Tuesday, February 9, 2016
New Hampshire primary 2016 live updates: Donald Trump's $8B wall, Hillary Clinton's paid speeches
Bernie Sanders are expected to win Tuesday's New Hampshire primary. The results, however they turn out, likely will prove fatal to some of the Republican contenders and could re-define the Democratic race. This post will update throughout the day with news, analysis, exit polls and results.
Update (2:35 p.m. PT): Donald Trump's beautiful wall
Donald Trump told MSNBC this morning that the wall he wants to build along the southern border with Mexico will cost $8 billion. He came up with that number through "a very simple calculation," he said.
"We need 1,000 [miles] because we have natural barriers [along the 2,000-mile border] and I'm taking it price-per-square-foot and a price-per-square-mile," he said, pointing out that his experience as a real-estate developer has made him very good at nailing down such cost estimates.
He said the wall will be 35-40 feet high and will have a "beautiful door" for immigrants who go through the process to gain legal entry to the U.S. He continues to insist the Mexican government will pay for the wall, suggesting he would use trade sanctions and the withdrawal of aid to get them to pony up.
Update (1:25 p.m. PT): Ivanka on the ground, Hillary on YouTube
Much has been made about Hillary Clinton giving paid speeches to Wall Street, with critics suggesting she is in the financial sector's pocket. (Clinton has said this is part of the Sanders campaign's "artistic smear" of her reputation.) Sanders has highlighted the fact that Clinton, then in the U.S. Senate, changed her vote on a bankruptcy bill back in 2001.
Clinton's response: she did indeed initially oppose the bill, at the time telling progressive heroine Elizabeth Warren, then a little-known Harvard professor, "Professor Warren, we've got to stop that awful bill." And then later she did indeed vote for it, because her support came with strings attached. She says her backing brought about the removal of a hated provision about child support "she said would hurt women and children."
"That's the way it happens (in the Senate) sometimes," she told CNN's Jake Tapper. "I didn't like the bill any more than I had liked it before. It still had very bad provisions. But I also pushed hard for a deal to protect women and children. So, okay. I held my nose, I voted for it. It never became law."
It's this kind of approach to politics -- Washington insiders call it pragmatic and intelligent; Washington outsiders call it selling out -- that makes progressive activists suspicious of Clinton, and Sanders has taken advantage of that suspicion.
A Sanders spokeswoman recently called for Clinton to release transcripts of her speeches to banking groups. Well ... at least one has surfaced on YouTube: Clinton giving a 2014 Goldman Sachs-hosted speech. It is undeniably innocuous, with Clinton's theme being women's critical role in the economy. "If we are talking about global economic growth ... there is no path forward that does not include women," she says in the speech.
Is it representative of all her speeches to big banks? Politico is reporting on a Goldman Sachs speech from a year earlier that was apparently much different. "It was pretty glowing about us," said an unnamed source who apparently works for Goldman Sachs. "It's so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director."
Donald Trump is expected to win the New Hampshire primary, and from there the sky might be the limit. Forty-two percent of registered Republicans now say the political novice will go on and win the nomination.
If he does become the GOP standard bearer, can he win the votes of women that Clinton is having such a hard time with right now? The Washington Post doubts it. The paper has cataloged the insults he's lobbed at women reporters during the campaign. They include: "bimbo"; "liberal clown"; "dopey"; "dummy"; a "disaster"; "one of the truly bad reporters"; "third-rate reporter"; "two of the dumbest people in politics"; "poor and purposely inaccurate reporting"; "one of the dumber bloggers"; "kooky"; "so average in every way"; "dishonest!"; "absolutely terrible."
Trump has essentially argued that he slams everyone who's not fair to him and the fact that he doesn't treat women reporters better than male journalists shows he's all for equality.
There might be something to that -- or, at the least, there might be something to his ability to spin it that way. "After closely watching the GOP presidential debates, it's not hard to see that Donald Trump has been far more shrewd than his opponents have been giving him credit for," a commenter said on the Web community Quora, expressing an increasingly common opinion.
That might be why his daughter, 34-year-old businesswoman and former model Ivanka Trump, is making the rounds of New Hampshire voting sites today, talking up her father and posing for selfies. (Watch video below.) She's not just photogenic, she's poised, articulate and likable. She humanizes Trump, helping dispel the idea of him as the "American Mussolini" and thus making him more palatable to voters who are heading into the voting booth still undecided. (One estimate is that 30 percent of the GOP electorate in New Hampshire will make up their mind or change their preference today).
