Posts Tagged ‘Michelle Obama’

BidenWatch for June 22, 2020

Monday, June 22nd, 2020

Exploring the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden (plus the equally huge campaign technology gap), some fundraising analysis, more Veepstakes, and a majority of Americans think Biden is a few tacos shy of a combo plate. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Fundraising update:

    Joe Biden still trails President Donald Trump in cash, but he’s catching up.

    Biden and the Democratic National Committee hit an all-time monthly fundraising record in May, bringing in $80.8 million. That total topped Trump and the Republican National Committee, which together raised $74 million over the same period.

    But Trump — who has been able to jointly fundraise with the Republican Party at higher levels as the Republican presidential nominee for months — leads Biden in cash on hand, $265 million to $122.2 million, an all-important number that shows how much the candidate and committee can still spend. Notably, May was the first full month Biden raised money in tandem with the DNC, drafting off of a joint fundraising agreement that allowed individual donors to give more than $620,000.

    Some Trump numbers snipped.

    A handful of super PACs are jockeying to be Biden’s preferred outside group. Their fundraising totals showed that one has amassed a commanding lead.

    During the presidential primary, Unite the Country boosted Biden when he needed it most, helping his campaign rebound from losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to a decisive Super Tuesday performance. That March, the super PAC brought in more than $10 million. But over the past two months, the super PACs fundraising cratered, bringing in $723,000 in April and $1.3 million in May.

    The drop occurred after Biden’s campaign initially signaled Priorities USA, another group that led outside Democratic spending in 2016, would be its preferred super PAC. Those moves are closely tracked by big-money donors, who want to stick with the favored outside group.

    Priorities USA, which backed Biden after Super Tuesday, raised $7.5 million last month. The group told the Los Angeles Times it secured $38 million in donations and commitments since early May, two-thirds during the last three weeks. That would mean a huge spike in the group’s June fundraising totals.

    Priorities USA also spent nearly five times more than Unite the Country — $9.7 million to $2.1 million — largely on TV ads, slamming Trump.

    But Unite the Country says it’s still relevant. An aide told POLITICO that the group topped its May fundraising total in the first ten days of June. Unite the Country and American Bridge 21st Century — another pro-Biden outside group that files quarterly, not monthly — also forged a partnership to pool resources and research.

  • For all these polls that say Biden is ahead, doesn’t there seem to be a big enthusiasm gap?

    Team Trump has a legendary data program. Even Democrats have expressed concern over the campaign’s digital prowess and collection methods. Trump rallies are key to this strategy for a number of reasons. And according to Brad Parscale, it seems a return to the road is generating unprecedented enthusiasm.

    This is for a rally in an arena that holds 19,000. If the campaign holds true to form, there will be large screens for those unable to get a seat to watch from outside. But the key to the operation is in Parscale’s tweet. It is the biggest data haul to date.

    What does this data give them? The opportunity to register people who are interested in the rally to vote who are not already registered. The ability to contact these potential voters throughout the rest of the campaign with updates and fundraising efforts. The information to ensure absentee ballots and in-person voting happen right through the close of the polls on Election Day.

  • That piece also cites this Dave Weigel piece, which discusses the significant difference between campaign contact touches:

    On the 48th day of quarantine, as traditional presidential campaigning became a gauzy memory, I immersed myself in the worlds created by the campaigns of Joe Biden and President Trump. I downloaded both campaigns’ apps — TeamJoe and Trump 2020, respectively — and agreed to get notifications. I created a Twitter list consisting of nothing but official campaign accounts and checked in a few times a day. What I found: The Republican effort was designed to keep supporters energized, inspired and sometimes angry. The Democratic effort was genteel and gave me much less to do.

    Signing up for the Trump app subscribed me to not one, but two automated text chains. The first came in from the Trump campaign within seconds of sign-up, informing me that I had just gotten “Reward Access Unlocked,” thus qualifying me to “earn points & meet Pres Trump during the campaign in fall.” One minute later, the Republican National Committee thanked me for joining the “team,” and asked whether I could let the president “know what you think of this week’s accomplishments.”

    Following the first link took me back to the Trump campaign page; following the second gave me a yes or no poll on whether I approved of the president, with space to write about why. I didn’t go further than that, but two hours later, the RNC texted with news: “You were 1 of the 25 President Trump selected for a 5X-MATCH EXTENSION! The other 24 patriots already donated, now it’s your turn.”

    Not wanting to be left out, I clicked through to a page powered by WinRed, the newish Republican donation portal. A photo of the president pointing at me like Uncle Sam was displayed next to a pitch that had become even more urgent: “This offer is only available for the NEXT HOUR, so you need to act fast. Please contribute ANY AMOUNT in the NEXT HOUR and your gift will be 5X-MATCHED!” A $100 donation button was already colored in, and a box that would have made this a “monthly recurring donation” was already checked. When I tried to click away, a window popped up warning me, in vain, that the offer was about to expire.

    All of that happened within two hours. The Biden campaign did not contact me until seven hours after I’d downloaded the app, finally texting me in the late afternoon. “It’s Joe Biden and I owe you my sincere thanks, David,” the account wrote. “You all have been so great to this campaign.” (You all?) “I’ve been calling donors and it’s so great to thank people personally. I’m calling more this week who are helping us start May strong. If you aren’t a May donor yet, you can chip in here and I might be calling you soon.”

    Following that link, I was offered a shot at “a video call from Joe” and told that the “average gift is only $25.” A form to fill in an exact donation amount was left blank; a box that would make this a one-time donation, not a recurring one, was already checked.

    Over the next few days, it was easy to forget that the Biden app existed. Push texts were infrequent, and unlike the Trump app, the Biden app didn’t let me track virtual campaign events. (That was on the website.) TeamJoe offered me a few options and news items, all of which directed me from the app back to the campaign website. For 24 hours, the top news item was a new Biden campaign pledge, which I could take, committing myself to “empathy,” “keeping the faith,” “humility,” and “no malarkey,” among other nice things. If I wanted to volunteer, the app made it easier, but not addictive.

    Trump 2020 did not let me go so easily. A news feed let me read the latest messaging, just as it would appear to a reporter on the media list, or the campaign’s curated tweets, which prioritized big names like campaign manager Brad Parscale. An “engage” button educated me on ways to “fight with President Trump,” from hosting a “MAGA Meet Up” to joining the campaign finance committee as a high-dollar bundler. Sharing the app with a friend would award me 100 points, while sharing any news item to Twitter or Facebook would give me a single point. A good prize, like expedited entry at any to-be-scheduled rallies, cost 25,000 points.

    The “gamified” Trump app has made some Democrats nervous, not least because Biden hasn’t tried to compete with it. Everything that came from the Trump campaign had an act-fast, as-seen-on-TV feeling; nothing from the Biden campaign did. Biden’s campaign texted me a poll (“Are you planning to vote for Joe Biden in the general election in your state?”) and a longer “strategy survey,” asking if I wanted to volunteer and what issues I cared about.

    The Trump campaign and the RNC, in the same time period, invited me to “the Trump 100 Club” (“offer permanently expires in SIX HOURS”), a “2020 sustaining membership” with the campaign, and a poll that claimed the president had closed “ALL borders to Keep America Safe.” (While citizenship applications have been halted, and while resources have been sent to the Mexican border, the nation’s borders are not closed.)

    All of this fit snugly with the rest of the campaign’s other media and messaging. The point of the Trump app, social media accounts and Web TV was not just to keep me informed — it was to replace some of the news I might be getting from other outlets. “Forget the mainstream media,” went one ad that played at the start of the daily Trump video broadcasts. “Get your facts from the source.”

    Snip.

    I had more company watching Trump content than I did watching Biden content. As of Thursday morning, the Biden campaign’s Cinco de Mayo broadcast had clocked 7,000 views on YouTube and 180,000 on Facebook, while the Trump campaign’s had clocked 11,000 and 900,000 views, respectively. Trump’s campaign has 29 million followers on Facebook, while Biden’s has less than 2 million. Biden got a higher percentage of his active supporters to tune in, but Trump had exponentially more supporters to draw from.

    In some ways, the Biden campaign is years behind on this kind of engagement. By this point in the 2012 campaign, Obama’s team had established a popular video series in which deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter shared good news and debunked Republican attacks. There’s no such block-and-tackle effort from the Biden social media experience, apart from the occasional tweet responding to the Trump campaign — and no Trump-style points for helping get the message out.

    Gee, Biden is running an old-fashioned campaign decades behind the state-of-the-art? What are the odds?

