Biden drifts left, embraces the Green New Deal, and lifts his platform from Bernie Sanders. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Joe Biden signs up for the Green New Deal. You know, if primary voters wanted a socialist takeover of the economy, they could have just voted for Bernie Sanders…
Joe Biden is looking at building 500 million solar panels, slashing U.S. carbon emissions within 15 years, and rapidly expanding a government-sponsored health care plan. He wants to overhaul the way policing is conducted on American streets and the way success is measured in primary schools.
Over the past week, the presumptive Democratic nominee has offered the biggest burst of policy proposals since he effectively won the nomination, including a plan to spend $700 billion on American products and research. It marks a significant move to the left from where Biden and his party were only recently — on everything from climate and guns to health care and policing — and reflects a fundamental shift in the political landscape.
The new plans, which have come in speeches, interviews, and a 110-page policy document crafted with allies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), provide a window into how Biden would govern, and they kick off a new phase in a campaign that until now has focused mostly on President Trump’s performance. As Biden releases more plans — including one on climate and clean energy investments this week — he appears to be drafting a blueprint for the biggest surge of government action in generations.
“I think the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR,” Sanders, a democratic socialist who does not offer such assessments lightly, told MSNBC.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden issued a statement Wednesday evening in which he said he is “disappointed in today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision” in the case Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania.
“I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the [2014 Supreme Court] Hobby Lobby ruling,” Biden said.
Barack Obama famously (infamously?) said that he wanted to “fundamentally transform” America. Thankfully, he was unable to completely do that. Now Obama’s senile Mini-Me, Joe Biden, is parroting his former boss and going on about “rebuilding” and “transforming” our beloved country.
Snip.
America is just fine, thank you. Warts and all, this 244-year-old experiment in freedom is — put mildly — freakin’ glorious. Every leftist who says America needs to be rebuilt or transformed is lying.
What’s really disturbing is that Joe Biden is the most moderate of the Dems to emerge from that large primary field. If he’s going on about transformation then the center of American politics has moved too far to ever get it back to anything resembling “normal.”
We’re fine here, Joe. We won’t be needing your help.
Putting aside the fact that Biden almost certainly doesn’t have the capacity to consistently write his own tweets, one is left wondering exactly what he plans to transform “this nation” into. Given how much the nation has already been transformed over the last several months, with the continued tolerance of the destruction of cities and America’s history, the promise of some higher level of radicalism coming should worry everyone.
Biden is not a moderate and never has been. The fact that he likely didn’t write the above tweet is perhaps worse than if he had. He’s surrounded by radicals, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his actual campaign staff, some of whom are alumni of the Sanders and Obama campaigns.
I’d go further and say that it’s not playing into Trump’s messaging but that it’s reality. Biden is telling us who he is and he has continuously done so. The idea that he’s a moderate is a myth perpetuated by people who want it to be true, i.e. voters who are not comfortable with the current cultural revolution but still want to vote for Biden. They are deluding themselves, believing that he’ll flip a switch when he’s president. He won’t and there’s absolutely no reason to believe he won’t govern exactly as he’s campaigning.
Since that day in May when I announced I would support Donald Trump for president, my motives have been questioned, my integrity assailed, even my intelligence challenged. That’s okay.
I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I am also a black man, the son of a World War II veteran and a proud American.
In recent weeks, there have been absurd calls to defund and disband police departments across the country by Democrats in response to the unjust murder of George Floyd. These are extreme calls that will only lead to more pain and suffering in our most vulnerable communities.
As the former Chief Executive Officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, I’ve had to manage one of the largest police departments in the state. I’ve had the experience of dealing with police shootings and comforting the families of victims. But at the same time, I’ve also had the experience of losing two black police officers. I’ve had to comfort their families in the middle of the night and console their young children. I know firsthand when others are running away from chaos, police officers are running into the fight to protect and serve.
President Trump was sickened by the death of George Floyd and fully committed to ensuring that he will not have died in vain. The president has taken a commonsense approach to heal our nation. President Trump made clear that he will protect all Americans, serve as an ally to peaceful protesters and always uphold law and order.
But the protesters were determined to sow chaos and destruction, all in the name of racial equality. Listen, during my first legislative session in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1993, I filed the first bill in my career to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. But I also understand the preservation of our history — the good and the bad. And still I bow to no one in my advocacy for the black community.
But unlike other Washington politicians, this president actually backed up his words with actions. He signed an Executive Order on police reform — taking steps to build a better bridge between law enforcement men and women and their communities.
The landmark Executive Order encourages police to implement best practices to protect the people they serve. It sets the highest professional standards for law enforcement officers, while promoting peace and equality for all Americans.
Under the order, the Trump administration will now prioritize federal grants from the Department of Justice to police departments that meet these high standards. Additionally, the order pushes forward the creation of a national database of police misconduct. This database will root out bad cops and help create accountability between police agencies.
Where were Joe Biden and the previous administration for 8 years in the White House on this issue? I’ll tell you. They were absent in unifying this country.
The forces of anti-Trump hatred comprise not just Democratic aspirants to high office but also, and more significantly, the media (social and otherwise), the spoiled, pajama-boy Left, and—above all, perhaps—the entrenched administrative apparatus of government, the self-engorging bureaucracy of the state whose fundamental allegiance is to the principle of self-perpetuation.
It is all of that which Donald Trump came to office to sweep clean, like Hercules confronting the Augean stables. The first time around the reaction was a compact of contempt and ridicule, but that was only because Trump could not win. The smartest people in the world—Bill Kristol, Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow—they all knew he couldn’t win. So they didn’t come together in a single caterwauling primal scream to stop him.
This time they have. And since they control almost all the major megaphones, it can sometimes seem that everyone is against Donald Trump and no one is for him.
