Bloomberg is getting in, Holder is thinking about it, Yang boosts Williamson, the Steyer campaign commits a felony, and Biden keeps bide bide biding along at the top of polls. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Maine People’s Resource Center (Maine): Biden 26.8, Warren 22.1, Sanders 15.4, Buttigieg 9.1, Harris 5.0, Booker 2.7, O’Rourke 2.2, Yang 1.7, Other 6.5. 723 respondents. What I don’t get is that Maine Democrats show overwhelming majorities for every far left socialist scheme anyone has proposed (socialized medicine, Green New Deal, etc.), but Biden still comes out on top of their poll.
Emerson (Nevada): Biden 30, Warren 22, Sanders 19, Yang 5, Harris 5, Buttigieg 5, Steyer 3, Gabbard 1, Booker 1, Klobuchar 1, Bennet 1, Castro 1. I think this is the first poll that’s had Yang even tired with Buttigieg.
Texas Tribune (Texas): Biden 23, Warren 18, O’Rourke 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, Yang 4, Castro 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2. Poll conducted before O’Rourke dropped out (obviously), but it has to sting for Castro to be losing to Yang in his home state…
538 offers up post-debate poll aggregation. Buttigieg and Sanders are up the most, while Warren is down the most.
Election betting markets. Bloomberg has already zoomed up to fifth place, above Clinton, Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar…
Pundits, etc.
Jonathan Chait has a bracing message for Democrats: “New Poll Shows Democratic Candidates Have Been Living in a Fantasy World“:
In 2018, Democratic candidates waded into hostile territory and flipped 40 House districts, many of them moderate or conservative in their makeup. In almost every instance, their formula centered on narrowing their target profile by avoiding controversial positions, and focusing obsessively on Republican weaknesses, primarily Donald Trump’s abuses of power and attempts to eliminate health insurance for millions of Americans.
The Democratic presidential field has largely abandoned that model. Working from the premise that the country largely agrees with them on everything, or that agreeing with the majority of voters on issues is not necessary to win, the campaign has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again.
A new batch of swing state polls from the New York Times ought to deliver a bracing shock to Democrats. The polls find that, in six swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona — Trump is highly competitive. He trails Joe Biden there by the narrowest of margins, and leads Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Normally, it is a mistake to overreact to the findings of a single poll. In general, an outlier result should only marginally nudge our preexisting understanding of where public opinion stands. This case is different. To see why, you need to understand two interrelated flaws in the 2016 polling. First, they tended to under-sample white voters without college degrees. And this made them especially vulnerable to polling misses in a handful of states with disproportionately large numbers of white non-college voters. The Times found several months ago that Trump might well win 270 Electoral College votes even in the face of a larger national vote defeat than he suffered in 2016.
All this is to say that, if you’ve been relying on national polls for your picture of the race, you’re probably living in la-la land. However broadly unpopular Trump may be, at the moment he is right on the cusp of victory.
What about the fact Democrats crushed Trump’s party in the midterms? The new Times polling finds many of those voters are swinging back. Almost two-thirds of the people who supported Trump in 2016, and then a Democrat in the 2018 midterms, plan to vote for Trump again in 2020.
Snip.
The debate has taken shape within a world formed by Twitter, in which the country is poised to leap into a new cultural and economic revolution, and even large chunks of the Democratic Party’s elected officials and voting base have fallen behind the times. As my colleague Ed Kilgore argues, the party’s left-wing intelligentsia have treated any appeals to voters in the center as a sign of being behind the times.
Biden’s paper-thin lead over Trump in the swing states is largely attributable to the perception that he is more moderate than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Three-quarters of those who would vote for Biden over Trump, but Trump over Warren, say they would prefer a more moderate Democratic nominee to a more liberal one, and a candidate who would find common ground with Republicans over one who would fight for a progressive agenda.
There are lots of Democrats who are trying to run moderate campaigns. But the new environment in which they’re running has made it difficult for any of them to break through. There are many reasons the party’s mainstream has failed to exert itself. Biden’s name recognition and association with the popular Obama administration has blotted out alternatives, and the sheer number of center-left candidates has made it hard for any non-Biden to gain traction. Candidates with strong profiles, like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, have struggled to gain attention, and proven politicians like Michael Bennet and Steve Bullock have failed even to qualify for debates.
But in addition to those obstacles, they have all labored against the ingrained perception that the Democratic party has moved beyond Obama-like liberalism, and that incremental reform is timid and boring. The same dynamic was already beginning to form in 2016, though Hillary Clinton overcame it with a combination of name recognition and a series of leftward moves of her own to defuse progressive objections. Biden’s name brand has given him a head start with the half of the Democratic electorate that has moderate or conservative views. But it’s much harder for a newer moderate Democrat lacking that established identity to build a national constituency. The only avenue that has seemed to be open for a candidate to break into the top has been to excite activists, who are demanding positions far to the left of the median voter.
Golly, who else has been saying such things? Besides, you know, me and pretty much every right-of-center blogger over the last three years.
A consulting firm representing Burisma Holdings used the Biden name to leverage a meeting between the gas company and State Department officials, according to documents released this week.
The firm, Washington-based Blue Star Strategies, mentioned the name of Hunter Biden, who then sat on Burisma’s board, in a request for the Ukrainian natural gas company executives to meet with State Department officials, according to internal State Department email exchanges obtained by journalist John Solomon and later reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Blue Star representatives also mentioned Biden’s name during the resulting meeting, which they claim was scheduled as part of an effort to rehabilitate Burisma’s reputation in Washington following a corruption investigation.
Biden allies are worried about Bloomberg getting in. As well they should be. I doubt Millionaire McMoneyBags is going to be pulling too many Warren or Sanders voters over. Biden slams Warren’s sneering elitism: “If only you were as smart as I am you would agree with me.”
Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Getting In? Twitter. So the prophecy has foretold:
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is preparing to jump into the 2020 Democratic primary for president.
Bloomberg, 77, a billionaire, has mulled over a presidential bid for months, according to the New York Times. Bloomberg has publicly downplayed and, at times, outright denied that he would enter the race for 2020.
Bloomberg still has not yet made a decision on whether to jump into the crowded Democratic primary field, but he is expected to file paperwork in at least one state, Alabama, designating him a contender in the primary. He has hired staff and sent them to Alabama to collect enough signatures to qualify for a run. The deadline to file paperwork for a presidential run in Alabama is Nov. 8.
“We now need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated — but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that,” said Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg adviser. “If Mike runs, he would offer a new choice to Democrats built on a unique record running America’s biggest city, building a business from scratch and taking on some of America’s toughest challenges as a high-impact philanthropist.”
The reason, though, why Bloomberg is considering a last-minute bid is that he is reportedly worried about the way the Democratic primary is unfolding, as one adviser told the Times. Back in March, Bloomberg said he believed that it was essential that the Democratic nominee be able to defeat President Trump, and last month it was reported that he would reconsider his decision not to run if former Vice President Joe Biden continued to struggle. Presumably, Bloomberg has now changed his mind after seeing Sen. Elizabeth Warren — whose ideas, especially the wealth tax, he has lambasted as socialism — gain ground in the polls and Biden struggle with fundraising.
But there is arguably very little appetite among Democratic voters — donors may be a different story — for yet another presidential candidate. In October, a YouGov/HuffPost poll found that 83 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters were either enthusiastic or satisfied with their presidential choices. And it looks like there is even less appetite for Bloomberg specifically. According to last week’s Fox News poll, just 6 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they would definitely vote for Bloomberg should he enter the race. And a hypothetical Harvard-Harris Poll of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bloomberg mixed in with the rest of the Democratic field gave Bloomberg the same 6 percent of the vote.
And those polls would probably qualify as good news for Bloomberg, given that he was generally registering around 2 or 3 percent in national primary polls before first taking his name out of consideration in March (which is also when pollsters largely stopped asking about him).
In a field this crowded, entering the race in the high single digits wouldn’t even necessarily be a bad thing, but the problem is that it might be harder for Bloomberg to build on that support than it would be for other candidates. In an average of polls from January and early February, I found that 62 percent of Democrats knew enough about Bloomberg to form an opinion (which was pretty high), but his net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) was only +11 (which was pretty low).
“History suggests Bloomberg’s low favorability ratings would be a major obstacle to winning the nomination.” You don’t say. The last candidate to have a lower rating was also a New York City mayor.
On the other hand, de Blasio didn’t have billions of his own money to throw at the campaign. Bloomberg’s net worth is around $52.3 billion, so if he wanted to, he could just buy every single minute of airtime on every TV station in Iowa and New Hampshire.
That would certainly have a negative effect on longshot candidates trying to break through. Of course there is that tiny little problem that he recently said we need to take guns away from male minorities between the ages of 15 and 25. Because hey, what’s a little racism, collective guilt, and trampling civil rights next to the holy goal of gun control? Besides, the Northam blackface scandal showed that Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) don’t care about racism as long as the person committing it has a (D) after their name. President Donald Trump has already dubbed him “Little Michael” and says he relishes the opportunity to run against him. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) But this is the real kiss of death:
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He attended an “environmental justice” forum in South Carolina. Also attending: Warren, Steyer, Delaney, Williamson and Sestak. Pictures on Twitter of Warren speaking there suggests it was sparsely attended.
Pete Buttigieg was quickly locking down a solid lane in the Democratic primary: a young, vibrant, gay, midwestern, war veteran mayor with progressive ideas and plenty of money — but both feet planted in fiscal prudence.
Young Wall Street and tech-entrepreneur types were starting to fall in love — with his poll numbers and fundraising totals underscoring the Buttigieg boomlet. He was the “Parks and Recreation” candidate in the Democratic field and an alternative to seventy-somethings Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who are both looking to lock down the hyper-online progressive, anti-Wall Street crowd as well as blue collar workers across the Midwest.
And Buttigieg is a lot younger than former Vice President Joe Biden, who has lagged in fundraising and hardly taken off in the big-donor crowd the way many expected. Buttigieg was poised to perhaps emerge as the leading moderate alternative to Biden.
But then a funny thing happened last week: Another 70-something candidate beloved on Wall Street — billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg — made an unexpected splash by suggesting he may still enter the race.
Bloomberg will not steal Buttigieg’s momentum with younger, wealthier Democratic voters and donors, people close to the South Bend mayor say. But the former NYC mayor does give Big Finance, Big Tech and other more corporate-friendly Democrats another progressive prospect as an alternative to Biden, Sanders and Warren.
(Which raises the question: Why would anyone donate to Bloomberg? Let moneybags 100% self-fund.) “Why Pete Buttigieg Annoys His Democratic Rivals.” “Many of their campaigns have griped privately about the attention and cash directed toward Buttigieg. They said he is too inexperienced to be electable and that his accomplishments don’t merit the outsize appeal he has with elite donors and voters. His public punditry about the race has prompted eye rolls from older rivals who view him as a know-it-all.” I linked a very similar story about a month ago. Is Buttigieg really annoying, or does one of his rivals keep pitching this story to a compliant press? “Pete Buttigieg Pitches Himself As The Obama Of 2020.”
Like a gay white thirty-something mayor is going to tap two centuries of white guilt. That trick only works once, and not for you. OK, now I see why they say he’s annoying…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “With an Eye Toward Beto Voters, Castro Campaign Limps On.” Oh yeah, that’s what you want to do: add the 1% of voters who supported the guy who just dropped out to your 1%.
When former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the race last week, Castro made the call and then made some more. And it worked. As the last Texan standing, he flipped nine Lone Star State endorsements that previously belonged to O’Rourke to his own campaign.
He also launched a new ad campaign in Iowa. That, plus the endorsements, are evidence, his campaign manager said, of how Castro is prepared to “supercharge the coalitions needed to beat Donald Trump.”
You snagged nine second-hand endorsements from your own state. Hoo freaking ray. That would almost matter in a statewide, but he won’t run one of those because he knows he’d lose.
Except a supercharger requires an engine with some gas, and Castro bus appears to be dangerously close to empty. The endorsements come at a moment when the candidate has stripped his campaign down to bare bones. He laid off campaign teams in New Hampshire and South Carolina over the weekend.
CONCORD, NH — About 50 of her most devoted and bundled-up supporters gathered in the cold on the state house steps last week to watch Rep. Tulsi Gabbard firebomb the establishment.
Over the next half hour, her fire was directed left and right: At Democratic leaders and President Donald Trump, at Saudi Arabian monarchs and at plutocratic warmongers, all of whom have become the bogeymen — or bogeywomen, in the case of Hillary Clinton — of her scrappy presidential campaign.
She brought up Tim Frolich, a 9/11 survivor, to allege a conspiracy at the highest levels to conceal information about the true Saudi Arabian masterminds of the terror attack.
It’s an unusual speech to deliver directly after filing paperwork to run in the state, especially amid a presidential primary field almost preternaturally occupied with health care. But Gabbard is an unusual candidate. And that’s exactly what is giving the four-term representative’s improbable presidential run a toe-hold in this early primary state.
Her campaign got a polling bounce here after Clinton implied on a podcast that Gabbard is a Russian stooge and Gabbard replied in a tweet that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers” leading a conspiracy to destroy her reputation. Clinton is not exactly beloved in New Hampshire, after all; Sen. Bernie Sanders blew her out in the 2016 primary before she went on to beat Trump by just under 3,000 votes.
“When I heard Hillary do that, the first thing I said was, ‘Oh my god,’ and the second thing I said is, ‘This is going to be great, because that’s going to really help Tulsi,’ — and it has,” said Peggy Marko, a Gabbard supporter and physical therapist in Candia, New Hampshire. “She has crossover appeal … and I think the folks in New Hampshire especially value that.”
Gabbard recently polled at 5 percent here, outlasting sitting senators and governors by securing a spot on the November debate stage. Just 1 percent higher in two more New Hampshire polls would meet the Democratic National Committee’s threshold for entry to the next debate in Los Angeles in December. And from there on, who knows?
So as candidates like Sen. Kamala Harris and Julián Castro have all but given up on the Granite State, Gabbard is digging in. This notoriously nonpartisan state is her ticket to staying in the race. Independent voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, and the state’s semi-open primary laws allow anyone to change affiliation up to the day of the primary to vote for whomever they want.
“We’re seeing support coming from people across the political spectrum and building the kind of coalition that we need to be able to defeat Donald Trump, and it’s encouraging,” Gabbard told VICE News.
Usual grains of salt apply, especially when it says she’s pulling in Trump voters. I can see a few, but not remotely enough to lift her up even to the 15% delegate threshold in New Hampshire. But Democrats are still freaking out about her:
In 2012, Nancy Pelosi described Tulsi Gabbard as an “emerging star.” In 2019, Hillary Clinton decried the Hawaii congresswoman as a “Russian asset.” Suffice to say, the honeymoon is over.
Gabbard is a major target of the liberal elite’s disgust. She feuded with the party organs in 2016 over her backing of Bernie Sanders. Now, during the 2020 election, she is upping the ante — Gabbard isn’t just criticizing the party mainstream; she’s doing so as a candidate for president. She hasn’t pulled punches, toed the party line, or been silenced by criticism from her peers or intraparty backlash. She’s an outsider and a long shot, but her poll numbers have edged slightly higher as she battles the Democratic old guard.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t find new ways to make ordinary people hate them, Kamala Harris wants to expanded the school day to match the work day. So she found a way to piss off students, parents, teachers, bus drivers, and anyone who actually understands how the real world works.
Eric Holder, the former attorney general and self-proclaimed “wingman” to President Barack Obama, may be on the brink of diving into the Democrats’ nomination fight, Newsweek reported Friday.
The hint came from Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who tweeted that Holder has been “consulting strategists” about launching a campaign.
Holder’s potential bid follows Michael Bloomberg’s late entry into the race last week – and would swell the historically huge Democratic field, with only 86 days to go until the Iowa caucuses.
I just don’t see it. He’s not independently wealthy, and he’s never run in any political race, ever. Does he expect to yell “Obaminations, conglomerate!” and the Obama 2012 Campaign will magically come flying in, perform a superhero landing, and carry him off to contention?
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Thursday released a sweeping immigration plan that would impose a moratorium on deportations, “break up” existing immigration enforcement agencies, grant full welfare access to illegal immigrants and welcome a minimum of 50,000 “climate migrants” in the first year of a Sanders administration.
The plan effectively establishes Sanders at the far left of the immigration debate, as he aims to energize a base that helped drive his 2016 primary campaign amid competition from other liberal candidates in the field this time around.
Following the heart attack and flush with cash, Bernie is going to buy more ads. Also, please stop:
I didn't realize 💕✨ was the emoji combination that stood for "painfully staged."
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bad week for Tommy Make-A-Wish: Not only is he stuck at 1% in the polls, but, with Bloomberg getting in, he’s no longer the richest guy in the race either, Plus It looks like the Steyer campaign committed a federal felony by privately offering “campaign contributions to local politicians in exchange for endorsing his White House bid.” Oopsie!
It is hard to overstate how utterly insane and dishonest this is. Warren claims that in order to finance the $52 trillion her plan would entail over its first ten years, she’d ‘only’ need to raise taxes by approximately $20 trillion, to cover new spending. This math amounts to a $14 trillion shortfall, based on the nonpartisan consensus about the true mathematical cost of her plan (overall, her basket of proposals would double the annual federal budget). She does not even attempt to account for this staggering amount of money. Experts and commentators have been punching gaping holes in Warren’s proposals, including proving that her ‘not one penny of tax increases on non-billionaires’ assertion (even ignoring the $14 trillion gap) is a dramatic, fantastical, bald-faced lie.
Not only does this pie-in-the-sky funding scheme rely on dubious — some would say, “dishonest” — number crunching, it self-evidently breaks her promise not to raise middle-class taxes….
Warren and her team are relying on a compliant media and other allies to hide her tax hike. That $9 trillion payroll tax is not coming from the super-rich or the undeserving wealthy. It won’t bleed billionaires or stick it to the upper class. That “head tax” will fall squarely on the shoulders of the American worker. And Warren’s shameful dishonesty is more than political posturing. It’s an assault on the middle class.
Are presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and WeWork founder Adam Neumann the same person? I mean, they have different hairstyles and all, but their philosophies are more alike than not.
They both claim, falsely, to be capitalists. Ms. Warren told the New England Council last year, “I am a capitalist to my bones.” She then told CNBC, “I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.” It was almost as if she didn’t believe it herself. Then came the caveat: “But only fair markets, markets with rules. Markets without rules is about the rich take it all, it’s about the powerful get all of it. And that’s what’s gone wrong in America.” She clearly doesn’t understand capitalism.
Neither does Mr. Neumann, who said of WeWork, “We are making a capitalist kibbutz.” Talk about mixed metaphors. In Israel, a kibbutz is often defined as “a collective community, traditionally based in agriculture.” WeWork’s prospectus for its initial public offering mentioned the word “community” 150 times. Yet one little secret of kibbutzim is that many of them hired outsiders to do menial jobs that the “community” wouldn’t do, similar to migrant workers on U.S. farms. A capitalist kibbutz is a plain old farm, much like a WeWork building is plain old shared office space. Big deal.
Ms. Warren wants to reshape capitalism, while Mr. Neumann wants to “revolutionize your workspace.” Meanwhile, the Vision Fund, with capital from SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has thrown good money after bad, writing off $9.2 billion in its quest toward this WeWork revolution. The same mismatch between communitarian vision and market realities would doom Ms. Warren’s economic reshaping. It’s hard to repeal good old capitalism.
The commonalities go on. Last year, Ms. Warren proposed the Accountable Capitalism Act. If it became law, large companies would have to obtain a federal charter that “obligates company directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders,” or dare I say, community. For each company, Ms. Warren insists that “40% of its directors are selected by the corporation’s employees.” Back to the kibbutz?
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Rival Yang fundraises for Williamson, much the way she herself did for the now-departed Mike Gravel. If only all the longshots could Voltron themselves together into one viable candidate…
He’s a true nerd, and he’s making arguments common in the nerd capital of the world, Silicon Valley. Except for one thing: Much of his stump speech lacerates Silicon Valley.
Yang’s candidacy is something of a toxic bouillabaisse for the tech industry. He presents himself as someone of the industry, wearing a lapel that says “math” instead of one with a flag. Pundits call him a tech entrepreneur, though he actually made his money at a test-prep company. He talks about breaking problems apart and finding solutions. He played D&D as a kid, read science fiction, and understands blockchain.
He has run his campaign in the most modern of digital ways too. The guy is dynamite on Reddit, and he spends time answering questions on Quora. And that is part of why he’s going to win, he hollers from the stage. He can beat Trump on his own terrain—“I’m better at the internet than he is!”
But the tech-friendly trappings mask a thorough critique of technology itself. His whole message is premised on the dangers of automation taking away jobs and the risks of artificial intelligence. He lambastes today’s technology firms for not compensating us for our data. If there’s a villain in his stump speech, it’s not Trump—it’s Amazon. (“We have to be pretty fucking stupid to let a trillion-dollar tech company pay nothing in taxes, am I right, Los Angeles?”)
