is now leading Sanders 60%-30% nationwide, according to Quinnippiac, up from 53%-35% a month ago. More and more, it looks like the Republicans sealed Clinton’s nomination at the Benghazi hearings.

The silver lining for Sanders is that he performs slightly better in head-to-head match-ups with Republicans: Clinton beats Trump (47%-41%) and Cruz (47%-42%) while Sanders’s leads are larger (49%-41% and 49%-39%).

I’m inclined to discount that Sanders advantage for a simple reason: The Republican attack machine that has been after the Clintons since 1992 hasn’t really taken aim at Sanders yet. So far, Republican anti-Sanders comments have been more-or-less generic attacks on a socialist running for president. They haven’t gone after him personally yet, and they haven’t started making up complete crap about him — which they will if he gets nominated.

If you think Bernie’s upright nature protects him from this, you’re kidding yourself. Anybody can be lied about. (Remember Kitty Dukakis burning the American flag? Or Michelle Obama’s “whitey” speech? George W. Bush — the guy who dodged Vietnam by using political pull to score a cushy stateside National Guard spot — managed to turn John Kerry’s war record against him.) Picture Sanders wanting to talk about the minimum wage or his infrastructure-building jobs plan, but instead having to fend off totally baseless questions about illegitimate children or male prostitutes. How hard would it be to get some Russian emigre to claim he was in the KGB in the 1980s, and Sanders was his agent? I doubt Bernie has the temperament to deal with that kind of stuff, while Hillary clearly does.

I can claim deep insight into exactly one New Hampshire Democrat — me. Here’s what I’ve been thinking: I agree with Sanders’ positions more than Hillary’s, but I think Hillary is the stronger general-election candidate for the reason I just gave: She comes pre-slimed, while we don’t know yet what a slimed Bernie looks like. That leads to this perverse logic: The more convinced I am that Clinton will be nominated, the likelier I am to vote for Sanders.

The scenario I worry about with Hillary is that she’ll make a strategic decision to move to the right for the general election. For example, she picks a red-state Democrat for VP — some white male who is NRA-acceptable, wants a more active war against ISIS, and repeats a lot of Republican talking points about “religious freedom” and “all lives matter” and so on. Not only would that bode ill for a Clinton administration, it’s also the only way I can see her losing — by depressing turnout among the young and non-white parts of the Obama coalition.

So while I want Clinton to be nominated, I also want her to know that the party has a left wing she can’t take for granted. I doubt Elizabeth Warren wants to be VP — I think she likes the job she has — but if not her, I want some other very solidly liberal VP like Sherrod Brown or Al Franken. I want Clinton to run to raise turnout, presenting a strong contrast with the GOP on climate change and guns and income inequality and racism. (Incidentally, raising turnout is also the best way to get the Senate back and narrow the gap in the House.) When the primary rolls around, the best way to send Clinton that message might be for me to vote for Bernie.

Republicans. According to CNN, Trump is solidly atop the Republican field with 36% and Ted Cruz is second at 16%. (Cruz’ showing represents a 12-point surge since the mid-October poll.) Pre-season favorite Jeb Bush is sixth at 3%.

It’s time to start reviewing some of the assertions I’ve made about the Republican field. The boldest one (from July) was that Trump isn’t running a serious campaign, because when the time came to put up real money — in November and December, I thought — he won’t do it.

That’s what happens when the crystal ball shows you a half-truth: Trump hasn’t been putting up serious money: The NBC News pie chart on the right shows him spending just $217,000 on TV ads, compared to Bush’s $28.9 million. (Here in New Hampshire, I still haven’t seen a Trump ad.) What I didn’t foresee was that money would be having so little impact this late in the campaign. Will Trump ever need to put up significant amounts of his own money? If that time arrives, will he do it? We still don’t know.

My comments about Chris Christie look a little better: After seeing a Christie town hall meeting in April, I predicted that his skill in that format would pay off in New Hampshire — maybe not enough to win the primary, but enough to do better than pundits were predicting at that time. That seems to be happening. A recent PPP poll has Christie rising into fourth place in NH with 10%, leading Carson (9%) and Bush (5%).

