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):
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This week: Texas legislative news, foreign elections, and a surprising amount on analog synthesizers…
Theresa May is out as British Prime Minister effective June 7. The only reason she’s not the worst prime minister of the last century is that she didn’t give Czechoslovakia to Hitler…
Even before [EU Parliamentary] election results are known on Sunday, therefore, there’s a growing sense that the Brexit party may be a permanent factor in British politics. Opinion polls on how people would vote in a general election show that the party would do less well than in European elections but still run about level with the Tories and Labour. There are deep divisions on policy apart from Brexit that have allowed critics to argue that the party would fall apart once its main goal had been achieved. But the divisions don’t seem deeper than those of other parties, and power or its prospect is itself a unifying social glue. Farage’s rallies around the country are hugely successful — packed, good-humored, more diverse socially and politically than those of the other parties, full of confidence and optimism, and notably without rancor. As with Trump’s election rallies, people seem to find them enjoyable as well as genuinely serious. A kind of Brexit party spirit already exists with many different types of people happy to be together on the bandwagon. It seems less class-bound than any of the existing parties.
And if the Brexit party wins one-third or more of Britain’s votes this week from a standing start, it will change British politics. Such a result would have the effect of a second referendum victory for Leave. It simply would not be possible for Parliament and the mainstream parties to push through a Brexit that doesn’t get the effective consent of Farage and his party. If such a thing is attempted, it will be seen to be anti-democratic and will have to be abandoned quite quickly. It would force the EU to confront the fact that there is little chance of getting a deal like May’s withdrawal deal accepted, and that even if one were to make it into the statute book, it could never be effectively implemented. In those circumstances the EU might simply throw up its collective hands and declare that the U.K. has left without a deal.
The third effect of a Farage success in the European elections would be to realign political parties and, in particular, to place the Conservative party in mortal peril. Voting for a political party is a matter of both loyalty and habit. For lifelong Tories, the idea of voting for another party is anathema. Most people who think about it never actually get around to doing it. But the Tories have certainly given their traditional supporters and those new supporters who voted for them in order to achieve Brexit good reason to leave them on this occasion. Many will do so this week. And as with adultery, betraying your party for another is much easier the second time around.
Well:
….during the 2016 Presidential election. The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information….
….Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.” @PressSec
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) May 10, 2019
“A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally.”
Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is a rarity: an actual pro-life Democrat. When Edwards’ wife was “20 weeks pregnant with their first child, a doctor discovered their daughter had spina bifida and encouraged an abortion. The Edwardses refused. Now, daughter Samantha is married and working as a school counselor, and Edwards finds himself an outlier in polarized abortion politics.”
A succinct summary from across the pond:
WOW – This “Guy” Gets It!
This “Guy” Is Nigel Evans – A Conservative British Politician Who Stands Up & Let’s Everyone Know WHY The People Voted For Brexit & Donald Trump!!
If you look at what China is targeting in retaliatory tariffs, it’s obvious their hand is incredibly weak:
But based on what we know, what’s even more revealing about China’s choices are the U.S.-made products that haven’t made any tariff list. They include civilian aircraft and their engines and parts, which had a 2018 export total of $17.73 billion. They include semiconductors and their components, which last year had China shipments that totaled several billion additional dollars. They include the equipment needed to manufacture and inspect semiconductors and their parts, which racked up at least $850 million in 2018 exports to China; devices for conducting chemical and physical analyses (with $912 million in China exports last year); laser equipment ($304 million), motor vehicles, auto parts, and plastics resins and polymers (which each produced billions in exports to China); and billions of dollars’ worth of other products that the Chinese either can’t (yet) make or can’t make in the amounts that they need—or that consist of goods preferred by Chinese consumers over their Made in China counterparts.
As I’ve said before, semiconductor equipment is an area where it’s all but impossible for the Chinese to do without American technology.
Narendra Modi wins reelection in India. Forcing Pakistan to stand down over Kashmir probably clinched the victory for him. Modi’s Hindu ethononationalism is not good for India in the long-run, but he’s probably someone President Trump can trust to be a staunch ally against Islamic terrorism. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The election was an outright disaster for Rahul Gandhi, “the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and leader of India’s Congress party,” which is down to 52 seats as opposed to 303 for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. (Remember that Indira Gandhi was the daughter on India’s first prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and is not related to Mahatma Gandhi.)
“60% of male managers are ‘uncomfortable‘ working around women,” a 32% increase over last year. You mean they don’t want false accusations of sexual harassment to derail their careers? Way to go feminists! Once again you’ve made things worse for women living in the real world!
People have known that Chinese manufacturer Huawei has been stealing American intellectual property for at least seven years. Former congressman Mike Rogers: “If I were an American company today, and I’ll tell you this as the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and you are looking at Huawei, I would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America.”
How computer security is actually handled in the wild:
I recently talked with an enterprise security auditor who often finds overseas staff names are just “persona identities” that real humans cycle through using. When someone there quits, someone else inherits their VPN login credentials. Hides staff turnover from customer network.
UK foreign minister to Iran: “Bitch, you try to throw down on T-Dog, he gonna go HAM upside yo dome!” Of course I’m paraphrasing a bit…
Good news! It looks like Texas taxpayers will finally be getting some meaningful property tax relief, to the tune of $5 billion, or half the projected surplus. (Kids, if you have any friends in California or Illinois, try to explain to them what a “budget surplus” is.) This follows months of waffling.
Coordinated Instagram troll farm attack on Trump. So the next time you see a Trump-Putin meme, be sure to post that link and ask “How the trolling, Trolly McTrollFace?”
