Tenured Thugs and Thieves

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri criminally assaulted an undergraduate student and, though local prosecutors were slow to move on the case — there was video of the incident, and the facts were not in question — she eventually was charged with third-degree assault. She will not be convicted of a crime, and, so far, her tenure-track position is safe.

Ironies abound. Click, a professor of Lady Gaga studies (no, really), enjoyed an appointment in Mizzou’s journalism department, which for mysterious reasons is highly regarded. The undergraduate she assaulted was a student journalist going about his proper business, covering a campus protest of which Professor Click was one instigator.

The subject of that protest was, in part, “white privilege,” which the protesters held up in contrast to the purportedly rough and unfair treatment that African Americans, particularly young men, receive at the hands of the police.

Which brings up the obvious question: What do we imagine would have happened to a young black man who criminally assaulted a white female college professor — and then, as Professor Click did, attempted to instigate mob violence against her? On campus? On video?

There would have been handcuffs, at least. He almost certainly would not have been given the option of performing 20 hours of community service in exchange for deferred adjudication, which is the deal Professor Click is getting from Columbia’s shamefully cowardly prosecutor, Steve Richey. He would not be, as Professor Click is, on track to a lifetime sinecure from which he effectively cannot be fired.

Other scenarios are worth considering: Say the assault had been perpetrated by a burly football coach against a young black woman. We’d have had the president himself baying for blood.

But he’s selective in his baying. A few months back congressional Republicans found themselves dismayed that the Veterans Affairs hospitals had, through their negligence and stupidity, killed more of our servicemen than died during any year of the Iraq war, and then engaged in a massive criminal cover-up. Legislation was introduced to make it easier to fire people for — let’s focus here — killing veterans through their negligence and stupidity. But government employees are the single most important Democratic interest group, and the president and his congressional allies complained that the bill was too harsh on public servants who were killing veterans through their negligence and stupidity. And so the bill died in the Senate, with Donald Trump’s pals Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer breathing a sigh of relief.

But killing veterans through their negligence and stupidity is not the only species of shenanigans that the VA system gets up to. Oh, no. The VA has a very generous program for covering employees’ relocation costs — payments that can reach into six figures. What could possibly go wrong with that? Only the obvious.

Responding to the financial incentives, VA employees set about securing for themselves cushy jobs that required relocation. Kimberly Graves, a VA official who oversaw several offices in the northeast, pressured a colleague into accepting a position in Baltimore so she could take his job in St. Paul. She had much less responsibility in the new position, going from being responsible for 16 VA regional offices to being responsible for one — but kept her $174,000 salary and pocketed $130,000 in moving costs. How one racks up $130,000 in moving costs is a mystery to me.

A second colleague was paid $274,000 to move . . . from Washington to Philadelphia, 134 miles away. That’s about $2,000 a mile. At that price, it would have been cheaper to have a New York City taxi dispatched from Manhattan to Washington to haul her worldly goods to Philadelphia before returning to New York, running the meter the whole way.

The VA’s inspector general issued a very amusing report on the matter, and made a criminal referral in the case. Employees were suspended. And then . . . nothing.

Worse than nothing, really: Graves has just been reinstated to her position. Another suspended employee will have a hearing on Monday, and may also be reinstated.

In the Treasury Department, the EPA, and the FCC, employees have been found to routinely spend the equivalent of a full workday every week watching pornography on their office computers. Most of those crank-yanking bureaucrats are still on your payroll. At the Commerce Department, paralegals spent their days shopping online and trolling dating sites because they were assigned no work — their supervisors were afraid giving their employees work would “antagonize the labor union.” In California, the teachers’ union has gone to bat to keep pedophile teachers on the payroll after they were found to be having sex with children. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo managed to corrupt an anti-corruption task force. The IRS and the ATF are routinely used as political weapons. The nice liberal Democrats in Flint, Mich., poisoned the city’s children in the name of infrastructure spending.

Despite all of the dark whispering about the NRA and “dark money,” the right-wing bogeymen mostly are minor players. The two major teachers’ unions are between them the biggest political spender in Washington, with the NEA and the ATF spending a combined $50 million in the 2014 cycle. AFSCME, the government-employees’ union, spent $11 million that cycle, and was the twelfth-largest overall political spender. The NRA, which barely cracks the top-300 list, spent less than $1 million. Beyond spending on (overwhelmingly Democratic) political campaigns, government workers and their unions also show up to vote, to knock on doors, and to bully, harass, and threaten nonconformists. They are the backbone of the Democratic party — and they are thieving, lazy, grasping, thieving, dishonest, thieving, pervy, thieving, detestable, despicable, thieving, thieving thieves with a minor sideline in violence and intimidation.