It can seem that way, but of course it is not. And that is chiefly for two reasons. First, there are those 63 million voters—perhaps it will be 66 or 68 million this time. Voters whose voices you don’t hear in the pages of the New York Times and whose rigged Google searches and Facebook hot spots somehow leave out of account. They’re sitting at home watching their cities burn, watching monuments to Columbus, to Washington and Thomas Jefferson be defaced or toppled. They see that, and they hear a nonstop litany telling them how racist they are and how evil America is.
And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.
Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.
Employing the same pro-growth policies that turned the stagnant Obama-Biden economy into a record-setting dynamo in recent years, President Trump is orchestrating an unprecedented “V-shaped” recovery as our country emerges from pandemic-related lockdowns. The past two months have both seen blowout new records for job creation — 2.7 million new jobs in May, followed by an even more incredible 4.8 million new jobs in June.
The recovery has been rapid, but our progress remains fragile, and America’s beleaguered workers and business owners could not withstand the strain of Biden’s new taxes and regulations.
Biden’s proposal to halt all fracking would be particularly disastrous, both economically and geopolitically. Over the course of just four years, Biden’s fracking ban would destroy an estimated 19 million jobs and shave over $7 trillion from our national GDP.
But Biden’s radical environmentalism gets even worse.
For the first time in over half a century, America has become a net exporter of fossil fuels under President Trump, whose common-sense deregulatory agenda has allowed our country to become the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. This means our country is now less reliant on Middle Eastern dictators for its oil, and American consumers are paying less at the pump and on their energy bills.
Joe Biden, however, wants to restore the sort of punitive regulations that were the centerpiece of the “war on coal” waged during the Obama-Biden administration.
Economic growth and innovation would also be severely undercut in other ways by a Biden presidency. In 2018, the Commerce Department calculated that total regulatory costs were equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the entire national economy — an alarming statistic that President Trump has made it a priority to correct.
As the most far-left of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, Biden’s platform is replete with proposals to increase the burden of bureaucracy even more.
I truly believe Jill Biden wants to be Edith Wilson 2.0. Woodrow Wilson’s wife basically ran the White House after his stroke in 1919. She only had to do that for two years. I’m pretty sure that Jill Biden would like at least an eight-year run at the gig.
When Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep’s handlers first began letting him do videos from his quarantine basement, Jill was often sitting at his side, grinning like a proud mother whose idiot underachieving kid had just successfully recited the alphabet for the first time. It was, quite frankly, very creepy to watch.
I’m still convinced that the overarching Democratic National Committee plan is to get Biden elected, whisk him back to the basement until Inauguration Day, then tell everyone that he’s had a medical situation of some sort shortly after that. Then his progressive VP can take over the job of running the country off a progressive cliff.
I am also firmly convinced that Jill Biden has other plans.
For reasons beyond my comprehension, Team Biden keeps releasing videos of this drooling moron. They are all painful to watch, and it seems at times to be a little cruel to mock him. He is, however, making a bid for becoming the most powerful man in the world. As long as he is running, Biden is fair game.
Jill Biden knows that and she doesn’t care.
The longer the Joe Biden Obvious Decline Circus is allowed to go on, the more I’m convinced that Jill Biden is a power-hungry madwoman who so desperately wants to be in the White House that she is willing to subject her husband to what has now become bipartisan ridicule.
Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.
Liberal organizations have seized upon the promise of Biden to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, urging him to consider someone like Leslie Abrams, the sister of Stacey Abrams, or liberal academic Michelle Alexander, who compared the nation of Israel to apartheid South Africa. Though Biden himself has not yet released his own shortlist of potential nominees, progressive activists who would wield immense power in his potential administration are already narrowing down the names.
Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.
We cannot afford to give Biden the opportunity to appoint new Supreme Court justices. With so many important cases decided along such narrow political lines, and with the “conservative majority” becoming increasingly fragile as Chief Justice John Roberts continues to drift leftward, the way to prevent a liberal takeover of the highest court in the land is to ensure that the next few vacancies are filled by reliably conservative judges.
Biden finished fifth in Iowa to Hillary and Obama in 2008. And Biden has not aged well in the intervening 12 years.
In the past month, Democrats have made the same mistake they have made in every election they have lost since 1968. They turned their backs on patriotism.
The liberal scorn of patriotism will once again backfire. Democrats are burning down their cities. Conrad Black sees this destruction as re-electing the president.
He wrote, “This is some new form of farce noire, a nightmare of outright idiocy, part slapstick and part horror, playing on a gigantic stage. Fortunately, we know it has to end on November 3, but the audience will likely tire of it and bring down the curtain well before then. No society can tolerate this for long. The arsonists will not burn down society; the society will awaken and banish the arsonists.”
There is an element of extortion in all this. Democrats are saying everything will return to normal only if we elect Biden.
Otherwise…
The attacks on the flag and the nation’s Founding Fathers (as well as Lincoln and Frederick Douglass) show an arrogance and tone-deafness. Americans still love their country. Be they the sons and daughters of slaves or slave owners or people who were neither, Americans are proud of their country and proud of their heritage.
I said 37 states in January. I say 37 states in July because Democrats have done not one thing to win over Trump voters, who were enough in number to win 30 states and the presidency in 2016. Seven more Hillary states will flip. I mean, does anyone seriously believe Minnesotans will not switch to President Trump after the George Floyd riots?
Here’s a long, flattering portrait of Michigan Democratic representative Elissa Slotkin, who came in the semi-blue-wave of 2018. Ignore the fawning and the credence given the now-debunked “Russian bounty” scandal and read the part where she thinks Democrats are deluding themselves if they think 2020 is in the bag:
“I don’t believe it,” Slotkin says matter of factly. “Listen, if anyone tells me they can accurately predict what major events are coming in the remainder of 2020, I’ll give them a thousand dollars. I mean, this has been the year of black swans. … I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.”
I stop Slotkin there. Is her gripe that these snapshots—the polling, both public and private, that shows Republicans bleeding support across the board—are accurate in the present, yet subject to so much volatility in the future as to be worthless? Or does she believe the snapshots themselves are inaccurate here and now?
