Last Call For The Webb We Leave

I've talked extensively about which Republican would be the next out of the clown car, but it seems petulance and gravity have caught up with Democrat (and I use the term loosely) Jim Webb in a big way.

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said he is "stepping aside" from the Democratic presidential race, leaving the door open to an independent bid for the White House.

"I’m withdrawing from any consideration of being the Democratic party’s nominee for the presidency," he said.

Instead, the former Republican said he would discuss the possibility of an independent run for president -- which is significantly more difficult and requires significant funding -- during the "next couple of weeks." He said he understands the "histories of independent candidacies."

"We'll just have to see what happens next," he said.

Webb served as Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, but switched parties in protest to the Iraq War and ran for Senate as a Democrat in Virginia in 2006. He said today that he takes it “as a compliment” that his party affiliation has been hard to pin down.

“Some people say I am a Republican who became a Democrat, but that I often sound like a Republican in a room full of Democrats or a Democrat in a room full of Republicans," he said.

"More people in this country called themselves independents than Republicans and Democrats," he said today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., speaking with his wife at his side. "Our country is more important than a label. ... The other party in America is not the enemy."

So Jim has gone from the D side to the "Third Party screw the Ds side", possibly trying to Nader the Democratic nominee into another Republican president.  Won't that be fun?

Seriously, if Webb is trying to chase the No Labels nomination, he'd better hurry up.  Time is running out for a serious third party screw job attempt with the primaries being so early this year, and there's the matter of getting on the ballot in swing states where he can do the most damage to the Dems.

Get crackin' there, Jimmy.

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

And go directly to jail if you want to go to jail so badly, Confederate flag fetishists.

Hundreds of Virginia residents were waging a new Confederate battle this month and refusing to give up state license plates with the flag on them. They say the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles' recent recall on the controversial plates violates their rights, despite being essentially approved by a federal judge in August, WAVY reported. 

“Next thing you know, they’re going to say you can’t wear blue on Monday … or you can’t wear yellow on Thursday. Where’s it going to end?” Kevin Collier, a commander with the Stonewall Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the local news station. 

He's not alone. Roughly 1,600 Virginians with Confederate flag-themed license plates received a letter from the DMV in September requesting they swap the plates for new, state-designed ones by Oct. 4. Only 187 people have done so, according to WAVY. Others simply sent back the new plates.

 Some people are just going to have to have the stupid beat out of them, I guess.

The plates had been allowed in Virginia for nearly 15 years, ever since a federal judge issued a 2001 injunction ruling that banning them would be discriminating against the Sons of Confederate Veterans and limiting their First Amendment rights. But the judge dissolved the injunction this past August, referencing a related Texas case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled plates should be considered government speech. 

Now, if caught on the roads with the invalid plates, drivers could be charged with a misdemeanor, MSNBC reported. 

Collier told WVEC his refusal was a matter of principle and family history. "I have a great-great-great grandfather who fought and died with the 5th Georgia Infantry. And his four brothers all died with him in the name of that flag," he said. "I will go to jail before I change those tags."

Welp, enjoy jail then, dude.  State gets to say what counts as a license plate.

Some people have to learn the hard way.

StupidiNews Focus: O, Canada!

Canadian PM Steven Harper and his Conservative party were trounced yesterday night by the Liberals, coming far back from third place to push aside moderate Tom Mulcair and the New Democratic party.  Canadian voters wanted real change from ten years of Harper, and with Justin Trudeau, they are going to get it.

Speaking in Calgary, Alberta, Mr. Harper conceded defeat but vowed to supporters that the Conservatives would rise again.

“The disappointment you all so feel, is my responsibility and mine alone,” he said. While Mr. Harper made no mention of his plans, the Conservative Party issued a statement saying that he had resigned as its leader.

The election became something of a referendum on Mr. Harper’s approach to government, which, in the view of his critics, has often focused on issues important to core Conservative supporters, mostly in the West, rather than to much of the population.

Dominic LeBlanc, a prominent Liberal member of Parliament who was handily re-elected in New Brunswick, attributed the party’s extraordinary revival, following a period during which many people forecast its extinction, to Mr. Trudeau, who became the party’s leader in 2013.

