Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

The president will be ­re-elected. Easily.

“Easily?” I asked, making sure I heard them correctly. Yes, they insisted, with her nodding as he said Democrats had gone bonkers and voters would respond by giving Trump four more years.

The recent Manhattan conversation would be insignificant except that it dovetails with national trends, namely a growing belief that Dems are not coming back to this world anytime soon. The election is still a long way off, but there is no sign that the radicalism surging through the party can be put back in the bottle before the election. What we see now is likely what voters will see in 2020.

One of many defining moments among the presidential contenders and pretenders came with their unanimous support for giving illegal immigrants free health care. They raised their hands to signal yes, as if the question was a ­no-brainer.

Implicit in their so-called compassion is an invitation for millions and millions more to cross the border and get free care. Free, of course, except to American taxpayers.

To qualify, candidates must have at least 2 percent support in four qualifying national or early-state polls released after the first debate on June 26-27 through two weeks before the third debate on Sept. 12-13 and 130,000 unique donors (including at least 400 individual donors in at least 20 states).1 And while those thresholds might not sound that difficult to meet, it’s definitely raising the ante from the first two debates, in which candidates needed to hit only 1 percent support in three qualifying polls or 65,000 unique donors (including at least 200 individual donors in at least 20 states).

Right now only Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren have met the criteria.

“The party, in my opinion, has moved for me, personally, too far to the left, and for that reason I don’t have a candidate in the party at this time,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, if a Democrat is going to beat Trump that person, he or she, is going to have to move to the center and you can’t wait too long to do that because the message of some of the programs that the Democrats are pushing are not resonating with the majority of the American people.”

“It’s really working for the party for the primaries, but if you’re going to win a general election against President Trump, who has a lockdown at his base and everybody’s going to contest for the middle and the independents, you can’t be too far left in that process,” he added.

Joe Biden unveiled a proposal Monday to expand the Affordable Care Act with an optional public health insurance program, escalating a fierce debate with his Democratic rivals who favor a more sweeping Medicare-for-all system.

Biden’s plan, which campaign officials estimate would cost $750 billion over 10 years, would also expand tax credits to pay for health premiums, and it would create a new coverage option to help people living in states that have resisted the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.

Funny how a plan that socializes American medicine than the plan Obama and Pelosi just barely managed to get passed when they controlled all three branches of government is now too timid for the party’s true believers. Just one day before his candidacy, Biden had his records archive at the University of Delaware sealed. How convenient. Speaking of murky university doings, just exactly what is it that the University of Pennsylvania got for the more than $900,000 paid Joe Biden? “The former vice president collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) This is interesting: “Presidential candidate Joe Biden refused to apologize for the nearly three million deportations carried out during his tenure as vice president in the Obama administration, after being confronted by protesters while campaigning in Dover, New Hampshire Friday.” Also this: “‘I will not halt deportations and detentions.’ Protestors continued to chant and demanded an apology but Biden remained intransigent.” Holy crap! Biden might win the nomination by simply not pandering to the Open Borders crowd. “The only thing making Biden look ‘electable’ is his rivals’ extremism.” Yeah, but that ain’t exactly nuthin’, hoss. Late breaking news: “Biden cancer nonprofit suspends operations indefinitely…Biden and his wife left the group’s board in April as an ethics precaution before he joined the presidential campaign. But the nonprofit had trouble maintaining momentum without their involvement.”

Notably, however, it came three days after Buttigieg held a fundraiser at the home of Hamilton James — a longtime Democratic donor, a political bundler for the likes of Hillary Clinton, and also the executive vice chairman of the Blackstone Group and an architect of a $20 billion deal to use Saudi dollars to fund U.S. infrastructure projects.

Blackstone, the largest alternative investment firm in the world, has long counted Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund as a major client, according to the New York Times. The infrastructure deal was in the works before the last presidential election and long before the death of Khashoggi, for which bin Salman is widely believed to be responsible.

The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.

Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.

And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.

Snip.

De Blasio gave his wife $850 million for her ThriveNYC mental health initiative, and when questioned by the City Council, she couldn’t come up with one thing it succeeded in doing.