  • It’s been 76 82 days since Biden held a press conference. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Poll: 55% Believe That Biden Potentially Has ‘Early Stages Of Dementia.'”

    “Overall, subgroups who normally approve of Trump’s job as president, were the most likely to believe Biden could be suffering from dementia,” the poll found. “Thus, majorities of Republicans (77% more likely/23% less likely) and Independents (56% more likely/44% less likely) thought Joe Biden had early-onset dementia; while nearly a third of Democrats (32% more likely/68% less likely) thought this was the case.”

    Takeaway: Almost a third of Democrats and over half of independents think Biden is already a few Cocoa Puffs shy of a full bowl. (Hat tip: Ian McKelvey.)

  • Daniel Pipes offers a guide for deciphering the Bidenese. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden hasn’t just lost a step, he’s lost a lap:

    Vote for President Trump and you are voting for the Constitution, military strength and robust economic growth.

    Vote for former vice president Joe Biden and you are voting for bureaucrats, appeasement abroad, and economic entropy.

    These are the policy choices embedded in each candidate. There is also a temperamental choice to be made.

    Trump is chaos theory contained in a man, an explosive combination of complete candor as to what he thinks and feels, a willingness to brawl, an almost animal energy for the fray.

    Biden is clearly not that. He is mostly invisible these days, but he hasn’t just lost a step. He’s lost a lap. His White House would be marked by echo-chamber enthusiasts and the control of the appointees he brings along with him, a haphazard and dangerous step for the republic.

    With Trump, all will be well in the country and all will be in upheaval inside the Beltway, Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

    With Biden, the deep-blue centers of genuine privilege will have their restoration. The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner will regain its luster.

  • Amy Klobuchar’s veep chances just flew out the window like a stapler hurled at a staffer’s head:

    “Senator Amy Klobuchar said Thursday that she is withdrawing her name from consideration as Joe Biden’s running mate, saying a woman of color should be chosen as vice-presidential nominee instead.”

    This morning, some political observers are concluding that Klobuchar could see the writing on the wall — as in, the writing on the wall was graffiti from Black Lives Matter activists declaring, “Don’t pick Amy Klobuchar.”

    But let’s think through the absolute worst-case scenario for Klobuchar. Right now, the polls look golden for Joe Biden. Imagine that Biden picked Klobuchar, helping him among some demographics in the Midwest but largely disappointing African-Americans, and infuriating progressive activists who don’t like Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor. Then imagine that on Election Day 2020, turnout among African-Americans is lower than expected in places like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and North Carolina . . . and Trump emerged with more than 270 electoral votes again. The entire Democratic Party would be livid with the Biden-Klobuchar ticket, and the Minnesota senator would be known as that other woman who had a golden opportunity to beat Donald Trump and blew it.

    If a Biden administration comes to pass, it will have plenty of other prestigious cabinet posts for Klobuchar if she wants one. Joe Biden may even feel he owes her a plum posting.

    And if Biden crashes and burns, it won’t be her fault!

  • BBC writer does a Veepstakes roundup. In addition to the usual names he includes Kyrsten Sinema (would never happen, because she’s strayed from the party line too much) and Michelle Obama (who so many on the left are pining for).
  • “Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe faced backlash and has apologized for his comments about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate choice, saying that when Biden picks his running mate, he should do it based on each contender’s qualifications and reputation, not skin color.”

    via GIPHY

  • Michigan Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell doesn’t believe Biden’s lead:

    “And look at what’s happened in five months. The world is upside down and not one of us on this phone call would have predicted that the world will be as it is today. And it is five months from now until November.”

    Real Clear Politics currently shows Biden to have a 7.3% lead over President Donald Trump in its average of recent polling in Michigan and an 8.1% average polling lead nationally.

    Four years ago, when polling showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to have leads over Trump, Dingell voiced concerns before Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Michigan since 1988. Trump won the state by 10,704 votes against Clinton, his closest margin of victory nationally.

    “Four years ago, many of you on this phone call thought that I was nuts,” Dingell said. “I was in enough communities and heard enough people talking that I was very worried about the outcome of that election.”

    Dingell said Democrats should take nothing for granted in 2020.

  • Biden will accept the Democratic nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Stop the presses!
  • You know those “Bolton is voting for Biden” stories? More fake news.
  • “Will Joe Biden Become Our First Female President?” “Under Biden’s own understanding of gender and his own proposed policy, it is entirely up to him what gender he identifies as after the election.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Biden: ‘Republicans May Have Standards, But We Have Double Standards.'”

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    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for February 3, 2020 (IOWA CAUCUSES TODAY!)

    Monday, February 3rd, 2020

    It begins!

    The Iowa Caucuses are finally here today, Bernie panic wracks the DNC, a key poll mysteriously vanishes, Delaney drops Out, and one Biden staffer provides handy voter appreciation. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    A special shout-out to longtime readers who have been with me on this journay since January of last year. What a long, strange trip it’s been!

    Polls

  • Emerson (Iowa): Sanders 28, Biden 21, Buttigieg 15, Warren 14, Klobuchar 11, Yang 5, Steyer 4, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Patrick 0.
  • CBS: Biden 25, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 21, Warren 16, Klobuchar 5.
  • Civiqs (Iowa): Sanders 28, Warren 21, Buttigieg 15, Biden 15, Klobuchar 8, Yang 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 2. Hard left lean and sample size of 615.
  • Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 25, Sanders 20, Steyer 18, Warren 11, Buttigieg 7, Gabbard 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2. Bad news for Biden from his “firewall” state, as Steyer is making inroads into the black vote.
  • New York Times (Iowa): Sanders 25, Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Warren 15, Klobuchar 8, Steyer 3, Yang 3.
  • Emerson (Iowa): Sanders 30, Biden 21, Klobuchar 13, Warren 11, Buttigieg 10, Steyer 5, Yang 5, Gabbard 5, Delaney 1, Patrick 0, Bennet 0.
  • USA Today/Suffolk (Iowa): Biden 25, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6.
  • Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire): Sanders 29, Biden 22, Warren 16, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 5.
  • American Research Group (New Hampshire): Sanders 28, Biden 13, Buttigieg 12, Warren 11, Gabbard 8, Klobuchar 7, Yang 5, Patrick 2, Steyer 2, Bloomberg (write-in) 2, Bennet 1. Sample size of 600.
  • Berkeley IGS (California): Sanders 26, Warren 20, Biden 15, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 5, Yang 4, Steyer 2.
  • Salt Lake City Tribune (Utah): Sanders 27, Warren 14, Biden 12, Bloomberg 10, Buttigieg 5, Yang 5, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1. Tiny poll sample size of 132. You would think this was unrepresentative, but Bernie crushed Hillary in Utah in 2016, winning 79% of the vote. I think Utah has moved to a primary system this year (and one run by the state, not by the political parties).
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Sanders leads Biden by 8 points here as well, Bloomberg is third, and Hillary Clinton is favored over Buttigieg, Yang or Klobuchar (in that order).

    • Pundits, etc.

  • Steyer and Bloomberg dropped $340 million in Q4.

    Democrat presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer spent a combined $340 million in the final quarter of 2019, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data released on Friday.

    Both billionaire candidates far outspent their Democrat rivals, according to the FEC. Former New York City Mayor Bloomberg, whose campaign is almost entirely self-funded, spent more than $188 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 and ended the fundraising period with $12 million cash available.

    Steyer, a California businessman, spent approximately $153 million in the fourth quarter and ended it with $5.4 million cash available.

    The figures from the FEC show that both billionaire Democrats spent more money on their campaigns than the top four Democrat contenders combined.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spent slightly over $50 million in the fourth quarter, while former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg spent $34 million.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) spent $33.7 million while former Vice President Joe Biden spent more than $23.3 million during the fourth quarter.

  • The DNC hates Sanders so much they’re actually talking about changing the rules back so superdelegates can screw him:

    A small group of Democratic National Committee members has privately begun gauging support for a plan to potentially weaken Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and head off a brokered convention.

    In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention. Such a move would increase the influence of DNC members, members of Congress and other top party officials, who now must wait until the second ballot to have their say if the convention is contested.

    “I do believe we should re-open the rules. I hear it from others as well,” one DNC member said in a text message last week to William Owen, a DNC member from Tennessee who does not support re-opening the rules.

    Owen, who declined to identify the member, said the member added in a text that “It would be hard though. We could force a meeting or on the floor.”

    Even proponents of the change acknowledge it is all but certain not to gain enough support to move past these initial conversations. But the talks reveal the extent of angst that many establishment Democrats are feeling on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.

