Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Traveling hundreds of miles across Iowa, passing cornfields and covered bridges, visiting quaint small town after quaint small town, listening to the stump speeches of Democrat after would-be Donald Trump-combating Democrat, only one thought comes to mind:

They’re gonna blow this again.

Imagine how it looks to Republicans. If that’s too difficult or unpalatable, just look at the swarm of 24 Democratic candidates in high school terms.

The front-runner — the front-runner! — is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the Eighties and never finished higher than “candidacy withdrawn,” with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s “momentum” challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with “I don’t think you’re a racist . . . but . . .” on national TV.

A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her “I have a plan for that” argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis — another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.

A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.

The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says “We’re out of ideas” quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.

Snip.

With a few exceptions, all the candidates here are giving a version of the same stump speech, which by itself is a problem — voters tend to notice this sort of thing.

Then there’s the content, which, to paraphrase Lincoln, is thinner than a soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that starved to death. The Democrats’ basic pitch reads like a list of five poll topics: kids are in cages; let’s close the gun-show loophole; this administration’s policies are an existential threat; something something Mitch McConnell; and Trump is (insert joke here).

There are truths there, but in baseball terms, it’s weak cheese Trump will swat into the seats. Our walking civil war of a president reached office on a promise to burn it all down, which, incidentally, he’s doing. A core psychological appeal to destruction needs a profound response. Slogans won’t work. Poll-and-pander won’t work. True inspiration is the only way out.

The Democrats had years to come up with an answer to Trump that is fundamental, powerful, and new, solving the problem the elder George Bush once called “the vision thing.” What’s mostly been shown instead is more of the same. Literally more, as in three times the usual suspects. The sequel even Hollywood would never make is now showing in Iowa.

Nor is he any more impressed with the debates.

There was Klobuchar dunking on Inslee, Harris thrashing Biden over his past stance on school busing, former Housing Secretary Julián Castro walloping O’Rourke for not doing his “homework” on section 1325 of the immigration code, and O’Rourke providing an anti-moment of his own in an agonizing marathon effort at speaking Spanish in his introductory debate segment.

The gambit inspired hundreds of vicious Twitter memes. Someone forgot to tell O’Rourke and fellow en-Español adventurist Cory Booker that the debates were already translated into Spanish on NBC’s broadcast partner, Telemundo. Stephen Colbert called it an “Español-off” and joked that the remarks “really got through, really penetrated.” Trevor Noah of The Daily Show and Jimmy Fallon of The Tonight Show also hammered the effort, leading to an approving recap of late-night comedy by Breitbart, never a good sign for Democrats.

There are real, heavy ideas underlying the Democratic primary…but few of them are coming through in these melees. Mostly the Democrats are taking tweet-size bites out of one another’s hind parts in Heathers-style putdowns, or engaging in virtue-signaling contests, like they’re running for president of Woke Twitter.

Snip.

Biden’s early front-runner flubs are reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s $150 million failure to handle Trump tweets. There are many such parallels. Biden is Jeb. O’Rourke, running in what the Times calls the “younger face” lane, is Marco Rubio. Unseen Steve Bullock is unseen Jim Gilmore. Bill de Blasio is the same “Why is he running?” New Yorker George Pataki was. And this election’s version of John Kasich, the embittered realist barking, “What are we doing here?” from the literal edge of the debate stage, is former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.

(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

The day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Advisors was a memorable one.

In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger brother, James, purchased the firm. On their first day on the job, they showed up with Joe’s other son, Beau, and two large men and ordered the hedge fund’s chief of compliance to fire its president, according to a Paradigm executive who was present.

After the firing, the two large men escorted the fund’s president out of the firm’s midtown Manhattan office, and James Biden laid out his vision for the fund’s future. “Don’t worry about investors,” he said, according to the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”

At the time, the senator was just months away from both assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second presidential bid. According to the executive, James Biden made it clear he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

At this, the executive recalled, Beau Biden, who was then running for attorney general of Delaware, turned bright red. He told his uncle, “This can never leave this room, and if you ever say it again, I will have nothing to do with this.”

