From this side of the pond, the EU election results may seem somewhat baffling. Populist parties gained ground at the expense of centrist and traditional parties, but so did the Greens. This doesn’t fit our traditional left-right political schemas.
In the UK, Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party captured the most EU parliamentary seats. “Mr Farage’s party won 29 seats, the Lib Dems 16, Labour 10, the Greens seven, the Tories four, the SNP three, and Plaid Cymru and the DUP one each.” Those are disasterous results for Labour and the Tories. UKIP was wiped out and entirely replaced by the Brexit Party. The Liberal Democrats coming in second was a result I do not think was foreseen by anyone, nor the Greens doing better than the Tories. The colossal stink of the inability to deliver Brexit that clings to the Tories and Labour helped both Liberal Democrats and Greens, both being so far from power and out of the spotlight the last few years. Faced with parties run by Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, “Vote them all out!” must have seemed like a coldly rational choice.
Some interesting results in Scotland:
In Scotland, the pro-Remain SNP won the biggest share of the vote, with just under 38%, giving it three MEPs.
The Brexit Party came in second place with a significantly lower percentage – 14.8% – followed by the Lib Dems with 13.9% and the Tories with 11.6% – meaning each party has one seat.
But Labour only received 9.3% of the vote – a loss in vote share of 16.6% – leaving it with no MEPs in Scotland for the first time.
It’s hard to say what these results indicate for UK domestic politics going forward, as traditionally MEP elections have been very poor indicators of the next general election. But the giant Brexit cockup is hugely hurting both Tories and Labour.
1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.
2) Where the center retreated, however, the populist Right did not always occupy the abandoned position. National populists (which is the approved non-hostile term for describing them) advanced moderately and consolidated their previous gains substantially in the elections. Victor Orban’s Fidesz won 52 percent of the votes in Hungary. Poland’s Law and Justice party held off a multi-party attack from an organized left-wing coalition and won a majority that suggests it will win the forthcoming national elections. France’s National Rally — the latest name for the populist Right party led by Marine Le Pen — narrowly defeated the populist-centrist party of President Macron in France. (Populist-centrism may be a novel concept, and it may prove to be an unsuccessful one, but it’s the best description yet coined of Macron’s ambiguous politics.) The political success of Italy’s populism we outlined above. And in the United Kingdom, the populist Euroskeptic party, titled with stunning simplicity the Brexit party, went from its foundation five weeks ago to become the largest U.K. party in the European Parliament, with 32 percent of the national vote and 29 MEPs. But it hopes to be leaving Parliament soon.
Populism suffered no major defeats anywhere — unless you count (and you shouldn’t) Denmark, where the People’s Party share of the vote was halved because the more respectable social democrats adopted their tough migration policy. On the other hand, populism didn’t win as many votes as the populists had hoped and as the Left and the media had feared. In particular, populists fell well short of taking control of the European Parliament or, as we shall see, even weakening the control of it exercised by the reigning centrist duopoly of Christian and Social Democrats.
3) If the center retreated and the Right advanced only so far, European Liberals (the ALDE parliamentary group) and Greens occupied the vacant ground. Greens became the second party in Germany and the third party in France; Liberal Democrats became the surprise second-place winners, after Nigel Farage’s Brexit party in Britain; and both parties did well throughout the western half of Europe. Their success is not a mystery. Progressive middle-class voters wanted more idealistic commitments to policies such as combatting climate change and opening borders than the cautious center always provided. In addition, such voters were alarmed by what they saw as the national-populist threat to the European Union — a greatly exaggerated one in reality since none of the populists outside the U.K. want to leave the EU, merely to restrain it. All the same, these voters turned out to support the EU, too, which in the U.K. explains the rise of the Lib Dems as a response to the Brexit party.
The moderately conservative EPP will struggle to keep its preeminence within the centrist coalition because the ALDE and the Greens are ideologically closer to the socialists than to themselves; Greens within the European Parliament and Germany itself will want to use their newfound power to phase out fossil fuels, which will be resisted by coal-producing Poland and Eastern Germany; the more progressive Euro-parliamentary majority may want to press sanctions on Viktor Orban for violating “European values,” but the success of populists in half of Europe means that he now has more allies in that conflict; and, above all, President Macron has enthusiastic supporters among the ALDE liberals in the European Parliament for his ambitious integrationist projects that the Germans and other Northern European governments fear they will be asked to finance.
And these projects are indeed formidable: to centralize the power and sovereignty of 27 nation-states in European institutions without solving their existing democracy deficit; to replace their independent budgetary arrangements with a single European fiscal policy without the power of tax collection; to create a common European defense structure separate from NATO without increasing anyone’s defense expenditure; to replace fossil fuels with renewables to solve climate change without massive regulation, and a realistic plan to prevent a huge rise in energy costs for industry and consumers. This is the hubris of government, but its costs always fall on others. It is sometimes said that the error of socialists is not that they have no faith in capitalism but that they have almost boundless faith in it. They think it can bear any burden they place on it and still stagger on delivering the goods. Modern European statesmen feel the same way about their citizens. The populists remind them they’re wrong. And they haven’t gone away.
One moderating effect on an “radical center” is the fact that the structure of the EU leaves very little actual power in the hands of the EU Parliament. My suspicion is that if the EU Parliament wanted to phase out fossil fuels faster than the real rulers of the EU think wise, those policies would just magically not get implemented.
As I’ve stated before, the future of EU politics probably looks a lot like the Northern League-Five Star alliance in Italy: Moderately populist, in favor of both low taxes and a large welfare state, guaranteed to remain popular right up until the inevitable economic crash.
As I did in March and April, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers among Democratic presidential candidates. Still more candidates have jumped into the race since the last update, so let’s look at how the Twitter Primary stacks up today:
The following are all the declared Presidential candidates ranked in order of most to least Twitter followers:
For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 60.6 million followers, up 700,000 since the last update. According to my math, that gain in followers is larger than the aggregate gain of all new followers for all Democratic presidential candidates combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 25.9 million, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.
A few notes:
Twitter does rounding, and counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
Harris zipped by Williamson for fourth place.
Warren and Buttigieg, both of whom enjoyed boomlets this cycle, enjoyed the largest numbers of new followers.
The rate of uptick for all the Democratic Presidential Candidates has slowed (though Trump’s actually picked up).
Biden isn’t adding followers at nearly the rate I would expect from a frontrunner.
Hickenlooper drops below two newcomers, Bullock and de Blasio, but has seven times the followers of fellow Coloradan Michael Bennet, which may be a comfort for him.
Castro, Bullock, de Blasio, Hickenlooper, Moulton, Swalwell, Gravel, Inslee, Bennet, Delaney, Ryan and Messam are all below Yang, and none seem to be on a trajectory to catch him.
Biden continues to lap the field, Buttigieg’s boomlet bottoms out, O’Rourke stabilizes, Messam registers, Klobucher shows a tiny bit of life, and mentions of John McCain, Jimmy Carter and Alannis Morissette. It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
My original idea behind doing this update was to show at a glance which candidates were in, which were out, and what all of them were doing. With so many declared candidates in the race, I’ve decided it was high time to move all of the declared Out names, as well as those for whom there was zero buzz, down to the Out of the Running section below the clown car list proper. This should make it a bit easier to read, with less repetition from week to week.
Polls
Echelon Insights: Biden 38, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 5, Warren 5, O’Rourke 5, Harris 5, Klobucher 2, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Yang 1, Gillibrand 1, Castro 1, Messam 1. Messam actually registering 1% is far and away his best showing. Also interesting breakdowns on the voters backing each candidate (Biden old, Sanders young, Buttigieg suburban women, Warren whites with Bachelor’s degrees, etc.).
Monmouth: Biden 33, Sanders 15, Harris 11, Warren 10, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 4, Klobucher 3, Booker 1, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1, everyone else below 1%. However, the information they lead with on the poll is who is doing best in early voting states: Biden 26, Sander 14, Harris 14, Warren 9, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Williamson 1, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delany 1, Hickenlooper 1, Ryan 1.
