Patrick jumps in, Bloomberg is running Heisenberg’s Campaign, Buttigieg is up big in Iowa, Warren falls, Tulsi draws all the boys to the yard, and Biden won’t puff or pass. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Quinnipiac (South Carolina): Biden 33, Warren 13, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 6, Steyer 5, Yang 4, Harris 3, Booker 2, Klobuchar 1, Williamson 1. Got to think this is evidence Steyer is dropping big bucks on South Carolina…
Election betting markets. If you think Deval Patrick has a chance, now’s a great time to put down your money: he has no bets backing him, not even the 0.1% laid on the departed Hickenlooper…
Voters cast ballots in less than three months, and the Democratic primary is still crowded with little guys. Roughly a half-dozen candidates in the very bottom tier of the Democratic presidential primary are soldiering on, hoping that even after months of campaigning without catching fire that there’s still a chance. Their resolve reflects, in part, some Democrats’ insistence that the lineup of top contenders is deeply flawed and the race is primed for some late twists and turns.
“I truly believe that that person is as likely to be someone polling at 1% today as it is to be the people that are leading in the race today,” Bennet told reporters after filing his paperwork. “Stranger things have happened than that.”
Candidates like Bennet have some reason for optimism. Polls show many Democratic voters, even in early-voting states, have not made up their minds. In Iowa, the first state to weigh in, the front of the pack is crowded, another sign of ambiguity, some argue. Worries about the strength of the front-runners prompted Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor, to move toward a bid, threatening to expand the field just as the party thought it would be winnowing.
Some higher-profile aspirants, including New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand or former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, weren’t able to stick it out, after months of poor polling and lackluster fundraising. Some middle-tier candidates, meanwhile, have had to scale back their operations. California Sen. Kamala Harris pulled staff from New Hampshire this past week, while former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro cut positions there and in early-voting South Carolina.
But Bennet and others seemed to have prepared for a long, very slow burn. Bennet and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock never expected to raise much money and built small-scale operations that could carry them until the first part of February, when Iowa and then New Hampshire vote.
“Everybody goes up and down, and what I need to be is organizing and catching fire as voting starts,” said Bullock, another candidate mired in the bottom tier who has announced an initial $500,000 advertising campaign in Iowa.
Bennet and Bullock stand out in the crowded bottom tier as two well-regarded moderate politicians who got into the race late — in May — and appear to have the same strategy: wait for former Vice President Joe Biden’s support to collapse and hope they’re the best centrist standing. A Bloomberg bid would immediately add another contender — and millions of dollars — to the competition on that front, though the former mayor’s team says he will likely stay out of early states.
Other perennial 1% polling candidates have plans that are far less clear. They include spiritualist and best-selling author Marianne Williamson, who moved from Los Angeles to Iowa for the race; former Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak, who just concluded a walk across New Hampshire to attempt to draw attention to his campaign; and former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, a wealthy businessman who is self-funding much of his race.
Delaney explained his continued campaign with a “why not?” rationale. After millions spent and countless hours of time, “it just seems kind of crazy for me to get out before the caucus,” he said.
“The left smells a rat in Bloomberg, Patrick bids”:
Aides and allies to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, among other liberals, perceive the eleventh-hour campaign launched last week by Patrick — and the prospect of an impending Bloomberg 2020 bid — as an attempt to crush an ascendant left wing that would expand government more than any other Democratic president in decades.
In their view, Patrick and Bloomberg are stalking horses for moderate Democrats, high-dollar contributors and bundlers desperate to halt the momentum of the economic populists at the top of the polls — and regain control of the party levers.
It’s no minor intra-party spat in an election where all wings of the Democratic Party will need to be working in concert to beat Trump.