If Yang is the candidate of Silicon Valley, he’s the one driving a Humvee up the wrong side of the 101. Or, as Chris Anderson, one of my predecessors as editor of WIRED and now a drone entrepreneur, tweeted the night of the fourth Democratic debate, “I turned on the radio for 6 seconds, enough to hear that the Dem debates were on and @AndrewYang, who I thought I liked, was talking about how autonomous trucks were endangering driver jobs. Head slapped, vote changed. Bummer.”
As Yang wraps up, he has another message: “What does this look like to you, Los Angeles? This looks like a fucking revolution to me.” That may be a bit much. It’s more an evolution, and it’s a killer party. Still, Andrew Yang has found his voice, found his message, and found his people.
So it’s entirely possible that, long after most of the other candidates have dropped out, Yang will still be there tweeting, jumping onto Reddit threads, grabbing microphones, and using the best of modern technology to explain why modern technology is leading America into the abyss.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lots of China and technology news this time around.
How much public, firsthand evidence is there of this so-called Ukrainian quid pro quo? Right now, zero: “The problem with this narrative is that all we have to rely on is Mr. [William] Taylor’s opening statement and leaks from Democrats. What we don’t know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions, or what he knew first-hand versus what he concluded on his own, because like all impeachment witnesses he testified in secret. Chairman Adam Schiff, with the approval of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses to release any witness transcripts.”
Let ye who has never brushed a congressional aide’s hair in the nude, taken naked bong hits, gotten an Iron Cross tattoo, and posted wife-sharing pics to a wife-swapping site cast the first stone.
We all know that if she was a Republican, this would dominate news cycles for weeks on end…
Brett Kavanaugh: *has a beer*
Media: TAKE. HIM. DOWN.
Katie Hill: Does drugs, has multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with employees, posts exhibitionist pictures on Reddit, does "wifesharing," etc. etc.
Media: She's living her best life, give her some privacy.
>Parliament flooded with tractors >Doors rammed >Army deployed >Angry politicians
This has had little to no traction outside the Dutch sphere, so Ive decided to make an English thread detailing the events on the 3 major protests pic.twitter.com/u7W3RWWPdz
This is a bad look: “Apple CEO becomes chairman of China university board.” What’s a little widespread rape and torture next to the almighty buck? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say.” An elegant, worm ouroboros structure which answers many questions, but since it’s from vice Motherboard, a salt shaker is probably in order.
Today, the vegetarian ideology is not a stand-alone philosophy. It is tied inexorably to other ideologies such as socialism, globalism and extremist forms of environmentalism. There are very few vegetarian promoters that are not politically motivated. This has caused a rash of propaganda, attempting to rewrite the history of the human diet to fit their bizarre narrative.
Even though human beings have been omnivores for millions of years, the anti-meat campaign claims that humans were actually long time vegetarians. They do this by comparing humans to our closest evolutionary relatives, like chimpanzees and gorillas, and arguing that these animals have a strict vegetable diet (which is not exactly true).
Of course, Native American tribes, living closest to how our prehistoric ancestors lived long ago, had meat heavy diets, but don’t expect the environmentalists to accept this reality. What they conveniently do not mention is that over 2 million years ago human ancestors broke from their vegetable diet and began eating meat. Not only this, but the diet changed our very physical makeup. We grew far stronger, and smarter.
Yes, that’s right, the rise of meat in the human diet tracks almost exactly with the rise of human intelligence and advances in tools and technology.
My theory is that “ethical humanism” among our chattering classes is a low-calorie substitute for traditional religion, and forgoing meat is our punishment for environmental sins. Either way, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it. Speaking of spinach…
Russian fighter with freakishly large biceps nicknamed Popeye gets clock cleaned by guy 20 years older. You’ve seen those “Skipped Leg Day” memes? This guy looks like he skipped everything but biceps day for five years.
I regard GNU Foundation head Richard Stallman as a fanatic who’s just a few steps shy of being a complete lunatic. But he’s right to defy Social Justice Warrior-types who want him removed for objecting to the lynch mob regarding the late Marvin Minsky’s minimal ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Ukraine revelations are pummeling the Biden campaign, furthering his slump, Q3 fundraising numbers drop, Yang rises, and rumors fly that Grandma Death is about to escape from her crypt yet again. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Q3 Fundraising
It’s that time again! Fundraising totals came gushing out of the campaigns last week:
Those are good numbers for Yang, bad numbers for Harris, and terrible numbers for Biden. As the presumed front-runner and DNC insider candidate, Biden should be rolling in donor dough. He’s not. And he had two-and-a-half months to raise money before the whole Ukraine thing really broke open. This suggests serious organizational impairment by the Biden campaign, or that Biden himself is simply phoning it in.
Sanders topped the list, but everything hings on how well, and how quickly, he comes back from his heart attack. Warren is in line with expectation: The bump from beating Biden has to be tempered with the disappointment of losing to Sanders. More than half of the media seems ready to anoint Warren The Chosen One, but her performance isn’t yet justifying it yet.
As for Yang, between this and his rising poll numbers, there’s no reason to treat him as any less serious a candidate than Harris.
Polls
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 41, Warren 12, Sanders 10, Harris 4, Steyer 4, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. Has Steyer been making ad buys in South Carolina?
Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire): Warren 25, Biden 24, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 5, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 2, Yang 2, Booker 1. Sample size of 423. Castro received zero votes.
Candidates will need to clear 3 percent in four DNC-approved polls, up from the 2 percent required to qualify for the September and October debates. But the committee also created an additional early-state path to qualify: garnering 5 percent in two approved polls conducted in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.
Additionally, candidates now need to receive donations from 165,000 unique donors — up from 130,000 from the September and October debates — with 600 unique donors in 20 different states, territories or the District of Columbia.
The top fundraiser in the Democratic presidential field was hospitalized for a heart attack, the longtime polling leader and his son sit at the center of an impeachment inquiry, and the one candidate with clear momentum faces persistent doubts among some party leaders that she is too liberal to win the general election.
With breathtaking speed, the events of the past two weeks have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race, shaking a party desperate to defeat President Trump next year and deeply fearful of any misstep that risks reelecting a president many Democrats see as dangerously unfit for office.
Concerns have risen in recent days that the potential Democratic slate has been weakened by events largely out of the candidates’ control. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) promised a speedy return to the campaign trail after leaving the hospital Friday, but it was unclear whether the 78-year-old would be able to replicate his previously frenetic travel schedule. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has spent most of the race as the leader in the polls, has faced daily attacks from Trump over largely unfounded allegations about his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings, highlighting a potential vulnerability for the candidate many saw as the best hope for beating Trump.
Snip.
But they point to several worrying factors, including questions about whether Biden is equipped to mount an effective defense against Trump’s attacks and whether the surging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would alienate moderate voters and donors if she were the nominee. Some fear that Sanders’s health problems put a spotlight on the advanced age of the top contenders, all of whom are in their 70s. Others expressed skepticism that any Democrat would be able to compete against Trump’s unmatched ability to shift the public’s focus.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Launches ads attacking “Medicare for All.” It’s open question to whether the majority of the Democratic Party’s total voting membership (as opposed to the hard left activist base) supports fully socialized medicine and destroying private health insurance. If Biden falters, Bennet and Bullock would be two candidates with a good shot to pick up his moderate voters. Well, that is, assuming they can get past Buttigieg’s giant spiked walls of money…
For Mr. Biden’s campaign, no attack could have been more difficult to deal with than one involving the candidate’s son.
Mr. Biden nearly did not run for president because of the effect it would have on his family — and particularly on Hunter Biden and his children, according to multiple advisers to the former vice president. Hunter Biden has struggled for years with substance addiction and had recently gone through a very public divorce from his first wife.
In separate interviews, Mr. Coons and his fellow senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, both said they had warned Mr. Biden that the president would target his family.
“He expected his family to be attacked,” Mr. Carper said, adding that Mr. Biden assured him he was braced for “the onslaught.’’
Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, encouraged him to enter the race, knowing the attacks were inevitable. But as Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, put it: “When it happens, it still feels pretty lousy.”
The Biden campaign has attempted to handle the candidate’s son with great sensitivity. Mr. Biden made clear at the outset that Hunter, a lawyer who had long advised his father on his campaigns, should not be made to feel excluded, people who spoke with him said. One adviser to Mr. Biden recently telephoned his son to solicit advice on the upcoming debate in Ohio.
But to most of Mr. Biden’s aides, Hunter Biden has been a spectral presence. He is living in Los Angeles and stayed away from Mr. Biden’s campaign launch in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden quietly attended the last two debates and appeared with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, at a July fund-raiser in Pasadena, Calif.
Still, Mr. Biden’s advisers are aware that Hunter Biden carries political vulnerabilities. His business career has intersected repeatedly with his father’s political power, through roles he had held in banking, lobbying and international finance. Working for a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month while his father was vice president, and some of Mr. Biden’s admirers worry that, while Mr. Trump’s accusations are without merit, voters may view Hunter Biden’s actions as problematic.
“Without merit.” “Problematic.” You can always count on the press to put lipstick on a Democrats’ pig. More on Hunter Biden:
There’s an old saying about addiction. The man takes a drink (or a sniff), then the drink takes a drink, until the drink takes the man. It will take the bystanders, too, if they let it. Addiction is ravenous. But there was always someone in Joe Biden’s life to help him out with Hunter. It’s heartwarming when family and friends swoop in to care for the boys while Daddy serves the people of Delaware. But little boys have little needs, while big boys have bigger needs.
Soon enough, directionless Hunter has a six-figure job at a bank run by Biden supporters. When Hunter grows bored, there’s another lucrative job under the tutelage of a former Biden staffer. When Hunter wants a house he can’t afford, he receives a loan for 110 percent of the purchase price. And when he goes bust, another friendly banker mops up the damage.
Then his brother Beau contracts fatal brain cancer, and the last wobbly wheels come off Hunter Biden’s fragile self. At this point, the New Yorker piece becomes a gonzo nightmare — much of it narrated by Hunter himself — of hallucinations, a car abandoned in the desert, maxed-out credit cards, a crack pipe, a strip club and a brandished gun.
If, as the magazine headline put it, Hunter Biden now jeopardizes his father’s campaign, the article makes clear Joe Biden feels a share of the blame. Yet, by the time the senator was vice president, the folks still willing to help Hunter were of a sketchier variety. There was a Chinese businessman who, Hunter said, left him a large diamond as a nice-to-meet-you gift. And a Ukrainian oligarch who hired Hunter at a princely sum to do nothing much. (Neither the firm nor Hunter Biden identified any specific contribution he made). Joe Biden’s response, according to his son, was: “I hope you know what you are doing.”
Hope! What family of an addict hasn’t fallen back to that last trench? Denial, they say, is not just a river in Egypt.
And don’t look now, but there’s more Rudy going after Hunter coming down the pike: “We haven’t even talked about Romania yet.” Evidently 38% of Biden’s Q2 fundraising came from just 2,800 people.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. His $6 million is enough to keep him in the game, but not enough to make any headway in closing with the frontrunners, but both Biden and Harris flaming out (a definite possibility at this point) would open a couple of those hypothetical “lanes” for him. Booker calls on TV stations to not air Trump ad attacking Biden over Ukraine.” More grist for the idea he’s running for VP.
Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city (South Bend) half the size of Des Moines, is acing the listening test. His words, even in a stump speech, tend to be more thoughtful and more surprising than the standard political applause lines of his rivals. Elizabeth Warren often elicits cheers, Joe Biden gets the occasional affectionate chuckle, but Buttigieg summons up a different reaction. I first noticed it while seeing him at a Des Moines house party on a sparkling Saturday morning in June. As with Obama in 2006, members of the audience leaned forward to listen to Buttigieg speak rather than sitting back to applaud politely. What struck me at the time was that Buttigieg was pulling off this listening trick even though he lacked the national political profile that Obama boasted back in 2006, from his electrifying speech to the 2004 Democratic convention.
Right now, the pair are each below 2.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages, with O’Rourke at 2.2 and Castro at 1.4 percent respectively. Even businessman Andrew Yang has eclipsed the pair.
In Texas, O’Rourke has held a slight hold on second place for months — 10 points behind Biden and slightly ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — until the recent Quinnipiac poll, which showed Warren had moved ahead of O’Rourke and put him in third place in his home state.
Meanwhile, while Castro is outperforming his national poll numbers in Texas, he has failed to hit higher than 4 percent in any Texas polls taken thus far.
Castro praises Cesar Chavez, calling him a hero and ignoring the fact he was passionately opposed to illegal immigration.
Update: Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Following Sanders’ heart attack, the Intertubes are rife with rumors that Grandma Death is going to jump into the race, so I moved her up here from the also-rans. Also, she just passed Buttigieg in election betting odds, and is in third place there behind Warren and Biden. Here’s a recent piece speculating on Clinton entering the race, but it’s from a Norwegian-owned site that used to focus on cryptocurrency, so caveat lictor.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. He’s not in the debates…again. Now it’s just a question of how much of John Delaney’s money does John Delaney want to spend to kept pretending that John Delaney is running for President.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She made the next debate. “The Hawaii congresswoman’s debate performances haven’t done much to break her out of the asterisk category, but boy, can she dissect an opponent’s record in a devastating fashion. You could argue that Gabbard more than anyone else triggered the slide of Kamala Harris since the second debate.” If Sanders drops out, could Gabbard pick up some of his supporters? I’ve noticed some overlap there, but I doubt she could pick up enough to be even remotely viable.
Out of all the Democratic candidates, there is perhaps none more inauthentic and grating as Kamala Harris. To be fair, she doesn’t have the shrillness of Hillary Clinton, but she has every other bad quality in spades. She can’t hold a consistent position, she’ll do anything for support, and everything she says sounds like it was focus grouped. None of those things are good descriptors to be attached to one’s campaign.
After being fluffed as the presumptive front runner following the first debate (which I called a sucker’s bet at the time), Tulsi Gabbard kneecapped Harris in the second debate and she has never recovered. Since then, it’s been a steady stream of desperation from her campaign….Her campaign is hemorrhaging cash, the donors have dried up, and she’s old news to the media.
But now things are getting even worse. Her campaign is literally breaking down. The upper levels of her campaign staff are being changed up and she’s bringing over people from the Senate side to try to rescue her.
California Sen. Kamala Harris plans to restructure her struggling presidential campaign, sources with knowledge of the staffing plans tell CNN.
The changes represent the clearest sign to date that Harris, who has seen her poll numbers consistently fall over the last three months, feels changes are needed to jumpstart her presidential bid and streamline an operation that one source said has been been bogged down by bureaucratic hurdles.
Harris will elevate Rohini Kosoglu, her Senate chief of staff, and senior adviser Laphonza Butler into senior leadership positions within the campaign, the sources said, splitting responsibilities for the day to day management of the operation.
Juan Rodriguez will remain Harris’ campaign manager, but the addition of Kosoglu and elevation of Butler shifts some of the longtime Harris aide’s responsibilities to different staffers.
Adding more cooks to the slop kitchen won’t help. The problem with the Kalama Harris campaign is Kamala Harris. Heh: “Kamala Harris Undergoes Heart Surgery After Seeing Positive Reception For Sanders.” Heh 2:
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets interviewed by WMUR (along with Tim Ryan), where he offers up some education/STEM/entrepreneurial platitudes. Also worried that self-driving cars will result in unemployment for Uber and Lyft drivers. Wouldn’t they theoretically make money off their self-driving cars?
With just four months until the first-in-the-nation caucuses, Sanders is in trouble. As he delivered his populist gospel to large crowds of camouflage-clad high schoolers, liberal arts college students, and trade union members across Iowa last week, a problematic narrative was hardening around him: His campaign is in disarray and Elizabeth Warren has eclipsed him as the progressive standard-bearer of the primary. He’s sunk to third place nationally, behind Warren and Joe Biden, and some polls of early nomination states show him barely clinging to double digits. He’s shaken up his staffs in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s lost the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a left-wing group that backed him in 2016, to Warren.
Dismissed out of the gate in 2016 as a nonfactor against Hillary Clinton — only to single-handedly shift the Democratic Party’s ideological center of gravity — Sanders is quite familiar with being left for dead. His top brass’ official line is that pundits and political elites are writing him off because they have no clue what’s happening at kitchen tables and picket lines across America. Sanders and his team have argued some polls that are bad for him are out of whack and several polls that are good for him are ignored by the media.
Meanwhile, his aides say, Sanders remains a fundraising and organizing juggernaut. In its classic big-big-big-numbers style, the campaign announced this month that it had both contacted 1 million voters in Iowa and received donations from 1 million people throughout the United States — a milestone he reached faster than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.
For a guy who’s supposed to be slowly fading into the second tier, Bernie Sanders had a good third quarter of fundraising, announcing this morning that his campaign raised $25 million in the past three months. (One wrinkle: Sanders’ campaign did not specify how much cash on hand he has left.)
The upshot is that Bernie Sanders will probably have enough financial resources to stay in the presidential race as long has he likes, all the way to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee if he wants. As of this morning, he’s still a respectable third nationally in the RealClearPolitics average nationally (17.8 percent), third in Iowa (12 percent), third in New Hampshire (18.8 percent), second in Nevada (21.7 percent), and third in South Carolina (15 percent, and Elizabeth Warren is at 15.7 percent). And fairly or not, a lot of Democratic race-watchers see Joe Biden’s campaign as a ticking time-bomb with a gaffe-prone candidate and the Hunter Biden stuff now getting more play.
From an early age, Tom Steyer has hopscotched from one rarified sphere of American prestige and privilege to the next. His resume starts at the Upper East Side of New York’s The Buckley School, a private K-9 that educated Franklin Roosevelt and a young Donald Trump. Next stop was Phillips Exeter, the patrician New Hampshire boarding academy. Then Yale, where Steyer studied economics, played soccer and graduated at the top of his class. A brief stint at Morgan Stanley, a business degree at Stanford and a job at Goldman Sachs rounded out Steyer’s gilded early resume.
And that was before he became a billionaire.
In San Francisco, Steyer teamed up with the banjo-playing financier Warren Hellman and started a hedge fund. It would eventually be named Farallon Capital and grow from $15 million to more than $20 billion investing diversely: corporate mergers, distressed Asian banks, pharmaceutical companies.
Today Forbes estimates Steyer’s net worth at $1.6 billion. But Farallon’s past investments in coal mines, private prison companies and aquifer-pumping land deals may not jibe with Democratic voters. Neither might Steyer himself — a white guy from high finance.
“The whole issue of income inequality has become a fairly major talking point with Democrats,” said Garry South, a California political strategist. “Why would you think that a billionaire is the best person to deal with income inequality? It’s sort of a contradiction in terms.”
Steyer is a bit of a contradiction himself. In the mold of Warren Buffet, he is famously restrained in his spending habits (to a point). His sartorial style could be described as “Boomer dad”: He regularly wears the same tartan tie and a colorful beaded belt he bought on a trip to Kenya. He flies commercial, for environmental reasons. Speaking to CalMatters over the phone from Iowa, he recalls meeting a “slick-as-could-be” energy lobbyist a few years back who was wearing a “$5,000 suit.” As if Steyer couldn’t drop ten times that on a new outfit every morning for the rest of his life.
Snip.
In 2010, he co-chaired the committee to defeat a repeal of the state’s cap-and-trade emissions reduction program, putting $5 million into the effort. He struck Dan Logue, a former Republican Assemblyman who sponsored the measure and debated Steyer that year, as a true believer “committed to the cause.”
In 2012, Steyer ratcheted up his financial involvement, spending $30 million on a ballot measure to close a tax loophole, effectively raising rates on businesses with out-of-state facilities. In 2016, he spent millions more on an unsuccessful bid to overturn the death penalty, and successful initiatives to raise cigarette taxes and reduce sentences for non-violent crimes.
Steyer’s early focus on voter-initiated policy change runs through into his presidential campaign. He’s proposing to give voters the power to directly make federal law twice each year.
Snip.
Many California voters may not know who Steyer is, but California politicians do.
He’s spent the past decade putting massive sums of cash toward supporting progressive candidates and boosting voter registration.
Starting in 2013, Steyer began throwing his considerable financial weight behind individual candidates across the country through NextGen Climate Action Committee, a super PAC he started to help make climate change a winning issue for progressives.
In the lead-up to both the 2014 and 2016 elections, Steyer’s family firm, Fahr LLC, was the biggest contributor of publicly disclosed political cash of any organization in the country. (Fahr, his middle name, was his mother’s maiden name.) In 2018, Fahr slipped to second place. So far in the 2020 cycle, the Steyers are back in the top spot.
That largesse has endeared him to some Democrats.
“I know the difference between talkers and doers and Steyer is a doer,” said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California.
“Some candidates can come and be the main speaker at a dinner and that’s nice. But if you can write big checks…,” he said, trailing off.