The Hill/HarrisX: Biden 33, Sanders 14, Warren 8, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, O’Rourke 5. “Several aspirants were not named by any participant: Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Mont.), former Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, Gov. Jay Inslee (D-Washington), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), Florida mayor Wayne Messam, and author Marianne Williamson.”
Florida Atlantic University for the Florida primary: Biden 29, Sanders 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 9, Harris 7, O’Rourke 5. (In the 2020 general matchup, Trump ties Biden and beats everyone else.)
Quinnipiac: Biden 35, Sanders 16, Warren 13, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3, Klobucher 2, O’Rourke 2, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1. Interesting nugget: Harris does better among white votes (9) than non-white voters (7).
Progressives think they can still take Biden down. “Biden’s initial strength was always expected, they said. They maintain that the progressive nature of the Democratic electorate will soon make itself known, to his detriment.” Whistling past the graveyard…
“Young voters have Buttigieg and Beto. So why do they prefer old socialists?” Boiled down: Because they want free stuff. Unstated: And they’re easier to fool into thinking they can get it.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Teflon Joe” continues to crush the opposition in early polling. “He also leads in all of the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and is clobbering rivals in South Carolina.” Some democratic strategists you’ve never heard of are mystified by his popularity. “Why Joe Biden Is the Only True Progressive Candidate.” As in 1924 progressives like Robert LaFollett. I’m sure “He’d be a progessive 96 years ago!” is a battle cry that will stir the woke base to the Biden barricades…
Amanda Perez, who worked as the policy director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, will serve as Booker’s national policy director. Jen Kim, who has worked on national campaigns to engage communities of color in elections, has signed on as Booker’s states chief of staff.
Booker’s campaign, headquartered in Newark, N.J., is also adding Jenna Kruse, a former vice president of research at EMILY’s List, who will serve as Booker’s research director. Emily Norman, an Obama 2012 alum who served on analytics teams at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee, will be chief innovation officer.
Simon Vance, who previously worked from Ohio on Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and as deputy campaign manager in Rich Cordray’s unsuccessful Ohio gubernatorial run, will be chief analytics officer. In 2016, Vance was Clinton’s national targeting director and Iowa caucus analytics director.
n addition, Booker is bringing on on Jenn Brown, the former executive director of Civic Nation, as a deputy campaign manager. Josh Wolf, a former director of operations for MoveOn.org, will serve as chief operations officer.
Other hires include: Bridgit Donnelly, who worked with early vote data for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Michael Fisher, as chief technology officer. Fisher previously served in roles at the DNC and on the 2016 Clinton campaign.
The only name in that group that rings a bell is Jenn Brown, because she got demoted as executive director of Battleground Texas after the debacle of 2014. Booker is also making his third trip to Nevada tomorrow.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got interviewed by WBUR. “In order to win in 2020, we’ve got to win back some of the places that voted for Trump.” And then he offers up your standard let-wing talking points.
Buttigieg is encouraging moneyed supporters to juice his campaign’s fundraising with a new bundling program, details of which were recently circulated to some donors and obtained by POLITICO. Members at different levels of the program pledge to raise anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 for Buttigieg over the course of the primary campaign and receive special perks, including briefings with the candidate and senior campaign staff.
Unusual only in its blatantness. Being gay just isn’t gay enough for a Yale professor complaining about Buttigieg’s Time magazine cover. And he accused President Trump of faking an injury to avoid the Vietnam draft. Because all those attacks on stuff did Trump did 20 or 30 years ago worked so well, let’s go back 50 years instead. It didn’t work against Clinton in 1992, why would it work against Trump in 2020? He also attacked Joe Biden over voting for the 1994 crime bill, a line of attack that I suspect will be equally ineffectual.
De Blasio’s one applause line on the stump now—repeated at each stop where so far staffers and New York reporters have tended to outnumber supporters—has been that “there’s plenty of money. It’s just in the wrong hands.”
He’d know! De Blasio—born Warren Wilhelm Jr.—was elected mayor with a huge under-the-table assist from UNITE HERE, the national hospitality workers union previously run by his cousin John Wilhelm. This organization gave $175,000 to a group crusading to ban carriage horses from New York and is led by a real-estate executive who insists that cause has nothing to do with the insanely lucrative development opportunity that would open up if Manhattan’s horse stables were to close.
That group, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS, promptly cut its own check for $175,000 to New York City Is Not for Sale, an outside PAC whose potent ads helped take down frontrunner Christine Quinn. No other candidate had any comparable outside money operation, and none of that money—which appeared to be a naked attempt to evade the city’s strict cap on direct donations to candidates, and ban on coordination with outside groups—was disclosed until after the election.
Even as the FBI began looking into that set-up, Mayor de Blasio was, well, off to the races, setting up the Campaign for One New York to raise money for his political agenda and direct-dialing fat cats with city business to get them to “donate” to his cause.
He finally shut that operation down as the feds and local prosecutors and city agencies investigated it, before prosecutors reluctantly decided not to charge him even as they publicly scolded him—no “allegedly”—for hitting up people with business before the city for big bucks for his political operation.
As the bribe-taker got off, his bribe-makers keep going to prison, with one of them sentenced to four years and two others pleading guilty the same week that de Blasio announced his presidential run.
Bonus! Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler became physically ill at a de Blasio presser.
Two and a half hours. Did I watch it all? I did not. There are only so many hours in the week. She wants to return to Obama’s expensive, failed nuclear deal with Iran. Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi hits the Daily Beast over their “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists” piece. “The Gabbard campaign has received 75,000 individual donations. This crazy Beast article is based on (maybe) three of them.”
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. A former donor (and Biden backer) condemned Gillum: “You lost by 30k votes and kept the money from people who trusted you so that now you can go around the state with a staff preparing for your next run,” Morgan tweeted. “I will tell you that is a huge mistake. Your donors are very disappointed. This is a huge ethical lapse.”
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. He issued tweets slamming Bill Kristol and John McCain, and manages a slam on Klobuchar in the process:
"Stalinism means having to apologize for promoting a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people" – Bill Kristol, "respected intellectual" https://t.co/pquhJYZakE
McCain's image has been sanctified by an old David Foster Wallace article, a nonfactual "maverick" image, and a few cherrypicked memories of his old campaigns. He was a bad guy. If @amyklobuchar wasn't so busy abusing her workers, she could have done research and found that out.
“I don’t know why she’s not caught fire. But she hasn’t,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. “I think everybody is sampling and taking a look at everybody. But for now, she’s a regional candidate. A California candidate.”
Snip.
Joining Harris at [the Democratic Party’s California state convention] will be more than half the announced Democratic field: Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sanders; Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind.; Reps. Eric Swalwell of Dublin and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; former Reps. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and John Delaney of Maryland; former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and current Washington Gov. Jay Inslee; and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.
Her Oakland kickoff rally was expensive. “Harris’ campaign has so far paid $65,000 on the city police tab and has until next month to send the more than $122,000 remaining, according to the city.” She also regurgitated the pay gap myth. “This is not a good measure of equal pay because it doesn’t take into account workers’ labor choices, such as profession, education, hours worked, or many other work preferences — preferences that we should want people to be able to express and take into account when selecting work. This statistic isn’t a signal of systematic sex discrimination in our economy.” Hell, even Polifact dinged her for it being mostly false. Oh, and evidently she talked about it on Colbert last week, and I only found out about it when I went to do this roundup, which suggests that neither she nor he are as hot as they once were…
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar said that she recently received some words of encouragement about her poll numbers from former President Jimmy Carter.” And if there’s anyone with sure political instincts… Klobuchar also tells a “Just So” story about John McCain reciting the names of dictators during Trump’s inaguration speech. Though it’s so weird I suspect it might be true.
In May 2013, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien against the couple for $32,652 in unpaid 2007, 2008, and 2010 taxes. Records show the lien was withdrawn in October 2013. But three years later, the IRS filed yet another lien. In December 2016, the Messams received notice that they owed $69,795 from 2014. The couple paid the government in August 2017, according to court documents.
Polifact also gave him a “mostly false” for saying that “in Florida, it’s illegal for mayors to even bring up gun reform for discussion.” They simply can’t impose their own laws (good) due to state preemption.