He spent a jaw-dropping $773 million on his Renewal program to turn around failing schools. It did absolutely nothing except keep kids trapped in institutions the city knew were terrible. Shamed? You don’t know Bill. He claims the biggest threat to education is charter schools, which actually deliver results, not his own mismanagement.

I think the central issue facing this country is how terribly divided we are and how our government doesn’t work anymore meaning we don’t get anything done. And I’m running for president to get America working again so that we can actually fix health care, build infrastructure, improve public education, make sure there’s jobs in every community in this country. Those are the reasons I’m running for president. And- but to do any of those things we actually have to start coming together. We have to find common ground. We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.

Snip.

Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize. My plan which is called “Better Care” is a universal health care plan. Every single American gets health care as a basic right of citizenship for free. But I preserve options if people want to opt out and keep their private insurance. They can if they want to buy supplemental plans. They can. It’s a much better way to create a universal health care system.

He dinged the other candidates for making impossible promises.

“Mike Gravel and His Online Teens Want Weed in the Constitution.” I prefer to see federal marijuana prohibition ended on Tenth Amendment grounds, as passing a constitutional amendment is both the stupidest and least-likely path to legalization, but I’m surprised that more serious candidates haven’t made a play for pro-pot voters. It’s a significant single-issue constituency, albeit it not as big a one as its supporters think.

As a black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some liberals, while professing a strong desire to see a woman of color in the White House, fear that California’s former “top cop” won’t fulfill sweeping progressive goals. To them, she seems like a defender of the status quo posing as a reformer. Others are less bothered by her past as a prosecutor—after all, Democrats often struggle to cultivate “toughness”—but believe that the best person to stop Trump’s reëlection is another white man in his eighth decade. To this way of thinking, which contends that the prospect of a liberal black woman President may present too much of a challenge for mainstream America, Harris would make an advantageous Veep. But when, in May, matchmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus speculated about the possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket, she had a snappy retort. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she said.

Snip.

Harris’s father does not participate in her public life (and didn’t answer a request for an interview). The exception to the rule is telling. In February, on “The Breakfast Club,” an urban-market radio show, Harris admitted to smoking a joint in college, and one of the hosts asked if she supported legalizing marijuana. “Half my family’s from Jamaica—are you kidding me?” she replied, laughing. The glib response elided a more complicated record: she opposed recreational pot when she was D.A. of San Francisco, then apparently adapted her view as the public consensus shifted. But that wasn’t the problem. After Harris’s radio appearance, her father gave a statement to the Jamaican-diaspora Web site, reprimanding his daughter. “My deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” When I asked Harris how she felt about this belated, public parenting, she said, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” I asked if she found talking about Donald unpleasant. “I’m happy to talk about my father,” she said, glumly. “But, ya know.” She raised her eyebrows, and said nothing. This was not going to be “Dreams from My Father,” the sequel.

Snip.

Around the time that Owsley met her, Harris was a young prosecutor. She was dating Willie Brown, one of the most visible and powerful politicians in the state. He was sixty—four years older than her dad. Originally from segregated East Texas, he had come to San Francisco during the era of “James Crow” and, rather than join his uncle’s illegal gambling operation, became a defense attorney, representing pimps and prostitutes. Eventually, he won a seat in the State Assembly and, for fourteen years, served as speaker, earning the nickname the Ayatollah. A Democratic power broker with Republican allies, he apportioned the prime office space and knew where to find a legislator if his wife showed up looking for him. In the course of Brown’s career, he was investigated twice by the F.B.I. for corruption, but never charged with a crime. (He played a version of himself in “The Godfather: Part III,” glad-handing Michael Corleone.) Brown’s social life was “spicy,” as he puts it. Married since 1957, he lives amicably apart from his wife, seeing her on holidays. He has had a series of girlfriends—currently, he’s dating a Russian socialite—and maintains a large collection of friends all over the city, notably among wealthy white donors in Pacific Heights. “Willie knows no strangers,” Owsley told me.

During Harris’s short-lived romance with Brown, he ran for mayor; they broke up sometime between his victory party and his swearing-in. The association has clung to her—“an albatross,” she told SF Weekly years ago. Some of the most abhorrent memes of the Presidential campaign riff on their relationship (“Just say no to Willie Brown’s ho”), as does the third comment down on just about any Harris news story. Roseanne Barr has weighed in, scurrilously. Stories that mention Brown have always infuriated Harris; when I asked her campaign about him, a spokesperson testily referred me to statements that she made sixteen years ago.