I discounted Rubio’s chances because he was everybody’s second choice, but didn’t clearly represent any of the GOP’s four factions. That was also in April, when I didn’t foresee that the leading Corporatist candidates (Bush and Walker) would run such terrible campaigns. Today, Rubio looks like the Corporatists’ only chance for an acceptable nominee.

Sticking with the four-faction (Corporatist, Theocrat, Libertarian, and NeoCon) analysis, the big news is in the Theocrat wing, where Huckabee and Santorum have failed to catch fire, and Cruz is starting to edge out Carson. The Libertarian wing of the party has proven to be a non-factor. (Early on, Rand Paul decided he had to transcend his Libertarian base if he was going to win the nomination, and no one has tried to pick it up from him. As a result, both Paul and the Libertarians are nowhere.) What nobody could have foreseen was Trump’s appeal to NeoCon voters: When there’s a terrorist attack, he surges. But Trump seems to be transcending the factions: He also gets considerable Theocrat support, despite having no religious credibility at all.

In March I wrote:

The hardest factor to predict is how well candidates will perform on the campaign trail. … I expect Cruz and Christie to perform well, and Jindal and Paul to perform badly. (Watch Paul’s interview with Rachel Maddow.) The big wild card is Bush, who has never campaigned for national office, or for anything at all since 2002.

Well, now we know about Bush: He’s an absolutely terrible campaigner and debater. All the money in the world can’t save him.

So my four-faction analysis has shrunk to three factions, and at the moment it produces Trump, Rubio, and Cruz as finalists. If you’re wondering why I focus so much on which Democrat can do better in the general election, just say “President Cruz” a few times and I think you’ll understand.

In the full sunlight of public attention, one very smart, very well prepared Democrat is more than a match for a roomful of Republicans who have been breathing the stale air inside the conservative news bubble.

Unlike so many of the stories that Republicans use to rally their base — Obama’s plot to persecute conservative political organizations through the IRS, Planned Parenthood’s attempt to make big money through the baby-body-parts market, or the conspiracy of the international scientific community to establish a world socialist government by trumping up a global warming crisis — the attack on the American outpost in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 really happened. Four Americans died, including our ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

It was a bad day for America. Not nearly as bad as, say, October 23, 1983, when a Marine barracks in Beirut was bombed, killing 299 American and French servicemen, but a bad day nonetheless.

In hindsight, a lot of people might have done something differently. For instance, Republicans in Congress might have funded the State Department’s security program at the level requested, rather than repeatedly cutting it. Or the State Department might have allocated more of that scarce funding to the Benghazi compound. Or, simplest of all, Ambassador Stevens might have chosen to spend the anniversary of 9-11 in a more secure location.

Hindsight is like that. You can always find something. What’s harder — but far more important — is to find actual lessons for keeping our diplomats safer in the future. That’s the legitimate point of having Congress investigate Benghazi.

As The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer observed a year-and-a-half ago, a good model for that investigation would have been the one the Democratically controlled House did in 1983: It respected the human tragedy of the Beirut bombing, didn’t use the lives of American servicemen as political poker chips, produced a genuinely bipartisan report, put rumors to rest rather than fanning them, and completed its job in a timely fashion rather than spawning second, third, and fourth House investigations that might have gone on for years. The bombing did not become a major issue to use against President Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign.

As we know, Republicans in Congress decided not to follow that model. Investigating Benghazi has turned into an industry and the investigation never ends. Depending on how you count, the House Select Committee chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy is maybe the ninth Benghazi investigation. Mayer’s article concluded:

If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home.

What went wrong with the previous eight investigations — from the Republican point of view — is that they didn’t decisively nail either President Obama or then-Secretary of State Clinton. They didn’t result in grounds for impeachment, or justify fantasies of putting Hillary in jail. They didn’t substantiate rumors of a rescue mission that was ready to roll until either Obama or Clinton pulled the plug and let our people die. They didn’t justify crowd-pleasing lines like Lindsey Graham’s, “Hillary Clinton got away with murder.”

