Biden’s phony-baloney polls are running behind Hillary’s phony-baloney polls of four years ago, more China policy weakness, more anti-police rhetoric, and Slow Joe comes in many days and dollars short denouncing the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
On election day, Hillary Clinton polled 6.5 points ahead of Trump in Wisconsin in the Real Clear Politics average (an aggregate of polls). Trump ended up winning the state by 0.7 points. Biden currently leads by 3.5 points in Wisconsin in the RCP.
The story is the same in North Carolina and Michigan. In North Carolina Trump lead Hillary by only 0.8 points on election day but ended up winning by 3.6. Biden is tied with Trump currently in the polls. In Michigan, Clinton lead by 3.6 points on election day, but Trump won by 0.3. Biden currently leads by 2.6 points.
Or more accurately, “supposedly leads.”
If we measure Hillary’s polling averages as of August 26th instead of election day, as the National Review’s David Harysanyi notes: Biden is +5.5 in Pennsylvania today [the 26th]. Hillary was +9.2 the same day in 2016. Florida is the only battleground state where Biden (+3.7) is outperforming Clinton (+2.7).
In mid-August, a Pew Research Center poll found that the issue of violent crime ranks fifth in importance to registered voters—behind the economy, health care, the Supreme Court, and the pandemic, but ahead of foreign policy, guns, race, immigration, and climate change. The poll found a large partisan gap on the issue: three-quarters of Trump voters rated violent crime “very important,” second behind only the economy. Nonetheless, nearly half of Biden voters also rated it “very important.” Other polls show that, over the summer, Biden has lost some of the support he gained among older white Americans in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.
With some exceptions, the media have been reluctant to shine a bright light on the summer’s violence—both the riots and the concurrent spike in violence. The New York Times ignored or downplayed the subject for weeks. One of its first major articles appeared in mid-August, under the headline “In the Wake of Covid-19 Lockdowns, a Troubling Surge in Homicides.” The piece argued that the crime surge had to do with the end of the lockdown that coincided with the beginning of summer, citing the skepticism of criminologists that “the increase is tied to any pullback by the police in response to criticism or defunding efforts,” and pointing to economic disruption and the spread of despair. But it also offered a different explanation, contradicting the thesis: “Police officials in several cities have said the protests have diverted officers from crime-fighting duty or emboldened criminals.”
After the 2016 election, the Times admitted that it had somehow missed the story, and it earnestly set about at self-correction. Like many other outlets, the paper sent reporters to talk to Americans who had put Trump in the White House. It was a new beat, almost a foreign bureau—heartland reporting—but that focus soon faded as the president’s daily depredations consumed the media’s attention. This election year, news organizations grown more activist might miss the story again, this time on principle—as they avoid stories that don’t support their preferred narrative. Trump supporters are hoping for it.
I think I speak for all Trump supporters when I say hat we want a news media that honestly and fairly reports the news. But that ship sailed a long, long time ago. (What was the last Republican President who got unbiased reporting in the media? Eisenhower?) But I do agree that the MSM’s unsuccessful attempts to enforce preference falsification turns out to be a major advantage for Republicans.
Speaking of Chuck DeVore, he has a piece on how well President Trump is doing when it comes to foreign policy, how bad Biden’s foreign policy record has been, and how weak Biden is on China:
Biden’s lifetime of foreign policy miscues include:
Opposing Ronald Reagan’s military buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative
Voting to invade Iraq in 2002, saying in 2003, “I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again.”
Early support for the 1999 bombing of Serbia which pushed Serbs to back the authoritarian leader there while stifling the nascent pro-democracy movement.
Criticism of President Trump’s authorization to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the man responsible for paying bounties to the Taliban for the killing of American troops in Afghanistan.
Advising President Obama to wait for more information before approving the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011—advice, that if acted upon, might have led to bin Laden’s escape.
Reviewing Biden’s campaign statements and materials for clues on his foreign policy proposals suggests a Biden administration would major on the minors. In a sprawling 4,444-word essay entitled, “Why America Must Lead Again,” Biden sets out his vision. He mentions China 13 times:
Suggesting U.S. tech giants shouldn’t be aiding China’s repression.
Claiming his foreign policy will help the middle class “…win the competition for the future against China or anyone else… (author’s italics).”
Saying “There is no reason we should be falling behind China or anyone else (author’s italics) when it comes to clean energy, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, 5G, high-speed rail, or the race to end cancer as we know it.”
That, “The United States, not China, should be leading…” with new trade deals.
Admitting that “The United States does need to get tough with China…” or else China will “…keep robbing the United States and American companies of their technology and intellectual property,” with the best way to address the challenge being to “…build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security.”
Working with “…China, to advance our shared objective of a denuclearized North Korea…”
Ensuring that “the rules of the digital age (aren’t) written by China and Russia.”
And working with China on climate change.
Absent is any mention by Biden of China’s massive military build up of modern missiles, ships, aircraft, and space systems and its growing willingness to use that military power against virtually all neighboring nations. It’s as if, by closing one’s eyes to the threat, one can wish the dragon away.
So while the People’s Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party is methodically preparing for a military conquest of the free island of Taiwan, to slice off more Himalayan territory from India, to take islands from Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia (all while holding the U.S. military at bay with an increasing array of long range missiles), Biden stresses the importance of climate change and getting the Chinese to use less coal.
President Trump is paying attention to the true nature of the existential threat from communist China, while Joe Biden focuses on lesser irritants from an earlier era.
The Democratic Party’s presidential nominee Joe Biden is “dangerous” when it comes to offshoring American jobs and because of his past relationship issues with China, and the United States needs a tough president like Donald Trump to stand up against the country’s bullying behavior, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Friday.
“The problem with Joe Biden is he has a record, 44-year record,” Navarro said on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” “In 2001, he voted to allow China into the World Trade Organization. That created a tsunami of offshoring, where we lost over 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs. This also happened on his watch when he was vice president.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to “bully this country into submission through threats on Huawei and medical supplies,” Navarro said.
“What we learned from this pandemic is we need to bring home our supply chains and manufacturing, not just for our essential medicines or medical supplies like masks or medical equipment like ventilators but for everything,” Navarro said. “China is bullying Australia right now for daring to question how that virus was created. Australia wants to do an investigation of China about where the virus came from. The next thing you know China is punishing Australia and New Zealand. It is a bully.”
No post-convention bump for Biden. “Getting no boost after a convention has happened only a few times in modern Democrat Party history. By John Kerry in 2004 and George McGovern in 1972. Kerry ended up losing to George W. Bush and McGovern got thrashed by Nixon in an historic landslide beaten only in scale by Presidents FDR and Ronald Reagan.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
C-SPAN changed their open phone line labels after an overwhelming number of Democratic viewers called on Wednesday night proclaiming their support for President Donald Trump in the upcoming election.
“I’m a longtime Democrat, born and raised … After watching tonight … I have made up my mind. I am definitely gonna vote for Donald Trump,” said one of the many voters who dialed in.
Before the Republican National Convention, C-SPAN’s open phone lines were labeled as open for “Democrats,” “Republicans,” and “Other” viewers to call into and share their opinions on-air. After Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, however, C-SPAN received an influx of callers who identified as Democrat but said they would be voting for Trump in November.
Due to the increasing nature of these calls, the network adjusted the phone lines to encompass those who “Support Trump,” “Support Biden,” and “Support Others.”
The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:
1. Ben Shapiro 2. Ben Shapiro 3. Blue Lives Matter 4. Ben Shapiro 5. David J. Harris Jr. 6. Ben Shapiro 7. Ben Shapiro 8. SportsCenter 9. Shaun King 10. NPR
Is Joe Biden for or against defunding the police? Yes:
We should begin with Joe Biden who said he would redirect budgeted police money to non-police areas. That’s right. Biden made that statement on July 8, when he replied, “Yes, absolutely” to an interviewer who asked him, “But do we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?”
But this defunding of the police, or “redirecting” as Biden spins it, contradicts a June 8 statement by his campaign claiming that Biden “does not believe that police should be defunded.”
When that contradiction and doublespeak raised eyebrows, Biden then reversed on both prior positions, claiming he would give more money to the police to handle the “god-awful problems” they face in the line of duty. Talk about a pandering, wishy-washy politician who will say anything to get elected. Can anyone believe Biden now?
The president of the top lobbying group representing police and law enforcement officers tore into Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, calling them the “most radical anti-police ticket in history.”
Michael McHale, the president of the National Association of Police Organizations, decried what he described as a rash of violence against police officers in recent months and railed against “failed” elected officials in cities such as Minneapolis, New York and Chicago who he said had made “the conscious decision not to support law enforcement.”
Biden, he said, would follow their lead.
“Joe Biden has turned his candidacy over to the far-left, anti-law enforcement radicals,” he said. “And as a senator, Kamala Harris pushed to further restrict police, cut their training, and make our American communities and streets even more dangerous than they are.”
Nor are they attempting to lower the rhetoric:
This statement is vile. It doesn't take down the temperature; it raises it. It explicitly jumps to conclusions in the absence of evidence. It's racial demagoguery of the highest order. And this is supposedly the man who will restore calm and normalcy to the country? pic.twitter.com/mWCtoxl4pd
.@JoeBiden did not condemn the riots in #Kenosha in his statement this morning, but condemned the police. Effectively, he gave a green light to the nationwide mayhem. Disqualifying. #2020
Biden and Harris want to monkey with your 401Ks. I don’t know a single person who contributes to a 401K who goes “You know what the problem is? I’m just saving too much in taxes!”
Nothing says you’ll fight for black people quite like being endorsed by white supremacist Richard Spencer. Hey, the MSM insisted on linking this loon to the Republican Party for four years, so it’s only fair Republicans return the favor.
Noted for the record: “Joe Biden to visit Southwestern Pennsylvania Monday; location, details not announced.” My experience has been that most presidential campaigns announce a time and place for a candidate’s appearance well more than a day in advance.
Good question:
At what point does anti-Trumpism cost too much for Democrats?
Cities are being destroyed. Businesses torched. Police officers attacked & even killed.
All because woke Democratic mayors and Governors are refusing to ask for the National Guard.
Biden voters threatening to burn down a church the day after the media went to bat for his catholicism will be a good photo op. https://t.co/wsuNvfQOyx
Joe Biden just went on CNN and alleged Kyle Rittenhouse was a member of an Illinois white supremacist militia. Does he have any evidence of that? What is their name?
Michael Moore thinks President Trump is going to win again. He was right about this in 2016 as well. “The Biden campaign just announced he’ll be visiting a number of states— but not Michigan. Sound familiar?”
Speaking of Michigan: Trump 47, Biden 45. It’s almost like the working class is never returning to the Democrat Party. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Also, I note for the record that no notable Kamala Harris links made their way across my desktop this week. I wasn’t trying to exclude them, but after the DNC was over, it seemed like the media universe at large just sort of lost interest in her. She generates a palpable lack of excitement.
Biden flogs the Fine People Hoax yet again, wants to lock down the nation yet again, more DNC fallout, and a look at Biden’s foreign policy team in waiting (and how some got paid by China). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
There are a few safe bets in life – the sun will rise in the East, the mainstream media will tongue-bathe the Dems, the Never Trump sissies of the Ahoy crew will die alone, forgotten, and unloved – but there is no safer bet than on Joe Biden not taking the debate stage with Donald Trump.
If he does debate Trump, Grandpa Badfinger is toast. And if he doesn’t debate Trump, Grandpa Badfinger is also toast. Either way, that post-moderate muppet is a breakfast entrée. Dodging the debate is merely his least bad choice, sort of like going with chlamydia over syphilis.
The media and the Biden campaign are doing everything they can to avoid the moment where the public consensus coalesces around Biden’s obsolescence. You know how that goes. One day, a politician is defined by his positions. The next day, there’s a moment in time when a new perception gets locked in stone, where the mere mention of his name gets people nodding and a single word seems to define him forever. With Biden, the word will be “senile,” just like with Bill Clinton the word is “humidor.”
And Trump is going to define Slow Joe mercilessly, but not quite yet. Those of us swimming in the cesspool of politics every day see Trump’s gentle pokes about Rip van Wrinkled’s manifest mental deterioration, but it’s clear that Trump is holding his big guns in reserve for the moment. Why? Well, Trump certainly wants the Democrats to go all-in and formally nominate Joethuselah before he unleashes hell like Maximus upon my uppity German tribesman ancestors. Further, you don’t want to lower expectations so much that Oldfinger gets pronounced competent simply by appearing in public without drooling all over his bib.
But mostly, Trump knows that normal people aren’t paying attention yet. In September, they will take a break from trying not to be bankrupted by stupid pols panicking over the flu and from dealing with how their kids are not going to school because teacher unions members can’t take the same minimal risk that Trader Joe’s baggers have been enduring since Day One. When people start paying attention after Labor Day, they will be expecting to see Share A Beer Joe and instead see Share An Ensure Joe.
And the Dems know that Trump will then paint Biden in all the colors of the dementia rainbow.
Even as he was leaving office, Vice President Joe Biden and his cohorts carved out their own fiefdom within the empire of liberal philanthropy and academia. They await the time when they will be able to use the trappings of public office to spread largesse and grease palms once again. As the presumptive nominee struggles to maintain a presentable and coherent front in public, the phalanx of aides and stooges around him provide an example of how lifelong politicians build personal machines using donor money, some of it from offshore strategic rivals like China.
Snip
But then there are the benchwarmers, who lack the name recognition or ambition to hack it on their own. For them, it was announced on February 1, 2017, a mere week and a half after Biden left office, that there would be the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement(PBC), a name that perhaps Derek Zoolander brainstormed for them. But rather than have the PBC on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, it was announced at the outset that its location would be in Washington, D.C. with only a satellite office back at Penn.
The PBC’s address is 101 Constitution Ave. N.W., putting it across the street from Capitol Hill and within the sixth most expensive real estate market in the United States, averaging $32 per square foot—more than Philadelphia. Biden himself would be called the “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor,” whatever that means. In its announcement, the Penn Biden Center claimed that it “promises significant impact for both Penn’s teaching and research missions. As the Presidential Practice Professor, Biden will hold joint appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Arts and Sciences, with a secondary affiliation in the Wharton School.”
Biden does have a profile on Annenberg’s site as a member of the teaching faculty, but according to Philadelphia magazine in 2019 he never taught a single course despite earning $775,000 in salary over two years, almost twice the annual income of the average Penn professor.
So what exactly does the Penn Biden Center do? Looking into its staff, the PBC appears to be a cushy green room for old Obama Administration aides waiting for new gigs once Polident Joe gets back into office. It doesn’t have a class or event schedule, and only two events are listed on its Facebook page history, the last one being in Chicago in November 2017. Its Twitter account mostly retweets articles by and interviews with members of its staff on niche websites for international affairs specialists like World Politics Review and Balkan Insider. In effect, the University of Pennsylvania has loaned its branding to become an expensive PR firm for Joe Biden’s foreign policy. Luckily for Penn, it’s a win-win situation for them in terms of revenue.
In May the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group, filed a complaint against the PBC alleging that Penn had violated federal law by not disclosing the source of $22 million in anonymous donations from China (out of a total of almost $70 million from there). When this relationship was reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a spokesperson for the American Council on Education complained that there is not enough guidance from the Department of Education about how to report the donations.
ACE, a lobbying group for colleges and universities that two months later lobbied Capitol Hill for a “floor” of $47 billion in coronavirus relief, apparently thinks that demanding disclosure of the giver’s identity for a donation of over $250,000 is a “gotcha.” And who are the people who actually run the PBC?
Ariana Berengaut (Director Programs, Partnerships, and Strategic Planning)—former speechwriter for Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, before that, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah.
Spencer Boyer (Senior Fellow)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and National Intelligence Officer for Europe.
Michael Carpenter (Managing Director)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, White House foreign policy advisor to Biden, and Director for Russia on the National Security Council.
Dan Erikson (Senior Fellow)—former special advisor to Biden and senior advisor for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department.
Juan González (Senior Fellow)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, special advisor to Joe Biden, and National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere.
Colin Kahl (Strategic Consultant)—senior advisor to both Obama and Biden on foreign policy and national security affairs. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East from 2009 to 2011, National Security Advisor to Biden.
Jeffrey Prescott (Strategic Consultant)—special assistant to Obama and senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States for the NSC.
Caroline Tess (Senior Fellow)—special assistant to Obama and senior director for legislative affairs at the NSC.
More details:
In 2016 Michael Carpenter, while still serving at the Defense Department, agreed with a report by the Rand Corporation that Russia could defeat NATO in less than three days. Carpenter is a staunch supporter of increasing U.S. confrontation with Russia. In 2017 he recommended deploying a combat brigade to Eastern Europe as a deterrent in his testimony before Congress’s joint Helsinki Commission hearing, a move that the Trump Administration has agreed with through steps such as deploying 500 soldiers to Lithuania in 2019. Carpenter consistently lobbied for the successful expansion of NATO to Montenegro, while warning of “Russian influence” on its election. With an active duty military numbering only 2,400, an air force consisting largely of converted civil aircraft along with a remnant of the old Yugoslav Navy, Montenegro’s membership in NATO is more a liability than an asset.
Daniel Erikson also happens to work for Blue Star Strategies, a strategic consulting company that worked with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which Biden’s son Hunter served as a no-show board member earning at least $50,000 a month. Senate Homeland Security Committee members accused Blue Star of dragging its feet in producing documents to the committee regarding its dealings with Burisma. In June Ukraine’s anti-corruption prosecutor announced that Burisma’s founder had attempted to bribe an official probing the company in order to drop the investigation.