They’re not wrong, but note that the word “unelectable” is strangely missing from the piece. Finally, an actual excuse for using a silly image:
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inside the war on Biden-Ukraine reporting. Man, Alexandra Chalupa’s name shows up in so many places. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Comes out against marijuana legalization. While I think that’s the wrong opinion, I’ve got to admit that it’s a bit gutsy for Biden to stick to his guns on this one, as it would be so easy to give lip-service to legalization the way most other candidates are doing. Promises he can work with Republicans once that evil mastermind Trump is gone. Caveat: It’s a garbage article full of far-left talking points like “more and more men on the right turn to political violence,” as though a Bernie Bro hadn’t started shooting at Republican congressmen.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Getting In? Twitter. The Bloomberg campaign is currently in a quantum superimposition state, since he’s running (applied for ballot access in Alabama) and not running (hasn’t officially announced) at the same time. So don’t make too much fun of him, or he might not run:
Name the Democrat who is super-excited to have Michael Bloomberg barge into the Dem primaries like some nutty ex-girlfriend who gave you crabs popping in at your wedding. Where is the groundswell of support behind this pint-sized presidential aspirant? Perhaps the Democratic consultants who didn’t sign up with one of the other goofy candidates are happy. The micro-zillionaire may not have charisma or a vision or actual human support, but he’s got endless bucks to squander on electoral parasites.
So, those jerks will love him getting in. And so will us Republicans – Trump already has a nickname laid upon the numismatic gnome, “Little Michael.”
Real talk: the guy is delusional. Can you hear the excitement about the Verne Troyer of American politics bubbling over in the Midwest where this election’s going to be won?”
“Hey Lou, good news. That Bloomberg guy is in the race. I’ve been lookin’ for a miniature Manhattan finance snob who wants to ban Cokes, take our deer rifles, and who makes the New York Times happy.”
“Yeah Phil, I’m sure getting tired of all this great economic good news and my kids not coming home in boxes from Whocaresistan.”
“We need a guy who’s thinks he’s smarter and better than us and isn’t afraid to tell us how to live our lives!”
Snip.
Bloomberg is the kind of pursed-lipped, uptight scold the Normals are saluting with a single digit. You get the distinct impression that he spends a lot of his time being very, very upset that we are choosing to live our lives without his approval, and that it grates on him. Electing him president would be like electing your kindergarten teacher POTUS, if your kindergarten teacher was tiny, 77, and jetted away for every weekend to Bermuda in her Gulfstream after lecturing you on how you can’t have chocolate because of global warming.
Snip.
But that’s okay, because his ego trip is going to cause amazing, glorious disruption within the Democratic race and help Donald Trump immeasurably. Blue on blue is the best kind of conflict, and this uncivil war is going to send popcorn sales through the roof. I know I’ll be gobbling it down, while sipping a Big Gulp just to tick him off.
Do you think Joe Biden, who now occupies the “fake moderate” lane Bloomberg wants to run in, will just go quietly? It was Gropey’s age-fueled decline, magnified by his snortunate son Hoover’s coke-fueled Slavic shenanigans, that made the creepy veep vulnerable. But Joe won’t stagger away quietly. He’ll stagger away loudly, incoherently, and bloodily. Joe may be utterly confused – “Whaddya mean the Blue Man Group is running against me?” – but those around him, those investing in his success, those planning to actually control things should the American people be dumb enough to elect the empty figurehead, are not going to just throw in the towel.
It’s not like Bloomberg has a lot of love out there in Dem land, or in Republican land, or in any land. He wants to claim the centrist slot, but the Dems are in no mood for puny moderation. And we Republicans are not fooled by Lil’ Duce. He’s a liberal schoolmarm just like the rest, except his business acumen won’t let him support the trillions in giveaways Chief Sitting Bolshevik and the rest are touting. He knows their numbers are literally insane, and he’ll say so, but just because you can count doesn’t make you moderate.
Bloomberg sees another gap, this one in the Democratic presidential field, where no center-left candidate dominates. Both Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg have obvious weaknesses and Amy Klobuchar has all but disappeared. Bloomberg is right in saying the whole field is weak, most candidates are too far left to win in November, and the center lane is not too crowded. He’s also right in saying that President Trump is vulnerable despite the strong economy. And he’s right in thinking that his age is no barrier. At 77, he is still energetic and sharp enough to do the job.
Where Bloomberg is wrong is thinking he can captivate a Democratic base that has moved sharply left since Barack Obama left office. He’s wrong, too, if he thinks policies that worked in New York City will appeal to contemporary Democrats.