For three years now, Republican politicians have been like the guy who tells his wife he’s working to launch a new business that will make them rich, when really he’s been spending his afternoons at the bar. (“Someday soon it’s all going to come together, honey, and then you’ll see.”) They’ve been telling their base that they have the goods on Secretary Clinton. They’ve been winking and nodding at every scurrilous rumor right-wing talk radio can manufacture, implying that when they finally get Hillary under oath, they’ll confront her with the hard evidence and expose her for the whole country to see.

Unfortunately, they missed the lesson that every tale-spinning husband should know: You never actually schedule that demonstration. The fantasy that your ship is coming in can’t survive if you circle a date on the calendar and invite all your friends and relatives down to the docks.

Well, Thursday the circled date on the calendar arrived. There was Hillary Clinton, under oath, on national TV, outnumbered, in a setting designed and controlled by the House Select Committee’s Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy. But for a one-hour lunch break, they kept her answering hostile questions from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

I’m sure the Republicans thought they had a chance. They had ten hours, and they only needed a ten-second lapse. If Clinton stumbled once, if she contradicted herself, if she looked guilty or flustered, if she lost her cool, if she had a Freudian slip … then Fox News would have its lead story and the eventual Republican nominee would have his attack ad. It would all be worth it.

What actually happened is pretty well summed up by the cartoon at the top of the page. (Hillary didn’t really say that line. In Watchmen, Rorschach says it to his fellow prison inmates.) The Republicans didn’t have Hillary where they wanted her, she had them. For 11 hours on national TV on multiple networks, she demonstrated her most presidential qualities: She’s smart, she knows her stuff, she’s unflappable, and she has amazing stamina. Not only did she defuse Benghazi and her email server as issues — if you’ve really got something on her, why couldn’t you produce it? — but she also shut down the argument that she’s too old to be president.

I mean, young Marco Rubio (currently the betting favorite to win the GOP nomination) couldn’t stay presidential for 15 minutes when he gave the Republicans’ State of the Union response in 2013. Josh Marshall had the same thought:

Seriously, can you imagine Marco Rubio in the same chair under the same sort of questioning? Not to mention Donald Trump or – God forbid – the increasingly Chauncey Gardner-esque Ben Carson?

Meanwhile, Chairman Gowdy came out shining with sweat and looking like he’d been through the mill. (I can sympathize. When I saw Clinton this summer inside an oven — I mean, a school gym — in Nashua, I came out soaked and she still looked fresh.)

In short, it was a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the Republicans, and they had nothing to put up.

I would compare Clinton’s testimony to the time in 2010 when President Obama submitted to a Q&A at the retreat of the House Republican Caucus. He ran rings around them that day, and so they never invited him back. Needing to conform to the bizarre fantasies popular among the conservative base is a severe disadvantage when Republicans venture into the view of the general public.

I’ll conclude with some short observations.

You need a comedian to cover the Benghazi hearing properly. Trevor Noah, say.

One way you can tell how an all-day spectacle like this is going is to check which news network cuts away first: that’s the side that thinks it’s losing. Liberal MSNBC stuck with Hillary’s testimony all the way to 9 p.m., while conservative Fox News abandoned ship in mid-afternoon. MSNBC’s Steve Benen sums up

that’s how awful yesterday’s hearing was for Republicans: even conservatives who desperately wanted it to go well for the right had to concede that the gambit was a failure.

As so often happens, right-wingers are annoyed that their people let them down (if you click that link, be sure to read the comments), but won’t consider the idea that there is no Benghazi scandal to ferret out. The clamor for yet another investigation is bound to start soon.

The Republican base views investigations like fortune cookies in a big box. They think that if they open enough of them, they’re bound to find one that says what they want.