Potentially the most controversial PBC bullpen member is Colin Kahl, who in September 2012 defended the Obama Administration against critics from the Mitt Romney campaign about its performance during the Arab Spring in the wake of the Benghazi terror attack earlier that month. He claimed that Iran had failed to take advantage of the Arab Spring earlier that year in an op-ed for Foreign Policy. The irony of the statement is that a result of that wave of uprisings is the replacement of two autocratic but stable regimes in Yemen and Syria with bloody proxy conflicts where Iran is deeply involved.
There is apparently bad blood between Kahl and the pro-Israel community. In September 2012, Kahl was blamed by Democratic insiders for a flap at the party convention in which it was omitted that the party seeks to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In 2015, while serving as Biden’s advisor on the Iran Nuclear Deal, Kahl spoke to War on the Rocks—a national security insiders’ podcast—to defend the agreement. He brushed aside criticisms that it would lead to increased terror activity by Iran. He also dismissed criticism that the deal would encourage nuclear proliferation elsewhere.
Just six months later North Korea successfully tested its fourth nuclear weapon, thereby validating those fears. In 2018 an Israeli spy firm Black Cubewas alleged to have tried to lure Kahl and fellow PBC fellow Catherine Tess into providing information on Iranian assets that could be seized as part of civil litigation. It has been reported by Al-Monitor that Kahl is handling the Iran brief on the Biden campaign after having condemned the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, and bemoaoning subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. In May 2019 he joined Rachel Maddow in order to hype fears of a U.S. invasion of Iran by President Trump, which of course later events proved was the opposite of the president’s goal. His inclusion in a future administration is sure to lead to friction with both Israel and the Sunni monarchies on the Persian Gulf if the new administration seeks to reimpose the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Joe Biden’s response to the virus makes Trump’s look masterful. Biden and his team made a series of statements in the first few months of the year that denied the seriousness of the virus and criticized President Trump for taking steps to prevent its spread.
This, too, was to be expected. Hack that he is, Biden has been wrong on almost every national security issue for as long as anyone can remember. He even advised Barack Obama against undertaking the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Karl Rove put together a list of Biden’s greatest misses on the coronavirus. He presented it on one of the Fox News programs last night.
Here is Rove’s list:
1) Jan. 31: In response to Trump’s travel ban, Biden says “this is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia.”
2) Early February: Biden public health advisory committee member says the coronavirus is less lethal than the SARS virus and a top aide says this “is probably not a serious epidemic.”
3) Mid February: Top Biden adviser says “we don”t have a Covid epidemic, we have a fear epidemic.”
4) Late February: Biden health adviser Zeke Emmanuel says many experts view the virus “like the flu” and expect it to dissipate with warmer weather moving to the southern hemisphere. Masks will not help, he adds.
5) Early March: Biden holds a mass indoor rally and criticizes the European travel ban as ineffective and “counterproductive.”
6) Mid March: Regarding Trump’s January 31st decision to close travel to China, Biden says “stop the xenophobic fear mongering.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden said in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight” Anchor David Muir on Friday that as president, he would shut the country down to stop the spread of COVID-19 if the move was recommended to him by scientists.
“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” Biden told Muir Friday, alongside his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., during their first joint interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees.
Before Trump, cartoonist Scott Adams seemed like something of a centrist. But Trump’s persuasion and Democrats clinging to the Fine People Hoax seems to have red-pilled him all the way:
If Asshole Joe Biden really believes the Fine People Hoax, he's too dumb to be president. If he knows it is fake and is using it to divide the country, he is too evil to be president.
Neither of those flaws is cancelled out by his ability to read in public or ride a bike.
If you watched Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the other big, headline speeches at the Democratic convention, you might be forgiven for thinking that you had stepped into a meeting of old-time Democrats. There was less woke, radical rhetoric than in the primaries, more invocations of old-fashioned patriotic Americana, and more efforts to sound conservative themes and reach out to small-businesspeople and churchgoers. What you might have missed was the far-reaching agenda of the Biden–Harris Democrats.
Biden talked about “ending loopholes” and rolling back Trump-era tax cuts. His actual proposal would raise $3.8 trillion in new individual and business taxes and result in a tax hike, on average, for taxpayers in every income quintile.
He spoke vaguely about climate and energy. He’s actually proposing a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” in a “clean energy future,” just as a first step. This is the “Green New Deal” in all but name, on top of a vast expansion of health-care entitlement spending from a government-run “public option” of the sort that was left out of Obamacare for being too far left. Overall, Biden is proposing some $7 trillion in additional spending, most of it permanent, which will eventually require even more enormous tax hikes than the ones he has so far detailed.
Rose McGowan brings the fire:
What have the Democrats done to solve ANYTHING? Help the poor? No. Help black & brown people? No. Stop police brutality? No. Help single mothers? No. Help children? No. You have achieved nothing. NOTHING. Why did people vote Trump? Because of you motherfuckers.
Any focus on abortion would have invited a discussion of Joe Biden’s flip-flop on the Hyde amendment, the measure that since 1976 has banned federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients. For four decades, Biden portrayed his support of the Hyde amendment as a fundamental matter of conscience, only to abandon it under pressure from Democratic activists in June 2019.
The Hyde amendment has been America’s most important pro-life policy for four decades: By one estimate, it has saved 50,000 lives from abortion each year. It is also popular: A poll on the eve of the 2016 election showed Americans supported it 58 percent to 36 percent.
Democratic presidential contenders snubbed from the DNC include Tulsi Gabbard. “Gabbard was the only candidate to be denied a speaking slot despite winning delegates.”
Also not speaking at the DNC: Julian Castro, who complained about the lack of Hispanic speakers. Democrats seem to be taking Hispanics for granted this year in all-out effort to pander to black voters and woke white radicals.
Democrats have said, “we care more about the woke mob than we do about standing with cops or firefighters or working men and women,” and “are the party of the rich, they’re the party of coastal elites, they’re the party of Manhattan and San Francisco.”
Cruz said, “I think what we saw tonight was the beginning of the collapse of Joe Biden’s basement strategy. Joe Biden has been hiding in his basement since he won the nomination, but tonight was Bernie Sanders’ night. Tonight — so, John Kasich is promising voters, don’t pay attention to all the craziness on the Democratic side. Joe isn’t that crazy. Well, you know who didn’t believe John Kasich? Bernie Sanders didn’t believe John Kasich. Because Bernie Sanders stood up there and said, our radical, socialist agenda has won. We’ve taken over the Democratic Party, and Joe Biden is ours. And that really underscores the stakes of this election. If the Democrats win, you are looking at Bernie in ascension. You’re looking at AOC. You’re looking at, mark my words, Elizabeth Warren as treasury secretary. Bernie might be secretary of state. These are radicals, and that’s where the Democratic Party is.”
While I tend to view “Flight 93” thinking as hyperbolic, [Harris] does present a major threat to the constitutional order, to the economy, and to established norms. Moreover, she stands an excellent chance of succeeding Biden to the presidency should their ticket be elected in November. Kamala Harris poses a far greater danger to the Republic than Hillary Clinton. Anyone who calls himself a conservative should recognize this.
Harris’s platform is so far to the left of the mainstream that she makes Mrs. Clinton, a hero to the Left for several decades, look moderate. Clinton, for instance, said that illegal immigrants should be allowed to purchase health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges but without subsidies, which is Joe Biden’s position (according to his platform, though Biden himself often seems confused about this when publicly discussing the issue). Kamala Harris backs a single-payer federal health-care plan and did not equivocate when asked whether illegal immigrants would be covered: “Let me just be very clear about this. I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health, period.” This would mark an end to the distinction between people who are here legally and illegally and would signal to the world’s poor that it’s time to make their break for the United States. Harris also compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to the Ku Klux Klan and said we should decriminalize unauthorized border crossings. (“I would not make it a crime punishable by jail. It should be a civil enforcement issue but not a criminal enforcement issue.”)
So: a parking ticket for coming in illegally? How is that to be seen as anything other than an engraved invitation to would-be migrants? In a Senate hearing, Harris suggested ICE should be more of a welcome wagon than an enforcement agency: “Are you aware,” she said to Ronald Vitiello, acting director of ICE, “that there is a perception that ICE is administering its power in a way that is causing fear and intimidation, particularly among immigrants? And specifically among immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America?” Neither the culture nor the federal fisc is prepared for the massive disruption likely to be unleashed if an American president so encourages illegal migration. Way back in 1994, when the Democratic Party was still concerned with what the center of the country thought and felt, Mrs. Clinton said in a House hearing that her Hillarycare plan would not be available to illegal entrants: “We do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration into this country,” she said, adding that “we know now that too many people come in for medical care, as it is.”
Kamala Harris laughed uproariously at Joe Biden’s suggestion that a president is constrained by the Constitution from ruling by executive fiat. This clip ought to nauseate any constitutionalist: Even Hillary Clinton would not have gone so far as to treat the Constitution as a joke. Harris, moreover, has the most extreme position on abortion imaginable. And when an undercover journalist, David Daleiden, made the abortion lobby look bad by accurately exposing the inner doings of Planned Parenthood executives, she brought the full force of the state down on his head, raiding his home and launching a vendetta that would result in nine felony charges against him. Former Obama speechwriter and leftist pundit Jon Favreau calls it “hilarious” that anyone thinks Harris is a moderate because “she has one of the most liberal records in the U.S. Senate.”
Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism.
American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them.
Harris was a leader in the junta of Democratic state attorneys general that attempted to criminalize dissent in the matter of global warming, using her office’s investigatory powers to target and harass non-profit policy groups while she and her counterpart in New York attempted to shake down Exxon on phony fraud cases.
Until she was stopped by a federal court, Harris was laying subpoenas on organizations such as the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a conservative-leaning group that is critical of Democratic global-warming proposals. She demanded private information that the organizations were not legally obliged to disclose, including financial information and donor lists, in order to be able to subject the supporters of right-leaning groups to legal and financial harassment. This was, as a federal judge confirmed, an obvious and unquestionable violation of the First Amendment.
It was also a serious abuse of power. Harris’s actions were coordinated with those of then attorney general Eric Schneiderman in New York, who argued — preposterously — that Exxon’s taking a different view of global warming was a form of securities fraud. This isn’t a conspiracy theory: They held a press conference and organized their effort into a committee, which they called AGs United for Clean Power.
The Wikipedia war over Kamala Harris’ race. “The battles over Harris’s Wikipedia page played out primarily over the specific term African American.”
Hey look, it’s the hoary old “the Republican who’s now voting for a Democrat has been a Democrat all along” trick. Gets trotted out every presidential election.
During Joe Biden’s presidential nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, both his personal YouTube page and the Democratic Party’s YouTube page saw strong, negative reactions from live audiences. In fact, “Dislikes” outnumbered “Likes,” in real time.
Yet both pages’ “Dislikes” mysteriously dropped in the hours after the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had concluded. The changing statistics led some on social media to wonder if the Google-owned YouTube platform was protecting Biden.
The number of Democratic convention stream “Dislikes”–or people pressing a button saying they did not like the content onscreen–dropped on Friday below where they stood on Thursday last night.
Biden as McCain:
Biden is the Democrat's 'McCain.' He is the throw-away candidate they know can't win who has been knocking on the door for the nod for a long time. They knew McCain wasn't going to beat Obama, just like they know Biden won't beat Trump.
Michelle Obama had a lot of guts rolling out the old “kids in cages” talking point. Doesn’t she know that was an Obama/Biden policy? https://t.co/hoBJX1uv5A
Biden inserts foot into mouth yet again, refuses to leave his basement for something as trivial as the DNC, embraces illegal alien amnesty, mumbles about China, plays footsie with more commies, and gives up on door-knocking. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Indeed, there’s not going to be any in-person DNC at all. Why would anyone watch an online streaming convention unless it’s their job? What’s the point if you can’t see the freaks in the funny hats?
On his website, former Vice President (and presumptive Democratic candidate for president) Joe Biden vows, if elected, to pass legislation “providing a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants”. Last week, his old boss, former President Barack Obama, explained how Biden (or whoever controls him) will do it: by eliminating the filibuster.
Snip.
Obama believes that Biden will be elected, and that the Democrats will win a majority in the Senate in November, as the Wall Street Journal postulated on July 30. That will enable both to push for legislation that they want — like statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. And amnesty for illegal aliens.
Each of these actions will solidify a Democratic majority into the foreseeable future, and give the party of Jackson the White House for as long.
Snip.
If the Democrats maintain control of the House, win the White House, and gain control of the Senate and end the filibuster, amnesty would be among the first bills that would be rammed through to signature in the 117th Congress, for that most basic (and base) of reasons: power.
Assuming that there are 10.5 million illegal aliens in the United States (a conservative estimate the Pew Research Center in June 2019 made of the population in 2017), and depending on the parameters of the amnesty, that would mean that there could be that many new voters (or more) in 2026.
Donald Trump’s campaign says it knocked on over 1 million doors in the past week alone.
Joe Biden’s campaign says it knocked on zero.
The Republican and Democratic parties — from the presidential candidates on down — are taking polar opposite approaches to door-to-door canvassing this fall. The competing bets on the value of face-to-face campaigning during a pandemic has no modern precedent, making it a potential wild card in November, especially in close races.
Biden and the Democratic National Committee aren’t sending volunteers or staffers to talk with voters at home, and don’t anticipate doing anything more than dropping off literature unless the crisis abates. The campaign and the Democratic National Committee think they can compensate for the lack of in-person canvassing with phone calls, texts, new forms of digital organizing, and virtual meet-ups with voters.
I don’t know how effective door-knocking is in 2020, but I do know that every other method listing is easy to ignore. I suspect that door-knocking and direct mail work better for casual voters than “virtual meetups,” mainly because a 1% chance of effectivity is better than a 0% chance.
Gertrude Stein once quipped of her native Oakland, California, “there is no there there.” Isn’t that how it is with Joe Biden? He doesn’t make gaffes; he is a gaffe, poor thing. (I’ve expatiated on this elsewhere.)
I suspect that most Americans, whatever side of the political aisle they occupy, do not really see Joe Biden—especially when, like Alice, they are looking directly at him. They need to manage a sidelong glance, a sudden shift of perspective to catch his drift (and I employ the word “drift” advisedly).
This was brought home to me by an article that appeared a few days ago in Le Figaro, the biggest newspaper in France. The headline summed up its burden: “La stupéfiante indulgence des grands médias américains envers Joe Biden”—“The stupefying indulgence of big American media towards Joe Biden.”
The author evinced no pro-Trump sympathies. On the contrary. Yet he wrote in amazement at the seamless media distortion that worked to disparage Trump while excusing Biden—a process that “va jusqu’à l’occultation des faits”—goes so far (add an expression of amazement) as to conceal the facts.
Description of plagiarizing Neil Kinnock snipped.
The article in Le Figaro notes that the American media has generally covered for Democrats while castigating Republicans. Just think of their worshipful treatment of JFK and demonization of Richard Nixon. (And the love affair with all things Kennedy reached back to JFK’s father—Hitler’s favorite U.S. ambassador—and forward to Teddy “Chappaquiddick” “waitress sandwich” Kennedy and beyond. And of course, the media positively fawned over Barack Obama while snarling endlessly at George W. Bush.
But there is something different and more extreme about the indulgence lavished upon Joe Biden and the obloquy heaped upon President Trump. Le Figaro quotes Joel Kotkin, an outspoken opponent of Trump’s, who nevertheless acknowledges he has “never seen a president treated the way he was. The effort to remove him was already being considered before he even set foot in the White House!”
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, endeavoring to ingratiate himself with black voters, claims that he was arrested by South African police while attempting to visit Nelson Mandela. But he wasn’t and he didn’t. “Invention,” Figaro notes, “du début à la fin.”
In brief, the difference in the treatment accorded to Trump and Biden is the difference between a bright daytime and a black night. . . . It amounts to a democratic scandal that is essentially Orwellian.
In one sense, the article in Le Figaro tells us nothing we didn’t already know. And yet it reveals a rift or fissure in The Narrative that is obvious to everyone outside the bubble, outside the echo chamber of American punditocracy. Joe Biden is toast. Already the polls, rigged though most of them are, are tightening. President Trump is calmly stealing the Democrats’ thunder, issuing executive orders on everything from payroll tax cuts to instituting a moratorium on evictions.
Coronavirus hysteria has, at least for now, prevented the president from deploying his biggest vote-getter, the huge rally. But he has adapted and is outflanking poor Biden on every front.
Remember: Hispanics are diverse, but black people are not:
Joe Biden says that “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community" pic.twitter.com/eSw8tU5fVQ
More on Biden’s black people aren’t diverse gaffe. “I think what happened is that Biden, in cognitive decline, is losing the ability to maintain the boundary between what is said behind the scenes with his advisers and what is appropriate for speech to the general public.”
More on the same subject:
From the media’s way of telling it, if Trump makes a racist statement, it’s proof he’s a racist. Case closed! But if Biden makes 10 racist statements, those are GAFFES. The implication is that Biden isn’t a racist, only a bungler. The guy just misspoke, again and again and again
The Biden/Sanders Unity Platform explicitly calls for defunding police agencies. Black Lives Matter leaders are demanding even more radical changes to the criminal justice system, and in an interview late last month, Biden responded “Absolutely” when he was asked if he would divert funds away from law enforcement.