“I think they’re inaccurate,” she replies without hesitation. “Here’s the thing. When I started to run and I had to hire a pollster, I interviewed a bunch of different folks and I decided to do what we do sometimes at the Pentagon, which is to take a ‘bad cop’ approach to the interview. … It was five or six folks that I interviewed, and I said, ‘You got something wrong. You screwed up in 2016. What did you get wrong? And how are you going to fix it?”
Only one pollster, Slotkin says, admitted that he got it wrong. That was the person—Al Quinlan of GQR, a large Washington-based firm—she hired.
“He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” she explains. “On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”
Slotkin, ever the intel analyst—identifying trends, compiling a report, presenting a conclusion—tells me, with a high degree of confidence, “I believe that same thing is happening right now.”
Veepstakes: “The Biden VP Pick Who Would Satisfy Both Ilhan Omar and George Will. California Representative Karen Bass’s low-key manner and progressive credentials could strengthen Biden’s campaign when he needs it most.”
Veepstakes: Profile of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Because being less strident while letting the city you lead burn less than Minneapolis is evidently a qualification.
This is the poll that purports to show Joe Biden beating Donald Trump by five points and Senator John Cornyn under 50% against either M.J. Hegar or Royce West.
The nice thing about this Dallas Morning News/UT Tyler poll is that it tells you how the poll weighting is skewed right up front:
Democrat 39%
Republican 42%
So it oversamples Democrats by at least 7% compared to the 2016 Presidential election. I assume that they’re using Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss in a semi-blue-wave year against Ted Cruz in the 2018 U.S. Senate race as the baseline, not Lupe Valdez’s twelve point pasting by Greg Abbott in the Governor’s race. Neither Hegar are West are going to be awash in money and fawning media coverage the way O’Rourke was.
Presidential year voter turnout has distinctly different patterns than off-year election turnout. The 2020 general election is more likely to resemble the 2016 election, when Trump beat Clinton by nine points in Texas, than the 2018 election.
Even money says that the next Texas Tribune and Texas Lyceum polls you see will be just as skewed.
There are plenty of things to worry about in November. Trump and Cornyn losing Texas should not be among them.
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
Black voters have about the same enthusiasm for Biden as they do for leftover tuna casserole, his non-profit did more to line staffer’s pockets than fight cancer, and Biden agrees to three debates with Trump. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Politico has a long, revealing profile of a group of black voters in Detroit. All think the Democratic Party has done nothing for them. All support Biden. None are enthusiastic about him. All think Trump is going to win.
If what I heard Sunday in southeast Michigan is at all representative of the Black community across America, Democrats should be disturbed and afraid. Not because they risk losing an election, but because they risk losing the loyalty of an entire class of voters.
“Here’s the thing about Black people,” TONYA GRIFFITH said between sips of rose-colored liquid from a clear plastic cup. “We are real passive politically—until they give us a reason not to be. And trust me, we’re not feeling real passive right now.”
Three weeks ago, Griffith said, that wasn’t the case. Black voters she knows were coasting on autopilot during this election year. There was no feeling of intensity. And then came the killing of George Floyd. “That lit a fire under our ass like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Griffith said.
But how long will that fire burn? Griffith is skeptical. A 55-year-old clinical therapist, she was born and raised in Detroit. She had to work hard to make it—but she knows plenty of folks who didn’t make it. She was drilled by her parents on basic civic obligations—but she knows plenty of folks who weren’t. Griffith will vote this November. But she isn’t excited about it. And truth be told, she doesn’t know anyone who is.
“I bet our numbers come up, because nobody liked Hillary Clinton, but I don’t think they come up much. And I know they don’t get back to those record numbers from Obama,” Griffith said of Black voter turnout. “We look at Joe Biden and see more of the same. It’s about the era he came up. It’s about his identity—he’s a rich, old white man. What are his credentials to us, other than Obama picking him? It’s nice that he worked with Obama. But let’s keep it real: That was a political calculation. Obama thought he needed a white man to get elected, just like Biden thinks he needs a Black woman to get elected. We can see through that.”
These sentiments resurfaced in almost every conversation I had. First, that Biden choosing a woman of color might actually irritate, not appease, Black voters. Second, that the inferno of June would flicker by summer’s end and fade entirely by November. And third, that Biden does little to inspire a wary Black electorate that views him as the status quo personified. It was thoroughly convincing. Here were high-information voters, giving their personal opinions while also analyzing the feeling of their community, all making the same points in separate conversations.
We’re all Democrats, but we’re all Black Democrats. So, we can see things for what they are,” explained URSURA MOORE, a 53-year-old real estate agent. “Some people thought just because we had a Black president, he was going to make things better for Black people—he was going to free Black prisoners, wipe out Black debt. That was just ignorance. But the disappointment some of us felt with Obama—more so with the Democratic Party—that was real. And it hasn’t gone away. So, people start to wonder whether the outcome even matters. They wonder whether they should bother voting at all.”
She stopped herself. “I’m going to vote. But Trump’s getting back in office either way.”
This was another recurring theme of my conversations: a fatalism about defeating Trump this fall. Not a single person I spoke with at the cookout told me they believed Biden would win.
“There’s no excitement for Biden,” Moore said. “Trump can get his people riled up. Biden can’t. That’s why there’s all this talk of putting a Black woman on the ticket. But that’s not going to help him win.”
Nearly two-thirds of the money the Biden Cancer Initiative spent since its founding in 2017 went toward staff compensation and six-figure salaries for top executives. The group spent far less on efforts to eradicate cancer.
One of several nonprofits Joe Biden created following his tenure in the White House, the Biden Cancer Initiative paid top executives lavishly, with salaries comprising nearly 65 percent of its total expenditures. That is well above the 25 percent charity watchdogs recommend nonprofits spend on administrative overhead and fundraising costs combined.
The nonprofit raised and spent $4.8 million over its two years in operation, its 2017 and 2018 tax forms show. Slightly more than $3 million of that amount went to salaries, compensation, and benefits. At the same time, the group spent just $1.7 million on all of its other expenses. A bulk of this cash—$740,000—was poured into conferences, conventions, and meetings. It did not cut a single grant to any other group or foundation during its two-year run.