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke says that if he becomes president he will:
-Ban all semi-automatic firearms -Will push for unconstitutional red flag laws, which allows for firearm confiscation without due process -Will look into creating a national gun registry pic.twitter.com/oP7gYu0Mco
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “While teaching, Warren worked on about 60 legal matters, far more than she’d previously disclosed.” Including advising Getty Oil and Dow Chemical. New York Magazine looks at her rise to third place:
Elizabeth Warren has emerged as the solidly third-place candidate behind Biden and Bernie Sanders. That’s evident in horse-race polls: In the Real Clear Politics average of national surveys, she’s at around 10 percent, comfortably ahead of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, with the rest of the field (including the steadily fading Beto O’Rourke) not making much of an impression so far.
It’s harder to get a grip on the infrequently polled early states, though Warren does seem to be running a bit behind her national averages in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. But on the other hand, she has invested the most of any candidate in early-state staff and infrastructure, and has an especially impressive organization in Iowa, as the New York Times reported earlier this month:
[Warren has] about 50 paid staff members … already on the ground in Iowa, far more than any other Democratic candidate is known to have hired in the state. The growing Warren juggernaut reflects a bet that rapidly hiring a large staff of organizers will give the senator an advantage over her rivals who are ramping up their efforts at a slower pace.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile at The Cut. Including this nugget: “Alannis Morissette wrote and recorded a song for Williamson’s campaign, titled, ‘Today.'” Which reminds me that it’s been 20 years since Dogma came out…
“MATH” hats. Fox News. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Andrew Yang knows how to run an insurgent presidential campaign. The 44-year-old candidate, once barely known outside New York and Silicon Valley, is now leader of the “Yang Gang,” a growing following of online fans and IRL admirers rallying to Yang’s campaign cry of “humanity first.”
Yang is now outpolling seasoned pols like Kirsten Gillibrand, averaging 1% in recent surveys. Despite being “neither popular nor well-known,” as a FiveThirtyEight story puts it, he’s disturbing the forces of the Democratic establishment. His rallies are attracting thousands of people. A two-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February garnered almost 3 million views. He’s winning over betting markets, which have given the long-shot candidate 2.3% odds at taking the White House, besting senator Corey Booker and Texas phenom Beto O’Rourke. Despite his distance from Washington, Yang’s surge shows that a candidate seemingly assembled from the musings of a Silicon Valley Reddit thread can take on the Democratic establishment.
Yang’s done it in part by stealing the most effective tactics from Trump’s electoral victory. Need a visible symbol for your followers? Sell $30 MATH hats (“Make America Think Harder”) and own the meme game. Need to vanquish better-known primary opponents? Flood every media outlet that will give you an interview. No one is talking about a controversial, radical idea? Turn it into your signature issue, rechristening universal basic income, a guaranteed payment to every American, as a $1,000 “freedom dividend” (and force primary rivals like Bernie Sanders and O’Rourke to come out against it). As other candidates play it safe, Yang doubles down on policies that no reasonable wonk would touch, and promotes them on Republican turf such as Fox News (a tactic his fellow long-shot candidates have adopted).
Quibble: Doing better than rock-bottom does not, in fact, constitute “winning.” Yang is running an interesting campaign that’s attracting more than expected attention because the expectations were zero. Whether this can translate into actually winning delegates in primaries remains to be seen.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running (and I’ve even gone back and put in names that were mentioned as possibilities for running that I’ve dropped, just for the sake of completeness):
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This week: Texas legislative news, foreign elections, and a surprising amount on analog synthesizers…
Theresa May is out as British Prime Minister effective June 7. The only reason she’s not the worst prime minister of the last century is that she didn’t give Czechoslovakia to Hitler…
Even before [EU Parliamentary] election results are known on Sunday, therefore, there’s a growing sense that the Brexit party may be a permanent factor in British politics. Opinion polls on how people would vote in a general election show that the party would do less well than in European elections but still run about level with the Tories and Labour. There are deep divisions on policy apart from Brexit that have allowed critics to argue that the party would fall apart once its main goal had been achieved. But the divisions don’t seem deeper than those of other parties, and power or its prospect is itself a unifying social glue. Farage’s rallies around the country are hugely successful — packed, good-humored, more diverse socially and politically than those of the other parties, full of confidence and optimism, and notably without rancor. As with Trump’s election rallies, people seem to find them enjoyable as well as genuinely serious. A kind of Brexit party spirit already exists with many different types of people happy to be together on the bandwagon. It seems less class-bound than any of the existing parties.
And if the Brexit party wins one-third or more of Britain’s votes this week from a standing start, it will change British politics. Such a result would have the effect of a second referendum victory for Leave. It simply would not be possible for Parliament and the mainstream parties to push through a Brexit that doesn’t get the effective consent of Farage and his party. If such a thing is attempted, it will be seen to be anti-democratic and will have to be abandoned quite quickly. It would force the EU to confront the fact that there is little chance of getting a deal like May’s withdrawal deal accepted, and that even if one were to make it into the statute book, it could never be effectively implemented. In those circumstances the EU might simply throw up its collective hands and declare that the U.K. has left without a deal.
The third effect of a Farage success in the European elections would be to realign political parties and, in particular, to place the Conservative party in mortal peril. Voting for a political party is a matter of both loyalty and habit. For lifelong Tories, the idea of voting for another party is anathema. Most people who think about it never actually get around to doing it. But the Tories have certainly given their traditional supporters and those new supporters who voted for them in order to achieve Brexit good reason to leave them on this occasion. Many will do so this week. And as with adultery, betraying your party for another is much easier the second time around.
Well:
….during the 2016 Presidential election. The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information….
….Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.” @PressSec
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) May 10, 2019
“A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally.”
Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is a rarity: an actual pro-life Democrat. When Edwards’ wife was “20 weeks pregnant with their first child, a doctor discovered their daughter had spina bifida and encouraged an abortion. The Edwardses refused. Now, daughter Samantha is married and working as a school counselor, and Edwards finds himself an outlier in polarized abortion politics.”
A succinct summary from across the pond:
WOW – This “Guy” Gets It!
This “Guy” Is Nigel Evans – A Conservative British Politician Who Stands Up & Let’s Everyone Know WHY The People Voted For Brexit & Donald Trump!!
If you look at what China is targeting in retaliatory tariffs, it’s obvious their hand is incredibly weak:
But based on what we know, what’s even more revealing about China’s choices are the U.S.-made products that haven’t made any tariff list. They include civilian aircraft and their engines and parts, which had a 2018 export total of $17.73 billion. They include semiconductors and their components, which last year had China shipments that totaled several billion additional dollars. They include the equipment needed to manufacture and inspect semiconductors and their parts, which racked up at least $850 million in 2018 exports to China; devices for conducting chemical and physical analyses (with $912 million in China exports last year); laser equipment ($304 million), motor vehicles, auto parts, and plastics resins and polymers (which each produced billions in exports to China); and billions of dollars’ worth of other products that the Chinese either can’t (yet) make or can’t make in the amounts that they need—or that consist of goods preferred by Chinese consumers over their Made in China counterparts.
As I’ve said before, semiconductor equipment is an area where it’s all but impossible for the Chinese to do without American technology.
Narendra Modi wins reelection in India. Forcing Pakistan to stand down over Kashmir probably clinched the victory for him. Modi’s Hindu ethononationalism is not good for India in the long-run, but he’s probably someone President Trump can trust to be a staunch ally against Islamic terrorism. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The election was an outright disaster for Rahul Gandhi, “the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and leader of India’s Congress party,” which is down to 52 seats as opposed to 303 for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. (Remember that Indira Gandhi was the daughter on India’s first prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and is not related to Mahatma Gandhi.)
“60% of male managers are ‘uncomfortable‘ working around women,” a 32% increase over last year. You mean they don’t want false accusations of sexual harassment to derail their careers? Way to go feminists! Once again you’ve made things worse for women living in the real world!