Yet, just today, Biden said he supports additional funding for police. Perhaps it is a poll-driven statement as polls have repeatedly shown this is deeply unpopular.
Snip.
Now the Radical Communist Party (RCP) has endorsed Biden. They did it very carefully, saying Biden is still a terrible candidate, but he is the lesser of two evils. For them, he certainly is. Trump will stand up to the anarcho-communists in antifa and other groups. Biden’s inner circle sympathizes with their aims, and their allies are ascendant in the Democrat party.
Just today, another candidate supported by the Justice Democrats defeated an incumbent Democrat. Cori Bush, Ferguson Black Lives Matter leader, will join the other ideologues in the Squad when she wins in November. She defeated Lacy Clay, a black man whose father founded the Congressional Black Caucus. Clay supported Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, yet he wasn’t radical enough for new urban Democrats. She is the sixth socialist challenger to win a primary.
Remember that the Radical Communist Party was the group that had pre-printed signs ready to go for the Ferguson riots.
Spokespeople for Refuse Fascism include Carl Dix, a founding member of the RCP and Sunsara Taylor, another member of the RCP. The cutest thing about Taylor is that she also sits on the board of World Can’t Wait. This organization used the exact same language, accusations of bigotry and fascism, and calls to drive out the regime following the reelection of George W. Bush. And the same ridiculous logic to tie their batty ideas together.
It almost seems like the RCP pushes out these satellite groups that borrow the 501(c)(3) status from another organization to fund their riots and destruction every time Democrats lose an election. Refuse Fascism runs its donations through the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ). Its funders read like a who’s who of left-wing radicals from Tides to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
Last month, multiple Wall Street bundlers, including Alan Leventhal, the chief executive of Beacon Capital; Nat Simons, who runs a clean-tech investment fund; and Mr. Gray, Blackstone’s president, held virtual fund-raisers for Mr. Biden. The giving has been so robust that the Biden campaign is now asking for at least $1 million in donations before it will confirm the former vice president’s attendance at an event, say bundlers.
As the checks roll in, the Biden campaign has been carefully cultivating its relationship with the business community, with a focus on Wall Street. The outreach has included offering private briefings ahead of major policy rollouts and dangling various donor packages for the upcoming, and mostly virtual, Democratic National Convention.
I guess Democrats think the 1% is cool now that the real class enemy is working class cops…
Does he even mean WHO here, or did he mean the WTO?
Speaking of China:
#China is interfering in our election with almost all of its effort directed at unseating Prez #Trump. In this cycle, Beijing will do far more than any other foreign power has ever done, and that includes #Russia. #Biden
I heard someone describe whoever Biden picks for VP as his “living will”. That’s as good a description as any. (Biden would be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president, was on his last.)
The “final” Biden veep pick “rankings“: Harris, Rice, Whitmer, Duckworth, Bass. I don’t know any pundit that doesn’t think Biden is going to pick a black woman.
Over 90 field organizers for the Florida Democratic Party signed a scathing letter Friday to the party’s leadership, claiming among other things that the campaign is “suppressing the Hispanic vote” in Central Florida.
The seven-page internal letter, obtained by the Miami Herald, contains eight allegations from field organizers about what they say is a lack of a “fully actionable field plan” from the Biden campaign as it transitions into the Florida party to coordinate voter outreach efforts.
This letter comes 100 days out from the general election and as recent polls show enthusiasm about voting among Latinos in battleground states like Florida could be waning in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the claims: mistreatment of field organizers, relocating trained staff members without explanation, lack of organizing resources and taking on volunteers who are then left in limbo.
In a battleground state where elections are historically won by thin margins — and as presidential campaigns ramp up outreach efforts in Florida’s Hispanic communities — organizers claim that the Coordinated Campaign lacks key infrastructure and perpetuates a “toxic” work culture that is hurting morale among on-the-ground staffers.
One big issue is that at least a handful of organizers were recently transferred from a heavily-Puerto Rican part of the state to counties with a small percentage of Hispanics.
“Four of five Spanish-speaking organizers along the I-4 corridor who were moved to North Florida were Puerto Rican,” the letter says.
Field organizers add that input from staffers connected to Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida is often dismissed.
“The [Coordinated Campaign of Florida] is suppressing the Hispanic vote by removing Spanish-speaking organizers from Central Florida without explanation, which fails to confront a system of white-dominated politics we are supposed to be working against as organizers of a progressive party,” the letter adds.
A Democratic official familiar with internal discussions who asked not to be named said the letter comes amid negotiations between the Coordinated Campaign in Florida and the field organizers’ union, the IBEW Local 824.
So the Biden campaign is plagued by internal dissension thanks to Social Justice pandering, ethnic identity groups, and unions.
“Trump neck and neck with Biden, 45%-47%, approval equal with Obama’s in 2012.” The usual “polls are meaningless” caveats apply, along with the perception that Rasmussen favors Republicans. As opposed to all the other polls, which favor Democrats by about 3% in a good year… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
We’ve all heard the rumors. Joe Biden is running for president. Joe Biden has a huge lead in the polls. Joe Biden can tie his own shoes.
All are difficult to prove or understand.
I know that Joe Biden’s Twitter account is running for president. It’s a horrible candidate, by the way, maybe worse than he is in person. As for the shoe-tying thing, I’d wager good money that, if you asked Joe to tie his shoes he would try to shove a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up his nose.
The lead in the polls is the most mystifying, however. It’s true that many of us have a well-founded distrust of pollsters. In the past, however, when they’ve been deliberately skewing things one could at least find the occasional supporter of the candidate they were trying to prop up. They were ridiculously off about Granny Maojackets in 2016, but most of us at least met some Hillary voters.
Joe Biden is a different thing altogether. Last week, a friend of mine who is well-placed on Capitol Hill remarked that no one in D.C. is talking about Joe Biden. In the ensuing four days, three other friends whose opinions I also respect mentioned that nobody ever meets a Biden supporter in person.
I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the most liberal city in Arizona. It’s left-wing bumper sticker (Coexist!) and yard sign hell here. None of them mention Joe Biden. Bernie bumper stickers abound, however. Heck, I have a neighbor up the street who still has a Bernie 2016 sign up, so it’s not like the local folk aren’t dedicated.
This is all anecdotal, of course, but so were the rumors about flyover country support for Trump in 2016.
Snip.
What we’re looking at now is a candidate who is, according to polling, a juggernaut but one whose real world support is nigh on invisible. It hasn’t been that long since the national pollsters were really, really wrong, of course. However, this disconnect between Biden’s poll numbers and the nonexistent enthusiasm for his candidacy is weird even when you factor in the plague year and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The leftist loons that run the New York Times editorial board wonder who Biden listens to. It’s pretty tiresome, but it does let us capture the names of some of Biden’s advisors.
The Democratic Party’s activist base, especially its younger members, harbors grave doubts about Mr. Biden and has vowed to keep the pressure on as he charts a path forward. One big, basic question on many people’s minds is, Just how far left will Joe go?
Snip.
Skepticism about Mr. Biden runs deep on the left. During more than four decades in public office, he earned a reputation as a pragmatic centrist (sorry!) — the guy President Obama sent to negotiate deals with congressional Republicans that no one else wanted to be in the room with. Some progressives regard him as just the sort of compromised, compromising, politics-as-usual establishment tool standing in the way of meaningful change, and they fear that he has surrounded himself with other establishment tools who see the activist base as a threat to the existing power structure that must be neutralized.
“There’s a whole wing of the Democratic Party establishment that doesn’t simply want an electoral victory,” they want it on terms that let them “weave a narrative” to discredit the left, said Mr. Mitchell. “They want to defeat Trump and progressives in one fell swoop.”
Conversely, the Social Justice Warriors in the party’s insane wing are just as willing to lose this election if it means getting to control the party’s levers of power.
As the saying goes: Personnel is policy. But the campaign has been cagey about who is advising it and how the policy sausage gets made. Members of its extended economics team, for instance, were ordered to keep quiet about their campaign work. They can tell friends and colleagues, according to a memo acquired by The Times, but should not mention their affiliation “on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn or in your professional bio.” And they should steer clear of the news media. Period.
Some names have trickled out. Progressives are not happy that Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff/congressman/mayor of Chicago is advising the campaign on economic policy and political strategy. (The left’s grievance list against this former Clintonite is long, and his mayoral tenure was marred by serious police scandals, including the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, which prompted protests and an investigation by the Justice Department.) “Not the sign we want to see,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of the grass roots group MoveOn.
Even more explosive was the April news that Lawrence Summers has been offering his economic insights. A veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses, Mr. Summers is viewed as a neoliberal, business-cozy monster by the left, his name invoked with a level of distaste normally reserved for child predators.
In early May, more than two dozen progressive groups sent an open letter to Mr. Biden, demanding that he remove Mr. Summers from any campaign advisory role and “exclude him from a future Biden administration.” Charging that Mr. Summers had “put the interests of large corporations ahead of working families in the United States and around the world, fueled the climate crisis, and undermined efforts to ensure gender equality,” they declared it “hard to imagine a worse person than Larry Summers to guide the next President toward an economy that works for all.”
The Biden campaign has met such criticisms with assurances that it is listening to a wide range of voices.
Translation: “Run along, little girl, the adults are trying to speak.”
With Mr. Biden having spent the last half-century collecting friends, aides and advisers, not to mention this campaign’s fast-growing official staff, the org chart for Team Biden can be hard to decipher. His inner circle is defined differently depending on whom you ask, and even reasonably senior staffers aren’t always clear about who does what. But whether you think in terms of concentric circles or Venn diagrams or pyramids of power, there are legions of people offering counsel.
For instance, the campaign is consulting with more than 100 left-leaning experts on economic policy. The nominee’s regular briefings are conducted by a smaller core of liberal economists, former Obama officials and advisers to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Former Clinton 2016 advisors: There’s a surefire recipe for victory!
On foreign policy, the nominee has a large network of working groups subdivided according to specialty: nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, China, etc. Who is running these groups, and how much real influence they have, is hard to pin down. For all Mr. Trump’s ravings about China, international matters typically receive less play in presidential races than do domestic issues such as jobs or health care — meaning the Biden campaign is facing relatively little leftward pressure. When Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders formed a collection of working groups in the spring to hammer out joint proposals on various policy issues, foreign policy was not even among the topics tackled.
This likely suits Mr. Biden just fine. Foreign policy is kind of his thing. His expertise runs deep. He knows the players and the issues. As vice president, his instincts were more cautious and minimalist than those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Times once described the two as representing “the yin and the yang of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.”
But, in this as in so many areas, Mr. Biden is a solidly establishment player, and he relies on a clutch of trusted hands, including Julie Smith, Tom Donilon and Tony Blinken, who sits atop the campaign’s foreign policy shop. Mr. Blinken has been with Mr. Biden for nearly two decades and served as his national security adviser in the Obama White House.
Don’t expect his team to be taking on the military-industrial complex or taking up calls to slash funding for the Pentagon. The nominee’s message thus far has been mainstream and soothing, with talk of rebuilding frayed alliances and restoring American leadership on issues ranging from nuclear arms to the Middle East to global warming.
Other top policy dogs: Stef Feldman is the campaign’s official policy director, while Jake Sullivan serves as a combination gatekeeper and air traffic controller, gathering input, coordinating info and bringing order to the chaos across fields and working groups. Bruce Reed, one of Mr. Biden’s chiefs of staff in the Obama White House and a former head of the now-defunct centrist Democratic Leadership Council, also plays a central advisory role. (He used to brief Mr. Biden on campaign trips — in the pre-Covid days when people could still travel.)
Many of those with the most influence operate outside any official lines of authority. Mr. Biden’s inner circle includes longtime loyalists like Mr. Klain; Mike Donilon (brother of the aforementioned Tom), Mr. Biden’s political guru; Steve Ricchetti, who was another of his chiefs of staff in the Obama administration, and Ted Kaufman, who has been with Mr. Biden since his 1972 Senate race. These are the kitchen cabinet folks who make progressives super nervous. They are considered establishment fogies unlikely to challenge the nominee or push him to think big.
The inner ranks are not entirely closed to newcomers. Anita Dunn, a veteran of Obamaworld, effectively took control of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign in the shake-up following his loss in Iowa, and continues to wield serious clout. But Ms. Dunn is herself a Washington fixture and an object of suspicion for some on the left.
“He’s not listening to the folks he needs to listen to,” said Yvette Simpson, who leads the political action committee Democracy for America.
“Wah! He’s not listening to the right leftwing lunatics! Wah!”
It’s all tedious inside baseball stuff, but I’m harvesting and tagging those names so I can track them for future reference if, say, one of them testifies at a future congressional hearing on illegal Chinese contributions to the Biden campaign, just to pluck a random hypothetical out of thin air.
Also mentioned: Sister Valerie Biden Owens and wife Jill Biden.
Instead of telling people Biden is not competent, let Biden continue to show it. The former vice president will misspeak a lot in the coming weeks and months. Let the American people see by his words and actions that he’s not all there. Leave it to surrogates to draw attention to his gaffes. They should do so with sadness rather than ridicule. The message should be: We’ve all seen loved ones struggle with memory loss as they age. No one likes to see it, or point it out. But in Biden’s case, it can’t be ignored. Because our loved ones aren’t asking to be given the nuclear codes. Biden is.
It all started when, after about 40 minutes of an almost-continuous Biden monologue at an April event, Frank Fahey, a Claremont, N.H., teacher, asked Biden: “What law school did you attend and where did you place in that class?”
Here’s Biden full answer:
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”
Biden didn’t even mention where he went to law school, but it was at Syracuse University. The problem was, as Newsweek revealed:
Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
Gallup says there’s little reason Biden will appeal more or less to Catholics, being the first Catholic Vice President and supporting abortion. Maybe. But it’s pretty obvious that Social Justice is the only allowed religion of the Democratic Party…
“Senate Republicans secure impeachment witness who flagged concern about Hunter Biden.” That would be George Kent. Remember that the Burisma scandal never went away…
Biden says Trump is wrong to hold China accountable for coronavirus because Americans can’t distinguish “between a South Korean and someone from Beijing.”
The patronizing view of voters aside, not sure what that has to do with the CCP, or anything. pic.twitter.com/hWUbIRK910
Tara Reade would still like to look at Biden’s records at the University of Delaware. So would Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of itself and the Daily Caller News Foundation against the University of Delaware for former Vice President Joe Biden’s Senate records, which are housed at the university’s library (Daily Caller News Foundation v. University of Delaware (N20A-07-001 CEB)). The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware.
The university said it will not release the records until two years after Biden has retired from public life.
The Daily Caller and Judicial Watch filed requests on April 30 for all of Biden’s records and for records about the preservation and any proposed release of the records, including communications with Mr. Biden or his representatives.
If current trends continue until Election Day, the economy will be surging, vaccinations will be imminent, and Biden will no longer be allowed to use cutlery at dinner.
Biden’s tax increases would raise taxes on middle-class families by over $2,000 a year, with a $1,300 annual tax increase on a median-income, single parent with one child. Repealing Trump’s tax reform would cut in half the child tax credit and standard deduction, which currently help lower-income families the most.
There’s more: Biden proposes to reinstate the ObamaCare individual mandate tax, which hits lower-income and middle-class households the hardest, with an estimated bill of $695 to $2,085 per family. Most households paying that tax made less than $50,000 a year. Remember, Trump’s 2017 tax reform zeroed out that ObamaCare tax, to help working people.
Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs. What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this “fundamental transformation.”
The suburbs are the swing constituency in our national elections. If suburban voters knew what the Democrats had in store for them, they’d run screaming in the other direction. Unfortunately, Republicans have been too clueless or timid to make an issue of the Democrats’ anti-suburban plans. It’s time to tell voters the truth.
I’ve been studying Joe Biden’s housing plans, and what I’ve seen is both surprising and frightening. I expected that a President Biden would enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation to the hilt. That is exactly what Biden promises to do. By itself, that would be more than enough to end America’s suburbs as we’ve known them, as I’ve explained repeatedly here at NRO.
What surprises me is that Biden has actually promised to go much further than AFFH. Biden has embraced Cory Booker’s strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call “little downtowns” in the suburbs. Combine the Obama-Biden administration’s radical AFFH regulation with Booker’s new strategy, and I don’t see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves. It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live. Shouldn’t voters know that this is what’s at stake in the election?
It is no exaggeration to say that progressive urbanists have long dreamed of abolishing the suburbs. (In fact, I’ve explained it all in a book.) Initially, these anti-suburban radicals wanted large cities to simply annex their surrounding suburbs, like cities did in the 19th century. That way a big city could fatten up its tax base. Once progressives discovered it had since become illegal for a city to annex its surrounding suburbs without voter consent, they cooked up a strategy that would amount to the same thing.
This de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force “economic integration” on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.
Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ “abolish the suburbs” strategy into effect (as I explain in detail here). Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.
That’s all bad enough. But on top of AFFH, Biden now plans to use Cory Booker’s strategy for attacking suburban zoning. AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands. Suburbs won’t be able to get the millions of dollars they’re used to in HUD grants unless they eliminate single-family zoning and densify their business districts. AFFH also forces HUD-grant recipients to sign pledges to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Those pledges could get suburbs sued by civil-rights groups, or by the feds, if they don’t get rid of single-family zoning. The only defense suburbs have against this two-pronged attack is to refuse HUD grants. True, that will effectively redistribute huge amounts of suburban money to cities, but if they give up their HUD grants at least the suburbs will be free of federal control.