A spokesman for James and Hunter Biden said no such episode ever occurred. Beau Biden died in 2015, at 46.

But the recollection of an effort to cash in on Joe’s political ties is consistent with other accounts provided by other former executives at the fund.

Snip.

Biden’s image as a straight-shooting man of the people, however, is clouded by the careers of his son and brother, who have lengthy track records of making, or seeking, deals that cash in on his name. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden used his power inappropriately or took action to benefit his relatives with respect to these ventures. Interviews, court records, government filings and news reports, however, reveal that some members of the Biden family have consistently mixed business and politics over nearly half a century, moving from one business to the next as Joe’s stature in Washington grew.

None of the ventures appear to have been runaway successes, and Biden’s relatives have not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in their dealings. But over the years, several of their partners and associates have ended up indicted or convicted. The dealings have brought Joe unwelcome scrutiny and threaten to distract from his presidential bid.

Read the whole thing, and at the very least look at that timeline of all the questionable business ventures the Biden clan has embarked on during Joe’s political career.

Like Pete Buttigieg, Booker was a Rhodes scholar and the dynamic mayor of a city afflicted by industrial decline, and unlike Buttigieg, he’d be sure to increase African-American turnout. He’s more talented than Joe Biden or Beto O’Rourke at summoning an inspiring and unifying civic gospel. His criminal-justice record is better than Kamala Harris’s. He is near the top of Greenpeace’s ranking of Democratic presidential candidates on environmental issues, behind only Jay Inslee and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Hell, he was even a reality TV star, albeit of the prestige type; his mayoral exploits were chronicled in the award-winning 2009 documentary series “Brick City.” He once ran into a burning building and carried a woman out over his shoulder. Long before Donald Trump, he was known for his innovative use of Twitter, responding to his Newark constituents’ complaints about things like potholes and snow removal. (In 2010, Time magazine called him a “social-media superhero.”) He looks like a movie star, and is dating one, the former Bernie Sanders surrogate Rosario Dawson. Booker is often mocked for showboating, but his ebullient theatrical streak would be useful in running against a carnival barker who is, as Marianne Williamson said on Tuesday, channeling a dark psychic force.

After Booker’s skillful performance on Wednesday, a CNN focus group and a flash poll of activists from the progressive group Indivisible both found him to be the night’s winner. That makes him, along with Elizabeth Warren, one of only two candidates who is widely viewed as shining in both the June and July Democratic debates. His sparring with Biden was particularly impressive; he was able to simultaneously make the case against the party’s front-runner and maintain a posture of optimistic, intraparty comity.

It’s a bit of mystery, then, why he’s yet to break into the top tier of 2020 Democratic contenders.

No it’s not. It’s because large swathes of the media have already chosen Kamala Harris as their Social Justice Warrior champion based on more instersectionality brownie points.

Federal Election Commission filings for the last quarter, reviewed by the Washington Examiner, show Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg were the top recipients of banker cash. The South Bend, Indiana mayor brought in $67,019.42 for the April through June period, followed by the former vice president at $45,456.25.

“The banking industry is more conservative than other industries. The biggest risk for them is uncertainty,” Kenneth Leon, director of equity research at CFRA, told the Washington Examiner. “The primaries are a noisy period. Bankers want a middle of the road Democrat. If you look at what happened under President Bill Clinton, where he and [Treasury Director] Robert Rubin teamed up and delivered big benefits to the financial sector and the American economy, that’s the kind of success bankers want.”

Rubin, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, has given a combined $8,000 to Biden, Buttigieg, and Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

Despite her polling surge after the first round of Democratic debates, Harris brought in much less money from bankers than her fellow front-runners, at $30,314.00. Those with connections to the banking industry, who only spoke with the Washington Examiner on background, said part of that hesitation could be because of her history as a prosecutor.

“Harris came into the Senate as a moderate, but her voting record is almost as liberal as Warren or Sanders,” the individual said. “Wall Street also doesn’t want to be sitting on the other side of a prosecutor. Think about how she treated [Supreme Court Justice] Brett Kavanaugh during his hearing.”