The focus of the campaign fluttered among issues, including a scandal over Conservative senators’ expenses; antiterrorism measures Mr. Harper introduced; pensions; the stagnation of the economy brought about by plunging oil prices; the government’s handling of refugees; the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact; and Mr. Harper’s attempts to ban the wearing of face veils known as niqabs during citizenship ceremonies.

The key to the Liberals' win?  Turnout baby turnout.

While the Canadian election was initially met with summer-vacation indifference when it was called on Aug. 2, the dramatic ending appeared to have attracted voter interest.

Turnout fell to as low as 58.8 percent in 2008 and was 61.1 percent in the last parliamentary elections, in 2011. The agency that supervises federal elections reported that 68.5 percent of the country’s 25.6 million voters cast ballots in this election.

News reports indicated that voters faced unusually long lines at some of the 66,000 polling stations on Monday. A rush of traffic temporarily overwhelmed the website of Elections Canada, the agency responsible for federal votes. 

Can you imagine how any Democrats would be elected here with 68.5% turnout?  It would be an absolute wipeout of the GOP and they know it.  But there's another reason why Trudeau did so well. Ed Kilgore explains:

One wrinkle in this campaign that center-left parties everywhere should note is that Liberals broke with the other two major parties in refusing to pledge a balanced budget, instead promising to run short-term deficits to finance needed infrastructure projects. 

Another possible ripple-effect from the vote is to cast a pall on the appropriation of American-style cultural conservatism by Harper’s Tories. It’s fitting that Harper’s last political acts as PM were to demagogue Muslim apparel and campaign with Rob Ford. 

And without question, the ejection of Harper is a boon to the Obama administration, especially on energy and environmental issues where Canada had become problematic in its resistance to climate change action and its advocacy of the Keystone XL pipeline.

In other words, the Liberals presented themselves as a clearly different choice from not only Harper's Conservatives, but from Mulcair's NDP as well.

There's a lesson there if Dems want to learn it.

StupidiNews!

• Canada's Liberal party has scored a decisive victory in last night's election, winning a majority of seats in parliament, meaning Justin Trudeau, son of former PM Pierre Trudeau, will lead.
• A federal judge has denied the ACLU's request to modify Wisconsin's state voter ID law, saying that the state's reliance on photo IDs for voting is constitutional.
• Russian airstrikes in Syria's Latakia province has killed 45 Syrian rebels, including a top rebel commander of US-supported forces.
• Convicted South African athlete Oscar Pistorious has been released from prison on parole and will serve the remainder of his five-year sentence for manslaughter under house arrest.
• A new study suggests that young children taught to consider the feelings of others in decisions may be better at lying to other people as well.

Last Call For Sober Reflection

Matt Yglesias reminds us that outside the battle for the White House, the Democrats are getting the crap kicked out of them, and they have no plan for 2016 or more importantly, 2018.

The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Indeed, even the House infighting reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won't lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have. 

Not only have Republicans won most elections, but they have a perfectly reasonable plan for trying to recapture the White House. But Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot. Democrats aren't even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don't even admit that they exist. 

Instead, the party is focused on a competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over whether they should go a little bit to Obama's left or a lot to his left, options that are unlikely to help Democrats down-ballot in the face of an unfriendly House map and a more conservative midterm electorate. The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor. 

The worst part of the problem for the Democratic Party is in races that are, collectively, the most important: state government. 

Elections for state legislature rarely make the national news, but they are the fundamental building blocks of American politics. Since they run the redistricting process for the US House of Representatives and for themselves, they are where the greatest level of electoral entrenchment is possible. 

And in the wake of the 2014 midterms, Republicans have overwhelming dominance of America's state legislatures.

Instead of saying that if we lose the presidency, we cede the entire country to the GOP (which would be true, they would control nearly every aspect of our government) we need to get the states back. It's fine to say "well nobody really has a plan for that" because that's true, but we need to get one and fast.

The descent from 2010 to 2014 has been precipitous. Obama's re-election was the only good news for the Dems, because right now only seven states are under Democratic control.

Seven.  Out of 50. The Republicans have complete control of 25 states, including swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina, and Florida, and legislatures in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

We have to get the states back, or we're done. 2016 is vital for the White House of course, but if we lose any more state legislatures at this point, the Democrats are going to be relegated to a New England/California coastal party.