The Booker approach — now endorsed by Biden — may block even this way out. Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked. AFFH plus the Booker plan will leave America’s suburbs with no alternative but to eliminate their single-family zoning and turn over their planning to the feds. Slowly but surely, suburbs will become helpless satellites of the cities they surround, exactly as progressive urbanists intend.
Several things give me pause in the Biden Triumphant narrative. First, as we saw in 2016, Trump tends to run ahead of his polls. The Trump vote totals in the uncontested Republican primaries show a lot of enthusiasm—more than for Joe Biden, who doesn’t excite anyone. Aside from the usual problems and biases of polling these days, I think the number of “shy Trump” voters may have soared over the last month because of the riots. Back in 2016, the clever pollsters who got closer to the correct result did so by asking voters who they were voting for, and for Hillary responses, followed up with, “Who do you think your neighbor is voting for?” For the Hillary respondents who answered “Trump,” some pollsters correctly surmised (and adjusted their models accordingly) to count some of these supposed Hillary voters as Trump voters.
Second, I also keep thinking of the last national election in Australia, where every poll for the previous 18 months had the Labour Party beating the [conservative] Liberal Party, and yet the Liberal Party prevailed in the vote, largely because the Labour Party campaigned on a hard-left platform. (I know, that could never happen with our good ol’ “centrist” Joe Biden! /sarc). Ditto the last general election in Britain, where the Conservative Party was favored, but ended up running way ahead of its polls in the biggest rout of the Labour Party in 80 years. The point is, leftist parties continue to be in retreat in most western democracies; why should our Democratic Party buck this trend?
Third, there is one very significant cross-tab in the current polls. While Biden leads Trump in nearly every specific issue area, the one area where Trump is judged ahead of Biden is the economy, which may turn out to be the most important issue in the fall. Voters understand that our current economic crisis is not Trump or the government’s fault. It is hard to say right now whether the economy will be rising in the fall, or whether it relapses if a second wave of COVID-19 strangles the recovery. Either way Trump has a strong argument: does anyone think Biden’s proposed massive tax increases are a good idea for a struggling economy? Advantage Trump.
Plus a mention of the Bush-Dukakis race, also covered in the link below.
There are still four months before the election — and any number of ways for Biden to blow it.
Even the best campaigns “can get f—– up,” said Kelly Dietrich, founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, which trains candidates across the country. “There are a million ways to lose.”
Dietrich, like even the most circumspect observers of the 2020 campaign, does not predict that Biden will fall apart. But Democrats carry checklists in their minds of the universe of things that could alter the course of the campaign.
Biden might say the wrong thing at a debate, or have an awkward moment in an interview or at a news conference. Trump’s massive advertising campaign might begin to resonate, hurting Biden’s favorability ratings. Biden’s campaign might make poor decisions about spending allocations in the battleground states, or the coverage of his campaign may sour if he loses even a percentage point or two in polls. Presidential candidates with large leads have all suffered from less.
And then there are the factors outside Biden’s control. It is possible that Trump before November will announce a coronavirus vaccine, whether real or imagined. And it is possible that the economy will improve, a prospect Republicans are pinning their hopes on.
So much has changed over such a short period of time — so far, much of it to Biden’s advantage — that it’s impossible to rule out any kind of black swan political event.
Late this week, Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, sent an email to a circle of friends, including a former congressman and former administration officials, with the subject line, “123 days until the election — and a sobering prospect.”
Right now, he said, “Trump is more than vulnerable.” But then he went on to outline a scenario in which Republicans hold down turnout and sufficiently harden Trump’s base.
“Think it can’t work?” Francis concluded. “Think again.”
Biden’s polling lead over Trump is significant, but not unprecedented. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Biden running ahead of Trump by just less than 9 percentage points.
Richard Nixon maintained double-digit leads over Hubert Humphrey throughout the summer of 1968, then was forced to scramble in the fall as Humphrey surged. Twenty years later, after that year’s Democratic National Convention, a Gallup Poll put Michael Dukakis’ lead over George H.W. Bush at 17 percentage points. As they do today, voters that summer appeared eager for change — before abandoning Dukakis and voting for Bush.
“Sometimes things can look very, very comfortable and it changes, it can change very, very quickly,” said Ken Khachigian, a former aide to Nixon and chief speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. “The psyche of the American voter can be affected by events very dramatically between Labor Day and Election Day.”
Why Biden’s lead will evaporate. Namely because his black female veep choices all suck, and there’s no way Democrats will let him step on a debate stage. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.
I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.
But there were always problems with placing Biden in suspended animation in his basement, even as he seemingly surged ahead of Trump in the early-summer polls.
One, seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more Biden “rests up,” the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse does not make it firmer.
Two, in theory there should be a shelf life to a virtual presidential candidate. True, Biden has climbed in the polls, as the public never sees or hears him — in the manner that an unpopular lame-duck Obama disappeared to the golf courses and retreats in 2016 and yielded the media spotlight to the dog and cat fighting between Trump and Clinton. Obama then discovered that the more he retreated from the public eye, the more the public liked the old idea, rather than the current reality, of him.
Snip.
But by avoiding the campaign trail, Biden is only postponing the inevitable. He is compressing the campaign into an ever-shorter late-summer and autumn cycle. If he really agrees to three debates (he may not agree to any at all), and if he performs as he usually now acts and speaks, then he may end up reminding the American people in the eleventh hour of the campaign that they have a choice between a controversial president and a presidential candidate who simply cannot fulfill the office of presidency. And if Biden is a no-show, Trump will probably debate an empty, Clint Eastwood–prop mute chair.
Read the whole thing.
“Biden says he’s eager to compare ‘cognitive ability’ against Trump’s.”
Joe Biden has once again demonstrated he knows little about U.S. history and the Second Amendment thanks to a recent sit down with Wired in which he was asked about his support for gun control.
Biden responded by launching into a rambling tirade directed at AR-15s, which he says “should be outlawed.” After all, he continued, “From the very beginning you weren’t allowed to have certain weapons. You weren’t allowed to own a cannon during the Revolutionary War as an individual.”
Oh, Joe, you silly, silly man. During the Revolutionary War, not only could individuals own cannons, they could own an entire ship equipped with them. Privateering was an important part of the war effort, especially since the new United States had virtually no real navy of its own.
Snip.
Of course semi-automatic AR-15s aren’t weapons of war, but they’re quite popular among civilians. In fact, they’re the most commonly sold rifle in the country today. When Biden talks about outlawing the possession of these rifles, he’s talking about turning tens of millions of Americans into criminals for simply maintaining possession of the guns they already own. Biden’s grasp on American history may be tenuous, but his commitment to criminalizing the exercise of a constitutionally-protected right is firm.
Biden is not on board with the statue demolition rampage, at least as far as Christopher Columbus, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are concerned. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The former vice president is sticking with Jackie Lee as his Florida state director after Lee led Biden’s Florida campaign ahead of the March 17 Democratic primary, when he trounced rival Bernie Sanders.
For its coordinated director — a position responsible for syncing operations with the Democratic National Committee and the Florida Democratic Party — the Biden campaign has hired Brandon Thompson. He most recently worked as campaign director for Organizing Together 2020 Florida, a political group focused on building campaign infrastructure early for the eventual Democratic nominee.
Thompson previously served as director of national campaigns for California Senator and potential Biden running mate Kamala Harris.
Biden’s campaign is also tapping two Florida strategists who have been involved in efforts to build back the Democratic Party’s registered voter advantage over Republicans in the state: Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Juan Peñalosa and former Organizing Together 2020 Florida political director Karen Andre.
Obama: “Nice country you’ve got here. Too bad all these riots are ruining it. Say, why don’t you hire this Joe Biden guy, if you know what’s good for you? Bet they’ll stop then.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The press is tossing Biden softballs like a grandmother to her four-year-old niece. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily achieve ‘mail-in’ voting; which they desperately need in key battleground states in order to control the outcome.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot shut down rallies and political campaigning efforts of President Trump; which they desperate need to do in key battleground states.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot block the campaign contrast between an energetic President Trump and a physically tenuous, mentally compromised, challenger.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have an excuse for cancelling the DNC convention in Milwaukee; thereby blocking Team Bernie Sanders from visible opposition while protecting candidate gibberish from himself.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have a mechanism to keep voters isolated from each-other; limiting communication and national debate adverse to their interests. COVID-19 panic pushes the national conversation into the digital space where Big Tech controls every element of the conversation.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot keep their Blue state economies easily shut-down and continue to block U.S. economic growth. All thriving economies are against the political interests of Democrats.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily keep club candidate Joe Biden sealed in the basement; where the electorate is not exposed to visible signs of his dementia.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic it becomes more difficult for Big Tech to censor voices that would outline the fraud and scheme. With COVID-19 panic they have a better method and an excuse.
♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot advance, influence, or organize their preferred presidential debate format, a ‘virtual presidential debate’ series.
In 2016, The Atlantic published an article about Wikipedia edits and how a burst of activity could foreshadow Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick, noting that Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s page had seen significantly more edits than any other candidate’s in the weeks leading up to the announcement. The article also cited a 2008 Washington Post report about Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page seeing more than 65 edits in the hours leading up to John McCain’s announcement.
Last month, a Reddit user remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks: Harris had 408, Stacey Abrams had 66, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four. Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris’s edits were coming from a single person.
Harris has been working to distance herself on the national stage from her prosecutorial record in California, which has increasingly become a political liability, while taking a lead on Democratic police reform legislation after the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. During the 2020 primary, she branded herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and shifted left on issues like health care and climate change. But the most drastic gap is between her current messaging on crime and her past.
A section in her bio that detailed her decision not to prosecute Mnuchin for financial fraud, despite recommendations from her staff attorneys, has also been deleted:
In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin‘s bank OneWest despite evidence “suggestive of widespread misconduct” according to a leaked memo….In 2017, she said that her office’s decision not to prosecute Mnuchin was based on “following the facts and the evidence…like any other case”. In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to her campaign, making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin, but as senator, she voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.
A section on an Ethics Commission finding Harris guilty of a campaign spending violation during her San Francisco district attorney race has also been deleted. A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017, where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was removed altogether.
The Wikipedia user, who goes by the username “Bnguyen1114,” has made hundreds of edits to Harris’s page throughout the last several months, often getting into fights over the proposed edits with other Wikipedia editors, who pointed out that the language was getting pulled directly from press releases and campaign literature. “You seem to have gone through a database of press releases from Harris’s office, cataloging every single one and adding it to the article,” one Wikipedia editor said. “That is not how we write encyclopedic articles.”
Susan Rice is also pimping herself hard for Veep. Why the Iran deal and allowing the rise of the Islamic State would be seen as positive job qualifications by the American people eludes me.
Boom!
Biden is controlled by the radical left.
His leftwing controllers are determined to defund the police and make you and your family less safe.
We can't allow their dangerous and twisted dream become a reality. Too much is at stake! pic.twitter.com/mlx6Wjfz3s
Biden comes out of his basement and sees his shadow, more questions about China and Ukraine, more veepstakes, and questioning just how much of that #BlackLivesMatter money ActBlue is raking in goes to Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
After reaching the BLM homepage, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chooses to donate, they’re rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”
Joe Biden is the top beneficiary of the ActBlue’s fundraising efforts.
Is there any evidence that BLM funds donated through ActBlue aren’t going to Biden? If so, who are the recipients?
Reminder: Biden once had a very different view of street disorder and black lives:
I’m not sure that highlighting the 1994 crime bill will actually cost Biden votes, but showing videos like this does provide a stark contrast of the Joe Biden of today and the Joe Biden of the past who obviously had a far more functional brain…
Creepy Joe Biden is beginning to emerge from the basement again, and the results have not been auspicious thus far.
Cut to Philadelphia, Wednesday. He was sporting the de rigueur mask, but it was dangling loosely from his left ear, as if he’d forgotten it. That made his statement attacking President Trump (I think) all the more bizarre.
All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:
“You know, the rapidly rising uh, um, uh, in with the — with the — I don’t know, uh uh,” he said, finally looking up in utter confusion from his notes.
“His, his just inability to focus on any federal responsibility,” Biden mumbled, and I don’t believe he’s been seen outside the basement since.
That latest stumble got a good leaving alone from approximately 99% of the media’s Democrat stenographers. So the next day the Trump campaign manager put out an email demanding that the press’s Democrat rump swabs “stop protecting Biden.”
“The failure to expose the American people to these rambling displays of incoherence, ineptitude and forgetfulness is depriving voters of a clear picture of Biden’s inability to execute the duties of the office he seeks.”
Which is exactly why Biden’s comrades in the media are doing their damnedest to keep him under wraps.
Staying out of the limelight is good for Biden because the election is not about him. It’s about Trump and his missteps, and Biden is the generic Democratic alternative to another four years of the current administration.
Biden’s campaign is explicitly trying to define the election based on whether or not to give Trump four more years in office. A slide in a Biden campaign strategy briefing last month said, “This election is a referendum on Trump.”
“If the country is asked to have an up or down vote on whether or not Donald Trump should receive four more years, the country would say no, and [the Trump campaign] themselves admit it,” Biden campaign strategist Mike Donilon said during the presentation.
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe plainly explained why Biden does not need to be out in the open during a video call with a local Democratic group over the weekend.
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, we got to get the vice president out of the basement,’ He’s fine in the basement,” McAuliffe said. “Two people see him a day: his two body people. That’s it.”
Will a Joe Biden presidency derail housing reform and the “recap and release” of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
The answer is a resounding “yes,” according to housing analysts who have ties to Biden’s economic advisers and their thinking on what might happen to the housing giants, if as current polls suggest, the former vice president unseats Donald Trump and becomes president in November….affordable housing is a significant issue to Biden and he would like to expand Fannie and Freddie’s mandate and likely keep them under government control.
Of course they do. How else are Democrats supposed to rake off the graft?
We all agreed that Trump has been too tepid lately and not using the instincts that blew up the political world in 2016.
We are all aware that Joe Biden has benefited greatly from his pandemic-induced basement quarantine. He’s such a train wreck that his handlers are no doubt working overtime to come up with excuses to keep him away from the campaign trail and — more importantly — from sharing a debate stage with President Trump.
The three of us agreed that President Trump needs to seize the initiative now and start goading Biden to get back in the public eye and into a debate. One of Trump’s greatest gifts is the thing that drives old guard Republicans crazy — his ability to drive a narrative on social media. Now is the time for him to use that bully pulpit and relentlessly bait Biden and force his hand.
Biden can’t win a Twitter throwdown with Trump. His handlers are tweeting for him and they are not the most inventive lot. His Twitter feed reads like something that came from a book titled “Democrat-y Stuff Candidates Should Say.” It would be very easy for the president to make Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep look awful all day, every day. The end game is to get Biden back in public, of course, but there is an immediate return on investment in a Twitter flame war.
In my five years of watching Donald Trump in the political arena, the only thing I’ve learned is that Trump probably isn’t going to do what I expect him to do, or think he should, and that what he ends up doing will probably be more effective than what I suggested. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Biden spent over three decades opening American markets to Chinese goods, ignoring China’s abhorrent human rights record, and dismissing the challenge posed by our greatest rival for global leadership. The “made in China” era coincided with the closure of tens of thousands of American factories, stagnant working-class wages, and the loss of America’s ability to produce essential goods domestically — a vulnerability that took on incredible significance when we learned that we were dependent upon China to produce the medical equipment needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
This disaster was facilitated by politicians of both parties, and no one was more gung ho than Joe Biden, the poster child for the globalism that reigned supreme until the 2016 presidential election, which Donald J. Trump won by campaigning on a platform diametrically opposed to the “open markets and open borders” philosophy of the D.C. establishment. In the White House, President Trump became the first American leader in decades to take a firm stand against China’s malfeasance and demand a genuinely fair and reciprocal trade deal for American workers.
While Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, conversely, he was downplaying the consequences of China’s rise — even as his own family tried to get rich through deals with Chinese state-owned companies.
Biden leading in swing states, yadda yadda yadda. Consider this your periodic reminder that polls are pretty much meaningless this election season. The one poll I dug into, for Texas, undersampled Republicans by about seven points, so expect widespread media falsification of just about every media to help drag Biden over the line.
Another reason not to believe those polls: When you ask people who they think will win, a majority agree that President Trump will beat Biden, 51%-37%. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
As data show recent riots and the months-long COVID-19 economic shutdown hurt black-owned businesses more than any other racial group, the Trump campaign slammed rival presidential candidate Joe Biden for a “weak” response to these challenges.
Democratic governors generally have been more hesitant to reopen their states’ economies than Republicans, leading to criticism from President Trump and his campaign, which argues that delays hurt black-owned enterprises.
The Trump campaign pointed to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing there has been a a 41% decline in the number of black business owners from February to April of this year, driven by the COVID-19 shutdown.
“President Trump’s background as an entrepreneur and builder shapes his passion for protecting, supporting and empowering American black-owned business owners, especially right now,” Paris Dennard, Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member told Just the News. “Every day Joe Biden fails to strongly call an end to the looting, and rioting in urban cities, more black-owned businesses are destroyed. Every day Joe Biden fails to support efforts to safely and expeditiously re-open the economy, more black businesses are destroyed. The data shows a prolonged economic shutdown hurts black American entrepreneurs, so Joe Biden’s opposition is standing in the way of black generational wealth, growth and opportunities.”
More veepstakes pandering. “Among the candidates who have progressed to the point of more comprehensive vetting or have the potential to do so are Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), former national security adviser Susan E. Rice and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, all of whom are black. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is white, is also in that group, as is New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is Latina.”