Among political hopefuls, Brown is known as a mentor and a Pygmalion. Always nattily turned out—he favors Brioni suits and Borsalino hats—he believes that people in public life should present themselves well. “Women in politics need five or six well-fitted sets of pants,” he writes in his memoir. “They also need a complement of blouses or shirts that can be interchanged. And they need a whole series of blazers.” Pelosi is always on point, he writes; Feinstein can look as if she’s caught between seasons. Tactfully, he doesn’t mention Harris, but he may as well have been cataloguing her wardrobe.

“Willie is a bit of a finishing school for some of the people in his orbit,” the local observer told me. “Most people don’t quite know one hundred per cent how to dress for the first Pacific Heights cocktail party they get invited to. The notion that he helped polish somebody like Kamala a little more—I don’t think that is sexist. To use a Colette metaphor, he might have been the Aunt Alicia. ‘Here’s how you dress for this, and when you talk to this person remember that her husband likes to talk about this subject—and you might get a big donation.’ ” Harris grew close to Wilkes Bashford, a friend of Brown’s and one of San Francisco’s most exclusive clothiers, and she became a frequent bold name in the society columns. Even now, she is often featured in the address-restricted magazine the Nob Hill Gazette. Brown also arranged appointments for Harris on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the state’s Medical Assistance Commission, which together reportedly paid her about four hundred thousand dollars over five years. He gave her a car.

In his memoir, published the year Obama was elected President, Brown writes that it is critical for black candidates to “cross over into the white community.” He maintains that black women face a particular challenge being seen as leaders. “When whites look at black women, they see the women as servants, maids, and cooks (just as my mother was),” he writes. “No matter how astute these women are, they’ve never been viewed as worthy of much beyond domestic-service status.” His advice to black women seeking political office: get involved at a high level with cultural and charitable organizations, “like symphonies, museums, and hospitals.” In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she designed a mentorship program for public-school teens.

Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, is another Brown protégé, though the connection is rarely held against him. Born into a political family from Pacific Heights, Newsom was a fixture in the social scene to which Brown introduced Harris. “I certainly remember Gavin delivering wine to our house,” Owsley said, remarking that her husband had invested in PlumpJack, Newsom’s hospitality company. When Newsom was twenty-eight, Brown appointed him to chair the Parking and Traffic Commission of San Francisco. Not long after, when a seat opened on the city’s powerful Board of Supervisors, Brown chose Newsom to fill it. “I can candidly tell you with conviction I would not be governor of California—I would not have been mayor of San Francisco—without his support and his mentorship,” Newsom told me. “Kamala was not directly appointed D.A. of San Francisco. I think it’s patently unfair to judge that harshly and not judge my relationship.”

Since Brown fostered both of them, Harris and Newsom have been political siblings vying for primacy. The day Harris was sworn in as D.A., in 2004, Newsom became mayor; when he became lieutenant governor, she was sworn in as state attorney general. They share donors, networks, and consultants, and have backed each other publicly on issues that range from supporting gay marriage to opposing the death penalty. (Harris also endorsed Newsom’s decision to turn undocumented minors accused of felonies over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a decision both have since disavowed.) The two have even vacationed together, Newsom acknowledged to me. I asked Nathan Click, who once served as a spokesperson for Harris and now does the same for Newsom, who the elder was. “I don’t know—twins?” he said. A civic leader in San Francisco told me, “Kamala and Gavin are like two puppies rolling around having fun together, seeing who pops out first.”

Several years ago, Harris and Newsom’s sibling rivalry was nearly put before the state’s voters. As Governor Jerry Brown was entering his final term, Newsom was the lieutenant governor and Harris was attorney general. Governor was clearly the next job for each of them. “It divided the social world,” Mimi Silbert, who co-founded the Delancey Street Foundation, a residency program for ex-convicts, and who is an old friend of both Harris and Newsom, says. “It was, ‘I’m more for Gavin,’ ‘Well, I’m more for Kamala.’ ” As the tension was becoming excruciating, Barbara Boxer unexpectedly announced that she was giving up her seat in the U.S. Senate. Within days, Harris had declared that she would run for the Senate, clearing the way for Newsom eventually to become governor. “It was very important when she decided, because running against her for any office was not something I had any desire to do,” Newsom, who is a co-chair of Harris’s California campaign, said. “If she decided to run for governor, that would have been perilous in terms of my own considerations.”