An analysis of nonprofits by Charity Navigator, which rates charities for effectiveness, found that mid-to-large-sized nonprofits paid their chief executives an average salary of $126,000 per year—far less than what the Biden Cancer Initiative paid its president, Greg Simon, who pocketed $224,539 in 2017 and $429,850 in 2018. Charity Navigator’s primary criterion for rating charities is whether they “spend at least 75% of their expenses directly on their programs.”
“Presumably things will continue with maximizing the hatred of Trump and Biden just waiting there, being not-Trump. Why doesn’t he DO something?!”
And speaking of black female California representatives who haven’t covered themselves in glory, here’s a WaPo writer pushing Rep. Barbara Lee.
If Biden becomes president, get ready for stocks to tank. “The stock market typically performs better when an incumbent is reelected, while it usually underperforms when the White House flips from Republican to Democrat, according to data from Bank of America. According to a recent RBC Capital Markets survey, the majority of the firm’s clients still believe that Trump’s reelection is a positive for the market, with 60% saying that a Biden presidency would negatively impact stocks.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Exploring the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden (plus the equally huge campaign technology gap), some fundraising analysis, more Veepstakes, and a majority of Americans think Biden is a few tacos shy of a combo plate. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Joe Biden still trails President Donald Trump in cash, but he’s catching up.
Biden and the Democratic National Committee hit an all-time monthly fundraising record in May, bringing in $80.8 million. That total topped Trump and the Republican National Committee, which together raised $74 million over the same period.
But Trump — who has been able to jointly fundraise with the Republican Party at higher levels as the Republican presidential nominee for months — leads Biden in cash on hand, $265 million to $122.2 million, an all-important number that shows how much the candidate and committee can still spend. Notably, May was the first full month Biden raised money in tandem with the DNC, drafting off of a joint fundraising agreement that allowed individual donors to give more than $620,000.
Some Trump numbers snipped.
A handful of super PACs are jockeying to be Biden’s preferred outside group. Their fundraising totals showed that one has amassed a commanding lead.
During the presidential primary, Unite the Country boosted Biden when he needed it most, helping his campaign rebound from losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to a decisive Super Tuesday performance. That March, the super PAC brought in more than $10 million. But over the past two months, the super PACs fundraising cratered, bringing in $723,000 in April and $1.3 million in May.
The drop occurred after Biden’s campaign initially signaled Priorities USA, another group that led outside Democratic spending in 2016, would be its preferred super PAC. Those moves are closely tracked by big-money donors, who want to stick with the favored outside group.
Priorities USA, which backed Biden after Super Tuesday, raised $7.5 million last month. The group told the Los Angeles Times it secured $38 million in donations and commitments since early May, two-thirds during the last three weeks. That would mean a huge spike in the group’s June fundraising totals.
Priorities USA also spent nearly five times more than Unite the Country — $9.7 million to $2.1 million — largely on TV ads, slamming Trump.
But Unite the Country says it’s still relevant. An aide told POLITICO that the group topped its May fundraising total in the first ten days of June. Unite the Country and American Bridge 21st Century — another pro-Biden outside group that files quarterly, not monthly — also forged a partnership to pool resources and research.
For all these polls that say Biden is ahead, doesn’t there seem to be a big enthusiasm gap?
Team Trump has a legendary data program. Even Democrats have expressed concern over the campaign’s digital prowess and collection methods. Trump rallies are key to this strategy for a number of reasons. And according to Brad Parscale, it seems a return to the road is generating unprecedented enthusiasm.
Just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x.
This is for a rally in an arena that holds 19,000. If the campaign holds true to form, there will be large screens for those unable to get a seat to watch from outside. But the key to the operation is in Parscale’s tweet. It is the biggest data haul to date.
What does this data give them? The opportunity to register people who are interested in the rally to vote who are not already registered. The ability to contact these potential voters throughout the rest of the campaign with updates and fundraising efforts. The information to ensure absentee ballots and in-person voting happen right through the close of the polls on Election Day.
That piece also cites this Dave Weigel piece, which discusses the significant difference between campaign contact touches:
On the 48th day of quarantine, as traditional presidential campaigning became a gauzy memory, I immersed myself in the worlds created by the campaigns of Joe Biden and President Trump. I downloaded both campaigns’ apps — TeamJoe and Trump 2020, respectively — and agreed to get notifications. I created a Twitter list consisting of nothing but official campaign accounts and checked in a few times a day. What I found: The Republican effort was designed to keep supporters energized, inspired and sometimes angry. The Democratic effort was genteel and gave me much less to do.
Signing up for the Trump app subscribed me to not one, but two automated text chains. The first came in from the Trump campaign within seconds of sign-up, informing me that I had just gotten “Reward Access Unlocked,” thus qualifying me to “earn points & meet Pres Trump during the campaign in fall.” One minute later, the Republican National Committee thanked me for joining the “team,” and asked whether I could let the president “know what you think of this week’s accomplishments.”
Following the first link took me back to the Trump campaign page; following the second gave me a yes or no poll on whether I approved of the president, with space to write about why. I didn’t go further than that, but two hours later, the RNC texted with news: “You were 1 of the 25 President Trump selected for a 5X-MATCH EXTENSION! The other 24 patriots already donated, now it’s your turn.”
Not wanting to be left out, I clicked through to a page powered by WinRed, the newish Republican donation portal. A photo of the president pointing at me like Uncle Sam was displayed next to a pitch that had become even more urgent: “This offer is only available for the NEXT HOUR, so you need to act fast. Please contribute ANY AMOUNT in the NEXT HOUR and your gift will be 5X-MATCHED!” A $100 donation button was already colored in, and a box that would have made this a “monthly recurring donation” was already checked. When I tried to click away, a window popped up warning me, in vain, that the offer was about to expire.