    Sanders is surging and Joe Biden has maintained his lead nationally, but at least three other candidates are widely seen as viable. The cluster raises the specter of a convention requiring a second ballot.

    If Sanders wins the Iowa caucuses on Monday and continues to gain momentum, it is possible he could arrive at the convention with the most delegates — but without enough to win the nomination on the first ballot. It is also possible that he and Elizabeth Warren, a fellow progressive, could arrive at the convention in second and third place, but with more delegates combined than the frontrunner.

    If, on the second ballot, superdelegates were to throw their support to someone else, tipping the scales, many moderate Democrats fear the upheaval that would cause could weaken the eventual nominee.

  • Democratic insiders enter the Danger Panic Zone over Sanders. “Democrats have valid reasons to be concerned. Bernie Sanders may play well to the Ocasio-Cortez wing of their party. Still, it’s hard to picture voters abandoning the booming Trump economy for the radical changes Bernie is proposing in a general election.”
  • Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks its going to come down to Biden and Bernie:

    I’d bet on the field to narrow to these two for two reasons.

    First, there’s a tendency for the top-polling candidates going into Iowa to overperform in the final results, because the caucusing process ultimately forces supporters of low-performing candidates to cast their votes for stronger ones. Second, the possibility of Bernie’s winning may drive a stampede toward Biden or vice versa.

    The emergence of a head-to-head race between Biden and Sanders would immediately clarify the choices for Democrats.

    One septuagenarian — Sanders — has recently suffered a heart attack. The other septuagenarian — Biden — frequently seems to have senior moments in the middle of his sentences. A race between these two could eliminate age as a relevant dynamic, leaving clear questions of electability and ideology on the table.

    And what then? On one side there is Biden, the more moderate Democrat who scares nobody by design — he’s framed his entire campaign as a return to normalcy — but doesn’t excite progressive activists. On the other side there is Sanders, whose has argued in recent debates that he is electable because he has the backing of a large, young, grassroots movement whose enthusiasm will become contagious. The viability of one could drive the viability of the other.

    After many pointless hours debating the ins and outs of Platonic health-care reforms that will never be implemented and many pointless minutes worrying about personality, a Biden–Sanders clash would focus the race on the only questions that really matter to Democrats: Should the party move to the left or to the center?

  • How should other candidate stop Bernie? I don’t know, maybe by actually attacking him? Too bad none of them have tried that.

    Still, there is reason to believe that an attack on Sanders’ resistance to math would contain his rise. The Democratic Party has plenty of moderates who get nervous about overpromising and overreaching. Even Sanders’ best national poll, a 3-point lead within the margin of error in a CNN survey last week, shows the combined support of him and Warren to be 3 points less than the combined support of the four leading moderates: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Mike Bloomberg. If Sanders can be shown to be unwilling to grapple with the finer points of policymaking, that would likely hamper his ability to forge a coalition beyond his initial democratic-socialist base, which would in turn prevent him from securing the nomination.

    But a bigger shadow lurks over the Democratic field: the ghost of the Republican presidential campaign of 2016, when the candidates (like Jeb Bush) who attacked the outsider with the intense fan base lived to regret it. If you attack Sanders, and his democratic socialist platform, as mathematically challenged, you are not just attacking Sanders. You are attacking democratic socialism itself. And if you’re in a party with a young wave of democratic socialists as its newest and most unpredictable force, you risk disaster.

    No one can say with certainty how many Sanders supporters would abandon the Democratic nominee if he lost the nomination. But we do know that his supporters are, on average, less loyal to the Democratic Party than voters who prefer other candidates. The Economist’s data guru G. Elliott Morris reported, based on two months of his operation’s polling toward the end of last year, that 87 percent of Sanders supporters would stick with the Democrats if he wasn’t the nominee. That’s a lot, but more than 90 percent of Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren supporters said they would vote for the Democrats this fall, no matter what. And just a few percentage points, if even that, could decide the presidency.

  • A look at why the frontrunners aren’t attacking others in their “lane”:

    The relative tameness of this year’s race also stems from the candidates’ overlapping set of assumptions about how the primary will play out after Iowa. Biden’s camp is convinced that if the former vice president can’t win Iowa—and they are not sure he can if turnout is high—a Sanders win would be the best outcome for him. The reason, according to interviews with top Biden advisers, is that they believe Sanders has a ceiling on his support that will impede his ability to clinch the nomination. They believe that a victory for Warren, Buttigieg, or Klobuchar would pose a greater threat—a win for the latter two would also represent a meteor strike on the moderate voters Biden is relying upon.

    The trio of Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are lagging behind Sanders and Biden, but they are betting that Iowa and the New Hampshire primary after that will not winnow the field as quickly as in the past. Instead, all three campaigns generally believe that the heightened media attention on the race, and the rise of online fundraising, will allow them to survive regardless of whether they win, or even finish in the top tier, in the first two states. “The idea that this is going to fit into the same mold as every other campaign you have covered in the past … is inaccurate,” Michael Halle, a senior adviser for Buttigieg told reporters this weekend.

    But Iowa’s stakes may be higher than the candidates’ cautious strategy would seem to indicate. [Jeff] Link is one of several Democratic strategists who thinks that all of the campaigns are underestimating how powerfully the Iowa results may reshape the rest of the race. He believes the risks for the others are especially great if Sanders wins, because a victory here would likely further turbocharge the senator’s fundraising operation, which is already swamping those of his rivals. “There’s a kind of lack of urgency between Warren and Biden and Buttigieg and Klobuchar,” Link said. “Anyone who thinks it’s okay to let Sanders win anything is miscalculating.”

  • More on the fear of a Bernie Planet:

  • Dan “Baseball Crank” McLaughlin looks at the Democratic primary calendar:

    Barring a last-minute surge in Iowa by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesotan who has banked her whole campaign on her neighboring state, this is a four-horse race that increasingly looks like it could quickly become a two-horse race between Biden and Bernie Sanders. But funny things can happen at the last minute in Iowa. The most stunning late surge was in the 2012 Republican caucus, when Rick Santorum won after being in sixth place and single digits in the polling averages as late as a week before the vote.

    In December 1975, a month before Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucus with 27 percent of the vote, a nationwide Gallup poll showed Hubert Humphrey in first place at 30 percent, George Wallace at 20 percent, Henry “Scoop” Jackson at 10 percent, and Birch Bayh at 5 percent. Some 29 percent of Democrats said they would back Ted Kennedy if he ran. Carter wasn’t even on the radar. Carter was in better shape in the Des Moines Register’s Iowa polling, but his victory still totally overturned the race. National poll leaders in January lost the Democratic nomination in 2008, 2004, 1992, 1988, and 1972. Polling has gotten more sophisticated since then, but large fields and sequential primaries make it a lot less reliable than general-election polling.

    Iowa is particularly unsettled in this year’s Democratic race because of the way the 15 percent threshold interacts with the caucus process. Unlike the 2016 Republican race, and even many past Democratic primaries, there are no winner-take-all Democratic primaries this year. Various states have different ways of dividing up delegates — some statewide, some on a district-by-district basis — but many have a 15 percent or similar threshold that prevents minor candidates from gathering any delegates. And Iowa’s caucus rules have a particular wrinkle: In each individual polling place, after the original votes are counted, all the candidates below 15 percent are eliminated and their supporters must switch to one of the remaining candidates (or band together to make one of the under-15% candidates viable) if they want their votes counted. That means that even a candidate who wins the statewide popular vote may be effectively wiped off the ballot in some polling stations. Second choices could decide Iowa.

    Go over and read it for a long, detailed, and hard-to-summarize breakdown of the race. “After South Carolina, the calendar and the map are new, and they could make this race less predictable than in years past. Buckle up.”

  • It’s going to be hard for Democrats to win the White House without Pennsylvania, so maybe they shouldn’t have promised to put hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians out of work with a fracking ban.
  • A look at how the race got where it is today:

    Take your mind back there. Miami. June 2019. Two nights, 20 candidates. A portrait of the Democratic Party in miniature assembled onstage, mics on, ready to debate.

    They are U.S. senators and House members, governors and a mayor, a refreshingly human economic futurist and a self-help guru best known as Oprah’s spiritual adviser. They are young and old, black and white and Asian and brown, wealthy and in debt, gay and straight, war veterans, hailing from all parts of the country. They are, as Democratic chairman Tom Perez proudly points out, “the most diverse field in our nation’s history.”

    Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?