The search committee has been in touch with roughly a dozen women, and some eight or nine are already being vetted more intensively.
Among that group are two contenders who have recently grown in prominence, Representative Val Demings of Florida and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. One well-known candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has lost her perch as a front-runner. And some lower-profile candidates, like Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are advancing steadily in the search process.
Some of the contenders who have advanced furthest in the process are well known, including Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But The Times confirmed that several other women — whose names have been repeatedly floated but who have not publicly confirmed that they agreed to be vetted for the job — are under active consideration as well.
Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren have been interviewed at length by Mr. Biden’s team, as has Ms. Baldwin, who was the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the Senate.
Two women with distinctive national-defense credentials have also been interviewed and asked for documents: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war combat veteran who is Asian-American, and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and the first black woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.
As the vetting process advances to a newly intense phase, the political currents of the last few weeks are also leaving a mark on the Biden team’s deliberations. The wave of demonstrations touched off by the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer there, has elevated a pair of black women long regarded as intriguing long-shot candidates: Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms.
Though Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms are far less known to the national electorate than other figures on Mr. Biden’s list, they have played crucial roles in a cascading civil rights crisis: Ms. Demings, a former police chief in Orlando, Fla., has become a major figure in the law-enforcement debate, while Ms. Bottoms’s handling of chaotic demonstrations in her city earned her national acclaim.
For “national acclaim” read “less incompetent than other Democratic mayors.
More Ukraine news, China and Iran compete to see who can buy a bigger piece of Slow Joe, Biden’s staff bail out antifa rioters, and he confuses D-Day and Pearl Harbor. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
“Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach on May 19 made public leaked audio recordings of phone conversations held by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State John Kerry with ex-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko.
“At a press event held in Kyiv on Tuesday, Derkach said U.S. officials asked that Petro Poroshenko ensure the dismissal of the-then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“One of the conversations on the said issues was allegedly recorded on December 3, 2015, where the voice that’s purportedly John Kerry’s is heard saying: ‘I just wanted to try to urge you to see if there’s a way to get by this problem of replacing the prosecutor general, you know, [Viktor] Shokin because per my perception, he’s blocked the cleanup of the Prosecutor General’s Office,’ said Kerry.”
There’s another recording from March 22, 2016, in which Derkach claims the voices of Biden and Poroshenko are heard again. In it, Biden reiterates his quid pro quod demand for change in the prosecutor general’s office and “the government” (unspecified) in return for $1 billion.
Not surprisingly, Derkach is being accused of being everything from a KGB agent to a Trump shill, but it should be fairly easy to authenticate those voices. Just don’t look for The New York Times to do it.
Meanwhile, also on May 20, the Senate Homeland Security Committee and its chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have finally subpoenaed Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-leaning Washington firm that was doing public relations for Burisma, attempting to burnish its tarnished image. Blue Star’s CEO denies any wrong-doing but for reasons unknown had refused to turn over documents to the committee for months.
Anyway, it’s certain that Biden’s “Ukraine problem” isn’t going to go away. Ditto his China problem, which also involves Hunter.
Many claims were made that Trump would be in Putin’s pocket were he elected U.S. president. The reality is, for similar reasons with considerably more actual evidence, electing Biden would be far more dangerous to our country.
Iranian state-sponsored hackers are looking to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections in November, say senior U.S. intelligence officials.
“Iran seeks to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, the current U.S. president, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections,” one official told Just The News.
In addition to hacking the election, the Iranians are looking to sow discord about the pandemic. “Iran is targeting U.S. and international health organizations for COVID-19 information” and selectively release information that would stoke divisions, the official said. This seems unnecessary when the liberal media is already doing that.
Iran is also targeting U.S. electric utilities, and oil and gas companies.
“It’s fairly well known that the Iranian government has invested considerable resources into cyber hacking, and have done so for some time,” said Fred Fleitz, former NSC chief of staff and CIA analyst.
As for their goals in hacking the U.S. elections, can you guess who they want to win?
“Iran’s attempt to interfere in U.S. elections must be analyzed in the context of its deep trouble domestically,” Ramesh Sepehrrad, a cybersecurity executive, explained to Just The News. “With three rounds of major nationwide uprisings calling for regime change, widespread corruption added to the public’s anger, and mismanagement, the cash-hungry regime is extremely vulnerable.”
According to Sepehrrad, the mullahs believe a change in leadership in the United States will benefit them. “Tehran’s strategy is to buy time and survive until November, hoping that a potentially Democratic U.S. President would save them,” she said. “Therefore, given their absolute desperation to survive domestic unrest, economic disaster, and U.S. pressure, Trump’s reelection is a nightmare for the ayatollahs.”
What do you want to bet that our beloved news media suddenly won’t treat election interference by a hostile foreign power as The Worst Thing Ever anymore? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Speaking of foreign powers with a Piece of Joe, The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania accused of taking “over $70 million from China, of which $22 million were listed as ‘Anonymous.'”
It’s pretty clear who the commie bastards known for their shoddy lab practices and their weird fetish for gnawing on pangolins badly want to win in November, and it’s not Trump and the Republicans. The Chinese communists want their money’s worth, and they will go all-in for the Democrats who find the chance to hurt Trump at the same time they hurt America too delicious to pass up. Plus, the Dems heartily approve of what Mao’s Pals are doing to freedom-loving Hong Kongers, seeing it as a template for what they would love to do to freedom-loving us.
We need to understand and accept that a vote for anyone with a “D” is a vote for Xi.
Snip.
Let’s look at Joe Biden for a moment, though it will have to be on video since the Geppettos holding his strings are not letting him out of his Delaware dungeon unless a miracle happens and he becomes a real boy.
This is the guy that went publicly incontinent when the Great Wall Gang was shipping Typhoid Mulans over here and Trump cut off that insanity. Travel bans were racist, you know, until they weren’t. And this guy wants to be president, when he remembers he is running for president, though his priority was not saving American lives but not vexing Beijing. This guy is so far in the Red Menace’s pocket that he’s risking lint poisoning.
They channel the digital Dem, asking, “Come on man, is it too much to want a president who takes America’s side?
Well, to the Democrats, the answer is a responding, “Yes, and don’t assume my gender.”
Now, Biden always sides with the PRC because, like the elite whose Guccis he slurps, he’s totally comfortable with the Chinese supplanting the USA as the world’s preeminent nation – that’ll show those flag-waving flyover rubes who’s not boss! The totally-not-senile politician opposed Trump’s tariffs and his attempts to level the playing field, and Hi-Bidder Biden would sign agreements to lock in the former Deliverance trade model. His response to the People’s Liberation Army arms build-up that threatens our Pacific Fleet would be, “Hey man, I believe in building-up arms! I work out and I am strong and I can do more push-ups than you, fat!”
Here’s the other thing. Remember all that idiotic babble about the Russki kompromat of Trump? That somewhere, Putin had this video library of Trump water-sporting with Muscovite rent girls? Well, we all know Joe’s pride n’ joy Hoover went to China and did a big-bucks deal, probably because he’s such a super-achiever who got where he is on his own talents and not at all drafting after his daddy. So, what else do you think he did when he was there? Explored the Great Wall? Marveled at the Forbidden City? Cavorted with every skeeze the ChiCom intel guys could throuple him up with on video?
Did it happen? You want to bet it didn’t? We know the guy got booted from the Navy for dope. We know he got zillions from some Ukrainian oligarch. We know he was accused of forgetting his crack pipe in a rental car. We know he impregnated a stripper. We know he was voted “Least Likely to be the Centerfold of Good Judgment Monthly.”
What are the chances the Chinese Gestapo didn’t try to honey-trap the guy who’s the Winnie the Pooh of hookers n’ blow? What do you think they probably caught him doing on Candid Commie Camera? It’d be like a home movie from Memorial Day weekend in Lake Havasu on Bob Crane’s houseboat.
That Biden is the Democrats’ presumptive nominee is truly remarkable when you think about it. He’s all but abandoned his native tongue. He had one mediocre debate performance while the rest ranged from awful to disastrous. He’s off-script more than Robin Williams during his peak cocaine years on Mork and Mindy, yet everyone over on that side keeps giving him a pass.
As many have noted, this pandemic shutdown has been a boon for Biden and is probably the reason he’s doing well in the polls. Time away from the public eye has been Biden’s friend, train wreck video appearances notwithstanding.
My latest “Democrats want the shutdown to continue” theory doesn’t have to do with tanking the economy, which I still believe is their primary objective. I believe their secondary objective is to leave as little time as possible between the return of the candidates to the campaign trail and the election. Biden is barely able to navigate the tightly scripted affairs that his handlers have him doing from his basement, they’re petrified of the thought of him being out in the wild, off-leash and babbling.
So, the longer Democratic governors can keep things at least in partial shutdown, the more the economy tanks and hurts Trump and the more reason Team Biden has to keep their guy away from cameras where he might eat a booger or sniff a stranger.
I’ll admit, this is the first presidential election since 1984 where I was looking forward to the general election debates. The thought of seeing Trump’s extemporaneous wizardry going head-to-head with Biden’s word salad factory will probably come off as something more akin to British comedy than American political theater. Must-see TV for sure.
There is little doubt that Biden’s biggest gaffe is just waiting for his grand return to campaigning in public. You know it, I know it, and his handlers all have bleeding ulcers because they know it better than anyone. Once he is back out in public, Joe Biden becomes the greatest weapon against Joe Biden. President Trump could go on autopilot and win the election.
Wow, it was awfully convenient that antifa launched their riot spree right after Biden made his “You ain’t black” comment, wasn’t it?
Any questions about the Mueller Investigations impartiality?
This is the prosecutor who also attended Hillary Clinton's tear-filled election night event in 2016. Doing his best to discredit the investigation. https://t.co/xMbn9LnzY5
On the other hand, the Harris reputation for being “top cop” may rule her out.
And the riots may spell doom for Amy Klobuchar’s campaign as well, given that she declined to prosecute Derek Chauvin or other police who had complaints against them.
The Biden campaign makes some more hires. “Mr. Biden’s campaign is designating Addisu Demissie, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, as a senior adviser responsible for coordinating the convention. It is also naming Lindsay Holst, who was Mr. Biden’s digital director when he was vice president, to lead special projects for the convention, including its digital side, according to people familiar with the appointments.”
“Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden confused D-Day and Pearl Harbor—as well as the date that Delaware declared its independence from neighboring Pennsylvania—at a Wednesday campaign event. ‘We declared our independence on December the 7th. It’s not just D-Day.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit, who notes “Was it over when the Germans landed at Pearl Harbor?”)
I will consider your candidacy if you explain the science behind your opinion that a biological man can be a woman, and your party's position that a baby in the ninth month of pregnancy is a mere cluster of cells. https://t.co/gayelXptRA
The rape allegation against Biden slowly percolates out into the mainstream media, Biden’s brain melts (more), Slow Joe stumbles through interviews (again), and more memes than you can shake a stick at. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
A remarkable thing happened Monday: The New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, actually had to answer questions about his paper’s very different coverage of sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden and Brett Kavanaugh. It did not go well. It is simply impossible to read the interview and the Times coverage of the two cases and come away believing that the Times acted in good faith or, frankly, that it even expects anyone to believe its explanations. The paper’s motto, at this point, may as well be “All the News You’re Willing to Buy.”
For all their lectures to the public about transparency and fearless independence, prestige journalists tend to be very reluctant to face accountability of their own. Ben Smith, who only recently left his position as editor in chief of BuzzFeed for a perch as media reporter for the Times, deserves credit for putting Baquet to some tough questioning. Let’s walk through the Times’ very belated report on the Biden allegations and Baquet’s defenses of that reporting. The article, blandly titled “Examining a Sexual Assault Allegation Against Biden,” ran on page A20 of the Easter Sunday edition of the paper. On the same day, the Times opinion page ran a much more visible op-ed by Biden himself on his proposals to reopen the country.
Snip.
Tara Reade was one of the women who accused Biden in early 2019, but at the time, she did not accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her by penetrating her with his hands under her skirt, as she has now. Biden has never been asked personally to respond to Reade’s allegation. The Times assigned multiple reporters to the story but printed his campaign’s formal denials without addressing whether it had asked Biden himself to comment. Its report expressed no concerns that there has been inadequate investigation of the charge.
Smith started off by asking Baquet why it took until April 12 for the Times to even mention the allegations, which were made in a podcast interview on March 25 and reported at National Review and elsewhere within days:
Lots of people covered it as breaking news at the time. And I just thought that nobody other than The Intercept was actually doing the reporting to help people figure out what to make of it. . . . Mainly I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party’s nominee. Look, I get the argument. Just do a short, straightforward news story. But I’m not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand. Have all the information he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing.
So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” This does not pass the laugh-out-loud test. Does any sentient being believe that the Times would have waited more than two weeks to even mention such an allegation against a Republican or conservative figure, while it tried to figure out how to tell its readers what “he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing”? Recall its wall-to-wall instant coverage of the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape, which by the next day had a full news analysis by Maggie Haberman asking why Trump had not apologized yet.
In Kavanaugh’s case, on September 14, 2018, before Christine Blasey Ford had even put her name to a public allegation against Kavanaugh, the Times published a 31-paragraph story on the then-anonymous charge. Two days later, the very day that Ford agreed to come forward publicly, the Times blared out a Sheryl Gay Stolberg story, which opened
President Trump’s bid to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was thrown into uncertainty on Sunday as a woman came forward with explosive allegations that Mr. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers more than three decades ago.
Unlike here, the story led with the most inflammatory line in Ford’s allegations (“I thought he might inadvertently kill me”) and contrasted that with what it described as “a terse statement” from the White House, terms it did not use in framing the allegations against Biden. Then, the Times complained that “some of the president’s allies on the right excoriated Ms. Ford — a registered Democrat — as a partisan.” Here, regarding Reade, the Times reported its reasons for skepticism of her political motivations (supporting Marianne Williamson, then Elizabeth Warren, then Bernie Sanders) without putting those accusations in the mouths of people primed to be disliked by Times readers.
Snip.
It got worse: When undeniably disreputable figures came out of the woodwork to offer lurid and preposterous tales of Kavanaugh’s supposed predations (many of which have since been recanted or thoroughly debunked), the Times ran with them. As Smith notes, when since-convicted lawyer Michael Avenatti pushed forward the charges by Julie Swetnick of Kavanaugh’s involvement in gang rapes, “The Times wrote that story the same day she made the allegation, noting that ‘none of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated.’” Baquet’s response:
Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case. So I thought in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment. . . . Kavanaugh was a running, hot story. I don’t think it’s that the ethical standards were different. I think the news judgments had to be made from a different perspective in a running hot story.
This is entirely circular: If the media make something a story, it becomes newsworthy; if it’s not reported, the readers don’t know about it, so it’s not newsworthy. No purer distillation can be found of the idea that the media set their own agenda.
How on earth do you pretend that Joe Biden’s character is not instantly newsworthy? He’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president. He was the vice president of the United States for eight years. He’s been a front-page news figure since the 1980s. Thought experiment: Imagine that an allegation came forward against Ken Starr. We all know that, because Starr was involved in pursuing the Lewinsky story, any whiff of sexual impropriety would instantly be framed as a hypocrisy story even long after Starr has left public service. Biden chaired the Hill–Thomas hearings in 1991; how is that not the same thing?
We were constantly told that the Kavanaugh allegations should be judged by a low bar because the hearings were “a job interview” and he’d be confirmed to a powerful, life-tenured job. Well, presidents have a lot more power than any individual Supreme Court justice, including the power to appoint lots of life-tenured federal judges and justices. Isn’t this Biden’s job interview?
Rick McHugh previously reported on Weinstein’s many victims, so he’s not new to this rodeo.
In the interview below, he says the following:
* Tara Reade says she told her mother, her friend, and her brother about the sexual assault just after it happened. The mother has passed, but the friend and brother confirm they were told about this at the time.
* He further says his interviews of the friend and brother were “not short conversations,” but long ones, where he “drilled down” to discover if their recollections matched the story Reade was telling now. He says they do in fact match.
* He notes further that the timing of this claim tracks with Reade’s sudden demotion at the Senate.
* Tara Reade says she also filed a complaint with the Senate about sexual harassment (not assault, which happened later) after her complaint to the Biden staff was ignored. McHugh cannot find this document, but says it seems to be located (assuming it exists) at the University of Maryland’s collection of Joe Biden’s papers — which is conveniently under seal.
“NYT: We Looked Into the Accusations Against Joe Biden and Determined He’s A Democrat“:
“While the charges of sexual assault by Biden’s former aide, Tara Reade, are something we would call extremely credible in any other situation,” reads the article, “our investigation revealed that legitimizing them would be politically unhelpful to Democrats. Thus we conclude the allegations are false for reasons we will fill in later — unless we can just go back to not talking about them and not give any reasons at all. We also find it absolutely necessary to consider Biden’s habit of inappropriately touching women to be ‘charming.’”
CNN? Not so much. The published over 700 articles on Christine Blasey Ford, but as of April 16 had yet to mention Tara Reade.
CNN’s political campaign against Kavanaugh included sympathetic articles toward Blasey Ford, hostile articles about Kavanaugh, supportive pieces about the importance of believing women even when they provide no evidence, hostile pieces about the danger of due process and empathy for men, and targeting of key Republican senators. CNN’s work culminated with their award-winning efforts to sway Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, broadcasting a confrontation between a professional activist and the wavering senator.