The piece notes he’s sometimes “not been a team player”…but only in the sense that he backs farther left challengers against Democratic incumbents. Picked up a state rep endorsement in South Carolina. “Steyer’s campaign says state Rep. Jerry Govan has signed on as a senior adviser. Govan is chairman of South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus.”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let no one say she’s not pandering to left-wing interest groups hard enough, as she came out for eliminating right-to-work laws. Democrats couldn’t even implement card check when they had the White House, House and Senate, what makes her think she can pass a big labor pander a hundred times more radical? Or that a nation full of non-unionized employees would ever elect her? Union membership has been declining for decades, down to some 6.5% of private sector jobs. Most states are right-to-work states. Does Warren really think “vote for me and I’ll force you to join a union” is a winning campaign slogan? Once again, Warren maneuvers to win the primary at the cost of winning the election. Well well well: “Elizabeth Warren Fires National Organizing Director Over ‘Inappropriate Behavior.'” “Over the past two weeks, senior campaign leadership received multiple complaints regarding inappropriate behavior by Rich McDaniel.” He “was also Hillary Clinton’s primary states regional director.” Should we assume McDaniel: A.) Tried to get jiggy with new recruits, B.) Forced all new hires to eat a bug, or C.) Proclaimed his love of Nickleback*? She keeps ducking admitting that she’s going to hike your taxes until your eyes bleed. She also got caught lying about being fired for getting pregnant. Indeed, “lying” seems to be the theme of Warren’s entire career. Dissecting all of her pie-in-the-sky promises:
From stem to stern, the senator from Massachusetts has marketed herself as the candidate with everything thought out. For every problem facing our nation, her slogan says she “has a plan for that.” Warren is running on a myriad of big government programs including Medicare for all, student loan debt cancellation, and free college tuition. Her plan to pay for these promises includes a wealth tax of 2 percent on fortunes above $50 million and 3 percent on fortunes above $1 billion.
To many voters, her plans sound attractive, and her years in academia lend to her pitch. She is articulate and crafty enough to crib off Sanders, while arguing that she just wants capitalism with a human face. In reality, however, the former Harvard professor is hoping you will not do the math yourself when it comes to her grandiose pitch. Almost every element of her plans would drive discourse to the left, while weakening our political and economic systems to make it susceptible to crony capitalism.
Even the centerpiece of the Warren campaign platform is obviously unworkable. A wealth tax on fortunes above $50 million is touted as the key funding mechanism for a plethora of new programs. But European nations have attempted numerous such wealth taxes, and none have been successful. Since 1990, the number of European states with such a levy has fallen from a dozen to three, including otherwise low tax Switzerland. Between 2000 and 2012, the burdensome wealth tax in France caused 42,000 millionaires to flee the country. The nation ultimately scrapped the impost in 2018.
While a wealth tax in the United States is likely unconstitutional to begin with, it is certainly unenforceable in the way that Warren desires.
Snip.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the Warren wealth tax plan is that it is estimated to bring in an average of less than $3 trillion over the following decade, which would provide less than 10 percent of the total cost of her Medicare for all plan. Warren will not state the obvious that in order to pay for any of her policy proposals, it would require a massive tax increase on the middle class.
Even worse, Warren proposes a frightening Office of United States Corporations through her Accountable Capitalism Act. Under the plan, workers must represent 40 percent of corporate boards of companies worth more than $1 billion. It also institutes strict controls on political spending and requires a corporate charter approved by the federal government. This idea is Orwellian. After all, the idea of government control of private industry is among the textbook definitions of fascism and its concept of corporatism. That means charters to do business could be revoked by Washington.
As Peter Beinart has trenchantly observed in The Atlantic, formerly moderate Generation X Democratic candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have chosen to turn their backs on policies they once championed. Booker no longer talks up his successful expansion of charter schools as mayor of Newark, while Harris has run away from her common-sense decision, as San Francisco district attorney, to enforce truancy laws as a means to get the attention of parents of disadvantaged students. But there’s another Gen X candidate, unmentioned by Beinart, who’s run away from past successes: Andrew Yang.
While he promotes government-led efforts to redistribute income, Yang has been silent about his own groundbreaking efforts to help declining cities — not through government, but through civil society. In 2011, after a successful career as corporate lawyer and business-school test-prep entrepreneur, Yang founded Venture for America (VFA). Modeled on Teach for America, VFA aimed to attract applicants from elite colleges to work as paid interns at start-up companies in poor cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Birmingham, and Baltimore. Its funding came entirely from philanthropists, most importantly Detroit’s Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans. Like Dan Markowits, the author of the new The Meritocracy Trap, Yang saw the best and brightest as having “too limited a vision of what career success looks like,” and got to work fixing the problem.
Today, VFA is still in operation, with fellowships in 14 different cities around the country. The organization has supported more than 1,000 fellows, working in business incubators and often going on to found start-ups of their own. It says that 51 percent of them continue to live in the cities where their fellowship was based, and they’ve been involved in starting 129 new companies.
Bringing graduates of some 300 colleges to cities that ambitious young people have long been fleeing is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a record of success that gives Yang, if he’d only use it, a ready-made, positive message on the stump: Talented people can start new businesses, help power established ones, and in the process, make cities thrive. This message is all the more powerful when juxtaposed with generations of failed local, state, and federal policies based on the idea that subsidies to attract business are the best way of rejuvenating cities in decline.
Indeed, what is striking about Yang’s Venture for America is its fundamental separation from those failed government policies and from government itself.
I suspect that’s the very reason he doesn’t talk about it to Democrats. He blasted China for blasting the Houston Rockets for Daryl Morey posting a pro-Hong Kong tweet, which has engendered big controversy, because the Rockets have a lot of business deals in China thanks to the Yao Ming era. But Morey (and Yang) was right the first time. Funny how CNN and MSNBC just keeps leaving Yang out of infographics:
Yang raised $10 million, but MSNBC shows Booker in fourth at $6 million. https://t.co/N1tf7NBI9q
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
*I was only vaguely aware of Nickleback in their heyday, and only became aware of them after all the memes talking about how much they sucked. Now that I’ve been forced to listen to “Photograph” to keep up with current events, eh, I don’t hate it. Solid piece of nostalgic pop rock. Honestly, what strikes me most is how the chorus of a song from 2005 sounds exactly like every “hot country” song circa 2014…
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I thought fall started tomorrow, but various reference sources say the fall equinox doesn’t actually occur until Monday, September 23.
What happens when a political party is hijacked by fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics who don’t care whether they win or lose an election?
They lose elections.
That’s where the Democrats are headed because they’d rather be “right” than clever. And when it comes to the issue of race, Democrats think they have a corner on “right.”
They’ve got a small problem, though. In order to appeal to the fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics to tap them for money and support, they have to at least give lip service to their warped views on race. And that includes calling you and me and about 70 percent of the American voters “racist.”
Not only did Christine Blasey Ford’s key witness and friend — Leland Keyser — state that she didn’t recall the party where Ford claimed she was assaulted, she also says she doesn’t remember “any others like it.”
Her words were strong: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” she said. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”
Even more, Pogrebin and Kelly uncovered a pressure campaign to get Keyser to alter her testimony, to back Ford. Keyser told the writers, “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could spread about me if I didn’t comply,” and they report on group texts containing ominous language about Keyser’s allegedly “f***ed up” life.
While the reaction to the allegations against Kavanaugh was almost uniformly partisan (Republicans rejected the claims; Democrats either believed them or thought they cast enough doubt on Kavanaugh to deny him the nomination), there is — in fact — a truth of the matter here. Kavanaugh did or did not assault Ford, and in any fair proceeding Keyser’s testimony would detonate like a bomb. Remember, this wasFord’s witness and friend. She’s a Democrat. And, moreover, there was now evidence of a pressure campaign that looked a lot like an attempt to suborn perjury.
Pogrebin is at the center of a discussion of gross journalistic malpractice after publishing a story Saturday night with colleague Kate Kelly that failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL. Pure confirmation bias.
Though the woman at the center of the story wants no part of it, Kelly and Pogrebin published her name anyway (in their book, albeit not in the Times). “You’re kind of directing attention at a victim and she’s gonna be besieged,” Pogrebin said on the radio show, in explaining why the Times piece left the name out. “Even if people can ultimately find her name, it’s not necessarily important to make it easier for them to do so.” Oh, so publishing her name in a book does not constitute making it too easy for people to find this private citizen? It’s a separate but serious scandal. This woman has been made a public figure in a national story without her consent. Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy? Is every woman in America to think of herself as potential collateral damage should she ever cross paths with any Republican whom Times reporters later tried to take down?
In her WMAL interview this morning, Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. Calling her a victim would be begging the question if the woman claimed this status for herself. She would then be only an alleged victim. But she isn’t even that. She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion. Pogrebin then impugns the woman by saying she was so drunk that her memory can’t be trusted. She also says that “everyone” at the party was massively drunk and that their memories are therefore unreliable.
Does she hear herself talking? If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter — the woman in question at the Yale party — in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.
A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.
An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.
No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.
Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.
In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.
Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.
Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.
In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.
Democratic megadonor Ed Buck finally arrested after overdosing a third black man. This one, unlike the previous two, survived. He’s also been charged with running a meth ring.
So evidently TWO dead black men is the absolute limit for rich gay white Democratic Party donors to get away with before attracting the attention of California law enforcement! THREE times is just one too many!
JFK, even Clancy Wiggums would have slapped the cuffs after death #2
The real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.
England is an island. Historically, politically and linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European culture and traditions.
The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with France, Germany or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured his superiors in 1801 amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”
Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary government and majority Protestant religion set it apart from its European neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.
The 18th century British and Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke and Adam Smith emphasized individualism, freedom and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of their rights and even their lives.
Hillary Clinton blames her 2016 presidential defeat on “voter suppression.” Which is a weird way to say “refusing to campaign in the Midwest.”
Poll of Palestinian opinions. I’m sure many will point out the 37-50% (depending on the question) who support war against Israel. I’m more interested in the 48% who believe in possession by djinn or demons. (To be fair, the percentage in America would probably be similar in 1973…)
Israel’s election is still up in the air. The liberalish Blue and White faction appears to have edged Likud 33 to 31, but 61 votes are required to form a government. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has 55 votes to form a coalition government with orthodox religious parties that Blue and White vows not to join a coalition with.
Although meat has been a central component of the diet of our lineage for millions of years, some nutrition authorities—who often have close connections to animal rights activists or other forms of ideological vegetarianism, such as Seventh-Day Adventism (Banta et al., 2018 Banta, J. E., J. W. Lee, G. Hodgkin, Z. Yi, A. Fanica, and J. Sabate. 2018. The global influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on diet. Religions 9 (9):251. doi: 10.3390/rel9090251.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])—are promoting the view that meat causes a host of health problems and has no redeeming value. We contend that a large part of the case against meat is based on cherry-picked evidence and low-quality observational studies. The bald claim that red meat is an “unhealthy food” (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is wildly unsupported.
Based on misrepresentations of the state of the science, some organizations are attempting to influence policy makers to take action to reduce meat consumption. Simplification of complex science increases persuasive power but may also serve ideological purposes and lead to scientistic approaches. According to Mayes and Thompson (2015 Mayes, C. R., and D. B. Thompson. 2015. What should we eat? biopolitics, ethics, and nutritional scientism. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):587–99. doi: 10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), manifestations of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics can have various ethical implications for “individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being”. Well-meaning yet overemphasized and premature recommendations may eventually cause more damage than benefit, not only physiologically but also by unjustifiably holding individuals accountable for their health outcomes. We believe that a large reduction in meat consumption, such as has been advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), could produce serious harm. Meat has long been, and continues to be, a primary source of high-quality nutrition. The theory that it can be replaced with legumes and supplements is mere speculation. While diets high in meat have proved successful over the long history of our species, the benefits of vegetarian diets are far from being established, and its dangers have been largely ignored by those who have endorsed it prematurely on the basis of questionable evidence.
Heh: I seem to have my own Fark logo now: . Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
Biden threatens a black man with a chain, Beto wants to take your guns, and Democrats don’t want to govern America, they want to punish it. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
The Hill/Harris X: Biden 27, Sanders 15, Warren 12, Harris 7, Yang 5, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2. Large gap between this poll and YouGov for Warren; suspect the small sample (454) and methodology differences may be at play. But 5 points for Yang is his best showing, and means he gets to play Ted Cruz in basketball (see below).
Reuters/IPSOS: Biden 22, Sanders 16, Warren 11, Buttigieg 4, Harris 4, Yang 3, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1. No cross-tabs or sample size.
Quinnipac (Texas): Biden 28, Warren 18, Sanders 12, O’Rourke 12, Harris 5, Castro 3, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 2, Delaney 1, Yang 1. Sample size of 456 Democratic-leaning voters out of 1,410 registered voters.
“Democrats onstage in Houston aspire not so much to govern America as to punish it.”
Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke called racism not only “endemic” to America but “foundational.” He explained, “We can mark the creation of this country not at the Fourth of July, 1776, but August 20, 1619, when the first kidnapped African was brought to this country against his will and in bondage and as a slave built the greatness, and the success, and the wealth that neither he nor his descendants would ever be able to participate in or enjoy.”
The villains in the Democratic Party story of America do not remain hundreds of years beyond our reach. Cops, gun owners, factory farmers, employees of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Wall Street speculators, the oil industry, Republicans, and so many others who, together, constitute the majority of the nation: our Houston Dems do not look to them as fellow countrymen but as impediments, evil impediments in some cases, to realizing their ideological vision. And if that message did not come across in English, several candidates speaking Spanish not comprehended by most viewers nevertheless did not get lost in translation.
That ideological vision includes a doubly unconstitutional confiscation of weapons through executive fiat endorsed by Sen. Kamala Harris and O’Rourke (“Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47”), abolition of private health insurance in a bill sponsored by Sens. Sanders and Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden’s insistence that “nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime,” reparations for slavery supported by O’Rourke, a wealth tax proposed by Warren, Sen. Cory Booker’s call to “create an office in the White House to deal with the problem of white supremacy and hate crimes,” Harris demanding that government “de-incarcerate women and children” (even ones who murder?), Andrew Yang wanting to “give every American 100 democracy dollars that you only give to candidates and causes you like,” and the entire stage endorsing open borders, if in muted terms during this debate, and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Here is a science-fiction scenario: Imagine a strange new virus that incapacitates everybody below the age of 75. The virus wipes out the entire political leadership, except one old man, who has survived on account of his age, but may also be too old to handle the awesome task before him.
Now suppose — and I am not certain this is the case, but just suppose — that this is happening to the Democratic presidential campaign. The virus is Twitter, and the old man is (duh) Joe Biden.
In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, an exotic political theory promoted by the party’s most left-wing flank suddenly gained wide circulation. The appeal of Bernie Sanders proved Democrats were ready to embrace socialism, or at least something close to it; and Donald Trump’s election proved a nominee with extreme positions could still win. These two conclusions, in combination, suggested the party would move as far left as activists preferred at no political cost.
Neither of these conclusions was actually correct. The Bernie Sanders vote encompassed voters who opposed Hillary Clinton for a wide array of reasons — including that she was too liberal — and were overall slightly to the right of Clinton voters. And political-science findings that general election voters tend to punish more ideologically extreme candidates remain very much intact. (Trump benefited greatly by distancing himself rhetorically from his party’s unpopular small-government positions, and voters saw him as more moderate than previous Republican nominees, even though he predictably reverted to partisan form once in office.)
And yet, this analysis seemed to race unchallenged through the Democratic Party from about 2016 — it seemed to influence Clinton, who declined the traditional lurch toward the center after vanquishing Sanders — through this year. Through sheer force of repetition, it achieved the status of a kind of self-evident truth.
2. Joe Biden did look old — especially when I switched from the downstairs TV to the newer upstairs TV. The sharper image of him is a little disturbing — I can see that his hair is a strange illusion — but the sharpness of his mind is what matters. He seemed ready to fight, and his idea was he identified with Barack Obama and he offers to make the country into where it would go if we still had Barack Obama. Make America Barack-Obama-Style Again. MABOSA!
3. Bernie was awful. His voice had acquired a new raspiness that made his angry, yelling style outright ugly. I couldn’t believe I needed to listen to him. I cried out in outrage and pain. The stabbing hand gestures — ugh! This is the Democrats second-most-popular candidate? I loved Bernie when he challenged Hillary 4 years ago. The anger was a fascinating mix of comedy and righteousness. But the act is old, and the socialism — did Joe call him a “socialist” more than once? — is scary. We can’t be having a raving crank throwing radical change in our face.
4. Elizabeth Warren was there on the other side of Biden. She and Bernie were double-teaming Joe, and that worked… for Joe. He linked Warren to Bernie: She’s for Bernie/I’m for Barack. I remember Warren reacting to every question with “Listen…” Like we’re the slow students in her class and we haven’t been paying attention and she’s getting tired of us. We should already know what she’s been saying on whatever the question happens to be. She was sunny and bright with enthusiasm when she talked about her early career as a school teacher and how when she was a child she lined up her “dollies” for a lesson. She was, she said, “tough but fair.” I love whatever love there is for tough but fair teachers. Maybe more of that, but we’re not in her class, and our responsibilities are to people and things in our own lives, not in keeping track of whatever her various policies and positions are. Warren seems to have the most potential, but she got yoked to Bernie, and the impression from a distance is: 2 radicals who want to make America unrecognizably different. MAUD!
Dozens of reporters and photographers descended on the Hawkeye Downs speedway, all waiting for one man to appear at a local Labor Day picnic.
That man was not Michael Bennet.
“We’re having a great Labor Day in Iowa,” said Mr. Bennet, the Colorado senator and still a presidential candidate, showing up suddenly to address the scrum that gathered 20 minutes earlier for the arrival of Joseph R. Biden Jr. “And here comes the vice president! So let me get out of his way.”
Life isn’t easy these days for bottom-tier Democratic presidential candidates. Not many people know who they are. Fewer come to their events. No reporters cover them regularly.
The indignities don’t stop there. On Saturday, an Iowa Democrat approached a Wall Street Journal reporter and asked if he was Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana. “I don’t even have cowboy boots on,” the reporter, John McCormick, wrote on Twitter about the encounter. Mr. Bullock’s campaign didn’t have yard signs for a house party on Sunday, so it borrowed signs used by Andy McGuire in Iowa’s 2018 primary for governor and taped “Bullock” placards on them. (Ms. McGuire, who placed fourth in the primary, has endorsed Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota for president.)
The real problem with obscurity, though, is not securing enough donors, or high enough poll numbers, to make the debates. And it becomes something of a vicious cycle: Democratic voters and activists tend to see debate qualification as a litmus test of viability, but candidates can’t increase their viability unless they make the debate in the first place.
There were a lot of good politicians on the debate stage in Houston. But the night rang hollow as they clung to the old conventions — the overcoached performances, the canned lines, the pandering, the well-worn childhood anecdotes meant to project “relatability.”
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Tactics superseded passion and vision. Everyone seemed one tick off. Unlike with Barack Obama in 2008, none made you feel like you wanted to pump your fist in the air and march into the future behind them.
“Being a good politician doesn’t matter anymore,” lamented one freaked-out congressional Democrat afterward. “It’s like being a great used car salesman. We need a Holden Caulfield to call out all the phonies.”
It’s a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron about a moron: Trump’s faux-thenticity somehow makes the Democratic candidates seem more packaged, more stuck in politician-speak.
Unlike former “Apprentice” host Donald Trump’s exaggerations and narcissisms, Biden’s fantasies are not baked into an outsider candidacy that by intent offers as a radical change of policy, a tough presidential tone, and unconventional political tactics. Trump is a renegade. Biden remains what he always was—a deep state fixture. And his brand is mainstream Democrat left-liberal orthodoxy, which supposedly does not include weird and wild La La Land pronouncements.
Snip.
Biden’s fantasies, however, are quite different: 1) total memory losses and brain freezes—in which he has forgotten in what state he is, when he was vice president, or for whom he once served in that office; 2) mythography in which Joe Biden becomes an epic hero of every fiction he relates, as he stitches together half-true and quarter-true memories into mythical proportions, and 3) his race and gender hang-ups, in which he says something the Left would normally categorize as racist (e.g., “clean” and “articulate” blacks) or he breathes onto, touches, grabs, and hugs too long and too closely unsuspecting girls and women in the no margin-of-error #MeToo era, and 4) promises that he never intends to keep, such as embracing the suicidal Green New Deal.
As far as the diagnosis of the Biden gaffe machine, the only debate is whether Biden at 76 is addled and suffering early signs of dementia—that is, hardly the sharp and energetic septuagenarian that Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Elizabeth Warren seem to be. Or, in fact, is he just now back in the spotlight and thus resuming his forty years of characteristic embarrassments, some of which blew up his prior two presidential bids.
Is Biden in fact not any more unhinged than he was at 40—the difference now being only that what was seen as eccentric and obnoxious then is now recalibrated as demented due to his advanced age?