People have known that Chinese manufacturer Huawei has been stealing American intellectual property for at least seven years. Former congressman Mike Rogers: “If I were an American company today, and I’ll tell you this as the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and you are looking at Huawei, I would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America.”
How computer security is actually handled in the wild:
I recently talked with an enterprise security auditor who often finds overseas staff names are just “persona identities” that real humans cycle through using. When someone there quits, someone else inherits their VPN login credentials. Hides staff turnover from customer network.
UK foreign minister to Iran: “Bitch, you try to throw down on T-Dog, he gonna go HAM upside yo dome!” Of course I’m paraphrasing a bit…
Good news! It looks like Texas taxpayers will finally be getting some meaningful property tax relief, to the tune of $5 billion, or half the projected surplus. (Kids, if you have any friends in California or Illinois, try to explain to them what a “budget surplus” is.) This follows months of waffling.
Coordinated Instagram troll farm attack on Trump. So the next time you see a Trump-Putin meme, be sure to post that link and ask “How the trolling, Trolly McTrollFace?”
Speaking of trolls: Twitter Permanently Bans Anti-Trump Krassenstein Brothers” for “operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions.” The overwhelming majority of conservatives I follow think Twitter should lift the ban so these idiots can keep talking, but it will be nice to no longer see these morons as the top reply on every Trump tweet.
Speaking of legal fees, Harvey Weinstein will reportedly pay $44 million to settle various sexual harassment/etc. lawsuits, the money evidently coming from insurance, but will still face criminal prosecution over at least two sexual assault allegations.
“Florida man hid legless fugitive girlfriend in plastic tote.” She sounds like a real winner: “Anderson was wanted for failing to appear in court on charges including false imprisonment related to a 2015 incident when she allegedly held people hostage at a Burger King with a BB gun. It ended in a shooting with police and she lost both legs.”
Speaking of lunatics: “Trump is the devil!” Genuine loon, or suicide by cop? You make the call. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Followup: “Medieval Sex Cult at Center of German Crossbow Murder Mystery. Police now say a German sex guru specializing in medieval bondage directed lesbian sex slaves in bizarre murder-suicide.”
De Blasio and Bullock are In, which means I’m now tracking 24 declared Democratic Presidential candidates. That’s enough to field both side of a football team, plus Mike Gravel as the coach and Beto O’Rourke as the towel boy. It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Reuters finds Biden up five points since their last poll: Biden 29, Sanders 13, O’Rourke 6, Warren 6, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, Booker 2, Klobucher 1, Gillibrand 1, Hickenlooper 1, Castro 1, Yang 1, Inslee 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, de Blasio 1. That’s one more than I ever expected for de Blasio…
Fox: Biden 35 (up 4), Sanders 17, Warren 9, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, O’Rourke 4, Booker 3, Castro 2, Klobucher 2, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Inslee 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. I think two percent is a record for Castro.
Quinnipiac Pennsylvania: Biden 39, Sanders 13, Warren 8, Harris 8, Buttigieg 6, Booker 5, O’Rourke 2, Klobucher 1. Relatively good showing for Booker, but state polls tend to be more volatile.
Rich Lowry wonders if President Donald Trump has, paradoxically, driven Democrats sane.
What if Donald Trump hasn’t driven Democrats insane, sending them into a spiral of self-defeating radicalism, but instead made them shockingly pragmatic?
Biden’s early strength suggests it may be the latter, that the reaction to Trump is so intense that it has crossed some sort of event horizon from fevered fantasy of his leaving office early via resignation or impeachment to a cold-eyed, win-at-any-cost practicality.
If this is true, one of the exogenous factors that could appreciably increase Trump’s odds of reelection — a zany Democratic nomination contest leading to a nominee much too far left for the American electorate — may not materialize.
Snip.
If hardly dispositive, Biden’s robust numbers at least suggest that this play is more likely than it seemed in the very early going, when candidates were stumbling over one another apologizing for sundry alleged offenses in the Woke Olympics.
If that’s not going to be the true dynamic of the race, I’m as surprised as anyone. What’s extraordinary, though, is that almost every Democratic candidate might have been misreading it as well, and chasing the wrong rabbit down the track.
Certainly, Bernie Sanders dominated the intellectual and policy debate in the wake of his 2016 run, driving other presidential candidates to embrace his signature proposals. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a genuine political star.
It’s only because the center of gravity of the party has clearly moved left that Biden, always a standard liberal, now sounds like a centrist when he calls himself an Obama-Biden Democrat.
But, as Harry Enten of CNN, among others, has been insisting for some time, the average Democrat is older, more moderate or conservative, and less likely to have a college degree than you’d guess from following Twitter or cable TV.
These voters were underserved by the rest of the field, and Biden is taking dead aim at them with the simple message that he can beat Trump.
Others suggest that the size of the field highlights vulnerabilities of the two candidates now topping the polls, former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Biden has started strong, but it’s too early to judge his candidacy. Front-runners never coast to victory, and he will face adversity, whether self-inflicted or delivered by a rival who rises to the moment.
One risk for Democrats is that, with so many candidates and so many voices, side debates distract from core issues and unifying messages. The debate over reparations sparks passions within the Democratic base but is not an issue high on the list of most voters who will determine who is the next president. The same is even more true of the issue of whether violent felons, terrorists or sexual predators should be allowed to vote while in prison, a topic recently injected into the Democratic conversation by Sanders.
At least 10 states are planning to switch from a caucus to a primary in 2020. As things stand, just two states — Iowa and Nevada — have firm plans to caucus again. Two other 2016 caucus states — Maine and Wyoming — are still up in the air. Maine lawmakers may establish a government-run primary, in which case the Maine Democratic Party plans to move to a primary. And Wyoming Democrats are still ironing out some details.
“I think it’s also critical to understand, as I’ve been telling candidates who have come to see me,” she said last week, “you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.”
One third of that statement is true — she was the nominee; two thirds are not. Hillary Clinton did not run the best campaign. Her campaign was a disaster. She was a disaster. She insulted half of the electorate by calling them “deplorables” even before the first vote was cast.
“So, part of our challenge is to understand what it will take to put together not only the popular vote, but the Electoral College,” she added.
That is good advice. It is also advice she should have given herself in 2016 when, capturing the popular vote, she lost the Electoral College to Trump.
And via Reuters, here’s a handy visual guide to the clown car:
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Blah blah blah abortion blah blah blah. But she did finally pay off the $54,000 she owed the IRS, as well as student and credit card debt. Which shows that attention=money, so why wouldn’t she run for President?
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out. Somehow I missed the fact that Avenatti endorsed Biden after he entered the race. I’m sure Biden is just thrilled at that endorsement.
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Far-left group Demand Justice is already running attack ads against him for voting for too many of Trump’s judicial nominees. Demand Justice is being run by Brian Fallon, who was press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. Makes you go “Hmmmmm.”
A January poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative. In contrast, 53 percent of Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate.
That raises the question of whether the party’s center of gravity lies less with vocal activists than with a quieter group of voters that is less likely to join Twitter or show up at campaign events. “His candidacy may be different,” says Biden’s campaign pollster John Anzalone, “But it is the one that is working.”
The Democratic Party of 2019 does not look much like Joe Biden. Women, African-American, Latino and Asian voters are all much more likely to say they support Democratic candidates than Republican ones. White voters, male voters and especially white male voters generally support Republicans.
Statistics on who votes Democratic also suggest that the Democratic Party is more diverse than the experts deciding who is electable.
Those assumptions about electability reflect entrenched biases more than political science, and have a dash of arrogance to boot. An electable candidate, the thinking goes, has to be authentic and broadly appealing. But authenticity itself is coded as white and male when it’s defined by white men.
“Shut up and eat your intersectionality, white patriarchal oppressor!”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS profile; expect to read the Hassan Washington anecdote in every Booker profile. Plus an NPR interview. I’m just assuming the Booker campaign has friends at NPR.
According to Morning Consult data from the first quarter of 2019, Bullock is among the 15 most popular governors in the country, and one of the top Democrats to make the list (13 out of the top 15 most popular governors are Republicans; the other Democrat is Delaware governor John Carney). But that fact makes Bullock’s decision to run for president a bit more puzzling.
