According to an article in Talking Points Memo, Republican Senator Roy Blunt will continue to endorse Donald Trump in spite of the recent brouhaha about what fellow Missouri Republican Ann Wagner terms Trump’s “predatory and reprehensible comments” about women. Blunt’s rationale is … Obama:

“I am glad to see that he understands more about the country now than he believes he did when this process started,” Blunt said, referring to a comment Trump made in his apology for the remarks. “I think if you want to solve the problems that have been created over the last eight years, you can’t have a third Obama administration. So he needs to be vigorous in explaining how he is a different man than that person, but how he hopes to lead the country and I think he may very well get that done.”

Problems that have been created over the last eight years? Like bringing a depression-bound economy back from the dead, pushing unemployment figures to less than 5%, and encouraging a steadily expanding economy? There’s lots more of that type of problem on the record and it was all accomplished despite record levels of GOP obstruction in which Roy Blunt was an enthusiastic participant. Close to 55% of Americans now approve of Obama’s performance in office. So, as far as a “third Obama administration” goes – preferably one without Roy Blunt in the Senate – why not?

But enough. We all know that the real reason for Blunt’s fealty to Trump lies in the fact that Missouri is one of those states where Trump is riding high and likely to continue to do so. The latest Emerson Poll has Trump up 13% in Missouri; Blunt hasn’t got any problem with those coattails and he’s gambling that a tape telling the red-meat eaters what we already knew about Trump won’t cut them off too short.

Ann Wagner, who has renounced Trump in the wake of the recent revelations must appeal to more moderate, suburban St. Louis voters who were already disturbed by Trump. Blunt, however, faced with a strong Democratic challenger in Jason Kander who, arguably, has some cross-over appeal to more moderate Republicans, can’t afford to dampen his support among the Trump-loving, out-state Republican base.

But, for the record, Blunt did say that Trump’s remarks “were disrespectful and inappropriate.” It’s called covering your backside.

Breaking news from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: country-club Republican, Ann Wagner (R-2) has had a change of heart and will no longer support Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The occasion for her newfound disdain was the exposure of Trump’s decade-old more explicitly sleazy than usual comments about women:

I have committed my short time in Congress to fighting for the most vulnerable in our society. As a strong and vocal advocate for victims of sex trafficking and assault, I must be true to those survivors and myself and condemn the predatory and reprehensible comments of Donald Trump, […]  I withdraw my endorsement and call for Governor Pence to take the lead so we can defeat Hillary Clinton.

Laudable, but, one can only ask, why now? Why didn’t the stream of bigotry, racism and misogyny that have emanated from Trump over the past few months lead Wagner to disavow him as the leader of her party long ago? This is a woman who, up to now has been willing to support a candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan , giving him her vote with only a few, pro forma quivers of trepidation.

Do you think that maybe that the last sentence in the quote above might have something to do with Wagner’s sudden willingness to make a hard turn on a candidate whose essential unfitness for office has been obvious from day one?

The faint whiff of Republican defeat in November has now become an overwhelming stench and, like rats too timid to leap pell-mell from their sinking boat, many GOPers hope that Pence might just be just the life-preserver the party and their own, individual political fortunes need if they are to emerge unscathed from association with Trump. And this latest piece of Trumpian nastiness, along with Pence’s self-aggrandizing performance at last Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, offers just the opportunity they have needed.

Pence emerged as the hero of the Republican day when he coolly abandoned Trump during his debate with the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Kaine, last Tuesday. With almost breathtaking audacity, he substituted his own policy prescriptions for the incoherent ramblings of Donald Trump and earned widespread huzzahs for the cold-blooded smoothness with which he left his running mate twisting in the wind.

Many commentators have suggested that Pence did what he did in an effort to raise his profile for 2020. He was, in effect, preparing to make future lemonade out of an admittedly over-sized lemon. However, pols like Wagner want their lemonade right now and they think they can get away with flipping the ticket – even at this late date, an action that, as Akhil Reed Amar suggests in Vox, might be plausible if they act fast.