It’s a low bar but Tara Reade’s accusation is undoubtedly stronger than the one made against Kavanaugh. Unlike Blasey Ford, she told multiple people about the alleged incident at the time it happened, not three decades later. And unlike Blasey Ford, she has evidence she met the accused, in her case when she worked for him in the U.S. Senate.
Since then they’ve done one article on her April 17, then mentioned her in another.
Former Bill Clinton advisor Dick Morris doesn’t think Biden has the stuff. “It’s hard to see. It’s like a suicide march with them. But they’re pretty stubborn people.”
Former Bernie Sis Shoe0nHead on the hilarity of watching a Biden-Trump election. “Biden’s brain is melting. He doesn’t know where he is half the time, he loses his train of thought, he wanders off camera, and Trump is like a 12 year old on Xbox Live. The combination of these two these two titans coming together will be hilarious! Trump will beat Joe Biden like a pinata, an old, senile pinata, and the DNC will be forced to watch helplessly as their golden goose gets boiled alive right in front of their eyes! Hilarious!”
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) April 16, 2020
More on the theme:
BIDEN: "Um, you know, there's a, uh, during World War II, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing, uh, that, uh, you know, was totally different than a- than the- it's called, he called it, the, you know, the World War II, he had the war- the the War Production Board." pic.twitter.com/CwFSW2UITD
Lacking such a ring, Stephen Green tries unsuccessfully to decode from the Bidenese. “When most politicians speak, audiences have to suspend their disbelief. When it’s Biden speaking they have to suspend their incomprehension.”
OC makes this comment and then poof, just like that, Biden calls her up and they are in talks for an endorsement. It’s almost as if the #metoo movement has been turned into a complete joke, able to be covered up at will via political agreements.
Joe Biden obviously wanted no part of having AOC and her wing propagating the sexual assault claim against him. He’s succeeded in having outlets like the Times and the Post run interference for him, even trashing Tara Reade along the way, but he has no such control over Bernie’s fanbase. Getting an endorsement from their biggest star gives him that.
I have to give it to her though. AOC is nothing if not cunning. She’s managed to go from a nobody freshman congresswoman to the upper echelons of Democratic party influencers in a very short period of time. We can make fun of her all we want, but that takes skill and a lack of shame usually relegated to the Adam Schiff’s of the world.
“Pro-Trump PAC hits ‘Beijing Biden,’ cites China cheerleading.”
Hey, remember that Chinese company Hunter Biden says he’s no longer affiliated with? Well, guess what?
Hunter Biden received wall-to-wall media coverage and praise from his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, in October when he announced he would resign from the board of a Chinese private equity firm by the end of the month.
But six months after Hunter Biden pledged to relinquish his position with BHR Partners, no evidence has surfaced to prove he actually followed through on his promise.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in early November that his client had resigned from BHR’s board, but he did not provide any evidence of his departure from the Chinese private equity firm at the time.
Chinese business records the DCNF accessed Tuesday still name Hunter Biden as a director of BHR. He also retains a 10% equity stake in BHR through his company, Skaneateles LLC, business records for the Chinese private equity firm show.
Related tweet:
Oh wow. Hunter Biden got the Chinese company to say he’s no longer on the board that seems credible so they just lied on their business filings in March? pic.twitter.com/1TwlzklC09
A global plague has shut down much of American society. The virus is particularly deadly to the elderly, and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will turn 78 later this year. In November, voters will want more than anything a VP who is ready on a moment’s notice to lead the country out of a crisis. So the Democratic veepstakes is suddenly much more important than it otherwise would be.
Joe Biden has pledged to name a woman as his running mate, and he has indicated that he would very much like that woman to be an African American. Stacey Abrams checks both boxes, and she is auditioning for the job. But while she might excite the Democratic base, a failed gubernatorial candidate who has never held a public office more powerful than state legislator obviously has no chance of getting the nod during the present pandemic. Maybe the coronavirus will, against all odds, abate in the coming months. But it would be an act of political insanity for a geriatric presidential nominee to select a former state legislator as his running mate under the current circumstances.
If Biden wants his VP to be a black woman, then, he is left with only one real choice: Kamala Harris. While the California senator has three years of experience as a senator and six years more as her state’s attorney general, her presidential campaign was a disaster, doomed by vacillation and equivocation on important matters of policy. She proved herself capable of delivering scripted attacks during debates, but her most famous such attack came at Biden’s expense: She hit him on his past opposition to forced busing, practically calling him a racist. That would be difficult, to say the least, for her to explain away were Biden to choose her. It shouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle, and she still makes sense on paper. But her primary performance failed to generate much enthusiasm among Democrats, and her indecisiveness made her seem unready to step up in a crisis.
What about Elizabeth Warren? If Biden wants ideological balance on the ticket, the senator from Massachusetts makes the most sense. But does he really need ideological balance?
For most of the left, Biden’s pledges to lower the Medicare-eligibility age to 60, establish a public option for health care, and defeat Donald Trump will be enough. Bernie Sanders’s most alienated, angry, hardcore supporters are not going to turn out because of Warren; they hate her just as much as they hate Biden. The greater number of 2016 Sanders voters who didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton in key Midwestern states could be swayed by Warren, but my hunch is that they were turned off more by Clinton’s persona than her ideology, and it’s hard to see how Warren would connect with them on a cultural level. More importantly, Warren’s pledges to radically transform the nation’s economy could scare away the moderate suburbanites who powered Democrats’ successful 2018 effort to retake the House — and Biden really can’t afford to lose those voters in 2020.
All of which suggests that a relatively moderate woman from the Midwest would make much more sense as Biden’s VP.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks, but a fair amount of it has been negative. Whitmer only has one year of experience as governor, and voters may come to view Michigan’s especially stringent lockdown restrictions as arbitrary and excessive in the coming months. She seems like a long-shot for the second spot on the national ticket.
The darkhorse VP nominee from the Midwest is Tammy Baldwin, who has been a senator from the potentially decisive, perpetually polarized swing state of Wisconsin for the last seven years, and won re-election in 2018 by eleven points even as GOP governor Scott Walker lost his bid for a fourth term by just one point. The existence of Baldwin–Walker voters, plus the fact that Baldwin was the first openly gay women in Congress, must be attractive to Democrats. The major drawback is that Baldwin has never endured the national spotlight.
That leaves just one name: Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator who is still the leading contender for the job. She won’t scare away crucial suburban voters the way that Warren would and Harris might. She is serving her 14th year in the Senate, so she has experience, and having run for the presidency this cycle, she has survived the scrutiny of a national campaign.
Politico also has a veepstakes roundup. Toward the end we have this from an unnamed Biden adviser: “Anyone who is telling you about who’s leading in the so-called ‘veepstakes’ is full of shit and doesn’t know anything.” Well then, I guess you don’t need to click that link…
"It's apparently a Senate rite of passage that you're not officially sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediate family."
Biden’s back, Bernie’s coronation is postponed, Buttigieg and Steyer are Out, Bloomberg sucks up to China, Super Tuesday looms, and Biden seeks help from the Holy Roman Empire. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
East Carolina University (North Carolina): Biden 29, Sanders 25, Bloomberg 14, Warren 11, Klobuchar 5, Buttigieg 4, Gabbard 1. Evidently both the Carolinas love them some Biden…
But from a broader perspective, the emergence of Sanders as the Democratic frontrunner mirrors the rise of Trump and the crackup of the Republican Party in 2016, and for many of the same reasons. In both cases, a significant swath of each party’s voter base rejected the party establishment after years of being pandered to or ignored altogether.
Populism cuts both ways, right and left, and the impending takeover of the Democratic Party by a left-wing populist should have been anticipated by party leaders four years ago—and maybe it would have been, if they hadn’t been busy gloating over the GOP’s apparent misfortune of being taken over by Trump.
But Trump’s triumph was a necessary corrective to a party that had lost its way. When Trump cinched the nomination in 2016, it was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. Gone was the mild-mannered GOP of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner. Gone were the empty platitudes, repeated ad nauseum for decades, about comprehensive immigration reform and defunding Planned Parenthood. Gone was the slavish devotion to global free trade deals regardless of the toll it took on American workers. Gone, too, was the subtle deference toward the liberal media that belied the Republican establishment’s ambivalence about the issues rank-and-file Republicans really cared about.
Trump swept all of that away. Before he went to war with Democrats and the media, his candidacy was an all-out assault on the Republican establishment, which had drifted so far from its base that GOP leaders didn’t take him seriously until it was too late. They couldn’t see what he saw: Republican voters—and not a few independents and moderate Democrats—were tired of being ignored by their leaders, whom they had grown to despise. Trump was able to topple the edifice of the GOP because he saw it was rotten underneath.
Now, Sanders is poised to do the same to the Democratic Party. The media is aware of this, but only vaguely, tending to frame Sanders’s rise as a contest between a radically leftist base and a more moderate Democratic electorate at large. That’s one reason the press has so quickly glommed on to the candidacy of Bloomberg, treating him as a viable contender for the nomination and a real rival to Sanders.
“If [Sanders] is the nominee, we lose,” said one Democrat.
That lawmaker indicated that a Sanders primary win would cost Democrats their state in the fall. The lawmaker suggested that many voters could leave the top of the ticket blank. Two other vulnerable Democrats indicated that a Sanders nomination would almost certainly cede their states to President Trump, to say nothing of the impact on races down the ballot for Democratic House and Senate candidates. One Democrat said they would try to hyper-focus on local issues to serve as a counterbalance. But the lawmaker conceded it’s hard to compete with the Sanders narrative and the reverberations of impeachment.
Here’s what’s dangerous about enjoying Bernie’s early success and Dems’ early troubles: Most people say he can’t win and he’ll hand four more years to the other party. Many of those people include the alleged elites of his own party.
Sanders has a cadre of hardcore nobodies who feel alienated from both parties, especially the establishment types who inhabit the once uninhabitable swamp that Maryland so generously donated to the new nation back in 1790.
Those cadres, many of them young, ignorant and inspired, get excited at the mere mention of the name of the man who’s lived off taxpayers virtually his entire career and still managed to acquire three homes.
He’s grumpy, often angry but he is what he is, an authentic, angry grump. His disciples pack the rallies to the rafters or the farthest street corner, cheer everything he says, especially the angry stuff.
The candidate talks about implementing a most ambitious program of reforms that no one thinks can get through Congress. Many fellow party officeholders are already running for fear he’ll drag them down to defeat.
Any of this sound familiar? It’s a parallel phenomenon to the Trump Train of 2015-16. A rich guy from Queens (Bernie is a Brooklyn native) who instinctively tapped into the anger and frustrations of millions of overlooked Americans he has nothing in common with and harnessed that power to a surprise upset ticket into the White House.
The parallel is, of course, imperfect. Sanders is older, Jewish, no friend of Israel. He doesn’t know from tax cuts. There’s hardly anyone safe from the many trillions in new taxes the lifelong politician promises.
There’s a very long way to go in this process. But winning has a way of adorning anyone with campaign credibility and more admirers. You can smell it already.
“Russians Declare Election Too Chaotic For Them To Successfully Interfere.” “‘In our wildest ambitions, we never would have tried to get a straight out Communist to win the nomination in a major U.S. party,’ Putin said. ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to interfere and add to that.’ Putin hung his head sadly. ‘It’s like people don’t even need a Russia anymore.'”
Joe Biden thumped all the competition in South Carolina. The scale of his victory there scrambles the Democratic race. And Biden’s victory takes more steam out of the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But it is not easy to imagine Biden having the stamina to take on Sanders in a long race.
The result should worry Democrats who wanted unity. There had been some evidence in the polls that black voters were warming up to Sanders. They did not do so in sufficient numbers in South Carolina to begin making Sanders into a consensus candidate.
Can Biden sustain the momentum? It’s hard to imagine that he can. This is a Saturday-night victory just days before Super Tuesday. Biden cannot mount much new campaign organization in the upcoming states or process any surge of donations into a surge of advertising. If Sanders wins the preponderance of delegates available next Tuesday, then Biden will just be another non-Sanders candidate, like Pete Buttigieg, who was given a strong look by a particular subset of voters within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile Sanders continues to put points on the board.
Biden’s biggest difficulty is the media. Biden is now depending on an avalanche of earned media gushing about his “comeback” in the race in South Carolina. But, unlike John McCain in 2008, Biden is a candidate uniquely disliked and distrusted by the liberal media apparatus that would provide him such a narrative. They are very likely not to give it to him.
Although much has been made about the continuing importance of black voters and black turnout to Democratic general-election victories, I expect to see stories in the next 48 hours about the unique nature of South Carolina’s Democratic electorate. There may be an undercurrent of internal Democratic class warfare in these accounts, emphasizing that South Carolina’s Democrats are much less educated, less Latino, and less progressive than the party as a whole. Sandersistas will emphasize that Sanders polls better with blacks in the North.
Biden’s victory raises serious questions about the role that liberal-leaning media play in the Democratic process. Black voters overwhelmingly rejected the liberal-media-approved alternatives to Bernie — Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. That media class has been whispering about Biden’s unfitness for office.
Hey, give some credit to those of us in the Vast right Wing Conspiracy: We’ve been shouting about Biden’s unfitness for office! He works with dead people. Hey, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, they’re both Chinese leaders with Xs in their name. More worrying is the fact that there were two different Chinese leaders between the two that Biden’s mind skipped right over. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) What?
“My name’s Joe Biden, I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States senate—if you like what you see, help out, if not, vote for the other Biden”
What words ordinary people associate with Hunter Biden: corruption, Ukraine, sleaze, cocaine, strippers. What word New York Times associates with Hunter Biden: “art”:
Jobless man at center of huge political controversy rents $12k/month house, keeps Porsche in driveway, converts pool house to art studio. NYT publishes feature on art. https://t.co/4cmLtAkNFV
“Biden Wishes Some Country, Any Country, Would Try To Influence Election For Him.” “Seriously, anyone! Prussia! Czechoslovakia! The Holy Roman Empire! They’re still around, right?”
“Anytime we’ve had this before, society blows up and they do set up the guillotines and the guillotines don’t have to be chop your head off. They could be confiscatory taxes, they could be seizing the endowments of uh, educational institutions and um, philanthropic organizations, all of which those proposals are out there. You know, you’re going to have to do something about this income inequality and a lot of it comes from zero interest rates.”
The business of the New York City billionaire (yes, another one) gets significant revenue from its financial and data services in China. He is deeply enmeshed with that country’s business and government networks, and it shows.
Snip.
If Bloomberg wins, he would arguably be the most pro-China president since an avalanche of such presidents following Richard Nixon, who fatefully opened the American economy to the country in 1972….loomberg generally ignores China’s growing military and diplomatic power, instead focusing his claims on how benefit can be derived from China’s growing economy. In a 2008 Newsweek article, he wrote that a “growing Chinese economy is good for America”. He continued, “we have a stake in working together to solve common problems, rather than trying to browbeat or intimidate the other into action.”
Here he broadcasts China’s “win-win” rhetoric against “zero-sum” thinking. But in his many comments on China, Bloomberg does not adequately address the zero-sum thinking of China’s own leaders who argue that the Chinese autocratic system is superior to liberal democracy. Neither does he adequately address how China’s growing economy fuels its global military power projection, or the ongoing praxis of Maoist ideology that lauds the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as growing from the barrel of a gun.
(Caveat: Really not wild about how this website’s bandwidth-and-gimmick heavy idea of webdesign.) (Hat tip: Instapundit.) “Bloomberg’s $400 million bet looks increasingly likely to flop as he lags in Super Tuesday states.” But he’s not out of it yet:
The sub-tweeters and thumb-twitchers are writing Michael Bloomberg’s political obituary after his admittedly less than thrilling turn in Las Vegas, but the pundits were always coming not to praise him, but to bury him. Who does this rich amateur think he is? What year does this out-of-touch oligarch think we’re in, 2016?
The elites of the Democratic party and their baggage train in the media have, like an earlier elite in search of a restoration, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They remember only the humiliation of Trump’s victory in 2016. They refuse to consider the reasons for their repudiation by the voters, or the arrogance that led Hillary Clinton and her team to assume that the Blue Wall was theirs by hereditary right. And they refuse to accept another lesson of 2016: it’s still possible to fix a party conference, but the party no longer controls the primaries and the debates.
Remember how Democrats and Republicans alike mocked Donald Trump for even entering the Republican nomination race? Remember how the pontificators decreed that Trump’s lack of political experience disbarred him from the high office of crashing the biggest economy in the world, as the professional politicians managed to do in 2007 and 2008?
Snip.
The truth is, Bloomberg is in the Democratic nomination race for as long as he wants to be. The longer he stays in the race, the greater the amount of money he’ll spread around. The more he spends, the more the party managers and the senators and the governors and, though they’re far too high-minded to admit it, the media will come to see his candidacy as a fact that’s going to go the distance, and a reality to which the smart money should accommodate itself in case Bloomberg’s candidacy becomes a payday.
Bloomberg understands the lessons of 2016 because, like Donald Trump, he understood them long before and was prepared to act accordingly. Trump and Bloomberg know what the rest of the Democratic field know but, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, lack the integrity to say. The politicians of America are for sale to their highest donor.
Bloomberg also shares with Trump a businessman’s awareness of the price of morals and the cost of moralizing. Elizabeth Warren affected outrage about Bloomberg’s alleged jokes about ‘horse-faced lesbians’ and transvestites, but Trump has already proven that these attitudes, fatal though they may be in the politically correct kingdom of the campus, are an inverse form of recommendation: the kind of candidate who refuses to bow to the puritans might also be the kind of president who could refuse the bribes of the donors.