Speaking of trolls: Twitter Permanently Bans Anti-Trump Krassenstein Brothers” for “operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions.” The overwhelming majority of conservatives I follow think Twitter should lift the ban so these idiots can keep talking, but it will be nice to no longer see these morons as the top reply on every Trump tweet.
Speaking of legal fees, Harvey Weinstein will reportedly pay $44 million to settle various sexual harassment/etc. lawsuits, the money evidently coming from insurance, but will still face criminal prosecution over at least two sexual assault allegations.
“Florida man hid legless fugitive girlfriend in plastic tote.” She sounds like a real winner: “Anderson was wanted for failing to appear in court on charges including false imprisonment related to a 2015 incident when she allegedly held people hostage at a Burger King with a BB gun. It ended in a shooting with police and she lost both legs.”
Speaking of lunatics: “Trump is the devil!” Genuine loon, or suicide by cop? You make the call. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Followup: “Medieval Sex Cult at Center of German Crossbow Murder Mystery. Police now say a German sex guru specializing in medieval bondage directed lesbian sex slaves in bizarre murder-suicide.”
One of the more puzzling aspects of the Social Justice Warrior long march through the Democratic Party is how laughably absurd assertions that no sane person would have entertained 20 years ago have now become the latest (and therefore most sacred) belief of the victimhood identity politics left.
As a case in point, take the suddenly widespread, irrational and unscientific notion that “sex is a social construct” or that “gender is fluid.” Both of these are lies. The sex of an individual human being, as with all other primates, is determined genetically before birth. If you have XX chromosomes, you’re female, and if you have XY chromosomes you’re male, the only exceptions being an exceptionally tiny handful of odd genetic corner cases that make up a vanishingly small fraction of the human population. All a “sex change” operation does is change a person’s outer appearance, it does not change their genetically-determined sex.
The Democratically controlled House of Representatives voted Friday 236-173 in favor of the Equality Act, which would require schools to include male athletes who identify as transgender girls on female sports teams.
Eight Republicans crossed party lines to vote for the bill, which had unanimous Democratic support.
The bill amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make “sexual orientation and gender identity” protected characteristics under federal anti-discrimination law.
Among other things, that would force public schools to expand female athletic teams to include biological males who identify as transgender girls.
Republican Florida Rep. Greg Steube introduced a last-minute amendment to the bill that would have preserved Title IX’s protections of female athletic teams, but Democrats rejected it.
Every House Democrat but one co-sponsored the legislation. The only Democrat who wasn’t a co-sponsor, Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, announced his support for the bill following pressure from left-wing activists.
“People need to wake up. This radical bill is going to totally eliminate women’s and girls sports,” Republican Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko warned in an op-ed Thursday.
Republican Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler and a half-dozen other House Republicans held a press conference Thursday in opposition to what Hartzler dubbed the “Inequality Act.”
“Congress enacted Title IX to provide equal opportunities for women in education and sports. All this is erased under H.R. 5,” Hartzler said at the press conference.
It’s not just women’s sports. Hartzler fears that it could also affect “domestic-violence shelters and other ‘safe spaces’ that have traditionally barred men.”
Republicans who voted for the bill include representatives Susan W. Brooks (IN), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Brian Fitzpatrick (PN), John Katko (NY), Will Hurd (TX), Tom Reed (NY), Elise Stefanik (NY) and and Greg Walden (OR). I know he’s a moderate in a swing district, but Hurd’s vote is especially disappointing, as I don’t see Hispanics in south and west Texas crying out for transsexual rights.
A bevy of arguments against the compromise have been provided. The first is that testosterone is no big deal when it comes to athletic ability. Men and women both have testosterone after all, and some in each sex have naturally higher levels than others. So why force someone to take meds — with side effects — when they are merely above average in one particular characteristic among the many that ultimately affect athletic performance? This appears to be the driving point behind a recent New York Times op-ed, “The Myth of Testosterone.” The authors — both professors who adhere to social-justice ideology — make some decent points. They usefully complicate the impact of testosterone on performance in differing sports, note that its effects are far more varied and subtle than mere physical strength. They then argue that “the International Association of Athletics Federations’ own analysis of testosterone and performance, involving more than 1,100 women competing in track and field events, shows that for six of the 11 running events, women with lower testosterone actually did better than those with higher levels.” Then this: “In other words, for most sports, testosterone levels do not correlate with superior performance.”
To put it mildly, this is bonkers. Women have a range of 0.3–2.4 npl, and we know that Semenya must have more than 5 npl, or the regulations would not apply to her. Men, in contrast, have a range from 10–38 npl. There’s not even an overlap. The range among women is tiny compared with the difference between men and women. Of course testosterone correlates with superior performance! That’s the entire reason we have separate contests for the two sexes. And the entire reason we forbid doping. How the New York Times could publish this deeply misleading sentence (to be polite) is beyond me.
Current testosterone levels per se also don’t account for the effect of the hormone throughout a man’s life. Doriane Coleman, Duke law professor and former 800-meter running champion, notes how profound the effects are:
Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilization, and higher anaerobic capacity.
A physician who ignored these differences would lose her license. Gender studies professors apparently make careers out of denying it. So take the top female runners in the world right now: Literally thousands of boys and men would beat them. Coleman elaborates: “In the single year 2017, Olympic and World Champion Allyson Felix’s lifetime best in the 400 meters of 49.26 seconds was surpassed over 15,000 times by boys and by men.” Remove the distinction between male and female testosterone levels, and no women will be in any major athletic contest for the foreseeable future.