Unsurprisingly, both Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont received the least amount of money from those in the banking sector. Warren brought in $11,482.39 from those employed in some capacity by a bank or financial firm, but a breakdown of those contributors show many of them work in retail or design positions.

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) More on Buttigieg’s bundlers:

Pete Buttigieg is drawing new blood into the world of big-league presidential fundraisers.

Buttigieg’s campaign has amassed 94 people and couples who have already raised more than $25,000 for him in the race, according to a list of his top bundlers obtained by POLITICO. But roughly two-thirds of those donors were not among the major fundraisers for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton during recent election cycles, according to a POLITICO analysis — though in many cases they are well-connected people in their own right.

Buttigieg’s roster of top bundlers, known inside the campaign as his “investor’s circle,” includes well-known hedge fund manager Orin Kramer and Esprit co-founder Susie Tompkins Buell — each of whom has raised upward of $25,000 for his campaign. The rainmakers were instrumental in making Buttigieg the biggest fundraiser in the Democratic presidential field this spring, as he brought in $24.8 million in the second quarter of the year.

And because Buttigieg is largely drawing from outside the ranks of traditional Democratic bundlers, the group’s loyalty could help the South Bend, Ind., mayor raise multiples more over the course of that campaign — helping him hire field staff, cut television ads and, they hope, break into the top of the polls at just the right time.

In his opening remarks, Delaney took direct aim at Warren, Sanders, and Medicare for All. “We can go down the road that Senator Sanders and Senator Warren want to take us, which is with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything, and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected,” he said. “That’s what happened with McGovern. That’s what happened with Mondale. That’s what happened with Dukakis.”

Delaney went toe-to-toe with Elizabeth Warren on free trade, but his best moment of the night came during his exchange with Bernie Sanders on health care.

Not only would Medicare for All tell “half the country that your health insurance is illegal,” Delaney said, “the bill that Senator Sanders drafted, by definition, will lower quality in health care.”
Delaney explained that Medicare for All would fund all health-care expenditures at current Medicare rates — only about 80 percent of the real cost of health care, while private insurance pays 120 percent. “So if you start underpaying all the health-care providers, you’re going to create a two-tier market where wealthy people buy their health care with cash, and the people . . . like my dad, the union electrician, will have that health-care plan taken away.”

Sanders was visibly angry at times. When Delaney noted he was the only candidate with experience in the health-care business, Sanders snapped: “It’s not a business!” Sanders’s response to Delaney’s argument about the true cost of health care was that Medicare for All would save $500 billion a year by “ending all of the incredible complexities that are driving every American crazy trying to deal with the health-insurance companies.”

“Listen, his math is wrong,” Delaney replied. “I’ve been going around rural America, and I ask rural hospital administrators one question: ‘If all your bills were paid at the Medicare rate last year, what would happen?’ And they all look at me and say, ‘We would close.’”

Which is why he has no chance.

— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) July 31, 2019

“Tracking metrics of Russian state propaganda on Twitter, she was by far the most favored candidate,” said Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “She’s the Kremlin’s preferred Democrat. She is such a useful agent of influence for them. Whether she knows it’s happening or not, they love what she’s saying.”

See also last week’s Gabbard vs. Harris piece.

Also:

Kirsten Gillibrand: “The first thing I would do is Clorox the Oval Office.”

Also Gillibrand: pic.twitter.com/XgsItyXx0W

— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) August 1, 2019

Kamala Harris on the debate stage:

“I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners.”

Kamala Harris behind closed doors:

– $49,860 from Morgan Stanley
– $49,452 from Wells Fargo

Looks like big banks love to be “taken on” by Kamala.

— Hal Lambert (@MAGAindex) August 2, 2019

O’Malley Dillon once helped eke out a 524-vote Democratic Senate victory in South Dakota. And before moving to the Obama camp, she was key to former U.S. Sen. John Edwards’ two second-place finishes in the 2004 and 2008 Iowa caucuses. While she started the 2008 cycle as the Iowa state director for Edwards, she eventually made her way to the Obama campaign and was his deputy campaign manager for the 2012 campaign.