In a field of 23 candidates, where Biden continues to lead the pack by double digits in many polls, it’s hard to imagine the Montana governor will have an easy time making an impression on primary voters. But it’s much easier to imagine Bullock putting up a decent fight against Republican senator Steve Daines, who is up for re-election in 2020.
In a May 8 tweet, he said, “As the only Democrat to win statewide re-election in a Trump state in 2016, I know firsthand: we must reach out to rural voters.”
And this message might resonate. As we know from polls, many Democratic voters think it’s a very important consideration to nominate a candidate who can beat President Trump, and as a white man, Bullock may benefit from perceptions that he is “electable.” But he has empirical evidence for it, too: He has won three statewide elections in red, heavily rural Montana — one for attorney general and two for governor. In 2016, he won his second gubernatorial term with 50 percent of the vote, 15 points more than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a town hall on Fox. “Mayor Pete and the Order of the Kong: How Buttigieg’s Harvard pals helped spur his rise in politics.” One of those friends was “Joe Green, who was Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate.” Yep, just good old ordinary, salt-of-the-earth Mayor Pete…
Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. See my previous post on how he sucks and everyone hates him. (And honestly, actually running on the slogan “De Blasio 2020: He Sucks And Everyone Hates Him” would actually probably earn him more votes than he would get otherwise.) I note that his official Presidential website has exactly zero links to the actual policies he’s running on. Jonah Goldberg calls him “the Sponge of Woke Platitudes“:
The reason it is very unlikely that de Blasio will replicate the success of Donald Trump in the Democratic primaries is that he cannot offer any contrasts that matter. He isn’t entertaining, he’s tiresome. He isn’t charismatic, he’s unctuous. He talks like the president of a small liberal-arts college, spouting clichés plucked from a flier on an assistant professor of Peace Studies’ door. He seems convinced that the glassy expression on the faces of the students and faculty in the audience is awe, not a soul-numbing tedium that is a few desperate heartbeats away from resorting to self-harm just to feel something again.
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. But the plea deal he cut on four of five charges with the Florida Ethics Commission is starting to look pretty smart now that new indictments are raining down on his associates.
At first, they just wanted Gravel to run so he could perform the same function he did in his longshot 2008 campaign – yell at the other candidates on stage and push them as far left as possible, especially on an anti-war foreign policy.
But at this point, nobody can rule anything out when it comes to election outcomes.
“We’re running to win, of course, but we don’t expect to win,” Oks told the Forward. “I don’t think Mike expects to become president – it would probably be a hitch in some of his plans.”
But earning enough donations and poll support to get him on the debate stage, he explained, would allow Gravel to “put forth criticism of war and the military industrial complex, and even domestic policy, that hasn’t been seen in many decades, even more radical than Bernie.”
Pushing the Democrats even further left? There’s no way that could possibly backfire…
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She wants to increase regulation on business, because that’s a surefire ticket for economic growth. “Klobuchar’s plan also calls for updating the tax code to support ‘gig workers’ by establishing a national paid leave program, mandatory sick leave and portable retirement savings accounts, funded by employers.” Thus ignoring the fact that the reason a “gig economy” exists at all is that government regulations have made regular full-time employees too expensive so expensive to hire.
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “Mike Gravel Can’t Believe His Polling Numbers Neck-And-Neck With Fucking Nobody Like Wayne Messam.”
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “O’Rourke stocks campaign with Obama and Clinton alums.” No names I’m familiar with. “O’Rourke’s recent hires come after the departure of Becky Bond and Zack Malitz, two senior strategists who worked on O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential effort — both evangelists for the distributed organizing model.” Snip. “[Jen] O’Malley Dillon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and deputy campaign manager to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, is bringing on a roster of staffers with long experience in the Democratic Party.” Pledges to “decriminalize truancy, address fines on parents.” That would be an interesting policy proposal…if he were running for the El Paso school board.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “An Our Revolution Staffer Fired For ‘Anti-Immigrant’ Remarks Is Suing The Pro-Bernie Group For Racial Discrimination.” As usual, “anti-immigration” is code for suggesting illegal aliens shouldn’t get government benefits. The staffer in question was part of the black outreach team. Also checkout this bedwetting overreaction from Our Revolution’s former political director Erika Andiola: “I became sick to my stomach and could not stop crying all night.” If hearing contrary opinions makes you ill and depressed, maybe you shouldn’t be working in politics. “Bernie Sanders is challenging two cherished theories of electability.”
One of those theories is beloved by self-styled centrists, and has served as a way to gate-keep against more liberal candidates. It argues that Americans are ideological moderates who punish political parties for nominating candidates too far to the left or right.
The other is beloved by leftists, and has served as a cudgel against more centrist candidates. It holds that there’s a vast working-class majority out there for any candidate willing to slough off the Democratic Party’s turn to corporatism, free trade, and identity politics and recapture the economic populism that made the New Deal Democrats dominant for a generation.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. “In the six years since Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) began earning the big salary that comes with being a member of Congress he has failed to pay down his student loans, cashed out his pension, and accumulated credit card debt.” Maybe a guy who can’t manage his own finances shouldn’t be managing America’s…
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. R.S. McCain thinks Warren is over: “My guess would be that, after the first round of debates, Warren will fade and Harris will rise, because Harris is black and is obviously better qualified than the other black candidate, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Such is the logic of identity politics, in which Democrats are heavily invested.” I expect that this is premature, especially with Warren also making a play for the hard left Sanders voters. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren Has A Plan For Everything — Including Your Love Life.”
For all the praise The New Republic is heaping on her opioid crisis plan, it just sounds like more federal government money airdrops.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Heh: “‘Tom Perez Is Such a Goddamned Weenie’: What Marianne Williamson’s Candidacy Reveals About the Democrats.” After noting Oprah’s not running:
Yet one of Oprah’s star guests, Marianne Williamson, is running—and has beat out several conventional politicians, including Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton and Colorado senator Michael Bennet, to qualify for the first D.N.C.-sponsored debate. That Williamson has qualified is irritating to some of her opponents—not because of who she is, but because of the rules that could make her one of the 20 contenders appearing on the prime-time stage: candidates need to score at least one percent in three certified polls or collect donations from 65,000 different people.
Marianne Williamson deserves some serious attention, and not just because she’s written four books that hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. At a time when the leftward drift of the Democratic Party is regularly in the news, she is by any measure the most rigorously progressive candidate in the field of 23. That she wraps her progressivism in a syncretic spirituality instead of socialist materialism may even be an advantage for a politician in this God-haunted country of ours.
Pick an issue, and odds are Williamson is going to out-Bernie Bernie and out-Warren Warren. She’s for Medicare For All, unsurprisingly, but she’s also for heavy investments in preventive medicine and nutritional education, and a pretty heavy regulatory arm on those she feels are poisoning our bodies, including those who produce “high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats.” So far as I can tell, she’s the only candidate committed to reducing national stress levels, too.
And one at The Hill: “Those who say who can and cannot win now are the same people who were telling us that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in three years ago.”
Over and over again when I ask people who identify as members of “the Yang Gang” what attracted them to Yang, they cite Silicon Valley’s preferred solution to our economic woes: universal basic income (UBI) or, as he calls it, “the Freedom Dividend.” Yang argues that technology is going to eat up millions of jobs over the coming decade, wiping out everything from retail workers to truckers. “How many of you have seen the self-service kiosk at McDonald’s or another fast food restaurant?” Yang asks. “You kind of like them. I kind of like them too.” The only solution to this inevitability, Yang argues, is giving every American, beginning at age 18, $1,000 a month. He’d fund it by upping taxes on technology companies.
Yang has translated his unlikely background and platform into something of a cult following, centered around men under the age of 40. The idea that anyone except the occasional oddball would thrill to carrying signs with the word “MATH” emblazoned on them — which stands for Make America Think Harder — may feel like a stretch in the United States, where an anti-intellectual streak is writ large, and our current president is prone to saying such things as, “I love the poorly educated.” But when people attending the rally talk about UBI, it feels more personal. “It makes a lot of sense, because a lot of Americans are struggling,” said Keegan Steinke, 24, a canvasser for a solar company. “It provides a safety net for everyone, and it doesn’t provide these perverse incentives like, ‘Okay, I made this much, I might lose these benefits,’ ” said Elliott Ribner, 32, a software engineer.