Reality is not optional, and I sincerely doubt that the vast majority of American voters are willing to accept the “sex is a social construct” canard peddled by the Social Justice Warrior left. This isn’t an issue that divides Democrats from Republicans, it’s an issue that divides lunatics from normal Americans. If the radical tranny agenda is the hill Democrats want to die on, the President Donald Trump and Republicans should make them die on it in 2020.
De Blasio and Bullock are In, which means I’m now tracking 24 declared Democratic Presidential candidates. That’s enough to field both side of a football team, plus Mike Gravel as the coach and Beto O’Rourke as the towel boy. It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Reuters finds Biden up five points since their last poll: Biden 29, Sanders 13, O’Rourke 6, Warren 6, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, Booker 2, Klobucher 1, Gillibrand 1, Hickenlooper 1, Castro 1, Yang 1, Inslee 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, de Blasio 1. That’s one more than I ever expected for de Blasio…
Fox: Biden 35 (up 4), Sanders 17, Warren 9, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, O’Rourke 4, Booker 3, Castro 2, Klobucher 2, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Inslee 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. I think two percent is a record for Castro.
Quinnipiac Pennsylvania: Biden 39, Sanders 13, Warren 8, Harris 8, Buttigieg 6, Booker 5, O’Rourke 2, Klobucher 1. Relatively good showing for Booker, but state polls tend to be more volatile.
Rich Lowry wonders if President Donald Trump has, paradoxically, driven Democrats sane.
What if Donald Trump hasn’t driven Democrats insane, sending them into a spiral of self-defeating radicalism, but instead made them shockingly pragmatic?
Biden’s early strength suggests it may be the latter, that the reaction to Trump is so intense that it has crossed some sort of event horizon from fevered fantasy of his leaving office early via resignation or impeachment to a cold-eyed, win-at-any-cost practicality.
If this is true, one of the exogenous factors that could appreciably increase Trump’s odds of reelection — a zany Democratic nomination contest leading to a nominee much too far left for the American electorate — may not materialize.
Snip.
If hardly dispositive, Biden’s robust numbers at least suggest that this play is more likely than it seemed in the very early going, when candidates were stumbling over one another apologizing for sundry alleged offenses in the Woke Olympics.
If that’s not going to be the true dynamic of the race, I’m as surprised as anyone. What’s extraordinary, though, is that almost every Democratic candidate might have been misreading it as well, and chasing the wrong rabbit down the track.
Certainly, Bernie Sanders dominated the intellectual and policy debate in the wake of his 2016 run, driving other presidential candidates to embrace his signature proposals. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a genuine political star.
It’s only because the center of gravity of the party has clearly moved left that Biden, always a standard liberal, now sounds like a centrist when he calls himself an Obama-Biden Democrat.
But, as Harry Enten of CNN, among others, has been insisting for some time, the average Democrat is older, more moderate or conservative, and less likely to have a college degree than you’d guess from following Twitter or cable TV.
These voters were underserved by the rest of the field, and Biden is taking dead aim at them with the simple message that he can beat Trump.
Others suggest that the size of the field highlights vulnerabilities of the two candidates now topping the polls, former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Biden has started strong, but it’s too early to judge his candidacy. Front-runners never coast to victory, and he will face adversity, whether self-inflicted or delivered by a rival who rises to the moment.
One risk for Democrats is that, with so many candidates and so many voices, side debates distract from core issues and unifying messages. The debate over reparations sparks passions within the Democratic base but is not an issue high on the list of most voters who will determine who is the next president. The same is even more true of the issue of whether violent felons, terrorists or sexual predators should be allowed to vote while in prison, a topic recently injected into the Democratic conversation by Sanders.
At least 10 states are planning to switch from a caucus to a primary in 2020. As things stand, just two states — Iowa and Nevada — have firm plans to caucus again. Two other 2016 caucus states — Maine and Wyoming — are still up in the air. Maine lawmakers may establish a government-run primary, in which case the Maine Democratic Party plans to move to a primary. And Wyoming Democrats are still ironing out some details.
“I think it’s also critical to understand, as I’ve been telling candidates who have come to see me,” she said last week, “you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.”
One third of that statement is true — she was the nominee; two thirds are not. Hillary Clinton did not run the best campaign. Her campaign was a disaster. She was a disaster. She insulted half of the electorate by calling them “deplorables” even before the first vote was cast.
“So, part of our challenge is to understand what it will take to put together not only the popular vote, but the Electoral College,” she added.
That is good advice. It is also advice she should have given herself in 2016 when, capturing the popular vote, she lost the Electoral College to Trump.
And via Reuters, here’s a handy visual guide to the clown car:
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Blah blah blah abortion blah blah blah. But she did finally pay off the $54,000 she owed the IRS, as well as student and credit card debt. Which shows that attention=money, so why wouldn’t she run for President?
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out. Somehow I missed the fact that Avenatti endorsed Biden after he entered the race. I’m sure Biden is just thrilled at that endorsement.
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Far-left group Demand Justice is already running attack ads against him for voting for too many of Trump’s judicial nominees. Demand Justice is being run by Brian Fallon, who was press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. Makes you go “Hmmmmm.”
A January poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative. In contrast, 53 percent of Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate.
That raises the question of whether the party’s center of gravity lies less with vocal activists than with a quieter group of voters that is less likely to join Twitter or show up at campaign events. “His candidacy may be different,” says Biden’s campaign pollster John Anzalone, “But it is the one that is working.”