Which brings us back to Melissa Click, who criminally assaulted an undergraduate student journalist for attempting to commit an act of journalism. As of this writing, she is still on track for tenure. Jail? She won’t even be formally convicted of her crime if she manages to go twelve months without committing a significant crime in public.

For all the talk about “privilege,” this is a much more familiar phenomenon: This is what it means to have a ruling class.

And it cannot be repeated often enough: We are ruled by criminals.

The Foundations behind the Left

By Jon Henke

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Over a decade ago, the New York Post’s Ryan Sager published a blockbuster story, showing that “campaign finance reform has been an immense scam perpetrated…by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a “mass movement.” Based on the astonishing testimony of Sean Treglia, who ran the campaign finance reform effort for Pew Trusts, Sager reported that…

    …Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of “experts” all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

    “The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington,” Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.” …

    From 1994 to 2004, almost $140 million was spent to lobby for changes to our country’s campaign-finance laws. … The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.

    These foundations were: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6 million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros’ Open Society Institute ($12.6 million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation ($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2 million).

Perhaps most (or least?) surprisingly, Treglia said the good news for the Foundations was that “Journalists didn’t care. They didn’t know. They didn’t care … so no one followed up on the story.” Treglia said, “if any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn’t…”

As a result, we got the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, which has only succeeded in, as opponents predicted, making politics less transparent and more expensive.

Unfortunately, after this story broke, the media continued to not know and not care. News reports overflow with stories about the Koch brothers or corporate donations, but the far more massive and highly political left wing Foundations operate almost entirely without scrutiny.

Consider this: in 2013, the left wing Center for Public Integrity reported that “Four foundations run by [the Koch brothers] hold a combined $310 million in assets…” By contrast, the Ford Foundation’s endowment is more than $12 billion — about 38x larger than the Koch Foundations.

On a list of the top 100 US Foundations (by asset size), the Ford Foundation is #2. The various Koch Foundations don’t make the list, nor do they make the list of top 100 Foundations by annual giving.

Yet, the news media and transparency groups constantly harp on the Koch’s massive organization and its “insidious,” “dark money” influence on American politics, while almost completely ignoring the far larger left-wing political Foundations.

In part, this is due to the perception in the media that money from conservative/libertarian/free market leaning organizations must be tainted, while funding from left-wing Foundations is free of such bias. It may also be due to the fact that the left wing Foundations fund many media organizations — I’m looking at you, NPR, PBS, Washington Post, LA Times and others — sometimes even funding them to cover “[other people’s] money in politics.” 

But that doesn’t explain all of the media apathy. Even right-of-center media is generally uninterested in these behind-the-scenes details about the left-wing Foundation money machine.

Sager’s 2005 story was a revelation to me at the time and it has continued to inform my understanding of how the left-wing political machine operates, domestically and internationally, up to the highest levels. Indeed, President Obama himself was a part of this, spending 8 years funding gun control and anti-2nd amendment research and advocacy as a Director of the Joyce Foundation.

After the passage of McCain-Feingold, the people and Foundations behind campaign finance reform mostly moved on to other areas, particularly media and technology policy, and they have replicated this Foundation driven campaign strategy over and over again. Some have drifted back towards campaign finance reform in recent years — unsurprising, given the appeal of being able to marginalize opponents and outlaw opposition speech — but most have realized that they can do far more to control the information and political environment by tinkering with the information inputs of policy and media rather than the information outputs of speech.

Whether it is energy, campaign finance reform, technology policy (especially internet regulation) or half a dozen other areas, the pattern is the same. Massive left wing Foundations — often in collaboration with corporate, investment and government organizations — are putting tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars into research, advocacy, organizing, media and lobbying operations.

They are succeeding, in large part, because nobody has been watching.

Just Because Trump Is ‘Anti-PC’ Doesn’t Mean We Should Celebrate His Vulgarity

By Jonah Goldberg

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Let me just say I’m in a foul mood.

I know, I know, Trump supporters will declare, “Your tears are delicious!”

But that’s not right.

First, I’m not weeping — that, I suspect, may come later — and my dyspepsia is only partly driven by Trump mania. Save for the joy my daughter and my dogs took from the massive snowstorm, this last week has been an unyielding ass ache. (By the way, when I am czar, I will make “assache” an acceptable one-word compound noun.)