There’s a lot more there on her various political campaigns and tenure as DA. Harris’ calculated straddles. “She wants to attack Biden on busing with paying the price of embracing a deeply unpopular policy of imposing busing today. She wants to say she’s on Bernie’s side on health care without acknowledging Medicare for All would abolish almost all private insurance.” A critique of her housing subsidy proposal:

Harris says her well-intentioned goal is to close the wealth gap between black and while families. She would give 4 million homebuyers HUD grants of up to $25,000 each to help them make down payments and pay closing costs to buy homes.

However, as we all know, the average cost of even a modest home far exceeds $25,000. That means that recipients of these generous government grants would need to borrow a lot more money to buy homes, even while facing big monthly mortgage payments that in many cases would be greater than they could afford.

Does this sound familiar? If you’ve followed news about the housing market for years, it should. It reminds us of the feel-good government intervention that precipitated the horrendous real estate crash of 2008 and the greatest recession since the Great Depression.

Husband Douglas Emhoff as Instagram spouse.

In 2016, the buzz around Hickenlooper was loud enough that Hillary Clinton vetted him to be her running mate. But three years later, Hickenlooper often finds himself talking to voters who have no idea who he is. A columnist for the New Hampshire Union-Leader recently likened the efforts of Hickenlooper — a former brewery owner — to “a fledgling IPA fighting for a tap in the neighborhood bar.”

That was evident during a recent visit to the Foundry, a beer hall and distillery in West Des Moines, where patrons eyed him with mild curiosity. “You are who?” a man said as Hickenlooper wandered near the bar. Upon learning Hickenlooper was running for president, he replied, “There are so many of you.”

In Cresco, Iowa, where Hickenlooper spoke at a local Democratic Party gathering, a woman mistook the former governor for Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), who is also running for president. “Two Coloradans,” the woman declared, as Hickenlooper walked away. “I can’t keep them straight.”

During a recent visit to the Des Moines farmers market, the unassuming Hickenlooper walked through the buyers in almost complete anonymity. He made little effort to call attention to himself, and the shoppers and merchants appeared to have no idea a presidential candidate was in their midst.

Hickenlooper’s road became even lonelier last week. Several top aides, including campaign manager Brad Komar, left the campaign or announced they would do so soon. Hickenlooper played down the departures, but a Democrat close to the campaign said the aides had urged him to drop his presidential bid and instead run for the Senate, which Hickenlooper refused to do.

When the rodents depart the dinghy, maybe it’s time to take the hint.

Hickenlooper also rejects some of the high-profile liberal initiatives embraced by other Democratic hopefuls. He is against Medicare-for-all, arguing there are “less disruptive ways” of achieving universal health care. And while citing a “sense of urgency” on climate change, Hickenlooper opposes the Green New Deal, saying it could never win Republican support.

He’s sought a similar middle path on immigration. At a deli in Boone, Iowa, Dean Lyons, a utility company manager, asked Hickenlooper what he would do about the “mess” at the border. The former governor replied, “We need borders. And we need people to obey the law. You cannot continue to have laws that people don’t obey.”

But he also said the nation can’t ignore the humanitarian issues at the border or its need for low-skilled workers, and he listed several policy ideas, such as a 10-year renewable visa program. Afterward, Lyons praised the nuanced answer but also stressed Hickenlooper’s long odds. “I was pretty impressed with him,” Lyons said. “But he’s got a long road to get up the ladder.”

Hickenlooper has recently tried to stand out by being ever more aggressive about the party’s leftward turn, arguing that “socialism is not the answer” and that embracing it will only lead to a Democratic defeat. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up reelecting the worst president ever in American history,” he has argued.

That line elicited boos from liberal attendees at last month’s California Democratic Convention in San Francisco, a reaction that lit up social media and attracted the first significant headlines of his campaign.

But the same line attracted polite nods in Iowa, where Hickenlooper hopes his “extreme moderate” message, as he calls it, will catch fire with a Midwestern electorate that often prefers middle-of-the-road candidates.