The Democratic Party of 2019 does not look much like Joe Biden. Women, African-American, Latino and Asian voters are all much more likely to say they support Democratic candidates than Republican ones. White voters, male voters and especially white male voters generally support Republicans.
Statistics on who votes Democratic also suggest that the Democratic Party is more diverse than the experts deciding who is electable.
Those assumptions about electability reflect entrenched biases more than political science, and have a dash of arrogance to boot. An electable candidate, the thinking goes, has to be authentic and broadly appealing. But authenticity itself is coded as white and male when it’s defined by white men.
“Shut up and eat your intersectionality, white patriarchal oppressor!”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS profile; expect to read the Hassan Washington anecdote in every Booker profile. Plus an NPR interview. I’m just assuming the Booker campaign has friends at NPR.
According to Morning Consult data from the first quarter of 2019, Bullock is among the 15 most popular governors in the country, and one of the top Democrats to make the list (13 out of the top 15 most popular governors are Republicans; the other Democrat is Delaware governor John Carney). But that fact makes Bullock’s decision to run for president a bit more puzzling.
In a field of 23 candidates, where Biden continues to lead the pack by double digits in many polls, it’s hard to imagine the Montana governor will have an easy time making an impression on primary voters. But it’s much easier to imagine Bullock putting up a decent fight against Republican senator Steve Daines, who is up for re-election in 2020.
In a May 8 tweet, he said, “As the only Democrat to win statewide re-election in a Trump state in 2016, I know firsthand: we must reach out to rural voters.”
And this message might resonate. As we know from polls, many Democratic voters think it’s a very important consideration to nominate a candidate who can beat President Trump, and as a white man, Bullock may benefit from perceptions that he is “electable.” But he has empirical evidence for it, too: He has won three statewide elections in red, heavily rural Montana — one for attorney general and two for governor. In 2016, he won his second gubernatorial term with 50 percent of the vote, 15 points more than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a town hall on Fox. “Mayor Pete and the Order of the Kong: How Buttigieg’s Harvard pals helped spur his rise in politics.” One of those friends was “Joe Green, who was Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate.” Yep, just good old ordinary, salt-of-the-earth Mayor Pete…
Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. See my previous post on how he sucks and everyone hates him. (And honestly, actually running on the slogan “De Blasio 2020: He Sucks And Everyone Hates Him” would actually probably earn him more votes than he would get otherwise.) I note that his official Presidential website has exactly zero links to the actual policies he’s running on. Jonah Goldberg calls him “the Sponge of Woke Platitudes“:
The reason it is very unlikely that de Blasio will replicate the success of Donald Trump in the Democratic primaries is that he cannot offer any contrasts that matter. He isn’t entertaining, he’s tiresome. He isn’t charismatic, he’s unctuous. He talks like the president of a small liberal-arts college, spouting clichés plucked from a flier on an assistant professor of Peace Studies’ door. He seems convinced that the glassy expression on the faces of the students and faculty in the audience is awe, not a soul-numbing tedium that is a few desperate heartbeats away from resorting to self-harm just to feel something again.
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. But the plea deal he cut on four of five charges with the Florida Ethics Commission is starting to look pretty smart now that new indictments are raining down on his associates.
At first, they just wanted Gravel to run so he could perform the same function he did in his longshot 2008 campaign – yell at the other candidates on stage and push them as far left as possible, especially on an anti-war foreign policy.
But at this point, nobody can rule anything out when it comes to election outcomes.
“We’re running to win, of course, but we don’t expect to win,” Oks told the Forward. “I don’t think Mike expects to become president – it would probably be a hitch in some of his plans.”
But earning enough donations and poll support to get him on the debate stage, he explained, would allow Gravel to “put forth criticism of war and the military industrial complex, and even domestic policy, that hasn’t been seen in many decades, even more radical than Bernie.”
Pushing the Democrats even further left? There’s no way that could possibly backfire…
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. Twitter. Facebook. She wants to increase regulation on business, because that’s a surefire ticket for economic growth. “Klobuchar’s plan also calls for updating the tax code to support ‘gig workers’ by establishing a national paid leave program, mandatory sick leave and portable retirement savings accounts, funded by employers.” Thus ignoring the fact that the reason a “gig economy” exists at all is that government regulations have made regular full-time employees too expensive so expensive to hire.
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “Mike Gravel Can’t Believe His Polling Numbers Neck-And-Neck With Fucking Nobody Like Wayne Messam.”
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “O’Rourke stocks campaign with Obama and Clinton alums.” No names I’m familiar with. “O’Rourke’s recent hires come after the departure of Becky Bond and Zack Malitz, two senior strategists who worked on O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential effort — both evangelists for the distributed organizing model.” Snip. “[Jen] O’Malley Dillon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and deputy campaign manager to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, is bringing on a roster of staffers with long experience in the Democratic Party.” Pledges to “decriminalize truancy, address fines on parents.” That would be an interesting policy proposal…if he were running for the El Paso school board.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “An Our Revolution Staffer Fired For ‘Anti-Immigrant’ Remarks Is Suing The Pro-Bernie Group For Racial Discrimination.” As usual, “anti-immigration” is code for suggesting illegal aliens shouldn’t get government benefits. The staffer in question was part of the black outreach team. Also checkout this bedwetting overreaction from Our Revolution’s former political director Erika Andiola: “I became sick to my stomach and could not stop crying all night.” If hearing contrary opinions makes you ill and depressed, maybe you shouldn’t be working in politics. “Bernie Sanders is challenging two cherished theories of electability.”
One of those theories is beloved by self-styled centrists, and has served as a way to gate-keep against more liberal candidates. It argues that Americans are ideological moderates who punish political parties for nominating candidates too far to the left or right.