After all, we remember a much younger Biden’s lies about his college résumé, his plagiarism in law school, his decades of creepy hugs and breathing into the ears and curls of prepubescent girls, his intellectual theft of British Labourite Neil Kinnock’s stump speech and padding it with family distortions, his trademark appropriation of the ideas and buzzwords of others, his racialist commentary (e.g., Barack Obama is our first “clean” and “articulate” major black presidential candidate, Delaware donut shops are all stuffed with Indian immigrants, Mitt Romney would put blacks “back in chains”) and on and on.
Whether one thinks that Biden is just continuing where he left off in 2008, or that his capacities have slipped considerably since that failed bid matters not. The key is the current prognosis: can the present Biden possibly survive the rigors of 14 more months of campaigning, some 10 or more primary debates, countless fundraisers and one-on-one televised interviews, nearly 50 state primaries, the convention melodramas, and likely three more debates with Donald Trump without every 24 hours sounding either crazy or incomprehensible or offering medical warning signals, in a fashion that confirms he is living in an alternate universe?
Biden’s positioning on racial issues has been problematic.
This issue exposed itself again Thursday during the presidential debate in Houston. Moderator Linsey Davis put a question to Biden:
“Mr. Vice President, I want to come to you and talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter, ‘I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather, I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.’
You said that some 40 years ago. But as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”
Biden could have taken responsibility for his comments and addressed the question directly, but he didn’t. Instead, he gave a rambling, nonsensical answer that included a reference to a record player. But, the response ended in yet another racial offense in which he seemed to suggest that black people lack the natural capacity to be good parents:
We bring social workers into homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help. They don’t — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.
His language belies a particular mind-set, one of a liberal of a particular vintage. On the issue of race, it is paternalistic and it pities, it sees deficiency in much the same way that the conservative does, but it responds as savior rather than with savagery. Better the former than the latter, surely, but the sensibility underlying the two positions is shockingly similar. It underscores that liberalism does not perfectly align with racial egalitarianism, regardless of rhetoric to the contrary.
The only surprising thing about the “not woke enough on race” attack is that we’re seeing it after Kamala Harris crashed and burned. So who does branding Biden as a racist benefit now? Liawatha? Michael Goodwin of the New York Post wants him to drop out. Fat chance. Grandpa Simpson is with the field until the bitter end.
Of all the Presidential hopefuls who have promised to oust Donald Trump in 2020, Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, has perhaps the most compelling electoral record. In 2016, he was the only Democratic governor to be reëlected in a red state, winning by four points among Montanans, who had voted overwhelmingly for Trump. His bid is centered on a pledge to reform campaign finance, and, at stops in Iowa, he routinely touts his history of working with a Rebublican-led legislature in his home state to curb dark-money contributions. And yet, Bullock, the last governor left in the race, failed to secure the necessary number of individual donors to qualify for Thursday’s Democratic debate. Like a number of his fellow-candidates, he has criticized the Democratic National Committee’s qualification criteria, which, for at least a night, winnowed the Democratic field to ten. Last month, the billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer, who has spent millions of dollars of his own money on advertisements, announced that he had received enough individual donations to qualify for the next round of Democratic debates, in October. A number of candidates expressed dismay, but the most vocal was Bullock, who appeared on television to criticize the lingering influence of money in politics. He conceded that the D.N.C.’s rule was well intentioned, but, he added, “what it really has done is allow a billionaire to buy a spot on the debate stage.”
On Thursday night, as his fellow-candidates stood behind their lecterns in Houston, Texas, Bullock sat at the corner of a glossy wooden bar at the Continental Lounge, a gastropub in Des Moines. The governor was in good spirits, hunched over a glass of Coke, with his right sleeve rolled up and his cowboy boots planted on the base of his stool. “I’d rather be on the debate stage,” he told me. “But I don’t think being on the debate stage is going to define what the first week of February looks like.” Earlier that day, in Clive, Bullock had attended a meet-and-greet hosted by the wife of Iowa’s former governor, Tom Vilsack. By his side at the Continental sat Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa and an old friend, who endorsed Bullock in May. (Miller, Bullock also noted, was one of the first state officials outside of Illinois to back Barack Obama in 2007.) They both ordered bacon cheeseburger flatbreads, which arrived, garnished with pickles, on marbled slabs of wood. Bullock, who had also ordered a refill of soda, looked surprised when the bartender arrived bearing tumblers of Bulleit bourbon.
“This is brought to you by the Gillibrand team,” the bartender said, gesturing to his left. A few former staffers of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, who withdrew her candidacy last week, waved.
“I guess we have to drink, then,” Bullock said, raising his glass.
She’s out of the race, and we’re still hearing about Gillibrand and booze…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ouch: “Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro lost one of his congressional endorsements Sunday, with Texas Rep. Vicente González switching to support former Vice President Joe Biden.” What does it tell you about the doomed nature of Castro’s campaign that even fellow Hispanic Texas democrats are abandoning it? On Fox, both Lisa Boothe and Juan Williams think Castro was Julian Castro the biggest debate loser for going after Biden.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ann Althouse notes that New York Timesfinally mentions the fact that she was Willie Brown’s mistress: “”He appointed her to two well-compensated state posts. He gave her a BMW. He introduced her to people worth knowing…. Ms. Harris’s allies have bristled at any suggestion that Mr. Brown powered her ascent, dismissing the charge as sexist and making clear that she was plenty capable of impressing on her own.” Let ye who has never gifted a BMW to a political protege cast the first stone. Don’t distract me with details: “Kamala Harris Does Not Understand Why the Constitution Should Get in the Way of Her Gun Control Agenda.” Big money donors aren’t opening their pocketbooks to her campaign. That’s what happens when you become a falling star…
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. “While it’s still early in the presidential race, one thing is clear: Wayne Messam is no Pete Buttigieg.” It’s largely a rehash of last week’s Buzzfeed piece, but that’s the only Messam news this week…
At the Democratic-primary debate in Houston last night, Beto O’Rourke formally killed off one of the gun-control movement’s favorite taunts: The famous “Nobody is coming for your guns, wingnut.” Asked bluntly whether he was proposing confiscation, O’Rourke abandoned the disingenuous euphemisms that have hitherto marked his descent into extremism, and confirmed as plainly as can be that he was. “Hell yes,” he said, “we’re going to take your AR-15.”
O’Rourke’s plan has been endorsed in full by Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, and is now insinuating its way into the manifestos of gun-control groups nationwide. Presumably, this was O’Rourke’s intention. But he — and his party — would do well to remember that there is a vast gap between the one-upmanship and playacting that is de rigueur during primary season, and the harsh reality on the ground. Prohibition has never been well received in America, and guns have proven no exception to that rule. In New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, attempts at the confiscation of “high capacity” magazines and the registration of “assault weapons” have both fallen embarrassingly flat — to the point that the police have simply refused to aid enforcement or to prosecute the dissenters. Does Beto, who must know this, expect the result to be different in Texas, Wyoming, or Florida? Earlier this week, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives was unable to marshal enough votes to pass a ban on the sale of “assault weapons” — let alone to mount a confiscation drive. Sorry, Robert Francis. That dog ain’t gonna hunt.
And nor should it, for O’Rourke’s policy is spectacularly unconstitutional. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America by a considerable margin, and is therefore clearly protected by the “in common use” standard that was laid out in D.C. v. Heller. Put as baldly as possible, confiscation is not a program that the federal government is permitted to adopt.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has replaced the New Hampshire state director of his presidential campaign after growing indignation from his fiercest supporters that their concerns about losing the first-in-the-nation primary states were being ignored.
More than 50 members from Sanders’ state steering committee applauded on Sunday afternoon when they heard that Joe Caiazzo had been reassigned to Massachusetts, according to those in the room. The news was delivered by the new state director, Shannon Jackson, who ran Sanders’ Senate reelection in 2018.
“The people who helped Bernie win here last time knew and felt intimately that something was very different and not for the best,” said a steering committee member who was at the meeting. “We know our state, we know our counties and we see what other campaigns on the ground are doing. We weren’t happy with what we were seeing.”
Maybe Bernie could ask Trump’s advice on the best way to fire underperforming underlings. “Senator Bernie Sanders’s announced last week that Palestinian-American activist and Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour would be joining his presidential campaign as an official surrogate.” Just how big is the radical antisemitic faction in the Democratic Party these days? This is a move that could really blow up a synagogue in his face. Flashback: “Bernie Sanders Was Asked to Leave Hippie Commune for Shirking.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the October debate. Which was mentioned last week, but if not for that, the only Steyer news appears to be from Salon, and there are things even I won’t do…
On the highest floor of the tallest building in Boston, Senator Elizabeth Warren was busy collecting big checks from some of the city’s politically connected insiders. It was April 2018 and Ms. Warren, up for re-election, was at a breakfast fund-raiser hosted for her by John M. Connors Jr., one of the old-guard power brokers of Massachusetts.
Soon after, Ms. Warren was in Manhattan doing the same. There would be trips to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Martha’s Vineyard and Philadelphia — all with fund-raisers on the agenda. She collected campaign funds at the private home of at least one California megadonor, and was hosted by another in Florida. She held finance events until two weeks before her all-but-assured re-election last November.
Then, early this year, Ms. Warren made a bold bet that would delight the left: She announced she was quitting this big-money circuit in the 2020 presidential primary, vowing not to attend private fund-raisers or dial up rich donors anymore. Admirers and activists praised her stand — but few noted the fact that she had built a financial cushion by pocketing big checks the years before.
The open secret of Ms. Warren’s campaign is that her big-money fund-raising through 2018 helped lay the foundation for her anti-big-money run for the presidency. Last winter and spring, she transferred $10.4 million in leftover funds from her 2018 Senate campaign to underwrite her 2020 run, a portion of which was raised from the same donor class she is now running against.
As Ms. Warren has risen in the polls on her populist and anti-corruption message, some donors and, privately, opponents are chafing at her campaign’s purity claims of being “100 percent grass-roots funded.” Several donors now hosting events for her rivals organized fund-raisers for her last year.
“Can you spell hypocrite?” said former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, who contributed $4,000 to Ms. Warren in 2018 and is now supporting former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Rendell said he had recruited donors to attend an intimate fund-raising dinner for Ms. Warren last year at Barclay Prime, a Philadelphia steakhouse where the famed cheesesteak goes for $120. (The dish includes Wagyu rib-eye, foie gras, truffled cheese whiz and a half-bottle of champagne.) He said he received a “glowing thank-you letter” from Ms. Warren afterward.
But when Mr. Rendell co-hosted Mr. Biden’s first fund-raiser this spring, Ms. Warren’s campaign sent brickbats, deriding the affair as “a swanky private fund-raiser for wealthy donors,” the likes of which she now shuns.
“She didn’t have any trouble taking our money the year before,” Mr. Rendell said. “All of a sudden, we were bad guys and power brokers and influence-peddlers. In 2018, we were wonderful.”
“While Warren won reelection easily in 2018, Biden’s backers point to her performance among independent and blue-collar voters as evidence she’ll fail to appeal to similar voters in the Rust Belt — just as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.” She wants to go after banks and big tech just as both are doing gangbusters. “Who would want to weaken America’s strong global leadership in technology? It would undoubtedly lead to mass layoffs and definitely destroy future investment and wreck the economy.”
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead) Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “John Hickenlooper’s exit from the presidential race came on the same day he would have had to file his financial disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics.”
For all this talk of hurricanes, it’s rained like five minutes in the last eight weeks here in Austin…
Imagine that there’s a long, informative paragraph here explaining the latest twists and turns of the Brexit saga, because I have no friging clue what’s going on as of today. The House of Commons narrowly ruled out a no-deal Brexit, but the House of Lords vows to block it, Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to call an early election, but evidently the votes don’t exist for that either, so who knows? Maybe this Jim Geraghty piece will do the trick, but it’s already two days old, so…
The American economy looks an awful lot like full employment.
Robert Mugabe, the brutal, incompetent ex-dictator of Zimbabwe, has died, but not before he destroyed his country’s economy through Marxist policies, land confiscation and hyperinflation. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Remember when Democrats swore up and down they weren’t going to take our guns? They’ve stopped pretending:
The media should stop using absurdly lazy phrases like “mandatory gun buybacks.” Unless the politician they’re talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it’s impossible for him to “buy back” anything. No government official—not Joe Biden, not Beto O’Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support “buyback” programs—has ever sold firearms.
What Democrats propose can be more accurately described as “the first American gun confiscation effort since Lexington and Concord,” or some variation on that theme. Although tax dollars will be meted out in an effort to incentivize volunteers, the policy is to confiscate AR-15s, the vast majority of which have been legally purchased by Americans who have undergone background checks and never used a gun for a criminal purpose.
The “mandatory gun buyback” exemplifies the impracticality and absurdity of do-somethingism (although Biden’s proposal to ban “magazines that hold bullets”—so most guns—is also a contender!). Democrats want to turn millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight for refusing to adhere to a law that retroactively transforms the exercise of a constitutional right into a crime.
And they do it without any evidence that it would curtail rare mass shootings or save lives.
emocrats are going after guns for two reasons. First, since the advent of the big-government Democrat Party under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they have increasingly opposed people having arms with which they might most easily defend themselves against government overreach.
After imposing the NFA and GCA, primarily to restrict guns particularly useful for defensive purposes, Democrats in the late 1970s and 1980s supported campaigns to get handguns banned. In 1986, when most members of the House of Representatives were not present, Democrats snuck into the otherwise favorable Firearms Owners’ Protection Act an amendment banning newly manufactured fully-automatic firearms. In 1989, they began campaigning to ban various semi-automatic firearms. Democrats also signed amicus briefs supporting the District of Columbia’s handgun ban in Heller.
Second, midway through the Obama administration, “progressives” decided to use “guns” as a core issue around which to rally their voter base.
Also:
Democrats claim that the Supreme Court never considered the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to arms before Heller. To the contrary, the court did so in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Presser v. Illinois (1886), Miller v. Texas (1894), U.S. v. Miller (1939), and U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990). Heller was only the first case in which the court was asked specifically to state whose right the amendment protects.
But you can argue about gun rights if you want to – here are some suggestions how – but I prefer the threat of the total political destruction of those who would betray us. That’s not because our arguments are weak – our arguments are ironclad – but because arguments mean nothing anymore, since the goal of the gun grabbers is not enacting good policy. If it were, they wouldn’t be targeting law-abiding citizens like us. Nor would they have tolerated decades of bloodbaths in every Democrat big city. They would have unleashed the cops to bust the drug-dealing, gang-banging scumbags who wander about loose today because the liberals in charge simply do not care about scores of dead inner-city citizens.
There’s no good faith argument to be had because our gooey elite, supported by the Ahoy Division of Fredocon submissives eager to once again receive their ration of establishment table scraps, don’t care about facts or reason. They already have their objective and they aren’t going to let bourgeois conceits like “evidence” and “rights” get in their way.
They want power, and they want to demonstrate their power over those knuckle-dragging cisgender Jesus people who work for a living, like you, by taking away a right that is central to your conception of yourself as an American citizen. Guns represent your power to protect yourself and your family, and your power to remove a tyrannical government. Taking that from you allows them the delightful opportunity to rub your face in your own submission, and it puts you in your place. Oh, and there’s also the practical value of depriving you of the power to remove a tyrannical government, since that’s what the elite aspires to enact. Disarmed, you are at their mercy and, as the history of left-wing governments teaches, they have none for such as you.
San Francisco’s government goes full retard, declares the NRA a “terrorist organization.” You can probably smell the lawsuits from here, assuming that’s not just homeless feces…
No idea should be as discredited as the irrational fear of too many people, yet this Malthusian temptation has somehow managed to avoid the stigma it deserves. The belief popularized by [Paul] Ehrlich, that the planet has a finite “carrying capacity” and that we’re currently running up against it, has justified some of the most abhorrent episodes of state-sponsored bigotry and eugenics since the end of World War II. The United States, in cooperation with groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, justified the sterilization of low-income Native American and Puerto Rican women through population control hysteria. In the developing world, the goal of ensuring “sustainable” population levels led organizations like the World Bank to create incentives for voluntary sterilization and punishments for larger families. The campaign went so far as to include the USAID-backed dissemination of untested and potentially hazardous contraceptive devices in 60 developing countries.
Ehrlich has a habit of being wrong. He claimed that the average American lifespan would decline to just 42-years-old by 1980. In 1970, he predicted that “the death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” That same year, he warned that “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct” by 1980. At least 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in what he dubbed “the great die-off” between 1980 and 1989. “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,” Ehrlich said in 1971. The Stanford Professor evinces no contrition about his errors. “As I’ve said many times,” he warned as recently as last year, “‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.’”
Though the population controllers have not altered their diagnosis or recommendations in the last 40 years, the world around them has changed dramatically. Between 1981 and 2008, 700 million people emerged from extreme poverty even as the world’s population increased by 48 percent. The elimination of subsistence living is no longer a utopian prospect but an attainable goal. Global life expectancy grew by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016, with the gap between the sexes remaining stable. Global food production has risen to meet demand, and the number of people suffering from undernourishment declined by half between 1960 and 2008. Deaths attributable to global conflict have declined to proportional rates almost unknown in human history. This revolution in human existence is a product of two conditions: the triumph of the market over its socialistic alternatives in the last decades of the 20th century and the increasing number of people who participate in that market, augmenting the incentives associated with innovation and growth.
“A Very Fast, Very Safe, Very SLIMM Nuclear Reactor.” Thorium molten salt design. Would like to see how a working prototype of this compares to comparable prototypes of fast integral reactions and pebble bed designs. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
Thanks to Venezuela, FARC is back. Because why feed your people when you can back a fellow communist terrorist organization instead? You submitted this to FARK with a funnier headline. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Has actor Jared Leto formed a cult? Sure seems so. I was unaware he was in a band called 30 Seconds to Mars, I only know him (by reputation) as the Joker in Suicide Squad. Since I just saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I’d rather keep cult leaders away from Margot Robbie…
Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).
A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the … wear and tear to which they’ve subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not.
Music concerts and the film industry are really the last media institutions that still require an audience to turn up en masse in a single location to consume its product. No wonder Hollywood relies on the fumes of Marvel and DC comic books, plus midcentury franchises such as James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and Brit-lit such as the Lord of the Rings, the Narnia franchise and Paddington to keep itself alive. No wonder rock music as a whole already has one foot in the grave.
In other words, the last remaining universally known products of mass media are getting very old and their freshness sell-by dates have long expired. And there’s no mass media left to create something that strikes a sufficiently universal chord in either rock music and Hollywood to influence the zeitgeist any longer. Rock music has arguably already given way to rap as the most popular genre of American teenagers. Hollywood could be in deep trouble if the public turns away from superhero and sci-fi franchises the same way that moviegoers abandoned the musical as a genre in the late 1960s. It’s not like either industry hadn’t seen these trends coming, and they will each be “riding the gravy train” for as long as possible, as Roger Waters (age 75) would say. But for both, the end of the line may be in sight.
A teapot tempest example of Our Stupid Media’s incompetent mendacity. Appellate lawyer Leif Olson resigned from the Labor Department on August 30, less than four hours after Bloomberg Law asked the department for comment on a Facebook conversation that referenced anti-Semitic tropes. The posts Bloomberg Law referenced had been making fun of anti-semites, which was clear from context, but Bloomberg Law spun them as antisemitic, Because Trump. Now Olson has rejoined the agency, but Bloomberg Law still hasn’t apologized for a lying smear job.
Gillibrand is Out, CNN is going to subject America to 7 hours of climate change blather because they hate America (and ratings), Biden suffers imaginary flashbacks, and the next debates loom. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
USA Today/Suffolk University: Biden 32, Warren 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Yang 3, O’Rourke 2, Booker 2, Castro 1, Ryan 1. “The contenders who did not receive the support of a single one of the 424 likely Democratic voters surveyed included Montana Governor Steve Bullock, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maryland Rep. John Delaney, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Miramar (Florida) Mayor Wayne Messam and former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak.”
The Hill/Harris X: Biden 30, Sanders 17, Warren 14, Harris 4, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2. Sample size: 465, 190 males, 275 females. That’s a pretty small samples and a pretty strong sex skew.
Monmouth: Sanders 20, Warren 20, Biden 19, Harris 8, Booker 4, Buttigieg 4, Yang 3, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 2. This is the poll that launched a thousand “Biden is toast!” pieces last week, only for every other poll to come out and go “Yeah, not so much.”
Ten Democrats qualified for the next round of debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren and Yang. 538 staffers debate the debate. “Isn’t Biden presented with the most downside risk now that the focus gets tightened to 10 candidates? Instead of having to worry about mainly one top-tier challenge (Harris or Bernie or whomever), he now risks getting outshone by any or all of them.”
Believe it or not, the criteria to make the October debates is actually easier.
Here’s the catch: To qualify for the fourth round of debates in October, the candidates must meet the same requirements as those for September. In other words, candidates can raise money or improve in polling with a much longer deadline; for this reason, at least a few candidates will stick around until October.
Of the candidates who failed to qualify, only Gabbard, Steyer, and Williamson came close, so it’s unlikely any of them will call it quits over the next month. (Steyer fell short only one point from qualifying for September’s debates.)