I wouldn’t hold your breath. “Hickenlooper refuses to condemn protesters who hoisted Mexican flag at ICE facility.” It must suck to be pandering as hard as you can and still be stuck at 1%.

“No. I think we hung out with different groups of friends. Not at all, I was not hanging out with the Harvard Democrats,” Moulton said.

He was then asked to describe what his friend group was like.

“Athletes. People who went out and, you know, had a good time,” Moulton said.

The excitement that greeted Beto O’Rourke’s presidential candidacy is long gone. The former Texas congressman has been stuck in low single digits in most polls, and CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny reports he’s now running low on cash.

“On the eve of the fundraising deadline for all the candidates to report their money, he’s yet to report,” Zeleny said. “I’m told by a couple of top supporters familiar with his financial situation that it’s bleak. A few staffers have begun leaving El Paso, moving on to other things. … He has a lot of high-powered, high-paid staff members so there are discussions going on, I’m told, as to what the next step is. He’s committed to staying in, but it’s not the summer he envisioned.”

“In Texas, allegiance to O’Rourke is vanishing“:

Just nine months ago, attorney Katie Baron was so inspired by Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign in Texas that she commissioned a sprawling mural on the side of a building in east Austinfeaturing the candidate in a Superman-like pose.

After O’Rourke lost race and began mulling a presidential campaign, the artist added a sweeping “2020” in blue paint – providing what seemed to be yet one more call for O’Rourke to get into the crowded race.

Now, four months into O’Rourke’s campaign, Baron wishes he had stayed out.

After the first Democratic presidential debate last month, Baron posted an altered picture of the mural on a Facebook page dedicated to the artwork. She had replaced O’Rourke’s face with Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s and wrote: “Don’t worry, still got PLENTY of love for Beto, but Kamala earned herself a little recognition too last night!” The comments filled with messages from angry O’Rourke supporters and a few excited Harris backers.

While Baron says she will be forever grateful to O’Rourke for inspiring her and thousands of others to become politically active, she doesn’t think he’s the strongest candidate for president, nor has he shown he can nationalize the magic of his Senate campaign.

“If the primary vote was tomorrow, he wouldn’t have my vote,” said Baron, 35, who likes Harris, D-Calif., for her sharp intellect and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for her methodical policy papers.

“Being part of the Beto-mania that was fueling the fire, I can see why he kind of thought he had no choice but to enter,” she said. “Honestly, I did get a little caught up. We were still riding the wave of the midterms.”

As O’Rourke slogs through a difficult primary season, he’s not only struggling to gain the support of voters who don’t know of him, but also to hold on to the support of those who know him best, Texans who powered his long-shot campaign against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year.

On the one hand, yeah, there’s the widespread impression that he missed his mark. On the other hand, I still see a lot of Beto 2020 signs and stickers around Austin…

Indeed, if you’re going to construct a path to the nomination for Sestak, it probably goes something like: If Biden stumbles, here’s another white man with gravitas who can speak credibly to middle America (and doesn’t call himself a socialist). But he has a problem that other candidates in this position (e.g., Sen. Michael Bennet or Gov. Steve Bullock) don’t — he’s made a lot of enemies in the Democratic establishment. In 2010, in defiance of party leadership, Sestak primaried Sen. Arlen Specter, who had recently switched parties from the GOP. Although Sestak impressively came from behind to topple Specter in the primary, he lost the general election by 2 points, and some Democrats blamed him for blowing a winnable race. So when he tried for a rematch in 2016, party elders recruited another Democrat, Katie McGinty, to block his path, and she handily defeated him in the primary. That was the last time Sestak ran for office — until now.

O’Connell wouldn’t say which specific constituencies within the party Sestak would try to woo, but his campaign strategy so far has been focused on retail politics — shaking hands at parades and convincing one voter at a time — in Iowa. But Sestak also plans to tap his old donor base in Pennsylvania, which raised millions for him in his previous campaigns, although O’Connell acknowledged that presidential fundraising will be a challenge because of Sestak’s late entry into the race. Without question, Sestak is starting from behind: Since 1976, only one successful nominee, Bill Clinton, kicked off a campaign later than April of the year before the election. And with only 27 percent of Democrats having an opinion of Sestak, according to a recent YouGov poll, he can scarcely afford to get a late start. However, he didn’t do so by choice: O’Connell says Sestak would have jumped in the race much sooner, but he didn’t want to run as long as his daughter was undergoing treatment for brain cancer. (She was given the all-clear earlier in June.)