The other is beloved by leftists, and has served as a cudgel against more centrist candidates. It holds that there’s a vast working-class majority out there for any candidate willing to slough off the Democratic Party’s turn to corporatism, free trade, and identity politics and recapture the economic populism that made the New Deal Democrats dominant for a generation.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. “In the six years since Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) began earning the big salary that comes with being a member of Congress he has failed to pay down his student loans, cashed out his pension, and accumulated credit card debt.” Maybe a guy who can’t manage his own finances shouldn’t be managing America’s…
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. R.S. McCain thinks Warren is over: “My guess would be that, after the first round of debates, Warren will fade and Harris will rise, because Harris is black and is obviously better qualified than the other black candidate, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Such is the logic of identity politics, in which Democrats are heavily invested.” I expect that this is premature, especially with Warren also making a play for the hard left Sanders voters. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren Has A Plan For Everything — Including Your Love Life.”
For all the praise The New Republic is heaping on her opioid crisis plan, it just sounds like more federal government money airdrops.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Heh: “‘Tom Perez Is Such a Goddamned Weenie’: What Marianne Williamson’s Candidacy Reveals About the Democrats.” After noting Oprah’s not running:
Yet one of Oprah’s star guests, Marianne Williamson, is running—and has beat out several conventional politicians, including Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton and Colorado senator Michael Bennet, to qualify for the first D.N.C.-sponsored debate. That Williamson has qualified is irritating to some of her opponents—not because of who she is, but because of the rules that could make her one of the 20 contenders appearing on the prime-time stage: candidates need to score at least one percent in three certified polls or collect donations from 65,000 different people.
Marianne Williamson deserves some serious attention, and not just because she’s written four books that hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. At a time when the leftward drift of the Democratic Party is regularly in the news, she is by any measure the most rigorously progressive candidate in the field of 23. That she wraps her progressivism in a syncretic spirituality instead of socialist materialism may even be an advantage for a politician in this God-haunted country of ours.
Pick an issue, and odds are Williamson is going to out-Bernie Bernie and out-Warren Warren. She’s for Medicare For All, unsurprisingly, but she’s also for heavy investments in preventive medicine and nutritional education, and a pretty heavy regulatory arm on those she feels are poisoning our bodies, including those who produce “high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats.” So far as I can tell, she’s the only candidate committed to reducing national stress levels, too.
And one at The Hill: “Those who say who can and cannot win now are the same people who were telling us that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in three years ago.”
Over and over again when I ask people who identify as members of “the Yang Gang” what attracted them to Yang, they cite Silicon Valley’s preferred solution to our economic woes: universal basic income (UBI) or, as he calls it, “the Freedom Dividend.” Yang argues that technology is going to eat up millions of jobs over the coming decade, wiping out everything from retail workers to truckers. “How many of you have seen the self-service kiosk at McDonald’s or another fast food restaurant?” Yang asks. “You kind of like them. I kind of like them too.” The only solution to this inevitability, Yang argues, is giving every American, beginning at age 18, $1,000 a month. He’d fund it by upping taxes on technology companies.
Yang has translated his unlikely background and platform into something of a cult following, centered around men under the age of 40. The idea that anyone except the occasional oddball would thrill to carrying signs with the word “MATH” emblazoned on them — which stands for Make America Think Harder — may feel like a stretch in the United States, where an anti-intellectual streak is writ large, and our current president is prone to saying such things as, “I love the poorly educated.” But when people attending the rally talk about UBI, it feels more personal. “It makes a lot of sense, because a lot of Americans are struggling,” said Keegan Steinke, 24, a canvasser for a solar company. “It provides a safety net for everyone, and it doesn’t provide these perverse incentives like, ‘Okay, I made this much, I might lose these benefits,’ ” said Elliott Ribner, 32, a software engineer.
Viewed from a great distance, Yang’s candidacy has a lot in common with the two political comets that streaked across the 2016 presidential campaign: Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. Yang runs essentially the same playbook: embracing economic grievance, hammering the tech giants and other darlings of the “new economy,” selling his case directly to the working American. Since he launched his campaign in November 2017, he has been retailing a vision of America in which educated, entitled elites have rigged the system and hoovered money away from middle America and toward the coasts, giving little in return. With no prior political experience or prominent backers, Yang is nonetheless gaining a peculiar traction, including some true believers who want him to be president and others who are mostly just intrigued.
Unlike Trump and Sanders, however, Yang, 44, comes precisely from the same corporate, tech-soaked world he is trying to attack. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, he made his money prepping students to get into MBA programs and, in recent years, has spent months at a time living in Silicon Valley. He was once a successful startup CEO and head of a group that trains budding entrepreneurs, but in the wake of 2016 presidential election Yang soured on an industry that wreaths itself in promises of prosperity and transformation; he rejects the conventional policy wisdom—popular on the left and the right—that out-of-work Americans should retrain for jobs in tech. And in a Democratic Party reveling in its diversity, the Taiwanese-American candidate says he worries most about how displaced white men will react to their declining fortunes—a stance that has, strangely, won him some fans from the “alt-right.“
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
I'm in Nebraska for a trip. The national media has done a horrific job covering the catastrophic flooding that has for months made homes inaccessible. It is all you see from the air, and a big deal. pic.twitter.com/XU9DmTb5Ju
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
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.