She earned legendary status within Democratic circles in November 2012 when she was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in charge of field and data. That campaign pioneered analytics and turnout models and outperformed the late polls.

Man, the threshold for “legendary” among female Democratic political operatives is pretty low. Also, let me get the Betteridge’s Law answer to the headline out of the way: No.

It’s unseemly, the degree to which the press is rooting for Sanders to get his socialist tuchis out of the race. This is an actual headline from Politico after the first set of debates: “Harris, Warren Tie for Third in New Poll, But Biden Still Leads.”

The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Biden dropping to 25 percent nationally, with Harris and Warren jousting for third at nine percent. Where’s Waldo? The missing data point is that Sanders doubled both Harris and Warren in said poll at 18 percent. He also has the highest number of unique donors, and is the leading fundraiser overall in the race.

That doesn’t mean Sanders is going to win. He’s the only candidate with a more or less insoluble base of voters, but unlike Warren, who seems really to want this, Bernie has sometimes seemed dispirited. Still, the undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’ ”

There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”

Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.

Sanders endorses “strong border protections” to prevent illegal aliens from taking advantage of government education and health care. There are two possibilities here: 1.) He’s lying. 2.) He’s telling the truth (maybe on “Socialism in one country” grounds), and, if elected, wouldn’t lift a finger to stop Democrats from passing open border laws, since any Sanders Administration would mean an absolutely disasterous 2020 for Republicans in the House and Senate. How Sanders made the health care debates among Democrats all about how much to socialize medicine. “I’ll take Unlikely Teamups for $200, Alex.” “Cardi B joins Bernie Sanders for campaign video and talks student debt, climate change and the minimum wage.” Gets his own Ben & Jerry’s flavor. To really make it taste like Bernie, you have to wait until someone else buys some and then steals theirs…

Low name recognition isn’t necessarily a serious liability, however. In fact, it can be an opportunity, if you have access to a lot of money — which Steyer certainly does. With a net worth of $1.6 billion, Steyer can easily afford to spend millions of his own dollars on campaign ads. The former hedge fund manager is already responsible for the largest TV ad buy of the Democratic primary thus far: a reported $1.4 million for two weeks of ads on national cable news and local programs in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Steyer has also outspent every other candidate in Facebook and Google ad buys since entering the race. And there could be much more to come: Steyer and his wife were the largest contributors to the 2014 and 2016 federal elections (ahead of the likes of Sheldon Adelson and George Soros!) and the third-most prolific donors in the 2018 cycle, giving a cool $74 million. And Steyer has claimed that he will spend at least $100 million on the presidential race.

Unfortunately for Steyer, all that money may not make a difference. (Just ask Presidents Ross Perot and Steve Forbes … oh wait.) Our research into 2018 Democratic primary races found that self-funders (specifically, candidates who loaned or donated $400,000 or more to their campaigns) didn’t have an advantage. If anything, self-funders historically have had poor electoral track records, especially in open-seat races. As FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote in 2010, they often suffer from inexperience when interacting with voters, a lack of adequate vetting and the diminishing returns of ad spending.

Steyer’s background in finance probably hurts him as well, as Democrats do not seem favorably disposed to nominating a businessman of their own. Steyer, Andrew Yang and now-declined candidate Michael Bloomberg have all tended to have lower favorability ratings than would be expected based on how well-known they are. And people without experience running for office are also generally less successful.

But Steyer does have one ace in the hole: his close association with the effort to impeach Trump. Until switching gears to run for president, he was the founder and primary funder of Need to Impeach, a group that advocates for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. Impeachment is quite popular among Democrats, too. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said they supported beginning impeachment proceedings in a recent Quinnipiac poll, and the most recent Fox News poll found that 74 percent of Democrats wanted to see Trump impeached and removed from office. In addition, Sen. Elizabeth Warren experienced a small bump in the polls in late April — which happened to occur right after she became the first candidate to come out forcefully for impeachment, although it’s impossible to know if one caused the other.