Viewed from a great distance, Yang’s candidacy has a lot in common with the two political comets that streaked across the 2016 presidential campaign: Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. Yang runs essentially the same playbook: embracing economic grievance, hammering the tech giants and other darlings of the “new economy,” selling his case directly to the working American. Since he launched his campaign in November 2017, he has been retailing a vision of America in which educated, entitled elites have rigged the system and hoovered money away from middle America and toward the coasts, giving little in return. With no prior political experience or prominent backers, Yang is nonetheless gaining a peculiar traction, including some true believers who want him to be president and others who are mostly just intrigued.
Unlike Trump and Sanders, however, Yang, 44, comes precisely from the same corporate, tech-soaked world he is trying to attack. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, he made his money prepping students to get into MBA programs and, in recent years, has spent months at a time living in Silicon Valley. He was once a successful startup CEO and head of a group that trains budding entrepreneurs, but in the wake of 2016 presidential election Yang soured on an industry that wreaths itself in promises of prosperity and transformation; he rejects the conventional policy wisdom—popular on the left and the right—that out-of-work Americans should retrain for jobs in tech. And in a Democratic Party reveling in its diversity, the Taiwanese-American candidate says he worries most about how displaced white men will react to their declining fortunes—a stance that has, strangely, won him some fans from the “alt-right.“
I did not intimately track every step of the Australian election, but it seems that Labor campaigned in large measure on that holy shibboleth of transnational leftism, climate change. By contrast, in 2017, “Morrison addressed the House of Representatives while holding a lump of coal, stating ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you,’ and accusing those concerned about the environmental impact of the coal industry of having ‘an ideological, pathological fear of coal.'”
Labor’s policies mirror those of the America’s Democrats in another way, in that they’ve made a huge stink about the “rights” of illegal aliens entering Australia. In 2009, with Labor in power and the Liberals out, Morrison became shadow minister for immigration and citizenship, urging a policy of strict immigration enforcement, which he continued to follow as actual minister when the Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party kicked out Labor in 2013, before becoming Prime Minister in 2018 following a “leadership spill” which resulted in Liberal Party Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (who had replaced Abbott in another “spill” in 2015) stepping down. So it’s rather like the director of ICE becoming President.
And once again a left-leaning party has lost an “unloseable” election that polls said was in the bag. Why, it’s almost as though modern “scientific” polling has a built in bias against conservative parties!
Keep that in mind (yet again) the next time someone confidently predicts victory for a left-wing party or candidate based on polls…
Like watching the Titanic plot a course directly into the iceberg, political observers from all points of the spectrum have watched the impending disaster of a Bill de Blasio presidential run with morbid fascination. Now, against the advice of just about everyone outside his inner circle (and a few in it), the New York City mayor has launched his Presidential campaign.
After nearly half a year of hemming and hawing, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday entered the 2020 presidential race, becoming the 23rd Democrat to join the jam-packed field.
The termed-out politician, known for his habitual tardiness, finally decided to run after five months of toying with a White House bid.
“I’m Bill de Blasio and I’m running for president because it’s time we put working people first,” the mayor said in a three-minute YouTube video announcing his candidacy.
The opening shots include de Blasio zipping around the city in the back of an SUV — his gas-guzzling choice of transportation for the 11-mile jaunt from Gracie Mansion to the gym in Park Slope.
That’s about as kind as the media coverage of de Blasio gets. A National Review piece earlier this month captured the general tenor of pieces about de Blasio’s presidential chances:
New York is a town that enjoys a good quarrel, but it’s all but impossible to find someone to argue, “I love Bill de Blasio.” Rarely do you meet anyone who can even tolerate Bill de Blasio. If you must have an argument about Bill de Blasio, you need to ask a crowd, “Why do you hate Bill de Blasio?” To this, everyone has something to say.
At 6-foot-6, de Blasio may be the world’s largest twerp, unmistakably large but barely in charge. New Yorkers, for a change, line up with the rest of America on this. As de Blasio reportedly readies a hilariously futile run for president, he sits at 0 percent in Iowa. He’s at 0 percent in New Hampshire. A Quinnipiac poll taken in March showed that, among New Yorkers, he is the least popular presidential candidate in the immense field. In that survey, the former Warren Wilhelm Jr. scored a favorability/unfavorability rating of 24/49, the lowest of any Democrat in New York, that approval rating being lower than Donald Trump’s, which is 28. A different New Hampshire poll that asked voters to plump for anyone they liked for president elicited mentions of Barack Obama, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Howard Schultz, and even, on a handful of occasions, Kirsten Gillibrand, but 0 percent mentioned De Blasio. In a New Hampshire appearance, de Blasio recently found himself in a panel discussion comprising 14 people that drew only six spectators. Rule of thumb for political superstars: You aren’t one if, at age 57, the crowd on your stage dwarfs the crowd in the audience.
Then again the “No one likes Bill de Blasio and he’s an idiot for running for President” genre is wide, rich and deep:
If there’s one person who can unite this nation, it’s New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who likes to prattle on about his transcendent, historic vision and who (polls confirm) roughly nobody wants running for president after he’s flirted with the idea for months, but who The New York Daily News reported Friday will announce as soon as next week that he’s joining the absurdly crowded Democratic field—where he’d be the only one of 23 declared candidates with a negative favorability rating.
I was tempted to propose a New York to America: Take our mayor, please, joke, but 76 percent of New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run. Politico New York surveyed 30-odd members of Team de Blasio, and all but two said it was a bad idea, with one calling it “fucking insane.”
The mayor is the consummate special-interest politician; his latest pay-to-play scandal is for the city to pay an above-market price for a portfolio of homeless hotels owned by a family with a key donor connection to the mayor. In a hypothetical debate with the current president – extremely hypothetical at this point, to be sure – de Blasio would have no moral authority to take on Trump’s own shady real estate practices.
De Blasio, despite his rhetoric, has never been a good radical; he’s too beholden to the local fundraising machine. But he’s also not a good technocrat: key initiatives to turn around underperforming high schools and help people with mental illnesses have failed, with the mayor barely noticing. It’s not clear which path, ultimately, Democratic primary voters will choose, but they would seem to want one of these two choices – and the mayor fits neither bill.
As de Blasio weighs entering the 2020 race, the prospect of a President de Blasio has been met with widespread derision. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard termed his interest in the presidency an “embarrassing quest for national fame,” while the mayor’s own allies (anonymously) told Politico that his flirtation with a presidential run was “fucking insane.” De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, has said the “timing is not exactly right” for him to launch a campaign. The New York Times, which seems to take gleeful pleasure in dinging de Blasio for everything from calling errant snow days to ostentatiously hanging around Iowa, recently noted that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has generated far more presidential buzz than the mayor of the country’s biggest city. Even in his hometown, there seems to be only one person who thinks a de Blasio presidential campaign would be anything other than a joke: de Blasio himself.
The human ego is a powerful beast that grows luxuriant in the soul of career politicians. We are seeing an egregious example in the proto-presidential campaign of New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who, according to the New York Times, is bulling ahead toward a formal candidacy despite multiple indicators that it’s a very bad idea….
There have been so signs of any craving for a de Blasio candidacy on the trail so far. His first two recent trips to Iowa have been, in a word, fiascoes (his first, last December, was marked by NYPD protests, and during the second, in February, he was stranded in a blizzard at a Super 8 motel and dined on a gas-station burrito). He hasn’t been listed in most 2020 polls, and his peak performance in any has been a booming one percent.