At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. How does a candidate dropping out increase the likelihood of no majority? Shouldn’t it clear the field up and make it easier to achieve a majority?
The key is in how the Democrats’ delegate math works. The rules require candidates to receive at least 15 percent of the vote, typically, to win delegates statewide or at the district-level.
Buttigieg was projected to get under 15 percent in the vast majority of states and districts on Super Tuesday. Thus, his votes were essentially wasted. Redistributing his votes to other candidates will help them to meet the 15 percent threshold, however. In particular, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were both close to the 15 percent line in many states or districts. So even an extra percentage point or two would help them get over that line in more places. For instance, both Bloomberg and Warren were projected to finish with an average of 14 percent of the vote in California before Buttigieg’s dropout. Now, they’re forecasted for 16 percent instead.
Biden was also projected to finish under 15 percent in some states and districts — so Buttigieg’s dropout helps him out also in a few places. Biden went from a projected 14 percent of the vote to 16 percent in Minnesota, for example.
Conversely, Sanders was already projected to get 15 percent almost everywhere. So although he will pick up a few Buttigieg voters, they don’t necessarily translate to more delegates.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Everybody who wanted a Hillary Clinton podcast, raise your hand. (pause) OK, that’s Ben Rhodes, Huma Abedin, and Bill Clinton (gets her out of the house). Also: “We Need to Talk About Hillary Clinton’s Disturbing Harvey Weinstein Ties.”
Sanders gained steady employment for the first time when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., by ten votes in 1981, at the head of a coalition of leftist civic-action groups against a five-term Democrat who was tacitly endorsed by the Republicans as well. Sanders accused him of being a patronage-tainted stooge of local developers. As mayor, Sanders balanced the municipal budget, attracted a minor-league baseball team (it was called the Vermont Reds not because of Sanders, but because it was a farm team of the Cincinnati Reds). He was a pioneer in community-trust housing, sued to reduce local cable-television rates, and championed an imaginative multi-use redevelopment plan for the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront; his slogan was “Burlington is not for sale.” He worked well with all groups (except some developers) and showed no signs of the authoritarianism of the doctrinaire Left, though he admired some of their most odious exemplars, such as Fidel Castro, whom he unsuccessfully tried to visit. He was reelected three times as a declared socialist, with his vote inching up above 55 percent in 1987, and he had another try at the governor’s chair in 1986, but got only 14 percent of the vote. By this time Sanders was already focused on national government and had invited leftist professor and eminent linguist Noam Chomsky to give a speech in 1985 denouncing American foreign policy. He retired as mayor in 1989 and became a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1989 and at Hamilton College in 1991.
In 1988, Sanders ran again as an independent for statewide office, as congressman at large for Vermont, and gained 38 percent of the vote, double the vote for the Democratic candidate, and within three points of the winner, Republican Peter Smith. Two years later, he ran again as an independent, but without a Democrat in the race, and this time he entered Congress, aged 50, as a Democratic-left independent fusion candidate. He served eight consecutive terms as a congressman and then in 2006 won the first of three terms (so far) as U.S. senator. It was unjust for Michael Bloomberg to suggest that Sanders was a Communist, as he does believe in free elections. He has stuck to his platform and doggedly fought out his career at the polls through 20 elections between 1972 and 2018, 16 of them statewide, albeit in a small state. It is correct, but unsurprising given that he sat as a socialist in the Senate, to say that he has introduced 364 bills as a senator, of which only three have passed, and two of them were to name post offices.
Bernie Sanders believes in mobilizing the less advantaged 50.1 percent of the voters in America, as in Vermont and in Burlington, by promising them a sufficient share of the wealth and status of the upper 49.9 percent of society, while assuaging any reservations about confiscating the wealth and income of others by denouncing the system and representing such redistribution as fairness. He wants an environmental revolution, no doubt to reduce pollution as a side benefit, but more importantly as a planet-saving cover for his assault on capitalism and his acquisition of the votes of the relatively disadvantaged. He is making a direct appeal to a majority of Americans by promising them economic benefits wrenched from the hands of the greedy 49.9 percent, or benignly showered upon them by a kindly state, as if the state got its money from anyone but its constituents.
Sanders keeps saying he’ll attract new voters. New York Times: Yeah, not so much. Here are 55 facts about Bernie Sanders. Nothing says “reasonable centrist” like hanging a Soviet flag in your office. Also: “Throughout his adult life he has denigrated Democrats, calling the party ‘ideologically bankrupt.'” Even Sweden’s Democratic Socialists find Bernie Sanders too far left. More media double standards:
Help me out here. Who decides which old comments "resurface" and which stay "long-buried"? pic.twitter.com/ADNKZjEjB5
It’s a 2 hr drive from Charleston to Myrtle Beach & locals do it all the time – Not @BernieSanders– He & his entourage flew from Charleston to Myrtle Beach in not 1, not 2, but 3 Gulfstream Jets today. It took them 10 minutes to fly. Who is the elitist?? #BernieIsACommunistpic.twitter.com/2CWMXVn4eE
WaPo: “Wow, Bernie sure loves him some communist dictators. Who knew?” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) “Hey there, Mr. SuperDelegate! How do you feel about Bernie as the nominee?” “Aw, HELLS NO!” Bernie bros show up in the middle of the night with bullhorns outside the homes of DNC members Wow, that’s sure to bring them over to your side! There’s at least one outlet that’s all the way in the tank for Bernie: The Onion. Thou Shalt Not Make Funny Of Thy Holy Socialist.
Update: Billionaire Tom Steyer: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 29, 2020. The shade of John Connally can rest a little easier tonight: No longer is his spending $11 million to garner one delegate the most embarrassing waste of money in presidential campaign history. Through January 1, Steyer spent $253,718,074 to get zero delegates. Steyer’s campaign never made any sense:
Even relative to the other longshots, Tom Steyer, who dropped out of the race on Saturday night after a disappointing finish in the South Carolina primary, was a longshot. Nor was it entirely clear why he was running.
Steyer, a billionaire from his previous career as a hedge fund manager, spent the years before his presidential run pushing two causes in particular: efforts to mitigate climate change and the impeachment of President Trump. But Steyer’s presidential campaign wasn’t particularly focused on either issue — or anything else. He embraced some more liberal ideas (a wealth tax) and opposed others (Medicare for All). He cast himself as a populist while also emphasizing his business experience. He touted his electability and his commitment to fighting climate change, but not in ways that were particularly unique compared to the other candidates.
Steyer’s broader electoral strategy, skipping Iowa and New Hampshire while using his fortune to pump ads into states later in the calendar that the other candidates were not focused on yet, was fairly novel at first. And it halfway worked. According to our polling averages, Steyer eked just into the double digits in Nevada and South Carolina. He finished with 5 percent of county convention delegates in Nevada and 11 percent of the vote in South Carolina. That’s more than a lot of candidates managed.
But it’s not good. And in national polls, Steyer’s support never escaped the low single digits.
That’s why I always cheered on Steyer’s campaign: The money he spent on it was money he couldn’t spend against Republicans in races where it might have helped viable Democratic candidates win.
Warren was clearly the favorite candidate of academics and journalists — the intelligentsia. Why? Because she was the quintessential “front row” candidate, to borrow a term from author and photographer Chris Arnade. The image of her campaign will be her on a debate stage, hand raised, ready with an answer — but losing support roughly every minute she speaks.
After her dismal showing in South Carolina, there is no chance of Warren becoming the electoral alternative to Bernie Sanders. The first three states tried Pete Buttigieg in that role. South Carolina resoundingly chose Joe Biden. Her campaign fell between two stools: the young, somewhat nervous Left, and an older, aspirational center.
Her campaign persona had a funny way of playing to each. To the Left, she offered her ambition: her plans to end private health insurance, institute a wealth tax, make day care universal and free. Her promise was to give them security. To the center, she gave her ability to do homework. Every issue had an elaborate plan. Every plan was drawn up in dollars and cents. Sometimes the figures weren’t quite right. To them, she offered her competence and attention to detail.
Well, sort of. Her Medicare for All plan would send the federal budget into a new stratosphere, and she didn’t even include the cost of her plan to cover illegal aliens as well. Not to mention that her proposal includes tax increases that are unconstitutional and politically infeasible.
Both she and Gabbard are evidently flying to Michigan before either knows how badly they lost on Super Tuesday.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
The Iowa Caucuses are finally here today, Bernie panic wracks the DNC, a key poll mysteriously vanishes, Delaney drops Out, and one Biden staffer provides handy voter appreciation. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
A special shout-out to longtime readers who have been with me on this journay since January of last year. What a long, strange trip it’s been!
Civiqs (Iowa): Sanders 28, Warren 21, Buttigieg 15, Biden 15, Klobuchar 8, Yang 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 2. Hard left lean and sample size of 615.
Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 25, Sanders 20, Steyer 18, Warren 11, Buttigieg 7, Gabbard 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2. Bad news for Biden from his “firewall” state, as Steyer is making inroads into the black vote.
New York Times (Iowa): Sanders 25, Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Warren 15, Klobuchar 8, Steyer 3, Yang 3.
American Research Group (New Hampshire): Sanders 28, Biden 13, Buttigieg 12, Warren 11, Gabbard 8, Klobuchar 7, Yang 5, Patrick 2, Steyer 2, Bloomberg (write-in) 2, Bennet 1. Sample size of 600.
Salt Lake City Tribune (Utah): Sanders 27, Warren 14, Biden 12, Bloomberg 10, Buttigieg 5, Yang 5, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1. Tiny poll sample size of 132. You would think this was unrepresentative, but Bernie crushed Hillary in Utah in 2016, winning 79% of the vote. I think Utah has moved to a primary system this year (and one run by the state, not by the political parties).
Election betting markets. Sanders leads Biden by 8 points here as well, Bloomberg is third, and Hillary Clinton is favored over Buttigieg, Yang or Klobuchar (in that order).
Democrat presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer spent a combined $340 million in the final quarter of 2019, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data released on Friday.
Both billionaire candidates far outspent their Democrat rivals, according to the FEC. Former New York City Mayor Bloomberg, whose campaign is almost entirely self-funded, spent more than $188 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 and ended the fundraising period with $12 million cash available.
Steyer, a California businessman, spent approximately $153 million in the fourth quarter and ended it with $5.4 million cash available.
The figures from the FEC show that both billionaire Democrats spent more money on their campaigns than the top four Democrat contenders combined.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spent slightly over $50 million in the fourth quarter, while former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg spent $34 million.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) spent $33.7 million while former Vice President Joe Biden spent more than $23.3 million during the fourth quarter.
A small group of Democratic National Committee members has privately begun gauging support for a plan to potentially weaken Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and head off a brokered convention.
In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention. Such a move would increase the influence of DNC members, members of Congress and other top party officials, who now must wait until the second ballot to have their say if the convention is contested.
“I do believe we should re-open the rules. I hear it from others as well,” one DNC member said in a text message last week to William Owen, a DNC member from Tennessee who does not support re-opening the rules.
Owen, who declined to identify the member, said the member added in a text that “It would be hard though. We could force a meeting or on the floor.”
Even proponents of the change acknowledge it is all but certain not to gain enough support to move past these initial conversations. But the talks reveal the extent of angst that many establishment Democrats are feeling on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.
Sanders is surging and Joe Biden has maintained his lead nationally, but at least three other candidates are widely seen as viable. The cluster raises the specter of a convention requiring a second ballot.
If Sanders wins the Iowa caucuses on Monday and continues to gain momentum, it is possible he could arrive at the convention with the most delegates — but without enough to win the nomination on the first ballot. It is also possible that he and Elizabeth Warren, a fellow progressive, could arrive at the convention in second and third place, but with more delegates combined than the frontrunner.
If, on the second ballot, superdelegates were to throw their support to someone else, tipping the scales, many moderate Democrats fear the upheaval that would cause could weaken the eventual nominee.
Democratic insiders enter the DangerPanic Zone over Sanders. “Democrats have valid reasons to be concerned. Bernie Sanders may play well to the Ocasio-Cortez wing of their party. Still, it’s hard to picture voters abandoning the booming Trump economy for the radical changes Bernie is proposing in a general election.”
Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks its going to come down to Biden and Bernie:
I’d bet on the field to narrow to these two for two reasons.
First, there’s a tendency for the top-polling candidates going into Iowa to overperform in the final results, because the caucusing process ultimately forces supporters of low-performing candidates to cast their votes for stronger ones. Second, the possibility of Bernie’s winning may drive a stampede toward Biden or vice versa.
The emergence of a head-to-head race between Biden and Sanders would immediately clarify the choices for Democrats.
One septuagenarian — Sanders — has recently suffered a heart attack. The other septuagenarian — Biden — frequently seems to have senior moments in the middle of his sentences. A race between these two could eliminate age as a relevant dynamic, leaving clear questions of electability and ideology on the table.
And what then? On one side there is Biden, the more moderate Democrat who scares nobody by design — he’s framed his entire campaign as a return to normalcy — but doesn’t excite progressive activists. On the other side there is Sanders, whose has argued in recent debates that he is electable because he has the backing of a large, young, grassroots movement whose enthusiasm will become contagious. The viability of one could drive the viability of the other.
After many pointless hours debating the ins and outs of Platonic health-care reforms that will never be implemented and many pointless minutes worrying about personality, a Biden–Sanders clash would focus the race on the only questions that really matter to Democrats: Should the party move to the left or to the center?
How should other candidate stop Bernie? I don’t know, maybe by actually attacking him? Too bad none of them have tried that.
Still, there is reason to believe that an attack on Sanders’ resistance to math would contain his rise. The Democratic Party has plenty of moderates who get nervous about overpromising and overreaching. Even Sanders’ best national poll, a 3-point lead within the margin of error in a CNN survey last week, shows the combined support of him and Warren to be 3 points less than the combined support of the four leading moderates: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Mike Bloomberg. If Sanders can be shown to be unwilling to grapple with the finer points of policymaking, that would likely hamper his ability to forge a coalition beyond his initial democratic-socialist base, which would in turn prevent him from securing the nomination.
But a bigger shadow lurks over the Democratic field: the ghost of the Republican presidential campaign of 2016, when the candidates (like Jeb Bush) who attacked the outsider with the intense fan base lived to regret it. If you attack Sanders, and his democratic socialist platform, as mathematically challenged, you are not just attacking Sanders. You are attacking democratic socialism itself. And if you’re in a party with a young wave of democratic socialists as its newest and most unpredictable force, you risk disaster.
No one can say with certainty how many Sanders supporters would abandon the Democratic nominee if he lost the nomination. But we do know that his supporters are, on average, less loyal to the Democratic Party than voters who prefer other candidates. The Economist’s data guru G. Elliott Morris reported, based on two months of his operation’s polling toward the end of last year, that 87 percent of Sanders supporters would stick with the Democrats if he wasn’t the nominee. That’s a lot, but more than 90 percent of Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren supporters said they would vote for the Democrats this fall, no matter what. And just a few percentage points, if even that, could decide the presidency.
The relative tameness of this year’s race also stems from the candidates’ overlapping set of assumptions about how the primary will play out after Iowa. Biden’s camp is convinced that if the former vice president can’t win Iowa—and they are not sure he can if turnout is high—a Sanders win would be the best outcome for him. The reason, according to interviews with top Biden advisers, is that they believe Sanders has a ceiling on his support that will impede his ability to clinch the nomination. They believe that a victory for Warren, Buttigieg, or Klobuchar would pose a greater threat—a win for the latter two would also represent a meteor strike on the moderate voters Biden is relying upon.
The trio of Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are lagging behind Sanders and Biden, but they are betting that Iowa and the New Hampshire primary after that will not winnow the field as quickly as in the past. Instead, all three campaigns generally believe that the heightened media attention on the race, and the rise of online fundraising, will allow them to survive regardless of whether they win, or even finish in the top tier, in the first two states. “The idea that this is going to fit into the same mold as every other campaign you have covered in the past … is inaccurate,” Michael Halle, a senior adviser for Buttigieg told reporters this weekend.
But Iowa’s stakes may be higher than the candidates’ cautious strategy would seem to indicate. [Jeff] Link is one of several Democratic strategists who thinks that all of the campaigns are underestimating how powerfully the Iowa results may reshape the rest of the race. He believes the risks for the others are especially great if Sanders wins, because a victory here would likely further turbocharge the senator’s fundraising operation, which is already swamping those of his rivals. “There’s a kind of lack of urgency between Warren and Biden and Buttigieg and Klobuchar,” Link said. “Anyone who thinks it’s okay to let Sanders win anything is miscalculating.”
More on the fear of a Bernie Planet:
Biden doesn’t have the win-at-all-costs mentality to take out Bernie with lies. So if someone else does it — let’s say with fake news — it means someone behind the curtain is pulling the strings.
Barring a last-minute surge in Iowa by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesotan who has banked her whole campaign on her neighboring state, this is a four-horse race that increasingly looks like it could quickly become a two-horse race between Biden and Bernie Sanders. But funny things can happen at the last minute in Iowa. The most stunning late surge was in the 2012 Republican caucus, when Rick Santorum won after being in sixth place and single digits in the polling averages as late as a week before the vote.
