Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 18, 2019

It’s Betomania time among certain media outlets after Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke announced he was running last week. So there’s a ton of Beto news below. Also, two names I had pegged as Out are now making noises about (possibly) getting In.

National Review‘s Dan Maclaughlin offers up a lengthy essay on the five lanes of the Democratic Presidential race. There’s lots of interesting analysis to chew on in terms of demographic and age trends and preferences among Democratic voters. I don’t agree with all his conclusions, but it’s well worth reading the whole thing. His summary:

My own ranking, for now, of the likeliest nominee:

  1. Kamala Harris
  2. Beto O’Rourke
  3. Joe Biden
  4. Amy Klobuchar
  5. Cory Booker
  6. Bernie Sanders
  7. Elizabeth Warren
  8. [Field]
  9. Kirsten Gillibrand

538 Presidential roundup.

538 polls.

Democratic Party presidential primary schedule.

Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Now she’s saying a 2020 presidential run is “on the table.” Upgrade from Out.
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning Toward In. Not seeing any presidential run news on Bennet this week.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning Towards Running. He keeps dropping hints. Obama’s Vice President seems like he’s going to run against the “new left.” God help us all. He’s also rich:

    “Middle-Class Joe” Biden has a $2.7 million vacation home. He charges more than $100,000 per speaking gig and has inked a book deal likely worth seven figures.

    Since leaving office in 2017, the 76-year-old former vice president has watched his bank account swell as he continues to cultivate the image of a regular, Amtrak-riding guy. He’s repeatedly referred to himself as “Middle-Class Joe” on the campaign trail and in speaking engagements as he publicly mulls whether to run for president.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Out.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “After months of speculation, actress Rosario Dawson confirmed Thursday that she and presidential candidate Senator Cory Booker are dating.” Evidently Booker is on the Dennis Kucinich Presidential dating plan. That should help quiet the “Booker is gay” whispering campaign.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Out.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning Toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1. Bullock announced he’s not running…for the senate.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Chicago Tribune profile. He also raised $600,000 after a CNN townhall where he slammed Mike Pence.
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro “dropped a list of 30 high-profile endorsement from Lone Star State politicians shortly after fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke announced his own bid for the presidency. The list includes San Antonio’s political powerhouse, Henry Cisneros; six current San Antonio city council members, including Rey Saldana and Rebecca Viagran; and multiple Bexar County officials, including Nelson Wolff.” That’s great…if you’re running for the president of Texas. Castro was always going to pick up San Antonio endorsements. How well can he run nationwide? He also visited Charleston.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Leaning toward In. “Iowa has zero interest in de Blasio as presidential candidate: poll.” Much like the rest of the union…
  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Delany is asking for donations to meet the official DNC “65,000 donors from 20 states” threshold to appear in debates.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She .
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gillibrand did that “Oh, I was already running, but now I’m officially running” thing.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Maybe? Thought he was out, but now he has an announcement on Wednesday. May be a Presidential run, maybe an endorsement, maybe a 2022 senate run, maybe a teamup with Stacey Abrams to form Sore Loser PAC 2020. Who knows? Upgrade from Out.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently all is not sunshine and roses for the Harris campaign, since Chelsea Janes in the Washington Post dinged her for “verbal miscues.” To wit: “In the first weeks of Harris’s campaign, the 54-year-old has fielded criticism for equivocal and imprecise answers to questions about her stances on specific policies and her record as a prosecutor.” She also had to return money from foreign lobbyists: “Three days after she announced her White House bid in January, Harris received $2,700 from Arthur R. Collins, a lobbyist for the government of Bermuda. Sometime in January or February, Harris also received $2,700 from Vinca LaFleur, a speechwriter for the royal family of Jordan.” But only, of course, after the media asked about them…
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Twenty-Two Things You Didn’t Know about John Hickenlooper. Including the fact he’s Kurt Vonnegut’s fake son and watched Deep Throat with his mother.
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Out.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. He got a Gaurdian profile. In his capacity as Washington Governor, Inselee signed a new law that shifts the election date from late May to the second Tuesday in March.” How convenient.
  • 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. Facebook. Twitter. She talked about taxing big tech. There’s no problem so thorny government intervention can’t make worse…
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Probably Out.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run? Progressive blog Blue Virginia notes that McAuliffe sucks in all the polls. In one he was behind Andrew Yang…
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? “He’ll spend much of next week’s congressional recess in key presidential primary states, starting in New Hampshire on Saturday and then moving on to South Carolina and Iowa during the week.” He also wants to end the filibuster and the electoral college. There’s no think like groupthink…
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Out.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s so much O’Rorurke news it needs its own section:
    • After O’Rourke’s announcement, Reuters dropped the news of “Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group,” The Cult of the Dead Cow. Having been part of the Austin BBS scene way back in the pre-Internet days, I can tell you that all of this amounts to a whole lot less than meets the eye. The Cult of the Dead Cow were no Legion of Doom, and O’Rourke’s “hacking” seemed to consist mainly of trading warez (copied computer programs, sometimes hacked to remove the copy protection). Illegal, but just about everyone in the BBS scene did it; think of it as a very low-bandwidth version of Napster back when programs fit on a single floppy disk and had to been downloaded on 2400 baud modems. Though the fact this is coming out now does suggest lapses on both the media and Ted Cruz’s opposition research department.
    • Related: Tripmaster Beto, Psychedelic Warlord.
    • O’Rourke raised $6.1 million in his first 24 hours, edging out Bernie Sanders’ haul.
    • Matt Welch at Reason wonders if phony Betomania has already bitten the dust. He also digs up this preemptive Club for Growth video hitpiece:

      The problem, of course, is that it believes Democrats actually care about the ideas Democrats claim they care about.