It’s hard to discern any path to the White House for Hizzoner. Let’s say he can revive his sagging reputation as a fighting progressive. Is he really going to challenge Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris in that “lane”? None of the early states would strike you as de Blasio Country, unless New York chooses to have a relatively early primary next year (it was in April in 2016, and the legislature has yet to set a 2020 date). But then again, it’s not like New York is a hotbed of BDB ’20 enthusiasm. Au contraire, as the Daily News noted after a new Quinnipiac poll of his constituents was released this very week:
A whopping 76% of New Yorkers polled said de Blasio should not run for president — with just 18% supporting a bid. The feeling was as universal among New Yorkers as their contempt for bagels sliced like bread — every single party, gender, racial group, borough and age group polled agreed Hizzoner should not run.
Those polled didn’t just think the potential run was a bad idea — they thought it would be bad for New York City, by a margin of 47% to 32%, the poll found.
The specter of President Bill de Blasio has attracted ridicule, from his would-be constituents and from the media—back in January, for example, the NY Times cuttingly said, of BdB’s theoretical run, that he “remains an afterthought” in the deepening pool of Democratic candidates, “if he is thought of at all.”
Yet none of that has deterred our mayor from coyly glad-handing, a practice that does not sit well with New Yorkers. In a Quinnipiac University poll published Thursday, New York City residents surveyed gave him the lowest score of all the Democratic hopefuls: 48 percent have an unfavorable opinion of de Blasio. And de Blasio’s statewide favorability rating is at an all-time low since taking office in 2014, according to Mary Snow, polling analyst for the Quinnipiac University Poll.
New Yorkers think a congresswoman who isn’t even eligible for the White House would be a better president than Mayor Bill de Blasio, a new poll suggests. Just 5 percent of Empire State voters picked the Democratic mayor when asked who among New York’s political stars would make the best president, according to the Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
That’s the lowest share among the five names included in the poll. Even U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez — who at 29 isn’t even old enough to be president — did better, with 7 percent of voters saying she would be the best fit.
A rich, rich genre.
The Tweets have been equally savage.
The Dems are getting another beauty to join their group. Bill de Blasio of NYC, considered the worst mayor in the U.S., will supposedly be making an announcement for president today. He is a JOKE, but if you like high taxes & crime, he’s your man. NYC HATES HIM!
I rarely get political but I this is an absolute JOKE. As a NYer I can tell you Bill de Blasio is the WORST mayor and has done incredible damage to this city. I’d 🤣 if I weren’t so 😡 The only bright side is this might finally free us of us horrible reign… https://t.co/YIzb04U4QI
Lanley's the name, and Iowa caucusing's the game. I just blew into town from Cedar Rapids to talk to you fine folks of Gotham about the surefire president-making miracle of saturation ad buys in the Hawkeye State! pic.twitter.com/jTZXu6eB52
You know, a candidate in Iowa with unspent ad money's a little like the mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it, and danged if he knows how to use it!
As I wrote when his name was first floated: “De Blasio is widely loathed with no national base and no notable fundraising prowess. Other than that he’s in good shape.” I’ve seen nothing from him since to change my mind. A de Blasio presidential campaign isn’t going to be a dumpster fire, it’s going to be a parade of dumpster fires, and all we can do is sit back and bask in the warmth…
Biden’s still up big, O’Rourke’s freefall continues, Yang threatens to PowerPoint the nation, and get ready for the Gravalanche! It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
18 of the declared Democratic nominees for President have met the minimum threshold to appear in the first debate, either by garnering donations from 65,000 individuals or scoring at least 1% in three or more polls: Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris, Warren, O’Roruke, Yang, Biden, Booker, Castro, Gabbard, Klobuchard (both), Delaney, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, Ryan, Swalwell (polls), and Marianne Williamson (donations). (Hat tip: BruceTheGay.)
Late yesterday afternoon I raised the possibility that the hype surrounding Pete Buttigieg is peaking. He’s back to modest single digits in most national polls after a quick rise and very few African-Americans are attending his events, even in places such as Orangeburg, S.C. Young, well-educated, ambitious, and articulate, Buttigieg may well be a boutique candidate who mostly appeals to one important but not quite decisive demographic: the kinds of people who end up covering the Democratic presidential primary for major news organizations.
Since formally announcing his presidential run, Joe Biden has enjoyed leads in national polls of 21, 32, 30, 26, and 24 percentage points ahead of Bernie Sanders. Perhaps this will turn out to be a short-term bump, but the people currently preferring Biden probably feel like they know him well. He’s a familiar and liked face amidst a crowd of strangers.
Biden doesn’t need the formal endorsement of Barack Obama because he’s already received the clearest de-facto endorsement imaginable: Obama wanted Biden in the Oval Office if he ever died or was incapacitated. Obama effectively made his 2020 presidential endorsement in the summer of 2008.
And if Biden does become the 2020 Democratic nominee . . . the ramifications will be hilarious. After all the talk of the most diverse group of candidates in American history, and for all the identity-politics obsession gripping the party, the Democratic nominee would be a (very) old, straight, white male. Post-Obama Democratic politics would not be focused on a Generation X or Millennial figure, but (sigh) yet another Baby Boomer.
Also: “For all of the talk of the Democrats’ move towards socialism, the nominee would be a figure from the party’s establishment, who’s done the bidding of Delaware’s banking industry and credit-card companies for most of his career.”
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. No news on a presidential run, but he does deride “flyover country” in an interview. Though he’s got this right: “When you hear specific left-leaning Democratic candidates and progressive candidates talking about these buffet tables they want to set up of public policy without one word about how they’re going to pay for it. That’s what’s going to kill them.”
He is a very thoughtful and pragmatic liberal who works well with colleagues on both sides. He has held important posts in state and local government and the executive branch. In 2010 he was one of the few Democrats from a competitive state to stave off the Republican Tea party surge. He likely would win a general election and — better than most others — navigate the almost impossibly polarized environment in Washington.
Snip.
He lacks the lengthy experience, contacts and warmth of Joe Biden; the new generational appeal of Pete Buttigieg or Beto O’Rourke; the ideological passion of Bernie Sanders — and if it’s the year of the woman, the gender of Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.
The poor guy has disregarded all the advice and decided to run anyway. And initial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.
The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.
Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He criticized Warren’s calls to break up Facebook. “We do not need a president that is going to use their own personal beliefs and tell you which companies we should break up. We need a president that’s going to enforce antitrust laws in this country.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. His staff unionized. Decoding Castro’s vibe in Massachusetts: “This guy is class, this guy is smart, this guy is funny, this guy is a politician….Castro is young, energetic and exudes a positivity and kindness. I liked him.” If this piece were a supermarket product, it would be I Can’t Believe It’s Not Content.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But Ann Althouse says never say never. “It’s a joke until it happens. DJT was a joke until it happened. The funniest thing may be the most likely thing.”
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: All But In. Random New Yorkers are actually going up to him in the street and yelling at him not to run.
By mid-2016, Gabbard committed the ultimate party heresy: She very publicly resigned from her position as Democratic National Committee vice chair at the peak of the primary battle to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders after months of internally accusing DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of corruptly violating the DNC’s duty of neutrality by favoring Hillary Clinton. Her accusation was later vindicated through emails published by WikiLeaks, Wasserman Schultz’s resignation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s own “rigging” accusation, and current DNC Chair Donna Brazile’s book, which caused Gabbard to publicly repeat her allegations of the DNC’s “unethical rigging” of the primary in favor of Clinton.
Gabbard has compiled a record on domestic policy questions that places her squarely within the left populist wing of the party — from advocating Medicare for All, a national $15 an hour minimum wage, various free college programs, and even participating in anti-pipeline Standing Rock protests in North Dakota. Yet her aggressive criticisms of the pieties of the bipartisan foreign policy community — particularly her harsh criticism of regime change operations from Iraq and Libya, to Syria and Venezuela, and her warnings about escalating tensions with Russia and China and the dangers of a “new Cold War” — have further cemented her status as party outsider and heretic from the perspective of Washington Democratic insiders.