    There was a sense of possibility and optimism on that stage. Fast forward six months. The leading Democratic candidates are all white. Three are men, and three are older than 70. Meanwhile two old white billionaires are buying their way into contention by spending hundreds of millions of their personal fortunes. At this point four years ago, the top candidates for the Republican nomination were more diverse than the Democratic frontrunners today. Many politicians hailed as the Future of The Party — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke — are gone, exiting the race before a single vote was cast.

    Reasons: Trump is inside their heads driving them crazy, the DNC rules ostensibly designed to make the contest fairer backfired spectacularly, and the press sucks. Left out is the fact that all the dropped out candidates sucked to various degrees as well…

  • President Trump slams Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Sanders at Iowa rally. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • 538 does a district by district breakdown in Iowa.
  • Behold the totally fair and in-no-way-biased coverage of the Warren-and-Klobuchar-endorsing New York Times:

  • Unverified rumor thus far:

    • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still all in on New Hampshire. So we have to wait until at least February 11 to bid goodbye to him.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s betting on Catholics in Iowa. How many of those haven’t been completed alienated by the Democratic Party by now? Amalgamated Transit Union backs Biden, after backing Bernie in 2016. Just how much muscle organized labor still has left remains to be seen. Sanders supporters arrested for trespassing at Biden’s Iowa HQ. (Hat tip: TheDonald.win, which appears to be where the Reddit group went after they got siloed in the isolation tank.) Score this one for Joe:

    Panders to Obama voters by suggesting Michelle as veep pick. Hunter Biden magnanimously agrees to actually heed a judge’s order and pay child support. Now enjoy some scurrilous, unfounded gossip that’s still completely hilarious:

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bloomberg dropped $200,114,049.18 on his own campaign. The DNC changed the debate rules to make it easier for Moneybags Bloomberg to qualify:

    The Democratic National Committee eliminated Friday a fundraising requirement to qualify for the February debate in Las Vegas, potentially paving the way for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to make the stage for the first time.

    Under the new criteria, candidates can meet either a delegates threshold or a polling threshold to qualify for the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, just three days before the Nevada caucuses.

    Specifically, candidates must have been allocated at least one pledged delegate at the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary.

    Candidates can also qualify by reaching 10 percent support in at least four national polls or surveys of South Carolina and Nevada released between Jan. 15 and Feb. 18.

    Alternatively, a candidate can qualify for the debate by reaching 12 percent support in two sanctioned national or early-state surveys.

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Slipping Buttigieg under heavy pressure to finish strong in Iowa.” Yeah, if he doesn’t at least place, with his money and organizational advantages, I don’t think he has a prayer; Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg can all solider on without Top Two finishes in either Iowa or New Hampshire; Buttigieg can’t. He already has five town halls scheduled in New Hampshire. Was on This Week, along with Yang. He doesn’t think there’s any room for pro-life Democrats in the party. (Hat tip: Mike Huckabee.) Not just pandering, but really stupid and ineffective pandering:

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But why won’t she shut up? Is she angling for a veep spot? Does she not realize how much of the Democratic base actively hates her? “Hillary’s ego blinds her to the fact that nobody in either party wants to hear from her, and the fact that criticizing Bernie just reminds his supporters that the Democratic machine is out to get him.” She refused Tulsi Gabbard’s process servers. I was unaware you could even do that. Are we a nation of laws or a ruling nomenklatura?
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: Dropped Out January 31, 2020. I mean, why not wait three days until the Iowa caucuses give you an excuse to bow out anyway? Did he hit a self-imposed spending limit? Did he have no staffers left? Did the campaign office space lease agreement run out in January? Could he not book the Dubuque Pizza Hut banquet room for the “victory” party Tuesday night? This is like getting 100 yards from the end of a marathon, and then going “Yeah, screw it, I’m done.”

    In fact, most Democratic voters didn’t even know who Delaney was. In a recent average of national polls that asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the candidates, less than 40 percent of Democrats knew enough about Delaney to have an opinion of him. (This was also true of other long shot candidates like Sen. Michael Bennet and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.)

    Delaney did have millions at his disposal to self-fund his bid, which probably helped him stay in the race longer than some other also-rans, but unlike billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire activist Tom Steyer, his ample cash reserves didn’t help him make headway in the race. But like Bloomberg, he was running as a moderate candidate. In fact, Delaney’s attempt to contrast himself with the progressives in the field during the second Democratic debate in July maybe gave him his one big “moment” in the race. It ultimately didn’t help his poll numbers, but in that debate he got a lot of airtime attacking the Medicare-for-all health care plans of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, illustrating a major division between the moderate and progressive “lanes” of the Democratic Party.

    Delaney was probably the least likely of all Democratic candidates to destroy America’s economy. No wonder he never had a chance…

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. So why did CNN snub her? Other than the fact they’re total garbage? She campaigned in New Hampshire.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s on the rise in Iowa.

    A late surge for a candidate in Iowa wouldn’t be unprecedented either. Some notable past shifts include the 2004 Democratic race, in which John Kerry and John Edwards ended up capturing 38 and 32 percent of the vote, respectively, after polling at 24 and 19 percent going into the caucuses. And then, of course, there is the 2012 GOP contest, when Rick Santorum made a remarkably late push and actually won the caucuses with around 25 percent support despite polling at 13 percent going into caucus night.

    I don’t think she can win or place, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see her pick up delegates, and to do better than Warren and/or Buttigieg. She campaigned in Iowa and said she was going to campaign in New Hampshire no matter what. Doesn’t think Sanders should lead the ticket. (Hat tip: CutJibNews on Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Focusing on New Hampshire and South Carolina. Lasting longer than Cory Booker is no achievement if you can’t best his 3%…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bernie’s brand is left but not woke:

    Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot. Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal. Sanders may have outgrown the revolutionary socialism of his youth. He seems to think in terms of ameliorating bourgeois hegemony rather than overthrowing it. He is not necessarily hostile to transgender claims. He has co-sponsored the current version of the Equality Act, which includes transgender people in the classes to be provided equal public accommodation and to be protected from job discrimination. But Sanders certainly does seem to think that such concerns are secondary. Compare and contrast the answers that he and Elizabeth Warren gave at the December 19 Democratic debate in Los Angeles.

    Yamiche Alcindor of PBS asked:

    Senator Sanders, at least 22 transgender people were killed in the United States this year, [most] of them transgender women of color. Each of you has said you would push for the passage of the Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBTQ civil-rights bill. But if elected, what more would you do to stop violence against transgender people?

    Sanders’s answer quickly pivoted away from the cultural to the material.

    We need moral leadership in the White House. We need a president who will do everything humanly possible to end all forms of discrimination against the transgender community, against the African American community, against the Latino community, and against all minorities in this country.

    But above and beyond providing the moral leadership of trying to bring our people together, what we also need for the transgender community is to make sure that health care is available to every person in this country, regardless of their sexual orientation or their needs.

    And that is why I strongly support and have helped lead the effort for a Medicare for All single-payer program, which will provide comprehensive health care to all people, including, certainly, the transgender community.

    The question went next to Warren. She plunged directly into the question of identity.

    The transgender community has been marginalized in every way possible. And one thing that the president of the United States can do is lift up attention, lift up their voices, lift up their lives.

    Here’s a promise I make. I will go to the Rose Garden once every year to read the names of transgender women, of people of color, who have been killed in the past year. I will make sure that we read their names so that as a nation we are forced to address the particular vulnerability on homelessness. I will change the rules now that put people in prison based on their birth sex identification rather than their current identification. I will do everything I can to make sure that we are an America that leaves no one behind.

    Sanders checked a box of support for the identity issue, then returned to regular programming. For Warren, the identity issue was the regular programming.

    Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate. He has never fought a race in which he had to face serious personal scrutiny. None of his Democratic rivals is subjecting him to such scrutiny in 2020. Hillary Clinton refrained from scrutinizing Sanders in 2016. It did not happen, either, in his many races in Vermont. A Politico profile in 2015 by Michael Kruse argued that Sanders had benefited from “an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters, and local reporters who have steered clear” of writing about Sanders’s personal history “rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.”

    The Trump campaign will not steer clear. It will hit him with everything it’s got. It will depict him as a Communist in the grip of twisted sexual fantasies, a useless career politician who oversaw a culture of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign. Through 2019, Donald Trump and his proxies hailed Sanders as a true voice of the people, thwarted by the evil machinations of the Hillary Clinton machine. They will not pause for a minute before pivoting in 2020 to attack him as a seething stew of toxic masculinity whose vicious online followers martyred the Democratic Party’s first female presidential nominee.