Old and Busted: “Trump is guilty of treason!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of collusion!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of obstruction!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of something! Release the report!” (Report released.) “Ummm…Barr’s summary was slightly off on one point! Impeach!” Trump Derangement Syndrome is a helluva drug…
Checkmate. How President Trump’s legal team outfoxed Mueller.” From the newly resurrected Human Events, this is a detailed legal analysis of how a memo written by William Barr before he became Attorney General laid the groundwork for curtailed Robert Mueller using an overly-expansive definition of “obstruction.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016.” You know, a spy. Here’s a handy decoder for the “covering for Democrats” speak:
"level of alarm inside the F.B.I." = "Level of alarm in the Clinton campaign/Obama White House" "politically sensitive operation" = Spying on Trump "under extraordinary circumstances." = "The possibility Trump might win"@nytimes =Democratic operatives with bylines.
Alabama State Rep. John Rogers (D) on abortion: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later” pic.twitter.com/dxPg6X759h
Facebook banned Milo Yannopoulos, Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan for “extremism,” and the Washington Post headline initially called them all “far right” before a ton of criticism forced them to correct the headline. Because Louis Farrakhan is so well-known for palling around with conservatives. (Facebook is a private entity and can do what it wants, but I don’t want any of those people banned. Let them speak and let people debate their ideas/lunacy/etc. or not as they feel).
Even CNN is starting to get a clue:
CNN Poll: Trump’s approval rating on economy “is the highest number we’ve ever seen.” pic.twitter.com/sLjjW4Jd0p
The members of the Flint, Michigan City Council sound like real winners.
“Norwegian fisherman have discovered a beluga whale wearing a tight harness with a camera attachment – sparking speculation the animal belongs to the Russian Navy.” I wouldn’t be surprised, especially since we have our own dolphin program… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Lance Morrow reviews Robert Caro’s Working. “If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies.”
In the “trouble in places you may not have heard of” department, clashes broke out on the African nation of Benin (between Nigeria and Togo on the Ivory Coast) when the ruling party held a parliamentary election from which opposition parties were excluded.
Dispatches from Social Justice Warrior land: “Trinity College professor tweets ‘whiteness is terrorism,’ refers to Barack and Michelle Obama as ‘white kneegrows.’”
Japan’s Emperor Akihito abdicated, Emperor Naruhito mounting the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, marking the end of the Heisei era and inaugurating the Reiwa era.
Actor James Woods is still in the Twitter Gulag:
This is the tweet that got @RealJamesWoods suspended. It references a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote. And we all know how controversial and offensive RWE’s work is…🙄🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/8k9k1zSqpV
Unhappy meals. Now if only every one came with mopping teenage Goth girl figurines…
“‘Mortal Kombat’ Introduces Brutal New Fatality Where Your Character Just States An Opposing Viewpoint…One character says, ‘There are only two genders,’ and his opponent instantly melts into nothing, being unable to handle the opposing viewpoint. Another character suggests that capitalism isn’t all bad, and his opponent’s head instantly falls off.”
Monmouth from April 23rd: Biden 27, Sanders 20, Buttigieg 8, Harris 8, Warren 6, O’Rourke 4. “California Sen. Kamala Harris has 8% support, off just slightly from 10% in March and 11% in January.” But she can’t be thrilled at that trendline…
UNH New Hampshire poll. Sanders 30, Biden 18, Buttigieg 15, Warren 5, Harris 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Klobucher 2, Yang 2, Ryan 2. That’s as high as I’ve seen Buttigieg.
Emerson Texas poll: Biden 23, O’Rourke 22, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 8, Warren 7, Castro 4, Yang 3, Harris 3, Klobucher 3. That’s an abysmal showing for Castro in his home state, and Harris should be doing better just off urban voters from Houston and the Metroplex. Indeed, Harris is down in every poll here.
Election betting markets. Yang is polling better at 4.9% for the Dem nomination than Warren at 4.7%. One wonders which Bulwerk-backer has Marco Rubio 2020 at 0.5%…
Old white guy? Joe Biden has hair plugs that are older than the median Democratic primary voter. Sanders and Biden are a year apart — and both of them are older than Trump. Creaky? Creepy stuff in his history? Dusty northeastern union-hall politics? Check all those boxes. Worst: Sanders and Biden, though they are miles apart in rhetoric, are in many ways a couple of outmoded Teddy Kennedy liberals in a party that wants nothing to do with dinosaurs of that particular species.
Snip.
The old-white-guy thing isn’t working out too well for Sanders. In Houston earlier this week for a cracked festival of progressive inanity called “She the People,” Sanders got read the old-white-guy riot act: Pressed about racial issues, Comrade Muppet started to launch into yet another retelling of the fact that he marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 — but the crowd shut him down, hooting and laughing at him. “We know!” someone shouted. They’d heard it all before. Sanders, visibly flummoxed, went on to talk up the fact that he’d supported Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, and the room responded with, approximately, “Jesse Who?”
The Reverend Jackson’s is a name to conjure with no more.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry into the 2020 presidential primary sets the stage for another knock-down, drag-out fight between the establishment wing of the party and the ascendant left, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Snip.
The 2016 primary contest left liberals fuming at what they viewed as establishment interference in the race, underscored by the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails that showed favoritism toward Clinton.
And some mainstream Democrats are unnerved by what they view as a group of left-wing interlopers, online brawlers and sore losers trying to take over the party.
The same fight played out in 2017, when party officials elected Tom Perez to be the next DNC chairman. Perez, who was backed by Biden, narrowly defeated Sanders’s preferred candidate, former Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.). That race similarly cut along establishment and grass-roots lines.
Snip.
But many centrist Democrats are just as worried about how the left will approach the primary contest.