Sestak was always going to have an uphill climb. He hasn’t won an election in nine years, and long layovers between campaigns can make for weaker candidates. It’s also hard to win a nomination without at least some support from the party establishment, which he seems unlikely to get. Finally, he has yet to reach 1 percent in any poll, which is a severe handicap to his chances of making the stage for future debates (not to mention getting enough votes to win the nomination). Unfortunately for “Admiral Joe,” on-the-ground campaigning simply may not reach enough voters to make up for that.

Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.

This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”

To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”

Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”

Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I’m not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”

Jim Geraghty:

Tom Steyer, you beautiful madman. You’re about to turn the Democratic primary into an expensive demolition derby: “Billionaire Tom Steyer announced Tuesday that he will join the crowded field vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and promised to commit at least $100 million of his personal fortune to the campaign.

Steyer will not be the 2020 Democratic nominee. But with $100 million, he can do a lot of damage to anyone he deems an obstacle, and it’s worth remembering that Michael Bloomberg just overwhelmed every opponent with a tsunami of ad money when running for mayor in New York City three times. Steyer has limited name recognition now, but a nearly unlimited television advertising budget will change that fast. He can promise anything and accuse anyone else of being a “Washington insider.”

Steyer’s probably not quite a threat to overtake Biden or Harris or Sanders or Warren. But everybody below that might as well call it quits.

Life just stinks if you’re Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet these days, doesn’t it? You’ve worked hard to try to get things done in the U.S. Senate and it means bupkus to most Democratic primary voters. You could call for Trump’s impeachment, but you can’t do anything until the House of Representatives actually passes articles of impeachment. You’re sharing the stage with no-name House members and some spiritual guru from California who’s talking about the power of love. You’re going to spend your summer eating corn dogs in small towns in Iowa singing the praises of ethanol while reporters ask why you’re not raising as much money as the mayor of South Bend, who nobody had heard of a year ago. And now some billionaire who you’d prefer to have as a benefactor rather than an enemy has decided he wants the same job you want.

Lots of lefty activists are upset that Steyer’s money is going to Steyer’s campaign rather than into their pockets. Even environmentalists, frequent recipients of his largess, aren’t pleased with him. “Steyer’s campaign could blunt momentum generated by candidates, such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who have elevated climate change as a priority in the primary elections by proposing detailed policies to curb it.” Given that Inslee has zero momentum, I don’t see how it could.

It’s still early. There will be 16 more months of speech making and glad-handing and glitzy ballroom fundraisers before Election Day. Not committing to a presidential candidate just yet would make sense. But here at Netroots Nation, the premier annual convention for progressive activists, many attendees already seem fairly certain about their choice: They want Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, to be their next president. And if they have to pick a second choice? It’s Senator Kamala Harris of California.

“Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Turned To A Big Donor To Pay For The DNC Voter Database, Despite Her Fundraising Pledge”:

Warren officials say she did not violate that pledge when her campaign turned to one of California’s top Democratic donors, a wealthy Silicon Valley physician named Karla Jurvetson, to help pay for access to a crucial voter database earlier this spring.

The so-called national “voter file,” a pool of data about millions of people that presidential campaigns use as a foundation for their own private data as they identify and track support over time, is managed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and costs campaigns a total of $175,000, according to the DNC’s voter file contract.

The DNC term sheet outlines two ways campaigns may pay for the voter file: by transferring funds directly to the DNC, or raising that money “to” the DNC through donors.

Jurvetson, who contributed about $7 million to Democratic causes during the 2018 election, gave a total of $100,000 to the DNC in April 2019, Federal Election Commission filings show. The donations, according to two Democratic operatives with knowledge of the agreement, helped Warren pay for the voter file.