    “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says in a forthcoming documentary. She stood by those words in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last week. At the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this past weekend, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, that Sanders—alone among the Democratic aspirants in 2020—had refused to meet with her. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, you will hear Clinton’s negative assessment of him repeated so often by pro-Trump talkers that you will almost think Clinton is Trump’s running mate.

    Trump will terrorize the suburban moderates with the threat that Sanders will confiscate their health insurance and stock holdings, if not their homes. Trump accused Democrats of pro-ayatollah sympathies for noticing that his story about the killing of Qassem Soleimani was full of holes. [Should have put a “David Frum Warning” beforehand. -LP] In 1980, Sanders joined a left-wing party whose presidential candidate condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages” being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, suggesting that “many of them are simply spies … or people assigned to protect the spies,” as Ronald Radosh reported in The Daily Beast. Imagine what Trump and his team will do with that.

    The members of the team around Sanders are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle. They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.

    Bernie’s human shield of Millennials:

    A specter is haunting centrist Democrats — the specter of a Bernie Sanders nomination. As the democratic socialist has taken the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, and narrowed Joe Biden’s advantage in national polls, the high clerics of Clintonism have begun calling for a (political) counterrevolution.

    “People need to start taking Bernie pretty seriously — there is a really substantial risk of him becoming unstoppable if he wins these early states by large numbers,” Matt Bennett, vice-president of the centrist think tank Third Way, told the Washington Post this week. Bennett went on to chastise his fellow moderates for getting anxious instead of organized, lamenting, “It’s not like our phone is ringing from people saying, ‘Let’s do something.’ ”

    Third Way has been flooding influential Iowa Democrats’ in-boxes with memos on Sanders’s general-election liabilities and seeding similar stories in the mainstream press. Meanwhile, the Democratic Majority for Israel super-PAC is warning Iowans that a vote for a septuagenarian socialist with a heart condition is, in effect, a vote for four more years of President Trump. But a broad-based, deep-pocketed “Anyone But Sanders” push has yet to take shape. Allies of Michael Bloomberg have indicated that the billionaire’s burgeoning campaign will transform itself into such an entity, if necessary. If Biden suffers damage in the early states, the last thing he’ll need is for Bloomberg, an alternative anti-left candidate, to ramp up his (already gargantuan) ad spending, and likely eat into Uncle Joe’s margins on Super Tuesday. But by the time Iowa and New Hampshire are in the books, it may already be too late

    Snip.

    Even if one accepts Third Way’s memo as gospel, the hazards of mounting a massive “Anyone But Sanders” campaign still outweigh the benefits.

    The reason for this is simple: Democrats will need high turnout among young, left-leaning voters in November, and Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly popular with such voters.

    The age gap between the support bases of the two leading Democratic candidates is unprecedented in scale. According to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, Bernie Sanders boasts the support of 53 percent of Democratic voters under 35 nationwide, while Joe Biden lays claim to just 3 percent. That poll’s margin of error is 3.4 percentage points — which means that the percentage of younger voters who support the Democratic Party’s current front-runner could, technically, round down to zero. In other national surveys, age polarization among Democratic primary voters tends to be a bit less severe. But in virtually all of them, Biden’s support among the young is historically low for a front-running candidate, while Sanders’s popularity with the contingent is exceptionally high.

    It will be hard enough for Biden to mobilize younger voters after beating Sanders in a relatively friendly primary fight, free of conspicuous interference from Establishment forces. If Uncle Joe has to win millennial and Gen-Z hearts and minds — after riding to the nomination on the back of a wall-to-wall anti-Bernie ad blitz from Third Way and friends — his task may be impossible. Although Sanders’s 2016 backers did not sit out (or defect) during the general election in aberrantly high numbers, the age gap between Biden and Bernie backers this year is even larger than the one that prevailed between Clinton and the Vermont senator four years ago. One recent Emerson College poll found that only 53 percent of Sanders’s current supporters plan to vote for the Democratic nominee in November, no matter who that person turns out to be.

    Eh, I don’t find this argument entirely persuasive. Young voters are notoriously bad at actually showing up at the polls. What they gain in youth votes they lose in the “not voting for crazy socialists” vote. Besides, we should realize that the DNC was going to go all in to screw Bernie no matter what anyway… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Would Trump-Sanders 2020 be a replay of Nixon McGovern 1972?

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Steyer raised $156,640,495.93 in Q4, though only a million of that came from other people. He’s up to third in South Carolina, which speaks to the power of money. He’s so horrible a candidate that buying his way into vague contention is an actual achievement…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren’s tranny pander is pure cringe. Even Bill Maher slammed her for it. Shoe0nHead slams Warren the snake. (Shoe used to stan for Tulsi, but now stans for Bernie.) Ted Cruz said her impeachment shenanigans helped insure President Trumps’ acquittal.

    Ms. Warren’s question during Thursday’s session sought to impugn the credibility of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. by saying his credibility was on the line in the impeachment trial.

    Mr. Cruz, Texas Republican, said the question seemed desired to boost Ms. Warren’s struggling presidential campaign, but its immediate effect was to irk key GOP senators who realized Democrat’s‘ strategy to prolong the trial was centered on trying to drag the chief justice ever deeper into the action.

    “Elizabeth Warren helped defeat the impeachment of the president of the United States,” Mr. Cruz said late Friday on a new episode of his podcast “The Verdict.”

    “That stunt helped deliver the votes of Lisa and Lamar.”

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Transcript of an Andrew Yang speech in Iowa. There are actual interesting nuggets of truth in here.

    So I went to our leaders in D.C. and I asked them, “What are we going to do to help our people manage this time – this transition?” And what do you think the folks in D.C. said to me when I said, “What are we going to do?” The three big responses I got from the folks in D.C. were these: No. 1: “We cannot talk about this”; No. 2: “We should study this further”; and No. 3: “We must educate and retrain all Americans for the jobs of the future.” How many of you have ever heard something like that?

    But I’m a numbers guy and I looked at the studies. So I said to the folks who said we’re going to educate and retrain everyone, I said: “Hey, do you want to know what the effectiveness rate of government-funded retraining programs were for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs?”

    You all want to guess what those effectiveness rates were? So, I’m anchoring you very low, so you know it’s low, but you also know it’s low because you’re human beings and you know what other human beings are like, and if you had 1,000 manufacturing workers walk out of the factory that closed, they don’t all say, “Alright, I’m ready for my coding skills training.” And they don’t go in being like, “Oh, this is what I wanted to do the whole time!” And six weeks later they aren’t being like, “Time to get hired by I.B.M.” I mean, we know that’s ridiculous.

    The real-life success rates of those government-funded retraining programs were between 0 and 15 percent. Almost half of the workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry in the Midwest never worked again. We then saw surges in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities because half of them filed for disability and they did not find new work. When I said this to the folks in D.C., they said, “Well I guess we’ll get better at the retraining programs then.” And then they went back to their lunch.

    Watching Yang tour Iowa.

    The centerpiece of Andrew Yang’s final push in Iowa is a 17-day-bus tour: Bouncing around rural Iowa, hitting three to five towns a day, instilling the fear of automation and the hope of a large monthly check from the government in would-be caucus-goers.

    The route of the tour is an indication of the campaign’s strategy to try to nibble around the edges, popping up in areas that aren’t as delegate-rich but that other candidates aren’t paying as close attention to. The expectations for Yang are so low, his advisers know, that he just needs to surprise.

    Meat of piece snipped. Near the end:

    Publicly, Yang tells Iowans he’s ready to “win in Iowa,” but behind the scenes his campaign is under no illusions. They feel confident their rural strategy can yield a fifth-place finish and give them enough to move on to New Hampshire with their heads held high.

    Gets endorsed by the Lowell Sun. I don’t think newspaper endorsements move the needle, but endorsing someone outside the ostensible frontrunners is unusual. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.) This is a pretty good get for your phone bank:

    Why Yang won’t win the nomination, and why he might be formidable if he did, in one tweet:

    • 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:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. But! There was actually a report floated that he was considering getting in, that he actually had to come out and deny. Maybe, like Hillary, he’s secretly hoping to be called on at a brokered convention. Even better: Why not both? CLINTON-KERRY 2020: BECAUSE WE REALLY REALLY HATE YOU
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey

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    Norman Podhoretz Is Not Pleased With His Former Colleagues

    Saturday, April 20th, 2019

    Proving that “neocons” are not a monolithic bloc, Norman Podhoretz had some sharp words for his former fellows.