In a lot of way, we already are.  We sure as hell didn't vote in 2014.  If the same thing happens in 2018, the country's done.  This is the reality we live in: the GOP is one solid Democratic scandal away from running the entire country and it's entirely plausible that they get there.

Nobody believes the Democrats can get back to 2008 right now by 2016.  Hell, I don't think we can do that by 2024.

Now here's the sober reflection part.

We don't even have a plan. And maybe that *is* the plan.

You have to admit, the best way for the Dems to get back to 2008 was to be where the GOP was in 2004.  Sure it means destroying our economy again, and having the Democrats try to clean up, but breaking the government would be a lot faster than incremental change.

I'm not saying that's a good idea at all, it's horrible.  But I'm thinking that there are Democrats who like the idea, and it's the same ones who have been saying "We need to get working class white guys back!" for 35 years now.

I know Dems have a problem.  That's not the solution. Let's not play right into what will surely make this worse.

Never Get High On Your Own Supply

Chris Hayes famously made that Biggie Smalls quote in reference to Republicans believing their own talking points in 2012, and Greg Sargent believes they are right back in their own epistemic closure bubble in 2015 when it comes to Hillary Clinton.

What is the Republican theory of the 2016 election? Is it that the Democrats have developed a durable demographic advantage in national elections and that the GOP must nominate someone who can broaden the party’s reach beyond core constituencies, as Republicans concluded after the 2012 debacle?

Or is it increasingly that such demographic concerns can be tossed to the winds — that Hillary Clinton is such a flawed candidate that Republicans don’t have to worry too much about picking a standard bearer with broad general election appeal?

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein has a good piece today in which he posits the latter theory. Klein’s overall point is that the two parties are each making wildly different assumptions about next year’s contest — and that this has driven each party further into its own ideological corner, portending an unusually charged and intense general election battle.

Indeed, the GOP theory is that, just like Obama in 2012, there's no way that the electorate would possibly elect Hillary Clinton because everyone hates her, the polls show she's doomed, and that silly Democrats will nominate her anyway, leading to landslide losses in swing states. At this point, Republicans argue, the future of America is solely up to GOP primary voters to select the next President of the United States.  It doesn't matter how "electable" they are either...Clinton will be the Dem nominee and she can't win, so the GOP can pick anyone and they'll win easily.

It's a nice fantasy, frankly, but one that the GOP is now wholly invested in.

The Bully And The Little Brother

Ezra Klein has a point here: even if Donald Trump doesn't win the GOP nomination, he'll be remembered for taking out Jeb Bush.

Over the past week, Trump and Bush have been in an argument that basically boils down to the question of was George W. Bush president on 9/11/2001?

Trump insists that Bush was president both prior to and during the 9/11 attacks, and he was therefore at least partly responsible for the security failures that permitted the tragedy. And to Trump's credit, there is considerable evidence that George W. Bush was president on 9/11/2001.

Jeb Bush's position is harder to parse: he argues that his brother was only responsible for what happened after 9/11, suggesting, perhaps, that someone else bore the responsibilities of the presidency on 9/11/2001. Or, to be a bit kinder to his position, he argues that the measure of as president isn't whether something like 9/11 happens, but whether it happens again. 

The result is this absolutely brutal interview CNN's Jake Tapper conducted with Bush. "If your brother and his administration bear no responsibility at all," Tapper asks, "how do you then make the jump that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are responsible for what happened at Benghazi?"

Jeb looks absolutely terrible here, and he's letting Trump sucker him into this.  But Jeb doesn't have a choice: he can't not defend his brother's horrendous foreign policy record, even though it's largely indefensible. And so Jeb is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

On top of that, Bush, like Kevin McCarthy, gives away the game on Benghazi at the same time as Jake Tapper actually asks the right question here and Bush completely sticks his entire lower body into his mouth, let alone just his foot.  Not only does he make the Benghazi committee look like a bunch of fools, he also hurts his brother on 9/11 and the multiple times US embassy personnel were killed during Dubya's administration.

It's actually embarrassing how bad Jeb Bush is at this.  Didn't anyone in his organization think to come up with any real defense?  Or did they even bother, for as I've said, how do you defend the indefensible?

George W. really was the smart brother.

StupidiNews!

