Republican Party

Going into the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump was riding high.

The brazen billionaire was not only the clear frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, he had also managed to pull ahead of his closest rival, senator Ted Cruz, in Iowa for the first time since August.

Make no mistake, nine months ago the idea that Trump could be competitive in Iowa was laughable. But the only one laughing going into the caucus was Trump.

And then, something went wrong.

If Donald Trump has distanced himself from some of the positions held by two of the powerful wings of the conservative movement—free marketeers and evangelical Christians—he has provoked a fury among members of the third GOP wing, the neoconservatives, who for all practical purposes dominate the party’s foreign policy thinking.

Michael Brendan Dougherty identifies the main source of enthusiasm for Rubio among Republican elites and pundits:

The other reason that Rubio-mania will take off is less inspiring. Rallying around Rubio will just be too strong a temptation for the GOP’s elite and the most established organs of the conservative movement. Rubio’s candidacy is essentially based on the premise that nothing from the George W. Bush era has to change for the Republican Party.

Authored by Nomi Prins, originally posted at TomDispatch.com,

Speaking of the need for citizen participation in our national politics in his final State of the Union address, President Obama said, “Our brand of democracy is hard.” A more accurate characterization might have been: “Our brand of democracy is cold hard cash.”

As Donald Trump surges ahead in Iowa, taking the bellicose billionaire even closer to winning the Republican nomination, President Obama is busy trying to counter the GOP frontrunner’s message about “radical Islamic extremism.”