    About Donald Trump:

    CRB: Let’s start by talking about Donald Trump and you. In the first sentence of the first chapter of your book Making It, recently republished by the New York Review of Books Press, of all people—

    NP: Hell froze over!

    CRB: —you write famously, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan….” How does your journey compare to Trump’s journey from Queens to Manhattan?

    NP: Well, of course that’s very dated now. Nobody can afford to live in Brooklyn anymore. Escaping from Brooklyn was the great thing in my young life, but I have grandchildren who would like nothing better than to have an apartment there.

    Trump’s move from Queens to Manhattan was, as I understand the real estate business, a quite daring move. Maybe that was the longest journey in the world because the Manhattan real estate world is a world unto its own. The competition is very fierce, you’re dealing with many, many clever people. I think it was Tom Klingenstein who said he always thought Trump was Jewish because he fit in so well with the real-estatenicks in Manhattan, most of whom were, and are, Jewish.

    CRB: What does that comparison mean?

    NP: I take it as an affectionate remark. He had the qualities that all those guys had in common, and you might have thought, other things being equal, that he was one of them. And in a certain sense he was, but not entirely. I know a few of those guys and they’re actually very impressive. You have to get permits, and you have to deal with the mob, and you have to know how to handle workers who are very recalcitrant, many of whom are thuggish. You’re in a battlefield there, so you have to know how to operate politically as well as in a managerial capacity, and how to sweet talk and also how to curse. It’s not an easy field to master.

    CRB: Some people say that Trump has a blue collar sensibility. Do you see that?

    NP: I do see it and even before Trump—long before Trump—actually going back to when I was in the army in the 1950s, I got to know blue-collar Americans. I’m “blue collar” myself, I suppose. I’m from the working class—my father was a milk man. But in the army I got to know people from all over the country and I fell in love with Americans—they were just great! These guys were unlike anybody I had ever met in New York or in England or France. They were mostly blue-collar kids and I think Trump has, in that sense, the common touch. That’s one of the things—it may be the main thing—that explains his political success. It doesn’t explain his success in general, but his political success, yes. Also—I often explain this to people—when I was a kid, you would rather be beaten up than back away from a fight. The worst thing in the world you could be called was a sissy. And I was beaten up many times. Trump fights back. The people who say: “Oh, he shouldn’t lower himself,” “He should ignore this,” and “Why is he demeaning himself by arguing with some dopey reporter?” I think on the contrary—if you hit him, he hits back; and he is an equal opportunity counter puncher. It doesn’t matter who you are. And actually Obama, oddly enough, made the same statement: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.”

    CRB: “The Chicago way.” Your own attitude towards Trump as a political figure has changed over time. How would you describe that evolution?

    NP: Well, when he first appeared on the scene, I disliked him because he resembled one of the figures that I dislike most in American politics and with whom I had tangled, namely Pat Buchanan—I had tangled with him in print and I had accused him of anti-Semitism. And he came back at me, and I came back at him. And it was a real street fight. And I said to my wife: “This guy [Trump] is Buchanan without the anti-Semitism,” because he was a protectionist, a nativist, and an isolationist. And those were the three pillars of Pat Buchanan’s political philosophy. How did I know he wasn’t an anti-Semite? I don’t know—I just knew. And he certainly wasn’t and isn’t, and I don’t think he’s a racist or any of those things.

    CRB: But you still think he’s an isolationist and a nativist?

    NP: No, that’s what’s so interesting. At first, I disliked him because I thought he was a Buchananite, and then when he said that they lied us into Iraq—that put me off, because that is itself one of the big lies of the century, and no matter how often it’s been refuted and refuted decisively, it just stays alive. And when Trump committed himself to that, I thought, “well, to hell with him.”

    CRB: You refuted that lie in your book World War IV.

    NP: Yes, and I’m actually quite proud of that section of the book—it certainly convinced me! So for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office—I could understand that—but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards—and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on.

    Snip.

    CRB: So you began by looking at Trump as a kind of warmed over Pat Buchanan—

    NP: Yeah, without the anti-Semitism.

    CRB: Did he do anything as president or as a candidate that accelerated your reevaluation of him? Did a lightbulb go on at some point?

    NP: Well it wasn’t a lightbulb, and it wasn’t the road to Damascus revelation. It was that as I watched the appointments he was making even at the beginning, I was astonished. And he couldn’t have been doing this by accident. So that everything he was doing by way of policy as president, belied the impression he had given to me of a Buchananite. He was the opposite of a Buchananite in practice. The fact is he was a new phenomenon. And I still to this day haven’t quite figured out how he reconciled all of this in his own head. Maybe because, as I said earlier, he was not dogmatic about things. He did what he had to do to get things done.

    Wow, it’s almost as if Podhoretz took in new data and changed his opinion based on those new inputs. If only his former neocon colleagues would do the same.

    CRB: I think you said he didn’t have principles.

    NP: Well, okay, but he had something—he had instincts. And he knew, from my point of view, who the good guys were. Now, he made some mistakes, for example, with Secretary of State Tillerson, but so did Reagan. I used to point out to people that it took Lincoln three years to find the right generals to fight the civil war, so what did you expect from George W. Bush? In Trump’s case, most of his appointments were very good and they’ve gotten better as time’s gone on. And even the thing that I held almost sacred, and still do really, which is the need for American action abroad—interventionism—which he still says he’s against. I mean, he wants to pull out all our troops from Syria and I think it was probably Bolton who talked him out of doing it all in one stroke. Even concerning interventionism, I began to rethink. I found my mind opening to possibilities that hadn’t been there before. And in this case it was a matter of acknowledging changing circumstances rather than philosophical or theoretical changes.

    On the Iraq War:

    CRB: You were an avid supporter of the Iraq war. He’s a pronounced critic of it. Are you persuaded by his opinion?

    NP: No, I am intransigent on Iraq. I think it was the right thing to do at the time. I’ve even gone so far as to say Bush would have deserved to be impeached if he had not gone in. Every intelligence agency in the world said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—nuclear weapons, actually—every one of his own intelligence agencies said so. Saddam himself said so. Especially after 9/11, there was almost no good reason not to go in. The administration had gone through all the diplomatic kabuki, which I always knew wouldn’t work. It’s inconceivable that they could have been lying. Who would be stupid enough to lie when you’re going to be exposed in a week? It’s ridiculous! Nobody was lying, except Saddam.

    I was once on a panel on a National Review cruise. Bill Buckley was still alive. They posed the question: “Knowing what you know now, would you have gone into Iraq?” And everybody, including Bill, said no. And I said yes, for the reasons I just gave. And I said, “Anyway, if I knew the outcome of every decision I’ve ever made, I probably would have made the opposite of each one. You act on the basis of what you know now and what looks probable now—not under circumstances five years later.” I thought it was a stupid question, to tell you the truth. I still feel it was the right thing to do and the story’s not over yet, by the way. I mean, it’s assumed Iraq is a disaster and Iran is taking over—that’s not quite true. Many Iraqis are trying to resist Iran. I’m told that Baghdad has become what Beirut used to be—full of cafés and nightlife and traffic jams and liveliness; and they had a decent election.

    CRB: Invading Iraq—toppling Saddam—was one thing. Occupying and trying to democratize the country was another. How do you regard the latter now?

    NP: I know, it’s as if the effort to democratize was somehow ignoble instead of just misplaced. I mean, let me put it this way, we obviously did a bad job of the occupation and we are not an imperial power despite what the Left says. We’re not good at it. Although, in the case of Germany, Japan, and Korea, we’ve stationed troops there for 50 years. If you’re going to do it, you need to be prepared to do what is necessary when it’s over—when you’ve won. And we were not prepared. Many mistakes were made, and the will to see it through to the end was absent. So that I agree to. But my hope was not that we could have an election and overnight everything would be fine, but that we could clear the ground a bit in which seeds of democratization could be planted. That was what I used to call “draining the swamp.” And that swamp, we knew, was the swamp in which terrorism festered. So it seemed to me to make sense as a policy.

    CRB: Would you call Trump an isolationist? He didn’t use the term.

    NP: No, he didn’t; he was against what he called stupid wars or unnecessary wars. But I think that, again, he’s willing to be flexible under certain circumstances. I think that if we were hit by any of those people, he would respond with a hydrogen bomb.

    CRB: And you’re not speaking metaphorically.

    NP: No, I’m not. But again, I was a passionate interventionist. I was a passionate believer in democratization before I was a paleo-neoconservative—when I was just a plain neoconservative. But it was a totally different world.