• Three are dead in a shootout between a Bedouin and an Israeli soldier at an Israeli bus stop including an Eritrean man shot and beaten to death after being mistaken for an attacker.
• The trial of alleged mobster Vincent Asaro begins in Brooklyn today, Asaro is being charged with participating in the fabled $6 million 1978 "GoodFellas" heist at JFK airport. 
• US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Germany as part of another round of US "shuttle diplomacy" over recent violence in Israel.
• Iran is urging other OPEC nations to sharply cut oil production in order to double the price of oil from $40 to $80 a barrel, saying "no one is happy" with oil prices in the $40-$50 range.
• The final trailer of Star Wars: The Force Awakens will premiere tonight during Monday Night Football with advance tickets going on sale Monday across the nation for December 18.

Last Call For Podcast Versus The Stupid

This week on Podcast Versus The Stupid, Bon and I discuss the Democratic debate in The Master Debaters, Democratic Edition.

Check Out Blogs Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on BlogTalkRadio

Do give it a listen as we talk about Clinton, Sanders, the adults in the room, and more.

Weekend (Update) At Bernie's

Saturday Night Live's cold open nailed the Democratic debate this week, especially with Larry David as Bernie Sanders.





David is perfect as Sanders for what it's worth, almost making Bernie lovable as America's Angry Mensch Grandpa. When Kate McKinnon's Hillary Clinton turns to him and says "I wish I could scream and cuss like you" I lost it, and Alec Baldwin as Jim Webb?  Not a bad choice either.

It goes on a smidge too long, but then again, what debate doesn't? It's still worth a Sunday chuckle or three.

House GOP, Hat In Hand

With no real way forward on replacing John Boehner as Speaker themselves, Republicans are now openly admitting that they will need Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to get them out of this mess.

“It's a very simple question of math,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), who first floated the idea of Republicans and Democrats joining together on a Speaker candidate last week.

“If there are not 218 Republican votes on the House floor, then by necessity the Democrats will have a say in who the next Speaker will be,” he said. “I still think it's a possibility.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time that's something we don't want — it's not good,” King said of working with Democrats to elect a Speaker. “On the other hand, we can't go on forever without a Speaker.”

Such a scenario remains unlikely, even with the House GOP in apparent disarray ever since Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) decision to abruptly drop out of the race to succeed Boehner.

There have been no formal discussions between the parties about the possibility of a coalition Speaker, and some Democrats have dismissed the notion out of hand.

“It'll never happen,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus, said after McCarthy's announcement.

Since then, Democrats have generally played coy.

They've distanced themselves from the controversy, insisting the leadership shake-up is a GOP problem for the Republicans to solve on their own.

“Hopefully the Republicans will come to terms as to who their recommendation will be for Speaker,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last Friday. “But that's really up to them.”

And while that's true, it's leverage that Pelosi has over the GOP, and both sides know it.  The question is what will her price be at this point, because as we've seen over the last several years, in the end, the Republicans always fold.

Sunday Long Read: Back Home To Bloom County

This week's Sunday Long Read is something a bit less serious than usual, but still worth it: cartoonist legend Berkeley Breathed has returned this summer to where he started, his Pulitzer Prize winning Bloom County strip, now being published 25 years later on Facebook.  Here's the transcript of his interview with Sam Briger of NPR's Fresh Air, and host Terry Gross.

GROSS: So there's an interesting back story that you had started telling me about how Berkeley Breathed brought back the strip in part because of his connection to Harper Lee who wrote "To Kill A Mockingbird." And this past summer, the original draft of "To Kill A Mockingbird" was published under the title of "Go Set A Watchman," and he was very upset when it was published.

BRIGER: Yeah, that's right. He had a big, emotional reaction to the publication, and mostly because he was upset how the character Atticus Finch was treated. In the original "To Kill A Mockingbird," Atticus Finch is this very heroic character and in "Go Set A Watchman," he's portrayed as a racist. And Berkeley Breathed was worried that this was going to kill off the character in the imagination of readers. And it made him reconsider his own characters.

GROSS: So why don't we get to that part of the interview that Sam did with Berkeley Breathed.

BERKELEY BREATHED: I watched slack-jawed in horror as they threw one of the 20th century's most iconic fictional heroes, Atticus Finch, under the bus. At the time - and this was a couple of months ago - it made me think that there would have been no "Bloom County" without "Mockingbird" because I was 12 I read it, and the book's fictional Southern small town of Maycomb had settled deep into my graphic imagination and informed it forever. If you look at any of my art for the past 30 years, there's always a small-town flavor to it.