All of that happened within two hours. The Biden campaign did not contact me until seven hours after I’d downloaded the app, finally texting me in the late afternoon. “It’s Joe Biden and I owe you my sincere thanks, David,” the account wrote. “You all have been so great to this campaign.” (You all?) “I’ve been calling donors and it’s so great to thank people personally. I’m calling more this week who are helping us start May strong. If you aren’t a May donor yet, you can chip in here and I might be calling you soon.”
Following that link, I was offered a shot at “a video call from Joe” and told that the “average gift is only $25.” A form to fill in an exact donation amount was left blank; a box that would make this a one-time donation, not a recurring one, was already checked.
Over the next few days, it was easy to forget that the Biden app existed. Push texts were infrequent, and unlike the Trump app, the Biden app didn’t let me track virtual campaign events. (That was on the website.) TeamJoe offered me a few options and news items, all of which directed me from the app back to the campaign website. For 24 hours, the top news item was a new Biden campaign pledge, which I could take, committing myself to “empathy,” “keeping the faith,” “humility,” and “no malarkey,” among other nice things. If I wanted to volunteer, the app made it easier, but not addictive.
Trump 2020 did not let me go so easily. A news feed let me read the latest messaging, just as it would appear to a reporter on the media list, or the campaign’s curated tweets, which prioritized big names like campaign manager Brad Parscale. An “engage” button educated me on ways to “fight with President Trump,” from hosting a “MAGA Meet Up” to joining the campaign finance committee as a high-dollar bundler. Sharing the app with a friend would award me 100 points, while sharing any news item to Twitter or Facebook would give me a single point. A good prize, like expedited entry at any to-be-scheduled rallies, cost 25,000 points.
The “gamified” Trump app has made some Democrats nervous, not least because Biden hasn’t tried to compete with it. Everything that came from the Trump campaign had an act-fast, as-seen-on-TV feeling; nothing from the Biden campaign did. Biden’s campaign texted me a poll (“Are you planning to vote for Joe Biden in the general election in your state?”) and a longer “strategy survey,” asking if I wanted to volunteer and what issues I cared about.
The Trump campaign and the RNC, in the same time period, invited me to “the Trump 100 Club” (“offer permanently expires in SIX HOURS”), a “2020 sustaining membership” with the campaign, and a poll that claimed the president had closed “ALL borders to Keep America Safe.” (While citizenship applications have been halted, and while resources have been sent to the Mexican border, the nation’s borders are not closed.)
All of this fit snugly with the rest of the campaign’s other media and messaging. The point of the Trump app, social media accounts and Web TV was not just to keep me informed — it was to replace some of the news I might be getting from other outlets. “Forget the mainstream media,” went one ad that played at the start of the daily Trump video broadcasts. “Get your facts from the source.”
Snip.
I had more company watching Trump content than I did watching Biden content. As of Thursday morning, the Biden campaign’s Cinco de Mayo broadcast had clocked 7,000 views on YouTube and 180,000 on Facebook, while the Trump campaign’s had clocked 11,000 and 900,000 views, respectively. Trump’s campaign has 29 million followers on Facebook, while Biden’s has less than 2 million. Biden got a higher percentage of his active supporters to tune in, but Trump had exponentially more supporters to draw from.
In some ways, the Biden campaign is years behind on this kind of engagement. By this point in the 2012 campaign, Obama’s team had established a popular video series in which deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter shared good news and debunked Republican attacks. There’s no such block-and-tackle effort from the Biden social media experience, apart from the occasional tweet responding to the Trump campaign — and no Trump-style points for helping get the message out.
Gee, Biden is running an old-fashioned campaign decades behind the state-of-the-art? What are the odds?
“Overall, subgroups who normally approve of Trump’s job as president, were the most likely to believe Biden could be suffering from dementia,” the poll found. “Thus, majorities of Republicans (77% more likely/23% less likely) and Independents (56% more likely/44% less likely) thought Joe Biden had early-onset dementia; while nearly a third of Democrats (32% more likely/68% less likely) thought this was the case.”
Takeaway: Almost a third of Democrats and over half of independents think Biden is already a few Cocoa Puffs shy of a full bowl. (Hat tip: Ian McKelvey.)
Vote for President Trump and you are voting for the Constitution, military strength and robust economic growth.
Vote for former vice president Joe Biden and you are voting for bureaucrats, appeasement abroad, and economic entropy.
These are the policy choices embedded in each candidate. There is also a temperamental choice to be made.
Trump is chaos theory contained in a man, an explosive combination of complete candor as to what he thinks and feels, a willingness to brawl, an almost animal energy for the fray.
Biden is clearly not that. He is mostly invisible these days, but he hasn’t just lost a step. He’s lost a lap. His White House would be marked by echo-chamber enthusiasts and the control of the appointees he brings along with him, a haphazard and dangerous step for the republic.
With Trump, all will be well in the country and all will be in upheaval inside the Beltway, Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
With Biden, the deep-blue centers of genuine privilege will have their restoration. The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner will regain its luster.
Amy Klobuchar’s veep chances just flew out the window like a stapler hurled at a staffer’s head:
“Senator Amy Klobuchar said Thursday that she is withdrawing her name from consideration as Joe Biden’s running mate, saying a woman of color should be chosen as vice-presidential nominee instead.”
This morning, some political observers are concluding that Klobuchar could see the writing on the wall — as in, the writing on the wall was graffiti from Black Lives Matter activists declaring, “Don’t pick Amy Klobuchar.”
But let’s think through the absolute worst-case scenario for Klobuchar. Right now, the polls look golden for Joe Biden. Imagine that Biden picked Klobuchar, helping him among some demographics in the Midwest but largely disappointing African-Americans, and infuriating progressive activists who don’t like Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor. Then imagine that on Election Day 2020, turnout among African-Americans is lower than expected in places like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and North Carolina . . . and Trump emerged with more than 270 electoral votes again. The entire Democratic Party would be livid with the Biden-Klobuchar ticket, and the Minnesota senator would be known as that other woman who had a golden opportunity to beat Donald Trump and blew it.