    On his former neocon colleagues and the new left:

    CRB: But many of your new set of ex-friends, as you call them, were with you on Iraq and democratization, which explains partly at least, why they are against Trump. You deviated from them, or they deviated from you.

    NP: Well some of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it—okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done.

    But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms—love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea. We find ourselves in a domestic, or civil, war almost.

    In 1969-70, we neocons analyzed the international situation in a similar way, behind a clarifying idea that had a serious impact because it was both simple and sufficiently complex in its implications. I had by then become alienated from my long-term friend Hannah Arendt, whose book The Origins of Totalitarianism had had an enormous effect on me. Although she had become an ex-friend, her book’s argument still inspired me, and I think a lot of other people, to fight. And that argument was that the Soviet Union was an evil, moral and political, comparable to Nazi Germany. As we had fought to defend the West in World War II from the evil coming from, as it were, the Right, so we had to fight it coming from the Left in the Cold War, which I liked to call World War III. (And I’ve tried to say since 9/11, we have to fight an evil coming from the 7th century in what amounts to World War IV—but that name hasn’t caught on.) But the important point is we offered a wholehearted, full-throated defense of America. Not merely a defense, but a celebration, which is what I thought it deserved, nothing less. It was like rediscovering America—its virtues, its values, and how precious the heritage we had been born to was, and how it was, in effect, worth dying for. And that had a refreshing impact, I think, because that’s how most people felt. But all they had heard—though nothing compared to now—was that America was terrible. It was the greatest danger to peace in the world, it was born in racism, and genocide, and committed every conceivable crime. And then when new crimes were invented like sexism and Islamophobia, we were guilty of those, too.

    CRB: The fight against Soviet Communism ended in victory for the West, but not, it seems, in the rehabilitation of Americanism. What happened to “the new American patriotism” as Reagan called it?

    NP: Well, one of the Soviet officials, after the fall of the Soviet Union, actually put it correctly when he said: “You’ve lost your enemy.” And that’s, I think, the largest cause.

    CRB: You mean the only thing that really inspired us was the external threat?

    NP: No, the external threat inspired us, but it also gave rise to a new appreciation of what we were fighting for—not just against. I was a Democrat, you know, by heritage, and in 1972 I helped found a movement called, “The Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” which was an effort to save the Democratic Party from the McGovernites who had taken it over. We knew exactly what was wrong, but it metastasized. The long march through the institutions, as the Maoists called it, was more successful than I would have anticipated. The anti-Americanism became so powerful that there was virtually nothing to stop it. Even back then I once said, and it’s truer now: this country is like a warrior tribe which sends all its children to a pacifist monk to be educated. And after a while—it took 20 or 40 years—but little by little it turned out that Antonio Gramsci—the Communist theoretician who said that the culture is where the power is, not the economy—turned out to be right; and little by little the anti-Americanism made its way all the way down to kindergarten, practically. And there was no effective counterattack. I’m not sure why. I mean, some of us tried, but we didn’t get very far.

    CRB: How do you assess the American Left today?

    NP: The crack I make these days is that the Left thinks that the Constitution is unconstitutional. When Barack Obama said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming this country,” well it wasn’t five days, but he was for once telling the truth. He knew what he was doing. I’ve always said that Obama, from his own point of view, was a very successful president. I wrote a piece about that in the Wall Street Journal which surprised a lot of people. Far from being a failure, within the constraints of what is still the democratic political system, he had done about as much as you possibly could to transform the country into something like a social democracy. The term “social democrat,” however, used to be an honorable one. It designated people on the Left who were anti-Communist, who believed in democracy, but who thought that certain socialist measures could make the world more equitable. Now it’s become a euphemism for something that is hard to distinguish from Communism.

    And I would say the same thing about anti-Zionism. I gave a talk to a meeting of the American Jewish Committee, which was then the publisher of Commentary, two years or so after the Six Day War. And I said what’s happened since the that war is that anti-Semitism has migrated from the Right, which was its traditional home, to the Left, where it is getting a more and more hospitable reception. And people walked out on the talk, I mean, literally just got up. These were all Jews, you understand. Today, anti-Semitism, under the cover of anti-Zionism, has established itself much more firmly in the Democratic Party than I could ever have predicted, which is beyond appalling. The Democrats were unable to pass a House resolution condemning anti-Semitism, for example, which is confirmation of the Gramscian victory. I think they are anti-American—that’s what I would call them. They’ve become anti-American.

    CRB: What are they pro-?

    NP: Well, some of them say they’re pro-socialism, but most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. They ought to visit a British hospital or a Canadian hospital once in a while to see what Medicare for All comes down to. They don’t know what they’re for. I mean, the interesting thing about this whole leftist movement that started in the ’60s is how different it is from the Left of the ’30s. The Left of the ’30s had a positive alternative in mind—what they thought was positive—namely, the Soviet Union. So America was bad; Soviet Union, good. Turn America into the Soviet Union and everything is fine. The Left of the ’60s knew that the Soviet Union was flawed because its crimes that had been exposed, so they never had a well-defined alternative. One day it was Castro, the next day Mao, the next day Zimbabwe, I mean, they kept shifting—as long as it wasn’t America. Their real passion was to destroy America and the assumption was that anything that came out of those ruins would be better than the existing evil. That was the mentality—there was never an alternative and there still isn’t. So Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union—I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I have relatives who resemble him; I know him in my bones—and he’s an old Stalinist if there ever was one. Things have gone so haywire, he was able to revive the totally discredited idea of socialism, and others were so ignorant that they picked it up.

    As for attitudes toward America, I believe that Howard Zinn’s relentlessly anti-American People’s History of the United States sells something like 200,000 copies a year, and it’s a main text for the study of American History in the high schools and in kindergarten. So, we have miseducated a whole generation, two generations by now, about almost everything.

    CRB: And President Trump offers a path up from ignorance and anti-Americanism?

    NP: The only way I know out of this is to fight it intellectually, which sounds weak. But the fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left. And he’s not the first unworthy vessel chosen by God. There was King David who was very bad—I mean he had a guy murdered so he could sleep with his wife, among other things. And then there was King Solomon who was considered virtuous enough—more than his father—to build the temple, and then desecrated it with pagan altars; but he was nevertheless considered a great ancestor. So there are precedents for these unworthy vessels, and Trump, with all his vices, has the necessary virtues and strength to fight the fight that needs to be fought. And if he doesn’t win in 2020, I would despair of the future. I have 13 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren, and they are hostages to fortune. So I don’t have the luxury of not caring what’s going to happen after I’m gone.

    CRB: What are his virtues, if you had to enumerate them?

    NP: His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America. He thinks it’s great or could be made great again. Eric Holder, former attorney general, said, “When was it ever great?” And Michelle Obama says that the first time she was ever proud of her country was when Obama won. By the way, I make a prediction to you that the democratic candidate in 2020 is going to be Michelle Obama, and all these people knocking themselves out are wasting their time and money. The minute she announces that will be it.

    Let’s hope he’s wrong.

    CRB: The Never Trumpers agree with you that Trump is an “unworthy vessel” but see nothing whatsoever to redeem his vices.

    NP: Mainly they think he’s unfit to be president for all the obvious reasons—that he disgraces the office. I mean, I would say Bill Clinton disgraced the office.

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    Posted in Democrats, Republicans | No Comments »

    Laws Are For The Little People: Michael Avenatti/Jussie Smollett Edition

    Thursday, March 28th, 2019

    #TheResistance™ insists, again and again, that they’re the only moral alternative to that dastardly Donald Trump. This week, we got a good, close look at how a couple of “heroes” of #TheResistance™ operate.

    First up: Mr. Multiple-Felony-Indictments himself, Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti, who lead “a luxury lifestyle built on a purported house of cards.”

    Long before he was Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, well before he was accused of trying to shake down Nike for millions of dollars, Michael Avenatti was an Orange County plaintiff’s attorney living a luxe life adorned with fast cars, high-end properties and expensive jewelry.

    He flew in a private jet, lived in a mansion overlooking the Pacific and rang up six-figure receipts at Neiman Marcus and other sumptuous retailers.

    That his wealth might in fact be illusory, built on a flimsy and teetering financial foundation, slowly grew clear to some who knew Avenatti and hounded him for years in Bankruptcy Court and other venues in search of money he owed.

    Suddenly, with his arrest Monday in Manhattan for allegedly scheming to extort $20 million from the sportswear giant, the rest of the world got a glimpse into the tangled life of the pugnacious litigator and, prosecutors assert, his reckless venality.