One of the most annoying things about Acela-corridor journalism is the assumption that our weather stories — and any other events that inconvenience New Yorkers and Washingtonians — are somehow newsier than events elsewhere. If New York or D.C. had Chicago’s murder rate, we’d be hearing a lot more about the resurgence of crime in America. If roaming bands of wolverines were attacking nuns in Muncie, it’d hit the NBC Nightly News well after the story about an exciting breakthrough in catheter technology.

So I for one refuse to be part of that. However, the weather has contributed mightily to my Crom-like contempt for my fellow man. On Wednesday, while driving to get a $15 haircut, I more or less wrecked my car. I’m okay. The other driver is fine, and her car is fine. And no, the dingo wasn’t in the car.

Still, most expensive haircut I ever had.

Then there’s the literal back pain just north of the figurative assache that comes from shoveling snow days on end.

Then there’s the fact that D.C. handles snow about as well as Bernie Sanders handles questions about the Wu Tang Clan (“Mr. Sanders, how would you describe the totality of Ghostface Killah’s oeuvre?”).

Speaking of Sanders, some wag on Twitter noted that the best thing about the run on the grocery stores in blizzard-besieged D.C. is that it gave the Beltway crowd a sense of what it will be like under a Sanders administration. I don’t want to live under a socialist president, but a silver lining would be seeing all those MSNBC hosts waiting in line for toilet paper.

D.C.’s Collective-Action Problem

Part of the problem is that there’s a tragedy of the commons endemic to D.C. during its snow freak-outs. I’m not worried that we will starve to death in our home, our corpses eventually consumed by the cats (and the cats by the dogs). My wife is Alaskan. She can make six kinds of soup from snow.

But that is precisely the way many other Washingtonians think. And so they run to the supermarkets like the kids in Red Dawn and grab enough provisions to last them until spring. That leaves sane people with a dilemma: Do you run to the store, too, not out of fear of the snow, but out of concern that the deranged masses will clear the shelves?

Irritable Trump Syndrome

And then, of course, there’s Trump.

But before I get to him, I wonder if you caught what I did above. I said I didn’t want to indulge in Acela-corridor navel-gazing, and then I proceeded to spelunk into the very kind of Beltway omphaloskepsis I condemned.

I was, loosely speaking, flirting with apophasis there. Apophasis is a rhetorical device where you bring up something while denying or condemning it. (It shouldn’t be confused with aposiopesis, which is when you . . .)

For instance, you might say, “I do not think the fact that Hillary Clinton put our national security at risk just so she could hide her illegal communications from congressional oversight, journalists, and FOIA requests should be held against her.” Or you might say, “I have no doubt that Bill Clinton is telling the truth. Though I cannot for the life of me figure out why he was pantsless at 3:00 in the morning, trying to push that goat over the fence.”

Apophasis came up on Twitter the other day because Donald Trump tweeted: “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!”

I was mildly surprised by the number of people who thought Trump’s tweet was clever. But I was truly stunned by the number of idiots who thought he wasn’t calling Megyn Kelly a bimbo. His whole shtick is that he’s a warrior against political correctness. He wasn’t invoking political correctness as a legitimate thing, he was sarcastically hiding behind it. People not enthralled with Trump recognize this as smarmy cowardice.

Indeed, they would see it plainly if I were to tweet, “I’m not going to call Donald Trump an adulterous cad. That would be politically incorrect. So I’ll just say he’s a moral lightweight!”

The difference of course is that there’s no evidence that Kelly is a bimbo. There’s ample evidence that Trump cheated on his wife and slept with many married women. What’s the evidence? His own, boastful (!) testimony for starters.

My favorite part is that Trump’s “bimbo” tweet came immediately after one in which he condemned Fox’s response to his debate boycott as a “disgrace.” He added, “Who would ever say something so nasty and dumb?”

The almost Caligulan narcissism on display here is now familiar to everyone. The truly creepy part is how many conservatives overlook it or celebrate it. The slightest insult to the Donald arouses outrage and dismay from his digital court sycophants, but when he behaves like a boorish and childish lout, all praise and honor is due!

PC vs. Manners

But, as I hope to say one day with more lasting results, enough about Donald.

This does raise a point I always try to make when talking to campus conservatives. Rudeness and crudeness are un-PC, but that alone isn’t a defense of rudeness and crudeness. (I made precisely this point back in August about you-know-who.)