After failing to qualify, both Delaney and Ryan have reiterated their commitment to their campaigns. “We’re moving forward,” Ryan said on Morning Joe on Thursday. “This is not going to stop us at all … we’re picking up endorsements left and right.” And in a story published yesterday over at the Atlantic, Benett has already stated his commitment to stay in the race until the 2020 Iowa caucuses in February.
All of this leaves us with Bullock and de Blasio, our predictions for the next candidates to drop out of the race.
“Cory Booker meditates. Kamala Harris does SoulCycle. Beto O’Rourke eats dirt.” Pretty much posting it just for the headline.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s staying in the race despite not making the debate. “Bennet says he plans to do well in the 2020 Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.” In other news, I plan to date lots of hot supermodels this fall…
Biden is probably mentally and physically fine — or within the parameters of fine for a man who turns 77 in November and who never had the greatest verbal discipline at the height of his career.
When Biden tells a story where he gets just about all of the details wrong, when he mixes up New Hampshire and Vermont, or calls former British prime minister Theresa May “Margaret Thatcher,” or when he says, “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president” or when he mangles the address of his campaign web site at the end of a debate, it’s probably just a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s behaving like a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s.
I believe that if Biden were genuinely mentally or physically unwell and incapable of handling the duties of the presidency, his family and friends would sit him down and make him withdraw from the race. No one would want their loved one to go out into the national spotlight and stumble and be embarrassed. Watching a loved one succumb to age and gradually lose their mental acuity and memory from Alzheimer’s is an extremely painful process.
(In a strange way, “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” is kind of a cute and charming unofficial slogan. With the news being what it is these days, Mr. Vice President, we’ve all felt the need to reassure others and ourselves of that fact.)
But even assuming that these are just normal septuagenarian memory lapses, it’s more than a little uncomfortable to watch Biden appear to forget Barack Obama’s name, saying during a recent appearance, “he’s saying it was president . . . (pause) My boss’s, it’s his fault.” If part of the reason to vote for Biden is his superior experience and knowledge in foreign policy, it’s a little unnerving to hear Biden say, “I don’t know the new prime minister of England. He looks like Donald Trump, I know that.” Really? Does the former veep need glasses?
The problem for Biden and his campaign is that nothing gets easier from here. Running for president consists almost entirely of long days of extemporaneous speaking in front of cameras and getting asked difficult questions from both reporters and voters. It is physically and mentally grueling marathon even to the healthiest and youngest candidates. Sure, the Biden campaign can rely on ads where Biden barely speaks and try to get him to stick to a prepared script as much as possible. But we know this man. Biden likes to talk. He likes to tell stories. He will tell stories where he doesn’t really remember the details, fills in the blanks with how he wanted it to have happened, and insist, “this is the God’s honest truth.”
Kevin Williamson doesn’t think Biden is senile, he thinks he’s just a liar:
In the most recent example, detailed by the Washington Post, Biden made up a story in which he as vice president displayed personal courage and heroism in traveling to a dangerous war zone in order to recognize the service of an American soldier who had distinguished himself in a particularly dramatic way. It was a moving story. “This is the God’s truth,” he concluded. “My word as a Biden.”
But his word as a Biden isn’t worth squat, as the Post showed, reporting that “Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.” Which is a nice way of saying: Biden lied about an act of military heroism in order to aggrandize his own role in the story.
Like Hillary Rodham Clinton under fictitious sniper fire, Biden highlighted his own supposed courage in the face of physical danger: “We can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids.”
If Biden here is lying with malice aforethought, then he ought to be considered morally disqualified for the office. If he is senescent, then he obviously is unable to perform the duties associated with the presidency, and asking him to do so would be indecent, dangerous, and unpatriotic.
The evidence points more toward moral disability than mental disability, inasmuch as Biden has a long career of lying about precisely this sort of thing.
The most dramatic instance of that is Biden’s continued insistence on lying about the circumstances surrounding the horrifying deaths of his wife and daughter in a terrible car accident. It is not the case, as Biden has said on many occasions, that they were killed by a drunk driver, an irresponsible trucker who “drank his lunch,” as Biden put it. That is a pure fabrication, and a slander on the man who was behind the wheel of that truck and who was haunted by the episode until the end of his days. Imagine yourself in the position of that man’s family, whose natural sympathy for Biden’s loss must be complicated by outrage at his persistent lying about the relevant events.
Why would Biden lie about the death of his wife and daughter? Why would he lie about the already-heroic efforts of American soldiers? In both cases, to make the story more dramatic, to give himself a bigger and more impressive narrative arc. That he would subordinate other people — real people, living and dead — to his own political ambition in such a callous and demeaning way counsels strongly against entrusting him with any more political power than that which he already has wielded.
Biden is crushing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he is a known quantity, having been on the public stage for decades, most notably as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama. Biden’s lead in matchups between Trump and various Democratic candidates is his single greatest advantage in the Democratic primaries.
The risk for Biden is that he’s not a good presidential campaigner, as his two prior attempts demonstrated. While he may be showing signs of age, the truth is that he’s always been prone to gaffes, malapropisms, exaggerations, and misstatements. Every time Biden opens his mouth in an unscripted situation, there’s a chance he’ll say something goofy that undercuts his elder-statesman status.
So why play the game the way the others are playing it? In most sports, when you’re ahead by double digits, the smart (though boring) strategy is to play it safe and sit on your lead. Getting into arguments with political Lilliputians such as Senator Cory Booker and Andrew Yang elevates their profile while lowering Biden’s. And if Biden loses his cool and starts shouting, “And you can take those ducks to the bank!” or “My pants are made of iron!” the game is over.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hey, remember all the way back to a few months ago to when Mayor Pete was The Next Big Thing? Then it turned out that Mayor Pete wasn’t so good at the mayoring part:
Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18 percent during the first seven months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city’s violent crime rate is double the average for American cities its size.
Policing problems in South Bend came to national attention on June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer’s body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Mr. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others.
It is the great paradox of Mr. Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy: His record on public safety and policing, once largely a footnote in his political biography, has overshadowed his economic record in South Bend, which he had spent years developing as a calling card for higher office.
“When he came in, the goal was to help turn the city around. That had nothing to do with the police department,” said Kareemah Fowler, until recently the South Bend city clerk.
Mr. Buttigieg’s image as a young, results-oriented executive continues to make him popular with many upper-income white liberals. They have delivered an overflowing war chest to his campaign: He had the best recent fund-raising quarter of any Democrat in the race, pulling in $24.8 million.
But criticism of Mr. Buttigieg’s oversight of the police has damaged his viability as a Democratic presidential candidate, given the huge influence of black voters in choosing the party’s nominee. He has slipped in the polls in recent months, from double-digit poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire in the spring to the single digits more recently. In a recent Fox News poll, he earned less than 1 percent support from black Democratic primary voters.
So what’s a guy that’s suddenly not-so-hot but still have lots of campaign money to spend do? Obviously beef up his campaign staff. Especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. Buttigieg is in better shape than the also rans, or, for that matter, Harris, who wasn’t able to translate her brief turn in the sun into a fundraising haul the way the Buttigieg campaign did. If Biden does flame out, Buttigieg is still best positioned to pick up the mantle of “Well, he’s not as crazy as the rest,” and a lot of DNC money seems to be hedging that way.
The audience laughs and cheers and there is time for one more question, and it is the big one: How are you going to beat Trump?
Just as Castro begins to answer, an airplane, landing at nearby Manchester airport, flies low over the party. No one can hear anything over the plane’s growling engines. But Castro keeps talking, smiling, jabbing the air in front of him, uttering words only he understands or can hear.
This should be Julián Castro’s moment. At a time when issues of immigration and family separation, race and the border are front and center in the national consciousness, the story of a third-generation Mexican-American would seem tailor-made to resonate emotionally with voters.
Snip.
And yet, as he spoke to Democratic voters in New Hampshire, Castro’s campaign seemed to be on the cusp of ending. Despite being pegged as the future of the Democratic Party almost as soon as he arrived on the scene as San Antonio mayor in 2009, and as the “Latino Obama” after he delivered a memorable keynote to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, here he was, stuck in the third tier of a sprawling field, polling around the 1 percent mark. And most crucially, he had not yet qualified for the third Democratic debate in September, which required polling at 2 percent to make it on the stage.
Snip.
And yet Elizabeth Warren is the “policy candidate.” And Pete Buttigieg, seven years younger than Castro, is the Millennial Mayor candidate. Joe Biden is the one with better ties to the Obama administration. And even though Castro proposes taxing inheritances of $2 million or more, raising the capital gains tax rate, providing a $3,000 per child tax credit, paid family and medical leave and a $15 nationwide minimum wage, Bernie Sanders is the candidate known for fighting income inequality. And somehow, despite being able to trace his lineage to the American colonies of the 18th century, Beto O’Rourke, a son of El Paso and fluent in Spanish, has become the candidate of immigration and the new Texas.
Snip.
Although Castro had been considering a statewide run in Texas for years, probably for governor, before O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Ted Cruz it was widely thought that the state wasn’t ready to elect a Democrat yet. After losing the veepstakes, he had planned to remain in Washington, angle for a job in the Hillary Clinton administration, possibly as secretary of Education or Transportation or in the Office of Management and Budget, or at some politically influential think tank.
Instead he moved back to San Antonio in 2017 and signaled his interest in running for president almost immediately. He started a PAC, Opportunity First, which raised a half-million dollars and supported “young, progressive leaders” around the country. He wrote a pre-campaign memoir, An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream, which details his rise from the barrios of West San Antonio through Stanford, Harvard Law, San Antonio’s political scene and to the Obama administration, with his twin, Joaquin, younger by one minute, with him all the way.
But other than the book and the PAC, Castro really wasn’t a major figure in the “Invisible Primary” period after the 2016 election. He wasn’t a regular on “Pod Save America,” there weren’t glossy magazine profiles or stories of him stumping for down-ballot candidates in the early primary states. It is hard to go from Housing secretary to presidential front-runner, and much harder when you are last seen in the public eye as being not picked for your party’s presidential ticket. It is telling that few of the most sought-after political operatives in Democratic circles rushed to join Castro’s campaign even though he had signaled he was in the race for a long time. Instead of veterans of the Obama and Clinton or Sanders campaigns, the Castro team is filled with many longtime loyalists from San Antonio and his Housing secretary days.
The most likely and most obvious political path for Castro would be to consolidate the Latino vote, a population which comprises an increasingly growing share of the population but one that, frustratingly for Democratic strategists, doesn’t vote in nearly the numbers that it could. Latinos are the now the largest minority group in the country and account for about 10 percent to 20 percent of the Democratic Party electorate. 2020 polling on Latinos is scant, but the polling that does exist shows that immigration isn’t the big concern among Latinos that many analysts assume it to be. Jobs and health care rank above immigration, and polling shows that Latinos tend to favor the candidates who are preferred by the rest of the Democratic electorate like Warren, Sanders and Biden. A recent open-ended Pew survey put Castro below even Buttigieg in a poll of Latino Democrats.
Castro mouths the words, but he doesn’t hear the music.
Picture the Pacific Ocean after an underwater nuclear catastrophe, and you’ll have some idea of what Bill de Blasio’s public-school system is like.
There would be a few safe islands scattered around, but they would be separated by thousands of square miles of radioactive seawater — patrolled by mutant sharks, fire-breathing giant squids and unnecessarily rude sea turtles.
And what does de Blasio think when he surveys this immense realm of inequality?
“Hey, why not blow up the islands? That way everyone is equal. Problem solved!”
The mayor sent his own kids to be educated on those rare, precious islands. Chiara de Blasio, now 24, attended the selective Beacon School, a public high school that has tough admissions standards, in Hell’s Kitchen. Dante de Blasio, 21, graduated from the even more selective Brooklyn Tech, admission to which is granted entirely based on performance on a famously difficult test.
Yet de Blasio, the longtime Iowa resident who owes New Yorkers a large salary refund for all the days we’ve been paying him to wander the Midwest sucking on corn dogs, set up a commission to investigate the problem of de-facto segregation at New York City schools.
The city has a lot of underperforming high schools, these schools are filled with black children, and de Blasio is doing zilch to help them.
That’s because the teachers union won’t allow any solution that even whispers a hint of a rumor about the main problem at these schools, which is the large number of radioactive sharks: the lousy teachers who work there.
As de Blasio knew it would, the commission he stocked with his ideological cronies recommended this past week to get rid of the Department of Education’s selective schools and ax the Gifted & Talented (G &T) programs.
These programs operate within schools — sometimes effectively setting up a good school within an otherwise mediocre or bad one. That amounts to creating islands of safety away from the tired, lazy, inept, ambition-destroying teachers whose only goal is to kill time until their pensions kick in.
I know this story is only barely relevant to the 2020 Democrat Presidential Race. Much like de Blasio’s campaign…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s not dropping out. More than any other candidate, Gabbard seems to be screwed by the DNC debate rules. “Rep. Gabbard has exceeded 2% support in 26 national and early state polls, but only two of them are on the DNC’s ‘certified’ list. Many of the uncertified polls, including those conducted by highly reputable organizations such as The Economist and the Boston Globe, are ranked by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight as more accurate than some DNC ‘certified’ polls.” 538 on the same topic, noting Gabbard and Steyer might be in under different criteria.
Go back to Gillibrand’s biography. If you had a daughter who was accepted to Dartmouth and studied two semesters abroad in Beijing and Taiwan, you would probably be pretty proud. If she got into UCLA law school, and then was accepted for internships in her senator’s office and at the United Nations in Vienna, Austria, you would be proud of that, too. If, after law school, she got hired by one of Manhattan’s oldest and most distinguished law firms, and went on to get selected for coveted law clerk positions, you would probably be bragging to the neighbors.
By a lot of standards, Gillibrand did what a bright and ambitious woman is supposed to do. In fact, by the standards of America’s self-labeled meritocratic elite, Gillibrand’s path to success is exactly what a young person is supposed to pursue. This comparison hasn’t been made much, but in this way she’s like Pete Buttigieg — the bright young son of professors at Notre Dame who is accepted to Harvard, moves on to Oxford, and immediately gets hired by McKinsey consulting. They’re both Type-A personalities with grades to match, carrying around golden resumes and heads full of answers that wow teachers, professors, and potential employers. Quite a few parents look at standout young people like this and wish their kids could be more like that.
America’s self-labeled meritocracy (please avert your eyes from all the nepotism, bourgeoisie readers, it’s gauche to bring it up) unsubtly turns all aspects of life into a competition. You want to get the best grades, get into the best school, study under the best professors, get the best internships, get the best jobs, get the highest salary, move into the best house, drive the best car, have the biggest portfolio . . . This isn’t new; America has long had a competitive sense of “keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s easy to understand why many Americans would grow to find this rarely openly expressed but almost omnipresent mindset unappealing. People sigh about “the rat race.” Seemingly high-achieving workers hit burnout. People dream of winning the lottery and moving to some sparsely populated island somewhere and “leaving it all behind.” People crave a sense of being valued for who they are, not just for their big salary, prestigious job, or fancy car. A seemingly endless stream of nonfiction and fiction works explore “the cost of the American dream.”
When you have a competition, there are usually going to be a few winners and a lot of people who “lose.” We conservatives have grumbled about “class envy” for a long time, but maybe some resentment is natural. People who have thrived in America’s “meritocracy” include Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Eric Schneiderman, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Elizabeth Holmes. We’ve seen plenty of millionaires and self-proclaimed billionaires who turned out to be terrible human beings. We’ve seen plenty of celebrities demonstrate every repugnant behavior under the sun, to the point of self-destruction. Lots of people who are in the middle or bottom have reason to doubt the notion that the best really do rise to the top in America.
When Kirsten Gillibrand — super accomplished, $500,000-per-year lawyer — turned her attention and ambitions to the political world, the best opportunity to run for office was a purple district in the middle of New York state. The top-tier Manhattan lawyer might not seem like the perfect fit, but she adapted, her opponent got caught in a scandal, and she won.
There’s a particular circle of elite New York Democratic party and media voices who found Gillibrand to be exactly what they wanted; she had risen to the top, and other people at the top found her to be as close to perfect as they could imagine. Their swoon spurred those ridiculous-in-retrospect overestimations of her appeal as a presidential candidate: Politico (“Her moment has arrived”), GQ (“the most fearsome contender”), The New Yorker (“the new face of moral reform”), and Vogue (“she’s got newfound street cred among lefties and progressives”).
The swoon started soon after her appointment to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. I love making fun of Vogue’s 2017 profile of Gillibrand, but the gushing in the 2010 profile — entitled, “In Hillary’s Footsteps” — is pretty over-the-top, too:
“Gillibrand is nothing if not genuine, and through sheer force of personality she bends the occasion to suit her style, which is essentially folksy and earnest. She radiates kindness. But she is also direct and no-nonsense. Despite the fact that she is a Democrat (and a fairly progressive one, at that) and worked for fifteen years as a hotshot Manhattan lawyer, she seems utterly at ease among this crowd of mostly Republican farmers, with their rough hands and weathered faces.”
For some reason, Iowa and New Hampshire farmers did not find her as appealing.
Gillibrand kept getting compared to the character of Tracey Flick from Election, and perhaps that is indeed sexist. But let’s reexamine that character and that movie. On paper, the villain of the story is Matthew Broderick’s high school social studies teacher, who grows so infuriated and antagonistic to Reese Witherspoon’s Flick that he’s willing to try to cheat to ensure she doesn’t win the election for student body election. Technically, Flick is the victim in the story. But we, the audience, relate to Broderick. Flick is a fascinating but thoroughly unlikeable character, and she’s supposed to be one. At one point she declares, “I feel sorry for Mr. McAllister. I mean, anyone who’s stuck in the same little room, wearing the same stupid clothes, saying the exact same things year after year for all of his life, while his students go on to good colleges and move to big cities and do great things and make loads of money — he’s gotta be at least a little jealous. It’s like my mom says, the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.” Tracey Flick doesn’t have much beyond her all-consuming ambition and determination, and probably the single most important characteristic is that we never see her actually caring about anyone besides herself, and perhaps the desire to make her mother proud. Why was Election a hit that is remembered and still referred to, two decades later? Because a lot of people knew high school class presidents who reminded them of Tracey Flick.
I have two minor quibbles with this analysis, both related to the same facet of Gillibrand. One, Gillibrand’s rise strikes me as less meritocracy at work than credentialism (a point Geraghty implies without actually stating). In truth, nothing I’ve seen from Gillibrand suggests that she’s actually bright. It seems like liberal female New York political writers bestowed that unearned distinction on Gillibrand because she came across as one of them, someone with the right pedigree who held all the right fashionably liberal opinions. Gillibrand’s one-woman show of The Wokeist Sorority Girl is finally over. Good riddance:
From the beginning, her upstart campaign was characterized by an enormous amount of virtue-mongering, insisting not only that her progressive bona fides made her superior to you, but that only she could help you comprehend exactly how backwards you are. In the last debate, for instance, she promised to traverse the suburbs explaining “institutional racism” and white privilege to white women.
It was an interesting tactic from a candidate attempting to distinguish herself as a female candidate running for women, and it’s easy to see why the effort failed to gain much traction. The major policy centerpiece of her campaign was called “Fighting for women and families” and focused exclusively on issues like unlimited abortion rights, universal paid family leave, public education, and sexual harassment. Perhaps the most news attention she got all campaign came when she compared being pro-life to being racist. Light on substance, she needed a forum to peddle her platitudes, and without the debate stage, she had little hope of convincing Democrats to listen to her at all.
The news that she had terminated her campaign came just a few days after a former Gillibrand staffer told the New York Post, “I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious.”
On paper, though, Gillibrand’s campaign didn’t seem especially quixotic. She was on the national stage for more than a decade before throwing her hat in the ring, and established herself as a strong advocate for women’s rights issues such as paid family leave and sexual assault in the military. She was also explicitly pitching her candidacy toward groups like white college-educated suburban women, whose political enthusiasm had just helped sweep a record-breaking number of women into office in the 2018 midterms.
So Gillibrand’s biggest problem may have simply been that there wasn’t a clear base for her in the Democratic electorate — at least not one for which there wasn’t also fierce competition in the rest of the primary field. After all, she was running against a number of other women who are also strong on issues like abortion rights and equal pay. Without another signature issue to help her stand out, she often got lost in the melee of the primary.
Snip.
In some ways, Gillibrand’s campaign may have also shown just how tricky outreach to women voters can be, even in a year where issues such as abortion and the #MeToo movement are prominent. Women make up about 60 percent of the Democratic base, but there isn’t a lot of evidence that they gravitate automatically toward female candidates because of their shared identity, or even because of shared priorities. In that Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, only 5 percent of Democratic women voters said that gender equality was a top voting priority. And Warren and Harris appear to be polling only very slightly better with women than men; that gap is actually bigger for Biden.