So this summer, just a couple months ago when "Go Set A Watchman" was causing an uproar, I went back to my files and I pulled an old fan letter from years ago. It says (reading) dear Mr. Breathed, this is a plea from a dotty old lady and from others not dotty at all. Please don't shut down Opus. Can't you at least give him a reprieve? Opus is simply the best comic strip there is and depriving him of life is murder - a hard word to describe an obliteration of your creation. But Opus is real. He lives. Harper Lee, Monroeville, Ala.

BRIGER: Wow.

BREATHED: When I pulled that out - I hadn't seen it for 25 years. And I choked up, and I thought about the preposterously ironic impossibility of my literary heroine from my childhood demanding that I not kill one of her fictional heroes. The universe throws us some obvious little pitches sometimes, and we need to be awake enough not to let them slip by. So that night I found the blank four frames of "Bloom County" from years before in my files, and I sat down to draw the first one in 30 years. And I posted it on Facebook in sort of a what-the-hell moment, and that's exactly how much careful reason sober forethought went into the whole thing. And then it exploded after that.

BRIGER: Is it strange to return to "Bloom County" after 25 years? What comes easier or harder for you now writing the strip?

BREATHED: Well, no. It's a reverse question. It's why does it come so easy rather than why did it come so hard before, which is what it did. I never met any of my deadlines for 5,000 comic strips in the 10 years that I did "Bloom County," not a single one, and it was because I was miserable. I was driven, but every single deadline was ripped out of my backend. I don't know why. I've long examined why that was so difficult and why the strip turned out even readable. But it's such a reverse now that I'm still - it's all so new. I'm still trying to figure out and decipher what it is that's happened in the ensuing 25 years that has turned that around into something that I can't wait to get up in the morning to do.

And ever if there was a more perfect moment for the return of Opus, Bill the Cat, and the rest of Bloom County's off-kilter residents, it's now. I'd like to think of it as the body politic's autonomic response to the sheer ridiculousness of the 2016 campaign so far.  Make sure you're following the strip on Facebook, because politics here has gotten so insane that you really do need a comic strip to make sense of it all.

Last Call For McObtuse

Megan McArdle is in a weird "I told you so" mode about Obamacare "failing".

The administration is expecting barely any increase in enrollment in Obamacare next year. The forecast is for enrollment of only 10 million, just a smidge higher than the 9.9 million currently enrolled.

If enrollment growth has truly stalled out, that would be big news. The Congressional Budget Office had originally forecast that 22 million people would enroll in the exchanges in 2016. Some of this disparity may be because fewer employers are “dumping” employees onto the exchanges, but at best this could account for less than half of the shortfall. Mostly, this represents people who were expected to sign up declining to do so.

Of course, the Obama administration's estimate could be a lowball. After the embarrassing performance when Obamacare began, officials have tended to underpromise, enabling them to trumpet a nice “upside surprise” when they tell the public about enrollment.

Still, even if there is an upside surprise, it’s more likely to be on the order of a million or so than the missing 12 million people who were expected to be on the exchanges. What should we take from this?

She goes through a lot of factors, but finally arrives at the real answer at the end of her piece.

Obamacare has undoubtedly produced a large drop in the number of uninsured. But if the administration is correct, then that decline will be less than half of what was originally expected, both because of the underenrollment in exchange policies and because so many states didn’t expand their Medicaid programs. The program may be shaping up as a modest expansion of Medicaid, coupled with a more robust version of the old high-risk pools.

What's this, Megan?

You mean millions of people who could have had heath insurance continue to be denied because Republicans made sure that the program doesn't work in their states and sabotaged the risk-pool programs that were meant to help cushion the transition?

Imagine that.

It's really saying something that even McMegan admits that Republican sabotage may in fact be contributing to why 12 million expected people aren't on insurance exchanges, especially when she complains that insurance is all about the Law of Large Numbers.  When you deny large numbers of people access to the program, the risk isn't spread out as much.

Amazing how that works.  What even more amazing is how McArdle gets paid to write this stupidity.