To me the most interesting part of the story is: How does a physician have $7 million to give away in political donations? Doctors make good money, but not that good. Oh wait: “Jurvetson was married in 1990 to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, an early-stage investor in companies including SpaceX and Tesla.” Mystery solved! Hmmm: “Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. His backers are younger, make less money, have fewer degrees and are less engaged in politics…In poll after poll, Sanders appeals to lower-income and less-educated people; Warren beats Sanders among those with postgraduate degrees.” “Warren criticizes powerful businesses. She also worked for them.” In addition to Dow Chemical:

At issue are two decades when Warren enhanced her income as a law professor by consulting on various legal issues and representing clients. Some seem to fit her present-day brand: She worked on behalf of asbestos victims and represented the environmental lawyer whose story became the basis of the 1998 film “A Civil Action.”

But in about a dozen cases, Warren used her expertise to help major companies or their lawyers navigate corporate bankruptcies. In many cases she was brought in to argue motions, swooping in to offer her analysis and persuade a judge with her knowledge of bankruptcy law.

These include her work on behalf of plane manufacturer Fairchild Aircraft after a crash killed four people, including NASCAR star Alan Kulwicki. Warren argued that Fairchild should be shielded from liability because the plane that went down was made by a company that had gone bankrupt. (She lost.)

In another case, Warren represented Southwestern Electric Power Company, a firm that relied on Warren when its bid to buy power plants from a bankrupt energy co-op was jeopardized by allegations of vote buying. (She won.)

The work supplemented her salary from Harvard, which was about $185,000 a year in the mid-1990s, employment records show. Warren has not released tax returns from the 1990s, when she did much of the corporate work. But court records show she was paid as much as $675 an hour, which was at or below market rate for her level of expertise.

From 2008 to 2010, a period for which Warren has released tax returns, her outside work brought in an average of about $200,000 a year. That included royalties from books and enabled Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, to bring in nearly $1 million in each of those years.

Consistency is for the little people…

In her 2007 book A Republic of Mind and Spirit, Catherine Albanese argues that religiosity has taken three major forms in American history: evangelical Christianity, the mainline denominations, and what Albanese calls “metaphysical religion.” In that third strand, the material world is believed to be “organically linked to the spiritual one,” allowing people to tap into a “stream of energy” that “renders them divine and limitless.” The followers of this tradition believe that the “trained and controlled human imagination” can be honed “to bring desired and seemingly miraculous change.”

This worldview has Old World roots, but it has taken on a variety of distinctly American forms. One of the central threads of this tradition is what William James called the “religion of healthy-mindedness.” You hear its echoes whenever someone uses phrases like the law of attraction or the power of positive thinking.

Overview of the career of Phineas Quimby, who combined mesmerism and herbal teas, snipped.

(Maybe a decedent…)

If this reminds you of Christian Science, there’s a reason for that: Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy was one of Quimby’s patients, and she drew on Quimby’s ideas as she developed her own distinctive doctrines. (Just how much she drew on Quimby became a matter of considerable dispute between Eddy and Quimby’s disciples.) Enthusiasts outside Eddy’s orbit began to refer to their core concepts as New Thought, a term borrowed from the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action,” Emerson said, “that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”) Others adopted different names, such as “mind cure.” When Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Kansas City founded a church based on New Thought principles in 1889, they called it Unity. (The Unity congregation that hosted Williamson’s D.C. rally was founded in 1920, though it didn’t move to its current space until much later.)

Some of these new-thinkers were recognizably Christian. Others roped in a smorgasbord of other spiritual ideas, from Theosophy to bastardized versions of various Eastern traditions. Some of them argued that modern medical theories were entirely baseless; others acknowledged that doctors often knew what they were doing but suggested that New Thought techniques could either amplify medicine’s effects or work as an alternative when other remedies failed. As the movement evolved, its interests extended beyond physical health; in particular, the notion took hold that those streams of divine energy could be used to attract personal riches.

As these ideas grew more popular, they inevitably intersected with politics. Wallace D. Wattles, author of 1910’s The Science of Getting Rich, was to the left of Marianne Williamson: He was a member (and mayoral and congressional candidate) of the Socialist Party. Indeed, Horowitz’s book lists several social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who mixed their politics with mind-cure concepts. That shouldn’t be surprising. From the left-libertarian mystic Stephen Pearl Andrews to the spiritualist suffragette Victoria Woodhull, it was common in that period for populists, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and other radicals to draw on Albanese’s tradition of metaphysical religion. Why wouldn’t some of them be interested in New Thought too?