Note: Good manners, funnily enough, are sometimes un-PC, too. For instance, I hold doors open for women and try to remember to stand up whenever a woman enters the room. I’m not going to go look for examples, but I have every confidence that there are plenty of feminists out there who think this is some kind of outrage.

But what too many people forget is that on a Venn diagram, PC and good manners do overlap to a limited extent. Yes, huge swaths of political correctness amount to cultural-Marxist codswallop and other forms of leftist bullying. But some of it — just some — does have to do with figuring out how to show people respect. And that is exactly what good manners are all about: showing respect. And as someone who sincerely believes William F. Buckley was the most well-mannered man I’ve ever met, I’d hate to see conservatives defenestrate good manners in their indulgence of populist hysteria.

Look, I’m no absolutist in this regard. Not two minutes ago, I made a joke about a former president of the United States buggering a goat. There are any number of gray areas and subjective fine lines to be drawn. I hold writers — particularly of “news”letters like this one — to a different standard than presidential candidates. Comedians follow a different set of rules than pastors. I have different expectations for Boy Scout leaders than for pimps.

That so many people think such boorishness can be justified just because it’s an alleged knock against PC is just another sign of the metastasizing corruption of conservatism.

On Eugenics and White Privilege

The New Republic recently reviewed Thomas Leonard’s long-awaited Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era. The reviewer, Malcolm Harris, wrote:

    I was prompted to revisit the Scopes trial — which, like many Americans, I hadn’t thought about since an 11th grade history final — by a new book from Princeton scholar Thomas C. Leonard. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era is hard to classify politically. Conservatives can find a lot to like in Leonard’s research, and at times it feels like a serious, credentialed version of Jonah Goldberg’s screed Liberal Fascism. Among his revelations: The minimum wage was created to destroy jobs; progressives (including the founders of this magazine) really did hate small businesses and they were all way too enthusiastic about Germany’s social structure. But Leonard’s personal politics are hard to read, and at the very least he’s invested in progressivism, writing that it’s “too important to be left to hagiography and obloquy.”

As I noted in the Corner, I thought this potshot was kind of funny given that I relied on previous work by Leonard himself for much of my discussion of progressive economics and eugenics.

But there are a couple of other points to make. I thought this response to my post from Kevin Drum, whom I generally like, was intriguing and amusing. In a post titled “Enough With the Eugenics Already,” Drum writes:

    Everybody needs a hobby, but this is sure an odd thing to keep obsessing about. Yes, many early progressives believed in eugenics. Modern liberals aren’t especially proud of this, but we don’t deny it either. There are ugly parts of everyone’s history.

    So why go on and on about it? If it’s a professional historical field of study for you, sure. Go ahead. But in a political magazine? It might make sense if you’re investigating the roots of current beliefs, but eugenics died an unmourned death nearly a century ago. And no matter what you think of modern liberal views toward abortion or right-to-die laws, nobody can credibly argue that they’re rooted in anything but the opposite of eugenics. Early 20th century progressives supported eugenics out of a belief that it would improve society. Contemporary liberals support abortion rights and right-to-die laws out of a belief in individual rights that flowered in the 60s.

    So what’s the deal? Is this supposed to be something that will cause the general public to turn against liberals? Or what? It really doesn’t make much sense.

There is so much one could say in response to this. So I’ll do it rapid-fire.

1. First, Drum is complaining about my talking about eugenics. He’s not complaining about Leonard or even Harris. That’s odd, given that I only brought it up in this context because of Harris’s dumb swipe at me. I also like the claim that I am “obsessing,” as if it’s somehow irrational or weird to care about this stuff. It’s funny how conservatives are so often accused of “obsessing” about things that are inconvenient to liberals. (See: Benghazi, Hillary’s server, Bill Clinton’s pants, etc.)

2. Drum says liberals don’t deny the eugenic roots of progressivism. This strikes me as, at best, a serious exaggeration. To the extent there’s any truth to it at all, it is a very recent development. When my book came out, the very facts that Drum suggests are widely accepted were treated as crackpot by many liberals, and ignored by the rest. Indeed, Leonard’s might be the first popular book to address the issue dead-on and in such detail. I don’t think waving it away as old news is fair.

3. I’ll leave it to Wes Smith and others to wade deeply into the highly contestable claim that modern liberals have no tolerance for eugenics. If Drum had said they reject the sort of racist eugenics that largely defined Progressive Era economic thought, I’d say he’d have firmer legs to stand on. But I don’t hear a lot of meaningful complaints from liberals about designer babies, sex-selective abortion, or the ongoing efforts to eradicate Down’s syndrome in utero.