On the other hand, both polling and anecdotal evidence suggest that impeachment isn’t that important to Democratic primary voters. For instance, in a HuffPost/YouGov survey from June, only 18 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners listed it among the three issues most important to them; the topic has also rarely come up at town halls with the presidential candidates.

Steyer’s best-case scenario probably relies on his ability to use his massive financial resources and to seize on a popular issue to introduce himself favorably to the Democratic electorate. Indeed, in less than a month, he has notched half of the polls he needs to qualify for the September debate (although his ability to amass 130,000 individual donors remains a big question mark). He has already begun to leverage the robust campaign operations of Need to Impeach, which has more than 8.2 million people on its email list, and NextGen America, an advocacy group he founded in 2013, to help his campaign. But Steyer is also starting from way behind, and it’s going to take every ounce of political muscle he’s got to crack into the top tier in such a crowded field.

So what it amounts to is: He can spend his way into the race. Thanks for that blinding flash of the obvious, 538…

The line everyone is quoting is Warren’s riposte to John Delaney: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”

Step back and you can see a media myth being created before your eyes. Everyone’s talking about the zinger, nobody can remember that allegedly unambitious agenda from Delaney that spurred Warren’s response:

I think Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises, when we run on things that are workable, not fairy tale economics. Look at the story of Detroit, this amazing city that we’re in. This city is turning around because the government and the private sector are working well together. That has to be our model going forward. We need to encourage collaboration between the government, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector, and focus on those kitchen table, pocketbook issues that matter to hard-working Americans: building infrastructure, creating jobs, improving their pay, creating universal health care, and lowering drug prices.

That’s what makes Delaney such a naysayer and cynic? If the next president built up America’s infrastructure, created jobs, improved take-home pay, created universal health care, and lowered drug prices, would you look at that legacy and lament how timid and unambitious it was? Or would you say, “wow, that was an amazing presidency, I can’t believe so much got done”?

(This is all separate from the question of whether a zinger against one of the least-known, least-discussed, lowest-polling figures in the field really counts as the knockout punch that Warren fans want to believe it is.)

Delaney’s recurring refrain during the debate, particularly in reference to Sanders, was “I’ve done the math, it doesn’t add up,” and “his math is wrong.” The progressives hate him for it. Everyone wants their presidential campaign to be about brighter tomorrows and daring proposals and sunnier horizons and bold visions and all of that. But that doesn’t change the math.

Delaney may have exaggerated when he said that enacting Medicare for All would lead to all hospitals shutting down. But he’s pointing to a real problem. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, “more than two-thirds of hospitals are losing money on Medicare inpatient services and that the average Medicare inpatient hospital margin was -9.9 percent in 2017.” What happens when everyone’s paying through Medicare, and more hospitals are losing money on most of their treatment?

Over at Reason, Alex Muresianu calculates that Warren wants to spend her $2.75 trillion in new wealth taxes on $3.26 trillion in spending. When you use the trillion, it doesn’t look so bad, so let’s rephrase that: after enacting a gigantic new tax hike, Warren wants to spend $51,000,000,000 more. And she continues to insist her taxes will only hit “billionaires and big corporations.”

David A. Graham writes, “[Warren] seemed to be focusing on emotion.” Yeah, no kidding. Every presidential candidate prefers to focus on emotion. Obama talked about “hope” and “yes we can,” Trump vented his spleen and offered a vision of an America that was “great again.” Every candidate wants to focus on emotion because it’s easier than getting the math to add up. You would think the electorate would learn after getting so many consecutive cycles of believing in the next great inspiring hope and then being disappointed by the results.

Emotion is easy. Everybody’s got a sad anecdote about losing someone they loved, or knowing someone who faced an unfair, undeserved hardship. Everybody’s got some inspiring anecdote about someone who fought through adversity and is now living the American dream. Everybody’s heard about some kind of injustice that is technically legal but morally wrong, and that gets an audience’s blood boiling.

You know what kind of people want you to focus on emotion? Salesmen, con artists, cult leaders, and demagogues. Emotion empowered Bernie Madoff; math caught him.

You want to know why you have problems, America? Because you don’t like doing the math. Your checkbook doesn’t add up, you didn’t read the fine print, you didn’t realize how bad the interest rate on your credit card was, you didn’t think your adjustable rate mortgage would adjust so soon, and you can’t believe you agreed to buy that timeshare.

She said the U.S. should never use nukes first, so Russia should view a Wraren presidency as a great chance to get Alaska back. Anti-Israel BDS activist Max Berger is a Warren aide. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author made famous by Oprah Winfrey, is speaking to about 50 people. “When we get bad news, when we learn that something really terrible is going on, so many superficial concerns drop away. And we become very intelligent,” she says, glaring and pausing for emphasis.

Williamson is a small, almost ethereal figure with silver-streaked hair and intense eyes that 19th-century authors would have described as being “like coals.” Her superficial eccentricities and occasional incautious statements (she once said “there’s a skepticism which is actually healthy” on the issue of vaccines) have caused reporters to chortle at her run.

But her speech is not a lifeless collection of policy positions. It’s an interesting, tightly written diagnosis of the American problem. Precisely because socioeconomic stresses have pushed them into heightened awareness, she says, the American public sees what she calls “a transition from democracy to aristocracy,” and the corporate sector’s “insatiable appetite” for money that dominates American life.

Williamson is not a traditional orator, with a voice that fills the room. You can barely hear her without a microphone. But she grabs crowds. Nobody is checking sports scores or Twitter. They’re in.

Williamson goes on to say that most Americans are aware that their government is now little more than a handmaiden to sociopathic forces. She describes a two-party system that, at its worst, operates in perfect harmony with the darkest impulses of corporate capitalism, and at best — presumably she refers more to Democrats here — sounds like institutionalized beggary.

“ ‘Pretty please, can I maybe have a hundred-thousand-dollar grant here?’ ” she says. “ ‘Pretty please, can we maybe have a million dollars in the budget for all this?’ ”

Heads are nodding all over the place.

“They say, ‘I can get you a cookie.’ ”

This elicits a few yeahs from the crowd.

Christ, I think. This woman is going to win the nomination.

Williamson was interviewed by the Council on Foreign Relations. Now it’s time to play: “Marianne Williamson or John Bolton?”

Q: How, if at all, should China’s treatment of the Uighurs and the situation in Hong Kong affect broader U.S. policy toward China?

A: China is aggressively engaging in theft, practicing commercial espionage, and ignoring intellectual-property rights as well as trampling on human rights and democracy in their drive to dominate global markets. The US must maintain a strong position regarding China with regard to economics, politics, and human rights.

China’s treatment of the Uighurs and of Hong Kong reflect their aggressive drive for domination and their disdain for human rights and democracy. The United States needs to stand up for human rights and call out the gross violations of human rights committed by China. It’s a good thing that this week Secretary Pompeo denounced China’s treatment of the Uighurs. We should also be speaking out against the authoritarian push for greater control in Hong Kong where thousands of people are demonstrating for their democratic rights.

Additionally, the US has the power to prevent China from buying strategically important companies, which we have done through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS). We should exercise this power more vigorously as we defend our economic interests and human rights for all.

Yep, that’s Williamson. Save a mention of military power, I’m not sure a Bolton response would be much different. But then she ruins it by backing the Iran deal. “Apparently, Bill Maher Agrees With Marianne Williamson on ‘Everything.'” Received opinion seems disturbed that anyone questions the widespread use of antidepressants. Donald Trump, Jr. calls her the harbinger of doom for the Democratic Party, given the wild applause for her very-farthest left positions. Noah Berlatsky pens a weak “Williamson is no friend of the left” hit piece, which amounts to antivax and “fat shaming” viewpoints. Way to focus on the important issues! “Marianne Williamson Not Sure What She’s Doing Up Here With All These Crazy People.” See also last week’s Williamson debate piece.