What this suggests to me is that now that the power struggles that animate the opportunistic GOP hacks have been bared for all to see it is, as they say, time to pass the popcorn.

For the past three days I’ve been transfixed with horror as I’ve watched the people who want to run our country lie and rage, egged on by Donald Trump, who thinks that the goal of the whole event was to demonstrate “the fact that I’m very well liked.” I’m not alone. Lot’s of commentators seem to have been gobsmacked by the spectacle to which Trump and the RNC have subjected us. Consequently, I’m going to deviate from my usual focus on what’s going on in Missouri and survey a few of the more telling responses to the Cleveland Carnival and to the Carny-in-Chief behind it all:

David Leonhardt (New York Times):

Screaming matches between delegates. Past nominees who refused to attend. Speakers who seem allergic to mentioning the nominee’s name – or policies. The runner-up refusing to endorse the winner.

Plagiarism. Lies about plagiarism. Talk of Lucifer from the stage. Humanizing stories about the nominee relegated to obscure time slots. Multiple speakers calling for the jailing of the opposing nominee. A prominent delegate calling for that nominee’s execution by firing squad.

It’s time to ask where the Republican National Convention of 2016 ranks on the list of modern history’s worst political conventions.

Josh Marshall (Talking Point Memo):

Trump brings together aggression and narcissism with a kind of militant ignorance which can be harmless or even amusing in the make believe world of reality TV or New York real estate but becomes positively dangerous on a national and global stage, thrashing about like a hose spewing fire. As Will Saletan memorably put it, the GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord. […]

In any case, here we are. Trump’s convention is everything you could have predicted: a mix of bracing disorganization, provocation, aggression and lies. It is simply impossible to pick apart the incompetence from the transgressive behavior and pettiness. […]

This is Trump. His convention would be his presidency – entertaining and hilarious if he weren’t also a live wire against the fumy gasoline can set against our national home. It is quite literally a terrifying prospect. He’s quite likely to lose his quest for the presidency. But he might not. He’s that close to the unimaginable. And he’s brought almost an entire political party along with him. We will be blessed if we can escape this with no more harm.

Steve Benen (Maddow Blog)

… . There’s something rotten in Republican politics, and it’s contributing to the convention fiasco. This is a party lacking in leadership, substance, and ideas. Each of the individual errors this week help add up to a debacle, but what GOP officials need to recognize is the bankruptcy underpinning all of their many problems.

The nomination of a racist television personality to be president of the United State is a symptom of a larger crisis. Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann explained this week that Trump’s rise in GOP politics is “the culmination of a proud political party’s steady descent into a deeply destructive and dysfunctional state.

Trump’s convention has given voice to the most extremist portions of the right. It has sharpened the partisan divide. It has cast Clinton as a figure who cannot be allowed to take the White House—even if somehow she collects more votes (or the “rigged system” says she collects more votes). Trump has established a term sheet for this election that establishes an alarming dichotomy: If he wins, the process worked; if she wins, the game is corrupt and the results cannot be trusted. This is a perilous moment. There is talk of killing a presidential nominee and a foundation is being set for delegitimizing an election. And the convention is only halfway over.

The journey [i.e., the demonization of Hillary Clinton at the convention] into what once would have been written off as the land of the lunatic fringe explains how Trump has seized control of the GOP and forced traditional Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to bend to his will. Far from being an intermeddling alien force, Trump represents the true center of gravity in a party that has spent a quarter-century defining itself through extravagant shows of opposition first to the Clinton family and then to Barack Obama.

[…] Trumpism is an ideological wasteland where anger is the only point and winning is the only objective. Here in Cleveland, we have seen what the wasteland looks like.

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill wasted no time coming out for Hillary Clinton. Her alacrity  – she endorsed Clinton in June, declaring that “it’s important we start early” – suggested to some that she saw the  writing on the wall when it came to 2016 and she was sure that it spelled “Hillary.” Naturally, so the story goes, McCaskill had some work to do to make nice with the candidate she dissed in 2008 in favor of Barack Obama, hence the early endorsement.