4. The idea that progressivism’s deep roots in eugenics and race theory have no relevance today strikes me as just plain odd. For example, liberals still revere the Davis-Bacon Act, even though it was an explicitly racist law.

5. Drum’s claim rings particularly odd considering that today’s progressives routinely invoke the very same original progressives as their inspiration. When Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008, he held a rally at the University of Wisconsin, where he proclaimed, “Where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the Progressive movement was born?” Is it really so ridiculous to point out that those very same original Wisconsin progressives wanted to keep people like Barack Obama out of the country, never mind the Oval Office?

6. As an intellectual matter alone, all this is worth discussing. For instance, the phrase “social Darwinism” continues to be thrown at the Right. But what people mean by social Darwinism was never a right-wing or conservative value. And the Hitlerite connotation of social Darwinism (which is the exact opposite of the libertarian connotation) far better describes a great many of the founding fathers of progressivism. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see my piece from that other magazine.

7. Another thing worth considering for liberals: What if those racist eugenicists at the University of Wisconsin were right? No, not about the racial-inferiority junk and all that. But what if they were right about the effects of, say, the minimum wage? They wanted a high minimum wage to make it difficult for minorities — black and Chinese workers — to get into the labor market. Shouldn’t liberals, who celebrate these progressives when it comes to their policy legacy on countless other fronts, contemplate the possibility that they were on to something?

8. This is a major personal peeve, but it’s also a serious point: Why are self-described progressives unburdened by their historical baggage but conservatives are shackled by theirs? If a Republican called himself a “modern Confederate,” liberals would rain hatred and scorn down upon him for associating with long-dead racists (and understandably so). But Hillary Clinton can freely call herself a “modern progressive” and she is immune from any charge that she is associating with long-dead racists. If intellectual history matters for the Right, it has to matter for the Left, too.

9. Relatedly, large swaths of the Left are in a frenzy to catalogue the historical roots of “white privilege.” If that project is only defensible when it inconveniences conservatives, then it is not a serious intellectual project at all. I think the “white privilege” stuff is wildly overdone and is often little more than a b.s. shakedown racket. But to the extent it’s serious, how can you ignore the deep roots the liberal welfare state has in explicit notions of white supremacy?

One last point. When Liberal Fascism came out and I was being attacked on all sides, I remember my editor saying something like:

“Look, everyone’s going to scream about this for a long time. Then, someday, maybe in ten years, a more ‘reasonable’ person will come along and concede about 80 percent of your argument and claim that ‘everyone knows’ that stuff.”

We’re not there yet, obviously. And maybe we never will be. But the recent mainstream liberal acceptance that Woodrow Wilson was a bad, bad guy can be traced directly back to Liberal Fascism. I’m not claiming all of the credit, of course. The Claremont gang and the folks at Reason, among others, were beating up on Wilson long before me. But the anti-Wilson argument went mainstream on the right because of Liberal Fascism (largely because Glenn Beck picked up on it).

Similarly, the notion that progressives were eugenicists was crazy talk ten years ago. Now, everyone knows it, nothing to see here, move along. I can’t wait to see what becomes old news next.

It’s Rubio Or Bust For Republicans Who Want To Win

By David Wasserman

Thursday, January 28, 2016

A mediocre high school athlete of non-American parentage leaves his palm-tree-lined hometown to bounce between multiple colleges, eventually earning a political science degree and attending law school.

He begins his political career in an area dominated by an urban machine. After serving eight years in a state legislature and lecturing at a local college, he decides to launch a long-shot campaign for the U.S. Senate. His intra-party opposition starts out with far more money and includes a vaunted statewide official. But he excites partisans fed up with the status quo in the primary and capitalizes on a bizarrely fractured opposition in the fall, becoming an overnight celebrity in his party.

He frequently waxes about his parents’ dreams while speaking at party get-togethers, but he grows restless in his first term, and like most freshmen, compiles few notable legislative accomplishments. A few years into the job, his party retakes the Senate majority. Nevertheless, just a few months later, he launches an uphill presidential bid while still in his mid-40s.

At first, pundits dismiss his prospects because his party’s front-runner is an immediate family member of the previous president, with the ability to raise $100 million and roots in his home state. But his raw oratorical talent and a pervasive anti-dynasty sentiment help him win a drawn-out, seemingly endless primary slog.

In November, his opponent is more than two decades older and had lost a race for the White House eight years before. He capitalizes on the nation’s mood for change after a two-term president of the other party, claiming a historic victory.