If a Biden administration comes to pass, it will have plenty of other prestigious cabinet posts for Klobuchar if she wants one. Joe Biden may even feel he owes her a plum posting.
And if Biden crashes and burns, it won’t be her fault!
BBC writer does a Veepstakes roundup. In addition to the usual names he includes Kyrsten Sinema (would never happen, because she’s strayed from the party line too much) and Michelle Obama (who so many on the left are pining for).
“Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe faced backlash and has apologized for his comments about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate choice, saying that when Biden picks his running mate, he should do it based on each contender’s qualifications and reputation, not skin color.”
“And look at what’s happened in five months. The world is upside down and not one of us on this phone call would have predicted that the world will be as it is today. And it is five months from now until November.”
Real Clear Politics currently shows Biden to have a 7.3% lead over President Donald Trump in its average of recent polling in Michigan and an 8.1% average polling lead nationally.
Four years ago, when polling showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to have leads over Trump, Dingell voiced concerns before Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Michigan since 1988. Trump won the state by 10,704 votes against Clinton, his closest margin of victory nationally.
“Four years ago, many of you on this phone call thought that I was nuts,” Dingell said. “I was in enough communities and heard enough people talking that I was very worried about the outcome of that election.”
Dingell said Democrats should take nothing for granted in 2020.
You know those “Bolton is voting for Biden” stories? More fake news.
“Will Joe Biden Become Our First Female President?” “Under Biden’s own understanding of gender and his own proposed policy, it is entirely up to him what gender he identifies as after the election.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A three hour interview. Yeah, I know I’m not making things any easier on you.
Still, I suggest watching it, even though I think Rogan and Weinstein are wrong on some fundamentals (see my notes below) because Weinstein, having lived through the Evergreen State College nightmare, has a far better (and scarier) understanding of what outlandish ideas animate the unholy Social Justice Warrior alliance that has set America’s cities aflame.
Some of the money quotes:
“We were in a faculty meeting [at Evergreen], and I said that the proposals that were moving through were a threat to the Enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the Enlightenment but on the idea of enlightenment. I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that Enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.”
“If you end up in Critical Theory, any one of these fields, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, whatever, it is you have already foregone this option [of studying STEM]. You don’t end up in Critical Theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect you have people who don’t stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider, because they wouldn’t go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.”
“An excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette. Odette is half black her mom is Afro-Caribbean, she was known to be my student and Heather [Haying, Weinstein’s wife and also a teacher at Evergreen]’s student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened.”
“If #BlackLivesMatter just simply meant what those words imply, I’d be on board with it. It doesn’t. It means a great deal more than that, and we’re beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks.”
“There’s something in us that thinks that the Great Leap Forward in China cannot happen here. That what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here. That Nazi Germany cannot happen, and that the Soviet Union couldn’t happen here. I don’t know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible. I don’t think it’s impossible. I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure it is the Constitution.” (I would contend that widespread gun-ownership and ingrained American individualism make it very unlikely. I also wonder if he means the Cultural Revolution rather than the Great Leap Forward.)
“The proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish. The strategy is incredibly smart.”
“If there’s one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it’s that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we are also seeing in Seattle.”
“The idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane.”
“Joe Biden is an influence peddler. He is not an idea guy. He’s the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology. Who cares? This is not an answer to any known question. This is stay the course at a moment when we could not afford to stay the course less right. How dare the Democratic Party do this to us again at this moment?”
“Hillary Clinton advanced Trump’s candidacy because she wanted to run against him. So if you if you have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament.”
The biggest thing Weinstein and Rogan get wrong: The lack of opportunity in inner cities isn’t an effect of mass incarceration, but of the breakdown in the black nuclear family brought about by the perverse incentive structures of Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, which preceded rising black crime rates and increased incarceration. Widespread black economic progress was proceeding and converging toward white norms before the Great Society. Once again, read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, which goes into great statistical detail to prove the case.
Also, Occupy Wall Street was in no way, shape or form an “organic” movement, it started out battlespace preparation by the Obama team to face Mitt Romney in 2012, but quickly became the prototype for the organizational insurrection we saw first in Ferguson and which has now been rolled out nationwide.
His argument for a “radical centrist duo” to run for President and Vice President outside the two-party system just isn’t going to work, for political, cultural and (most important) Constitutional issues. And it can’t work this year for calendar/ballot access issues. (And the idea that former Admiral William McRaven is even remotely possible as a center-right white horse savior is laughable. Weirdly, Andrew Yang strikes me as much more plausible candidate, even if Universal Basic Income is wrong, but he’s neither rich nor famous enough to pull it off.) When he starts talking about that, feel free to skip to 1 hour and 44 minutes in for Rogan to start talking about Biden’s cognitive decline.
To be honest, I made it about an hour and fifty minutes in, only because I need to post this do other stuff. I fully intend to watch the rest this weekend.
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.
DEFUND THE POLICE! DEFUND THE POLICE! What seemed like a crazy slogan on the far left is threatening to become a reality in some places around the country. On Sunday the president of the Minneapolis City Council announced that a two-thirds majority of the council now supports “ending the Minneapolis Police Department.” Council members said they will be “taking intermediate steps towards ending the MPD through the budget process and other policy and budget decisions over the coming weeks and months.”
You ask what that means when someone commits a murder and they’re all “I dunno!”
On Sunday, a record 18 people were killed in Chicago in the worst single day of violence in 60 years, since the University of Chicago’s crime lab began keeping records in 1961. In total, over the weekend, 92 were shot and 27 succumbed to their wounds. All of the pictures of the known victims indicate they were African-Americans. And unlike with coronavirus, nearly all the victims were very young with much more life to live. Who is going to kneel on the ground for them? Who is going to pass legislation deterring repeat violent offenders, ending bail and parole for career criminals, and prescribing tougher sentences on gun felons? Well, certainly not the people using George Floyd’s death to promote the exact opposite.