Rand's Clock Is Running Out

The clock is ticking on Rand Paul's presidential run.  Erick Erickson over at Red State is calling on him to withdraw from the race, and as a result Paul has gone the full Trump in order to stay in it.

In what may be close to the most over-the-top claims made by Republicans about potential Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said Sanders’ election could lead to “mass genocide.”

Sanders is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, an economic model normally associated with Scandinavian countries that boast high quality of life. But Paul, like Texas state Rep. Jason Villalba, fear mongered by comparing Sanders to historical monsters who used the word “socialist” in their party names, Right Wing Watch reports.

Paul linked Sanders to murderous dictators like of Pol Pot and Josef Stalin.

“It amazes me and it actually kind of scares me,” Paul told South Carolina radio host Vince Coakley. “I think it’s not an accident of history that most of the times when socialism has been tried that attendant with that has been mass genocide of people or any of those who object to it. Stalin killed tens of millions of people. Mao killed tens of millions of people. Pol Pot killed tens of millions of people.”

Paul went on to ignore the “democratic” in democratic socialist when he said,” When you have a command economy, when everything is dictated from one authority, that’s socialism, but it doesn’t come easily to those who resist it.”

And so Bernie Sanders will kill tens of millions of people too! Duh!

Paul doesn't get that as a Republican in office who hasn't stopped Obama, and hasn't repealed Obamacare or impeached the President or deported tens of millions of brown people, who hasn't outlawed same-sex marriage everywhere, who hasn't declared all Democrats ineligible to vote forevermore, that he's the Enemy now of the GOP primary nutjob voter.  There is nothing he can say or that he can do to save his campaign at this point.

But he sure is trying.

Republicans are exactly who we thought they were, folks.

Who Can Trump Trump? Not Rubio

The Village expected Donald Trump to have been dispatched by now, and for the Very Serious People in the GOP to now be leading comfortably.  They of course are not, a full-scale open revolt is underway with Trump, Carson, and Fiorina leading a mob of GOP primary voters that want to destroy the party and replace it with Tea Party fantasy where "illegals" are rounded up and deported, and Democrats are just rounded up.

These are the same GOP primary voters that despise Sen. Marco Rubio because he's too weak on immigration, and the only acceptable immigration to the new Trumpian GOP is none at all. The Village is running out of patience and starting to blame the candidates.  Jeb Bush was first earlier this month, and now it's Rubio's turn for "Why haven't you stopped Trump yet?"

The hype surrounding Marco Rubio's presidential campaign just smashed into the wall of reality.

First, the Florida senator's team insisted it had stashed more campaign cash in the bank than fellow Floridian Jeb Bush -- only it hadn't. The campaign also told reporters it had raised $6 million in the last fundraising quarter -- also not true. That turned out to be an overly generous rounding of the underwhelming real figure: $5.7 million.

Yet those aren't even the most troublesome parts of the Florida senator's most recent campaign finance report. Rubio may be slowly rising in the polls, but his third quarter filing revealed a campaign that's also out-manned by many of its rivals in the early-voting states. His staff is largely concentrated in Washington, with just a small umbrella of on-the-ground, early-state operatives -- and he's already at a disadvantage because he hasn't invested the time in early-state visits that some of his opponents have.

For all the recent buzz surrounding his candidacy -- fueled by strong debate performances -- Rubio isn't raising enough money to keep pace with his rivals in the top tier and he's running out of time to assemble a robust field organization.

"If Trump-mania subsides, you’ve got to have a mechanism and a structure," said Chip Felkel, a South Carolina Republican strategist who isn't affiliated with any campaign. "I think you’re being risky if you don’t put a structure in place."

The smart money has been on Rubio for some time now as the dynamic Latino Republican who would solve immigration and knock the crazy out of the GOP, the charismatic Obama of the right. Remember this TIME cover from February 2013?

 

The Village has invested quite a lot in the myth of Rubio as the party's "savior" in 2016. Instead, Trump and Carson are crapping all over the bed.  Christie has failed.  Rand Paul has failed.  Jeb has failed.  Jindal has failed. Rubio isn't their last shot (that would be Ted Cruz) but he's the one they prefer.  And he's in the middle of failing.  The Summer of Trump is now the Fall of the GOP Establishment, and they are terrified that Trump or Carson will win the nomination and get crushed next year.

Rubio is their last hope.  And he's fading.