She also says the mainstream media is ignoring her. Well, they are when they’re not attacking her…
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. CNN gives her one of those a day in the life of a candidate story, the sort where we’re supposed to find her morning workout routine charming rather than annoying, and which would be pretty fawning if it didn’t bring up the fact she’s sucking so hard:
But there is a harsh irony to this upbeat attitude: Gillibrand’s campaign, despite the joy, has gone nowhere since she announced earlier this year. The senator’s polls are sagging — a recent Monmouth University poll found her with less than 1% in New Hampshire, she has yet to hit the fundraising threshold outlined by the Democratic National Committee — a mark that a series of lesser known candidates have met, and people coming to her events have begun to worry she is being engulfed by the massive field of Democrats.
Addition: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. After dismissing him as a joke campaign a month ago, I have come to the reluctantly conclusion that I need to include the 88 year-old gadfly in this roundup. Not because I think he can win, but because his campaign chances and activities look no less serious than those of Messam or Delaney. At 77,100 Twitter followers, he has more than Messam, Delany, Ryan, or Inslee. His pitch is geared toward the hard anti-war left, even more so than Gabbard or Sanders:
Here's the official Mike Gravel 2020 Campaign Launch Ad – "Rock 2.0" Join the #Gravelanche to push American politics to the left and speak truth to power, send Mike $1 to get him on the debate stage: https://t.co/R8N3DrihCD. pic.twitter.com/MWaPNCrxJH
Whether this gives him enough traction to make the debates remains to be seen, but at this point I like his chances better than Messam’s for meeting that threshold. On the other hand, he says he’d love a Sanders-Gabbard ticket.
“The goal of a Gravel 2020 campaign would not be to win, but instead to draw attention to the central issues that Sen. Gravel has focused on over the previous decades,” a draft version of his campaign plan indicates, adding “the ultimate goal would be to gain media attention and then endorse either Rep. Gabbard or Sen. Bernie Sanders before the Iowa caucuses.”
Watch the video at that link. Despite having a self-described “Senior Moment” in remembering Gabbard’s name, Gravel still sounds reasonably sharp, and like he’s actually telling it like he thinks it is. He can’t win, but he could actually make a little noise running an “screw it I’m just telling the truth and campaigning entirely on YouTube” effort…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. That Geraghty piece notes that Harris, being a liberal from California running on ending tax cuts and eliminating health insurance, might not play well in the Midwest. Said she would have voted against NAFTA. Senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus are pitching a Biden-Harris “dream ticket,” which sort of suggests they’ve already given up on her winning the nomination on her own.
Hickenlooper apparently means to put himself in the “moderate” lane to the extent that doing so is comparable with creating trillions of dollars in new taxes and benefits. I would not bet very much on the efficacy of that strategy, especially for a candidate who checks all the wrong demographic boxes for the 2020 Democratic primary.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. “With new polling at 0 percent, can anyone stop Jay Inslee? Yes. Literally anyone.” “It’s almost like running a campaign exclusively on climate change isn’t a good idea.” To prove that point, Inslee put out this ad:
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Business Insider profile. “Even after weeks of polling, we’re really not near the sample size of Seth Moulton’s name recognition where we’d be confident interpreting his performance and drawing conclusions about a viable candidacy.” OK, then. Moving on…
For O’Rourke, the phenomenon on display in [his losing senate] race—failure without negative effects, and with perhaps even some kind of personal boost—is a feature of his life and career. That biography is marked as much by meandering, missteps and moments of melancholic searching as by résumé-boosting victories and honors. A graduate of an eastern prep school and an Ivy League rower and English major, the only son of a gregarious attorney and glad-handing pol and the proprietor of an upscale furniture store, the beneficiary of his family’s expansive social, business and political contacts, O’Rourke has ambled past a pair of arrests, designed websites for El Paso’s who’s who, launched short-lived publishing projects, self-term-limited his largely unremarkable tenure on Capitol Hill, shunned the advice of pollsters and consultants and penned overwrought, solipsistic Medium missives, enjoying the latitude afforded by the cushion of an upper-middle-class upbringing that is only amplified by his marriage to the daughter of one of the region’s richest men.
(Hat tip: Erick Erickson, who notes “I know nothing of Kruse’s record and/or past infatuations or lack thereof with O’Rourke, but it is just hilarious watching various members of the Circle of Jerks that make up the political press pass the story around this morning. These people have been humping Beto O’Rourke’s leg for the past two years.”) “Beto O’Rourke is polling worse than ever.” “Looking at places, though, undersells O’Rourke’s media troubles. This past week, Biden’s name was mentioned 20 times as often on cable news as O’Rourke’s. The week before it was 22 times as often. And it’s not just less media: The stories seem to be more negative on O’Rourke than they once were.” He comes out against the right to work for non-union members. Get’s a profile from a college girlfriend that makes him sound really, really…boring.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Ryan, a Catholic who is married to a schoolteacher and lives with their three children, has moderated his position on two issues of particular interests to Democrats. He was opposed to abortion until 2015, and he previously received an A rating from the National Rifle Association, which indicated his votes were in line with the gun lobbying group’s agenda. Following the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting in which 58 people were killed, he donated $20,000 that his campaign received from the NRA to groups supporting gun control.
Well what do you know! A moderate pro-life, pro-gun Democratic magically becomes pro-abortion and anti-gun when running for national office! What are the odds?
Sanders had planned to pose as the quiet front-runner. The Democratic establishment might not be ready to anoint a populist insurrectionist, but Sanders, like Trump with the Republican base in 2016, thought that he had what the party’s voters wanted. Democratic operatives and veteran consultants whispered to anyone that would listen that Sanders, who had retained a permanent campaign infrastructure after coming up short in 2016, held a critical advantage in Democratic politics: the best ground game. The formula that supplied and maintained Barack Obama’s power had been mailing lists, volunteers, data, and pounding the pavement. Our Revolution, Sanders’s arm, was the heir to Organizing for America, the Obama mothership, and Sanders, like Obama, was awash in cash.
But Sanders’s campaign underestimated Biden out of the gate. And this time, Sanders’s Achilles heel appears to be even more exposed than it was to Clinton. African Americans are the lynchpin of any Democratic strategy, but so far, black Southern Democrats seem to like the idea of Barack Obama’s lieutenant as president, even if Obama himself doesn’t feel so warm about it. Last time round, South Carolina was Stalingrad for Sanders. It didn’t finish him off, but it lost him the war. Right now, it’s déjà vu all over again for the senator from Vermont.
On the trail with Bernie. See how many references to the 1960s you can spot. Frank Luntz thinks Sanders will win the race. I think he’s mistaking the Democratic Twitter base for the Democratic voting base.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. Dumbass compared the Russian Collusion Fantasy to Pearl Harbor. I know we’ll always remember the heroic moment when Doris Miller manned the Twittercades to fight back wave after devastating wave of Russian meme attacks…
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Yang is drawing some surprisingly large crowds.” He gets a PBS profile, which includes this nugget: “If elected, Yang promises to be the first president to use a PowerPoint during the State of the Union.” DEATH TO THE HERETIC!
Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, already polling in first place for the upcoming European Parliament elections, has now pulled ahead of the governing Conservative Party in polls for general elections to the House of Commons.
The latest major poll of Westminster voting intentions, conducted on the 9th of May by ComRes, shows the Brexit Party up five points at 20 per cent, while the Tories under embattled prime minister Theresa May have sunk four points to 19 per cent.
The opposition Labour Party, under hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, is in the lead on 27 per cent, but down six points compared to its previous rating.
Remain’s answer to the Brexit Party, Change UK (CUK), also appears unable to progress beyond a small niche, and is down two point to 7 per cent.
Change UK were founded by the seven renegades from the Labour Party who resigned over it’s creeping antisemitism, but are staunchly Remain.
The caveat is that, after Theresa May’s 2017 snap election, a new House of Commons election may not occur until 2022. However, May’s startling unpopularity means that a no confidence vote could well force an early election.
If the Tory wets don’t want to be swept from power, then they better get cracking on carrying out a real Brexit (not May’s sham dog’s Brexit) as they promised voters. And if that means a hard, no-deal Brexit, then so be it.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
I'm in Nebraska for a trip. The national media has done a horrific job covering the catastrophic flooding that has for months made homes inaccessible. It is all you see from the air, and a big deal. pic.twitter.com/XU9DmTb5Ju
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