In December 1975, a month before Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucus with 27 percent of the vote, a nationwide Gallup poll showed Hubert Humphrey in first place at 30 percent, George Wallace at 20 percent, Henry “Scoop” Jackson at 10 percent, and Birch Bayh at 5 percent. Some 29 percent of Democrats said they would back Ted Kennedy if he ran. Carter wasn’t even on the radar. Carter was in better shape in the Des Moines Register’s Iowa polling, but his victory still totally overturned the race. National poll leaders in January lost the Democratic nomination in 2008, 2004, 1992, 1988, and 1972. Polling has gotten more sophisticated since then, but large fields and sequential primaries make it a lot less reliable than general-election polling.
Iowa is particularly unsettled in this year’s Democratic race because of the way the 15 percent threshold interacts with the caucus process. Unlike the 2016 Republican race, and even many past Democratic primaries, there are no winner-take-all Democratic primaries this year. Various states have different ways of dividing up delegates — some statewide, some on a district-by-district basis — but many have a 15 percent or similar threshold that prevents minor candidates from gathering any delegates. And Iowa’s caucus rules have a particular wrinkle: In each individual polling place, after the original votes are counted, all the candidates below 15 percent are eliminated and their supporters must switch to one of the remaining candidates (or band together to make one of the under-15% candidates viable) if they want their votes counted. That means that even a candidate who wins the statewide popular vote may be effectively wiped off the ballot in some polling stations. Second choices could decide Iowa.
Go over and read it for a long, detailed, and hard-to-summarize breakdown of the race. “After South Carolina, the calendar and the map are new, and they could make this race less predictable than in years past. Buckle up.”
Take your mind back there. Miami. June 2019. Two nights, 20 candidates. A portrait of the Democratic Party in miniature assembled onstage, mics on, ready to debate.
They are U.S. senators and House members, governors and a mayor, a refreshingly human economic futurist and a self-help guru best known as Oprah’s spiritual adviser. They are young and old, black and white and Asian and brown, wealthy and in debt, gay and straight, war veterans, hailing from all parts of the country. They are, as Democratic chairman Tom Perez proudly points out, “the most diverse field in our nation’s history.”
Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?
There was a sense of possibility and optimism on that stage. Fast forward six months. The leading Democratic candidates are all white. Three are men, and three are older than 70. Meanwhile two old white billionaires are buying their way into contention by spending hundreds of millions of their personal fortunes. At this point four years ago, the top candidates for the Republican nomination were more diverse than the Democratic frontrunners today. Many politicians hailed as the Future of The Party — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke — are gone, exiting the race before a single vote was cast.
Reasons: Trump is inside their heads driving them crazy, the DNC rules ostensibly designed to make the contest fairer backfired spectacularly, and the press sucks. Left out is the fact that all the dropped out candidates sucked to various degrees as well…
IMPORTANT: I just got off the phone with a Bernie volunteer who said that caucus locations are being switched in Iowa, and particularly in places where Bernie is polling well. Make sure to communicate with other Bernie voters in your area about location updates. #Bernie2020#Iowa
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s betting on Catholics in Iowa. How many of those haven’t been completed alienated by the Democratic Party by now? Amalgamated Transit Union backs Biden, after backing Bernie in 2016. Just how much muscle organized labor still has left remains to be seen. Sanders supporters arrested for trespassing at Biden’s Iowa HQ. (Hat tip: TheDonald.win, which appears to be where the Reddit group went after they got siloed in the isolation tank.) Score this one for Joe:
Man interrupts Biden rally: My wife recently left me. She’s divorcing me. What can I do to get her back?
Panders to Obama voters by suggesting Michelle as veep pick. Hunter Biden magnanimously agrees to actually heed a judge’s order and pay child support. Now enjoy some scurrilous, unfounded gossip that’s still completely hilarious:
As Follow up: -I know she was a Biden staffer bc she was loudly talking about it -they did not know each other before the flight
The Democratic National Committee eliminated Friday a fundraising requirement to qualify for the February debate in Las Vegas, potentially paving the way for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to make the stage for the first time.
Under the new criteria, candidates can meet either a delegates threshold or a polling threshold to qualify for the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, just three days before the Nevada caucuses.
Specifically, candidates must have been allocated at least one pledged delegate at the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary.
Candidates can also qualify by reaching 10 percent support in at least four national polls or surveys of South Carolina and Nevada released between Jan. 15 and Feb. 18.
Alternatively, a candidate can qualify for the debate by reaching 12 percent support in two sanctioned national or early-state surveys.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Slipping Buttigieg under heavy pressure to finish strong in Iowa.” Yeah, if he doesn’t at least place, with his money and organizational advantages, I don’t think he has a prayer; Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg can all solider on without Top Two finishes in either Iowa or New Hampshire; Buttigieg can’t. He already has five town halls scheduled in New Hampshire. Was on This Week, along with Yang. He doesn’t think there’s any room for pro-life Democrats in the party. (Hat tip: Mike Huckabee.) Not just pandering, but really stupid and ineffective pandering:
Buttigieg staffers circulated a survey of microaggressions on the campaign.
"Please only fill out this survey if you identify as a Person of color," it read. Answers "will be used to inform our white colleagues about privilege and microaggression." https://t.co/UulPh9UkaApic.twitter.com/oCRELaOopT
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But why won’t she shut up? Is she angling for a veep spot? Does she not realize how much of the Democratic base actively hates her? “Hillary’s ego blinds her to the fact that nobody in either party wants to hear from her, and the fact that criticizing Bernie just reminds his supporters that the Democratic machine is out to get him.” She refused Tulsi Gabbard’s process servers. I was unaware you could even do that. Are we a nation of laws or a ruling nomenklatura?
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: Dropped Out January 31, 2020. I mean, why not wait three days until the Iowa caucuses give you an excuse to bow out anyway? Did he hit a self-imposed spending limit? Did he have no staffers left? Did the campaign office space lease agreement run out in January? Could he not book the Dubuque Pizza Hut banquet room for the “victory” party Tuesday night? This is like getting 100 yards from the end of a marathon, and then going “Yeah, screw it, I’m done.”
In fact, most Democratic voters didn’t even know who Delaney was. In a recent average of national polls that asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the candidates, less than 40 percent of Democrats knew enough about Delaney to have an opinion of him. (This was also true of other long shot candidates like Sen. Michael Bennet and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.)
Delaney did have millions at his disposal to self-fund his bid, which probably helped him stay in the race longer than some other also-rans, but unlike billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire activist Tom Steyer, his ample cash reserves didn’t help him make headway in the race. But like Bloomberg, he was running as a moderate candidate. In fact, Delaney’s attempt to contrast himself with the progressives in the field during the second Democratic debate in July maybe gave him his one big “moment” in the race. It ultimately didn’t help his poll numbers, but in that debate he got a lot of airtime attacking the Medicare-for-all health care plans of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, illustrating a major division between the moderate and progressive “lanes” of the Democratic Party.
Delaney was probably the least likely of all Democratic candidates to destroy America’s economy. No wonder he never had a chance…
A late surge for a candidate in Iowa wouldn’t be unprecedented either. Some notable past shifts include the 2004 Democratic race, in which John Kerry and John Edwards ended up capturing 38 and 32 percent of the vote, respectively, after polling at 24 and 19 percent going into the caucuses. And then, of course, there is the 2012 GOP contest, when Rick Santorum made a remarkably late push and actually won the caucuses with around 25 percent support despite polling at 13 percent going into caucus night.
Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot. Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal. Sanders may have outgrown the revolutionary socialism of his youth. He seems to think in terms of ameliorating bourgeois hegemony rather than overthrowing it. He is not necessarily hostile to transgender claims. He has co-sponsored the current version of the Equality Act, which includes transgender people in the classes to be provided equal public accommodation and to be protected from job discrimination. But Sanders certainly does seem to think that such concerns are secondary. Compare and contrast the answers that he and Elizabeth Warren gave at the December 19 Democratic debate in Los Angeles.
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS asked:
Senator Sanders, at least 22 transgender people were killed in the United States this year, [most] of them transgender women of color. Each of you has said you would push for the passage of the Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBTQ civil-rights bill. But if elected, what more would you do to stop violence against transgender people?
Sanders’s answer quickly pivoted away from the cultural to the material.
We need moral leadership in the White House. We need a president who will do everything humanly possible to end all forms of discrimination against the transgender community, against the African American community, against the Latino community, and against all minorities in this country.
But above and beyond providing the moral leadership of trying to bring our people together, what we also need for the transgender community is to make sure that health care is available to every person in this country, regardless of their sexual orientation or their needs.
And that is why I strongly support and have helped lead the effort for a Medicare for All single-payer program, which will provide comprehensive health care to all people, including, certainly, the transgender community.
The question went next to Warren. She plunged directly into the question of identity.
The transgender community has been marginalized in every way possible. And one thing that the president of the United States can do is lift up attention, lift up their voices, lift up their lives.
Here’s a promise I make. I will go to the Rose Garden once every year to read the names of transgender women, of people of color, who have been killed in the past year. I will make sure that we read their names so that as a nation we are forced to address the particular vulnerability on homelessness. I will change the rules now that put people in prison based on their birth sex identification rather than their current identification. I will do everything I can to make sure that we are an America that leaves no one behind.
Sanders checked a box of support for the identity issue, then returned to regular programming. For Warren, the identity issue was the regular programming.
Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate. He has never fought a race in which he had to face serious personal scrutiny. None of his Democratic rivals is subjecting him to such scrutiny in 2020. Hillary Clinton refrained from scrutinizing Sanders in 2016. It did not happen, either, in his many races in Vermont. A Politico profile in 2015 by Michael Kruse argued that Sanders had benefited from “an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters, and local reporters who have steered clear” of writing about Sanders’s personal history “rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.”
The Trump campaign will not steer clear. It will hit him with everything it’s got. It will depict him as a Communist in the grip of twisted sexual fantasies, a useless career politician who oversaw a culture of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign. Through 2019, Donald Trump and his proxies hailed Sanders as a true voice of the people, thwarted by the evil machinations of the Hillary Clinton machine. They will not pause for a minute before pivoting in 2020 to attack him as a seething stew of toxic masculinity whose vicious online followers martyred the Democratic Party’s first female presidential nominee.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says in a forthcoming documentary. She stood by those words in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last week. At the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this past weekend, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, that Sanders—alone among the Democratic aspirants in 2020—had refused to meet with her. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, you will hear Clinton’s negative assessment of him repeated so often by pro-Trump talkers that you will almost think Clinton is Trump’s running mate.
Trump will terrorize the suburban moderates with the threat that Sanders will confiscate their health insurance and stock holdings, if not their homes. Trump accused Democrats of pro-ayatollah sympathies for noticing that his story about the killing of Qassem Soleimani was full of holes. [Should have put a “David Frum Warning” beforehand. -LP] In 1980, Sanders joined a left-wing party whose presidential candidate condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages” being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, suggesting that “many of them are simply spies … or people assigned to protect the spies,” as Ronald Radosh reported in The Daily Beast. Imagine what Trump and his team will do with that.
The members of the team around Sanders are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle. They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.
A specter is haunting centrist Democrats — the specter of a Bernie Sanders nomination. As the democratic socialist has taken the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, and narrowed Joe Biden’s advantage in national polls, the high clerics of Clintonism have begun calling for a (political) counterrevolution.
“People need to start taking Bernie pretty seriously — there is a really substantial risk of him becoming unstoppable if he wins these early states by large numbers,” Matt Bennett, vice-president of the centrist think tank Third Way, told the Washington Post this week. Bennett went on to chastise his fellow moderates for getting anxious instead of organized, lamenting, “It’s not like our phone is ringing from people saying, ‘Let’s do something.’ ”
Third Way has been flooding influential Iowa Democrats’ in-boxes with memos on Sanders’s general-election liabilities and seeding similar stories in the mainstream press. Meanwhile, the Democratic Majority for Israel super-PAC is warning Iowans that a vote for a septuagenarian socialist with a heart condition is, in effect, a vote for four more years of President Trump. But a broad-based, deep-pocketed “Anyone But Sanders” push has yet to take shape. Allies of Michael Bloomberg have indicated that the billionaire’s burgeoning campaign will transform itself into such an entity, if necessary. If Biden suffers damage in the early states, the last thing he’ll need is for Bloomberg, an alternative anti-left candidate, to ramp up his (already gargantuan) ad spending, and likely eat into Uncle Joe’s margins on Super Tuesday. But by the time Iowa and New Hampshire are in the books, it may already be too late
Snip.
Even if one accepts Third Way’s memo as gospel, the hazards of mounting a massive “Anyone But Sanders” campaign still outweigh the benefits.
The reason for this is simple: Democrats will need high turnout among young, left-leaning voters in November, and Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly popular with such voters.
The age gap between the support bases of the two leading Democratic candidates is unprecedented in scale. According to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, Bernie Sanders boasts the support of 53 percent of Democratic voters under 35 nationwide, while Joe Biden lays claim to just 3 percent. That poll’s margin of error is 3.4 percentage points — which means that the percentage of younger voters who support the Democratic Party’s current front-runner could, technically, round down to zero. In other national surveys, age polarization among Democratic primary voters tends to be a bit less severe. But in virtually all of them, Biden’s support among the young is historically low for a front-running candidate, while Sanders’s popularity with the contingent is exceptionally high.
It will be hard enough for Biden to mobilize younger voters after beating Sanders in a relatively friendly primary fight, free of conspicuous interference from Establishment forces. If Uncle Joe has to win millennial and Gen-Z hearts and minds — after riding to the nomination on the back of a wall-to-wall anti-Bernie ad blitz from Third Way and friends — his task may be impossible. Although Sanders’s 2016 backers did not sit out (or defect) during the general election in aberrantly high numbers, the age gap between Biden and Bernie backers this year is even larger than the one that prevailed between Clinton and the Vermont senator four years ago. One recent Emerson College poll found that only 53 percent of Sanders’s current supporters plan to vote for the Democratic nominee in November, no matter who that person turns out to be.
Eh, I don’t find this argument entirely persuasive. Young voters are notoriously bad at actually showing up at the polls. What they gain in youth votes they lose in the “not voting for crazy socialists” vote. Besides, we should realize that the DNC was going to go all in to screw Bernie no matter what anyway… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Would Trump-Sanders 2020 be a replay of Nixon McGovern 1972?
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Steyer raised $156,640,495.93 in Q4, though only a million of that came from other people. He’s up to third in South Carolina, which speaks to the power of money. He’s so horrible a candidate that buying his way into vague contention is an actual achievement…
Ms. Warren’s question during Thursday’s session sought to impugn the credibility of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. by saying his credibility was on the line in the impeachment trial.
Mr. Cruz, Texas Republican, said the question seemed desired to boost Ms. Warren’s struggling presidential campaign, but its immediate effect was to irk key GOP senators who realized Democrat’s‘ strategy to prolong the trial was centered on trying to drag the chief justice ever deeper into the action.
“Elizabeth Warren helped defeat the impeachment of the president of the United States,” Mr. Cruz said late Friday on a new episode of his podcast “The Verdict.”
“That stunt helped deliver the votes of Lisa and Lamar.”
So I went to our leaders in D.C. and I asked them, “What are we going to do to help our people manage this time – this transition?” And what do you think the folks in D.C. said to me when I said, “What are we going to do?” The three big responses I got from the folks in D.C. were these: No. 1: “We cannot talk about this”; No. 2: “We should study this further”; and No. 3: “We must educate and retrain all Americans for the jobs of the future.” How many of you have ever heard something like that?
But I’m a numbers guy and I looked at the studies. So I said to the folks who said we’re going to educate and retrain everyone, I said: “Hey, do you want to know what the effectiveness rate of government-funded retraining programs were for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs?”
You all want to guess what those effectiveness rates were? So, I’m anchoring you very low, so you know it’s low, but you also know it’s low because you’re human beings and you know what other human beings are like, and if you had 1,000 manufacturing workers walk out of the factory that closed, they don’t all say, “Alright, I’m ready for my coding skills training.” And they don’t go in being like, “Oh, this is what I wanted to do the whole time!” And six weeks later they aren’t being like, “Time to get hired by I.B.M.” I mean, we know that’s ridiculous.
The real-life success rates of those government-funded retraining programs were between 0 and 15 percent. Almost half of the workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry in the Midwest never worked again. We then saw surges in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities because half of them filed for disability and they did not find new work. When I said this to the folks in D.C., they said, “Well I guess we’ll get better at the retraining programs then.” And then they went back to their lunch.
The centerpiece of Andrew Yang’s final push in Iowa is a 17-day-bus tour: Bouncing around rural Iowa, hitting three to five towns a day, instilling the fear of automation and the hope of a large monthly check from the government in would-be caucus-goers.
The route of the tour is an indication of the campaign’s strategy to try to nibble around the edges, popping up in areas that aren’t as delegate-rich but that other candidates aren’t paying as close attention to. The expectations for Yang are so low, his advisers know, that he just needs to surprise.
Meat of piece snipped. Near the end:
Publicly, Yang tells Iowans he’s ready to “win in Iowa,” but behind the scenes his campaign is under no illusions. They feel confident their rural strategy can yield a fifth-place finish and give them enough to move on to New Hampshire with their heads held high.
Gets endorsed by the Lowell Sun. I don’t think newspaper endorsements move the needle, but endorsing someone outside the ostensible frontrunners is unusual. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.) This is a pretty good get for your phone bank:
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. But! There was actually a report floated that he was considering getting in, that he actually had to come out and deny. Maybe, like Hillary, he’s secretly hoping to be called on at a brokered convention. Even better: Why not both? CLINTON-KERRY 2020: BECAUSE WE REALLY REALLY HATE YOU