But New Thought also planted the seeds of the health-and-wealth school of Christianity, whose political sympathies often trended in a different direction. Consider the career of Norman Vincent Peale, born to a Midwestern Methodist minister in 1898. Peale followed in his father’s footsteps and helmed a mainline Protestant congregation in New York, but he also read New Thought literature and soon started mixing it with his denomination’s doctrines. He was particularly taken with the writings of Napoleon Hill, a serial entrepreneur who left a trail of shady business practices and dubious biographical claims. Hill’s articles and books—most famously, his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich—repackaged New Thought techniques as business advice, often putting Hill’s ideas into the mouths of the successful executives he allegedly interviewed. (In an entertaining article published in Gizmodo in 2016, Matt Novak makes a compelling case that few if any of these conversations actually happened. Hill’s habit of inventing interviews reached its peak in the posthumously published Outwitting the Devil, in which he claimed to have had a Q&A session with Satan.) Hill eventually drifted into a Long Island sect called the Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, which attracted a degree of infamy when it declared its plans to unlock the path to physical immortality through a mixture of New Thought practices and vegetarianism.

All its missing is the Fox sisters and John Murray Spear. Skipping ahead to Williamson:

In Williamson’s case, that background begins in Houston, where she was born to a Jewish family in 1952. (She still considers herself a Jew, even as she regularly invokes Jesus and Buddha. Entertainment Weekly once called her Christ’s “most eminently eccentric Jewish exponent.”) She drifted in her 20s: dropping out of college, working briefly as a cabaret singer, imbibing a lot of alcohol and other drugs. Her life turned around after she discovered A Course in Miracles, a lengthy text that the historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal has called “a synthesis of psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy.” The book was “scribed” by the psychologist Helen Schucman from 1965 to 1972. (I say “scribed” rather than “written” because Schucman insisted that it had been dictated by Jesus.) Course says that everyone is a child of God, that our separate egos are an illusion, that the physical world itself is an illusion, and that one day we will wake into a state of eternal love.

Williamson embraced the book, calling it “my personal teacher, my path out of hell.” By 1983 she was giving talks about it at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

The Philosophical Research Society is a venerable New Age institution, having been founded in 1934 by a Theosophist named Manly P. Hall. Hall wrote frequently about secret societies and esoteric symbols, and he was a devotee of the idea that a benevolent conspiracy has been guiding America toward a higher destiny. Williamson remembers Hall fondly, though she wouldn’t describe him as an influence on her. “By the time I got to the Philosophical Research Society, my reading Manly Hall was more affirmation of the things I already believed in,” she tells me after the D.C. rally, in a little room adjacent to the senior minister’s office. “I was already on that basic course of knowing that there’s much more to life than what meets the physical eye.”

That said, there is one rather Hallian passage in Williamson’s first political book, 1997’s The Healing of America. The Great Seal of the United States—that eye-in-the-pyramid logo on the back of the dollar bill—”illustrates our Founders’ sense of America’s destiny,” Williamson writes. “The seal shows the Great Pyramid at Giza, with its missing capstone returned and illuminated. The Eye of Horus, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the consciousness of higher mind, is displayed within the capstone. Beneath the picture are written the words ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’—new order of the ages. This Masonic symbolism reveals democracy’s function as a vehicle for the realization of humanity’s highest potential.”

And now we’re back in Robert Anton Wilson territory. And speaking of hip pop culture references, Williamson is now memeing famed Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Given that show’s Kabbalistic underpinnings, that ties right back into the whole spiritualist enchilada above…

According to his campaign, some 300 malls will fold over the next 4 years, a number in line with an estimate by Credit Suisse that one-quarter of all malls will close by 2022. Many dozens or hundreds more will struggle as anchor stores collapse and retail outlets wither. Yang’s American Mall Act would devote $6 billion to finding new purposes for these dying retail complexes.

So, in other words, make them yet another sinkhole to toss taxpayer money into to prop up failing business models. Pass. “Andrew Yang on Automation: “You Can’t Turn Truck Drivers into Coders.'” He’s largely right there, but Universal Basic Income isn’t a solution, unless the question is “How do we prop up pot sellers, liquor stores and video game makers.”