I can’t find the link, but I recall TPM’s Josh Marshall complaining a month or two ago that Clinton-haters are so rabid and unfair in their attempts to bring Bill & Hillary down that he ends up rooting for the Clintons, even though he’d rather support more liberal candidates. That effect, combined with Hillary’s strong performance in the first debate, seems to be working.

Recently, Bernie Sanders held a lead in several New Hampshire polls and had even edged ahead in Iowa, but his advantage seems to have evaporated. Two new polls in Iowa show Clinton with a commanding lead. She has a smaller 38%-34% lead in a recent New Hampshire poll.

The articles on those polls attribute her bounce to the debate, but I imagine that the growing focus on the partisan nature of the Benghazi hearings has helped her too. I expect another bounce now that she has sailed through that grueling interrogation on national TV.

You might wonder why Clinton got the debate bounce when Sanders seemed to have all the good lines. I explain it like this: Clinton came into the campaign as the presumed nominee, much as an incumbent president would. In such cases, most voters make a two-part decision: First, a yes-or-no decision on the front-runner — am I satisfied with her or am I looking for an alternative? — and only if the first decision is negative do they proceed to a him-or-her decision between the presumptive nominee and a challenger.

To a lot of Democrats, Clinton looked good enough in the debate to win the first decision. After they said “I’m OK with her as the nominee”, Sanders’ performance really didn’t matter.

If the Benghazi hearings are working in her favor, I’d expect to see the effect most strongly among women, who would be quicker to identify with a woman being picked on unfairly, and especially with a woman who faces down her critics with poise and intelligence. The Quinnipiac poll in Iowa shows Clinton with a 59%-33% advantage with women, overcoming Sanders’ 51%-39% lead among men. We’ll see if that gap grows after the Benghazi hearings.

The Week‘s Paul Waldman sums up the most damning things we’ve discovered about Benghazi:

in May of last year, we learned of a memo that a White House communication official wrote at the time, encouraging staffers not to say Benghazi represented a failure of administration policy. In other words, a guy whose job it is to craft spin crafted some spin. … At another point in the hearing, a Republican congressman spent nearly 15 minutes aggressively interrogating Clinton over whether — brace yourself — her press secretary tried to make her look good to reporters.

The bait-and-switch pattern of Republican rhetoric has been the same from the beginning: They start out talking about four dead Americans and whether Obama/Clinton could have saved them. But when it comes time to detail what the administration might have done wrong, they focus on whether the post-attack talking points contained too much spin.

I want to hear a clear acknowledgment of this obvious fact: Nothing that could have been said on the next Sunday’s talk shows would have retroactively saved Ambassador Stevens. If we’re talking about talking points, we’re not talking about saving lives.

Maybe the most bizarre aspect of Thursday’s hearing was the repeated focus on Hillary’s communication with Sidney Blumenthal. It’s an example of one of those aspects of conservative discourse that has no liberal parallel: demonizing otherwise obscure people and then associating them with anybody else you want to bring down.

That’s what’s going on when conservatives talk about Saul Alinsky, for example, ignoring the fact that he died decades ago and his books go largely unread. (If your local library owns an Alinsky book — it may not — go look for it; I guarantee it won’t be checked out. Most of the Amazon reviews on Rules for Radicals are written by conservatives who think they’ve found the Rosetta Stone of the Obama presidency.) Bill Ayers is another one; if anybody can show me some major decision that turned on Bill Ayers’ opinion, I’d love to see it. Glenn Beck went so far as to put an octogenarian college professor most liberals have never heard of — Frances Fox Piven — at the center of the vast left-wing conspiracy. His web site did at least 24 stories about her in 2011-2012. If not for Beck, I still wouldn’t know who she is.

The dystopian fantasy of a hidden left-wing power structure (that will only be revealed after the Revolution) goes back to the McCarthy Red Scare, or maybe even further to ravings about the Illuminati or the Elders of Zion. Right-wing ideas like that never die.

Here’s the closest comparison I can find: Liberals demonize billionaires who contribute hundreds of millions to conservative causes — the Koch brothers, say — and we’ll connect you to them if you get lots of their money. That’s the best I can do.