***

This is the story of Barack Obama, but it could also be the story of Marco Rubio. The striking parallels between the two, beyond the obvious ethnic barrier-breaking nature of their candidacies, make Democratic strategists terrified to face Rubio in the fall. Yet the notion that Rubio is the “Republican Obama” also makes some GOP voters hesitant to support him.

There are a lot of complex analyses of the 2016 election floating around. My own theory is quite straightforward: If Hillary Clinton is the nominee — and she remains a heavy favorite over Bernie Sanders — her fate largely rests with Republican voters’ decisions over the next few months.

If Republicans nominate Rubio, they would have an excellent chance to beat Clinton by broadening their party’s appeal with moderates, millennials and Latinos. The GOP would also have an excellent chance to keep the Senate, hold onto a wide margin in the House and enjoy more control of federal government than they have in over a decade.

If they nominate Ted Cruz, Clinton would probably win, the GOP Senate majority would also be in peril and GOP House losses could climb well into the double digits. A Donald Trump nomination would not only make Clinton’s election very likely and raise the odds of a Democratic Senate; it could force down-ballot Republicans to repudiate Trump to survive, increase pressure on a center-right candidate to mount an independent bid and split the GOP asunder.

In other words, if you’re a member of the Republican Party who wants to win in November, it’s basically Rubio or bust. The “Rubio or bust” theory relies on a process of elimination rather than an assessment of his biography, skills or ground game.

There are seven Republican candidates polling above 5 percent in Iowa, New Hampshire or nationally. Three of them — John Kasich, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush — are competing for moderate GOP voters in New Hampshire, but their appeal remains so tepid with conservative Republicans who dominate most other primaries that they lack a plausible path to the nomination.

On the other hand, Trump and Cruz are more popular with conservative Republicans. But either could turn into the most disastrous GOP presidential nominee since 1964. Surveys conducted by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal in December and January tested Clinton against Trump, Cruz and Rubio among “swing” demographic groups — the groups that typically decide who wins key battleground states. Although polls that test general election matchups this far from Election Day (particularly before the nominees have been chosen) haven’t always been predictive, the relative differences between the candidates are telling; the “electability gap” between Rubio and Trump/Cruz was quite obvious:

 

Cruz certainly fares better than Trump, outperforming Clinton among two of these seven groups while Trump loses all of them. But unlike Trump and Clinton, Cruz hasn’t been the subject of years-long media coverage, and many voters still don’t know him. Democrats salivate at the prospect of defining him as the architect of the GOP’s government shutdown who personally showed up to cheer Kim Davis’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling.

Ben Carson wasn’t tested in the NBC/WSJ matchups, but his poor grasp of foreign policy and bizarre statements have written a ready-made script for Democrats to argue that he’s well out of the mainstream and in way over his head.

That leaves Rubio. It’s true that he can sound overly rehearsed, and his machismo can come off as trying too hard. After launching his campaign with a theme of a “new American century,” Rubio has realized that he needs to be more confrontational to woo angry conservatives. But unlike Trump, Carson and Cruz, he hasn’t done or said anything that Democrats could use to flat-out disqualify him in the eyes of swing voters.

If anything, Rubio has plenty of general election upside.

It’s hard to imagine Clinton matching the share of Latino voters that Obama won in 2012, 71 percent, against a Spanish-speaking son of immigrants who supported a bipartisan immigration reform bill. It’s also hard to imagine Clinton matching Obama’s 60 percent among 18-to-29-year-olds against a candidate two decades younger than she is. Finally, unlike in 2012, Democrats wouldn’t have the luxury of portraying the GOP nominee as a corporate robber baron who has never walked in voters’ shoes.

The stark differences between the leading GOP contenders’ appeal in a general election mean that Republican chances in 2016 may not depend so much on Clinton’s popularity. It may be time for Republicans to be more concerned with their own candidates’ electability than Clinton’s favorability, which has slid markedly over the past year.

American Crossroads, a well-funded super PAC guided, in part, by Karl Rove and dedicated to electing a Republican president and Congress in the fall, has largely existed as a stand-in entity to attack Clinton while Republican candidates fight among themselves in the primaries. But its resources might be better spent attacking Trump and Cruz. Astoundingly, Trump has not yet been the target of a sustained negative ad campaign.

Days before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican Party is on the verge of self-destruction. Between now and June, GOP voters will have to decide whether they want to prolong their catharsis or elect a president. Unless Republicans ditch the field altogether and nominate House Speaker Paul Ryan at a contested convention, it’s Rubio or bust.