They’re frustrated by Sanders’s steadfast refusal to officially join the Democratic Party and worried by what they view as his team of political assassins. And they wonder whether Sanders’s supporters will accept the outcome of the primary and turn out to vote for the nominee in the general election if Sanders falls short again.
“There is a ‘Bernie-or-bust’ coalition, and they have no allegiance to the party,” said the Democratic strategist. “They don’t care about campaign infrastructure or winning up and down the ballot. They’re just concerned about bullshit litmus tests and defending their guy no matter what and pretending that everyone else is a member of the big bad establishment.”
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still no news since his three week old tweet.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning toward a run. He’s been very quiet since his cancer surgery. Hard to blame him…
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. See last week’s post for his announcement video. Naturally, there’s tons of Biden news to wade through:
He raised $6.3 million within 24 hours of announcing, the most of any of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls, but not a “blow you away” number. “Biden’s campaign announced Friday that 96,926 donors contributed, with an average online donation of $41. His campaign also noted that 97% of his online donations were under $200.”
Biden has long since been close to lobbyists. Biden’s presidential campaign is currently being coordinated by his former chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, who was himself a lobbyist. In the past, Ricchetti’s role with Biden’s vice presidential office sidestepped the Obama administration’s ban on employing lobbyists: Ricchetti received a special waiver to take his role with Biden.
Thursday’s fundraiser will be rife with lobbyists — but not those registered in the federal system.
The Biden for President host committee includes Kenneth Jarin, a lobbyist with Ballard Spahr who is registered to work on behalf of toll road operator Conduent and several health care interests. Jarin is a major donor to both parties and has given to political action committees controlled by former Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner.
Another host of the Biden fundraiser is Alan Kessler, another lobbyist who works with the firm Duane Morris. Kessler is registered to lobby in Pennsylvania for American Airlines and the global information tech firm Unisys Corporation, among other clients.
Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, another host of the event, is a senior adviser to the local lobbying operation at Dentons, a law firm with a vast government affairs operation. Nutter is also on the board of Conduent.
In another election, at another time, the late entrance of a well-funded candidate leading in the polls might send convulsions through the primary field.
But Joe Biden’s arrival into the 2020 race has not had that effect. No Democratic rival appears doomed. No one’s fundraising seems in danger of drying up. Instead, in joining the race, the former vice president has laid bare how unsettled the entire 20-candidate contest remains — and how many in the party don’t believe the 76-year-old Biden is prepared for the rigors of a modern campaign, or the demands of a party transformed.
What, you mean the other candidates didn’t immediately start rending their garments and proclaiming “Woe is me! All is lost!”? Do tell…
Carpe Donktum nails Biden on the “very fine people” lie:
I’ve written previously on how the Democratic Party is more moderate and older than you probably think it is. About 50% of Democratic voters call themselves moderate or conservative, which is about the same percentage that are at least 50 years old. Most Democratic candidates running this year don’t seem to recognize that fact.
We’ve seen a Democratic field in which the candidates seem to be falling over each other to move further left, where the youngest Democrats are.
Biden, meanwhile, is sitting all alone in his base. In a Monmouth University poll released earlier this week, he had a 19-point advantage over his nearest competitor with Democrats who called themselves moderate or conservative. He was up by 18 points among those who were at least 50 years old. A Quinnipiac University poll released last month (that had Biden in a similar overall position) gave him even bigger advantages with more moderate and older voters.
Now, Biden does trail with the youngest and very liberal Democrats. But they make up a minority of the party, and Biden’s competitors are splitting that vote.
R. S. McCain thinks that Biden’s 29% is his peak. I’m not so sure. I think there are a substantial portion of people who vote in Democratic primaries that haven’t swallowed the SJW line, and will show up at the polls for Biden.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get’s a New York profile. Actually talks about meeting with Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Jared Kushner, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, as both Mayor of Newark and a Senator. “I value comity, I value finding common ground.” He posted 10 years of tax returns. “When I said we should crash the Booker campaign event, I didn’t mean literally!”
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Maybe. The Montana legislative session has already ended, and he had a closed event in Butte. But: “You know, the Legislature just left town, they left 300 bills on my desk, so I have quite a bit of work to do to sort the rest of that out, and haven’t made any decisions what I’d do after I get to serve governor.” Slight downgrade.
But another part of Buttigieg’s appeal rests on the fact that during and after the McKinsey stint, he did two very un-meritocratty things: First, he joined the Navy Reserve and was briefly deployed to Afghanistan, and then he moved back to the small, de-industrialized Midwestern city of his youth, not to join his parents in its academic enclave, but to run for mayor of South Bend and attempt to save a piece of the heartland from stagnation and decline.
These unusual steps away from elite self-segregation inform the way he sometimes seems to want to run for president: As a bridge-builder between the heartland and the coasts, as the Ivy League guy who takes Trump voters seriously as something more than just “deplorables,” as the first gay president who, like Nixon going to China, might be able to call a truce in the post-Obergefell culture wars and convince cultural liberals that they don’t need to bring every evangelical florist or Catholic adoption agency to heel.
But this bridge-building possibility coexists with another theory of Buttigieg, in which his unusual trajectory back homeward, far from a rejection of the meritocratic mentality, is actually just a clever meritocrat’s “hack” of the system of ascent — an advertisement for his own seriousness that, having served its purpose, can now be abandoned while he tries to vault insanely high, to return not only to Washington but to the Oval Office (or at least the Naval Observatory or a cabinet office).