Harris’ tumble in the Democratic primary race has worried donors and supporters after her launch attracted huge crowds amid high expectations. A rising charismatic and accomplished star, they did think she couldn’t go wrong. They also figured she could ride her early summer ascent to a face-off with the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. After all, her decision to jolt her campaign by attacking Biden at the first candidate debate had initially proven successful — Harris had left him wobbly-kneed and doubted. New endorsements came in from the Congressional Black Caucus, along with a surge in donations, and media accounts of voters and insiders talking about her unique ability to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump, as the former California attorney general likes to say.
But last week a CNN national poll that had her at 17% support — in second place — in June now showed her in fourth place with only 5%. In the new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll out Wednesday, Harris is at 6% but now in fifth place, behind Pete Buttigieg.
I’m going to go with “no.” Harris’ stumbles revealed that, like Gillibrand, her “charisma” was more media creation that real, and that she’s actually unpopular with black voters, a huge problem if the media positions you as ‘the black candidate.” “Five times prosecutor Kamala Harris got the wrong guy.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s no Messam news this week. His Twitter timeline is discussing preperations for Hurricane Dorian, so he’s evidently doing the job he actually has now, and will presumably continue having once he stops pretending he’s running for President. Maybe Mayor Pete could take notes…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Missed the debate, still running, but he’s also fundraising for his congressional campaign. Hardly burning his boats. Says there’s no shot of him dropping out of the Presidential race. So I’m guessing he’s out in about five weeks or so…
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the latest case of Bernie spending taxpayer money he doesn’t have, he promises to cancel all medical debts. At this rate, Democrats will be promising to cancel all debts on everything, credit cards and mortgages included, so why pay any bills any more ever? The Magic Power of Socialism™ will take care of it all! A California restaurant owner says that Brnie is a rude asshole. “It was all very nice, except for rude and cranky Bernie…He didn’t want to shake hands, he didn’t want a picture. No campaign face…He wasn’t nice to any of the staff.” Campaigned in Porland, Maine.
Tom Steyer’s campaign was confident he would make it into the September debate. With the help of a nearly $5 million online advertising blitz, the billionaire presidential candidate had scooped up the necessary 130,000 unique donors in just over a month, meeting the Democratic National Committee’s donor threshold to qualify.
But he also had to meet the polling requirement. As the party’s deadline approached, Steyer had notched the necessary 2% in three qualifying polls, meaning he needed just one more to make it into the debate. The campaign hoped for another in an early primary state, where Steyer had spent more than $8 million on TV ads in six weeks, according to Advertising Analytics — more than any candidate, including President Donald Trump.
That poll never materialized.
The campaign vented that there hadn’t been a qualifying poll in Nevada, where Steyer spent $1.7 million and finished fifth in one survey that wasn’t approved by the DNC. But several political strategists offered another possible reason Steyer’s strategy came up short: No amount of paid media can match the influence of actual coverage, referred to in media parlance as “earned media.”
“Advertising you pay for can increase your name recognition, but unless people are hearing about you from third parties like earned media that are reinforcing a real narrative, then it’s not really going to go anywhere,” said Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.
And if there’s anyone who knows about tremendous campaign failures, its Robby Mook. Steyer’s only been in the race for two months and we already have our first failure-to-launch piece:
Even before liberal billionaire Tom Steyer was shut out of the next Democratic debate, there were tell-tale signs his rocket-fueled six-week presidential bid was failing to launch.
At last weekend’s Democratic National Committee summer confab in San Francisco, Steyer’s home turf, his campaign had a fancy booth complete with a snazzy “Tom2020” photo backdrop, but only a handful of supporters were happily snapping pics and there were no sign-waving foot soldiers to compete with Kamala Harris’ k-hive entourage.
Still, just before his remarks to the gathering, there was a slight buzz in the ballroom from Democrats eager to hear from the familiar activist in person.
To put it bluntly, Steyer underwhelmed. The wooden speech fell especially flat when he lectured his DNC hosts to stop accepting corporate cash.
“We can’t be chasing corporate money. … We should only be chasing people’s votes,” he said. “As president, I would insist that the DNC not take one single penny from any corporation.”
Overall, the party faithful assembled there offered tepid applause even after Steyer reminded them that his NextGen group organized and paid for the “largest youth mobilization in American history” in 2018, helping to flip 33 GOP House seats to the Democratic column.
Strangely, with the notable exception of slamming Donald Trump as the “biggest swamp rat of them all,” Steyer didn’t focus much on the president despite the months he spent demanding Democrats in Congress move to impeach him.
Steyer’s speech left some DNC delegates scratching their heads, though no one wanted to go public berating a billionaire who has invested so many dollars in liberal causes. Steyer was the single largest individual donor to Democratic-aligned groups in 2016 and his voter registration drives in California and Arizona helped fuel the 2018 blue wave.
The spending largesse aside, many Democrats privately say Steyer, an Exeter/Yale/Stanford graduate and a former Goldman Sachs associate who made his fortune running a $26 billion hedge fund, is simply the wrong person to pitch the party’s anti-corporate message to voters.
Elizabeth Warren came to last week’s Native American presidential forum in Sioux City, Iowa, with, as you might expect, a plan. And she executed it perfectly.
First, the Massachusetts senator expressed sorrow for the “harm I caused,” referencing her attempt to prove she had Native American ancestry through a DNA test. Then she pivoted to her literal plan, her sweeping and detailed set of ideas to expand tribal nation sovereignty and invest in social programs benefiting Native American communities. The long list of proposals was repeatedly praised by the forum’s attendees, several of whom excitedly predicted that they were speaking to the next president of the United States.
While Warren’s campaign staff might have breathed easier coming out of the forum, her Republican antagonists have made it clear they have no intention of forgetting the episode. Shortly before Warren’s appearance at the forum, the Republican National Committee released an opposition research memo titled, “1/1024th Native American, 100% Liar,” which quoted its deputy chief of staff Mike Reed as saying, Warren “lied about being [Native American] to gain minority status at a time when Ivy League law schools were desperate to add diversity to their ranks.” A few days earlier, President Donald Trump, after lamenting that “Pocahontas is rising” in the polls, assured his supporters at a New Hampshire rally that he still has the ability to derail her: “I did the Pocahontas thing. I hit her really hard, and it looked like she was down and out. But that was too long ago. I should’ve waited. But don’t worry, we will revive it.”
Has Warren effectively addressed the controversy? In conversations I had with Democratic and Republican political strategists, unaffiliated with any presidential campaign, there was no bipartisan consensus. The Democrats believed Warren’s rise in the polls is evidence she has weathered the storm. The Republicans argued Warren remains vulnerable to charges of dishonest opportunism.
They’re both right. Warren is enjoying a comeback because she has convinced many skittish progressives that she won’t let Trump disrupt her relentless focus on policy solutions. And she has convinced many Native American leaders that her policy proposals for indigenous communities are more important than what she has said in the past about her ancestry.
But because Warren’s comeback has relied on restoring her standing on the left, she has not done anything to address concerns potentially percolating among swing voters. A detailed white paper on Native American policy has no bearing on whether a moderate white suburbanite believes Warren is of good character. And since Warren has apologized for her past claims, she remains open to the charge she was dishonest when, during her academic career, she relied on nothing more than family lore to identify herself as Native American.
That means if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president, Warren would still face a “Pocahontas” problem, one that threatens the core of her candidacy.
It used to be that the Boston Globe practically had a monopoly on slobbering, unctuous flattery of the erstwhile Native American, the first woman of color at Harvard, emeritus.
It wasn’t enough for the Boring Broadsheet to pretend that the New England Historical and Genealogical Society hadn’t busted her melanin-impaired grift, or to peddle fake statistics about her scam DNA test. No, the bow-tied bumkissers also penned hagiographies of her dead dog (Otis), her new dog (Bailey) and her campaign headquarters in Charlestown (complete with a cameo appearance by Bailey).
But the Globe is one busy Democrat fanzine these days, what with having to break out the pom-poms for, among others, Ed Markey (he may be a doddering old fool, but he’s our doddering old fool), JoJoJo Kennedy (look, a Kennedy! And he has red hair!), and of course Seth Moulton (America’s loss is Essex County’s gain, or something).
So when it comes to open and gross cheerleading for Lieawatha, there’s an open lane, and boy, are the Democrat operatives with press passes rushing to fill the void.
The thesis is that Fauxcahontas is, well, thoughtful and substantive, plus you always have to mention, as the New Republic gushed, “her passion, her intellect and her lack of artifice.”
Here’s how Lieawatha’s thoughtful, substantive policies work: Bernie Sanders goes in front of some whining group of self-proclaimed victims demanding handouts, and promises them, say, $10 trillion.
So the fake Indian follows and says, I’ll raise you, Bernie – how’s $20 trillion in handouts sound?
Scott Adams thinks Warren has gotten much better as a candidate but Biden is done (political portion starts about 34 minutes in):
Talking about how to beat Warren, China Fentanyl, G7, Homes for low income people, #Hoax5, and coffee. https://t.co/56TiTm0ni1
He also thinks Warren is vulnerable on making the healthcare of everyone who already has it worse. Also thinks Harris is the worst candidate of all time. “Even worse than Beto, and he’s terrible.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a thread on the many ways MSNBC and CNN have blatantly kept Andrew Yang out of newsgraphics describing all the candidates, even those polling lower than him. It’s pretty egregious. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) “Yang climate plan heavily relies on entrepreneurship, nuclear.” If you’re going to do something incredibly stupid like the Paris Climate Accords or the Green New Deal, then Yang’s approach is indeed the one that does the least collateral damage, and a pro-nucelar voice is a breath of fresh air among Democrats.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Hickenlooper is Out, Sanders slams the press, Gabbard comes out for legal pot and serves joint duty, and Biden just keeps chug-chug-chuging along. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Gravis Marketing (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Biden 15, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7, Gabbard 5, Yang 4, Steyer 4, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2. First for Sanders to top Biden, first recent poll with Buttigieg over Harris, and first poll with Gabbard or Steyer that high.
Politico has an analysis of candidate fundraising cycles, based on ActBlue data. It’s interesting data, but it’s not the whole story, as candidates have non-ActBlue avenues for fundraising.
Are Democrats jumping off the cliff? “I’ve been doing political consulting for over 30 years, and I can tell you that if the 2020 campaign is viewed as Freedom vs. Socialism, we Democrats are in deep trouble. Furthermore, giveaways vs personal responsibility is not a winning argument either.” A lot of the writer’s proposals are less popular than he thinks they are, but they’re clearly less insane than those most of the clown car has been putting forth. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
It’s another “drop out of the race and run for the senate” piece. “Senate bids by Hickenlooper, O’Rourke or Bullock are no guarantee that Democrats would win either those specific states or the broader majority come November 2020. But it would sure improve their chances.” As you can see below, Hickenlooper took the advice.
Guy polls his family BBQ to see who black voters prefer.
Here’s sort of a tedious thumbsucker exploring the shocking idea that some Democratic voters actually consider electability.
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Threatening To Get In. Lots of Avenatti news, but its all about his impending trials. (Avenatti appears to be a slimy, dishonest creep, but it wouldn’t bother me at all to see him take the NAACP and Nike down with him.) Now it’s been two weeks since his “I might get in” outburst. Unless I see something this week I’ll drop him back down to the Out of the Running list.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get’s a WBUR profile. “I don’t think banning private insurance and putting a $23 trillion tax on the American people is going to be something that people are going to want to sustain as the price for getting universal health care coverage, which we desperately need.”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Cory Booker’s plan to fight intergenerational poverty, a cornerstone of his presidential bid, includes a novel proposal: a trust fund for every American child seeded by the federal government that could eventually provide up to nearly $50,000 for college tuition, buying a home or starting a business.” This just in: There’s no shortage of ways for Democrats to spend federal money we don’t have. Oh, and he wants a White House office to fight “white supremacy.” “Social Justice Warrior Powers Activate!”
Pete Buttigieg burst into the 2020 presidential race by building national excitement on social media and cable news shows. Now, pork chop in hand, he’s playing catch-up in the all-important first caucus state.
The 37-year-old mayor has yet to snag a single in-state endorsement in Iowa, and while his campaign has 57 staffers on the ground, it expanded to that number only recently. It’s a sharp contrast to other top Democratic candidates, who made investments in Iowa last winter to try to identify supporters and build a foundation for 2020, knowing the results here will shape the rest of the fight for the Democratic nomination.
All Buttigieg’s money will buy a lot of campaign infrastructure there. He doesn’t like Trump’s China tariffs.
The night before Julián Castro delivered the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention for President Barack Obama’s re-election, he had eaten by himself at the T.G.I. Friday’s not far from the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.
No one recognized the 37-year-old mayor of San Antonio. As the other delegates party-hopped around Charlotte, Mr. Castro studied his notes over dinner and went to bed by 9 p.m. He wanted to be well-rested before giving the biggest speech of his political career — a speech that he and his family now remember as transforming everything.
“The next morning, when we walked down the street, he was just mobbed,” said Mr. Castro’s twin brother, Joaquin, who is a United States congressman. “It was this instantaneous example of how things can change so quickly.”
Mr. Castro’s speech, in a prime-time slot, burst him onto the national stage, just like the one that had catapulted Mr. Obama to superstardom in 2004. Mr. Castro symbolized a new moment in American politics: The grandson of a Mexican immigrant with a fourth-grade education, the young mayor talked about his family’s story, one so common for millions of Latinos and yet almost nonexistent at the highest level of national politics. “My family’s story isn’t special,” Mr. Castro said. “What’s special is the America that makes our story possible.”
The applause was raucous. The reviews were overwhelmingly glowing (“A Political Star is Born” and “A Latino Obama?” the headlines read). People started to recognize Mr. Castro, even if they often confused him for Joaquin. On the way back to San Antonio, a fan stopped him in a men’s room at the Atlanta airport to shake his hand. (“He wanted to shake my hand in a men’s room!” Mr. Castro said. “I couldn’t believe it.”) Political pundits declared the Castro brothers the future of the party.
“He was this kind of phenom and, you know, was this symbol of the growing diverse country,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said of Julián.
Party leaders waited for him to seize on his “Obama Moment.” And waited. And waited. And waited.
The keynote, as it turned out, became a turning point that didn’t quite turn him.
Falsehood No. 1: “I’m proud to say in New York, we’ve divested $5 billion” in pension-fund assets “from the fossil-fuel industry,” Hizzoner bragged in Iowa.
Uh, no. As Politico noted, the city’s pension funds have divested exactly zero from fossil-fuel companies.
Yes, there are plans to study the idea, but no such study has even begun. And even if, at some point, the pension funds do divest, de Blasio won’t be able to take credit because he doesn’t control their boards.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. On the next two weeks, Gabbard is on active military duty, but before she went she came out for an end on federal marijuana prohibition. “The Hawaii Democrat announced in a news release earlier this week that she will be joining the joint military exercise.”
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Want to know which celebrities are supporting Harris? Me neither, but here it is: “Eva Longoria, Elizabeth Banks and Empire director, Lee Daniels…Jane Fonda, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barbra Streisand, Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Charlize Theron and a long roster of studio executives.” Also Spike Lee, who held a fundraiser for her. She launched a Spanish-language organizational push.
Update: Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Dropped Out. Says he’s mulling a senate run instead. A successful moderate governor of a purple state would be enough to be considered a contender in previous election cycles, but he’s old, white and male, and only Biden is evidently able to overcome those disadvantages in the age of the Democratic Party’s hyperpartisan wokescold hysteria.
The Washington state Three Strikes You’re Out law holds that felons who have been convicted of two serious violent offenses in the past — such as murder, rape, or child molestation — must go for jail for life with no chance of parole after a third such conviction.
At that point, the only way for the offender to walk free would be with a pardon from the Clemency and Pardons Board, along with the governor.
Tracy Hoggatt, 59, had a long list of offenses — first-degree robbery, second-degree assault, second-degree theft, and on and on.
How is he on the loose today, you might wonder?
In January of 2017, Governor Jay Inslee and the Clemency Board approved Hoggatt’s request. Inslee wrote that Hoggatt had “taken steps to turn his life around and developed a strong sense of empathy.” So after being put in prison for life without parole, he was granted clemency.
Three months later, he went back to jail for violating the terms of his release. He had consumed alcohol, he was living at an unapproved address, and he was hanging out with known criminals. So they picked him up again and put him back in prison for life without the possibility of parole.
Guess what happened then?
This past Tuesday, Inslee let Hoggatt out on clemency for a second time, with the condition that he go to a halfway house in Kelso.
However, he got off the bus in Seattle without going all the way to Kelso. He told the Department of Corrections that he missed the bus, but that his fiancée would drive him to Kelso.
That was Tuesday. This is Friday, and nobody knows where he is. This Three Strikes offender is still on the loose.
Man, that decision would surely haunt him in the general election he won’t be the nominee for…
Six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, that centrist message of electability at the heart of Klobuchar’s long-shot presidential bid has yet to pay off in the polls, adding urgency to her pleas to a Democratic base that has lurched markedly to the left.
With much ground to make up, and the days of summer growing shorter, Klobuchar’s path to the party’s nomination is dotted with Iowa road signs, each town a stop in a long game to outlast a field of bigger names with more fulsome campaign coffers.
Over four days in early August, in a state crucial to her presidential hopes, Klobuchar courted Iowa Democrats in cafes and private homes, union halls and farms, at fundraising dinners and the Iowa State Fair. She asked them to look past her low poll numbers and support a fellow Midwesterner as their best hope against Trump in 2020.
“I think it is pretty important, Iowa, to have a candidate from the Midwest,” Klobuchar told hundreds at the State Fair in Des Moines. “And someone that just doesn’t have a bunch of policies written down on a piece of paper but has a track record of looking out for rural America.”
Her “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” campaign strategy hinges on Iowa Democrats being less insane than national Democrats. Probably, but are they less insane enough? Speaking of less insane: “On judicial nominations, Klobuchar’s bipartisan votes put her out of step with the Democratic field…Apart from Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Klobuchar has voted with Republicans to confirm many of President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, more than the other Senate Democrats running for president.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “‘And Then There Were 23,’ Says Wayne Messam Crossing Out Hickenlooper Photo In Elaborate Grid Of Rivals…’Another foe vanquished, and another step taken toward Messam’s glorious ascent…My plan is continuing apace. First Swalwell, now you, and soon all these fools who stand before me will begin dropping like flies, and then the era of Messam will be nigh.'”
The North Shore congressman has been crisscrossing the early presidential-primary states like any of the viable candidates. Just last week, he hit Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, before heading to Weare, Exeter, and Hillsborough in New Hampshire. He ate corn dogs and ice cream.
And America ignored him — as it has, resolutely, since he announced his candidacy in April.
In poll after poll after poll, Moulton has registered at zero percent. Yes, zero. The same number your dog or cat would poll. Yet the Harvard-educated US Marine Corps veteran soldiers on. He has not approached any of the benchmarks for getting onto the overcrowded Democratic debate stage.
Snip.
Why not pack it in? Or, rather, when does he pack it in?
“My experience working with candidates is that they’re the last ones to know,” said Democratic strategist and pollster Brad Bannon. “They’ve invested all their time and energy and money into running for president, and they have a hard time admitting that they’ve failed.”
Moulton is frustrated there hasn’t been more conversation about national security in the presidential primary. “The Democratic Party is failing to have a clear national security strategy. We’ve got to show America how we will make our country strong and safe. How we will stand up for patriotism, for our values. We’ve got to stop letting conservative Republicans own the flag,” he said.
With his campaign barely registering in the polls, Moulton wasn’t on any of the debate stages to make this case. Barring an unprecedented upheaval in the race, Moulton won’t be the Democratic presidential nominee. So what is he doing?
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s proposing a massive criminal justice system overhaul. “The plan calls for banning cash bail, solitary confinement and civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize people’s homes and other property even if they are not convicted of a crime. The plan also looks to legalize marijuana and abolish the death penalty, a practice Sanders has long opposed.” Ending civil asset forfeiture and ending federal marijuana prohibition I can get behind. (And why is it that only this week are Democratic candidates coming out for legal marijuana legalization? Hickenlooper and Inslee should have made that their themes week one.) The rest don’t seem like federal jurisdiction. “Bernie Sanders South Carolina crowd size one-third of Elizabeth Warren’s.” (300 vs. 900) Sanders also slammed his treatment in the press:
Bernie Sanders Monday gave a speech in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He took shots at the press, mentioning coverage of his campaign against Amazon:
I talk about (Amazon’s taxes) all of the time… And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.
Employees of the Post were put out by Sanders’s comments. They insisted they hold no ill will against him for regularly bashing the man who writes their checks as one of earth’s most obnoxious plutocrats, and moreover that Sanders is wrong to make the media a “boogeyman” the way he’s turned “billionaires and corporations” into boogeymen. This “doesn’t add up,” noted the Post, going so far as to put the term “corporate media” in quotation marks, as if it were a mythical creature.
Perhaps the negativity toward Sanders isn’t over Amazon. After all, Sanders gets similar treatment from the New York Times, CNN, the Atlantic and other outlets. Still, the Post’s Bernie fixation stands out. The paper humorously once wrote 16 negative pieces about Sanders in the space of 16 hours (e.g. “Clinton Is Running for President. Sanders Is Doing Something Else,” “Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals,”etc).