    But as startling as the Nike allegations may be — attempting to strong-arm one of the most recognizable companies on the planet — the federal fraud charges simultaneously unsealed in California may be more revealing and could pose greater jeopardy to Avenatti and his freedom.

    They exposed nearly a decade of alleged financial misdeeds on a vast scale, many of which have sporadically surfaced in courtrooms up and down the West Coast.

    Snip

    The 48-year-old counsel, who made his living by filing class-action lawsuits against big corporations, crashed into the nation’s consciousness a year ago as the representative of Daniels, an adult-film actress who sought to nullify a hush-money agreement stemming from an alleged 2006 sexual dalliance with Donald Trump.

    But Avenatti’s notoriety — so far as federal investigators were concerned — long preceded his emergence as Daniels’ advocate and President Trump’s tormentor.

    The nearly 200 pages of charging documents submitted by the Internal Revenue Service show that federal investigators started pursuing Avenatti for alleged tax violations a decade ago.

    The first sign of trouble came in 2009 when, the IRS said, he reported $1.9 million in personal income but failed to pay $570,000 in taxes. The next year, the IRS said, Avenatti reported $1.2 million in income but skipped out on a $282,000 tax bill.

    Since then, according to federal prosecutors, Avenatti has filed no personal income tax returns, even as he deposited $18 million into his bank accounts.

    He also has filed no tax returns since then for Avenatti & Associates, a corporation that has recorded $38 million in deposits, the government says. Avenatti, who owns the firm, has often used it to pay personal expenses, including $176,500 to Exclusive Resorts, which bills itself as “the world’s elite private vacation club.”

    “During these tax years, Avenatti generated substantial income and lived lavishly,” Remoun Karlous, an IRS criminal investigator, wrote in his sworn statement.

    Among other big-ticket items: $217,000 at Neiman Marcus; $117,000 at Jewelers on Time, a luxury watch store; $277,236 to Porsche dealers; $100,000-a-month rent for a waterfront house on Lido Isle in Newport Beach; $39,762 in Ferrari lease payments, $123,825 in rent on his apartment in a luxury high-rise in Century City.

    How arrogant do you have to be to think you can get away with not filing tax returns for a decade? Did he think the IRS was just going to shrug that off? Did he think they were too busy auditing Tea Party groups to go after him? Did he think he was somehow protected? Did he think his brash bad boy lawyer approach would get him off the hook with Uncle Sam?

    Here’s a kicker: “Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman collapsed in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday, shortly after the judge in her [NXIVM sex cult] racketeering conspiracy case asked if she’d secretly retained embattled lawyer Michael Avenatti in a bid to negotiate a deal with prosecutors.”

    From Hero of #TheResistance™ to persona non grata in a week.

    Speaking of heroes of #TheResistance™, the felony hate crime hoax charges against Jussie Smollett have been magically dropped:

    Jussie Smollett will not be prosecuted for allegedly faking a racial attack, because all charges have been dropped!!!

    Jussie and his lawyers ran to court Tuesday morning in Chicago, where he was facing 16 felony counts of lying to police in the alleged racial and homophobic attack.

    Jussie will surrender his $10,000 bond. But, that’s it. The case is over.

    Maybe not.

    State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office says, “After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case.”

    That “community service?” It was all of two days working for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

    That’s like dropping 16 felony charges against Ted Nugent in return for two days of him volunteering with the NRA.

    How did the charges get dropped? Evidently Tina Tchen, who once served as the chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama and as an aide to the president himself, ran interference with Foxx to get the charges dropped.

    Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is officially requesting a federal investigation into whether the Cook County State’s Attorney, Kim Foxx, tried to interfere into the department’s investigation of “Empire” star Jussie Smollett on behalf of a former Obama administration official.

    CWB Chicago, which has covered the Smollett case from the beginning, reports that Chicago’s police union requested the investigation in a letter to John R. Lausch, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago on Monday.

    Chicago Police Department superintendent Eddie Johnson is not pleased.

    I’m left hanging my head and asking, why? Why would anyone, especially an African-American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations? How could someone look at the hatred and suffering associated with that symbol and see an opportunity to manipulate that symbol to further his own public profile? How can an individual who has been embraced by the city of Chicago turn around and slap everyone in this city in the face by making these false claims? Bogus police reports cause real harm. They do harm to every legitimate victim who is in need of support by police and investigators as well as the citizens of this city. Chicago hosts one of the largest pride parades in the world, and we’re proud of that as a police department and also as a city. We do not, nor do we ever, tolerate hate in our city, whether that hate is based on an individual’s sexual orientation, race or anything else. So I’m offended by what has happened, and I’m also angry. I love the city of Chicago and the Chicago Police Department, warts and all. But this publicity stunt was a scar that Chicago didn’t earn and certainly didn’t deserve.

    Now the FBI is looking into the dropped charges.

    Why did Team Obama go all-out to get the charges dropped? Because of his friendship with the Obamas? Because of his high Victimhood Identity Politics “intersectionality” score? (“Black and gay? Well, that just wipes those 16 felony charges right out!”) But maybe it’s also because he was caught faking a hate crime hoax, and the liberal establishment wants to ensure that hate crime hoaxes continue to be manufactured because they’re politically useful. Namely to keep the black and gay communities stirred up enough to keep voting for Democrats rather than walking away.

    One way or another, the rules just seem to be different for our liberal elites.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    This Just In: ObamaCare Still Sucks

    Wednesday, October 30th, 2013

    Suddenly, Democrats aren’t sounding so all-fire sure about ObamaCare after all. “After 16 long days of vowing to Republicans that they would not cave in any way, shape or form on ObamaCare, Democrats spent their first post-shutdown week caving in every way, shape and form.”

    Jonah Goldberg gets in some solid whacks on the idiot pushback from Democratic mouthpieces: “Obama’s [#ObamaCare] statements were not ‘narrowly untrue.’ They were broadly, knowingly and entirely untrue.”

    Also:

    The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law. The right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete ownership of any major social legislation in a century. They bought this legislation with deceit and the GOP said so. Now that it is going into effect, the facts on the ground are confirming that deceit. Moreover, the same haughty condescending bureaucrats and politicians who told us they were smart enough and tech-savvy enough to do just about anything are being exposed as incompetent political hacks.

    Charles Cooke debunks the single payer fantasy and the myth of Republican responsibility for ObamaCare:

    Obamacare was passed into law without a single Republican vote; its passage led to the biggest midterm blowout since 1948; and repealing the measure has been, to borrow Harry Reid’s favorite word, the “obsession” of Republicans for nearly five years. It is a law based upon an idea that Republican leadership failed to consider, debate, or advance during any of the periods in which they have held political power — and one that they actively opposed when it was suggested in a similar form by President Clinton during the 1990s. If Republicans were desperate to get something done along the lines that Obama proposed in 2009, they have had a funny way of showing it over the past 159 years.

    Also, “single payer,” i.e. the Democrats platonic ideal of fully socialized medicine, was so horribly unpopular with the public that it never had a chance of passing:

    There is a devastatingly dull reason the bulletproof Democratic majority of 2008 didn’t build “comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare,” and that is that it didn’t have the votes. Indeed, with full control of the government, Democrats didn’t even have the votes to set up a public insurance option, let alone to take over the whole system. Long before Scott Brown was elected to the Senate, Ezra Klein was lamenting that the public option was dead on arrival.

    Charles Krauthammer also goes to town on Jay Carney’s smarmy dishonesty:

    The Obama Administration wrote regulations that actually made the situation worse. (Hat tip: Ace, who notes that NBC tried to neuter their original version to make it less critical of Obama).

    Mark Steyn on the website debacle. Bonus: The same firm who coded the ObamaCare website also coded the incompetent, bloated, non-functioning Canadian Firearms registry:

    Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

    Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60.

    So how did CGI get the gig? Well, the fact that executive Toni Townes-Whitley was an old friend of Michelle Obama’s, having been in the Organization of Black Unity together at Princeton, and who visited the Obama White House several times, might have something to do with it.

    It also promotes racism, with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants” and give “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships.” It also “creates separate and unequal operating standards for long-term care facilities that serve racial and ethnic minorities.”

    A few more nuggets:

  • “I lost my health insurance because of ObamaCare.”
  • Liberals: “I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it.”
  • The Obama Administration was warned that the website was non-functional garbage before it went live. Evidently spiting Ted Cruz was more important than actually providing a system that worked.

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    Posted in ObamaCare, Regulation, Uncategorized, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »