Democrats want to ban cheeseburgers, Biden’s eye fills with blood, the third debates loom, and Williamson is shocked to find out that leftist activists are mean liars. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
CBS battleground states: Let’s shotgun all these in one line. New Hampshire: Warren 27, Biden 26, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7. Iowa: Biden 29, Sanders 26, Warren 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 6. South Carolina: Biden 43, Sanders 18, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4. Nevada: Sanders 29, Biden 27, Warren 18, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3.
Texas Lyceum (Texas): Biden 24, O’Rourke 18, Warren 15, Sanders 13, Harris 4, Castro 4, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, McAuliffe (lolwut) 1, Moulton 1, Williamson 1. Keep in mind that the Lyceum poll always oversamples Democrats, but their intra-Democratic poll numbers aren’t necessarily inaccurate. And Biden beating Beto in his home state, and Castro garnering a puny 4%, are both hilarious…
The presidential ambitions of the leading Democrat candidates may not survive CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Townhall.
It was a man-made disaster, created in the fevered swamps of CNN and fueled by pledges of allegiance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
The candidates came across as not-serious-people. Worse, they came across as nanny-state monsters who really do want to take away your plastic straws and cheeseburgers to save the planet. It was a self-parody of what woke totalitarianism sounds like, with an abnormal focus on meat.
Republican attack-ad makers have hours of footage that can be sliced and diced to make any of the candidates who appeared at the Townhall look insane. And they wasted no time.
Ban all the things! “Here is a comprehensive list of everything the left wants to have banned for the sake of human survival:
One of Yang’s supporters, Scott Santens, has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter: an MSNBC graphic with other candidates polling at 2 percent but not Yang, oddly unbalanced graphics that seem to include just enough candidates to get in the media favorites but exclude Yang. As Axios recently pointed out, Yang is sixth in the polling average yet 14th in terms of the number of articles written about his candidacy.
Clearly, something is going on here. But what I’ve noticed is that Yang is not alone in facing media contempt. Without fail, every candidate who has come from outside the Democratic establishment, or who has dared to question the Democratic establishment, has been smeared, dismissed or ignored by most media.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who resigned from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in protest of its treatment of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and dares to challenge the bipartisan pro-war foreign policy consensus, has been smeared as “unpatriotic.” This despite the fact that she is an Iraq War veteran who, to this day, serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. The Daily Beast published an absurd article titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign is Being Boosted By Putin Apologists” about how three of her donors, among tens of thousands, had tangential connections to Russia. NBC News published a piece on how Russian bots were boosting Gabbard’s campaign. It cited one expert, a group that reportedly faked Russian bot activity in an Alabama election.
Gabbard had the distinction of being the most-Googled candidate in both of the first two debates. The media, however, have shown little interest in understanding why her pro-peace message might hold appeal.
I’ve talked quite a bit about media bias against Sanders. The latest, most egregious case involved a Washington Post “fact check” that found Sanders accurately cited academic research — but managed to give him three Pinocchios anyway.
Marianne Williamson, an author and activist, is definitely off the beaten path for a candidate, but she is an incredibly accomplished woman, with seven New York Times bestsellers to her name and decades of activism under her belt. Perhaps it would be interesting to hear more of her thoughts on national healing and reconciliation rather than just casting her as a weirdo and mocking her for a tweet about the power of prayer, something to which many, if not most, Americans subscribe.
These candidates occupy much different poll positions and have wildly different approaches, styles and philosophies. Yang, the cheerful prophet of doom; Williamson, the spiritual healer; Gabbard, the teller of hard truths about American imperialism; and Sanders, well, he’s just Bernie. But they have something important in common: They don’t fit the mold. They aren’t in the club. They defy the rules.
Asian techies are supposed to develop the latest AI, not lead the revolution to put humanity first. Democratic female veterans are supposed to burnish the party’s hawkish cred, not doggedly pursue diplomacy and engagement and call out the American war machine. Spirituality is not supposed to be mixed with politics on the left, even though religion is fully weaponized by the right. And septuagenarian democratic socialists who are not fashionable in any way are not supposed to be rock stars with youths or be top-polling presidential contenders.
Rather than deal with these contradictions — which, by the way, clearly fascinate the public, judging by Google and Twitter trends — it’s easier for many in the media to mock, smear or ignore.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida are four states likely to determine the 2020 presidential race, and Donald Trump won each by a percentage point or less. “Of course, we’re deprived of any painfully honest discussion of how much the Democrats need black voters in big cities to control the electoral votes of the swing states and why they’re having trouble getting these votes in the post-Obama era.”
Perhaps part of it is due to the pressure of being an old white man who’s posing as the standard-bearer of a political party whose sole agenda these days is the extermination and debasement of old white men. How taxing must it be to run on the premise of, “Well, sure, everything I represent sucks, but at least I acknowledge it, so vote for me, anyway”? I could see how that could take its toll on a fella.
But most of it is due to the fact that he has always been a liar who jumbled the facts, compounded by a septuagenarian brain that is rapidly fermenting.
Biden is often referred to as a “gaffe machine,” and although that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. A gaffe, by definition, is an unintentional mistake. There was the time when, in front of a crowd, he told wheelchair-bound Missouri state senator Chuck Graham to stand up. There was the time he called Barack Obama the “first sorta mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Those are simply dumb, clumsy mistakes.
But throughout his career, he has also blatantly lied about himself:
He claimed he finished in the top half of his law-school class; he actually finished 76th out of 85.
He has repeatedly claimed that both he and members of his family were coal miners. He even plagiarized sections of a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock about how his ancestors would work in the coal mines for 12 hours and then come up to play football for four hours. He was ultimately forced to admit he was lying.
He plagiarized portions of a law-school essay so extensively he had to beg administrators not to expel him.
He implied that Osama bin Laden’s men “forced down” his helicopter in Afghanistan, when the truth is that the pilot landed safely as a precaution to avoid a snowstorm.
He claims he was “shot at” in Iraq, when the truth is that a mortar landed several football fields away from where he was safely ensconced in a Baghdad motel.
He claims he participated in sit-ins and boycotts during the Civil Rights era and then was later forced to acknowledge that, no, he didn’t do any of that, although he did briefly work at a predominantly black swimming pool.
Joe Biden did not bring his fastball tonight. Nor did he know what sport he was playing or when the game was supposed to start. I think he was accidentally wearing someone else’s clothes.
The returns, which Booker released in April as part of his presidential campaign, show that he donated more than $110,000 of stock in Yandex, a Russian search-engine firm, from April 5, 2013 to October 11, 2013. In the middle of that stretch, on May 16, 2013, Booker filed a financial disclosure report. Yet on the report, an accounting of Booker’s assets and liabilities, he did not list Yandex. How could Booker have given away stock in the company if he did not own it?
“I certainly would be interested in hearing the campaign’s explanation,” said Brendan Fischer, director of the federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group. “It’s not uncommon for candidates to divest financial holdings that could be controversial or pose a conflict of interest, but if a candidate does hold assets at the time the financial disclosure report is filed, they have to be reported. And it’s not clear that that’s what happened here.”
Hey, remember all the way back to earlier this year when media companies told us that playing footsie with Russians was the worst thing in the world? Buzzfeed offers up a failure to launch piece.
There’s a world you can imagine where a candidate like Booker would be running strong with younger voters, especially young black voters. Research, such as a recent report titled the Black Millennial Economic Perspectives Report, published just this month found 36% said criminal justice was their top domestic issue — a top Booker issue. (A similar study from two Democratic PACs found that “despite having every reason to be disenchanted with politics and the political process, unregistered black millennials remain aspirational and committed to protecting and empowering their families and communities.”)
But Booker didn’t have strong black support in the race the moment he jumped in, and he can’t bank on it coming later. There is another leading black candidate in the primary, and that’s to say nothing of the high levels of support right now for Joe Biden, or the affinity for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders among some younger black activists and voters.
You can get a good sense of the intellectual vacuity (and religious sterility, if you’re interested in that) of this mode of politics from, e.g., Kirsten Powers’s banal and illiterate conversation with Buttigieg, written up for general amusement in USA Today. (You will not be surprised to read that Mayor Pete has “started a crucial conversation,” and has proceeded from cliché to cliché.) Powers, when she is not half-chiding her fellow Christian for showing what she considers excessive grace to people who have naughty political ideas (one wonders what she would consider insufficient grace), hits the reader with a few insights that are not exactly blistering in their originality: Jesus, she says, never mentioned abortion (but then, neither does the Constitution), while He did speak a great deal about looking after the poor. Powers writes this as though Christianity had been planted in a cultural vacuum and as though “feed my sheep” were synonymous with “vote for the party of the welfare state no matter what other horrifying business may be on their agenda” — and as though these kinds of issues had not been the subject of centuries of Christian inquiry. The New Testament is silent on the questions of, among other things, child pornography and cannibalism, but Christians are not expected to maintain a morally indifferent attitude toward these. Still less would Christians be expected to maintain such indifference in the face of the Supreme Court’s happening upon a right to cannibalism lurking in some unexplored constitutional penumbra and the subsequent establishment of a franchised chain of coast-to-coast cannibalism outlets enjoying public subsidies.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He wants to tax robots. He may throw in the towel if he doesn’t make the October debates. “I’m going to go and try to get into the October debates, and if I can, I think that’s a good reason to keep going forward. And if I can’t, I think it’s really tough to conceive of continuing.” They add: “Should de Blasio make good on his promise and drop out of the campaign in October, he’ll be forced to head back to his day job in New York City—likely to both his and his constituents’ chagrin.” Along those same lines: “NYC Mayor De Blasio Logged Just 7 Hours At Work For Entire Month.” De Blasio is running for President because it gives him an excuse to stay away from the city that hates his guts.
We have an interest, obviously, in Hong Kong. There’s a lot of economic activity that flows through Hong Kong. Obviously, U.S. businesses have a lot of interest in Hong Kong. So we clearly have an interest in Hong Kong maintaining the autonomy that they were promised.
But there’s also a bigger issue, and that is the role the United States has in providing some moral leadership, and standing up for people who are fighting for their rights and for their ability to have some self-governance, particularly self-governance that’s been assured to them, or at least was assured to them. So I think we not only have a direct interest in actually how things unfold in Hong Kong, particularly around their—the rule of law and their legal system that they have that’s very unique, and we have a lot of interest, but more broadly I think we have a leadership role around the world to stand up not only for human rights—which is another, obviously, issue related to China—but also for individuals who are fighting for their right to self-governance. And I think they have it, and I think we should be making our voice clear on this issue.
Snip.
I think it’s right to be a lot tougher on China. In my opinion, China’s acted in many ways like pirates across the last several decades, right? They’ve stolen things. They’ve stolen intellectual property. They haven’t played by the rules, particularly rules that they gave assurances that they would play by. You know, and they are taking islands in the South China Sea.
I mean, so there is a response that’s necessary because China’s become our economic rival by doing, in my judgment, three things. They worked really hard. Good for them. They made very smart investments, in some ways smarter than we did. Good for them. But they didn’t play by the rules. And we can’t allow the next several decades for them to continue to not play by the rules because I think that’ll put us in a very, very significant kind of difficult economic position.
So I think it’s appropriate to draw a hard line with China on a lot of these practices. And I think the president was actually right in raising this issue, but I think his diagnosis of the problem is entirely wrong and the way he’s approaching it is wrong.
You could call it meaningless blather, and you’re not far from wrong, but it’s still more coherent than 99% of prominent Democrats have been on the challenge posed by China.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Opposes impeachment. It is “important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further tear our country apart.”
Kamala Harris entered the presidential race with impressive credentials – a popular black woman with an inspiring story who hailed from a large Democratic state and drew accolades for her fiery questioning of President Donald Trump’s nominees.
Yet despite a shot of adrenaline after confronting front-runner Joe Biden in the first debate, she has failed to catch fire with Democratic voters who are torn between a nostalgic fondness for Biden and a revolutionary desire for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Harris’ attempt to replicate her feat in the second debate backfired among Democrats who say she went too negative on Biden. The Californian also suffers from a perception that she lacks a deep ideological well to guide her policy ideas, in contrast to her three main rivals who are better-defined. And her past as a prosecutor has earned her supporters and detractors.
Harris and Senator Cory Booker “really went after vice president Biden – it redounded to their detriment that they went after Biden so much. Because it also looked like they were not just going after Biden, but they were going after the Obama legacy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is neutral in the primaries.
Weingarten said many Democrats left the June debate thinking, “Kamala seems really feisty and let’s look at her.” But in the July debate they were turned off by Harris and other aggressors because “it looked like they were burning the house down, as opposed to building on what Democrats believe in.”
Harris surged from about 7% to 15% in averages of Democratic polls immediately after the first debate in late June, putting her in second or third place in the crowded field. But it was a sugar high – she’s back to the 7% she had when summer began.
For Harris, the danger is that she’s another Marco Rubio. The Florida senator, too, had a potentially history-making candidacy during the Republican nomination battle in 2016 and was hailed by the party establishment as presidential timber, before he failed to translate that on the ground.
Ouch! And like Rubio, Harris has a senate career to fall back on. “Kamala Harris claimed she ‘sued Exxon Mobil’ as California AG. She didn’t.” Ha ha! “Harris Only Three Points Ahead of Gabbard After Ridiculing Her Poll Numbers a Month Ago.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s not wild about the process, which I can understand from someone stuck in very last place in a field this ridiculously large. But it’s not like he’s run even a minimally competent campaign:
The mayor of Miramar, Florida, has not found much of an audience or appeared in any debates. He has raised a mere $93,812 and assembled a small campaign staff. And now, according to internal campaign documents and interviews with eight former Messam campaign staffers and contractors, his campaign appears to be in near-total disarray.
The documents as well as staffers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect future employment prospects, depicted a no-hope campaign that nonetheless was embroiled in bitter disputes over money and control — a “D-list version of The Sopranos,” in one description. In particular, staff members claim that Wayne and his wife, Angela Messam, have refused to pay them for their work. All of the staffers and vendors that BuzzFeed News spoke with said they were never fully compensated for their work on the campaign and, in some cases, weren’t paid at all for expenses they’d fronted from their own bank accounts, including business cards for the campaign and flights, hotel rooms, and security costs for a trip to the Middle East. In some instances, staffers were told by the Messams that the couple believed them to be “volunteering” for the campaign, despite emails from senior staff to the Messams telling them about start dates for employees, and what staff members say were verbal agreements and offer letters from the campaign for their positions.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently the Odessa shooter was not, in fact, a Beto backer, which I rather suspected when this made the rounds; never beleive something that seems too pat without verifying it. (And yeah, Snopes, but the piece cites some actual, non-risible sources.)
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) And just like with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, you can bet that all that population control is aimed firmly at “undesirable” black and brown kids.
A former ThinkProgress writer took to Twitter to condemn billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer after receiving a job notice for his campaign following news that the liberal news site is shutting down.
Rebekah Entralgo, a writer who covered immigration policy and detention at ThinkProgress, said she received a LinkedIn message that attempted to recruit her after the activist group the Center for American Progress (CAP) said it could not find a new publisher for the site.
“Sorry to learn about ThinkProgress,” the message said in a screenshot Entralgo posted. “Tom Steyer 2020 is hiring for digital and comms roles — we do pay a relocation fee…”
Steyer (a CAP board member whose 2020 run could have funded TP for a decade as @ryanlcooper pointed out) is now trying to capitalize off of the site’s demise. You truly cannot make this stuff up pic.twitter.com/r5dJAhJUVJ
There are plenty of jobs I’ve been solicited for that I didn’t apply for, but in none of the cases did I declare “Screw you, you should have funded my last job!”
Warren is not overwhelmingly popular among women right now, but she has had a small, consistent edge among women in recent polls. Our average of national polls1 taken between Aug. 1 and Sep. 1 do show Warren getting some extra support from women, though not to a huge degree. Women were 2.9 points more likely than men to support Warren on average, while both Biden’s and Harris’s backers were nearly identically split between men and women — with Biden getting the most backing from both groups. And according to Morning Consult’s weekly national primary poll, Biden’s support is particularly strong among black women, too.
Biden will once again be the piñata at Thursday’s debate because the best way for any of his nine rivals to gain ground is to beat up on him, as Sen. Kamala Harris proved in the first debate.
But Warren is the one to watch this time. Most national polls have her second, with two recent ones showing her trailing the former vice president by just four points.
She is drawing by far the largest crowds and is focused, energized and organized. Biden, on the other hand, had a terrible week, with a growing realization in the party that his flubs and memory lapses are not passing problems.
Both his blood-filled eye and his gibberish remarks about climate change added to doubts he can go the distance. His team wants to cut back on his schedule and lowered expectations for Iowa and New Hampshire, moves that smell like panic.
“I know this sounds naive. I didn’t think the left was so mean. I didn’t think the left lied like this,” Williamson told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview. “I thought the right did that. I thought we were better.”
Williamson accused the left of lying about her use of crystals and “crystal gazing,” telling Remnick that there has “never been a crystal on stage” at any of her events and “there is no crystal” in her home.
She accused those on the left of also falsely accusing her of having told AIDS patients not to take their medicines or implying that “lovelessness” causes diseases and “love” is “enough to cure their diseases.”
“I’m Jewish, I go to the doctor,” Williamson said, ripping those on the left for labeling her as an anti-science candidate who does not believe in modern medicine.
Mr. Yang has attracted an ideologically eclectic coalition that includes progressives, libertarians, disaffected voters and Trump supporters who have swapped their red MAGA hats for blue ones that say MATH — “Make America Think Harder.” Those who have come into his camp say his presence on YouTube, on podcasts and in the nationally televised debates helped them begin to see the logic behind giving people free money.
His performance in Houston could be crucial to sustaining his campaign’s newfound momentum. In the days immediately after the July debates, Mr. Yang’s campaign raked in about $1 million — more than a third of what his team had raised during the entirety of the second quarter. About 90 percent of the people who gave were new donors.
The campaign is now on track to raise more than $5.5 million in the third quarter of the year, according to Yang advisers — more than the total amount Mr. Yang had raised during the previous 20 months that he spent as a candidate. While his operation does not rival the size or scale of his more established rivals’ campaigns, his team has ballooned to over 50 staff members from around 10 initially, as new offices have opened in Nashua and Portsmouth, N.H., and Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa. At the New York headquarters, the campaign has leased additional office space and is building an in-house digital team.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
The second debate field is set, Bernie Bernies Bernie, Beto plunders staff from even less successful campaigns, and Andrew Yang plots his conquest of Area 51.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
CBS/YouGov (early states): Biden 25, Warren 20, Harris 16, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 4, Castro 2, Klobuchar 1, Booker 1, Yang 1, Steyer 1, Gabbard 1, Hickenlooper 1, Bullock 1. This is the summary, but dig deeper if you want individual numbers on Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, California, and Texas (a little far out for “early,” but its inclusion explains why O’Rourke gives the illusion of viability here)
Quinnipiac (California): Harris 23, Biden 21, Sanders 18, Warren 16, Buttigieg 3, Yang 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Inslee 1. 519 voters polled. I think this is the first poll where Harris beats Biden in her home state.
Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire): Biden 20.8, Harris 17.5, Warren 16.7, Buttigieg 11.5, Sanders 9.9, Yang 4.9, Klobuchar 2.7, Williamson 1.5, Booker 1.2, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 0.7, Inslee 0.3, O’Rourke 0.0. Sample size of 351.
CNN/University of New Hampshire (New Hampshire): Biden 24, Warren 19, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 10, Harris 9, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1, Delaney 1, Gillibrand 1, Bennet 1. Sample size of 386. One notable detail further in: Under “Candidate With Best Chance to Win General Election,” Biden has increased his lead from 32% in February to 45% now. How’s that “Woke Off” working out for you, Democrats?
Steyer just jumped into the race, and Sestak’s campaign didn’t file his FEC organizing papers until July 1st, so no Q2 numbers for them.
538 has a lot of analysis of the fundraising numbers, but not, alas, handy links straight to the actual Q2 reports for lazy efficient bloggers to use. Yang and Williamson have the highest burn rates in the field.
July 31: Biden, Harris, Booker, Castro, Yang, Inslee, Gabbard, Gillibrand, de Blasio, Bennet. If I were of a conspiratorial mindset, I’d say that CNN, deep in the tank for Harris, wants to give Harris another shot at Biden.
Not making the cut: Moulton, Gravel and Messam (all of who also missed the second debate) and late entries Steyer and Sestak. I’m guessing all those but Steyer will miss the third debate, too… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
The 2020 race is all about touting the democracy of small donors with a 130,000 donor threshold for the third Democrat debate. But certain zip codes keep coming up for the top Democrat candidates. The 100XX zip codes of Manhattan, the 90XXX zip codes of Los Angeles, the 94XXX zip codes of San Francisco, the 98XXX zip codes of Seattle, the 20XXX zip codes of D.C. and the 02XXX zip codes of Boston.
These are the core zip codes of the Democrat donor base. They are the pattern that recur in the campaign contributions lists of the top Democrats. And they explain the politics of the 2020 race.
Providing free health care for illegal aliens at taxpayer expense may not be very popular nationwide, but is commonplace in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston. Gun control is a loser nationwide, but a sure thing in the big blue cities. Even proposals to take away private health plans, allow rapists and terrorists to vote from prison, and open the border pick up more support there.
The 2020 Democrats aren’t speaking to Americans as a whole. Instead they’re addressing wealthy donors from 6 major cities, and some of their satellite areas, whose money they need to be able to buy teams, ads and consultants to help them win in places like New Hampshire and Iowa.
New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles show up in the top 5 donor cities for most of the top 2020 candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg. Boston shows up in the top 10, not only for Bernie and Warren, but for Kamala and Buttigieg. Seattle appears in the top 10 for Bernie, Warren, and Buttigieg. Washington D.C. features in the top 10 for Bernie, Booker, Warren, Kamala, and Buttigieg. And the rest of America doesn’t really matter.
Not if you’re a Democrat.
The democracy of small donors is illusory not only by zip code, but by industry. Google isn’t the largest company in America, but, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, its employees show up on the top company contributor lists for Kamala, Sanders, Buttigieg, and, Warren. Despite Warren’s supposed threat to break up big dot coms and Sanders’ talk of going after big companies, Google employees were the top backers of both candidates.
What do they know that we don’t?
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, does employ a lot people, but its number of employees is a fraction of those employed by Home Depot, Kroger or Wal-Mart. What Google does have is an enormous concentration of wealth and power through its monopolistic control over search advertising. That power also gives its radical employees a disproportionate ability to shape the 2020 Democrat field.
Despite Warren’s supposed threats to break up big tech, their employees are some of her biggest backers. Besides Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yelp employees are some of her major backers.
Again, what do the millionaire employees of big tech know about Warren’s plans that we don’t?
Microsoft employees show up on the donor leaderboards for Bernie, Kamala, Warren, and, Buttigieg. Amazon employees are a major donor group for Bernie and Buttigieg. Pinterest, which recently made headlines for the dot com’s aggressive censorship of pro-life views, appears on Buttigieg’s donor board. Apple employees are some of the major donors to Bernie, Warren, and Kamala.
There’s no question that big tech cash is helping shape the 2020 Democrat field.
Mr. Biden starts from behind organizationally. He entered the race at the end of April and began with a lighter public schedule than many of his opponents, allowing other earlier-launching campaigns to lock down experienced talent and build more visible volunteer operations first.
In Iowa especially, the impatience with his efforts among some activists was palpable this month following Mr. Biden’s shaky debut in the first presidential debate.
Snip.
There is a “persistence picnic” slated for Toledo, Iowa, and a “policy potluck” in Cresco. There is a “pints-and-policy” house party scheduled in Des Moines, an evening of acrylic painting in Sioux City and a trivia night in Burlington.
And that’s just a snapshot of the Warren team’s plans for Iowa on Thursday.
“Her people are everywhere,” said Mr. Marquardt, the Madison County official, relaying a story he heard about a Warren campaign representative seeking to recruit supporters in a yoga class. He described her organizers as trying to embed themselves in communities across Iowa, rather than relying exclusively on traditional tactics like phone banking.
In New Hampshire, said Judy Reardon, a veteran Democratic strategist, “They had a robust field staff early on and the field staff has been able to establish themselves in their areas.”
The Warren campaign declined to divulge the exact number of staff members it has in Iowa and New Hampshire, except to say that there are more than 300 people, with 60 percent of those hires based in the first four states, but as of May she had around 50 staffers on the ground in Iowa.
Snip.
“Cory Booker’s campaign has been amazing in New Hampshire,” said [State Representative Kris] Schultz, who, like many voters in that state, is still considering a long list of candidates. “They have the A-team for sure.’’
The challenge for Mr. Booker: Despite all of the retail politicking efforts — including 35 events in Iowa and more than 40 appearances in New Hampshire, his campaign said on Thursday — he is routinely mired in the polls at this early stage.
Still, his team has been building for months on the ground, hoping to be well positioned to capitalize on any burst of momentum. He has about 30 staff members in New Hampshire, where his campaign has been engaging with voters since April; in Iowa, he has nearly 50 full-time employees along with more than 80 of his family members who live in the Des Moines area.
Snip.
Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Harris were slower to expand their teams in Iowa and New Hampshire than rivals like Ms. Warren and Mr. Booker.
But activists say they are seeing increased activity from both of them.
Ms. Harris is planning a five-day bus tour through Iowa for next month, where she has more than 65 staff members, her campaign said. In New Hampshire, they have 30.
“They’re in the process of building up the ground organization here with all the fund-raising she’s had since the debate,” Ms. Sullivan, the former party chair, said.
In April, Mr. Buttigieg had one employee in New Hampshire, and on May 1, he had four in Iowa. He now has 39 people on staff in New Hampshire. In Iowa, he has more than 50 full-time staff members, as well as 27 paid interns.
Snip.
The Sanders campaign does not take the typical route of prioritizing engagement with local party leaders.
But while other candidates ruffle feathers if they are perceived as ignoring in-state gatekeepers, many activists are now reluctant to question Mr. Sanders’s method after he delivered a stronger-than-expected showing in 2016.
“Four years ago, he didn’t seem to have much on the ground, much going on,” said Jan Bauer, the former Democratic chair of Story County, Iowa, and a longtime party activist. She is supporting Governor Steve Bullock of Montana, but has heard from several other campaigns.
“But come caucus night, everyone discovered there was a lot going on here that was underground.”
Mr. Sanders began his campaign holding big rallies that doubled as opportunities to sign up supporters, and his aides view events as a chance to recruit volunteers and sign them up for the campaign app.
For example, Mr. Sanders did a multi-parade swing through Iowa on the Fourth of July, with his campaign giving out stickers and seeking to engage voters along the way (not everyone was receptive; one father insisted his daughter remove her Sanders sticker).
In New Hampshire, which Mr. Sanders won by around 22 percentage points in 2016, he has a core of die-hard supporters that helps ensure an on-the-ground presence, despite slipping in the polls recently.
“Bernie obviously has the lion’s share of his activists and volunteers with him from just four years ago,” said New Hampshire’s Democratic Party Chairman, Raymond Buckley. “It makes it pretty easy to build a solid foundation from.”
His campaign did not respond to requests for information on how many employees it has in the early states, but it announced earlier this month that it had 45 staff members in New Hampshire.
CBS has a mock early delegate tracker based on polls in early states (again including Texas): Projected delegates are Biden 581, Warren 430, Sanders 249, Harris 173, O’Rourke 48 (all from Texas), and Klobuchar 13 (all from Minnesota).
I’m far from convinced that those are the five most likely to win, or that only five have a reasonable chance. I’m not sure that “usually” applies to this cycle, mainly because of the mix of candidates. Each of the leaders has significant vulnerabilities – and some of the contenders who haven’t fired in the polls yet have assets that could yet matter.
Biden? I still think he’s a weaker version of Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale won the nomination, of course, but it wasn’t easy. If Biden is somewhat weaker, he might not be able to withstand a serious rally from another candidate.
Warren? For a candidate who has been doing well lately, the lack of endorsements both in Massachusetts and elsewhere – she hasn’t added a significant new one since May 12 – may suggest a real problem. Yes, President Donald Trump won despite outright opposition from most party actors, but support from the party has been important for a long time and it may still prove critical.
Harris? She’s a solid possibility. But her post-debate bounce flattened out, leaving her fourth in the national polls. She’s also right on the edge of holding conventional qualifications for the job. Sure, Barack Obama won after four years in the Senate and Harris has more impressive pre-Senate experience, but not everyone turns out to be Barack Obama.
Sanders? He’s still a factional candidate, and factional candidates rarely win nominations. It’s been true from early in the cycle that his polling numbers, adjusted for high name recognition, aren’t very impressive, and he’s lagging in endorsements.
And then there’s Mayor Pete, who doesn’t have conventional qualifications and, despite a very impressive fundraising quarter, hasn’t really broken out in the polls or picked up impressive endorsements.
99% of endorsements are meaningless, but the rest of the piece isn’t necessarily wrong.
“Governors tank in election about Trump.” “Bullock, the Montana governor, got shut out of the first debate. Inslee, the Washington governor, hasn’t cracked 2 percent in a national poll. Colorado’s Hickenlooper has hit even harder times — his senior staffers urged him to drop out of the race last month.” Politco suggests that this is because Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room and the congresscritters running get more media exposure by attacking Trump. I think Trump has less to do with it than the fact that all features variously high quantities of suckitude. If attacking Trump were the golden ticket, Swalwell would be at the top of the polls rather than dropped out…
Most likeable of the Democratic candidates? Would you believe Sanders? No, but that’s what Democrats told Gallup, at 72%. Biden came in second at 69%. As usual, de Blasio had the highest unfavorability rating, at 30%.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s at that NAACP meeting this week, along several declared presidential candidates, Rashida Tlaib, Nancy Pelosi, and Shaun “Talcum X” King.
Think about all of the factors that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. She was a figure who had been around a long time, among the best-known names in the party establishment. As a senator, she worked closely with her home state’s financial industry, leaving some liberal grassroots concluding she was a corporatist who was far too comfortable with big business. Critics asked how someone who had spent the past few decades in the public sector could so quickly become a multimillionaire, and contended that her family foundation had engaged in shady deals with foreign governments and foreign businesses. Some people couldn’t believe she wanted to charge University of Missouri at Kansas City a whopping $275,000 to give a speech at a luncheon.
More progressive figures challenged her in the primary, and activists on the Left hit her hard for her punitive stances on crime in the 1990s, including describing young gang members as “super-predators.” She attempted to shore up her support among African Americans by emphasizing her close work with Barack Obama.
“Joe Biden says ‘radicalization’ of young Democrats a myth: ‘This is not a generation of socialists.” I think he’s right in general. As for those voting in the 2020 Democratic primary, it’s a more open question. “How Joe Biden won friends in Hollywood by helping studios get their movies into China.” Nothing says “salt of the earth” quite like palling around with Communist Chinese bigwigs to increase the profits of Hollywood studio heads. “2020 Democrats Are Starting to Turn Obama’s Legacy Against Biden.”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s at the San Diego Comic Con for some damn reason. Booker said he’d meet with Louis Farrakhan, then said he wouldn’t and he was “misquoted.” He visited New Hampshire. “Noticeably absent from his campaign has been a breakout moment. The 50-year-old former Rhodes Scholar is among the score of presidential contenders polling in low-single digits both nationally and in New Hampshire.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He called for Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello to resign, though the reason cited was ‘massive protests” rather than “massive fraud.” The Hill contends that Castro is “carving a niche” for himself with a focus on immigration. Whistling past the graveyard. “In Iowa, Castro won 1 percent in a recent poll from USA Today and Suffolk University, behind nine other candidates, including former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.).” Gets a similar Washington Post puff piece from David Weigel.
The surge, if that’s the word for it, has not put Castro anywhere near the front of the pack. Polling, which can be a lagging indicator of candidate strength, has not shown much growth. A Quinnipiac poll of California, conducted after the debates, found Castro winning just 2 percent of Latino voters. He substantially lags the poll leaders in fundraising and has 12 staff members working in Iowa, where other campaigns have dozens of people on the ground. Escaping the back of the Democratic pack is one thing; how does an escapee, like Castro, elbow into the first tier? No candidate who has polled in the single digits six months before the first caucuses has gone on to be the nominee.
In Iowa, any answer starts with voters who aren’t comfortable with former vice president Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — for age reasons, mostly — and want a candidate who’d offer a night-and-day contrast with Trump. The people who showed up for Castro’s eastern Iowa swing often said they wanted a “fresh” candidate, that they had not heard much about Castro until the debates, and that they felt good hearing a candidate talk about taking in more refugees and immigrants. On Sunday night, after Castro spent an hour at a forum organized by the pro-immigration group Iowa WINS, some voters reminisced about how their state, under a Republican governor, took in thousands of refugees from the Vietnam War.
Snip.
Castro’s campaign has not, so far, stirred Latino organizations or endorsers, who want Trump gone but worry about allowing the president to run a nativist campaign on immigration. Cecilia Muñoz, who led President Barack Obama’s domestic policy council while Castro led the Department of Housing and Urban Development, told The Washington Post last week that Castro’s proposal to lower the criminal penalty for illegal border-crossing largely helps Trump.
It’s an awful lot of hemming and hawing. Castro’s entire post-debate bump was going from 1% to maybe 2% on a good day.
You stayed away for last week’s blackout to remain in Iowa for your ridiculous presidential campaign. You didn’t show up for the Puerto Rican Day Parade or veterans’ D-Day ceremonies. In May, you blew off a memorial event for victims of toxic exposure to Ground Zero — and blamed your staff. You skipped a murdered cop’s vigil in 2017 so as not to interrupt your junket to Germany.
You should learn from your City Hall predecessors. Some were great mayors, others lame. But they all knew the right public gestures to make when the chips were down, even though they might have needed to take a deep breath first.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gabbard too called for Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello to resign and joined protests there. She raised negative $20 for her House campaign. “The absence of any fundraising or spending on her House race has left political observers with the impression that Gabbard may not return to Congress at all if her White House bid falls short.”
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. AP story on Gillibrand and her fellow 1%ers (Booker, O’Rourke, Inslee, Ryan) working to revive their moribund campaigns. I’m beginning to think it’s less a campaign at this point than an excuse to indulge in alcohol abuse…
One problem with an approach like Harris’s of building a consensus path to victory is that the candidate isn’t necessarily the first choice of any one group of voters. And this can be a problem in states in which the demographics are idiosyncratic, as they are in all four early-voting states.
The electorates in Iowa and New Hampshire, for example, are probably a bit more liberal than Harris would like, helping candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren instead. And while South Carolina’s large black population could help Harris, it still looks like Joe Biden’s state to lose, provided he does well enough among African Americans while cleaning up among relatively conservative white Democrats who are also plentiful in the electorate there. Nevada? Well, I don’t know, Nevada is weird. (I love you, Nevada.) You probably want a candidate who does well among Hispanics, who has a good organization and who has the backing of organized labor. That could be Harris, but unions are mostly taking their time to make any endorsements.
It’s true that finishing first doesn’t actually matter in terms of the Democrats’ delegate math. Unlike in the Republican primary, there are no winner-take-all states; instead, delegates are divided proportionately among candidates who receive at least 15 percent of the vote in a given state or congressional district. And Harris was at 15 percent or higher in several of the early-state polls I mentioned above, even though she didn’t lead in any of them.
Winning can matter, though, in terms of momentum, which mostly takes the form of favorable media coverage. Although the post-Iowa bounce has faded in recent years — just ask Ted Cruz how much good winning Iowa did him in New Hampshire — a candidate who came from behind to win an early state or who is otherwise seen as expectations-defying could still get a pretty big boost. And if voters are still choosing among several candidates — say, Harris and Warren — they might jump on the bandwagon of whoever has performed well in these early states. No candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992 has won a nomination while losing both Iowa and New Hampshire.
Just two weeks after a major staff exodus from John Hickenlooper’s campaign — six key aides abruptly headed for the door on the heels of a debate performance where the former Colorado governor failed to dazzle — the former governor, despite fundraising and donor-number issues, is plowing straight ahead.
Among those who left — his campaign manager, communications director, digital director, New Hampshire political director, national finance director and his deputy finance director — sources told ABC News aides sat Hickenlooper down after the Democratic National Committee announced requirements for the September debate to discuss with him other options.
But, sources told ABC News, Hickenlooper was undeterred, adding staffers who’d stay the course.
Man, how about that Democratic staffer loyalty? Of course, they’re not wrong…
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ha: “‘The View’ co-host awkwardly confuses John Hickenlooper with Jay Inslee during interview.” Honestly, I’m not entirely unsympathetic, but fake Republican Ana Navarro just isn’t too bright.
Moulton is polling at the back of the pack seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and he didn’t make it on the stage for the first primary debate last month. But from his perspective, his party is overestimating its chances at beating Trump in 2020, Moulton said Thursday in a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO reporters and editors.
The Democratic front-runners are too focused on convincing Americans of Trump’s failings, Moulton said, and are not presenting a vision of the country that can win over people who supported the president in 2016.
“I think a lot of Democrats think, ‘You know, these Trump voters, what we need to do is we just need to educate them, and we’re going to get it through their heads that this guy is a bad guy,’” Moulton said. “OK, Trump voters are not idiots. We don’t need to give America a moral education; they know that he’s an asshole. They get it. They’ve just baked that in.”
“When we’re trying to win over Trump voters in the general election, we can’t go on this moral crusade because people are like, ‘Give me a break,’” he said. “What they’re really saying is, ‘I get it, I get this guy is immoral. I’m voting for him anyway because you don’t give me a better alternative.’”
There’s a real arrogance among a lot of Democrats in thinking that all these people are stupid policy-wise and stupid moral-wise,” he said in an interview conducted as part of a recurring POLITICO series with 2020 candidates.
The three-term Massachusetts congressman argued that he had a vision to take on Trump “in a way that doesn’t alienate his voters.” Moulton — who perhaps is best-known for helping lead a failed rebellion against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last year — was deeply critical of the leftward drift of the party on everything from health care to immigration.
“We have to have a pro-jobs, pro-growth kind of agenda, and not just a redistributive agenda,” he said.
Substitute “flawed” for “immoral” and there’s very little about his analysis to disagree with.
O’Rourke is probably competing for young voters more than for older ones, for white voters more than nonwhite ones, and for moderate voters more than for very liberal ones. (His voting record in Congress was fairly moderate, although the policy positions he’s staking out now are more of a mixed bag.) There are plenty of young voters, white voters and moderate voters in the Democratic electorate. But there aren’t that many who are young and white and moderate.
According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 63 percent of voters in the 2016 Democratic primaries were white, 51 percent identified themselves as moderate or conservative, and 56 percent were born in 1965 or afterward, per the Pew Research Center. Multiply those numbers together, and you’d expect:
63% * 51% * 56% = ~18%
…about 18 percent of Democrats to be all three things at once. That’s enough to form a real base when you’re competing for a party nomination, especially when Democratic rules require you to win at least 15 percent of voters in a state or congressional district to secure convention delegates.
But when you actually look at individual-level voter data, you find something different: Only 12 percent of Democratic primary voters are young and white and moderate. That’s far fewer voters to go around, especially when you’re also competing with, say, Pete Buttigieg for the same voters.
I bet O’Rourke thinks of Hispanics as part of his base, but so far there’s precious little evidence the feelings are mutual. He didn’t let a weak fundraising quarter keep him from hiring more senior staffers:
Nick Rathod, a Democratic operative who served as President Barack Obama’s liaison to state officials, has been hired as a senior national political adviser, a campaign spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO on Friday.
Adnan Mohamed, who was deputy national political director for Rep. Seth Moulton’s presidential campaign, has been named national political director. Anna Korman, who worked with O’Rourke’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, at Precision Strategies, will be O’Rourke’s national data director. And Morgan Hill, who was research director on Richard Cordray’s gubernatorial campaign in Ohio last year, will be national research director.
Lauren Hitt, who previously was communications director for former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s presidential campaign, has been hired as O’Rourke’s national director of rapid response.
Hitt’s departure from Hickenlooper’s campaign follows the earlier defection of Hickenlooper’s former national finance director, Dan Sorenson, who also went to O’Rourke’s campaign.
I can understand wanting to leave Hickenlooper’s campaign; jumping to O’Rourke’s doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. By the same token, the Hickenlooper campaign showed no sign of being such a well-oiled machine it deserved poaching. (Also, it’s amusing to go back through Hitt and Sorenson‘s Twitter timelines to see when they went from forwarding Hickenlooper posts to forwarding O’Rourke posts.) Finally, it seems like I’ve done more of this “senior staff hires” pieces on O’Rourke than any of the other candidates, and I wonder if his staff is top-heavy. Team O’Rourke says they have a plan for a comeback:
O’Rourke is still drawing relatively large crowds in Iowa — some 125 at Sioux City and another 100-plus in Sioux Center this weekend — and his campaign just opened 11 new field offices in the state, where he’s well on his way to visiting all 99 counties.
“Obviously we are going to need more resources for the national effort, but Iowa is a top priority for this campaign,” Norm Sterzenbach, the O’Rourke campaign Iowa director, said.
The campaign also hopes to make a major play for delegate-rich Texas, which votes early in the primary process next year. The state hasn’t been polled in over a month, but O’Rourke was in second place behind former Vice President Joe Biden in early June.
Eh. Minus Texas, “all in on Iowa” is every other longshot’s “plan,” and for most it’s like a losing-streak horse bettor counting on the last race’s trifecta to pull him out of a hole before the loan shark breaks his kneecaps.
Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan wants to be the presidential candidate who can appeal to “yoga moms” and blue-collar workers — and judging by his second-quarter fund-raising, he has a smattering of support from both.
Mr. Ryan’s $890,000 haul positions him second-to-last among the 20 candidates who qualified for the first round of Democratic debates, leaving him little in the way of resources to sustain him in the race against a top tier of candidates who each raised over $10 million in the last three months.
Mr. Ryan raised more than former Maryland Rep. John Delaney ($300,000) but less than New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ($1.1 million). He also raised less than spiritual author Marianne Williamson ($1.5 million), perhaps his closest competitor in the wellness space.
Still, those who did contribute to the northeast Ohioan’s presidential campaign demonstrate the cross section of supporters making up his base.
Among his most notable donors is New Age guru Deepak Chopra, who gave Mr. Ryan’s campaign $1,000. Mr. Chopra is listed on Mr. Ryan’s campaign finance report as an author at the Chopra Center in California, which didn’t respond to a request for comment. Another person associated with Mr. Chopra’s wellness empire gave $800.
If you’re competing with Marianne Williamson for the Deepak Chopra vote, you’ve already lost.
The Vermont socialist senator made history by agreeing that his paid 2020 presidential campaign workers would be repped by a union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, with all earning $15 an hour. But now the union complains some employees are getting less.
Worse, someone leaked the whole dispute to the Washington Post.
Worse yet, Sanders’ response could be a violation of US labor law, all on its own.
The union’s gripe centers on the fact that field organizers, the lowest-level workers, often put in 60 hours a week but get paid only for 40, since they’re on a flat salary. That drops their average minimum pay to less than $13 an hour.
“Many field staffers are barely managing to survive financially, which is severely impacting our team’s productivity and morale,” the union said in a draft letter to campaign manager Faiz Shakir. “Some field organizers have already left the campaign as a result.”
Ouch. So Sanders is down to march with McDonald’s employees demanding higher pay, and happy to slam Walmart execs for paying “starvation wages” — but the folks working for him are feeling “berned.”
In 2016, no state was better for Sanders than New Hampshire. The independent senator won the first-in-the-nation primary with 60 percent of the vote. The 22-point win over Hillary Clinton — who had a decades-long relationship with New Hampshire — was the biggest victory margin in that state for a competitive Democratic primary in over a half century.
In the years since, Sanders returned to the state often. He maintained a strong volunteer team and a local steering committee that met regularly. His son even ran for Congress in the state last year.
But now, with a little more than six months to go until the 2020 New Hampshire primary, Sanders can no longer take the state for granted. He has gone from being the unquestioned front-runner to second place — and sliding.
Snip.
“His campaign supporters felt they had New Hampshire in the bag and they could run this national campaign and dare others to catch up, but here they are in the summer and they are suddenly tumbling in what should be their best early state,” said Wayne Lesperance, a political science professor at New England College in Henniker, N.H. “And if he doesn’t win here, where can he actually go after that?”
“MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah said that 2020 presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders ‘makes my skin crawl‘ and that he’s not a “pro-woman candidate” on the network Sunday morning.” Caveat: She’s in the tank for Warren.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview in Merion West, which describes itself as “a journal of the hard center.” Asked to name the greatest threat to American national security, he said:
China. For four reasons. The first is because of climate change. If we shut down all Western oil companies today, that’s only ten percent of all natural gas and oil that’s being produced for fossil fuel in the entire world. So much of is by China and Russia, and China, in particular, has 1,600 coal burning facilities it is building globally in the next decade. Number one, it’s because of climate change—that is the biggest. And I tell people, by the way, just a side note—I have said climate change is a great and catastrophic threat, but we can only be 15% in reduction in greenhouse emissions, even if we zero us out. The 85% is over there, and China is the biggest polluter of them all.
And the second greatest threat is China; the second reason is through its Belt and Road initiative. Or predatory loans—it is actually enslaving nations through these loans. Djibouti had to give China a port for its Navy. Right there, a first base in Africa [for China]. Greece had to give up its political voice and block the European Union’s unanimity needed to stop a condemnation of the terrible human rights record for the Muslim Uighur citizens of China. And so Xi is a new illiberal world order where might makes right, and the Prime Minister of Malaysia said it’s a new colonial power. And in this Belt and Road initiative, it is exporting its old coal mines and factories and building them there with Chinese labor. It is a very illiberal and unjust world order. That’s why, John, our retreat from the world today, from home, thinking somehow we can become great again behind walls so dangerous to the American dream—we are hurting what we could be in the world.
The third reason is our national corporations have exported, outsourced not just jobs, but our national security to China. By having their technical supply chains, the high tech products being in China—75% of all mobile phones are constructed there, and 90% of all computers are there—you might’ve seen that the Mac Pro of Apple was just shut down a few weeks ago, and it’s being outsourced over there. What happens, as you may know, if you have an Android phone, everything you say, all the data on it is surreptitiously sent back to China. Because it’s with Chinese software. Motherboards that go into servers for Apple and Amazon, the Navy cruisers and CIA drones, were embedded with microchips being sent here. So we have our national corporations outsourcing to China. So that’s the third reason—we have a national security threat, through their ability to begin to identify, follow, and know everything for commercial and intelligence purposes.
But the greatest, the number four threat, within the cyberspace world is the 5G network. Because of the Belt and Road initiative, we must find out about the digital Silk Road. And each of these countries are now enslaved, so to speak, by the Belt and Road initiative to also have this 5G network that China is leading the world on. With Huawei and other companies. Whoever builds it, owns it—it will revolutionize economies and warfare. Because no longer do you need to hack—what China does now, with $300 billion per year—everything that will go through, a piece of equipment that they build, and we don’t build it—after we sold Lucent, only three companies in the world build it. They have eyes on everything. So if you put a virtual business meeting on there, with trade secrets, they’ll just listen in. They don’t have to hack, it just goes right through this piece of gear. Number two is they’re able to, without having to hack, through the same pipeline take down critical infrastructure during high speed tensions. So that is why, we must understand that China, it is now one world. We’re damaged by climate change, and it will come no matter what we do by ourselves here. Number two, changes to our way of life by China will happen no matter what we do alone. And third, damage to us by corporations outsourcing our national security to China will happen no matter what we do by ourselves. So we must convene the world once again. Go back to those institutions, like the World Trade Organization, the detective organizations that set the rules for technology. And convene the world to make sure that together, we ensure, like we did in the Cold War, like in making sure that extreme poverty—went from in 1945 with 80% of the world’s population to 8% today—we can confront and mitigate and eventually end the damage to us from what they’re doing. By forcing them, by everyone being united to follow the rules of the road. Of justice.
If Mr. Trump ran as the billionaire of the people, appealing to working-class Republicans and swing voters, Mr. Steyer is a very California billionaire: a denim shirt, a tan, and a hip activist wife.
And since he announced his run, his wealth has been the story, as he jockeys to be seen as a radical for change.
“Should we put a limit on what Beyoncé makes?” he asked a reporter for the Guardian.
Billionaire doesn’t appear to be a great brand among a Democratic base calling for single-payer health care. Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg decided not to run when he figured that out, and the campaign for Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, fizzled.
Onstage, Mr. Steyer, a soft-spoken man with sandy blond hair, fielded questions.
“Why? Why have you decided to run for president, Tom,” the moderator and venue owner Manny Yekutiel, 29, asked, kicking the evening off.
Mr. Steyer said he believes he is the only person willing to fight Mr. Trump.
“I am more than willing to take this fight on if no one else will,” Mr. Steyer said. “And I don’t see anyone else who sees it’s a very simple fight. It’s hard. But it’s not complicated.”
Oh yes, there’s a rare commodity among Democrats: being “willing to fight Trump.” It’s a like a NASCAR competitor saying he’s the only one that wants to drive really fast. “Tom Steyer is the poster child for liberal hypocrisy.”
Steyer’s alleged goal is to be the “outsider” in the race, ready to “break the corrupt stranglehold that corporations have on our government” and “return power to the American people.” The enemy, Steyer claims, is “corrupt corporate power,” with a bit of climate change sprinkled in. The liberal mega-donor has long fancied himself as an environmental activist, donating more than $100 million to Democratic candidates who agree with him on the issue.
Yet, even a cursory glance at Steyer’s background exposes a Democrat more corporate than community organizer. In 1986, Steyer founded Farallon Capital Management, which has grown into one of America’s largest hedge funds. As of last year, Farallon managed over $25 billion worth of assets: roughly the equivalent of Iceland’s entire economic output. Steyer’s net worth is pegged at $1.6 billion.
I guess “corporate power” is only corrupting when it’s the other guy.
Dig deeper, and the stench of hypocrisy only grows. Beginning in the 1980s, Steyer made his name (and much of his money) investing in coal, natural gas, and oil.
As they rise to the top of 2020 Democratic presidential field, Harris and Warren are increasingly in direct competition for many of the same voters and donors, according to polls and fundraising data, with each drawing support from the party’s more affluent, college-educated wing — particularly women.
The overlap between their supporters might be a surprise, especially for Warren, who is usually portrayed as being in direct competition with fellow liberal stalwart Bernie Sanders. But Warren’s strongest support so far has come from the same group of voters that is critical to Harris’ path to the nomination.
“A lot of people handicapped the race with Warren competing for voters in the Bernie wing of the party,” said Brian Fallon, a Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton campaign aide. “And it turns out that a lot of Clinton voters like Warren too, and she’s competing for voters in both lanes.
“And that lane definitely puts her in competition with Harris for some of those center-left college-educated women,” Fallon added. “Both of them have higher ceilings than others with those voters.”
Recent polls have underscored just how much support Warren and Harris each receive from white, college-educated voters — and how much room to grow they still have with this group.
In polling results shared with McClatchy, Quinnipiac University found that 24 percent of white, college-educated voters backed Warren earlier this month, compared to 21 percent for Harris.
Joe Biden placed third among those voters at 18 percent, despite having the top overall standing in the poll.
Like the Democratic Party in general, Harris and Warren are fighting over a small piece of the pie that they think is the whole pie. She gets a fawning Atlantic profile:
The crowds tell at least part of the story. Despite leading almost every poll, Biden has struggled with turnout: At one stop I was at last month, in Ottumwa, Iowa, the campaign had reserved a 664-seat theater and was excited when about 250 people showed up. Meanwhile, Warren drew more than 850 people on a recent Monday afternoon in Peterborough, New Hampshire, which was prime Bernie Sanders territory in 2016. Three days later, 1,500 people packed a Milwaukee high-school gym late into a Thursday night to see Warren, cheering and laughing along with her through a town hall. She walked out to “9 to 5.” She stood in front of an oversize American flag. She finished to “Respect.”
Nowhere does it say how a woman without Obama’s charisma can forge a movement the way Obama did. Warren goes after private equity. “Her new scheme is a far-reaching broadside against an entire industry that invests half a trillion dollars each year in American businesses.” Because how dare rich people build new businesses and hire people instead of building a bigger yacht? She says the economy is doomed, doomed unless congress adopts her laundry list of policy proposals. “Most of Warren’s proposals to head off the crisis are policies she has called for recently on the campaign trail such as forgiving over $600 billion in student loan debt, enacting her “Green Manufacturing Plan”, strengthening unions, providing universal child care and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.” Translation: You’re going to lose this race unless you strap this boat anchor to your car. Peter Thiel says that Warren is the only Democrat talking economics rather than identity politics.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Williamson asked white people to offer ‘prayer of apology.'” How about “No”? Does “No” work for you? Gets an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Finally, a meeting of the minds! It talks about her being roommates with Laura Dern.
A year and a half later, Yang, 44, is still introducing himself. But many of the people who have heard of him, who took in his interview with Fear Factor-host-turned-podcasting-king Joe Rogan or browsed his website’s absurdly long and eclectic list of policy positions, have come away intrigued and, in some cases, enamored. Over a span of months, Yang has ascended from sideshow to a Top 10 candidate in several recent polls. Morning Consult’s latest survey of Democratic primary voters ranked him seventh, tied with Senator Cory Booker; the candidates who trail Yang in that poll have more than 150 years of combined experience in elected office. Yang qualified for the first two Democratic National Committee debates in June and July well before the deadline; he has more Twitter followers than half of the Democratic field; and despite a disappointing performance at the Miami debate (he spoke the least of all 20 candidates), he’s blown past the threshold of 130,000 unique donors for the third and fourth debates this fall.
Yang’s pitch goes like this: Donald Trump got elected because we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, leading to economic insecurity, a declining quality of life, and a sense of desperation felt by millions of Americans who gave voice to that desperation by voting for the political equivalent of a human wrecking ball. And what automation did to manufacturing, he argues, it will soon do to trucking, call centers, fast food, and retail. “We’re in the third inning of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country,” he likes to say.
Yang’s flagship plan to deal with this transformation, his Big Idea, is a universal basic income. He calls it the Freedom Dividend. (He picked the name because it tested better with conservatives than UBI did.) It’s $1,000 a month, no strings attached, for every American over the age of 18. What this new, multitrillion-dollar program would mean for the existing social safety net — well, Yang hasn’t entirely worked that out yet. But he’s quick to note that the concept of a guaranteed income has been around for centuries, with many famous proponents. (Thomas Paine! MLK! Richard Nixon!) And the appeal of a simple, catchy solution to problems as complex as the rise of robots and AI is obvious. “If you’ve heard anything about me, you’ve heard this: There’s an Asian man running for president that wants to give everyone a thousand dollars a month!” he says at the fish fry. “All three of those things are dead true, South Carolina!”
I recently embedded for three weeks with Yang’s freewheeling campaign, traveling with him in New Hampshire, Washington, D.C., and South Carolina. He invited me to ride around with him and his lean (but growing) team, sit in on private meetings, and hang out with him in the green room at the Late Show With Stephen Colbert. (Reader, the snack spread was incredible.) I sought out Yang for the same reason so many others have, namely, to answer the question: Who is this guy?
But my curiosity was threaded with a sense of guilt: The last time a fringe candidate came along and started to gain traction, I dismissed him as a fluke and a fraud. That candidate was Donald Trump. This time, I figured I might learn something if I looked to the margins. Is Andrew Yang right about the robot apocalypse? Is he a teller of big truths that other candidates won’t touch or just the latest in a long line of TED-talking, techno-futurists scaring people about the End of Work? What does his popularity, however fleeting, tell us about American voters?
Joe Rogan stuff and some stupid “alt-right” accusation slinging snipped.
THE OBVIOUS NEXT question was whether Yang could translate his online support, all those “Yangstas,” as they call themselves, into something tangible. If he held rallies, would anyone come? If he asked for volunteers, would anyone sign up?
A series of big-city speeches in April and May, dubbed the Humanity First tour, settled those questions. Two thousand people showed up to see him at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, followed by 3,000 in Los Angeles, and 4,000 in Seattle. For the tour’s final stop, 2,500 people turned out in the pouring rain at New York City’s Washington Square Park. These crowd sizes exceeded those of some of the senators and governors in the race. The mainstream media tuned in as well: Yang got requests to appear on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN.
I saw Yang for the first time in June on a swing through New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation primary. It was the middle of the afternoon on a rainy Thursday, but 60 or 70 people filled Crackskull’s cafe in the town of Newmarket to hear Yang speak. I overheard a barista say that former Obama cabinet secretary Julián Castro drew half as many people a few weeks earlier.
On the stump, Yang oozes a kind of anti-charisma. Dressed in dark pants, a light-blue oxford shirt, no tie, and a navy blazer — call it venture-capital casual — he doesn’t try to charm or inspire or flatter. He peppers his speeches with bleak statistics and dire warnings. Like Trump, he talks about how Middle America is “disintegrating.” He refers to “my friends in Silicon Valley” a lot and to the technologies they’re devising that will put regular people out of work.
Tech visionaries who stoke fears about the robot apocalypse are nothing new. But in the context of a presidential race, Yang is the only one making this argument, and he’s found an audience for it, judging by the crowds that followed him across New Hampshire. High school kids wore blue MATH hats — short for Make America Think Harder, another one of Yang’s Trump-trolling slogans. At Crackskull’s, Yang’s supporters had memorized Yang’s lines and knew what to say in the call-and-response sections of his stump speech.
Snip. Still super vague on what happens to existing welfare programs after his guaranteed income scheme kicks in:
Yang’s book The War on Normal People — copies of which were given out for free at nearly every campaign event I attended — lays out his views in greater detail but raises as many questions as it answers. He writes that the Freedom Dividend “would replace the vast majority of existing welfare programs.” When I ask him about this, he denies that the Freedom Dividend is a Trojan horse for shredding the social safety net. But he acknowledges that programs like food stamps, temporary assistance for needy families, and housing subsidies could shrink if recipients took the $1,000-a-month instead. “There’s no reason to think that you would end up eliminating them entirely,” he tells me. “It is the case that if enrollment were to go down by 30 percent, then over time the bureaucracy hopefully would adjust accordingly.”
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Biden still leads, Steyer is In, Warren, Sanders and Harris are all bunched up for second, Castro wants nothing to do with your germ-bearing meatbag spawn, and Williamson channels Neon Genesis Evangelion and raises Gravel’s campaign from the dead.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Remember how Biden was doomed after a few bad polls? Yeah, no so much.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 35, Sanders 14. Harris 12, Warren 5, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Delany 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1.
NBC News/Wall Street Journal: Biden 26, Warren 19, Harris 13, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 7, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2. “Biden performs best among African Americans, older Democrats and those who are moderate or conservative in their political views, while Warren runs strongest with self-described liberals and those ages 18 to 49.”
Morning Consult (national): Biden 31, Sanders 18, Harris 14, Warren 13, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2. “The following candidates received 1% or less of the vote: Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Bennet, John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
Morning Consult (early states): Biden 31, Sanders 20, Harris 14, Warren 11, Buttigieg 5, Booker 5, O’Rourke 3. “The following candidates received 2% or less of the vote share: Amy Klobuchar, Tim Ryan, Andrew Yang, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Steve Bullock, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Julian Castro, Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton, and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
“Easily?” I asked, making sure I heard them correctly. Yes, they insisted, with her nodding as he said Democrats had gone bonkers and voters would respond by giving Trump four more years.
The recent Manhattan conversation would be insignificant except that it dovetails with national trends, namely a growing belief that Dems are not coming back to this world anytime soon. The election is still a long way off, but there is no sign that the radicalism surging through the party can be put back in the bottle before the election. What we see now is likely what voters will see in 2020.
One of many defining moments among the presidential contenders and pretenders came with their unanimous support for giving illegal immigrants free health care. They raised their hands to signal yes, as if the question was a no-brainer.
Implicit in their so-called compassion is an invitation for millions and millions more to cross the border and get free care. Free, of course, except to American taxpayers.
To qualify, candidates must have at least 2 percent support in four qualifying national or early-state polls released after the first debate on June 26-27 through two weeks before the third debate on Sept. 12-13 and 130,000 unique donors (including at least 400 individual donors in at least 20 states).1 And while those thresholds might not sound that difficult to meet, it’s definitely raising the ante from the first two debates, in which candidates needed to hit only 1 percent support in three qualifying polls or 65,000 unique donors (including at least 200 individual donors in at least 20 states).
Right now only Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren have met the criteria.
“The party, in my opinion, has moved for me, personally, too far to the left, and for that reason I don’t have a candidate in the party at this time,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, if a Democrat is going to beat Trump that person, he or she, is going to have to move to the center and you can’t wait too long to do that because the message of some of the programs that the Democrats are pushing are not resonating with the majority of the American people.”
“It’s really working for the party for the primaries, but if you’re going to win a general election against President Trump, who has a lockdown at his base and everybody’s going to contest for the middle and the independents, you can’t be too far left in that process,” he added.
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren stole the show at Netroots Nation’s presidential forum, if only for the fact that she was the lone top-tier presidential candidate who showed up.” Gillibrand, Inslee and Castro also showed up. That so many other candidates felt safe in skipping it (including Booker, who attended last year) is a sign of the conference’s continuing decline in importance.
There was a LULAC convention in Milwaukee. Sanders, Warren, Castro, O’Rourke all put in appearances, as did Jill Biden. Also see the bit on the Bennet/de Blasio being there below.
The NAACP’s 110th convention starts next Wednesday in Detroit, and declared candidates speaking there will be Biden, Booker, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, and Warren…plus Stacey Abrams. Klobuchar being there but not Buttigieg is…interesting.
I suppose I have a duty to link this 538 piece the topic of women running for president, but it starts with a lot of lefty culture war assumptions before inconclusive data scrying.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Local columnist from Rome, Georgia wants her to get in.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. George Will (I know) makes the case for Bennet, such as it is, which amounts to “he’s not as crazy as the rest.” Bennet said Democrats could lose Colorado if Sanders is the nominee. Since Clinton only beat Trump by 71,000 votes out of over 2 million cast in Colorado in 2016, any Democrat could conceivably lose Colorado. He got into an immigration pander-off with di Blasio at a LULAC convention in Milwaukee.
Joe Biden unveiled a proposal Monday to expand the Affordable Care Act with an optional public health insurance program, escalating a fierce debate with his Democratic rivals who favor a more sweeping Medicare-for-all system.
Biden’s plan, which campaign officials estimate would cost $750 billion over 10 years, would also expand tax credits to pay for health premiums, and it would create a new coverage option to help people living in states that have resisted the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.
Funny how a plan that socializes American medicine than the plan Obama and Pelosi just barely managed to get passed when they controlled all three branches of government is now too timid for the party’s true believers. Just one day before his candidacy, Biden had his records archive at the University of Delaware sealed. How convenient. Speaking of murky university doings, just exactly what is it that the University of Pennsylvania got for the more than $900,000 paid Joe Biden? “The former vice president collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) This is interesting: “Presidential candidate Joe Biden refused to apologize for the nearly three million deportations carried out during his tenure as vice president in the Obama administration, after being confronted by protesters while campaigning in Dover, New Hampshire Friday.” Also this: “‘I will not halt deportations and detentions.’ Protestors continued to chant and demanded an apology but Biden remained intransigent.” Holy crap! Biden might win the nomination by simply not pandering to the Open Borders crowd. “The only thing making Biden look ‘electable’ is his rivals’ extremism.” Yeah, but that ain’t exactly nuthin’, hoss. Late breaking news: “Biden cancer nonprofit suspends operations indefinitely…Biden and his wife left the group’s board in April as an ethics precaution before he joined the presidential campaign. But the nonprofit had trouble maintaining momentum without their involvement.”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Booker is unveiling new legislation that would give more federal prisoners the chance at early release, building on perviously [sic] passed criminal justice reform that some supporters say didn’t go far enough.” Typos in the very first sentence aside (“layers and layers of fact checkers”), it’s not necessarily a bad idea, but I suspect the number of prisoners it would actually affect are small. He brags about changing Newark’s image of “crime and corruption” as mayor. Don’t know about corruption, but the figures hardly show an unambiguous decline in crime between 2006 and 2013 (all numbers per 100,000). Murders: 105 in 2006, 112 in 2013. Rapes: 87 in 2006, 45 in 2013 (the biggest decline I can spot except for arson, though they’re way up to 116 in 2017); Robberies 1,288 in 2006, 2,433 in 2013, etc. Arson went from 166 in 2006 to 34 in 2013, so maybe there was a significant dent there. Or maybe the economy improved just enough that people weren’t torching their own places for the insurance money anymore. In fact, crime seems to have dropped more after he left.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Pete Buttigieg goes on hiring spree after top fundraising quarter. Buttigieg’s once tiny campaign now has more than 250 people on staff, an aide said Friday, making the South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s campaign more representative of a top fundraising candidate.” The New Republic, once the premier journal of what would come to be called neoliberalism, published a piece attacking Buttigieg for being a neoliberal, and does so in such explicit terms about his gay sex life that it might have been penned by a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. Speaking of tedious explorations of Buttigieg’s sex life, NYT offers up “Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet,” because evidently that’s a subject some fraction their readership deeply cares about. Speaking of tedious, here’s more on Mayor Pete and race relations, because Democrats never seem to tire of scrutinizing every single person on earth for suspected racism. (See also yesterday’s piece.) Someone tracks down at least some of where that huge fundraising haul came from:
Notably, however, it came three days after Buttigieg held a fundraiser at the home of Hamilton James — a longtime Democratic donor, a political bundler for the likes of Hillary Clinton, and also the executive vice chairman of the Blackstone Group and an architect of a $20 billion deal to use Saudi dollars to fund U.S. infrastructure projects.
Blackstone, the largest alternative investment firm in the world, has long counted Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund as a major client, according to the New York Times. The infrastructure deal was in the works before the last presidential election and long before the death of Khashoggi, for which bin Salman is widely believed to be responsible.
The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.
Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.
And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.
Snip.
De Blasio gave his wife $850 million for her ThriveNYC mental health initiative, and when questioned by the City Council, she couldn’t come up with one thing it succeeded in doing.
He spent a jaw-dropping $773 million on his Renewal program to turn around failing schools. It did absolutely nothing except keep kids trapped in institutions the city knew were terrible. Shamed? You don’t know Bill. He claims the biggest threat to education is charter schools, which actually deliver results, not his own mismanagement.
I think the central issue facing this country is how terribly divided we are and how our government doesn’t work anymore meaning we don’t get anything done. And I’m running for president to get America working again so that we can actually fix health care, build infrastructure, improve public education, make sure there’s jobs in every community in this country. Those are the reasons I’m running for president. And- but to do any of those things we actually have to start coming together. We have to find common ground. We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.
Snip.
Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize. My plan which is called “Better Care” is a universal health care plan. Every single American gets health care as a basic right of citizenship for free. But I preserve options if people want to opt out and keep their private insurance. They can if they want to buy supplemental plans. They can. It’s a much better way to create a universal health care system.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. At the Milwaukee LULAC convention, Gabbard criticized Trump’s immigration policies on much narrower grounds: non-Americans denied citizenship after serving in the U.S. military. This is a real issue, but it’s one that affected only 227 people in 2018. Gabbard appeared on an NPR podcast. “Asked if there are any wars in American history that she thinks were justifiable, she named only World War II.” She says the two party system sucks. A defensible position, but one not calculated to help win the nomination of the party Gabbard is running to represent. She also wants to eliminate superdelegates, which under the 2020 rules won’t vote unless the nomination goes beyond the first ballot.
Update: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Still In? Twitter. Facebook. Evidently last week’s news that he was dropping out was premature, or else he only plans to drop out after the debates, which he’s met the donor threshold for qualifying for, very possibly thanks to rival candidate William’s appeal for money. He promised the 65,000th donor a signed rock.
“Mike Gravel and His Online Teens Want Weed in the Constitution.” I prefer to see federal marijuana prohibition ended on Tenth Amendment grounds, as passing a constitutional amendment is both the stupidest and least-likely path to legalization, but I’m surprised that more serious candidates haven’t made a play for pro-pot voters. It’s a significant single-issue constituency, albeit it not as big a one as its supporters think.
As a black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some liberals, while professing a strong desire to see a woman of color in the White House, fear that California’s former “top cop” won’t fulfill sweeping progressive goals. To them, she seems like a defender of the status quo posing as a reformer. Others are less bothered by her past as a prosecutor—after all, Democrats often struggle to cultivate “toughness”—but believe that the best person to stop Trump’s reëlection is another white man in his eighth decade. To this way of thinking, which contends that the prospect of a liberal black woman President may present too much of a challenge for mainstream America, Harris would make an advantageous Veep. But when, in May, matchmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus speculated about the possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket, she had a snappy retort. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she said.
Snip.
Harris’s father does not participate in her public life (and didn’t answer a request for an interview). The exception to the rule is telling. In February, on “The Breakfast Club,” an urban-market radio show, Harris admitted to smoking a joint in college, and one of the hosts asked if she supported legalizing marijuana. “Half my family’s from Jamaica—are you kidding me?” she replied, laughing. The glib response elided a more complicated record: she opposed recreational pot when she was D.A. of San Francisco, then apparently adapted her view as the public consensus shifted. But that wasn’t the problem. After Harris’s radio appearance, her father gave a statement to the Jamaican-diaspora Web site, reprimanding his daughter. “My deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” When I asked Harris how she felt about this belated, public parenting, she said, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” I asked if she found talking about Donald unpleasant. “I’m happy to talk about my father,” she said, glumly. “But, ya know.” She raised her eyebrows, and said nothing. This was not going to be “Dreams from My Father,” the sequel.
Snip.
Around the time that Owsley met her, Harris was a young prosecutor. She was dating Willie Brown, one of the most visible and powerful politicians in the state. He was sixty—four years older than her dad. Originally from segregated East Texas, he had come to San Francisco during the era of “James Crow” and, rather than join his uncle’s illegal gambling operation, became a defense attorney, representing pimps and prostitutes. Eventually, he won a seat in the State Assembly and, for fourteen years, served as speaker, earning the nickname the Ayatollah. A Democratic power broker with Republican allies, he apportioned the prime office space and knew where to find a legislator if his wife showed up looking for him. In the course of Brown’s career, he was investigated twice by the F.B.I. for corruption, but never charged with a crime. (He played a version of himself in “The Godfather: Part III,” glad-handing Michael Corleone.) Brown’s social life was “spicy,” as he puts it. Married since 1957, he lives amicably apart from his wife, seeing her on holidays. He has had a series of girlfriends—currently, he’s dating a Russian socialite—and maintains a large collection of friends all over the city, notably among wealthy white donors in Pacific Heights. “Willie knows no strangers,” Owsley told me.
During Harris’s short-lived romance with Brown, he ran for mayor; they broke up sometime between his victory party and his swearing-in. The association has clung to her—“an albatross,” she told SF Weekly years ago. Some of the most abhorrent memes of the Presidential campaign riff on their relationship (“Just say no to Willie Brown’s ho”), as does the third comment down on just about any Harris news story. Roseanne Barr has weighed in, scurrilously. Stories that mention Brown have always infuriated Harris; when I asked her campaign about him, a spokesperson testily referred me to statements that she made sixteen years ago.
Among political hopefuls, Brown is known as a mentor and a Pygmalion. Always nattily turned out—he favors Brioni suits and Borsalino hats—he believes that people in public life should present themselves well. “Women in politics need five or six well-fitted sets of pants,” he writes in his memoir. “They also need a complement of blouses or shirts that can be interchanged. And they need a whole series of blazers.” Pelosi is always on point, he writes; Feinstein can look as if she’s caught between seasons. Tactfully, he doesn’t mention Harris, but he may as well have been cataloguing her wardrobe.
“Willie is a bit of a finishing school for some of the people in his orbit,” the local observer told me. “Most people don’t quite know one hundred per cent how to dress for the first Pacific Heights cocktail party they get invited to. The notion that he helped polish somebody like Kamala a little more—I don’t think that is sexist. To use a Colette metaphor, he might have been the Aunt Alicia. ‘Here’s how you dress for this, and when you talk to this person remember that her husband likes to talk about this subject—and you might get a big donation.’ ” Harris grew close to Wilkes Bashford, a friend of Brown’s and one of San Francisco’s most exclusive clothiers, and she became a frequent bold name in the society columns. Even now, she is often featured in the address-restricted magazine the Nob Hill Gazette. Brown also arranged appointments for Harris on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the state’s Medical Assistance Commission, which together reportedly paid her about four hundred thousand dollars over five years. He gave her a car.
In his memoir, published the year Obama was elected President, Brown writes that it is critical for black candidates to “cross over into the white community.” He maintains that black women face a particular challenge being seen as leaders. “When whites look at black women, they see the women as servants, maids, and cooks (just as my mother was),” he writes. “No matter how astute these women are, they’ve never been viewed as worthy of much beyond domestic-service status.” His advice to black women seeking political office: get involved at a high level with cultural and charitable organizations, “like symphonies, museums, and hospitals.” In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she designed a mentorship program for public-school teens.
Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, is another Brown protégé, though the connection is rarely held against him. Born into a political family from Pacific Heights, Newsom was a fixture in the social scene to which Brown introduced Harris. “I certainly remember Gavin delivering wine to our house,” Owsley said, remarking that her husband had invested in PlumpJack, Newsom’s hospitality company. When Newsom was twenty-eight, Brown appointed him to chair the Parking and Traffic Commission of San Francisco. Not long after, when a seat opened on the city’s powerful Board of Supervisors, Brown chose Newsom to fill it. “I can candidly tell you with conviction I would not be governor of California—I would not have been mayor of San Francisco—without his support and his mentorship,” Newsom told me. “Kamala was not directly appointed D.A. of San Francisco. I think it’s patently unfair to judge that harshly and not judge my relationship.”
Since Brown fostered both of them, Harris and Newsom have been political siblings vying for primacy. The day Harris was sworn in as D.A., in 2004, Newsom became mayor; when he became lieutenant governor, she was sworn in as state attorney general. They share donors, networks, and consultants, and have backed each other publicly on issues that range from supporting gay marriage to opposing the death penalty. (Harris also endorsed Newsom’s decision to turn undocumented minors accused of felonies over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a decision both have since disavowed.) The two have even vacationed together, Newsom acknowledged to me. I asked Nathan Click, who once served as a spokesperson for Harris and now does the same for Newsom, who the elder was. “I don’t know—twins?” he said. A civic leader in San Francisco told me, “Kamala and Gavin are like two puppies rolling around having fun together, seeing who pops out first.”
Several years ago, Harris and Newsom’s sibling rivalry was nearly put before the state’s voters. As Governor Jerry Brown was entering his final term, Newsom was the lieutenant governor and Harris was attorney general. Governor was clearly the next job for each of them. “It divided the social world,” Mimi Silbert, who co-founded the Delancey Street Foundation, a residency program for ex-convicts, and who is an old friend of both Harris and Newsom, says. “It was, ‘I’m more for Gavin,’ ‘Well, I’m more for Kamala.’ ” As the tension was becoming excruciating, Barbara Boxer unexpectedly announced that she was giving up her seat in the U.S. Senate. Within days, Harris had declared that she would run for the Senate, clearing the way for Newsom eventually to become governor. “It was very important when she decided, because running against her for any office was not something I had any desire to do,” Newsom, who is a co-chair of Harris’s California campaign, said. “If she decided to run for governor, that would have been perilous in terms of my own considerations.”
There’s a lot more there on her various political campaigns and tenure as DA. Harris’ calculated straddles. “She wants to attack Biden on busing with paying the price of embracing a deeply unpopular policy of imposing busing today. She wants to say she’s on Bernie’s side on health care without acknowledging Medicare for All would abolish almost all private insurance.” A critique of her housing subsidy proposal:
Harris says her well-intentioned goal is to close the wealth gap between black and while families. She would give 4 million homebuyers HUD grants of up to $25,000 each to help them make down payments and pay closing costs to buy homes.
However, as we all know, the average cost of even a modest home far exceeds $25,000. That means that recipients of these generous government grants would need to borrow a lot more money to buy homes, even while facing big monthly mortgage payments that in many cases would be greater than they could afford.
Does this sound familiar? If you’ve followed news about the housing market for years, it should. It reminds us of the feel-good government intervention that precipitated the horrendous real estate crash of 2008 and the greatest recession since the Great Depression.
In 2016, the buzz around Hickenlooper was loud enough that Hillary Clinton vetted him to be her running mate. But three years later, Hickenlooper often finds himself talking to voters who have no idea who he is. A columnist for the New Hampshire Union-Leader recently likened the efforts of Hickenlooper — a former brewery owner — to “a fledgling IPA fighting for a tap in the neighborhood bar.”
That was evident during a recent visit to the Foundry, a beer hall and distillery in West Des Moines, where patrons eyed him with mild curiosity. “You are who?” a man said as Hickenlooper wandered near the bar. Upon learning Hickenlooper was running for president, he replied, “There are so many of you.”
In Cresco, Iowa, where Hickenlooper spoke at a local Democratic Party gathering, a woman mistook the former governor for Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), who is also running for president. “Two Coloradans,” the woman declared, as Hickenlooper walked away. “I can’t keep them straight.”
During a recent visit to the Des Moines farmers market, the unassuming Hickenlooper walked through the buyers in almost complete anonymity. He made little effort to call attention to himself, and the shoppers and merchants appeared to have no idea a presidential candidate was in their midst.
Hickenlooper’s road became even lonelier last week. Several top aides, including campaign manager Brad Komar, left the campaign or announced they would do so soon. Hickenlooper played down the departures, but a Democrat close to the campaign said the aides had urged him to drop his presidential bid and instead run for the Senate, which Hickenlooper refused to do.
When the rodents depart the dinghy, maybe it’s time to take the hint.
Hickenlooper also rejects some of the high-profile liberal initiatives embraced by other Democratic hopefuls. He is against Medicare-for-all, arguing there are “less disruptive ways” of achieving universal health care. And while citing a “sense of urgency” on climate change, Hickenlooper opposes the Green New Deal, saying it could never win Republican support.
He’s sought a similar middle path on immigration. At a deli in Boone, Iowa, Dean Lyons, a utility company manager, asked Hickenlooper what he would do about the “mess” at the border. The former governor replied, “We need borders. And we need people to obey the law. You cannot continue to have laws that people don’t obey.”
But he also said the nation can’t ignore the humanitarian issues at the border or its need for low-skilled workers, and he listed several policy ideas, such as a 10-year renewable visa program. Afterward, Lyons praised the nuanced answer but also stressed Hickenlooper’s long odds. “I was pretty impressed with him,” Lyons said. “But he’s got a long road to get up the ladder.”
Hickenlooper has recently tried to stand out by being ever more aggressive about the party’s leftward turn, arguing that “socialism is not the answer” and that embracing it will only lead to a Democratic defeat. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up reelecting the worst president ever in American history,” he has argued.
That line elicited boos from liberal attendees at last month’s California Democratic Convention in San Francisco, a reaction that lit up social media and attracted the first significant headlines of his campaign.
But the same line attracted polite nods in Iowa, where Hickenlooper hopes his “extreme moderate” message, as he calls it, will catch fire with a Midwestern electorate that often prefers middle-of-the-road candidates.
I wouldn’t hold your breath. “Hickenlooper refuses to condemn protesters who hoisted Mexican flag at ICE facility.” It must suck to be pandering as hard as you can and still be stuck at 1%.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Piece wondering why Moulton, Ryan and the now-departed Swalwell are even running for President. “‘I think he’s got a better shot at being president than being a senator from Massachusetts,’ said [Democratic consultant Scott] Ferson, who worked for Moulton’s winning congressional race in 2014 but is not involved with his presidential run. ‘He burned a lot of bridges in Massachusetts in the Democratic Party, and for statewide office you need party support.'” Asked whether he knew Buttigieg at Harvard, Moulton said:
“No. I think we hung out with different groups of friends. Not at all, I was not hanging out with the Harvard Democrats,” Moulton said.
He was then asked to describe what his friend group was like.
“Athletes. People who went out and, you know, had a good time,” Moulton said.
The excitement that greeted Beto O’Rourke’s presidential candidacy is long gone. The former Texas congressman has been stuck in low single digits in most polls, and CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny reports he’s now running low on cash.
“On the eve of the fundraising deadline for all the candidates to report their money, he’s yet to report,” Zeleny said. “I’m told by a couple of top supporters familiar with his financial situation that it’s bleak. A few staffers have begun leaving El Paso, moving on to other things. … He has a lot of high-powered, high-paid staff members so there are discussions going on, I’m told, as to what the next step is. He’s committed to staying in, but it’s not the summer he envisioned.”
Just nine months ago, attorney Katie Baron was so inspired by Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign in Texas that she commissioned a sprawling mural on the side of a building in east Austinfeaturing the candidate in a Superman-like pose.
After O’Rourke lost race and began mulling a presidential campaign, the artist added a sweeping “2020” in blue paint – providing what seemed to be yet one more call for O’Rourke to get into the crowded race.
Now, four months into O’Rourke’s campaign, Baron wishes he had stayed out.
After the first Democratic presidential debate last month, Baron posted an altered picture of the mural on a Facebook page dedicated to the artwork. She had replaced O’Rourke’s face with Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s and wrote: “Don’t worry, still got PLENTY of love for Beto, but Kamala earned herself a little recognition too last night!” The comments filled with messages from angry O’Rourke supporters and a few excited Harris backers.
While Baron says she will be forever grateful to O’Rourke for inspiring her and thousands of others to become politically active, she doesn’t think he’s the strongest candidate for president, nor has he shown he can nationalize the magic of his Senate campaign.
“If the primary vote was tomorrow, he wouldn’t have my vote,” said Baron, 35, who likes Harris, D-Calif., for her sharp intellect and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for her methodical policy papers.
“Being part of the Beto-mania that was fueling the fire, I can see why he kind of thought he had no choice but to enter,” she said. “Honestly, I did get a little caught up. We were still riding the wave of the midterms.”
As O’Rourke slogs through a difficult primary season, he’s not only struggling to gain the support of voters who don’t know of him, but also to hold on to the support of those who know him best, Texans who powered his long-shot campaign against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year.
On the one hand, yeah, there’s the widespread impression that he missed his mark. On the other hand, I still see a lot of Beto 2020 signs and stickers around Austin…
Indeed, if you’re going to construct a path to the nomination for Sestak, it probably goes something like: If Biden stumbles, here’s another white man with gravitas who can speak credibly to middle America (and doesn’t call himself a socialist). But he has a problem that other candidates in this position (e.g., Sen. Michael Bennet or Gov. Steve Bullock) don’t — he’s made a lot of enemies in the Democratic establishment. In 2010, in defiance of party leadership, Sestak primaried Sen. Arlen Specter, who had recently switched parties from the GOP. Although Sestak impressively came from behind to topple Specter in the primary, he lost the general election by 2 points, and some Democrats blamed him for blowing a winnable race. So when he tried for a rematch in 2016, party elders recruited another Democrat, Katie McGinty, to block his path, and she handily defeated him in the primary. That was the last time Sestak ran for office — until now.
O’Connell wouldn’t say which specific constituencies within the party Sestak would try to woo, but his campaign strategy so far has been focused on retail politics — shaking hands at parades and convincing one voter at a time — in Iowa. But Sestak also plans to tap his old donor base in Pennsylvania, which raised millions for him in his previous campaigns, although O’Connell acknowledged that presidential fundraising will be a challenge because of Sestak’s late entry into the race. Without question, Sestak is starting from behind: Since 1976, only one successful nominee, Bill Clinton, kicked off a campaign later than April of the year before the election. And with only 27 percent of Democrats having an opinion of Sestak, according to a recent YouGov poll, he can scarcely afford to get a late start. However, he didn’t do so by choice: O’Connell says Sestak would have jumped in the race much sooner, but he didn’t want to run as long as his daughter was undergoing treatment for brain cancer. (She was given the all-clear earlier in June.)
Sestak was always going to have an uphill climb. He hasn’t won an election in nine years, and long layovers between campaigns can make for weaker candidates. It’s also hard to win a nomination without at least some support from the party establishment, which he seems unlikely to get. Finally, he has yet to reach 1 percent in any poll, which is a severe handicap to his chances of making the stage for future debates (not to mention getting enough votes to win the nomination). Unfortunately for “Admiral Joe,” on-the-ground campaigning simply may not reach enough voters to make up for that.
Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.
This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”
To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”
Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”
Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I’m not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”
Tom Steyer, you beautiful madman. You’re about to turn the Democratic primary into an expensive demolition derby: “Billionaire Tom Steyer announced Tuesday that he will join the crowded field vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and promised to commit at least $100 million of his personal fortune to the campaign.
Steyer will not be the 2020 Democratic nominee. But with $100 million, he can do a lot of damage to anyone he deems an obstacle, and it’s worth remembering that Michael Bloomberg just overwhelmed every opponent with a tsunami of ad money when running for mayor in New York City three times. Steyer has limited name recognition now, but a nearly unlimited television advertising budget will change that fast. He can promise anything and accuse anyone else of being a “Washington insider.”
Steyer’s probably not quite a threat to overtake Biden or Harris or Sanders or Warren. But everybody below that might as well call it quits.
Life just stinks if you’re Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet these days, doesn’t it? You’ve worked hard to try to get things done in the U.S. Senate and it means bupkus to most Democratic primary voters. You could call for Trump’s impeachment, but you can’t do anything until the House of Representatives actually passes articles of impeachment. You’re sharing the stage with no-name House members and some spiritual guru from California who’s talking about the power of love. You’re going to spend your summer eating corn dogs in small towns in Iowa singing the praises of ethanol while reporters ask why you’re not raising as much money as the mayor of South Bend, who nobody had heard of a year ago. And now some billionaire who you’d prefer to have as a benefactor rather than an enemy has decided he wants the same job you want.
Lots of lefty activists are upset that Steyer’s money is going to Steyer’s campaign rather than into their pockets. Even environmentalists, frequent recipients of his largess, aren’t pleased with him. “Steyer’s campaign could blunt momentum generated by candidates, such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who have elevated climate change as a priority in the primary elections by proposing detailed policies to curb it.” Given that Inslee has zero momentum, I don’t see how it could.
It’s still early. There will be 16 more months of speech making and glad-handing and glitzy ballroom fundraisers before Election Day. Not committing to a presidential candidate just yet would make sense. But here at Netroots Nation, the premier annual convention for progressive activists, many attendees already seem fairly certain about their choice: They want Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, to be their next president. And if they have to pick a second choice? It’s Senator Kamala Harris of California.
Warren officials say she did not violate that pledge when her campaign turned to one of California’s top Democratic donors, a wealthy Silicon Valley physician named Karla Jurvetson, to help pay for access to a crucial voter database earlier this spring.
The so-called national “voter file,” a pool of data about millions of people that presidential campaigns use as a foundation for their own private data as they identify and track support over time, is managed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and costs campaigns a total of $175,000, according to the DNC’s voter file contract.
The DNC term sheet outlines two ways campaigns may pay for the voter file: by transferring funds directly to the DNC, or raising that money “to” the DNC through donors.
Jurvetson, who contributed about $7 million to Democratic causes during the 2018 election, gave a total of $100,000 to the DNC in April 2019, Federal Election Commission filings show. The donations, according to two Democratic operatives with knowledge of the agreement, helped Warren pay for the voter file.
To me the most interesting part of the story is: How does a physician have $7 million to give away in political donations? Doctors make good money, but not that good. Oh wait: “Jurvetson was married in 1990 to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, an early-stage investor in companies including SpaceX and Tesla.” Mystery solved! Hmmm: “Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. His backers are younger, make less money, have fewer degrees and are less engaged in politics…In poll after poll, Sanders appeals to lower-income and less-educated people; Warren beats Sanders among those with postgraduate degrees.” “Warren criticizes powerful businesses. She also worked for them.” In addition to Dow Chemical:
At issue are two decades when Warren enhanced her income as a law professor by consulting on various legal issues and representing clients. Some seem to fit her present-day brand: She worked on behalf of asbestos victims and represented the environmental lawyer whose story became the basis of the 1998 film “A Civil Action.”
But in about a dozen cases, Warren used her expertise to help major companies or their lawyers navigate corporate bankruptcies. In many cases she was brought in to argue motions, swooping in to offer her analysis and persuade a judge with her knowledge of bankruptcy law.
These include her work on behalf of plane manufacturer Fairchild Aircraft after a crash killed four people, including NASCAR star Alan Kulwicki. Warren argued that Fairchild should be shielded from liability because the plane that went down was made by a company that had gone bankrupt. (She lost.)
In another case, Warren represented Southwestern Electric Power Company, a firm that relied on Warren when its bid to buy power plants from a bankrupt energy co-op was jeopardized by allegations of vote buying. (She won.)
The work supplemented her salary from Harvard, which was about $185,000 a year in the mid-1990s, employment records show. Warren has not released tax returns from the 1990s, when she did much of the corporate work. But court records show she was paid as much as $675 an hour, which was at or below market rate for her level of expertise.
From 2008 to 2010, a period for which Warren has released tax returns, her outside work brought in an average of about $200,000 a year. That included royalties from books and enabled Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, to bring in nearly $1 million in each of those years.
In her 2007 book A Republic of Mind and Spirit, Catherine Albanese argues that religiosity has taken three major forms in American history: evangelical Christianity, the mainline denominations, and what Albanese calls “metaphysical religion.” In that third strand, the material world is believed to be “organically linked to the spiritual one,” allowing people to tap into a “stream of energy” that “renders them divine and limitless.” The followers of this tradition believe that the “trained and controlled human imagination” can be honed “to bring desired and seemingly miraculous change.”
This worldview has Old World roots, but it has taken on a variety of distinctly American forms. One of the central threads of this tradition is what William James called the “religion of healthy-mindedness.” You hear its echoes whenever someone uses phrases like the law of attraction or the power of positive thinking.
Overview of the career of Phineas Quimby, who combined mesmerism and herbal teas, snipped.
(Maybe a decedent…)
If this reminds you of Christian Science, there’s a reason for that: Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy was one of Quimby’s patients, and she drew on Quimby’s ideas as she developed her own distinctive doctrines. (Just how much she drew on Quimby became a matter of considerable dispute between Eddy and Quimby’s disciples.) Enthusiasts outside Eddy’s orbit began to refer to their core concepts as New Thought, a term borrowed from the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action,” Emerson said, “that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”) Others adopted different names, such as “mind cure.” When Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Kansas City founded a church based on New Thought principles in 1889, they called it Unity. (The Unity congregation that hosted Williamson’s D.C. rally was founded in 1920, though it didn’t move to its current space until much later.)
Some of these new-thinkers were recognizably Christian. Others roped in a smorgasbord of other spiritual ideas, from Theosophy to bastardized versions of various Eastern traditions. Some of them argued that modern medical theories were entirely baseless; others acknowledged that doctors often knew what they were doing but suggested that New Thought techniques could either amplify medicine’s effects or work as an alternative when other remedies failed. As the movement evolved, its interests extended beyond physical health; in particular, the notion took hold that those streams of divine energy could be used to attract personal riches.
As these ideas grew more popular, they inevitably intersected with politics. Wallace D. Wattles, author of 1910’s The Science of Getting Rich, was to the left of Marianne Williamson: He was a member (and mayoral and congressional candidate) of the Socialist Party. Indeed, Horowitz’s book lists several social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who mixed their politics with mind-cure concepts. That shouldn’t be surprising. From the left-libertarian mystic Stephen Pearl Andrews to the spiritualist suffragette Victoria Woodhull, it was common in that period for populists, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and other radicals to draw on Albanese’s tradition of metaphysical religion. Why wouldn’t some of them be interested in New Thought too?
But New Thought also planted the seeds of the health-and-wealth school of Christianity, whose political sympathies often trended in a different direction. Consider the career of Norman Vincent Peale, born to a Midwestern Methodist minister in 1898. Peale followed in his father’s footsteps and helmed a mainline Protestant congregation in New York, but he also read New Thought literature and soon started mixing it with his denomination’s doctrines. He was particularly taken with the writings of Napoleon Hill, a serial entrepreneur who left a trail of shady business practices and dubious biographical claims. Hill’s articles and books—most famously, his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich—repackaged New Thought techniques as business advice, often putting Hill’s ideas into the mouths of the successful executives he allegedly interviewed. (In an entertaining article published in Gizmodo in 2016, Matt Novak makes a compelling case that few if any of these conversations actually happened. Hill’s habit of inventing interviews reached its peak in the posthumously published Outwitting the Devil, in which he claimed to have had a Q&A session with Satan.) Hill eventually drifted into a Long Island sect called the Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, which attracted a degree of infamy when it declared its plans to unlock the path to physical immortality through a mixture of New Thought practices and vegetarianism.
All its missing is the Fox sisters and John Murray Spear. Skipping ahead to Williamson:
In Williamson’s case, that background begins in Houston, where she was born to a Jewish family in 1952. (She still considers herself a Jew, even as she regularly invokes Jesus and Buddha. Entertainment Weekly once called her Christ’s “most eminently eccentric Jewish exponent.”) She drifted in her 20s: dropping out of college, working briefly as a cabaret singer, imbibing a lot of alcohol and other drugs. Her life turned around after she discovered A Course in Miracles, a lengthy text that the historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal has called “a synthesis of psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy.” The book was “scribed” by the psychologist Helen Schucman from 1965 to 1972. (I say “scribed” rather than “written” because Schucman insisted that it had been dictated by Jesus.) Course says that everyone is a child of God, that our separate egos are an illusion, that the physical world itself is an illusion, and that one day we will wake into a state of eternal love.
Williamson embraced the book, calling it “my personal teacher, my path out of hell.” By 1983 she was giving talks about it at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.
The Philosophical Research Society is a venerable New Age institution, having been founded in 1934 by a Theosophist named Manly P. Hall. Hall wrote frequently about secret societies and esoteric symbols, and he was a devotee of the idea that a benevolent conspiracy has been guiding America toward a higher destiny. Williamson remembers Hall fondly, though she wouldn’t describe him as an influence on her. “By the time I got to the Philosophical Research Society, my reading Manly Hall was more affirmation of the things I already believed in,” she tells me after the D.C. rally, in a little room adjacent to the senior minister’s office. “I was already on that basic course of knowing that there’s much more to life than what meets the physical eye.”
That said, there is one rather Hallian passage in Williamson’s first political book, 1997’s The Healing of America. The Great Seal of the United States—that eye-in-the-pyramid logo on the back of the dollar bill—”illustrates our Founders’ sense of America’s destiny,” Williamson writes. “The seal shows the Great Pyramid at Giza, with its missing capstone returned and illuminated. The Eye of Horus, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the consciousness of higher mind, is displayed within the capstone. Beneath the picture are written the words ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’—new order of the ages. This Masonic symbolism reveals democracy’s function as a vehicle for the realization of humanity’s highest potential.”
And now we’re back in Robert Anton Wilson territory. And speaking of hip pop culture references, Williamson is now memeing famed Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Given that show’s Kabbalistic underpinnings, that ties right back into the whole spiritualist enchilada above…
According to his campaign, some 300 malls will fold over the next 4 years, a number in line with an estimate by Credit Suisse that one-quarter of all malls will close by 2022. Many dozens or hundreds more will struggle as anchor stores collapse and retail outlets wither. Yang’s American Mall Act would devote $6 billion to finding new purposes for these dying retail complexes.
So, in other words, make them yet another sinkhole to toss taxpayer money into to prop up failing business models. Pass. “Andrew Yang on Automation: “You Can’t Turn Truck Drivers into Coders.'” He’s largely right there, but Universal Basic Income isn’t a solution, unless the question is “How do we prop up pot sellers, liquor stores and video game makers.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Biden brags about his segregationist buds, a sleestak joins the race, Beto hires a Ralph Northam staffer, and New York Times and/or Google News screw up a lot of candidate photos. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Lot of damn polls this time around…
Economist/YouGov (page 162): Biden 26, Warren 14, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 9, Harris 7, O’Rourke 4, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobucher 1, Yang 1. Hickenlooper, Messam, and Moulton not only got 0%, they got 0% across all demographic categories and subgroupsings (sex, age, race).
Monmouth University: Biden 32, Warren 15, Sanders 14, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Inslee 1, Klobucher 1, Williamson 1, Castro, Gillibrand and Ryan all with less than 1, everyone else with zero.
The New York Times asked short video interview questions of 21 of the Democratic Presidential contenders…Joe Biden conspicuously not among them. Has he already adopted an Ivory Tower strategy as frontrunner? Even if you’re not going to watch any of those interviews, you might want to click on the link to look at the weird way NYT has looped little video snippets of all 21 candidate talking heads silently mouthing answers. The effect is somewhat…disturbing. It also reminds you that the vast majority of Democratic voters couldn’t pick most of these people out of a police lineup if their life depended on it.
21 of the candidates (including Biden) were in South Carolina for the state convention and “US Rep. Jim Clyburn’s ‘World-Famous Fish Fry.'”
CNN asks which Democrat is number two. (Insert your own Austin Powers joke here.) Their ranking is currently Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobucher, Yang, and Castro. So Castro’s in the top ten and still below the Andrew Yang Line…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Michael Bennet pushes sweeping plan to remake political system. The Colorado senator says reforms on campaign finance, gerrymandering and lobbying are needed to push American forward.” Maybe he views all those as easier tasks than winning the Democratic nomination. More on the same theme. Democrats are still obsessed with the Citizens United decision, since they believe only left-leaning billionaires, tech companies, and union slush funds should be able to buy elections…
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden really stepped in while bragging about how well he worked with segregationist in the senate like late Mississippi Senator James Eastland. “‘I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,’ the former vice president said while putting on a Southern drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.” Yeah, that’s because you’re not black, moron. This is about the clumsiest and stupidest way you could brag on your ability to work with others. Will being Obama’s Vice President for eight years insulate him from charges of racism? Maybe with voters, but not with his fellow candidates (see below). Just another stop on the Biden Damage Control Tour. Has the Biden campaign bought lots of fake twitter accounts? Sure seems that way. (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Biden compared Trump’s election to MLK and JFK’s assassinations, which doesn’t sound at all like crazy talk. “Hunter Biden Still Active in Chinese-Sponsored Investment Fund.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Indeed, the media actually seem to be reporting on Hunter Biden’s shady deals, possibly because his segregationist samba removed the Obama Protective Shield of Media Disinterest in his scandals.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Buttigieg got targeted by #BlackLivesMatter after an officer-involved shooting in South Bend. “Some of the fiercest criticism at the march came from Logan’s mother, South Bend resident Shirley Newbill, who told Buttigieg that she’s ‘been here all my life’ and officials have not done a ‘thing about me or my son, or none of these people put here. It’s time for you to do something … I’m tired of talking now … and I’m tired of hearing your lies.'” He tripled his campaign staff in New Hampshire. Evidently his fundraising is going well. “Hollywood’s Top Gay Donors Have Mixed Feelings About Buttigieg. The young mayor’s candidacy may be historic, but many gay bundlers and donors in Los Angeles are skeptical of his ability to win in 2020.” He held a town hall in North Augusta, SC.
Delaney is perhaps the candidate most familiar with that Wall Street bell — he lists among his top bona fides the co-founding of two publicly traded companies before he turned 40. At one point, he was the youngest chief executive with a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The first, HealthCare Financial Partners, offered financing to mid-sized healthcare providers. The company sold to Heller Financial for about $483 million in April 1999, according to the Baltimore Sun. He partnered to start a second lending firm in 2000, this time to finance small businesses. Delaney was first elected to Congress in 2012 while he was CEO of CapitalSource, which was eventually merged with PacWest Bancorp.
A New Jersey native, wealthy businessman and proud son of a union electrician, Delaney surprised Maryland Democrats when he first ran after the Sixth District was redrawn in the party’s favor. A Washingtonian profile of Delaney from that year described a “nasty, expensive primary campaign” that ended with Delaney’s besting another candidate seen as the next in line by party officials.
Seven years later, Delaney’s presidential candidacy could again be viewed as unique. He was one of the wealthiest representatives in Congress when he served, according to a March 2018 Roll Call analysis. He declared nearly three years before the 2020 Democratic convention, and has been barnstorming through Iowa ever since in advance of the caucuses in February.
Yet despite his 29 campaign trips in the past two years, he is not polling at the same levels as many of his opponents. The Des Moines Register reported this week that many Iowans still don’t know him or remain undecided about him. A mid-June Iowa poll showed 1 percent of respondents rated Delaney as their top choice, and 1 percent said he was their second.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She criticized Warren and Harris for criticizing Biden on the segregationist stuff. “Joe Biden did not ‘celebrate’ or ‘coddle’ segregationists. His critics have unfairly misrepresented his important message to score cheap political points.” A study shows her in second behind Cory Booker for Asian American donations, though Biden evidently hadn’t entered the race in the period analyzed. Also, I can’t tell is someone at New York Times or Google news was asleep at the switch for this one:
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s the latest “why isn’t she doing better” piece: “Why Kirsten Gillibrand’s campaign is stuck at 0.3%.” “Gillibrand is failing to leave voters with much of an impression. Two-thirds of the voters interviewed – including 15 of the 21 who just saw Gillibrand’s 10-minute lightning round of a stump speech – said they don’t know enough about her to have a strong opinion of her.” Finally, a break for her campaign:
Candidate comfort food:
Warren: Chips and guacamole Harris: Fries Gabbard: Vegan cupcakes Buttigieg: Beef jerky Gillibrand: Whiskey Castro: Iced tea Booker: Veggies Klobuchar: Baked Potato Williamson: “I have no comfort food”
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s another campaign run by three teenagers piece. He slammed Buttigieg: “The media has given Buttigieg a pass on a lackluster record in South Bend that shows him to be more concerned about public acclaim than the lives of average people. Why the pass? Because he’s an articulate white kid with all the right credentials. His constituents know the truth.” You may not think much of Gravel’s “troll higher polling candidates’ strategy, but at least it is an apparent strategy, which is more than I can say for some…
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He too gets a Miami Herald profile, and there’s not a lot new there. Here’s a profile of him as “an extreme moderate.” “John Hickenlooper, a moderate, all the way through. He approaches a lighter shade of gray. Hickenlooper is so close to center he might be invisible.” And then one paragraph down it says “He supports reentering the Paris Accords, and imposing a Carbon Tax.” Those are not, in any way, shape or form, moderate positions that most Americans support. You don’t get to brag you’re a moderate because you’re slightly less radical than the most radical Democrats. And NYT/Google News do it again:
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of radical environmental proposals, Inslee wants to ban fossil fuel production on private land, ban fracking, and institute a punishing carbon tax, all 2030. In short, he wants us dependent on Middle East oil and to bring France’s yellow vest riots to America. No word on how the federal government will deal with those outlaws still using gasoline-powered engines in 2030. Naturally I’m imagining death squads.
dozen minutes into a debate with U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar last October, her Republican opponent went on the attack.
The Minnesota Democrat, Jim Newberger said, “has a 90% rubber-stamp, compliant voting record with her leadership, so when you talk about reaching across the aisle and achieving things … I’m not seeing it.”
Klobuchar was ready: She had voted more than 40% of the time with Republican senators from South Dakota, North Dakota and Alaska, she said. “I try to work in the middle with people that want to find actual solutions to things and not just grandstand on them.”
Yeah, try pitching your awesome record of bipartisanship to the Democratic Party base. Can’t possibly see that failing…
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Has an interview with South Florida Caribbean Radio. Or at least I assume he did. My Adblock blocked everything but the top banner bar. He spoke at that Columbia, South Carolina. But there’s only 50 seconds of video there. Even when he gets coverage, events conspire to deprive him of coverage…
Seth Moulton served four tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine, then won election three times to a U.S. House seat in Massachusetts, representing the district where he grew up.
Moulton, 41, earned three degrees from Harvard University — a bachelor’s, an M.B.A., and a master’s in public affairs. After earning his undergraduate degree in physics, Moulton joined the Marines, shortly before 9/11.
Moulton was among the first troops to enter Baghdad in 2003, and he was later assigned by Gen. David Petraeus to serve as a liaison to tribal leaders. Moulton earned two decorations for heroism. Personally, though, he had doubts about the war.
Moulton told The Atlantic that he remembers the moment in Iraq when he decided he wanted to enter politics. “It was after a difficult day in Najaf in 2004,” he said. “A young marine in my platoon said, ‘Sir, you should run for Congress someday, so this s— doesn’t happen again.’”
In 2014, Moulton defeated a scandal-weakened Democratic incumbent in a primary, then won the general election with 54% of the vote. He won reelection twice.
In Congress, Moulton took an active role on military issues as a member of the House Armed Services Committee. At times, he criticized President Barack Obama, including when Obama declined to describe the post-war military deployment to Iraq as a combat mission.
Why is it that every picture of Moulton, he either looks to be in pain, or his mouth is partially open? (It’s almost as common as Sanders’ “Enraged Squirrel Glare.”) Well, except this one:
O’Rourke has hired a former Obama administration official and policy executive at the left-leaning Center for American Progress to oversee his campaign’s expanding policy arm.
Carmel Martin, a former assistant secretary for policy and budget at the Department of Education, has joined O’Rourke’s campaign as his national policy director, an O’Rourke adviser confirmed to POLITICO.
Her hiring is a boon to O’Rourke, who is seeking to regain his footing in the Democratic primary.
Martin served as a policy adviser for John Kerry and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns. And her position as executive vice president for policy at CAP has been held in the past by heavyweights in Washington policy circles, including Melody Barnes before she left to join Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
Martin, before joining the Obama administration, worked as general counsel and chief education adviser to the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy on his Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
In addition to Martin, O’Rourke will continue to be advised by Ali Zaidi, a former associate director at Obama’s Office of Management and Budget and O’Rourke’s senior adviser for policy.
Despite consistently trailing five Democratic foes in national and early-voting state polls in recent weeks, the former Texas congressman is continuing to attract well-regarded Democratic talent to his campaign — and is ahead of most of his competitors in building on-the-ground organizations in the early states.
O’Rourke’s latest hires are deputy communications directors Rachel Thomas, hired from the Democratic digital organization ACRONYM, and Ofirah Yheskel, who was Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s communications director.
Thomas, a former EMILY’s List communications director and aide to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, is O’Rourke’s deputy communications director for strategic content.
Yheskel, who prior to working on Northam’s 2017 campaign was Hillary Clinton’s Wisconsin press secretary in 2016 and worked on Wendy Davis’ bid for Texas governor, is O’Rourke’s deputy communications director for states.
O’Rourke hired Aleigha Cavalier as his national press secretary. Cavalier, a former Planned Parenthood public affairs director, was most recently a top Tom Steyer aide as communications director for Steyer’s NextGen America, and involved in Steyer’s heavy spending to encourage impeaching President Donald Trump. O’Rourke has also called for Trump’s impeachment.
Anna Pacilio, who was communications director for Texas Rep. Marc Veasey, was hired as O’Rourke’s director of women’s messaging.
I’m not sure Ralph Northam’s communications director would make my “must hire” list. O’Rourke also did some Robert Kennedy quoting that I’m sure in no way is a cynical ploy to remind voters how he looks a little like Bobby Kennedy. You know who O’Rourke doesn’t look like? Bill de Blasio:
I feel compelled to screenshot media cock-ups that get through layers and layers of fact-checkers before they disappear.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation and promised to cancel eveyone’s student debt; I guess he’s feeling the heat from Warren on his left flank. Bernie’s always been free with other people’s money. Also: “Last time around you have to win 51 percent of the vote. This time I don’t believe anyone is going to come close to 50 percent, so it’s a very different race with 24 candidates.” 25 now (see below). An interview with Sanders’ top foreign policy advisors (Matt Duss) makes Sanders sound less dovish than billed. “Sanders has views about military intervention that are more complicated than his campaign rhetoric. And that may explain why he hasn’t delved into much detail about foreign policy.” Centerist Democrats are spooked by Sanders:
A two-day conference hosted here by the centrist Democratic group Third Way focused on helping Democrats figure out “the way to win” in 2020 — and they’re sick of economic messages that focus on “free stuff” rather than opportunity, as former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp put it.
They’re not down with Medicare for All, and shared data to back up their fear. Among 1,291 Democratic primary voters polled by Third Way, there’s a 17-point difference in support for Medicare for All between “Twitter Democrats” and Democratic primary voters as a whole.
In fact, they’d love if all the 2020 Democrats got off Twitter entirely. Listening to the Twitterverse “will help re-elect Donald Trump,” according to Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s SVP for social policy and politics.
They’re also trying to obliterate the “blue bubble” created by liberals — perpetuated, they say, by appearances on networks like MSNBC and an obsession with online reach. “If you killed it on that podcast, I assure you we did not hear you,” said Steve Benjamin, mayor of Columbia, S.C.
Things like free college are “fluffy” and perceived as “handouts,” said Anna Tovar, mayor of Tolleson, Arizona. Particularly with Latinx Democrats, she said, “They want to work towards [those opportunities] and be proud of that.”
“But Elizabeth Warren — who’s viewed as the closest candidate to Bernie ideologically — gets a pass with these moderates. They say she’s focused on a Democratic capitalist message, while they view Bernie as a full-blown socialist.”
Addition: Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. He announced he’s running and Dave Weigel spotted him in Iowa. What sort of man looks at the current Democratic field of 24 a few days before the first debate and says “You know, someone else really needs to jump in, and I’m just the guy”? Evidently Joe Sestak. Then again, his spirit animal is an extremely slow moving lizardman:
Sestak, 68, had a 31-year naval career before going into politics, rising to the three star rank of Vice Admiral, and his campaign logo says “ADM JOE.” Sestek did render the nation one great service: He knocked vile turncoat Republican-turned-Democrat incumbent senator Arlen Specter out of the race in 2010 before losing to Pat Toomey. (He tried running again in 2016, but the DSCC poured $1.1 million to back primary opponent and Clinton fav Katie McGinty, evidently as payback for running against Specter. McGinty won the primary, then lost to Toomey in the general.) He’s for soft illegal alien amnesty and “sections of fencing where needed and appropriate.” (If I thought he had a snowball’s chance in Hell, I’d screenshot that page as proof for when hard left activists make him take it out.) Scanned his policy positions for any departure from Democratic orthodoxy and didn’t see much (bring back ObamaCare, global warming, taxpayer subsidized abortions, overturn Citizens United, etc.); it’s all boilerplate. Calling it vanilla insults a vastly underrated flavor. Says he was late jumping in because his daughter was diagnosed with brain cancer. It’s hard to see Democrats turning to a high-ranking ex-military guy after the “John Kerry War Hero” narrative blew up in their faces in 2004 (a failure that I’m sure is still seared, seared into their memory). Biden campaigned for McGinty in 2016, so I wonder if Sestak is running a revenge campaign against him, which would be hilarious. Besides that, it’s tough to see any justification for Sestak to jump into the race this late.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Members of the Warren-aligned Progressive Change Campaign Committee think she can poach Biden voters. Presumably the pitch won’t be “Hey, they’re both really old and really white!” The lefty policy wonks behind Warren’s blizzard of policy proposals:
The head of the policy team, Jon Donenberg, makes the same as the campaign manager and other senior leaders.
“It’s all we can do to keep up with her,” said Donenberg, a Capitol Hill veteran who worked for former Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Richard Blumenthal before he joined Warren’s 2012 campaign and then served as legislative director in her senate office. “The job of the policy shop is to help her fill in the details around these proposals, to present data, and to talk through the costs and benefits of various approaches.”
Longtime Warren confidante Ganesh Sitaraman, an old friend of Pete Buttigieg from their time as undergrads at Harvard, is not on her campaign’s payroll given his job at Vanderbilt. But he has taken a lead role in formulating her domestic policies.
Sasha Baker is the former deputy chief of staff to Obama’s Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and focuses on national security. And Bharat Ramamurti, a longtime Senate aide who Warren pushed to fill a seat on the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2017, has been handling financial issues. The campaign said that both have been expanding their portfolios to other domestic policy topics as well.
Now Warren is promising reparations for gay people, a small demographic group that’s traditionally had above-average incomes, for what? The affront to their obviously not gay ancestors? Why not just adopt the campaign slogan “Free Money For Every Social Justice Warrior Victimhood Group?”
Williamson avoids using notes or prompters, never mutters an “um” or an “ah” or a “like.” She starts with the children, who are living in what she calls “America’s domestic war zones,” with their schools poorly funded and violence and starvation at home. She calls out the problem of corporate money in politics as little “more than a system of legalized bribery,” adding that she herself believes in “capitalism with a conscience.” Like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Williamson supports Medicare for All and a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
She also supports financial reparations for the descendants of slaves. “If you’ve been kicking someone to the ground — particularly if you’ve been kicking them to the ground for two and a half centuries — then you have a moral obligation to do two things,” she says. “No. 1 is to stop kicking. No. 2 is to say, ‘Here, let me help you up. We stopped kicking.’ ”
Williamson has often called for the formation of a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, and she wraps up her talk by articulating her position on national defense, describing 100 B-21 bombers the White House had ordered at a cost of $550 million each: “You think about what that $550 million could do for those chronically traumatized children. Your karmic fingerprint’s on that. The nation gets a karmic blowback from that.
“The only way to defeat dog whistles is to drown them out with angel forces.”
Snip.
Williamson found A Course in Miracles around the time of its publication, when she was, she says, “muddling through” her 20s, aimless and directionless. She has said she wasn’t ready the first time she picked it up, but about a year later, while working in the bookshop at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, she was; she started lecturing about it, initially at the suggestion of the society’s president. It was the height of the AIDS crisis, and there were a whole lot of people looking, and hoping, for miracles. By the mid-’80s, Williamson had a local following, particularly among the gay men most devastated by AIDS. The word on the street was that a woman was proselytizing a nonjudgmental God who “loved you no matter what,” and the audiences came.
Her own first book, published in 1992, was called A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, and her subsequent books have been built on its philosophy as well, including A Course in Weight Loss: 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever, which suggests that “a way to repair a broken childhood is to allow God to re-parent you,” as well as pasting photographs of your face onto photographs of hot bodies and then taping them up around your house. In A Return to Love, Williamson, channeling the self-doubt of her reader, asks, “Who am I to be brilliant, talented, gorgeous, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.”
Williamson grew up in Texas, the Jewish daughter of an immigration lawyer (she has said that if her Jewish education had been stronger, she might have been a rabbi). She left Texas for Pomona College, and after two years of studying philosophy, she dropped out and moved to New Mexico, where she took some classes at UNM and lived in a geodesic dome. Two years after that, as Beto O’Rourke would do 20 years later, Williamson moved to New York with dreams of singing on a stage. In her books, she describes a period of dissatisfaction and unhappiness and hints at addictions but does not make the circumstances explicit. “I sank deeper and deeper into my neurotic patterns,” she writes in A Return to Love, “seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract me from myself.” She acknowledges a “nervous breakdown” and that she was “addicted to her own pain.” She is, like Cory Booker, vague about her personal life. She has described an early marriage as “the best weekend I ever had,” and when it comes to the father of her daughter, a 29-year-old Ph.D. candidate in London, she says simply, “I don’t go there.”
The O’Rourke comparison is interesting, with early aimlessness as the most defining character trait. But in the unlikely event she does become the nominee, expect her vague early history to be dragged into the light very quickly. In a bit of bicoastal synchronicity, she also gets a Los Angeles Magazine profile:
A cynic might interpret her presidential bid as the world’s most expensive book tour, but she insists she’s legit. Her last time at the campaign rodeo left her finishing fourth out of 16 candidates. “When that was over,” she confesses, sipping an Arnold Palmer at her campaign’s temporary HQ at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, “I felt like I’d scratched whatever political itch I’d come down with. So I was surprised—and somewhat inwardly jolted—by this presidential impulse that emerged in 2017. It was either a moment of clarity or a moment of craziness. “Then the New Age practicing Jew explains: “The Yiddish word meshuga means both ‘inspired’ and ‘crazy.’ Look, I think we need a political visionary right now more than we need a political mechanic.”
Here’s a Daily Beast piece calling her “a dangerous wacko” for her anti-vaccination stance. The writer’s not wrong, but he’s swatting a butterfly with a sledgehammer.
Yang’s campaign, centered on his proposal to provide all American adults with a universal basic income of $12,000 a year until they’re eligible for Medicare, has attracted support from young progressives, a fair amount of libertarians, and despite his disavowals, even some white nationalists. He’s drawn thousands to his rallies across the country and inspired meme-filled Yang Gang anthems on YouTube. Yang blew past the 65,000-donor mark in March and told me he’s already closing in on the 130,000-contributor threshold the DNC set for its debates in the fall. He regularly hits 1 percent—and occasionally a bit higher—in the polls, and while he’s not threatening Biden’s front-runner status, Yang consistently registers in the top half of the crowded Democratic field, ahead of more established names like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York; Julián Castro, the former federal housing secretary; and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Yang’s website features an eclectic mix of 104 policy proposals, among them Medicare for All; term limits for members of Congress and the Supreme Court; statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.; a call for “empowering MMA fighters” and to pay NCAA student athletes; “free marriage counseling for all”; and the elimination of the penny. (He’s also come out against male circumcision.) But the centerpiece—indeed, the entire premise of Yang’s candidacy—is his embrace of a universal basic income, or what he calls the “freedom dividend.” (“It tests well on both sides of the aisle,” he told me of the branding.)
It is Yang’s answer to what he sees as the biggest, and most inevitable, threat facing the American economy, and a large part of the reason that Trump was elected in 2016: automation. The retail sector, call centers, fast-food chains, the trucking industry—all those job engines will be crushed in the coming years by advances in technology, Yang said, necessitating not only a government rescue of displaced workers but a reorientation of the federal safety net. By 2030, he told me, 20 to 30 percent of all jobs could be subject to automation: “No one is talking about it, and we’re getting dragged down this immigrant rabbit hole by Trump.”
And illegal aliens taking entry level jobs aren’t impacting legal American citizens right now? Americans lacking jobs right now don’t have the luxury of worrying about the Looming Robot Menace. “Some Asian Americans are excited about Andrew Yang. Others? Not so much. An April analysis of donor data found that Yang has received about $120K from Asian Americans, placing fifth out of 14 candidates examined.” That study has him behind Booker, Gabbard, and Harris.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running:
The lineup for the first two debates are set, Warren pulls ahead of Sanders for second place in early states, Castro and Klobuchar can’t even crack the top three in their own states, and Gabbard’s childhood in a white surfer dude’s Hari Krishna cult. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
For those who missed Saturday’s post, the DNC debates are set, with Warren, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobucher, Castro, Ryan, Gabbard, Inslee, de Blasio and Delaney debating June 26, while Biden, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, Yang, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Bennet, Williamson and Swalwell are going at it June 27. Bullock, Moulton, Gravel and Messam are left out in the cold.
Polls
UT/Texas Tribune (Texas primary): Biden 23, O’Rourke 15, Warren 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 8, Harris 5, Castro 3, Gabbard 3, Booker 1, Delaney 1, Gillibrand 1, Inslee 1, Klobucher 1, Swalwell 1. Castro trying Gabbard for 7th in his home state is a pretty clear sign he’s going nowhere.
Former Representative Beto O’Rourke’s campaign rented a taco truck and dished out free chorizo. Senator Amy Klobuchar’s gang rattled little white bells. Former Representative John Delaney’s team had a bagpiper and a mini blimp overhead. Some of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s supporters wore bright feather boas, with a few women dancing up and down the street playing Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” on a portable speaker. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg hosted a barbecue at a park and played keys with a local band while wearing sunglasses. Senator Bernie Sanders marched from a McDonald’s alongside striking workers and activists.
Interviews with more than a dozen strategists and organizers revealed rising alarm at the lack of attention being paid to Latinos in swing states where they could decide the outcome of the Democratic primary and the general election. Trump is counting on a slice of the Latino electorate to back him, announcing aggressive outreach plans to keep states like Florida in his column.
But if Democrats fail to counter those efforts — by energizing younger Latinos and reaching members of the community who feel estranged by the president — those voters may simply sit out the election.
I get the impression that Democrats feel their illegal alien Hispandering is all the outreach they need to Hispanic American citizens. I suspect they’re wrong.
Castro was the first Democratic hopeful to issue an immigration plan and has visited Nevada the most, but his inability to eclipse low-single-digits has troubled activists. Elizabeth Warren has placed nearly 30 staffers in Nevada and is working to hire Latino interns and to set up caucus trainings in Latino communities. Cory Booker is doing Latino outreach through social media as well as digital and TV, notably appearing on the Univision show “Despierta America” the day he announced.
Harris, whose campaign declined to say how many people it has in Nevada, has prioritized hiring Spanish-speaking organizing staff in the state and rolled out a paid fellowship program. She caught the attention of activists for providing headphones with real-time Spanish translation at an early Nevada town hall. Pete Buttigieg has no staffers on the ground, but his constituency director is Latino, and the campaign plans to hire a person dedicated to outreach to the Latino community.
Front-runner Joe Biden has just four people in Nevada and has visited the state once. His campaign website, however, does provide a full Spanish translation. Some of the Latino operatives said they’re eager to see whether he tailors his speeches more to the experiences of black and Latino populations, in addition to white working-class voters.
“What I have seen from Joe Biden is that he is running a campaign reminiscent of 1992 or 1993, the courting of the suburban white voter,” Salgado said.
Isabel Aldunate, a Biden campaign spokeswoman, said: “Vice President Biden committed from Day One that Latinos will have a voice at the highest level of this campaign.”
Sanders’ campaign would not disclose how many organizers it has in Nevada, but an adviser said its field staff would grow exponentially in the coming weeks. His pending immigration plan is being co-written by three undocumented immigrants and the campaign is collaborating with activist organizations on it. Ten percent of Sanders’ staff at its national headquarters are Dreamers or immigrants, according to the campaign.
“It’s the backbone of this campaign to reach out to Latinos and immigrants and disenfranchised communities of all color,” said Chuck Rocha, a top adviser to Sanders.
But the lack of an immigration plan from all but three Democrats — Castro, O’Rourke and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee — is a troubling indicator, the Latino operatives said. Trump has made clear that he intends to run on an anti-immigration platform again, and Democrats have yet to show they’ll have an effective response.
And by “anti-immigration” they, of course, mean “anti-illegal alien.”
With millions of dollars on the line, top New York donors are already beginning to pick favorites, and three candidates are generating most of the buzz: former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senator Kamala Harris of California and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.
It is, at first blush, an unusual grouping, considering that the mayor of New York City (Bill de Blasio), the state’s junior senator (Kirsten Gillibrand) and a neighboring senator with deep ties to New York’s elite (Cory Booker of New Jersey) are all in the race and vying for their money.
Interviews with two dozen top contributors, fund-raisers and political advisers on Wall Street and beyond revealed that while many are still hedging their bets, those who care most about picking a winner are gravitating toward Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, while donors are swooning over Mr. Buttigieg enough to open their wallets and bundling networks for him. These dynamics raise the prospect of growing financial advantages for some candidates and closed doors for others.
“There is going to be a real income inequality,” Steven Rattner, a Wall Street executive and Democratic donor, said of the coming fund-raising results for the second quarter, which covers April through June. “You are going to see a big separation between the rich and the poor.”
There are now 24 declared candidates seeking to cashier President Trump — almost enough for a full Major League Baseball roster—and the flimsy standards the party set to get a slot on stage will be met by almost all of them. Instead of substantive debates between the leading candidates, the party is going to get a chorus line of never-gonna-be-presidents yapping at each other for two hours.
Most of these people have no chance of becoming the nominee. They know it. The Democratic National Committee knows it. And the top tier candidates know it too. The debates should be structured as such, rather than like cattle-call auditions for The Voice.
It is understandable, after the unity-destroying trainwreck of the 2016 primary, that the DNC didn’t want to appear to be needlessly excluding particular candidates so early in the process. But their rules for making the first two rounds of debates in June and July — 65,000 individual donations with 200 or more donors from each of at least 20 states, or hitting 1 percent or higher in three or more qualifying polls — turned out to be Maginot Line inadequate. With the increasing ease of dropping a few bucks into a campaign and the 24/7 attention already given to the 2020 election, it was inevitable that basically anyone with even the slightest national profile or resources could meet one of these two bars.
“A new poll from the Black Economic Alliance of 1,003 black Americans found that between 27% and 33% of those surveyed “have reservations” about or are “very uncomfortable” with Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Pete Buttigieg as presidential candidates.” That’s a weird way to phrase things, as Sanders (31%) and Harris (27%) fall into the same range.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe?Still dithering. Says Hollywood should “stay and fight” in Georgia rather than boycott it over abortion. Pandering to local interests rather than the hard left base? That’s sort of a sign…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Yahoo finance interview and plugs a new book. Instead of telling you the title, I’d suggest checking the Barnes & Noble remainder table six months from now. “Bennet would rescind some of the Republican tax cuts from 2017, and spend more on education and infrastructure.” Of course he would. Bennet gets an attack ad from conservative Americans for Prosperity over corporate welfare, mainly to soften him up for the 2022 senate race, since his presidential campaign is going nowhere.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He promises to cure cancer; if Trump had said that in 2015 they’d still be crucifying him. The Washington Post puts up yet another “stop talking about electability and Joe Biden” piece, because we just haven’t had enough of those. It even quotes Amanda Marcotte, author of another piece on the same thing, because now even recycled garbage gets to be recycled again. “What “The West Wing” reveals about Joe Biden.” No, really, that’s a real CNN headline, and not an Onion or Babylon Bee parody. Polifact rates Biden’s statement that China has increased theft of U.S. technology under Trump as mostly true, but I would guess that it’s only they’ve been caught a lot more.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why you shouldn’t count Cory Booker out of the 2020 presidential race.” Why? “His steady strategy of hiring prominent political operatives and building powerful grassroots organizations in early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire could pay off big time months from now.” Maybe, maybe not, It’s not like the other candidates aren’t doing a lot of hiring in Iowa as well. Also this: “‘His team is playing the long game,’ added Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina Democratic consultant. ‘The worst thing you can do in a race like this is peak too soon.'” No, the worst you can do is fail to make any impression whatsoever. Gets a CNBC interview. “Of all the Democratic presidential candidates, none delivers a speech any better than Cory Booker.” Color me skeptical. “Cory Booker can blame his campaign’s irrelevancy on his school choice flip-flop.” Eh, probably not, though standing firm might have garnered him a little more black support in polls. But “It’s easy to see why Booker’s campaign hasn’t lifted off yet: He’s utterly unremarkable and has no real constituency among the Democratic base” is dead on…
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Gov. Bullock demands entry into first DNC debate.” People in Hell want ice-water, too. Gets a New York interview that’s mostly about being excluded. It’s like the coach of 20-18 college basketball team complaining that they really should have been included in the NIT…
Is it true that you speak Norwegian?
Ja, I am evasive in seven different languages.
How do you plan to tackle income inequality?
If I may, I’d like to speak to that very specific issue with a few glittering generalities.
Go on.
Freedom. Democracy. Bridges.
Care to elaborate?
Optimism. Honesty. A child’s lemonade stand.
You have my vote.
I know. If this piece were any fluffier, it’d have a thread count.
“Mayor Pete’s Foreign Policy: One Good Idea and Lots of Bad Ones. The good one is congress stepping up to its constitutional duty on war and piece. The bad ones are all leftwing boilerplate or vague generalities. He also says that the United States has had gay presidents before. The technical term for this theory is “talking out your ass.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a Fox townhall, which starts by him ignoring and deflecting a question about the Steele dossier. Has a plan to eliminate lead poisoning, which I’m sure will draw fire from those numerous pro-lead poisoning lobbyists.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got to be honest: I didn’t even expect him to make the debate stage, so his campaign has already exceeded my exceedingly low expectations. “New York Mayor Bill de Blasio takes his low popularity to the national stage.” “Bill de Blasio’s constituents appear to waver from being amused to appalled by his White House bid. Some of his past confidants have signaled they might sooner enlist with the LaRouche movement than take a job on his campaign.” More: “De Blasio shows every sign of suffering from a curse that has afflicted most every New York mayor who has aspired to higher office since 1868. The city’s tabloids are littered with the political carcasses of mayors whose aspirations were crushed as soon as they tried to set foot outside the city.” Also:
It doesn’t help that De Blasio has a penchant for self-inflicted wounds. He’s so loathed by New York’s police union that when he visited South Carolina, the union’s president warned the sister organization down South that De Blasio would be “an unmitigated disaster… for any American who wants a functioning government.” A pre-campaign launch event at Trump Tower went sideways when protesters — and the operator of the building’s sound system — outwitted the mayor and the media dismissed the effort as opportunistic and incompetent.
De Blasio’s actual launch was spoiled when invitations went out for an event in Iowa that listed him as already in the race, albeit with his name spelled wrong (something that happens a lot to the mayor).
Inside, de Blasio receives an endorsement, his first, from the Orangeburg mayor and lays out his case for why he, the 24th Democrat and sixth* white straight man in a row to declare a run for president, deserves their vote, having brought paid sick leave, higher wages, and universal prekindergarten to New York. “And when we put forward a nominee who has actually done things for working people,” he says, “working people are going to believe again!” He gets the kind of enthusiastic reception you’d never see at home, where he remains dogged by questions big and small: from violating ethics rules at his nonprofit; to his gym routine; to missing a 9/11 memorial commemoration; to rooting for the Red Sox; to his absence from City Hall; to the way he eats pizza.
Afterward, in the church basement, the mayor holds a press conference with just three reporters present; an aide pointedly ignores the one from New York to call on one with the Times and Democrat, a 7,000-circulation local newspaper, who asks the mayor to expound on the virtues of visiting South Carolina.
De Blasio would avoid the city press corps entirely if he could. The relations between them are way past repair, with reporters in New York finding him self-righteous, smug, with an inflated sense of his own importance, and he finding them in thrall to their corporate masters, in search of political gossip and cheap jokes about groundhogs.
But the derision the city’s press has for de Blasio has seeped upward into the wider culture. “De Blasio PAC Spends $30 Million on Ads Urging Candidate Not to Embarrass Self by Running,” read a recent headline in The Onion. After noting that the mayor was polling at zero percent in New Hampshire, Stephen Colbert cracked, “He has nowhere to go but home.” Even Lloyd Blankfein piled on, tweeting, “On the bright side, if DeB gets elected prez, we New Yorkers will lose his undivided attention a year ahead of schedule.”
“I look forward to laying out how my health care plan – ‘BetterCare’ – is both superior health care policy, and a much smarter way forward, than Senator Sanders plan, Medicare for All,” Delaney wrote on Friday.
Delaney had a similar message for the California Democratic Party’s convention earlier this month. He’s all for universal health care, he assured his audience, but Medicare for All is the wrong way to achieve it. It’s just “not good politics,” he said. He was booed and an unimpressed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who had heard enough of his moderate takes, asked him to “sashay away” from the race.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Polifact profile that contains little new. She gets a Wall Street Journal profile (alternate source). She “staunchly” opposes impeachment and decries identity politics, both of which make her stand out in this crowd. Says she’s getting a boost from the Rogan interviews. But the most notable news is a long, interesting piece on her childhood as part of (to quote the piece) the “alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”
When FiveThirtyEight asked 60 Democratic Party activists whom they didn’t want to win, Tulsi Gabbard came in first out of 17 candidates, a poll she used to rile up her own intensely motivated supporters, who tend to identify, proudly, as anti-Establishment outsiders. In May, Joe Rogan, whose podcast is listened to millions of times each month by MMA fans, stoner bros, and self-styled freethinkers, chose his candidate. “Tulsi Gabbard’s my girl,” he said. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it.”
Snip. About the white “surfer dude” guru her parents followed:
In 1970, the Honolulu Advertiser published a piece called “One Man Rules Haiku Krishnaites,” with the subhead “Absolute power of devotees.” In the photo beside the piece, [cult leader Chris] Butler is seated shirtless and smoking, hair skimming his shoulders and a sarong around his waist, staring alluringly into the distance, a mischievous smile on his face. It is the expression of less a guru than a playboy, and this is how Advertiser reporter Janice Wolf depicts him, a handsome dictator with the ability to hypnotize the two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds who live with him in his Quonset hut. One of the girls, an 18-year-old who also happened to have the Sanskrit name Tulsi, says he arranged her marriage to another member of the group. She and another girl, who say they would kill for him, describe his teachings. Among them: “Flowers scream when they’re picked. So do trees when they’re trimmed.” (“Tulsi and Boni were sitting on the lawn chewing blades of grass when they said this,” notes Wolf.)
Butler taught vegetarianism, sexual conservatism, mind-body dualism, and disinterest in the material world. He taught a virulent homophobia, skepticism of science, and the dangers of public schools. He had been associated with Hare Krishna, and in fact claimed to have been given his Sanskrit name, Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, by the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, but by the time he encountered the Gabbards, he’d started his own group. His teachings revolved around worship of Krishna but differed from those of Hare Krishna, in that he instructed his followers to learn from only a single guru — himself — and did not require them to shave their heads or wear robes. The lack of formal dress allowed the group an anonymity he encouraged. He forbade them from visiting India, which is not typical of Hare Krishna, and, also against Hare Krishna practice, married. His wife was one of his followers, Wai Lana, a popular yoga instructor who later had a long-running instructional yoga series on public television. (Abraham, Tulsi’s husband, has helped with filming Wai Lana’s videos; his mother also works for her.) Whenever Butler traveled, he’d have the homes he stayed in lined with tinfoil, to protect against electromagnetic radiation.
Snip.
It was the 1980s. Greg says he and Tulsi attended these gatherings together, and years later, when Abraham was born, he’d see him too. (Tulsi says that she did not attend gatherings like these.) Waiting four or five or six hours for Siddhaswarupananda’s entrance built a kind of thrilling pressure, and Greg remembers Sundays as “incredibly theatrical.” Devotees with radios would place themselves at various high points along the beach, operating as a security force. “You’re waiting hours and hours for this dude to show up, and then when he does, people go absolutely wild — it’s all your family and all your friends singing and dancing and chanting, you’re so excited,” says Greg. The guru would then address the crowd. He was good with the pregnant pause. He had the kind of easy confidence you’d expect from Krishna’s representative on Earth. He was also vulgar and vindictive. “He would start excoriating people for fucking up. Sound systems not working, cups of water not being cleaned, people dressed funny, driving poorly. He would publicly mock people. And when he would do that — that’s a form of Krishna’s mercy.” Everyone I spoke to who was raised in the group described, as children, hearing Butler call men “faggots” and women “cunts.” One time in Malibu, Greg recalls, Butler had passed a man on the beach in a thong on his way to the gathering; Butler then described in graphic detail what that man allegedly wanted his “boyfriend” to do to him. “That’s vivid as a kid,” says Greg, whose name is not really Greg; he does not want to be cut off from his family.
Back in the ’70s, Butler went by the name “Sai Young,” a name he possibly picked because he was a gifted baseball player who had hoped to go pro. In their boyhood, according to his estranged brother Kurt, Chris was the handsome, popular one. Their father, a family physician named Willis Butler, took them, their mother, and their siblings to protest Vietnam well before it was socially acceptable to do so. Kurt remembers the whole family standing along a sidewalk on the edge of the University of Hawaii campus, holding signs that read stop the war and stop the bombing. From their cars, people threw garbage at the family. They yelled things: “Losers,” “Love it or leave it,” “Fucking commies.”
Their father was, in fact, a communist. The Butler patriarch loved the Soviet Union, thought North Korea a workers’ paradise. When Kurt brought home a geography book from school that mentioned political repression in the USSR, his father called it “lying propaganda.” When, as an adolescent, Chris pointed out that the Viet Cong had committed atrocities, his father wouldn’t hear it. Chris sought refuge in psychedelics, Kurt wrote in an email to me, then in meditation. He began writing poetry. He began giving meditation classes. “The classes,” says Kurt, “gradually evolved into a full-fledged cult.”
It’s so frigging weird you really need to read the whole thing, but it’s peripheral enough to the 2020 campaign that I don’t want to excerpt any more here. But it does give the impression of a woman who had no strong political commitments outside of the cult she grew up in until she joined the army…which was two years after her first election as a state representative.
This isn’t going well for Gillibrand. She has failed at some basics. For someone who’s always been a voracious fundraiser, she raised just $3 million in the first quarter of the year, less than half of what South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg raised. And she was weeks behind the self-help author Marianne Williamson and the automation alarmist Andrew Yang in getting the 65,000 donors needed to guarantee her a spot on the Democratic debate stage later this month. (Her campaign announced she finally passed that mark last weekend.)
Gillibrand is a United States senator from New York, and this is the best she can do.
She also compared pro-life supporters to racists.
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. He’s raising money for Democrats in Florida, but a lot of it is going to travel expenses. Unless something happens, I’m going to move him down to the “Out of the Running” list next week.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Kamala Harris drops in the polls as Democratic rivals grab the spotlight.” More: “Her struggles were underscored this week when a new poll from UC Berkeley and The Los Angeles Times showed the senator in fourth place in California, her home state. At 13 percent, she’s even dropped below the cutoff for winning statewide delegates.” She says she doesn’t need any of that stinking congressional approval to rule by executive decree as President, and promises more soft illegal alien amnesty.
“The Democratic field has not only failed to oppose Sen. Sanders’ agenda, but they have actually pushed to embrace it,” he said at the National Press Club. “Democrats must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists.”
Nobody will confuse Hickenlooper for a disciple of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. He advocates what he calls “regulated capitalism,” pushed for several major tax-hike measures while he was governor, and proposes spending $100 billion annually in “climate financing” to developing nations.
But he has a long history of supporting fossil fuel drilling. He opposes the absurdly expensive “Green New Deal,” “Medicare for all,” and supposedly “free” college for all (meaning financed by taxpayers). In May, he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he declared he is “running to save capitalism.”
Don’t take this as an endorsement of Hickenlooper — he leans too far leftward on far too many issues for me. But he’s kind of the canary in the coal mine. If Hickenlooper’s modest nods to centrism are no longer welcome in the Democratic Party, the country is in trouble. It is not democratic socialism but democratic capitalism that has made this the most economically powerful nation on earth. While Communist and socialist nations like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela mire their people in collapse and despair, the world’s free economies thrive.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “DNC Committee Throws Bound Jay Inslee Onto Melting Iceberg Before Pushing Him Out To Sea.” Inslee’s not winning friends back home in Washington state: “Governing by phone: Inside Inslee’s hectic first months on 2020 trail.”
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s coming for your health insurance. The Decline and Fall of Bernie Sanders. “The Dems, even the hard lefties, are looking for electability. And nobody really believes Bernie is it. Not against Biden. So portions of his base are switching to candidates who seemed like they might have a shot at breaking out, like Elizabeth Warren. That seems almost as delusional, but Warren, with her barrage of 5-year-plans, has swallowed a chunk of Bernie’s support.” Here’s a lefty complaining that he’ll get Elizabeth Warren elected by just not being socialist enough.
In March, Warren demonstrated her appetite for challenging the economic and political dominance of corporate titans by going directly at America’s biggest tech companies. In a speech in Long Island City, Queens — where local protesters demanded that Amazon drop its plan to build a big new campus — Warren connected the companies’ success at smothering start-up rivals to their influence in Washington. She remarked dryly that the large amounts that businesses like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spend on lobbying is a “good return on investment if they can keep Washington from enforcing the antitrust laws.” She wants to use those laws to break up the companies instead — a move that no other major American politician had proposed.
After Warren started talking about the four tech giants, along with other critics, the Trump administration let it be known that it was scrutinizing them for potential antitrust violations. Conservatives have suspected social media platforms of bias against them for years, and with concerns about privacy violations escalating, big tech was suddenly a bipartisan target. Warren has specifics about how to reduce their influence; she wants to undo the mergers that allowed Facebook, for example, to snap up WhatsApp, rather than compete with it for users. Warren could unleash the power to bring major antitrust prosecutions without Congress — an answer to gridlock in Washington that’s crucially woven into some of her other plans too. (Warren also favors ending the filibuster in the Senate.) Warren wants to prevent companies that offer an online marketplace and have annual revenue of $25 billion or more from owning other companies that sell products on that platform. In other words, Amazon could no longer sell shoes and diapers and promote them over everyone else’s shoes and diapers — giving a small business a fair chance to break in.
Warren’s poll numbers have steadily climbed; in early June, two polls, one national and one in Nevada, had her in second, behind Joe Biden but ahead of Sanders, for the first time. With the help of advisers working from her headquarters, in Boston, Warren has been releasing a torrent of detailed policy proposals. She has issued a plan to dramatically reduce student debt and to offer free tuition at public colleges; a plan to unwind large agriculture conglomerates in order to make the market more equitable for family farms; a plan to require large corporations to pay more in federal taxes; a plan to dismantle the behemoth technology companies and regulate them like utilities; and new legislation to address opioid addiction, modelled on a bill passed by Congress in 1990 to combat the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. She has announced an “Economic Patriotism” plan, intended to create opportunities for American workers, and has issued proposals targeted at Donald Trump, including one that would make it permissible to indict a sitting President.
Together, the proposals promise a new level of government intervention in almost every aspect of economic life. Some of the ideas are pragmatic; others seem aimed more at marketing than at implementation. Regardless, “I have a plan for that” has become a rallying cry for her campaign—an echo of the way that “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a tagline for Warren supporters after Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, used it to describe Warren’s refusal to stand down during the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions, Trump’s former Attorney General. In May, the comedian Ashley Nicole Black wrote, on Twitter, “Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?” Warren responded, “DM me and let’s figure this out.” Even Tucker Carlson, the right-wing Fox News host, recently opened his show with an eight-minute monologue touting Warren’s Economic Patriotism plan, saying that she sounded like “Donald Trump at his best.”
The 2020 campaign is now only a couple of weeks away from its first Democratic debates, on June 26 and 27, in Miami. So it’s the right time for candidates to begin rolling out their policy platforms.
And none of them, not even the famously substantive Elizabeth Warren, has released more plans than Andrew Yang.
Yang is a former technology entrepreneur who has attracted more than 100,000 individual donors — enough to qualify him for inclusion in the first debates — in large part because of his detailed platform. His website includes more than 100 proposals.
Many of them revolve around Yang’s view that the American economy no longer works for the majority of people. He has proposed a universal basic income — $1,000 monthly checks for all adults — as well as more affordable college, a financial-transaction tax and rebuilding infrastructure. He has dozens of smaller ideas, too: free marriage counseling; more funding for autism; a ban on airlines removing passengers when they overbook flights; the return of congressional earmarks; and the extension of Daylight Saving Time to the entire year.
He’s also come out in favor of several ideas that regular newsletter readers will recognize: Supreme Court term limits, ranked-choice voting and statehood for Washington and Puerto Rico.
Finally, the speed and efficiency of federal bureaucracy can be extended to marriage counseling!
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running:
Biden flip-flops, the race tightens in Iowa, Bennet and Gillibrand qualify for the debates, de Blasio and Messam earn Iowa goose eggs, and Swalwell continues his All Cringe All The Time Campaign. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Des Moines Register/Mediacom/CNN Iowa Poll: Biden 24, Sanders 16, Warren 15, Buttigieg 14, Harris 7, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2. Biden has come back to the pack some, and that’s the best showing for Warren and Buttigieg I’ve seen in any poll. Also: “Two candidates — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam — were not listed by a single poll respondent as either first or second choice for president.”
The Economist/YouGov (page 95): Biden 27, Sanders 16, Warren 11, Buttigieg 9, Harris 8, Booker 2, De Blasio 2, O’Rourke 2, Bullock 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Hickenlooper 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1. 2% for De Blasio is 2% more than I (or just about anybody else) ever thought he would get. Nobody knows nothin’.
The Democratic presidential contenders are ready to break the bank with expensive policy proposals that would add trillions of dollars to the deficit if enacted.
The 2020 hopefuls are angling to one-up each other with big policy ideas that would overhaul the U.S. health care system, address climate change and provide free college tuition or erase student debt.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s “Global Climate Mobilization” plan, hailed by environmental activists as the gold standard, would cost the U.S. government $3 trillion over the next decade.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (Mass.) proposal to eliminate tuition at public colleges and erase existing student debt carries a $1.25 trillion price tag.
And Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) “Medicare for All” bill, co-sponsored by four other 2020 Democrats, would require $32 trillion in government spending, according to one study.
Most of the contenders (not including Biden or Sanders) appeared on the same stage in Iowa, with Warren and Booker marshelling the most supporters at the event.
Some Democratic presidential campaigns are like the protagonist in an M. Night Shyamalan movie: They’re dead already, they just don’t know it. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say they were never really alive.
The first Democratic presidential primary debates will be held in two weeks. The threshold for participation is exceptionally low, particularly for any candidate who announced near the beginning of the year: Either reach just 1 percent in three surveys approved by the Democratic National Committee or have 65,000 or more donors that include 200 people from at least 20 states. If you think reaching that threshold is difficult, keep in mind, this limit has already been reached by Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, John Delaney, and Irving Schmidlap.
(Okay, I threw Irving Schmidlap in there just to see if you were paying attention.)
The latest polls show Schmidlap already running well ahead of Messam and Swalwell.
If people wonder why complaints about fairness are so frequently ignored, it’s because of circumstances like this one. The DNC is being really generous, their thresholds are low, and if you can’t reach one percent — one percent! In either national or early primary state polls! — then no, you really don’t belong up there on that debate stage. You’re not supposed to run for president because you want a national reputation; you’re supposed to have a national reputation before you run for president. Presidential campaigns are not supposed to be publicity stunts or longer book tours. If you want to be the next commander in chief, I don’t want to year you whining about how hard all of this is. The job that you claim to be qualified for is going to have much tougher challenges than reaching one percent in a survey or attracting 130,000 donors.
A pen of donkeys will paw summer’s debate stage. Entrepreneur Yang figures his young grassroots fund-raising translates to a win. Lotsa luck. In BC, gladiators in Roman amphitheaters fought live animals. In 2020, Tiger Trump will swallow this creature like he’s granola.
NYC’s savvy dude mayor, a “much-derided presidential candidate,” grabs attention — but, bleat the pros, “he’s running because he’s got no more day job.” Even Kevin Costner would nix playing him in a movie.
Our only local woman to maybe break the gents barrier is Laurie Metcalf, who plays Hillary on B’way. Cutlery is out for struggling Kirsten Gillibrand, who once said she’s not around the state enough because she can’t be everywhere since she has children to raise. Now she’s around the country. So, pros ask, what’s with those kids?
Former frontrunner Bernie Sanders’ base gets youngisher and whitisher. He’s sinking into the lavatory.
Grampa Joe Boredom? Recalling his multiple heresies and zero accomplishments, the antis plan to make Bidenburgers out of him.
Don’t book on Booker. Wall Street and Silicon Valley keep Cory funded but, despite showing African-Americans he’s their Medicine Man, he’s trailing.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. Late start and zero name ID. While Montana made statehood 1889, the only other VIP from there was Gary Cooper. Also Dana Carvey.
A chorus line of other whocares from whoknowswhere are also scratching around for whoknowswhy. They figure this eventually grabs them a book deal, speaking gig, bigtime p.r. or a free trip to Times Square.
Supposedly 13 will be propped up for June 26’s debate: Biden, Bernie, Buttigieg, Beto, Booker, Kamala, Klobuchar, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard (who??), Jay Inslee, Marianne Williamson, Warren — and Yang — plus a partridge in a pear tree — with de Blasio and Gillibrand, still iffy.
Beto O’Rourke. Do not bet-o on him. Waning in the polls. Anyway, who cares.
Elizabeth Warren wows wonks with policy proposals and, for some reason, has a strong left-leaning organization in Iowa. But there’s also her “likability” — of which much there isn’t.
Kamala Harris. Trailing. Main asset is strategic. If she does well in South Carolina, she might twinkle in home state California’s early primary.
Buttigieg. Age 37. I mean, please. My pedicurist has a better shot. His college-educated white voters met the minimal polling threshold, but his résumé in public office is smaller than mine.
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. I mean, please. Paris Hilton has a better shot.
If Hilton jumped in tomorrow, she’d be in the top eight easy…
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? “The Stacey Abrams Myth Becomes the Democratic Catechism.”
The claims of voter suppression rest primarily on the fact that as Georgia secretary of state, Kemp enforced a statute passed by a Democratic-majority legislature and signed by a Democratic governor in 1997. It required the voting rolls to be periodically purged to remove names of voters who were dead, or who had moved away or were incarcerated. Under this law, 600,000 names of people who hadn’t voted in the last three elections were removed from the rolls in 2017 by Kemp’s office.
Those who were removed got prior notification in the mail about the impending purge, and they were given a menu of options to retain their registration. Moreover, it took four years to complete the process by which a name was removed. The reason so many names were taken off in 2017 was that a lawsuit by the Georgia NAACP had delayed the routine enforcement of the law for years before the organization eventually lost in the U.S. Supreme Court.
If you assume that most of the 600,000 were Democrats who were denied the right to vote — rather than voters who were deceased or who had moved or been jailed — that gives credibility to Abrams’s story. But there aren’t many people stepping forward since November 2018 to say they were wrongfully removed from the rolls, let alone the tens or hundreds of thousands necessary to substantiate Abrams’s claim that the election was stolen.
The other argument that purportedly backs up the stolen-election claim is that lengthy lines caused by the closing of 212 precincts in the state since 2012 deterred Georgia voters from turning out. But Kemp had nothing to do with that, since all decisions on consolidating voting stations were made by county officials. Which means if there were fewer precincts and longer lines in Democratic-majority counties in Georgia, it was almost certainly due to the decisions made by local Democrats, not Kemp or a national GOP conspiracy.
When examined soberly, Abrams’s claims evaporate. Kemp’s win was no landslide, but his 1.4 percent margin of victory didn’t even give her the right to demand a legal recount. Demographic changes may mean that Georgia is trending away from the red-state status it has had in the last decade, but Stacey Abrams lost because Republicans still can turn out majorities there even in years when the odds favor Democrats.
But by continuing to swear to the lie that the election was stolen, Biden, Buttigieg, and every other Democrat who repeats that claim while paying court to Abrams and hoping to win African-American votes are poisoning the well of American democracy.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He met the polling criteria for the first debate. “Bennet appears to be the 21st Democratic candidate to qualify for the first debates under one of the criteria, according to an estimated count from The Hill. So far only 13 appear to have met both criteria.” Five takeaways from his CNN town hall. Sanders goes too far on Medicare for all, Bennet backs the Georgia abortion boycott, opposes impeachment, criticizes Trump’s Mexico tariffs, and makes vague noises about building a “bigger coalition.” Among who? Gun owners? Pro-life advocates? Coal miners? People who want to stop illegal aliens from crossing the border? I’m sure they’ll all be just itching to pull that (D) lever. “Bennet hires Iowa state director, a former Indiana congressional campaign manager,” one Brian Peters.
The last month has featured the former vice president switching his stance on Hyde no fewer than three times — he tried to explain away one of his U-turns by claiming he’d “misheard” the reporter’s question — before finally settling on opposition to it. He explained his final decision in a tweet that could just as easily have been written by an activist from NARAL.
Biden’s rejection of his decades of support for Hyde betrays the reality: He was never actually pro-life. Though he has long had a reputation as “personally opposed” to abortion on religious grounds, his political actions have merited no such label. (Nor has he ever offered a sufficient explanation for why a man who believes, for whatever reason, that abortion kills innocent human beings ought to refrain from legislating that belief.)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He unveiled a stupid and unworkable housing subsidy idea. Cory Booker 2012: “Listen to me, the people dying in Chicago, the people dying in Newark are not being done with law-abiding gun owners. We do not need to go after the guns. A law-abiding, mentally stable American, that’s not America’s problem.” Now? Not so much.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mr. Zero Percent protests too much. “The presidential campaign of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is fundraising off claims that Republican forces fear his candidacy — even though the attacks are to damage him in a Senate run if, as expected, he drops out of the White House race.” Also: “Jon Tester endorses fellow Montana Democrat Steve Bullock for president.” Because that was his problem, not enough endorsements from Montana.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana and presidential hopeful, and his husband have over $130,000 in student loan debt, according to financial disclosures reviewed by the AP on Sunday. A campaign spokesperson would not tell AP whether the loans belong to Buttigieg, his husband, or both.” Hey, that means I get to recycle this from last week:
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He flips reality on its head by insisting that antisemitism is a right-wing problem. “And so, to cope with the cognitive dissonance involved in Jews getting beaten up in deep blue New York, naturally he comforts himself with the belief that this is a right-wing problem. Somehow.” And that piece embeds this tweet:
“The New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council announced Wednesday that it is endorsing de Blasio and will send members to campaign for him in early voting states including New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina.” Bread, know thy butter…
Since there’s so many people running for President (& not enough for Senate), instead of obsessing over who‘s a “frontrunner,” maybe we can start w some general eliminations.
This awful, untrue line got boo’ed for a full minute.
Then he challenged her to a debate. Good job! If you can reach those Democrats that don’t want Occasional Cortex to be the face of their party, you might start registering in polls…
I thought “how can we tell that’s not an Apple store opening?” but I slowed down the video and, yes, at least one person is in a Tusli t-shirt.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She secured a spot in the first debate. “Over the weekend, we crossed 65,000 donors to our campaign—guaranteeing our spot at the first debates.” Really? Just now? A sitting senator from America’s fourth-most popular state, and it took her that long to cross the threshold. She unleashed a plan to legalize marijuana, which is possibly the first smart move she’s made in this campaign. (And how come pot-friendly governors Hickenlooper and Inslee aren’t making the devil’s lettuce issues in their campaigns?) “Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: Boneless Wonder.” Sample: “Kirsten Gillibrand announced on National Public Radio that the Church is wrong about abortion, homosexuality and the male priesthood.” But other than that, she’s totally Catholic…
Many things, most of them unlikely, would have to transpire for former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel to win the Democratic nomination for president.
A few possibilities: All the other candidates drop out, and no successful write-in campaign is waged. A capricious President Trump orders a catastrophic invasion of another nation, lending massive credibility to Gravel’s perennial anti-war stance (he helped put the Pentagon Papers into the public record). The Democratic primary electorate all of a sudden decides that it would prefer an octogenarian candidate to the current septuagenarian front-runners. (Gravel is 89 years of age; meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is a youthful 77 years old, and Joe Biden is a spring chicken, at 76.)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He unveiled a plan for rural communities, which suggests he’s looking past the primary to the general election, which may not be the optimal strategy for someone currently topping out at 1%.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. His campaign is shaking its tiny fist at the DNC’s decision not to hold a climate change debate. The other Inslee news this week could be assembled from a book of Madlibs where the only words entered in every blank are “climate change.” (Example: “Inslee: Build U.S. foreign policy around climate crisis.”)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. That “zero people picked him or de Blasio” poll news is in fact the only Messam news I could locate this week. There’s an absence of evidence on his campaign, but there is evidence of absence…
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s all in on Iowa. “O’Rourke is also running a much more traditional Iowa campaign with a strong presence on the ground, probably only eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren’s efforts.” Heh: “Let’s hear it for the blank slate!” Unclear on the concept:
Beto O'Rourke on IA poll that has him at 2%: "There is a lot of time before the IA Caucus. We've never been guided by a poll before. If you were to look at the Texas Senate race the first couple of months after we were in, no poll was going to say that we were going to win that." pic.twitter.com/g2FNG7kacS
Sanders has changed the debate in great measure because he has never really changed himself. His consistency is the selling point—his mantras against billionaires stealing the American Dream, the system being rigged, working people needing to form a movement to take power back. And yet he is now running against nearly two dozen competitors, many of whom have chipped away at his distinctiveness by emulating his stances, and just being Bernie may not get the job done. Sanders is solidly in second place behind Biden in national and state polls. And while the movement he built in 2016 has proven durable, there are few signs that it’s growing. Between March and May, according to a national survey by Monmouth University, Sanders’ support dropped from 25% of likely Democratic votes to 15%, as several rivals increased their share.
There is a feeling in Sanders’ orbit that he will, in certain ways, have to evolve if he wants to do more than change the conversation. Tell his story more. Navigate the shoals of racial and gender politics with greater awareness of contemporary expectations and his own blind spots. Overcome his self-image of being a solitary outsider—alone, unheard, disrespected—and cultivate allies. “It’s one thing to talk to your 20% to 25% who are your core believers, but we’ve got to work on persuading people into the fold,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, told me. “And that’s why it takes, I believe, a continual evolution of the message, freshening up the message and also sharing more about him.”
See, Bernie just isn’t touchy-feely enough for today’s modern Democratic Party pieties:
After a few of these town halls, Sanders’ own stoicism makes more sense. He begins to seem almost a secular priest: People come to him with stories of despair, and he lifts their pain up into the air, to a place where it is no longer personal but something civic. He gives them the language and information to know it isn’t their fault. His speeches are like that hug in Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault; it’s not your fault. The system did this. Big corporations did this. A bought-and-paid-for government did this. He connects their pain to the pain of others, and in the process that pain is remade, almost transubstantiated, into a sweeping case against a corrupt system. The priest, in this metaphor, doesn’t reveal himself because his job is to float above his own feelings, own needs, own desire to be liked. His job is to make space for, make sense of and make use of your pain.
This covenant with his supporters is his great achievement. No rival for the Democratic nomination has anything quite like it. Even Steve Bannon, the right-wing populist who ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, admires it. Sanders’ agenda is “a hodgepodge of these half-baked socialist ideas that we’ve seen haven’t worked,” Bannon told me in his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, sitting in front of a painting on which the words Follow your dreams were written above a monkey sitting on a Coca-Cola box. But, he said, “Bernie has done a tremendous job of galvanizing a segment that hasn’t gone away. I mean, he has a real movement.”
Building a following fueled by pain and personal hardship is an especially big accomplishment for a candidate who is himself so emotionally inaccessible, reluctant to share more than the barest glimpses of his own history and inner life. “Not me. Us.” is his 2020 campaign slogan, and he means it. “Almost to a tee, what defines a politician is they love to tell their story,” Shakir told me. “He has absolutely zero inclination to do that. He abhors it.”
Sanders seems to believe the public doesn’t have a right to know him more intimately—even though there is abundant evidence that the essential character traits of our Presidents eventually shape all our lives: Bill Clinton’s appetites; George W. Bush’s certitude; Barack Obama’s instinct to hire bankers; Donald Trump’s narcissism. In our first interview, on a bench in the Des Moines airport, I asked Sanders a simple question: How did he first experience the idea that people blame themselves for systemic problems? “Well, before we get to me,” he said, “what the political revolution is about is the millions of people beginning to stand up …”
Many of Sanders’ advisers are eager for the Senator to get more personal.
And, of course, there’s the Old White Man issue for a party so blatantly racist aware of race as the Democratic Party circa 2019:
With Trump in the White House, Democrats cannot ignore Macomb. But there are other votes that need to be courted. Minorities and women, and black women especially, are the lifeblood of the modern Democratic Party—and for them, Sanders’ way of diluting the truth about Trump voters can be troubling.
The dilemma came to a head an hour later. We got off the bus at Detroit’s Sweet Potato Sensations, a bakery famous for its sweet-potato pies ($14 for a 9-in.). The audience was almost entirely African-American women. Sanders stood among them and took questions. A woman named Janis Hazel rose. She said she used to work for Representative John Conyers, a long-serving former House member from Michigan. Conyers (with Hazel’s assistance) had long ago proposed a bill mandating a commission to study how reparations for descendants of slavery might be undertaken in the U.S. Hazel asked Sanders whether he backed the idea, which Conyers had reintroduced each session until he resigned in 2017 over allegations of sexual harassment.
Before she could finish, Sanders cut her off, undermining the proposal by reminding people that it is merely for a “study.” She tried to complete the question, and again Sanders jumped in. “Well, I’ve said that if the Congress passes the bill, I will sign it. It is a study.” He pivoted. “You know Jim Clyburn from South Carolina? Clyburn has a bill which I like. He calls it ‘10-20-30.’” The plan calls for 10% of all funds from certain federal programs to go to distressed communities to rebuild those communities.
Afterward, Hazel told me she felt Sanders avoided her question. As it is, he had only recently come around to his tepid support for studying reparations. And his irritation at being pinned down on the issue was revealing. The dismissal of a mere “study” suggested an unfamiliarity with what advocates for reparations seek: a program so sweeping it would be impossible to administer without years of forethought.
The interaction also called into question Sanders’ ability to navigate the complex social terrain that is the Democratic electorate in 2019. A room full of black women who didn’t seem bought into the Sanders agenda were trying to figure out, as all voters are, if he got them. There were a thousand ways in that moment to say, “Yes, I back reparations” or even, “No, I don’t, and here’s why,” and still convey your grasp of what lay beneath the question—the desire to be seen and reassured that your community wouldn’t be forgotten. But Sanders didn’t do that.
The Democrat who emerges to take on Trump in 2020 will have to compete for those Reagan Democrats and those black women, two tribes living in different worlds, a short distance apart on I-94. An issue like reparations is a perfect example of how difficult this can be; pleasing Detroit may hurt you a few exits to the north.
In presidential elections past, the tension between what Macomb wanted and what Detroit wanted tended to be resolved in Macomb’s favor. But 2020 seems unlikely to repeat that history. It is being called the “woke primary” by people on the Republican side, because of the early pressure on candidates to take positions on questions of race and gender and identity—questions that matter to people other than white working-class men. The high maternal mortality rate for black women. Transgender rights. The question of when physical contact between men and women escalates from friendly to predatory. The problem of combating hate crimes.
The woke primary is a challenge for Sanders. In part because he is an old-style leftist whose overriding lens is class, not identity. In part because woke culture often craves the kind of gesturemaking to which he’s allergic. And in part because Sanders seems to struggle with the expectation that a 77-year-old white guy needs to learn, evolve and prove that he “gets it,” even if he was at Dr. King’s march.
It seems a little early for this: “Is Bernie Sanders Finished? Democrats like him. They just show no signs of wanting to vote for him this time around.”
That said: I think it’s starting to sink in that Senator Bernie Sanders is right at the fringes of plausibility. At best.That’s what I’m seeing from the mainstream media, some liberal bloggers and sophisticated polling analysis. Recent Iowa polls show Sanders at about 15%, essentially in a three-person race for second place with Senator Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. That’s for a candidate who won half the vote there in 2016.And while Sanders is faring somewhat better nationally, that’s mainly because almost all the other candidates remain unknown to voters. As Nate Silver points out, only about 8% of Democrats say they’re definitely supporting Sanders. In other words, it’s entirely plausible that Sanders could fail to reach the delegate threshold in Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina (and possibly New Hampshire).
I’m no Sanders fan, but all that is based on a bad poll or two and nothing else, which is pretty much meaningless at this point. He’s being more aggressive in South Carolina than he was in 2016. He also scolded Walmart.
Eric Swalwell: "To my fellow candidates, I consider us all a part of being the Avengers. The Republicans in 2016, that was the Hunger Games. We are in this, and with your help and support, to save this country we love so much."
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Her slow but steady rise continues, and she appears to be eating into Sanders’ base. “Senator Warren’s ‘economic patriotism’ consists of calling the bosses at the Fortune 500 a**holes and then writing them a check for tens of billions of dollars. I suspect the gentlemen in pinstripes will find a way to endure the insult.” With all her plans, does Warren have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell? “If I’m still the majority leader of the Senate, think of me as the Grim Reaper…None of that stuff is going to pass. None of it.” Also, her campaign unionized.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of “all in on Iowa,” she moved to Des Moines. A bold move, but one when Chris Dodd did the same thing in 2007, it netted him 2% of the Iowa vote and zero delegates. Here are some excerpts from a Williamson speech that are half warmed-over “Democrats good, Trump bad” talking points and half something else:
Too often the Democrats have been the party that stands for the right thing, but still cozies up to the forces that do the wrong thing, thinking that that’s okay because once we get in power we will do the right thing, and then we naively think that that doesn’t smell to people, that the putrid stench of that more complicated corruption will not be wafting into the nostrils of the average voter.
In other words, too many Democrats are half-truth tellers, ladies and gentlemen, and Donald Trump will eat the half-truth tellers alive.
She also talks about Trump using persuasion in a way that sounds like a funhouse mirror distortion of Scott Adams’ explanations of Trump’s techniques: “Trump has spoken to a very dark and primal place within the human psyche, a place of fear that becomes like an emotional knot in people’s brains and this knot cannot be unraveled by mere intellectual or rationalistic argument for I assure you the part of the brain that rationally analyzes an issue is not the part of the brain that decides who to vote for.”
In November 2017, Yang registered his presidential bid with the Federal Election Commission. In April 2018, he published a book titled, “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future.” “We are in the third inning of the greatest technological and economic shift in human history,” Yang often says, arguing that job losses in swing states propelled Donald Trump to the presidency. To survive the invasion of intelligent machines, Yang argues, America needs an economic and social overhaul, which would be spurred by a government-sponsored universal payment of $1,000 a month to every American adult. Or, in the language of nerd: Yang is an underdog hero rising up to fight the robots and save humanity. His weapon: allowance for grown-ups.
Yang now leads thousand-person rallies on the regular. Fans wave signs that say “MATH” to support the self-proclaimed candidate of numbers and data — the guy who wants to Make America Think Harder. “I’m going to be the first president in history to use PowerPoint in the State of the Union,” Yang announced to a crowd in Seattle in early May. “How do you feel about that?” Cheers. “Yeah, break out the PowerPoint chant! No — don’t do it —”
Too late. Fists were already pumping in the air, demonstrating the demagogic potential of Microsoft Office Suite.
“Yes, this is the nerdiest presidential campaign in history,” a triumphant Yang shouted. “We did it!”
Another improbable thing Yang has done: catapulted himself, an entrepreneur with few claims to fame and no political experience, into the Democratic presidential conversation. After a viral campaign seeking $1 donations, Yang earned a place in the upcoming primary debates by accruing 65,000 individual donors two months ahead of the deadline. (He celebrated with a cartoon GIF of himself doing the robot amid cascading dollar bills.) CNN hosted a Yang town hall event in April. By the end of May, the polling average at RealClearPolitics showed Yang with 1 percent of the vote — which is small, yes, but puts him ahead of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), who has 0.4 percent, and not far behind such established politicians as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), who has 1.8 percent, and former Cabinet secretary Julián Castro, who has 1.2 percent.
Conservative columnist Matthew Walther has characterized Yang as “Ross Perot for millennials” — “a soft reboot of the Texan businessman’s maverick populist wonkery.” Yang, too, is an improvisational outsider with an out-of-nowhere campaign. But he is also the product of so many colliding forces in contemporary America that comparisons to anyone who came before him are kind of useless. Yang’s ascent from anonymity has been instantaneous in a way that can only exist in the age of social media. (His fans, who call themselves the Yang Gang, sometimes Photoshop him into robot-fighting scenes from science fiction.) His staff credits podcasts for building Yang’s die-hard base almost overnight. Digital media shapes Yang’s worldview and his self-presentation; his website’s prodigious policy section could be recast as a Facebook-friendly listicle, something like “108 Big Ideas That Could Save America Right Now.” (Yes, he really has 108 policy proposals. At least, he did as of press time; the number changes frequently.) His tone blends irony and earnestness in the manner of late-night political comedy. And the source of Yang’s relentless focus — universal basic income — is, at the moment, popular in future-minded circles that take cues from the likes of Pierre Omidyar, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Yang’s campaign belongs to a mode of popular American discourse that did not exist 20, 10 or even five years ago: He is an emblem of the everyman thinkers of the Internet age.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running (and I’ve even gone back and put in names that were mentioned as possibilities for running that I’ve dropped, just for the sake of completeness):
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
I should really find some outlet to pay me to do these updates. PJ Media? Townhall? Daily Caller? Washington Examiner? Daily Wire? Breibart? Who pays the most?
Biden continues to lap the field, Buttigieg’s boomlet bottoms out, O’Rourke stabilizes, Messam registers, Klobucher shows a tiny bit of life, and mentions of John McCain, Jimmy Carter and Alannis Morissette. It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
My original idea behind doing this update was to show at a glance which candidates were in, which were out, and what all of them were doing. With so many declared candidates in the race, I’ve decided it was high time to move all of the declared Out names, as well as those for whom there was zero buzz, down to the Out of the Running section below the clown car list proper. This should make it a bit easier to read, with less repetition from week to week.
Polls
Echelon Insights: Biden 38, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 5, Warren 5, O’Rourke 5, Harris 5, Klobucher 2, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Yang 1, Gillibrand 1, Castro 1, Messam 1. Messam actually registering 1% is far and away his best showing. Also interesting breakdowns on the voters backing each candidate (Biden old, Sanders young, Buttigieg suburban women, Warren whites with Bachelor’s degrees, etc.).
Monmouth: Biden 33, Sanders 15, Harris 11, Warren 10, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 4, Klobucher 3, Booker 1, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1, everyone else below 1%. However, the information they lead with on the poll is who is doing best in early voting states: Biden 26, Sander 14, Harris 14, Warren 9, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Williamson 1, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delany 1, Hickenlooper 1, Ryan 1.
The Hill/HarrisX: Biden 33, Sanders 14, Warren 8, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, O’Rourke 5. “Several aspirants were not named by any participant: Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Mont.), former Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, Gov. Jay Inslee (D-Washington), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), Florida mayor Wayne Messam, and author Marianne Williamson.”
Florida Atlantic University for the Florida primary: Biden 29, Sanders 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 9, Harris 7, O’Rourke 5. (In the 2020 general matchup, Trump ties Biden and beats everyone else.)
Quinnipiac: Biden 35, Sanders 16, Warren 13, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3, Klobucher 2, O’Rourke 2, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1. Interesting nugget: Harris does better among white votes (9) than non-white voters (7).
Progressives think they can still take Biden down. “Biden’s initial strength was always expected, they said. They maintain that the progressive nature of the Democratic electorate will soon make itself known, to his detriment.” Whistling past the graveyard…
“Young voters have Buttigieg and Beto. So why do they prefer old socialists?” Boiled down: Because they want free stuff. Unstated: And they’re easier to fool into thinking they can get it.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Teflon Joe” continues to crush the opposition in early polling. “He also leads in all of the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and is clobbering rivals in South Carolina.” Some democratic strategists you’ve never heard of are mystified by his popularity. “Why Joe Biden Is the Only True Progressive Candidate.” As in 1924 progressives like Robert LaFollett. I’m sure “He’d be a progessive 96 years ago!” is a battle cry that will stir the woke base to the Biden barricades…
Amanda Perez, who worked as the policy director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, will serve as Booker’s national policy director. Jen Kim, who has worked on national campaigns to engage communities of color in elections, has signed on as Booker’s states chief of staff.
Booker’s campaign, headquartered in Newark, N.J., is also adding Jenna Kruse, a former vice president of research at EMILY’s List, who will serve as Booker’s research director. Emily Norman, an Obama 2012 alum who served on analytics teams at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee, will be chief innovation officer.
Simon Vance, who previously worked from Ohio on Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and as deputy campaign manager in Rich Cordray’s unsuccessful Ohio gubernatorial run, will be chief analytics officer. In 2016, Vance was Clinton’s national targeting director and Iowa caucus analytics director.
n addition, Booker is bringing on on Jenn Brown, the former executive director of Civic Nation, as a deputy campaign manager. Josh Wolf, a former director of operations for MoveOn.org, will serve as chief operations officer.
Other hires include: Bridgit Donnelly, who worked with early vote data for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Michael Fisher, as chief technology officer. Fisher previously served in roles at the DNC and on the 2016 Clinton campaign.
The only name in that group that rings a bell is Jenn Brown, because she got demoted as executive director of Battleground Texas after the debacle of 2014. Booker is also making his third trip to Nevada tomorrow.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got interviewed by WBUR. “In order to win in 2020, we’ve got to win back some of the places that voted for Trump.” And then he offers up your standard let-wing talking points.
Buttigieg is encouraging moneyed supporters to juice his campaign’s fundraising with a new bundling program, details of which were recently circulated to some donors and obtained by POLITICO. Members at different levels of the program pledge to raise anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 for Buttigieg over the course of the primary campaign and receive special perks, including briefings with the candidate and senior campaign staff.
Unusual only in its blatantness. Being gay just isn’t gay enough for a Yale professor complaining about Buttigieg’s Time magazine cover. And he accused President Trump of faking an injury to avoid the Vietnam draft. Because all those attacks on stuff did Trump did 20 or 30 years ago worked so well, let’s go back 50 years instead. It didn’t work against Clinton in 1992, why would it work against Trump in 2020? He also attacked Joe Biden over voting for the 1994 crime bill, a line of attack that I suspect will be equally ineffectual.
De Blasio’s one applause line on the stump now—repeated at each stop where so far staffers and New York reporters have tended to outnumber supporters—has been that “there’s plenty of money. It’s just in the wrong hands.”
He’d know! De Blasio—born Warren Wilhelm Jr.—was elected mayor with a huge under-the-table assist from UNITE HERE, the national hospitality workers union previously run by his cousin John Wilhelm. This organization gave $175,000 to a group crusading to ban carriage horses from New York and is led by a real-estate executive who insists that cause has nothing to do with the insanely lucrative development opportunity that would open up if Manhattan’s horse stables were to close.
That group, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS, promptly cut its own check for $175,000 to New York City Is Not for Sale, an outside PAC whose potent ads helped take down frontrunner Christine Quinn. No other candidate had any comparable outside money operation, and none of that money—which appeared to be a naked attempt to evade the city’s strict cap on direct donations to candidates, and ban on coordination with outside groups—was disclosed until after the election.
Even as the FBI began looking into that set-up, Mayor de Blasio was, well, off to the races, setting up the Campaign for One New York to raise money for his political agenda and direct-dialing fat cats with city business to get them to “donate” to his cause.
He finally shut that operation down as the feds and local prosecutors and city agencies investigated it, before prosecutors reluctantly decided not to charge him even as they publicly scolded him—no “allegedly”—for hitting up people with business before the city for big bucks for his political operation.
As the bribe-taker got off, his bribe-makers keep going to prison, with one of them sentenced to four years and two others pleading guilty the same week that de Blasio announced his presidential run.
Bonus! Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler became physically ill at a de Blasio presser.
Two and a half hours. Did I watch it all? I did not. There are only so many hours in the week. She wants to return to Obama’s expensive, failed nuclear deal with Iran. Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi hits the Daily Beast over their “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists” piece. “The Gabbard campaign has received 75,000 individual donations. This crazy Beast article is based on (maybe) three of them.”
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. A former donor (and Biden backer) condemned Gillum: “You lost by 30k votes and kept the money from people who trusted you so that now you can go around the state with a staff preparing for your next run,” Morgan tweeted. “I will tell you that is a huge mistake. Your donors are very disappointed. This is a huge ethical lapse.”
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. He issued tweets slamming Bill Kristol and John McCain, and manages a slam on Klobuchar in the process:
"Stalinism means having to apologize for promoting a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people" – Bill Kristol, "respected intellectual" https://t.co/pquhJYZakE
McCain's image has been sanctified by an old David Foster Wallace article, a nonfactual "maverick" image, and a few cherrypicked memories of his old campaigns. He was a bad guy. If @amyklobuchar wasn't so busy abusing her workers, she could have done research and found that out.
“I don’t know why she’s not caught fire. But she hasn’t,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. “I think everybody is sampling and taking a look at everybody. But for now, she’s a regional candidate. A California candidate.”
Snip.
Joining Harris at [the Democratic Party’s California state convention] will be more than half the announced Democratic field: Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sanders; Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind.; Reps. Eric Swalwell of Dublin and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; former Reps. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and John Delaney of Maryland; former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and current Washington Gov. Jay Inslee; and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.
Her Oakland kickoff rally was expensive. “Harris’ campaign has so far paid $65,000 on the city police tab and has until next month to send the more than $122,000 remaining, according to the city.” She also regurgitated the pay gap myth. “This is not a good measure of equal pay because it doesn’t take into account workers’ labor choices, such as profession, education, hours worked, or many other work preferences — preferences that we should want people to be able to express and take into account when selecting work. This statistic isn’t a signal of systematic sex discrimination in our economy.” Hell, even Polifact dinged her for it being mostly false. Oh, and evidently she talked about it on Colbert last week, and I only found out about it when I went to do this roundup, which suggests that neither she nor he are as hot as they once were…
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar said that she recently received some words of encouragement about her poll numbers from former President Jimmy Carter.” And if there’s anyone with sure political instincts… Klobuchar also tells a “Just So” story about John McCain reciting the names of dictators during Trump’s inaguration speech. Though it’s so weird I suspect it might be true.
In May 2013, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien against the couple for $32,652 in unpaid 2007, 2008, and 2010 taxes. Records show the lien was withdrawn in October 2013. But three years later, the IRS filed yet another lien. In December 2016, the Messams received notice that they owed $69,795 from 2014. The couple paid the government in August 2017, according to court documents.
Polifact also gave him a “mostly false” for saying that “in Florida, it’s illegal for mayors to even bring up gun reform for discussion.” They simply can’t impose their own laws (good) due to state preemption.
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke says that if he becomes president he will:
-Ban all semi-automatic firearms -Will push for unconstitutional red flag laws, which allows for firearm confiscation without due process -Will look into creating a national gun registry pic.twitter.com/oP7gYu0Mco
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “While teaching, Warren worked on about 60 legal matters, far more than she’d previously disclosed.” Including advising Getty Oil and Dow Chemical. New York Magazine looks at her rise to third place:
Elizabeth Warren has emerged as the solidly third-place candidate behind Biden and Bernie Sanders. That’s evident in horse-race polls: In the Real Clear Politics average of national surveys, she’s at around 10 percent, comfortably ahead of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, with the rest of the field (including the steadily fading Beto O’Rourke) not making much of an impression so far.
It’s harder to get a grip on the infrequently polled early states, though Warren does seem to be running a bit behind her national averages in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. But on the other hand, she has invested the most of any candidate in early-state staff and infrastructure, and has an especially impressive organization in Iowa, as the New York Times reported earlier this month:
[Warren has] about 50 paid staff members … already on the ground in Iowa, far more than any other Democratic candidate is known to have hired in the state. The growing Warren juggernaut reflects a bet that rapidly hiring a large staff of organizers will give the senator an advantage over her rivals who are ramping up their efforts at a slower pace.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile at The Cut. Including this nugget: “Alannis Morissette wrote and recorded a song for Williamson’s campaign, titled, ‘Today.'” Which reminds me that it’s been 20 years since Dogma came out…
“MATH” hats. Fox News. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Andrew Yang knows how to run an insurgent presidential campaign. The 44-year-old candidate, once barely known outside New York and Silicon Valley, is now leader of the “Yang Gang,” a growing following of online fans and IRL admirers rallying to Yang’s campaign cry of “humanity first.”
Yang is now outpolling seasoned pols like Kirsten Gillibrand, averaging 1% in recent surveys. Despite being “neither popular nor well-known,” as a FiveThirtyEight story puts it, he’s disturbing the forces of the Democratic establishment. His rallies are attracting thousands of people. A two-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February garnered almost 3 million views. He’s winning over betting markets, which have given the long-shot candidate 2.3% odds at taking the White House, besting senator Corey Booker and Texas phenom Beto O’Rourke. Despite his distance from Washington, Yang’s surge shows that a candidate seemingly assembled from the musings of a Silicon Valley Reddit thread can take on the Democratic establishment.
Yang’s done it in part by stealing the most effective tactics from Trump’s electoral victory. Need a visible symbol for your followers? Sell $30 MATH hats (“Make America Think Harder”) and own the meme game. Need to vanquish better-known primary opponents? Flood every media outlet that will give you an interview. No one is talking about a controversial, radical idea? Turn it into your signature issue, rechristening universal basic income, a guaranteed payment to every American, as a $1,000 “freedom dividend” (and force primary rivals like Bernie Sanders and O’Rourke to come out against it). As other candidates play it safe, Yang doubles down on policies that no reasonable wonk would touch, and promotes them on Republican turf such as Fox News (a tactic his fellow long-shot candidates have adopted).
Quibble: Doing better than rock-bottom does not, in fact, constitute “winning.” Yang is running an interesting campaign that’s attracting more than expected attention because the expectations were zero. Whether this can translate into actually winning delegates in primaries remains to be seen.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running (and I’ve even gone back and put in names that were mentioned as possibilities for running that I’ve dropped, just for the sake of completeness):
Biden’s still up big, O’Rourke’s freefall continues, Yang threatens to PowerPoint the nation, and get ready for the Gravalanche! It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
18 of the declared Democratic nominees for President have met the minimum threshold to appear in the first debate, either by garnering donations from 65,000 individuals or scoring at least 1% in three or more polls: Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris, Warren, O’Roruke, Yang, Biden, Booker, Castro, Gabbard, Klobuchard (both), Delaney, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, Ryan, Swalwell (polls), and Marianne Williamson (donations). (Hat tip: BruceTheGay.)
Late yesterday afternoon I raised the possibility that the hype surrounding Pete Buttigieg is peaking. He’s back to modest single digits in most national polls after a quick rise and very few African-Americans are attending his events, even in places such as Orangeburg, S.C. Young, well-educated, ambitious, and articulate, Buttigieg may well be a boutique candidate who mostly appeals to one important but not quite decisive demographic: the kinds of people who end up covering the Democratic presidential primary for major news organizations.
Since formally announcing his presidential run, Joe Biden has enjoyed leads in national polls of 21, 32, 30, 26, and 24 percentage points ahead of Bernie Sanders. Perhaps this will turn out to be a short-term bump, but the people currently preferring Biden probably feel like they know him well. He’s a familiar and liked face amidst a crowd of strangers.
Biden doesn’t need the formal endorsement of Barack Obama because he’s already received the clearest de-facto endorsement imaginable: Obama wanted Biden in the Oval Office if he ever died or was incapacitated. Obama effectively made his 2020 presidential endorsement in the summer of 2008.
And if Biden does become the 2020 Democratic nominee . . . the ramifications will be hilarious. After all the talk of the most diverse group of candidates in American history, and for all the identity-politics obsession gripping the party, the Democratic nominee would be a (very) old, straight, white male. Post-Obama Democratic politics would not be focused on a Generation X or Millennial figure, but (sigh) yet another Baby Boomer.
Also: “For all of the talk of the Democrats’ move towards socialism, the nominee would be a figure from the party’s establishment, who’s done the bidding of Delaware’s banking industry and credit-card companies for most of his career.”
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. No news on a presidential run, but he does deride “flyover country” in an interview. Though he’s got this right: “When you hear specific left-leaning Democratic candidates and progressive candidates talking about these buffet tables they want to set up of public policy without one word about how they’re going to pay for it. That’s what’s going to kill them.”
He is a very thoughtful and pragmatic liberal who works well with colleagues on both sides. He has held important posts in state and local government and the executive branch. In 2010 he was one of the few Democrats from a competitive state to stave off the Republican Tea party surge. He likely would win a general election and — better than most others — navigate the almost impossibly polarized environment in Washington.
Snip.
He lacks the lengthy experience, contacts and warmth of Joe Biden; the new generational appeal of Pete Buttigieg or Beto O’Rourke; the ideological passion of Bernie Sanders — and if it’s the year of the woman, the gender of Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.
The poor guy has disregarded all the advice and decided to run anyway. And initial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.
The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.
Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He criticized Warren’s calls to break up Facebook. “We do not need a president that is going to use their own personal beliefs and tell you which companies we should break up. We need a president that’s going to enforce antitrust laws in this country.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. His staff unionized. Decoding Castro’s vibe in Massachusetts: “This guy is class, this guy is smart, this guy is funny, this guy is a politician….Castro is young, energetic and exudes a positivity and kindness. I liked him.” If this piece were a supermarket product, it would be I Can’t Believe It’s Not Content.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But Ann Althouse says never say never. “It’s a joke until it happens. DJT was a joke until it happened. The funniest thing may be the most likely thing.”
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: All But In. Random New Yorkers are actually going up to him in the street and yelling at him not to run.
By mid-2016, Gabbard committed the ultimate party heresy: She very publicly resigned from her position as Democratic National Committee vice chair at the peak of the primary battle to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders after months of internally accusing DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of corruptly violating the DNC’s duty of neutrality by favoring Hillary Clinton. Her accusation was later vindicated through emails published by WikiLeaks, Wasserman Schultz’s resignation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s own “rigging” accusation, and current DNC Chair Donna Brazile’s book, which caused Gabbard to publicly repeat her allegations of the DNC’s “unethical rigging” of the primary in favor of Clinton.
Gabbard has compiled a record on domestic policy questions that places her squarely within the left populist wing of the party — from advocating Medicare for All, a national $15 an hour minimum wage, various free college programs, and even participating in anti-pipeline Standing Rock protests in North Dakota. Yet her aggressive criticisms of the pieties of the bipartisan foreign policy community — particularly her harsh criticism of regime change operations from Iraq and Libya, to Syria and Venezuela, and her warnings about escalating tensions with Russia and China and the dangers of a “new Cold War” — have further cemented her status as party outsider and heretic from the perspective of Washington Democratic insiders.
She also says the mainstream media is ignoring her. Well, they are when they’re not attacking her…
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. CNN gives her one of those a day in the life of a candidate story, the sort where we’re supposed to find her morning workout routine charming rather than annoying, and which would be pretty fawning if it didn’t bring up the fact she’s sucking so hard:
But there is a harsh irony to this upbeat attitude: Gillibrand’s campaign, despite the joy, has gone nowhere since she announced earlier this year. The senator’s polls are sagging — a recent Monmouth University poll found her with less than 1% in New Hampshire, she has yet to hit the fundraising threshold outlined by the Democratic National Committee — a mark that a series of lesser known candidates have met, and people coming to her events have begun to worry she is being engulfed by the massive field of Democrats.
Addition: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. After dismissing him as a joke campaign a month ago, I have come to the reluctantly conclusion that I need to include the 88 year-old gadfly in this roundup. Not because I think he can win, but because his campaign chances and activities look no less serious than those of Messam or Delaney. At 77,100 Twitter followers, he has more than Messam, Delany, Ryan, or Inslee. His pitch is geared toward the hard anti-war left, even more so than Gabbard or Sanders:
Here's the official Mike Gravel 2020 Campaign Launch Ad – "Rock 2.0" Join the #Gravelanche to push American politics to the left and speak truth to power, send Mike $1 to get him on the debate stage: https://t.co/R8N3DrihCD. pic.twitter.com/MWaPNCrxJH
Whether this gives him enough traction to make the debates remains to be seen, but at this point I like his chances better than Messam’s for meeting that threshold. On the other hand, he says he’d love a Sanders-Gabbard ticket.
“The goal of a Gravel 2020 campaign would not be to win, but instead to draw attention to the central issues that Sen. Gravel has focused on over the previous decades,” a draft version of his campaign plan indicates, adding “the ultimate goal would be to gain media attention and then endorse either Rep. Gabbard or Sen. Bernie Sanders before the Iowa caucuses.”
Watch the video at that link. Despite having a self-described “Senior Moment” in remembering Gabbard’s name, Gravel still sounds reasonably sharp, and like he’s actually telling it like he thinks it is. He can’t win, but he could actually make a little noise running an “screw it I’m just telling the truth and campaigning entirely on YouTube” effort…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. That Geraghty piece notes that Harris, being a liberal from California running on ending tax cuts and eliminating health insurance, might not play well in the Midwest. Said she would have voted against NAFTA. Senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus are pitching a Biden-Harris “dream ticket,” which sort of suggests they’ve already given up on her winning the nomination on her own.
Hickenlooper apparently means to put himself in the “moderate” lane to the extent that doing so is comparable with creating trillions of dollars in new taxes and benefits. I would not bet very much on the efficacy of that strategy, especially for a candidate who checks all the wrong demographic boxes for the 2020 Democratic primary.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. “With new polling at 0 percent, can anyone stop Jay Inslee? Yes. Literally anyone.” “It’s almost like running a campaign exclusively on climate change isn’t a good idea.” To prove that point, Inslee put out this ad:
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Business Insider profile. “Even after weeks of polling, we’re really not near the sample size of Seth Moulton’s name recognition where we’d be confident interpreting his performance and drawing conclusions about a viable candidacy.” OK, then. Moving on…
For O’Rourke, the phenomenon on display in [his losing senate] race—failure without negative effects, and with perhaps even some kind of personal boost—is a feature of his life and career. That biography is marked as much by meandering, missteps and moments of melancholic searching as by résumé-boosting victories and honors. A graduate of an eastern prep school and an Ivy League rower and English major, the only son of a gregarious attorney and glad-handing pol and the proprietor of an upscale furniture store, the beneficiary of his family’s expansive social, business and political contacts, O’Rourke has ambled past a pair of arrests, designed websites for El Paso’s who’s who, launched short-lived publishing projects, self-term-limited his largely unremarkable tenure on Capitol Hill, shunned the advice of pollsters and consultants and penned overwrought, solipsistic Medium missives, enjoying the latitude afforded by the cushion of an upper-middle-class upbringing that is only amplified by his marriage to the daughter of one of the region’s richest men.
(Hat tip: Erick Erickson, who notes “I know nothing of Kruse’s record and/or past infatuations or lack thereof with O’Rourke, but it is just hilarious watching various members of the Circle of Jerks that make up the political press pass the story around this morning. These people have been humping Beto O’Rourke’s leg for the past two years.”) “Beto O’Rourke is polling worse than ever.” “Looking at places, though, undersells O’Rourke’s media troubles. This past week, Biden’s name was mentioned 20 times as often on cable news as O’Rourke’s. The week before it was 22 times as often. And it’s not just less media: The stories seem to be more negative on O’Rourke than they once were.” He comes out against the right to work for non-union members. Get’s a profile from a college girlfriend that makes him sound really, really…boring.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Ryan, a Catholic who is married to a schoolteacher and lives with their three children, has moderated his position on two issues of particular interests to Democrats. He was opposed to abortion until 2015, and he previously received an A rating from the National Rifle Association, which indicated his votes were in line with the gun lobbying group’s agenda. Following the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting in which 58 people were killed, he donated $20,000 that his campaign received from the NRA to groups supporting gun control.
Well what do you know! A moderate pro-life, pro-gun Democratic magically becomes pro-abortion and anti-gun when running for national office! What are the odds?
Sanders had planned to pose as the quiet front-runner. The Democratic establishment might not be ready to anoint a populist insurrectionist, but Sanders, like Trump with the Republican base in 2016, thought that he had what the party’s voters wanted. Democratic operatives and veteran consultants whispered to anyone that would listen that Sanders, who had retained a permanent campaign infrastructure after coming up short in 2016, held a critical advantage in Democratic politics: the best ground game. The formula that supplied and maintained Barack Obama’s power had been mailing lists, volunteers, data, and pounding the pavement. Our Revolution, Sanders’s arm, was the heir to Organizing for America, the Obama mothership, and Sanders, like Obama, was awash in cash.
But Sanders’s campaign underestimated Biden out of the gate. And this time, Sanders’s Achilles heel appears to be even more exposed than it was to Clinton. African Americans are the lynchpin of any Democratic strategy, but so far, black Southern Democrats seem to like the idea of Barack Obama’s lieutenant as president, even if Obama himself doesn’t feel so warm about it. Last time round, South Carolina was Stalingrad for Sanders. It didn’t finish him off, but it lost him the war. Right now, it’s déjà vu all over again for the senator from Vermont.
On the trail with Bernie. See how many references to the 1960s you can spot. Frank Luntz thinks Sanders will win the race. I think he’s mistaking the Democratic Twitter base for the Democratic voting base.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. Dumbass compared the Russian Collusion Fantasy to Pearl Harbor. I know we’ll always remember the heroic moment when Doris Miller manned the Twittercades to fight back wave after devastating wave of Russian meme attacks…
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Yang is drawing some surprisingly large crowds.” He gets a PBS profile, which includes this nugget: “If elected, Yang promises to be the first president to use a PowerPoint during the State of the Union.” DEATH TO THE HERETIC!
Biden is up big, Bennet is In, Beto is down and de Blasio is about to unite all of America together in ridicule against him. Plus the raw sex appeal of Walter Mondale. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
In a Harvard-Harris poll, Biden leads his Democratic opponents by a whopping 30 points. Biden 44, Sanders 14, Harris 9, Warren 5, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 3. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Quinnipiac: Biden 38, Warren 12, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 8, O’Rourke 5. First poll I’ve seen Warren edge Sanders. Maybe all that “free everything for everybody” pandering is paying off for her…
Election betting markets. Warren (5.7%) is now up over Yang (5.3%) who is now up over O’Rourke (5.1%).
The Eight Tiers In This Race
People usually sort candidates into “First Tier, Second Tier, Third Tier,” but that’s not applicable to a race this crowded:
Right now Biden is alone in the first tier, and…
Sanders is alone in the second.
The third tier is Warren, Buttigieg and Harris all bunched up together (Warren is enjoying a little bounce, Buttigieg’s bounce faded as soon as Biden joined, and Harris is just barely hanging on as the media-boosted SJW darling).
O’Rouke has probably free-fallen alone into the fourth tier, his telegenic hype long over and people scratching their heads as to why people ever thought he was exciting when not running against Ted Cruz.
The fifth tier consists of Booker and Klobucher, who seem to be running competent, unexciting campaigns awaiting their turn to catch fire in a hype cycle.
The sixth tier is Interesting Weirdos, lead by a rising Yang and a hasn’t-showed-us-anything-yet Williamson. Let’s also stick Gabbard here, since she generates tons of buzz only because the Democratic base seems to actively hate her, and she seems to have more followers than the lower tiers.
The seventh tier is Dead in the Water, people who have resumes that suggest they should be credible Presidential candidates (mostly senators and governors), but somehow aren’t: Castro, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, and probably the newly-joined Bennet.
The eighth and lowest tier (sorry Dante) is Wasting Our Time, including all the representatives other than Gabbard: Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, Delany, Messam. Maybe one could break out, but I rather doubt it.
Pundits, etc.
How much a candidate’s announcement coverage boosts them in polls. Caveat: They relied on cable news coverage, which leaves out a lot of things, like legacy MSM outlets slathering fawning coverage on Harris like ketchup on french fries.
“If you have an appetite for schadenfreude, one of the pleasures of the ongoing 2020 Democratic primary will be watching once-highly-touted politicians realize just how limited their appeal is, as they struggle to reach 5 percent in a crowded field.” Special mention of Castro, Gabbard and Gillibrand.
Stephen Green on electability. “If the economy is still booming in November 2020, maybe none of this year’s massive crop of Dems is electable. Maybe they’re all Mondales, albeit with far less of Walt’s raw sexual magnetism.”
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s not running for the senate. Maybe she’s regretting turning down that Biden VP trial balloon. She also got a voter suppression pander from O’Rourke.
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still nothing since that now four-week old tweet. But his estimated net worth is $85 million, and he was “a political science major at George Washington University (where he ran for student body president and lost).” Baldwin could probably talk himself into a run if he really wanted to…
Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. “Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., announced he will run in the Democratic primary to seek his party’s nomination to go up against President Trump in the 2020 election.” More: “Bennet has built a reputation as a bipartisan, policy-focused senator on Capitol Hill, trending toward the center of the Democratic spectrum. He opposes a single-payer health care system, instead hoping to expand Obamacare.” Oh yeah, that’s just what the Democratic base in crying out for: bipartisanship. Data point: The guy’s a U.S. senator, and I have exactly one entry for him before I started doing the Clown Car update, and that was just a mention in the 2016 election. If you stuck guns to the heads of Democratic voters and said “Pick Michael Bennet out of these photos of all 21 declared Democratic Presidential candidates or die,” then you just killed a greater percentage of Democratic voters than Thanos.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A $1.5 billion sweetheart deal Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured from the state-owned Bank of China is ‘looming on the horizon’ as a potential line of attack against his father’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen.” It’s going to be fun hearing Democrats claim that random contacts by low-level staffers constituted collusion with Russia for Trump, but that $1.5 billion from China to the Vice President’s son was just no big deal. Why Biden is not Jeb Bush. Four of these points I agree with, but the fifth (“unlike Jeb, who was weakened by the presence of his one-time protege Marco Rubio in the field, Biden has no immediate competitor in his primary ‘lane'”) is probably untrue, as Buttigieg, Moulton, Hickenlooper, Ryan and Bennet could all plausibly fill the “white moderate” lane. He appeared on ABC’s The View, where he promised to be less creepy. Biden picked up a very early endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, another example of his strong play for union support. He appeals to forgotten blue collar Democrats. Flashback: In 1998, Joe Biden said Anita Hill was lying. (Right the first time.) Biden the liar. Speaking of which, the Washington Post gave him four Pinocchios for stating that the Trump tax cuts applied only to the rich. Biden’s campaign may be a well-oiled machine. Biden himself? Not so much:
How far will the left wing of the Democratic Party go to drag Biden? Here’s a Newsweek piece dinging him for opposing forced busing in 1974. Here’s a hint: everyone hated forced busing. “We’re going to take your daughter and ship her across town to a school in the ghetto because that’s a whole hell of a lot easier than spending more money to improve ghetto schools or take on teachers unions.” Democrats gave up on forced busing because it was a horrible idea that didn’t actually address the problem and they didn’t want be wiped out in elections.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe? I didn’t think he was going to run if Biden got in, but what the hell is this? It came up as an ad when I Googled “Michael Bloomberg President.” That sure as hell looks like the website of someone who is thinking of running for President. Upgraded from “Probably not” after I stumbled across it.
Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: All But In. “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will announce his bid for the presidency in two weeks, MTN News has learned — adding to the 20 Democrats already running for the 2020 nomination to challenge President Trump.” Upgrade over Leaning Toward In.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Julian Castro hits 65,000-donor threshold to secure spot in first presidential debate.” That’s probably a great relief to him. He’s making a play for Nevada, which falls right after New Hampshire and has a large Hispanic population. That’s a strategically sound decision, and even if it fails, it can’t fail worse than anything else he’s tried…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But she says the 2016 election was “stolen” from her.
Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: All But In. “It’s Now A Clown Bus: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Expected To Announce 2020 Run Next Week.” De Blasio unites all of America in contempt against him. “76 percent of New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run. Politico New York surveyed 30-odd members of Team de Blasio, and all but two said it was a bad idea, with one calling it ‘fucking insane.'” Also this: “He may have a shot if every Democratic candidate is caught sending racy selfies to minors.” Upgrade from Leaning Toward In.
According to the DNC, the max number of candidates participating will be a total of twenty even if all 21 announced candidates qualify as it threatens to eliminate candidates who had already made the cut – so much for “transparent, fair and inclusive.” Ten will appear on June 26 with the next ten on June 27th and selection will be determined by drawing lots. Conceivably, the Main Show of Bernie and Biden may occur on June 26th, or they may be split, appearing on two different nights. In any case, it may be difficult for the public to determine a clear ‘winner’ by virtue of candidate separation from the total field.
Snip.
Given her almost totally hostile reception by every MSM outlet who deigned to interview her, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has experienced, as an opponent of regime change wars, more bad manners and outright personal antagonism than any other candidate. While Gabbard easily qualified for the debates via the $65,000 requirement and continues to attract SRO audiences in NH, Iowa, California and elsewhere, yet until the newest CNN poll, she failed to register any % of public support. Something here does not compute given the ‘favored’ polls past history of favoritism. If the Dems continue to put a brick wall around her, Jill Stein has already opened the Green Party door as a more welcoming venue for a Tulsi candidacy. The Dems, who tend to be unprincipled and vindictive, better be careful what they wish for.
Caveat: Counterpunch, so grains of salt time. On the other hand, the author can smell the stench of the Russiagate corpse, so maybe actual clues are involved here…
Senator Kamala Harris was supposed to be a frontrunner. According to the rules of “the invisible primary,” in which donors and party activists coalesce around their chosen nominees, sending signals about candidate quality that primary voters, more often that not, eventually validate, Harris seemed to check all the boxes of a frontrunner. Her campaign team is full of veterans of the campaign of the last Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. She led the large donor fundraising race, with most of her big donors also being former donors to Clinton. Seth Masket, a political scientist and expert on the party system, conducted an informal poll last December of precisely the sort of party activists who are said to decide these things, and a healthy majority leaned toward supporting Harris. And in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted listing of endorsements, Harris ranked second among the declared candidates, losing out only to Senator Cory Booker (before Joe Biden formally entered the race last week).
Judging by all available polling, though, Harris is not even close to the frontrunner. (And Cory Booker’s campaign seems to be utterly foundering, suggesting that counting up endorsements may not be the best way to measure the viability of a candidate from a state, like New Jersey, with a powerful, old-fashioned party machine.) Most national polls put her in a distant third or fourth place, frequently trailing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a relative neophyte who was polling at basically zero a month ago.
This doesn’t render “the invisible primary” obsolete as an explanatory factor. The seemingly overnight rise of Buttigieg is in fact evidence of the concept’s durability: People have heard of him, and tell pollsters they support him, because his press is managed by Lis Smith, a well-connected Democratic operative who formerly worked for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, and Politico’s big donor analysis shows he is extremely popular among former Obama and Clinton bundlers. The energy around Mayor Pete is partly a reflection of the political press translating its knowledge of his advisers’ records and his popularity with the donor class into stories about his candidacy that create a sort of aura of “viability.” The new frontrunner, the former vice president, has, as you’d expect, even more institutional support behind him, especially among Democratic mega-donors and longtime elected officials.
So, what has, thus far (there is a lot of election left to go), prevented Harris’s campaign from breaking out? And for that matter, how is Elizabeth Warren receiving so much glowing press for her transformative policy agenda, but still polling just as poorly as Harris?
As the horserace quants at FiveThirtyEight explained, both are victims of the Democratic electorate’s fixation on “electability.” Polling broadly shows Democratic voters thinking Joe Biden has the best chance at winning the general election. That is exactly what Biden would like everyone to think, and that belief practically constitutes the sole argument for his candidacy.
Wait, primary voters focus on electability? Do tell. The New Republic writer is pouting because he wanted Harris. That’s why he says “‘Electability’ is a crock of shit,” because he wants hard-left candidates and the majority of Democratic primary voters aren’t having any. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) There’s a ton of “Oh yeah, she went after AG Barr! She’s my hero!” schoolgirl crush media pieces I’m omitting here, since the default setting on Harris coverage is “Fawning.”
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Climate Change Guy offers a pie-in-the-sky “carbon neutral by 2030” that also promises to destroy the coal industry. I guess he figures “Hey, everyone else is offering impossible bullshit! Why not me?”
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. She too unveiled a mental health plan. Funny how people who hang out with Democrats all the time naturally assume that large numbers of Americans are crazy…
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited all four early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina) and got a WGBH profile. “Moulton is a centrist among more aggressively liberal candidates. The progressive base fawns over Bernie Sanders’s calls for economic revolution, and Elizabeth Warren’s lengthening list of plans, but it’s unclear that the majority of primary voters, let alone general-election voters, will opt for radically upending an economy that seems to be humming along pretty well.”
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation, and spent his time nattering about the Russian Collusion Fantasy, which is far too precious for liberals to give up on despite being complete bunk.
The bill made it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy and get out of debt, a legal change that credit card companies and many major retailers had championed for years. The bill passed Congress with large majorities, but most Democratic senators, including Barack Obama, voted no. Biden voted yes and was widely seen at the time as one of the bill’s major Democratic champions.
So far, her efforts haven’t yet translated into much success. Despite her Hollywood connections, she managed to raise just $1.5 million as of the end of the first quarter — not chump change, but it does put her toward the bottom of the list of serious contenders. Nor has she yet managed to clear the 65,000-donor threshold that would qualify her to participate in the first two Democratic primary debates, although according to her campaign website, she’s about 90 percent of the way there.
And although her books have sold 3 million copies, her name recognition is among the lowest in the field. In a national poll conducted by Change Research in mid-April, 66 percent of likely Democratic voters had never heard of her; the same was true of 53 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers in an early-April Monmouth poll of Iowa. Candidates with low name recognition can still have a shot at the nomination if they’re backed by a decent percentage of the people who have heard of them, but Williamson gets almost no support in horse-race surveys: She has gotten 0 percent support in 27 of the 35 polls in our database that have asked about her. And she is unlikely to become better known as long as cable news networks and newspapers continue to cover her far less often than the candidates with more traditional credentials.
She visited Iowa, where she spoke to about 60 people, and Nevada, where she got interviewed by Politics Now, where it looks like they’re using cameras and a set from 1979.
More Q1 numbers are trickling out. Harris, Sanders and O’Rourke all did well, Gillibrand and Castro did poorly. Insert your own Biden as Hamlet sentence here.
Fundraising
More Q1 fundraising numbers, continued from last week, with new additions announced
Bernie Sanders: $18.2 million from 525,000 donors
Kamala Harris: $12 million from 138,000 donors
Beto O’Rourke: $9.4 million from 218,000 contributions (number of donors not specified)
For the sake of comparison, incumbent president Donald Trump pulled in pulled in $30 million, and has $40 million in hand.
Polls etc.
Emerson: Sanders 29, Biden 24%, Buttigieg 9%, Harris and O’Rourke at 8%. I think that’s the first poll that had Sanders over Biden, or Buttigieg over Harris and O’Rourke.
Washington Post‘s The Fix rates the candidates in order of likeliness to be a nominee. Any list that ranks Warren third and Biden sixth can’t be taken seriously.
Heh: “Scientists Recommend Reducing The Number Of Democratic Presidential Candidates To Help Fight Climate Change.” “Scientists recommend the current Democratic field be reduced to less than half the current number or we could see an increase in hurricanes, droughts, kaiju, and ‘other climate change things.'”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Krystal Ball (yes, her real name) make the case for Abrams. “You can just hear the narrator intoning: “With hard work and perseverance, anyone can succeed. America is the land of opportunity.’ But, Abrams doesn’t seem to buy that narrative. For one thing, in spite of all of her success in the grand American meritocracy, Abrams still found herself filing for governor at a time when she owed $170,000 in consumer and student loan debt and $50,000 in taxes.” Wait, you’re making the case for Abrams? As for running statewide:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out. But see Friday’s LinkSwarm for more information on this prince among men and his multiple felony indictments.
Addition: Actor Alec Baldwin: Maybe? No news from Baldwin himself since floating last week’s Twitter balloon, but this piece suggests Democrats should run a celebrity…just not Alec Baldwin.
In one of the Twitter rants he is always getting up to, Alec Baldwin claimed the other day that if he ran for president in 2020, he could beat President Trump. It would be “easy,” he said. “So easy. So easy.”
I’m not so sure he’s right about this. No one over the age of 35 watches Saturday Night Live anymore, certainly not outside our major cities. Normal people don’t know who is being parodied in your 37th different sketch about some minor White House official, which makes laughing along kind of difficult. What else do Americans associate Baldwin with these days, apart from 30 Rock and that one funny monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross? His stint narrating Thomas and Friends? The Hunt for Red October? I just don’t think he’s beloved enough.
Wait, people under the age of 35 watch Saturday Night Live? I’ll need to see documented evidence of that…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning toward a run. Despite his cancer diagnosis, he was visiting Iowa, which suggests he’s not easily deterred.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning Towards Running. He’s evidently planning to run as Obama’s pale third term. I’m not sure that’s the red tofu Democratic activists are longing to hear, but it may not matter. Biden also has an advantage in having every old Democratic office holder at his beck and call. Here’s a Vanity Fair piece on how the #MeToo creeper stuff is going to hurt him; it’s unconvincing, and it’s the same argument liberals made about the Billy Bush tape sinking Trump. He’s also delivering Fritz Hollings’ eulogy.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe. Nothing since last week’s “he might run after all” blip.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He did the “I was already running but now I’m officially officially running” thing. A report on his speech makes it sounds like all the usual Democratic talking points. “Buttigieg criticized what he called the more conservative connotation of the word “freedom,” one that he said refers simply to freedom from the government. He instead talked about government having a role in promoting other freedoms: from racism, gender inequality, unfair working conditions, financial exploitation, a lack of affordable health care.” Big Brother needs to get bigger! Kurt Schlichter wants us to remember how annoying Buttigieg is. Hmmm: “Austin Mayor Steve Adler backing Buttigieg two weeks after welcoming Beto at hometown rally.” Those liberal college town mayors have to stick together…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But for some inexplicable reason she and her husband are out on a speaking tour. Of course, it could be the very explicable reason of “money.”
Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He campaigned in Pennsylvania. “At a Tuesday night event hosted by Penn Democrats, Delaney billed himself as a different type of Democrat, offering a centrist vision for the nation.” The picture shows a crowd of what looks to be about 25 people, despite a plate of free sandwiches in the room…
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She raised $3 million in Q1, which is piss poor by the standards of a sitting new York senator. She should have been able to shake down that much from Wall Street the day she announced. her staff is blaming her stand on Al Franken. Heh: “White House National Security Adviser John Bolton could not stop laughing when played a clip of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) discussing her opposition to “tactile” nuclear weapons on the campaign trail.”
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. Seeing no sign he’s running for President in 2020. But this is interesting: “Former Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum built up some serious hype when he launched a voter drive. That work will be done with his Forward Florida political committee, which he now chairs. But it appears Gillum also formed a corporation with a similar name and function. Division of Corporations records show on April 5, paperwork was filed for the Forward Florida Action not-for-profit corporation.”
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. She released 15 years of tax returns, which showed she and her lawyer husband made nearly $2 million in 2018. Must be nice. She’s leading the Hollywood fundraising race (just like Alan Cranston did in 1984), which donations from Shonda Rhimes, Elizabeth Banks, Quincy Jones, and J.J. Abrams, who is reportedly considering buffing up her campaign with more lens flare. She’s also the candidate of big tech:
the national obsession with ethnicity and novelty obscures the more important reality: Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party. She has been a hit in all the important places—the Hamptons, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—that financed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Unlike Warren and Sanders, or Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, Harris has not called for curbs on, let alone for breaking up, the tech giants. As California’s attorney general, she did little to prevent the agglomeration of economic power that has increasingly turned California into a semi-feudal state dominated by a handful of large tech firms. These corporate behemoths now occupy 20 percent of Silicon Valley’s office space, and they have undermined the start-up culture that once drove the area’s growth.
Snip.
By the time Harris ran for the Senate, she could count on massive support from Bay Area law firms, real-estate developers, and Hollywood. More important, she appealed, early on, to tech mavens such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Sean Parker, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, venture capitalist John Doerr, Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell, and various executives at tech firms such as Airbnb, Google, and Nest, who have collectively poured money into her campaigns. Their investment was not ill-considered. Harris seems a sure bet for the tech leaders. Her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable Partners, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and trade associations opposing strict Internet regulations.
She’s also building out her campaign in South Carolina, probably a smart move. With so many candidates in the race and proportional delegate allocation, I don’t think Iowa and new Hampshire are going to winnow the field nearly as much in the past, which is going to make South Carolina’s February 29th primary more important than in year’s past. Speaking of which: “Bakari Sellers, a CNN commentator and former South Carolina state representative, endorsed Sen. Kamala Harris for president, her campaign announced Monday.” Wait, Harris is a gun owner? That will make for some interesting Harris-Swalwell deabtes. (Hat tip: CarpeDonktum.)
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. He had a CNN town hall. At least one review was not kind: “He really did sound like he has just half a brain, as he himself said earlier this week. CNN didn’t do Inslee any favors by airing this interview.” He said his state would love to get all those illegal aliens. One wonders if his constituents feel the same.
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
So you’re a thin-shelled, easily boiled crustacean deluded enough to think you can defeat a natural killing machine a hundred times more powerful than you are. Got it.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? “Seth Moulton is running social media ads asking if he should run for higher office.” Expect him to throw his hat into the ring under his new name of Candidate McCandidateFace.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The big idea? Beto doesn’t have one.” “Beto O’Rourke’s most distinctive policy position? To be determined. There’s no signature issue yet, no single policy proposal sparking his campaign. Convening crowds — and listening to them — is the central thrust of his early presidential bid.” The roots of Beto’s money. Hint: It’s not record sales. “O’Rourke co-owns a shopping mall worth seven figures; He received his half as a gift from his mother.”
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has accused a leading liberal think tank, founded and run by longtime Hillary Clinton allies, of orchestrating attacks on him and two other 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
In a letter provided to CNN by his campaign, Sanders addressed the board of the Center for American Progress and CAP Action Fund on Saturday, alleging that its activities are playing a “destructive role” in the “critical mission to defeat Donald Trump.” Sanders cited two posts about him by ThinkProgress, a website run by CAP’s political arm, and past pieces focused on Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.
The exchange threatens to shred an already frayed public détente between the wider circles surrounding both Sanders and Clinton, who fought a bitter 2016 presidential primary that still looms large in the minds of many Democrats — if only because they fear a divisive replay in 2020.
CAP, founded in 2003 by John Podesta, who was former President Bill Clinton’s final chief of staff and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, and its top officials have often been accused by progressives loyal to Sanders of seeking to undermine his political agenda — debates that frequently blow up on social media platforms like Twitter.
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Probably Out? Said he wasn’t running, but there’s this: “California billionaire Tom Steyer may be reconsidering his decision last January to remove himself as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, according to a new report. A citizen in Iowa recently recorded a robocall that tested political messaging related to Steyer, according to a report from Iowa Starting Line.” Still think he’s out, but not this for the record.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yang had some of his own bad ideas, like “monitoring malicious speech.” He also wants to decriminalize heroin and other opiates (along the lines of Portugal), which may be the first genuinely new idea any Democratic Presidential candidate has floated this cycle. Here’s a review of his book. “Once you read his book, it is apparent that Andrew Yang is running for president because he is afraid of normal people.” He’s an idea-a-minute guy, many of them bad, sort of a Democratic version of 2012’s Newt Gingrich. Yang also leads the candidates in Facebook spending.