The Post in 2017 asked readers how Democrats would “cope” with the Kremlin backing Bernie Sanders with “dirty tricks” in 2020. In April of this year it described the Sanders campaign as a Russian plot to help elect Donald Trump. They’ve run multiple stories about his “$575,000 lake house,” ripping his “socialist hankering” for real estate. “From each according to his ability,” the paper quipped, “to each according to his need for lakefront property…
Apart from being described as a faux-Leninist Russian stooge who wants to elect Trump and mass-release dangerous criminals, what does Sanders have to complain about?
It’s not just about Sanders.
The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup.
This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:
Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving… You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV.
That was too much truth for Correspondents’ Association, who decried Wolf’s lack of “commitment” to a “vigorous and free press” and “civility.” They scrapped the comedy idea, and this year brought in a self-described “boring” speaker, who made light of Trump’s complaints about the press by reading from Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.”
“I don’t want to be president if I have to win by outrage,” he explained. “I don’t want to just win. I want to govern, and not just by executive order. I understand the outrage people feel right now. But real leadership is taking two different needs and elevating them to one single want.”
Arguably, Sestak knows a thing or two about this topic. He commanded an aircraft carrier battle group conducting combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq with 30 US and allied ships and more than 15,000 sailors and 100 aircraft. He’s also considered the qualities of a good leader while teaching ethical leadership courses at the historically black college Cheyney University and at Carnegie Mellon.
It’s sort of like the Jim Geraghty piece on Sestak in last week’s Clown Car roundup.
The latest round of polling shows Elizabeth Warren gaining ground in the presidential race, but she still faces some critical obstacles to winning the Democratic nomination. She’s dominating among white progressive voters and, relatedly, is building support among white college-educated Democrats. But she continues to lag among working-class voters and has demonstrated minimal appeal to African-Americans.
Unless she builds appeal outside her core constituencies, it will be challenging for her to pull ahead of front-running Joe Biden, who has built his own beachhead of support among moderates, working-class whites, and African-American voters.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Marianne Williamson says ‘powerful forces’ on the left out to end presidential campaign.” Mainly over her questioning various medical orthodoxies. “Marianne Williamson is a danger to feminism — and her ideas could get Americans killed.” Eh, it’s just calling out her New Age power of positive thinking as bullshit and pouting because she’s not Warren or Harris. She spoke to some 350 people in California’s mission district.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Biden continues to lead the field despite his senior moments, witches boost Williamson, and Harris has become really unpopular…among black voters. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Caveat: Between a new job and a cold, this week has been a bear, so the clown car update may seem merely large rather than extra-extra-extra large…
Survey USA (California): Biden 25, Warren 21, Sanders 18, Harris 17, Buttigieg 6, Yang 1, Gabbard 1, Booker 1. So Harris is in fourth place in her own state…
Survey USA (North Carolina): Biden 36, Sanders 15, Warren 13, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 1, Yang 1, Booker 1, Castro 1.
Let’s look at how different segments of Democratic primary voters are responding to candidates this year.
Start with white college graduates, once a negligible splinter, now about 40 percent of them, according to exit polls. They’re also the Democrats’ leftmost voters on issues, from impeachment to racial reparations. A post-Detroit Quinnipiac poll with subgroup results shows Warren leading Biden 28 to 25 percent in this group, well ahead of Sanders (11 percent) and Harris, who is tied with Buttigieg (8 percent). White college grads are among the best groups for the articulate Harvard Law professor and the articulate Notre Dame professor’s son.
Black voters, solidly Democratic for a half-century, are about 25 percent of Democratic primary voters. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki’s useful summary of their primary voting history shows how they’ve voted near-unanimously or heavily for one candidate — Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton since. Note that each of these since Jackson has won the party’s nomination. Big margins among one-quarter of an electorate can overcome small margins among the other three-quarters.
Black Democrats’ clear choice now is Biden (47 percent in Quinnipiac), with Sanders (16 percent) a very distant second, while the white college grads’ favorite, Warren, lags behind (8 percent). Quinnipiac has black candidates Harris and Booker receiving 1 and zero percent from blacks; they do better in other polls but struggle to hit double digits.
Their left-wing issue stances may not help. Echelon Insights polling shows 13 percent fewer nonwhite Democrats identifying as liberal than white Democrats. That suggests that most blacks may not switch to the strident liberal Booker or flexible liberal Harris, as black voters in early 2008 switched to Barack Obama after he showed he could win the Iowa caucuses.
Some Democratic constituencies seem to have an active aversion to certain candidates. Black voters seem to be repelled by Pete Buttigieg; he gets only 1 percent from them in Quinnipiac and has been getting zero percent in other polls. Black voters have been the Democratic constituency least supportive of same-sex marriage.
And very high-income voters, heavily Democratic these days, nonetheless seem to have little use for Bernie Sanders. Among high-income ($100,000-plus) Democrats polled in Quinnipiac, only 6 percent chose the socialist and admirer of 70 percent income tax rates. Similarly, in 2016, he lost the highest-income suburbs — Greenwich, Connecticut; Winnetka, Illinois; Wellesley, Massachusetts; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan — to Hillary Clinton by roughly 2-1 margins.
Lots of candidates put in an appearance at the Iowa State Fair. CNN has details in a sort of low calorie tracker substitute for a high calorie event.
“Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth predicted Friday that most 2020 presidential hopefuls won’t be dropping out of the race anytime soon, saying those who do will most likely wait until late fall.”
“Forget ‘Lanes.’ The Democratic Primary Is A Whole Freaking Transit System.” Mainly an analysis of who Clinton and Sanders voters in 2016 are supporting this time around.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says “Trump reelection ‘more likely with each passing minute.” Wants to go all in on gun control, which is a great way for Democrats to win back the Midwest. Opposes eliminating private insurance.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. In Austin, he claimed he was a different kind of candidate before uttering a string of platitudes. “At 37, he is barely half the age of former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, among the frontrunners. Buttigieg would be the youngest Democratic nominee since William Jennings Bryan in the first of his three runs just before and after the turn of the 20th century.” And nothing says “success” quite like a comparison to the Democrat who lost Presidential elections more times than Hillary…
Yet Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland who began his career in business, has outpaced the rest of the field in at least one respect. Of all the Democrats vying to challenge Trump, he is the only candidate to have visited each of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties. He has held twice as many events in the state as anyone else, spent more than a million dollars on local television advertisements, and staffed up early, opening his eighth office there before the first debates. (Recently, he hired away a deputy state director from Marianne Williamson’s campaign.) Last week, as Delaney drove across Iowa in a crimson pickup truck that once belonged to his father, completing his thirty-fourth swing through the state, he seemed, for once, to be carrying some momentum. During the twenty-four hours following his showdown with Warren, in the second debate, his campaign received a ten-fold surge in fund-raising. “I have people who are moderates who thought I crushed it,” Delaney told me on Tuesday, as he sipped an iced tea at the counter of a diner in Marshalltown, Iowa. “And people who, you know, really are pretty far to the left, who think I did terribly. No one thinks I did an average job.”
Snip.
Delaney has yet to qualify for the third round of debates, in September, which require candidates to reach two-per-cent support in four approved polls and to attract a hundred and thirty thousand unique donors. Earlier this week, a memo from the D.N.C. informed campaigns that the requirements for the fourth round of debates, in October, will remain the same, extending the window for more candidates to qualify and postponing the long-awaited winnowing of the Democratic field. Delaney told me that he views the third and fourth rounds as “somewhat interchangeable.” It’s important to be in one of them, he clarified, adding that he had a “much better chance” of qualifying in time for the latter. When I caught up with Delaney’s wife, April, after his soapbox speech at the Iowa State Fair, she criticized the voter threshold for working against “a more centrist voice.” “To go online, you actually have to have a more fringe message, because that incites,” she said. “We’ll get there. It’ll just take us a little bit longer to get there, because we’re not going to make these impossible promises.”
Having wounded a presumptive frontrunner backed by nearly $25 million in campaign funds, Gabbard instantly became the subject of a slew of negative leaks, tweets, and press reports. Many of these continued the appalling recent Democratic Party tradition of denouncing anything it doesn’t like as treasonous aid to foreign enemies.
Harris national press chair Ian Sams tweeted, “Yo, you love Assad!”, a reference to Gabbard’s controversial visit with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017. He then tweeted a link to an insidious February 2 NBC News story, which asserted that Gabbard’s campaign was the beneficiary of Russian bots.
Harris herself meanwhile gave a sneering interview to Anderson Cooper.
“This is going to sound immodest,” she said, but as a “top-tier candidate,” she could “only take what [Gabbard] says and her opinion so seriously.”
She added Gabbard was an “apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”
The New York Times wrote Gabbard believes the United States has “wrought horror on the world,” and that “critics have called her actions un-American.” Politico denounced Gabbard’s “Star Wars bar scene-like following” and hissed that the Daily Stormer was a supporter (Gabbard has repeatedly condemned white nationalism and sworn off their support). On The View, co-host Sunny Hostin called Gabbard a “Trojan Horse,” while Ana Navarro viciously insinuated Gabbard, an Iraq veteran, was part of a foreign column.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She launched ads in Iowa and new Hampshire in an attempt to get into the third round of debates. Heh: “Kirsten Gillibrand’s son nearly casts ‘vote’ for Elizabeth Warren before mom corrects him.”
That unquestionably is most troublesome for the Harris campaign is the dramatic drop in support from black Democratic voters, down to 1% after reaching 27% in early July:
In today’s results: Biden gets 47 percent of black Democrats, with 16 percent for Sanders, 8 percent for Warren and 1 percent for Harris
Contrast that with the pre-second debate poll from July 29th:
Biden gets 53 percent of black Democrats, with 8 percent for Sanders, 7 percent for Harris and 4 percent for Warren
And also the survey from July 2nd:
Harris also essentially catches Biden among black Democratic voters, a historically strong voting bloc for Biden, with Biden at 31 percent and Harris at 27 percent.
When Quinnipiac asked Democratic voters after the first round of debates who performed the best, 47% said Harris. After her last debate, that number landed at 8%.
Harris’s support among female Democrats has also been in a freefall. She’s at 7% now in comparison to 24% a month ago.
So her support has dropped significantly among two crucial Democratic voting blocs: black people and women.
What went wrong for Harris? I bet Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s epic takedown of Harris on her record as California attorney general helped escalate the fall in her numbers. Gabbard raised incredibly essential issues to black Democratic voters about Harris’s time as AG on criminal justice reform.
Her ongoing racially-tinged attacks against Joe Biden may not sit well with black voters who remember (and are frequently reminded of) his eight years with President Obama.
Other polls taken after her second debate confirm the genuine drop in support for Harris.
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bad news for Hickenlooper: He’s dead in the water in the Presidential race. Worse news for Hickenlooper: He’s no sure thing in a senate race now. “As we shall not be following up on Hickenlooper’s further and presumptively fruitless activities, we urge citizens to pursue any other avenue of information they deem necessary, which from a practical perspective is, of course, none.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile from ABC News. Though typically thin, it’s the most substantial national news coverage he’s received since he announced. I bet his campaign celebrated with a pizza from Domino’s, assuming they could scrounge up a coupon…
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Moulton reportedly laid off half his staff and skipped a major Iowa dinner to attend a reunion of army buddies. He also says he’s not dropping out. The unvoiced word at the end of that last sentence is “yet.”
It’s always important to remember that O’Rourke’s only claims to national fame are losing a Senate election and launching an ill-advised presidential campaign that couldn’t have disappeared from prominence more quickly had David Copperfield been managing it.
The media created Beto, then the media forgot Beto, now the media is heartlessly giving the delusional narcissist false hope.
The headline of the article is ” After El Paso Shooting, Will Voters Revisit Beto O’Rourke?”
That’s a little misleading. In terms of this primary race, the voters weren’t really visiting Beto in the first place. They were mostly passing by and saying hi on their way to Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Mayor Pete.
The article does correctly note that times are tough for Team Beto right now:
A new Monmouth University poll, conducted Aug. 1-4, found Mr. O’Rourke with less than 1 percent of support from likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers. He was at 6 percent in the Monmouth poll in April.
His poll numbers have also been weak in New Hampshire and South Carolina, as well as nationally, and his July debate performance and his most recent campaign fund-raising report both fell short of the heightened expectations for his candidacy among some in the party earlier in the year.
Those “heightened expectations” were another thing that the media manufactured out of whole cloth. They were quickly ditched in favor of Mayor Pete, who was to be the MSM’s next hype concoction.
This is the ray of sunshine through all the murders that the Times sees for a Beto bounce-back:
But Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers hope that his impassioned response to the massacre in his hometown, with flashes of raw anger that match the mood of many Democrats, will prompt voters nationally to give him another look. His remarks calling President Trump a white supremacist, and his cussing out of the news media as he urged journalists to “ connect the dots” between the El Paso killings and Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant language and exploitation of racism, drew praise from both liberals and moderates.
Clarifying: “Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers” (all seven of them!) are pinning their hopes for Beto’s return to whatever relevance he had on him saying and doing the same exact things that every one of his primary opponents have been for the past week.
That illustrates the central problem with Beto, which I wrote about back in May when the MSM first began ignoring him in favor of Mayor Pete: under scrutiny, there is no “there” there.
He isn’t a particularly sharp thinker. What attention he’s gotten recently has come from carefully crafted publicity stunts.
What he is is a guy who spent too much time last year reading and believing the hype being spewed about him in the media.
If gun control was such a surefire winning issue for Democratic candidates, Eric Swalwell wouldn’t have dropped out.
“Bernie Sanders staffers manhandle press at Iowa State Fair.”
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Jim Geraghty: “Joe Sestak: The Most Interesting Democrat You Forgot Was Running.” (Sorry, Jim, I have to disagree with both parts of that headline.)
And while Sestak answers questions at length, with streams of consciousness that mix his personal history, tales from his Navy days, and John McCain–style invocations of country over party, he frequently wanders back to his fairly nonpartisan core message, that Americans are grappling with a crisis of unaccountability.
“I think what Americans want today, more than anything else, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, is somebody who they think is accountable to them,” Sestak tells me. “Above party, above ideology, above any special interest, above oneself. I think they need someone who has a breadth and depth of global experience in national security — and by that I mean from trade issues, economic issues, all the way over to military issues, understanding all the elements of our power, including the power from our ideals, and who has experience in that and has learned certain principles in how those are to be used. We need to restore U.S. leadership to a world order that is rules-based in order to protect our American dream here at home.”
“If you have a president who is really trusted, then you can move and advance those policies that actually make the American dream available to everyone. There are too many who have not shared in the benefits of this economy. We can be so much more productive, but how do you move them?”
In a Democratic field with seven senators, three governors, four mayors and four sitting congressman who can easily blur together, Sestak stands out for at least having done significant things in his life outside the realm of politics.
Following in the footsteps of his Slovakian immigrant father, Sestak was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated second in his class. He earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1980 and 1984. He rose through the naval ranks, serving on the U.S.S. Richard E. Byrd, the U.S.S. Hoel, and the U.S.S. Underwood. By 1991, he commanded the guided-missile frigate the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, and by November 1994 he was the director for defense policy on the National Security Council. Three years later, he was commanding the Navy’s Destroyer Squadron 14. (You can watch a snippet of younger Sestak discussing the history of his fleet and duties on the U.S.S. George Washington in this video from 1998.)
After 9/11, Sestak became the first director of the Navy Operations Group (Deep Blue), the Navy’s strategic anti-terrorism unit, and in 2002, Sestak assumed command of the George Washington Aircraft Carrier Battle Group — ten U.S. ships with 10,000 sailors, SEALs, Marines, and 100 aircraft. During a six-month deployment, the George Washington group launched approximately 10,000 sorties, including offensive strike missions, first against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, then enforcing the no-fly zone against Iraq.
This is an outright lie, one day after Warren complained of the dangers of rhetoric.
Michael Brown was not murdered. Michael Brown was shot by officer Darren Wilson in an act of self-defense. This is why the grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder or manslaughter, and it was also the conclusion of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.
“Every police officer in America should be offended by Sen. Warren’s ill-informed, inflammatory tweet today,” Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association told me via email. “Holding a would-be cop killer out as some sort of victim or worse yet, a hero, does no justice to the truth or to reconciliation. Her careless words disqualify her from fitness to serve impartially as commander-in-chief.”
“Elizabeth Warren just has a gigantic campaign,” said Laura Martin, executive director of the social justice organization Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “There are counties all over rural areas where some campaigns are just doing tours, but she has staff there. And that was a strategy President Obama had in 2008 when he won Nevada.”
Another Democratic operative put it more bluntly: “Warren has built a monster.”
Among 17 Democratic strategists, activists and experts interviewed by POLITICO for this story, Warren’s campaign was mentioned most often as the most impressive of the field, followed by Harris’.
Williamson floated through the fairgrounds like some sort of celestial being, unbothered by the harsh sun and perpetually surrounded by a throng of sweaty supporters demanding selfies and hoping to soak up some of her good vibes. Speaking at The Des Moines Register’s Political Soapbox, a mini stage where candidates take turns offering truncated stump speeches and fielding questions from curious Iowans, Williamson commanded a much larger crowd than either the entrepreneur Andrew Yang or former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who had both spoken before her. The Iowans in attendance may well have known about her low polling numbers—and about recent criticism she’s generated with her comments on science and medicine—but they seemed drawn to her nonetheless.
“We have an amoral economic mind-set that has corrupted our government and hijacked our value systems,” she told the audience, standing onstage in wedge heels and a marbled, blue-and-mauve blazer as a quiet drumbeat played ominously from the speakers. The “conventional political establishment” is the problem, she said, to loud applause, and it’s time for the American people to wake up. “While it is true that sometimes Americans are slow to wake up,” she added, “once we do wake up, we slam it like nobody’s business!”
Williamson’s eccentric performances in the first two presidential-primary debates are what put her on the map for many Americans: Hers was the most Googled name in the hours after the first debate, when, speaking in a quasi-Mid-Atlantic accent not unlike Katharine Hepburn’s, Williamson threatened to “harness love” to conquer President Donald Trump. In the second debate, she promised to combat the “dark, psychic force” of hatred in America, and offered a forceful argument for the payment of reparations to descendants of enslaved people in America.
Although Williamson describes herself as a “pretty straight-line progressive Democrat,” she’s taken pains to set herself apart from the other liberal presidential hopefuls. She criticized Elizabeth Warren’s oft-discussed plans in the first primary debate by labeling them “superficial fixes” to the much deeper problems facing the country. “If you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming,” Williamson said, citing America’s so-called sick-care system and the need for improved preventative care. “I’ve had a career not making political plans but harnessing the inspiration and the motivation and the excitement of people, masses of people,” she told the audience.
“‘Witches’ for Marianne Williamson Launch ‘Occult Task Force.'” She hired former Sanders staffer and accused serial groper Robert Becker for her campaign. “I believe in forgiveness. I believe in redemption. I believe in people rising up after they’ve fallen down…I had not read anything or heard anything that made me feel this was a man who never deserved to work again.”
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Since I see no sign she’s gearing up for a Presidential run, I’ve moved her out of the clown car proper. However, I wouldn’t rule out those early rumors of her becoming a Biden VP pick coming to pass…
Biden brags about his segregationist buds, a sleestak joins the race, Beto hires a Ralph Northam staffer, and New York Times and/or Google News screw up a lot of candidate photos. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Lot of damn polls this time around…
Economist/YouGov (page 162): Biden 26, Warren 14, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 9, Harris 7, O’Rourke 4, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobucher 1, Yang 1. Hickenlooper, Messam, and Moulton not only got 0%, they got 0% across all demographic categories and subgroupsings (sex, age, race).
Monmouth University: Biden 32, Warren 15, Sanders 14, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Inslee 1, Klobucher 1, Williamson 1, Castro, Gillibrand and Ryan all with less than 1, everyone else with zero.
The New York Times asked short video interview questions of 21 of the Democratic Presidential contenders…Joe Biden conspicuously not among them. Has he already adopted an Ivory Tower strategy as frontrunner? Even if you’re not going to watch any of those interviews, you might want to click on the link to look at the weird way NYT has looped little video snippets of all 21 candidate talking heads silently mouthing answers. The effect is somewhat…disturbing. It also reminds you that the vast majority of Democratic voters couldn’t pick most of these people out of a police lineup if their life depended on it.
21 of the candidates (including Biden) were in South Carolina for the state convention and “US Rep. Jim Clyburn’s ‘World-Famous Fish Fry.'”
CNN asks which Democrat is number two. (Insert your own Austin Powers joke here.) Their ranking is currently Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobucher, Yang, and Castro. So Castro’s in the top ten and still below the Andrew Yang Line…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Michael Bennet pushes sweeping plan to remake political system. The Colorado senator says reforms on campaign finance, gerrymandering and lobbying are needed to push American forward.” Maybe he views all those as easier tasks than winning the Democratic nomination. More on the same theme. Democrats are still obsessed with the Citizens United decision, since they believe only left-leaning billionaires, tech companies, and union slush funds should be able to buy elections…
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden really stepped in while bragging about how well he worked with segregationist in the senate like late Mississippi Senator James Eastland. “‘I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,’ the former vice president said while putting on a Southern drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.” Yeah, that’s because you’re not black, moron. This is about the clumsiest and stupidest way you could brag on your ability to work with others. Will being Obama’s Vice President for eight years insulate him from charges of racism? Maybe with voters, but not with his fellow candidates (see below). Just another stop on the Biden Damage Control Tour. Has the Biden campaign bought lots of fake twitter accounts? Sure seems that way. (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Biden compared Trump’s election to MLK and JFK’s assassinations, which doesn’t sound at all like crazy talk. “Hunter Biden Still Active in Chinese-Sponsored Investment Fund.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Indeed, the media actually seem to be reporting on Hunter Biden’s shady deals, possibly because his segregationist samba removed the Obama Protective Shield of Media Disinterest in his scandals.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Buttigieg got targeted by #BlackLivesMatter after an officer-involved shooting in South Bend. “Some of the fiercest criticism at the march came from Logan’s mother, South Bend resident Shirley Newbill, who told Buttigieg that she’s ‘been here all my life’ and officials have not done a ‘thing about me or my son, or none of these people put here. It’s time for you to do something … I’m tired of talking now … and I’m tired of hearing your lies.'” He tripled his campaign staff in New Hampshire. Evidently his fundraising is going well. “Hollywood’s Top Gay Donors Have Mixed Feelings About Buttigieg. The young mayor’s candidacy may be historic, but many gay bundlers and donors in Los Angeles are skeptical of his ability to win in 2020.” He held a town hall in North Augusta, SC.
Delaney is perhaps the candidate most familiar with that Wall Street bell — he lists among his top bona fides the co-founding of two publicly traded companies before he turned 40. At one point, he was the youngest chief executive with a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The first, HealthCare Financial Partners, offered financing to mid-sized healthcare providers. The company sold to Heller Financial for about $483 million in April 1999, according to the Baltimore Sun. He partnered to start a second lending firm in 2000, this time to finance small businesses. Delaney was first elected to Congress in 2012 while he was CEO of CapitalSource, which was eventually merged with PacWest Bancorp.
A New Jersey native, wealthy businessman and proud son of a union electrician, Delaney surprised Maryland Democrats when he first ran after the Sixth District was redrawn in the party’s favor. A Washingtonian profile of Delaney from that year described a “nasty, expensive primary campaign” that ended with Delaney’s besting another candidate seen as the next in line by party officials.
Seven years later, Delaney’s presidential candidacy could again be viewed as unique. He was one of the wealthiest representatives in Congress when he served, according to a March 2018 Roll Call analysis. He declared nearly three years before the 2020 Democratic convention, and has been barnstorming through Iowa ever since in advance of the caucuses in February.
Yet despite his 29 campaign trips in the past two years, he is not polling at the same levels as many of his opponents. The Des Moines Register reported this week that many Iowans still don’t know him or remain undecided about him. A mid-June Iowa poll showed 1 percent of respondents rated Delaney as their top choice, and 1 percent said he was their second.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She criticized Warren and Harris for criticizing Biden on the segregationist stuff. “Joe Biden did not ‘celebrate’ or ‘coddle’ segregationists. His critics have unfairly misrepresented his important message to score cheap political points.” A study shows her in second behind Cory Booker for Asian American donations, though Biden evidently hadn’t entered the race in the period analyzed. Also, I can’t tell is someone at New York Times or Google news was asleep at the switch for this one:
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s the latest “why isn’t she doing better” piece: “Why Kirsten Gillibrand’s campaign is stuck at 0.3%.” “Gillibrand is failing to leave voters with much of an impression. Two-thirds of the voters interviewed – including 15 of the 21 who just saw Gillibrand’s 10-minute lightning round of a stump speech – said they don’t know enough about her to have a strong opinion of her.” Finally, a break for her campaign:
Candidate comfort food:
Warren: Chips and guacamole Harris: Fries Gabbard: Vegan cupcakes Buttigieg: Beef jerky Gillibrand: Whiskey Castro: Iced tea Booker: Veggies Klobuchar: Baked Potato Williamson: “I have no comfort food”
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s another campaign run by three teenagers piece. He slammed Buttigieg: “The media has given Buttigieg a pass on a lackluster record in South Bend that shows him to be more concerned about public acclaim than the lives of average people. Why the pass? Because he’s an articulate white kid with all the right credentials. His constituents know the truth.” You may not think much of Gravel’s “troll higher polling candidates’ strategy, but at least it is an apparent strategy, which is more than I can say for some…
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He too gets a Miami Herald profile, and there’s not a lot new there. Here’s a profile of him as “an extreme moderate.” “John Hickenlooper, a moderate, all the way through. He approaches a lighter shade of gray. Hickenlooper is so close to center he might be invisible.” And then one paragraph down it says “He supports reentering the Paris Accords, and imposing a Carbon Tax.” Those are not, in any way, shape or form, moderate positions that most Americans support. You don’t get to brag you’re a moderate because you’re slightly less radical than the most radical Democrats. And NYT/Google News do it again:
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of radical environmental proposals, Inslee wants to ban fossil fuel production on private land, ban fracking, and institute a punishing carbon tax, all 2030. In short, he wants us dependent on Middle East oil and to bring France’s yellow vest riots to America. No word on how the federal government will deal with those outlaws still using gasoline-powered engines in 2030. Naturally I’m imagining death squads.
dozen minutes into a debate with U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar last October, her Republican opponent went on the attack.
The Minnesota Democrat, Jim Newberger said, “has a 90% rubber-stamp, compliant voting record with her leadership, so when you talk about reaching across the aisle and achieving things … I’m not seeing it.”
Klobuchar was ready: She had voted more than 40% of the time with Republican senators from South Dakota, North Dakota and Alaska, she said. “I try to work in the middle with people that want to find actual solutions to things and not just grandstand on them.”
Yeah, try pitching your awesome record of bipartisanship to the Democratic Party base. Can’t possibly see that failing…
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Has an interview with South Florida Caribbean Radio. Or at least I assume he did. My Adblock blocked everything but the top banner bar. He spoke at that Columbia, South Carolina. But there’s only 50 seconds of video there. Even when he gets coverage, events conspire to deprive him of coverage…
Seth Moulton served four tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine, then won election three times to a U.S. House seat in Massachusetts, representing the district where he grew up.
Moulton, 41, earned three degrees from Harvard University — a bachelor’s, an M.B.A., and a master’s in public affairs. After earning his undergraduate degree in physics, Moulton joined the Marines, shortly before 9/11.
Moulton was among the first troops to enter Baghdad in 2003, and he was later assigned by Gen. David Petraeus to serve as a liaison to tribal leaders. Moulton earned two decorations for heroism. Personally, though, he had doubts about the war.
Moulton told The Atlantic that he remembers the moment in Iraq when he decided he wanted to enter politics. “It was after a difficult day in Najaf in 2004,” he said. “A young marine in my platoon said, ‘Sir, you should run for Congress someday, so this s— doesn’t happen again.’”
In 2014, Moulton defeated a scandal-weakened Democratic incumbent in a primary, then won the general election with 54% of the vote. He won reelection twice.
In Congress, Moulton took an active role on military issues as a member of the House Armed Services Committee. At times, he criticized President Barack Obama, including when Obama declined to describe the post-war military deployment to Iraq as a combat mission.
Why is it that every picture of Moulton, he either looks to be in pain, or his mouth is partially open? (It’s almost as common as Sanders’ “Enraged Squirrel Glare.”) Well, except this one:
O’Rourke has hired a former Obama administration official and policy executive at the left-leaning Center for American Progress to oversee his campaign’s expanding policy arm.
Carmel Martin, a former assistant secretary for policy and budget at the Department of Education, has joined O’Rourke’s campaign as his national policy director, an O’Rourke adviser confirmed to POLITICO.
Her hiring is a boon to O’Rourke, who is seeking to regain his footing in the Democratic primary.
Martin served as a policy adviser for John Kerry and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns. And her position as executive vice president for policy at CAP has been held in the past by heavyweights in Washington policy circles, including Melody Barnes before she left to join Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
Martin, before joining the Obama administration, worked as general counsel and chief education adviser to the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy on his Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
In addition to Martin, O’Rourke will continue to be advised by Ali Zaidi, a former associate director at Obama’s Office of Management and Budget and O’Rourke’s senior adviser for policy.
Despite consistently trailing five Democratic foes in national and early-voting state polls in recent weeks, the former Texas congressman is continuing to attract well-regarded Democratic talent to his campaign — and is ahead of most of his competitors in building on-the-ground organizations in the early states.
O’Rourke’s latest hires are deputy communications directors Rachel Thomas, hired from the Democratic digital organization ACRONYM, and Ofirah Yheskel, who was Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s communications director.
Thomas, a former EMILY’s List communications director and aide to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, is O’Rourke’s deputy communications director for strategic content.
Yheskel, who prior to working on Northam’s 2017 campaign was Hillary Clinton’s Wisconsin press secretary in 2016 and worked on Wendy Davis’ bid for Texas governor, is O’Rourke’s deputy communications director for states.
O’Rourke hired Aleigha Cavalier as his national press secretary. Cavalier, a former Planned Parenthood public affairs director, was most recently a top Tom Steyer aide as communications director for Steyer’s NextGen America, and involved in Steyer’s heavy spending to encourage impeaching President Donald Trump. O’Rourke has also called for Trump’s impeachment.
Anna Pacilio, who was communications director for Texas Rep. Marc Veasey, was hired as O’Rourke’s director of women’s messaging.
I’m not sure Ralph Northam’s communications director would make my “must hire” list. O’Rourke also did some Robert Kennedy quoting that I’m sure in no way is a cynical ploy to remind voters how he looks a little like Bobby Kennedy. You know who O’Rourke doesn’t look like? Bill de Blasio:
I feel compelled to screenshot media cock-ups that get through layers and layers of fact-checkers before they disappear.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation and promised to cancel eveyone’s student debt; I guess he’s feeling the heat from Warren on his left flank. Bernie’s always been free with other people’s money. Also: “Last time around you have to win 51 percent of the vote. This time I don’t believe anyone is going to come close to 50 percent, so it’s a very different race with 24 candidates.” 25 now (see below). An interview with Sanders’ top foreign policy advisors (Matt Duss) makes Sanders sound less dovish than billed. “Sanders has views about military intervention that are more complicated than his campaign rhetoric. And that may explain why he hasn’t delved into much detail about foreign policy.” Centerist Democrats are spooked by Sanders:
A two-day conference hosted here by the centrist Democratic group Third Way focused on helping Democrats figure out “the way to win” in 2020 — and they’re sick of economic messages that focus on “free stuff” rather than opportunity, as former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp put it.
They’re not down with Medicare for All, and shared data to back up their fear. Among 1,291 Democratic primary voters polled by Third Way, there’s a 17-point difference in support for Medicare for All between “Twitter Democrats” and Democratic primary voters as a whole.
In fact, they’d love if all the 2020 Democrats got off Twitter entirely. Listening to the Twitterverse “will help re-elect Donald Trump,” according to Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s SVP for social policy and politics.
They’re also trying to obliterate the “blue bubble” created by liberals — perpetuated, they say, by appearances on networks like MSNBC and an obsession with online reach. “If you killed it on that podcast, I assure you we did not hear you,” said Steve Benjamin, mayor of Columbia, S.C.
Things like free college are “fluffy” and perceived as “handouts,” said Anna Tovar, mayor of Tolleson, Arizona. Particularly with Latinx Democrats, she said, “They want to work towards [those opportunities] and be proud of that.”
“But Elizabeth Warren — who’s viewed as the closest candidate to Bernie ideologically — gets a pass with these moderates. They say she’s focused on a Democratic capitalist message, while they view Bernie as a full-blown socialist.”
Addition: Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. He announced he’s running and Dave Weigel spotted him in Iowa. What sort of man looks at the current Democratic field of 24 a few days before the first debate and says “You know, someone else really needs to jump in, and I’m just the guy”? Evidently Joe Sestak. Then again, his spirit animal is an extremely slow moving lizardman:
Sestak, 68, had a 31-year naval career before going into politics, rising to the three star rank of Vice Admiral, and his campaign logo says “ADM JOE.” Sestek did render the nation one great service: He knocked vile turncoat Republican-turned-Democrat incumbent senator Arlen Specter out of the race in 2010 before losing to Pat Toomey. (He tried running again in 2016, but the DSCC poured $1.1 million to back primary opponent and Clinton fav Katie McGinty, evidently as payback for running against Specter. McGinty won the primary, then lost to Toomey in the general.) He’s for soft illegal alien amnesty and “sections of fencing where needed and appropriate.” (If I thought he had a snowball’s chance in Hell, I’d screenshot that page as proof for when hard left activists make him take it out.) Scanned his policy positions for any departure from Democratic orthodoxy and didn’t see much (bring back ObamaCare, global warming, taxpayer subsidized abortions, overturn Citizens United, etc.); it’s all boilerplate. Calling it vanilla insults a vastly underrated flavor. Says he was late jumping in because his daughter was diagnosed with brain cancer. It’s hard to see Democrats turning to a high-ranking ex-military guy after the “John Kerry War Hero” narrative blew up in their faces in 2004 (a failure that I’m sure is still seared, seared into their memory). Biden campaigned for McGinty in 2016, so I wonder if Sestak is running a revenge campaign against him, which would be hilarious. Besides that, it’s tough to see any justification for Sestak to jump into the race this late.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Members of the Warren-aligned Progressive Change Campaign Committee think she can poach Biden voters. Presumably the pitch won’t be “Hey, they’re both really old and really white!” The lefty policy wonks behind Warren’s blizzard of policy proposals:
The head of the policy team, Jon Donenberg, makes the same as the campaign manager and other senior leaders.
“It’s all we can do to keep up with her,” said Donenberg, a Capitol Hill veteran who worked for former Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Richard Blumenthal before he joined Warren’s 2012 campaign and then served as legislative director in her senate office. “The job of the policy shop is to help her fill in the details around these proposals, to present data, and to talk through the costs and benefits of various approaches.”
Longtime Warren confidante Ganesh Sitaraman, an old friend of Pete Buttigieg from their time as undergrads at Harvard, is not on her campaign’s payroll given his job at Vanderbilt. But he has taken a lead role in formulating her domestic policies.
Sasha Baker is the former deputy chief of staff to Obama’s Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and focuses on national security. And Bharat Ramamurti, a longtime Senate aide who Warren pushed to fill a seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2017, has been handling financial issues. The campaign said that both have been expanding their portfolios to other domestic policy topics as well.
Now Warren is promising reparations for gay people, a small demographic group that’s traditionally had above-average incomes, for what? The affront to their obviously not gay ancestors? Why not just adopt the campaign slogan “Free Money For Every Social Justice Warrior Victimhood Group?”
Williamson avoids using notes or prompters, never mutters an “um” or an “ah” or a “like.” She starts with the children, who are living in what she calls “America’s domestic war zones,” with their schools poorly funded and violence and starvation at home. She calls out the problem of corporate money in politics as little “more than a system of legalized bribery,” adding that she herself believes in “capitalism with a conscience.” Like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Williamson supports Medicare for All and a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
She also supports financial reparations for the descendants of slaves. “If you’ve been kicking someone to the ground — particularly if you’ve been kicking them to the ground for two and a half centuries — then you have a moral obligation to do two things,” she says. “No. 1 is to stop kicking. No. 2 is to say, ‘Here, let me help you up. We stopped kicking.’ ”
Williamson has often called for the formation of a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, and she wraps up her talk by articulating her position on national defense, describing 100 B-21 bombers the White House had ordered at a cost of $550 million each: “You think about what that $550 million could do for those chronically traumatized children. Your karmic fingerprint’s on that. The nation gets a karmic blowback from that.
“The only way to defeat dog whistles is to drown them out with angel forces.”
Snip.
Williamson found A Course in Miracles around the time of its publication, when she was, she says, “muddling through” her 20s, aimless and directionless. She has said she wasn’t ready the first time she picked it up, but about a year later, while working in the bookshop at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, she was; she started lecturing about it, initially at the suggestion of the society’s president. It was the height of the AIDS crisis, and there were a whole lot of people looking, and hoping, for miracles. By the mid-’80s, Williamson had a local following, particularly among the gay men most devastated by AIDS. The word on the street was that a woman was proselytizing a nonjudgmental God who “loved you no matter what,” and the audiences came.
Her own first book, published in 1992, was called A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, and her subsequent books have been built on its philosophy as well, including A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever, which suggests that “a way to repair a broken childhood is to allow God to re-parent you,” as well as pasting photographs of your face onto photographs of hot bodies and then taping them up around your house. In A Return to Love, Williamson, channeling the self-doubt of her reader, asks, “Who am I to be brilliant, talented, gorgeous, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.”
Williamson grew up in Texas, the Jewish daughter of an immigration lawyer (she has said that if her Jewish education had been stronger, she might have been a rabbi). She left Texas for Pomona College, and after two years of studying philosophy, she dropped out and moved to New Mexico, where she took some classes at UNM and lived in a geodesic dome. Two years after that, as Beto O’Rourke would do 20 years later, Williamson moved to New York with dreams of singing on a stage. In her books, she describes a period of dissatisfaction and unhappiness and hints at addictions but does not make the circumstances explicit. “I sank deeper and deeper into my neurotic patterns,” she writes in A Return to Love, “seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract me from myself.” She acknowledges a “nervous breakdown” and that she was “addicted to her own pain.” She is, like Cory Booker, vague about her personal life. She has described an early marriage as “the best weekend I ever had,” and when it comes to the father of her daughter, a 29-year-old Ph.D. candidate in London, she says simply, “I don’t go there.”
The O’Rourke comparison is interesting, with early aimlessness as the most defining character trait. But in the unlikely event she does become the nominee, expect her vague early history to be dragged into the light very quickly. In a bit of bicoastal synchronicity, she also gets a Los Angeles Magazine profile:
A cynic might interpret her presidential bid as the world’s most expensive book tour, but she insists she’s legit. Her last time at the campaign rodeo left her finishing fourth out of 16 candidates. “When that was over,” she confesses, sipping an Arnold Palmer at her campaign’s temporary HQ at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, “I felt like I’d scratched whatever political itch I’d come down with. So I was surprised—and somewhat inwardly jolted—by this presidential impulse that emerged in 2017. It was either a moment of clarity or a moment of craziness. “Then the New Age practicing Jew explains: “The Yiddish word meshuga means both ‘inspired’ and ‘crazy.’ Look, I think we need a political visionary right now more than we need a political mechanic.”
Here’s a Daily Beast piece calling her “a dangerous wacko” for her anti-vaccination stance. The writer’s not wrong, but he’s swatting a butterfly with a sledgehammer.
Yang’s campaign, centered on his proposal to provide all American adults with a universal basic income of $12,000 a year until they’re eligible for Medicare, has attracted support from young progressives, a fair amount of libertarians, and despite his disavowals, even some white nationalists. He’s drawn thousands to his rallies across the country and inspired meme-filled Yang Gang anthems on YouTube. Yang blew past the 65,000-donor mark in March and told me he’s already closing in on the 130,000-contributor threshold the DNC set for its debates in the fall. He regularly hits 1 percent—and occasionally a bit higher—in the polls, and while he’s not threatening Biden’s front-runner status, Yang consistently registers in the top half of the crowded Democratic field, ahead of more established names like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York; Julián Castro, the former federal housing secretary; and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Yang’s website features an eclectic mix of 104 policy proposals, among them Medicare for All; term limits for members of Congress and the Supreme Court; statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.; a call for “empowering MMA fighters” and to pay NCAA student athletes; “free marriage counseling for all”; and the elimination of the penny. (He’s also come out against male circumcision.) But the centerpiece—indeed, the entire premise of Yang’s candidacy—is his embrace of a universal basic income, or what he calls the “freedom dividend.” (“It tests well on both sides of the aisle,” he told me of the branding.)
It is Yang’s answer to what he sees as the biggest, and most inevitable, threat facing the American economy, and a large part of the reason that Trump was elected in 2016: automation. The retail sector, call centers, fast-food chains, the trucking industry—all those job engines will be crushed in the coming years by advances in technology, Yang said, necessitating not only a government rescue of displaced workers but a reorientation of the federal safety net. By 2030, he told me, 20 to 30 percent of all jobs could be subject to automation: “No one is talking about it, and we’re getting dragged down this immigrant rabbit hole by Trump.”
And illegal aliens taking entry level jobs aren’t impacting legal American citizens right now? Americans lacking jobs right now don’t have the luxury of worrying about the Looming Robot Menace. “Some Asian Americans are excited about Andrew Yang. Others? Not so much. An April analysis of donor data found that Yang has received about $120K from Asian Americans, placing fifth out of 14 candidates examined.” That study has him behind Booker, Gabbard, and Harris.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running:
. Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