The reality is that at least 17 people have been killed so far during the riots. However, as we see from Chicago and other cities, an unknown number – possibly totaling in the hundreds – have died likely as the result of police taking a hands-off approach to their work. The results of the riots and the war on cops are more deadly for African-Americans than anything imaginable.
Snip.
Police are getting beaten and can’t defend themselves lest they face prosecution. Over 300 NYPD officers have been injured in the riots. Few will see justice. In Los Angeles, the prosecutor announced that few rioters will face charges and all those who violated curfew will be free from criminal charges. In Chicago alone, in just nine days, 2,665 arrests have been made for civil unrest and disorderly, 788 arrests for looting, and 525 guns recovered. Watch for the same people who claim to abhor guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens to suddenly ignore these gun crimes.
What is the point of being a cop in America today? According to the FBI, in 2018, there were 58,866 assaults against law enforcement officers, resulting in 18,005 injuries. You almost never heard about them. God knows how many are taking place today. The resignations and retirements will continue while new recruitment will be nonexistent. The ones who don’t resign will be fired unless they kneel to the mob, like one police chief in Michigan who was forced out after voicing support for people engaging in open carry to protect their families from the politically untouchable rioters.
Want a preview of what the future looks like? Los Angeles homicides are up 250% during the riot week.
The notion that dangerous cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York will suddenly become feel-good hugfests if their police departments are defunded is patently absurd. The fact that they’ve all just experienced elevated levels of violence that have been perpetrated by the very people making the defund demand is indicative of just how bat-you-know-what crazy the mainstream American left has become. They can’t be left in charge of anything.
Did you notice that Seattle antifa just declared their own autonomous zone there and occupied City Hall while the police just retreat? How’s that working out?
BREAKING: Antifa mob planning to take over more Seattle neighbourhoodshttps://t.co/JFOo3YwnLw
Sources tell me there are those in the #CapitalHillAutonomousZone who are “shaking down” businesses by asking them to contribute supplies or resources. When there was the occupation in Portland in 2018, they threatened a food cart that wouldn’t give them electricity access.
Day 1: "We have done it, Comrades! This time Socialism is finally working!!" Day 2:"Homeless people stole all our food & we have a critical soy shortage" https://t.co/CHuE8pkyE1
Antifa—real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion—was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist “anti-fascist defense” units were associated with the KPD much earlier.
Anti-fascist Action’s sole purpose was to help the KPD combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic.
And yes, they fought the Nazis.
But they also fought liberal parties, conservative parties, and anyone and everyone who got in their way. While these early antecedents were short-lived, it is useful to view Antifa in this context. More than anything, Antifa exists to serve as a tool of revolutionary politics in a failed (or failing) state.
Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism. Autonomism is an anti-authoritarian anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade. Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the “black block,” where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed.
Antifa would form in a similar fashion in the United States, but under a different name.
According to Antifa lore, an effort by young punks to expel neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the music scene led to the formation of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), beginning in the Midwest and then spreading outward. As chapters formed in various cities, regional councils and networks were formed, such as the Midwest Anti-Fascist Network (MAFN) in 1995.
But present at the birth of ARA were members of America’s long-time revolutionary clique, with roots going all the way back to the domestic terror group Weather Underground. Consulting the young anti-racist punks in the formation of ARA were members of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC). Several separate ARAs would go on to form one of the largest Antifa networks in the country, Torch Antifa, whose website was registered by a former JBAKC member.
JBAKC was formed as a front for the May 19th Communist Organization (MCO), itself founded out of the remnants of the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, the FALN and other terrorist groups of the ’60s and ’70s. (May 19 was chosen since it was the birthday of both Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh.)
Following a split in the Weather Underground leadership over whether to emphasize class or racial struggle, the MCO emphasized working for “black liberation.” Members of the MCO were responsible for several bombings and robberies in the 1980s, including the infamous 1981 Brinks Armored Car Robbery.
But there’s a difference, and it’s the leftism of a much larger segment of the American public, the willingness of virtually the entire MSM to voluntarily become Pravda, the courts’ desire to play along as well, the amount of money supporting the movement, and what I see as the increasing sophistication of the violent forces such as Antifa who are ready to exploit any and every incident that lends itself to it.
The 60s radicals were relative amateurs. These people, less so, at least in terms of organization. And we have not yet seen the worst of it.
A few more links about the current leftwing madness:
Know who doesn’t want to defund the police? Joe Biden.
While it sounds great to attribute Floyd’s death to the racism built into the culture, what few are willing to do is analyze that culture. So why don’t we look into the system where this crime took place?
To start, you have as the city Mayor, Jacob Frey, an avowed leftist who follows a string of Democratic liberal leaders. The last time a Republican was elected to run the city was 1957. The police chief of Minneapolis is Medaria Arradondo, a black police official. The federal representative for the city, in Washington, is the famed female POC Ilhan Omar, and the top cop for the state is another POC and former head of the DNC, Attorney General Keith Ellison. Are these the leaders perpetuating the culture of white supremacy?
Just to add to the list, you have Minnesota headed by Democrat Tim Walz, the state is served by two Democrat senators, including Amy Klobuchar who spent years as an acting state attorney in a few offices, and even the sister city of Saint Paul has as its Mayor, Melvin Carter, another POC leader. These would be the people operating the ‘’racist and prejudicial system and culture’’. Looking over these names, note how few have incurred the wrath and blame over the past week, while President Trump has been pointed at as responsible.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
“A man who threatened to burn down Manhattan’s Diamond District, which is largely populated by Orthodox Jews, has been taken into custody.”
I know people have been busy focusing on all the rioting and other Social Justice Warrior insanity, but the inexorable march toward the November general election continues, and first up is Biden passing a big milestone. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Bloomberg has him at 2,004 pledged delegates, exceeding the threshold of 1,991, plus 372 “super delegates.”
So just how is Grandpa Simpson going to adapt to a party where a significant fraction of the young members are rioting and want to abolish police departments? He would like a word with “the youths.”