"I've seen him in the capacity obviously as a father, and a very loving one, and also as an incredible executive who built an amazing company," Ivanka said on the radio this week. "And he really is remarkable."
Morning report:
Dixville Notch loves its political ritual. Every four years, the tiny New Hampshire pseudo-town sends its registered voters to the polls just after midnight on primary day so that it can get a moment in the national spotlight. And it works every time.
Dixville Notch Republicans gave Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a decided underdog, the early lead in the New Hampshire primary. He beat businessman Donald Trump three votes to two. (Trump is the clear front-runner in both the New Hampshire and national polls.) All four of the hamlet's Democrats, meanwhile, voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Millsfield is another mini-town that's allowed to vote and close its polls early for publicity's sake. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz grabbed nine votes in Millsfield to Trump's three. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bested Sanders among Democrats, two votes to one.
The little towns can't be counted on as bellwethers for the state, but -- like a broken clock twice a day -- they do catch the zeitgeist sometimes. Back in the 1960 general election, for example, Dixville Notch gave nine votes to Richard Nixon and none to John F. Kennedy, and Nixon did carry New Hampshire with 53 percent of the vote. (Kennedy, of course, won the presidency in a famous squeaker.) Polls in New Hampshire close in most of the state at 7 p.m. Eastern.
Themes playing out today:
• Marco Rubio really might be a robot -- or, rubot, as he's been dubbed. At his last rally before New Hampshire voters headed to the polls, he showed that his tendency to repeat scripted lines -- sometimes the same ones over and over in a single short speech -- isn't reserved for TV debates. At Nashua Community College on Monday he said it was difficult for he and his wife "to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats." Then he said it two more times before stepping down from the podium, seemingly unaware that he was repeating himself.
This criticism isn't especially fair. Every political candidate repeats the same lines over and over. But at Saturday's GOP debate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pointed out -- repeatedly -- that the junior senator from Florida does seem to have trouble talking off the cuff, and now people are noticing it. The Independent's Marco Rubio headline today: "Marco Rubio repeated himself again. Marco Rubio repeated himself again. Marco Rubio repeated." The YouTube video that proved it (watch below) is titled, "Marco Rubio Short-Circuits Again, Inexplicably Repeats Scripted Line World for Word."
All of which probably won't bother him much if he can repeat his Iowa vote percentage -- 23 percent -- in New Hampshire.
Hillary Clinton is progressive. No, really. Sanders, seeking to clearly differentiate himself from Clinton, tweeted out last week, "You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive." This claim has received a fair amount of pushback. Vox succinctly explained why Sanders is, for the most part, wrong. "'Progressive' is an ideological term. It refers to a position on an ideological spectrum, namely to the left. A progressive's opposite is a conservative. 'Moderate' is a practical term. It belongs to the second category of assessment. Broadly speaking, it refers to a candidate who focuses on consensus building and incremental progress, someone who doesn't believe the US political system is capable of sudden, lurching change, or just doesn't want that kind of change. A moderate's opposite is a radical, someone who believes rapid, revolutionary change is both possible and necessary." Clinton, meanwhile, has been trying to shore up her progressive credentials all week. "I won't cut Social Security," she tweeted last Friday. "As always, I'll defend it, & I'll expand it. Enough false innuendos."
The perception that Clinton's progressivism is shaky, she and her closest advisers apparently believe, might be the campaign pros she's surrounded herself with. Politico reported Monday that heads are going to roll in the Clinton campaign after the New Hampshire primary. Clinton, for her part, said "we're going to take stock" after the vote, while adding that she supported her team.
Clinton's still not as progressive as Bernie Sanders. A number of economists have said Sanders' ambitious (indeed, revolutionary) economic program -- free public college, Medicare for all, massive infrastructure spending, increased Social Security benefits, etc. -- would blow a big hole in the federal budget. But University of Massachusetts-Amherst economics professor Gerald Friedman says Sanders' plan would actually be a boon to the economy, leading to 26 million new jobs and raising average family income by about $22,000 per year. Friedman compared Sanders' program to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and said it would spur the economy more than the plans of any of the Republican presidential candidates, ultimately taking care of the budget deficit. Oh, and Sanders is the only presidential candidate, from either party, who pays campaign interns. His interns receive $10.10 per hour.
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