    • David French roots for Beto against the Social Justice Warriors.
    • Beto O’Rourke, Weirdo:

      The former El Paso congressman’s spastic “Hey, I’m still figuring out these new hands” presidential-kickoff video, in which his upper limbs appeared to be subject to mad random yanks by an angry puppeteer, was merely the latest odd detail in the saga of Weirdo O’Rourke. It was even weirder than Elizabeth Warren’s “Greetings fellow earthlings, I too enjoy fermented malt beverages!” video. Robert/Beto is a man so apart from other human beings that he recently thought nothing of ditching his wife and three kids so he could drive around the country, alone, accosting unsuspecting dentists to help him apply Novocaine to his aching soul. He might be the first person ever to run for the White House on a platform of asking the nation to help him figure out who he is.

      The source of the angst is evident: Beto is a brainless rich kid who yearned to be cool and wasn’t very good at it. He flunked out of punk. He failed as a fiction writer. He belly-flopped as an alternative-newspaper publisher. And he’s so clueless that his apartment was once robbed while he was sitting in it. At his pricey Virginia prep school (Woodberry Forest School these days carries a sticker price of $48,000 a year), he thought he “just stuck out so badly” because of the “monoculture” there, which the Dallas Morning News called “white, wealthy and southern.” O’Rourke was and is white, wealthy, and southern, so he couldn’t have stuck out much more than Miracle Whip at the mayonnaise convention, yet he was wounded and alienated. Or maybe not. He put this in his high school yearbook: “I’m the angry son. I’m the angry son.” Below that: “I owe you everything, Mom, Dad . . .” You have to pick one, though, don’t you? You can’t be a seething rebel and a dutiful child. You can’t be Kurt Cobain and Kenny G. One pose nullifies the other. Or maybe O’Rourke was even then trying to position himself as acceptable to all constituencies.

      Snip.

      What’s the deal with his net worth, which is estimated at $9 million? I came across this line, on Heavy.com: “Peppertree Square Ltd. Imperial Arms is a real estate company, and Peppertree Square is a shopping center in El Paso, which was a gift from his mother.” Jeez, I remember when I thought my mom was sweet for buying me a blazer. I want Beto’s mom. When Beto’s dad died, he left the boy an apartment complex worth $5 million. Also his father-in-law William D. Sanders is worth a packet. Bloomberg once estimated he was worth $20 billion.

      So far, then, O’Rourke’s life story does not look like a fable about rising to meet fate’s challenge, but more like privilege and dilettantism.

    • Over at the New York Times, Gail “Team Kamala” Collins offers up a takedown of O’Rourke. Now I’m no O’Rourke fan, I’m happy to cheer on blue-on-blue attacks, and that Vanity Fair piece is eminently mockworthy, but this is a thuddingly bad piece of writing. It’s one long, smug, graceless sneer. You could have thrown a rock into a random crowd at CPAC and likely found someone capable of writing a better takedown of O’Rourke.
    • Scott Adams on the Beto dance.
    • Beto O’Rourke Announces He Starting Obama Cover Campaign.”
    • Finally, an observation: In addition to the contact harvesting splash screen, O’Rourke’s website only has four links: Shop, Jobs, Donate, Contact. No room for such trivia as “issues” or even a candidate biography. I guess the figure a three-term congressman is such a “rock star” that he doesn’t need to be introduced…
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan: Leaning Toward In? Gets an Atlantic profile that starts off with him doing yoga.

    Tim Ryan is a man containing multitudes. He is, as his contortions would suggest, a dedicated practitioner of hot power yoga and a meditation evangelist, but he sells himself as a champion of the American worker, and he speaks with the plain, sometimes brusque language of his mostly blue-collar constituents. In Congress, he has endorsed tax cuts for corporations, but he also supports progressive goals such as Medicare for all. And he’s a congressional backbencher—a relatively unknown Democrat from a rapidly reddening state. But he says he’s “very much looking” at running for president.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie Sanders Pledges To Do A Better Job Of Explaining Socialism.” Wait, I thought we wanted to win the race! Also:

  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning Toward In. Biggest Swalwell news: he shared a yearbook photo:

    I’m now imagining a an 80s teen comedy in which teenage jock Swalwell beats up teenage nerd O’Rourke…

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren campaigns in Memphis, kicking off three-state tour.” She also wants to break up big tech.
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a “click through these 12 photos so we can display ads” bullshit listicle minibio from the Houston Chronicle that’s not worth your time and is only included here because other news about her is thin on the ground. Oh, she also has that world peace thing all figured out in a simple 4-step program: “expand economic opportunities for women around the world; expand educational opportunities for children globally; reduce violence against women; improve unnecessary human suffering wherever possible.” It’s so simple! I’m sure this would instantly end the fighting in Yemen and Syria. That same piece also compares and contrasts her ideas with Andrew Yang’s. I guess they’re both competing in the Weirdo Lunatic Outsiders lane.
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares. Twitter. Facebook. OK, Yang is a fucking idiot.
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    One Response to “Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 18, 2019”

    1. T Migratorious says:

      Loved the “Weirdo” excerpt about Beto. It tracks something that my husband and I were talking about this weekend. The one unifiying theme that you see throughout Beto’s life is that he’s a poseur–always trying to fit into a subculture that he thinks is cool and failing. Yet I think he remains clueless about how obviously he failed and honestly believes he really was all those things.

      I’d feel sorry for him if it weren’t for the danger that people will vote for him.

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