Three and a half years later, as American streets fill nightly with young protesters, no one can quite agree on where Joe Biden stands. Is he running ahead of Clinton among the youngest voters owing to their hatred of Trump — and therefore even more securely buckled into the electoral driver’s seat than widely assumed? Or is Biden lagging dangerously behind Clinton’s pace — far enough back that he needs to significantly retool his youth outreach to beat Trump, no matter how unexpectedly strong his position may be among traditionally Republican groups like older voters and suburbanites? And, most urgently, have the recent weeks of unrest simply served to highlight the vast divisions between Biden and Trump — whose unacceptability to younger Americans deepens by the day — or are they instead underscoring a significant disillusionment with all politics, in particular among young black voters, that could spell trouble for the Democrat?
The confusion is understandable: One CNN analysis of national polling in April showed Biden roughly ten points short of where Clinton was among 18-to-34-year-olds after he was routinely destroyed by Bernie Sanders among this group in the primaries. But the well-respected Harvard Institute of Politics’ poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released a few days later placed Biden right around the 60 percent goal Mook had mentioned, and the former vice-president has consistently led national polls of the entire electorate. Plus, while many Democrats are worried that the protests show young voters ready to make a significant break from voting as a tool of politics as usual, others are convinced they are actually energizing this group to become further involved — usually pointing to the voter-mobilization groups boasting blockbuster registration numbers in recent days.
This ambiguity has led Democrats to their strategically safest conclusion: They might as well step things up. So in recent weeks, Biden ramped up his digital-outreach hiring and announced the launch of a new, discrete effort within his campaign to marshal resources specifically around organizing young voters. He’s appeared on new kinds of platforms for him, like Megan Rapinoe’s Instagram Live and with Don Cheadle on The Shade Room, while party groups focused on youth turnout, like the Tom Steyer–funded NextGen America, have formally begun orienting more of their programs toward electing him. And, as the protests over the police killing of George Floyd have grown, those close to Biden have been considering calls for him to directly address his involvement with the 1994 crime bill as a way of engaging young black voters about his own growth, and assuaging their concerns. (One Wilmington youth pastor last week urged Biden to do so directly; Stacey Abrams, a potential Biden running mate, soon after told me, “If that is what young people need, then that is what they should have.”)
Here’s the new head of Biden’s youth outreach group:
Some polling and wishful thinking strategy talk snipped.
Senior Democrats see that the youngest voters clearly prefer Biden to Trump, but they still need to organize them to actually vote for the man who, according to CNN’s analysis, won only 16 percent of Democratic primary voters under 30. “A lot of Biden’s support [among young voters] is soft support, so he has to shore up youth support, but also make sure to target all the people who say they don’t know and might vote third party,” explained Ben Wessel, the executive director of NextGen, which endorsed Biden in May and has pledged to spend $45 million this year. “What’s really clear is that Trump has a ceiling of about 33 percent with these folks — I don’t think there’s any risk they’re going to go to Trump. [Democrats] just have to make sure they’re going to Biden.” Now, especially amid the protests, senior Democrats have identified this task as a top priority for Biden — many believe he needs to work hardest to reach black and Latino Americans who feel disengaged from politics and not just the ones who supported Sanders in the primary.
In late May, the Biden team announced steps it would take toward these ends, forming an effort it calls “League 46” to bring the campaign’s various youth-outreach strands under one umbrella hoisted by senior adviser Symone Sanders. The idea is to have a centralized hub for the campaign’s youth organizing and also to mobilize surrogates, including young lawmakers and activists, to expand Biden’s network with youth voters through events like Zoom happy hours. Already, organizers have held a handful of virtual brunches for young battleground-state voters that are focused on specific topics, like policies to support minority-owned small businesses.
Yeah, there’s nothing young people love more than Zoom happy hours and brunch.
Still, some of the usual tools for organizing students may be of limited use in the coming months if colleges begin the fall semester virtually. Wessel, whose group has a major presence on swing-state campuses, pointed out that most students would still likely be in the states where they go to school, but at home. That makes messaging to large groups of students at once trickier, and Democrats are making plans to be as present as possible on the virtual versions of those quads and dorms: “There are so many campus-based meme pages where you can spread content dedicated to people usually on those campuses,” he said. He cited the University of Wisconsin at Madison as an example: The “UW-Madison Memes for Milk-Chugging Teens” Facebook group has nearly 28,000 members; the school has around 32,000 undergraduates.
I could quote more about their digital outreach plans, but it’s right there where political speak, marketing speak, and tech speak collide, and “engagement” is built on abstractions of abstractions of abstractions, without the benefit of hard-dollar results to measure effectivity. “What is the way to do TikTok that is substantive, on brand for him, and allows him to be the version of himself that has, historically, resonated with young people?” Why, is this not hell?
“Hey Joe, where do you stand on defunding police?” “A refund for Grease? Never saw it!”
“In the last week alone, two prospects who were initially not considered among the top tier [Vice Presidential] contenders have suddenly burst into contention: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Florida Rep. Val Demings.” Guess what they have in common.
If I were Joe Biden and had a son that got kicked out of the military for doing crack, married his brothers widow and got a stripper pregnant, I would not start talking about the 10 to 15 percent of Americans that aren’t good people. but you do you joe and I will do me
Evidently BidenMarch is an organization that wants another candidate at the top of the ticket because Biden isn’t woke enough. Will they succeed? Eh, probably not. DNC might still replace Biden as they candidate, but BidenMarch will have jack-all to do with it…
Shot and three chasers:
After President Trump implemented his travel ban from China on January 31, Joe Biden said in Iowa "this is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysterical xenophobia and fear-mongering." pic.twitter.com/gru4jsiCVf
Joe Biden also wrote in a USA Today op-ed on January 27 that travel bans during the ebola epidemic would have been "reactionary" and "would have made things worse"https://t.co/stDv5NKx07pic.twitter.com/sSGz1zontP
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