Nor, now that she is committed, is McCaskill a slacker in Clinton’s tightening primary fight against Bernie Sanders. Yesterday she attacked him in the New York Times as an unelectable extremist, declaring that “the Republicans won’t touch him because they can’t wait to run an ad with a hammer and sickle.”

Missouri’s other prominent Democrat, Governor Jay Nixon, also added his two cents to the Times account:

“Here in the heartland, we like our politicians in the mainstream, and he is not — he’s a socialist,” said Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri, who is term-limited and working to elect a Democratic successor. “He’s entitled to his positions, and it’s a big-tent party, but as far as having him at the top of the ticket, it would be a meltdown all the way down the ballot.”

Heartland! Save me from all the cliches. Of course Democrats maintain a big tent. If we didn’t, neither Nixon nor McCaskill would be welcome. That’s something that the Sanders’ insurgency is making very clear.

Nevertheless, there is some evidence that McCaskill and Nixon may be right about, what else, Republican perceptions. Prominent Republicans like Party Chairman Rince Pribus and Carl Rove have lately seemed to be boosting Sanders’ candidacy. Why? To answer that question Steve Benen cites Claire McCaskill’s last Senate race:

In the larger context, the idea of partisans taking steps to choose their own opponent is hardly unprecedented. Perhaps the best recent example was the 2012 U.S. Senate race in Missouri, when Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) carefully and methodically helped boost then-Rep. Todd Akin (R) in his primary race, confident she could beat him in a general election. (She was right; McCaskill won by over 15 points.)

In today’s Washington Post, Greg Sargent suggests that there may be some truth to the arguments coming from both the Sanders and Clinton camps. While noting that “head-to-head general election polling right now is meaningless,” he says of Sanders:

… the political science tells us that perceptions of moderation in a candidate — as opposed to perceptions that a candidate is outside the mainstream — actually can make a difference. So does the history (see Goldwater, Barry, and McGovern, George). To be clear, I’m not saying Sanders could not overcome perceptions as out of the mainstream, if such perceptions do currently exist. He might be able to do that. It’s possible such perceptions might not form at all. But it’s also very possible that Republicans could successfully paint Sanders as an ideological outlier, and that this could matter. It’s not crazy, illegitimate, or out of bounds to raise these concerns.

Sargent then proceeds to point out that Clinton is also vulnerable to arguments about electability:

… The Sanders camp points out that only he can motivate younger and newer voters, as evidenced by what we’re seeing in the Democratic primary. The question of whether Clinton can motivate those voters is a very serious concern, one that has been raised by veteran Democratic pollsters such as Stan Greenberg, and one that really does call into question whether Clinton will be able to win in November. Meanwhile, to my knowledge the Clinton camp has not meaningfully addressed the fair point that she made similar “electability” arguments against Barack Obama in 2008, which turned out (obviously) to be very wrong.

Add the on-going GOP efforts, aided and abetted by mainstream media, to paint Clinton as untrustworthy and “unlikeable,” and you may have a real argument.

But maybe the anti-Sanders contingent is right. Maybe the only thing that will save the election for the Democrats is the primacy of one of the really ridiculous Republican candidates. Who knows?  Elections are never certain, and while I understand the legitimate anxiety that prompts concerns about electability – the ugly GOP presidential line-up and the destructive nature of even the so-called moderates’ positions justify our worst fears –  that is not the criteria that should determine one’s choice of candidate.

All I know is that I’ll support either candidate with my whole heart when the primary is over. I also know that I’ll be glad to see the back of Jay Nixon though I’ll have to hold my nose and vote for the pseudo-Democratic candidate, Attorney General Chris Koster. Same goes for that inestimable centrist, Claire McCaskill, if she runs again – although I don’t think that the powers that be can guarantee her the gift of another Todd Akin.