This is the reading offered by Buttigieg’s pungent left-wing critics: I especially recommend a long takedown of the young mayor’s memoir by Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, and a shorter critique by a scion of the Studebaker family (Studebakers being the cars whose manufacture once built South Bend’s blue-collar prosperity).
These anti-Buttigiegians look at his mayoral record and see a politician who never really escaped the mentality of Harvard and McKinsey, whose big idea for the city involved bulldozing poor people’s houses and encouraging internet companies to move in — a “creative class” theory of urban renewal that didn’t supply the jobs that working-class South Benders need.
Here’s that Current Affirs takedown of Buttigieg’s memoir Douthat mentions. Current Affaris is both progressive and uber-smarmy, so read it only if you want a hard-lefty hit-piece. But I’ve got to admit that the author’s deep reading of Buttigieg’s own extremely lengthy index entry for himself in his own memoir (“CrossFit phase of, 133”) has some definite zing to it.
Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Presidential hopeful John Delaney wants you to unfollow Trump on Twitter.” See, I would think if you have some 19,800 Twitter followers, you wouldn’t want to draw attention to that fact by telling people to stop following the guy who has just under 60 million…
It’s clear that Gillibrand has made women and “women’s issues” a focus of her campaign, and it is clearly reflected in her fundraising. More than half of all the individual donations to her campaign during the first fundraising cycle of 2020 were from women. That’s more than any other 2020 contender can say. She is prioritizing issues like national paid family leave, access to abortion and birth control, improving public education, and stopping sexual harassment and abuse. But is that a winning strategy?
Maybe her hot pink campaign logo and website splashed with the word “BRAVE” all over are a little too on the nose. Maybe constantly describing herself as a “young mom” is a label that just isn’t doesn’t seem to fit. Maybe women voters don’t liked to be courted simply because of their sex. Or maybe, she’s just too much like Hillary Clinton.
Ouch!
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. But there is this: “Andrew Gillum Agrees To Pay $5,000 Fine In Ethics Case Settlement.”
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a New York Times profile. “In its 191-year history, the Democratic Party has never nominated a presidential candidate from west of the Central time zone.” I doubt that’s the tidbit I would have led with. Also “He got all these lefty programs through but supports fracking.” He had a brain freeze and forgot what GDP stands for.
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. “Klobuchar hails Anita Hill as an inspiration,” because of course she does. Genuflecting to St. Anita is a required ritual on the left again, mainly as a way for “woke” candidates to bash Biden for the Clarence Thomas confirmation. But one wonders how much a confirmation hearing that occurred more than a quarter-century ago will mean to an electorate that doesn’t remember Jesse Jackson…
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Last week’s Clown Car Update noted reports that Messam had missed payroll for campaign staffers. This week: “The two-term mayor’s campaign staffers have scattered from the nest after Messam missed payroll, first reported by The Miami New Times. Reports from the road say rallies have been sparsely attended. Now, Messam is mum, referring people to his legal counsel.” Also this: “There was speculation that Messam has his eyes set on the seat of Congressman Alcee Hastings, 82, who is reportedly going through treatment for pancreatic cancer.”
Democratic congressman Seth Moulton (D-MA), an Iraq war veteran who announced his candidacy for president early this week, wants you to know that presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who are trying to push America towards more progressive policies are bad for our country, and he’s running to save us.
“We can’t go too far left or we will lose middle America.”
It seems like Moulton is competing with Biden, Buttigieg and Delaney for the “non-crazy” Democratic Party vote. Whether this is a viable strategy remains to be seen. I have my doubts. But I was mildly surprised to see that Moulton has 138,000 Twitter followers, which is more than any of the other representatives running save Gabbard. Of course, that says less about how well Moulton is running than how badly Swalwell, Delaney and Ryan are…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got a KVUE interview: “I want to change the conversation. I’ve listened to some of these political shows and we’re not even talking about the real issues in the campaign. I think first and foremost, we need an industrial policy that actually lifts middle-class wages.”
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inside Bernie’s army: “On Saturday, the campaign launched a nationwide organizing program with nearly 5,000 house parties in every state throughout the country, demonstrating a show of force for his volunteer network and an opportunity to mobilize supporters in a primary contest that could remain close through the early voting states and beyond.” He’s also building out Our Revolution as a “shadow campaign” in the Midwest. “Bernie Sanders Can Win, But He Isn’t Polling Like A Favorite,” which compares Sanders’ numbers to candidates with similar numbers in previous cycles from Jeb! in 2016 all the way back to Hubert Humphrey in 1972. “Three of these candidates [Romney 2012, Obama 2008, McCain 2008] won their nominations; the other 12 lost.”
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Probably Out. But he did attract a sarcastic Trump tweet:
Weirdo Tom Steyer, who didn’t have the “guts” or money to run for President, is still trying to remain relevant by putting himself on ads begging for impeachment. He doesn’t mention the fact that mine is perhaps the most successful first 2 year presidency in history & NO C OR O!
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A Guide to Elizabeth Warren’s (Many) 2020 Policy Proposals.” How Warren is threatening Bernie’s left flank. Op-Ed: “Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are bad for the Democrats.” “Both represent the purist liberal wing of their party, a faction that has failed to elect a single president since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. And with only one out of four Americans calling themselves liberals in the last election, the notion that a doctrinaire left-winger can win in 2020 is an exercise in self-delusion.” Warren was evidently well-received at an SEIU shindig that Sanders skipped.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Report on a Yang rally in Los Angeles, complete with comparison to cult bad film The Room. “He is the hyper-enthusiastic high school teacher and his supporters are the jocks, goths, and potheads who never knew school could be so fun.” He also campaigned in Iowa.