Bloomberg’s problem is not that primary voters hate his notorious tax on Slurpees or his strong stance against guns. They like them. Party activists don’t drink Big Gulps; they sip fair-trade coffee and craft beer. They don’t drive pickup trucks with gun racks. Au contraire. They think restrictions on gun sales are long overdue and will reduce urban crime. They adore government policies crafted by experienced professionals, not gasbag populists. Some remember Bloomberg’s New York as a very competently run city, one that became cleaner, safer, and more prosperous during his tenure (2002-2013). So far, so good.
The problem is that Bloomberg made the city safer by cracking down on petty criminals (“broken windows” policing) and frisking lots of people to lessen gun violence. Those policies, begun under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and continued under Bloomberg, worked well—but they made enemies, especially in poor, minority neighborhoods. Today, those policies are despised by party activists, especially African Americans.
Being strong on crime is the surest way to alienate today’s Democratic primary voters. The same black politicians who backed tough laws during the crack cocaine epidemic now reject them and blame their passage on white racists. (That’s why Joe Biden, who voted for these bills, now apologizes for them.) Actually, black politicians were among their strongest advocates. Back then, they had plenty of support from minority voters living in communities ravaged by crack and the gangs that sold it.
Those days are gone. The politicians who previously supported such policies now revile “mass incarceration” and the “prison-industrial complex.” For them, Black Lives Matter means no more intrusive policing, no more arrests for “broken windows” or jumping turnstiles, no more street stops to frisk for illegal weapons.
Gone, too, are the days when reform-minded Democrats supported charter schools, as Mayor Bloomberg did. Teacher unions have waged war on them in Democratic cities across the country.
This shift in attitudes means Bloomberg can tell primary voters he made New York more livable, but he cannot tell them how. His successful policies are now politically toxic, at least among Democrats. They are major obstacles to winning black support, an essential element in the party’s coalition. Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Pete face their own obstacles with this vital constituency, where they badly lag Barack Obama’s vice president.
Bloomberg’s second problem is yet another one that would be a huge asset in a sane world. He is the very embodiment of an American economic success story. He is immensely rich, and he made it all himself. Republicans love that kind of story. Democrats once did, too. No more. It doesn’t matter that Bloomberg made his riches honestly by adding value to the economy. He didn’t throw poor people out of work, run sweatshops, mine coal, or slaughter cuddly animals. It hardly matters that he’s given away billions to charity. What matters is that he is not embarrassed by his riches, that he made them in the financial sector, and that he opposes the activists’ anti-growth policies, such as the Green New Deal. For the socialist wing of the party, those are the indelible marks of Cain. The hard left will never back him, even if he wins the nomination. Some might hold their noses and vote for him in the general election, but his nomination would rip the party apart.
Bloomberg faces other problems, too. He is the opposite of charismatic. He lacks a national, grassroots organization. His money can buy consultants and advertisements, but it cannot coax volunteers to ring doorbells.
“History Says Bloomberg 2020 Would Be a Sure Loser“:
If Bloomberg is concerned about the rise of Elizabeth Warren, the Thompson campaign should prompt him to think very hard about the ramifications of getting into the 2020 race. By splitting the moderate vote with Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, a Bloomberg candidacy might wind up delivering key states to Warren or Bernie Sanders.
Granted, none of the other latecomers has brought a fleet of Brinks trucks into a campaign. And the sheer volatility of primaries, along with the unpredictability of politics, warns against putting too much stock in history. Still, if Bloomberg or anyone else is seriously thinking of launching a campaign, it’s worth remembering that when it comes to a presidential run, the last has never been first.
Now that Bloomberg has hinted that he might get into the race, he must be considering how he’ll defend his record as mayor to an increasingly left-leaning Democratic voter. Though conservatives often deride Bloomberg for his nanny-state initiatives, like wanting to ban “big gulp” sugary drinks, a considerable part of what the Wall Street tycoon accomplished in New York—from carrying on Rudy Giuliani’s essential policing initiatives to knocking down barriers to real estate development and encouraging the rich to come to New York because “that’s where the revenue comes [from]”—will be far more noxious to the progressive voter than Biden’s policy transgressions. How Bloomberg defends himself will be significant because we’re entering a phase in which moderate, pro-business Democrats (and he was always a Democrat, even when he ran as a Republican) like him are disappearing from the political landscape of America’s big cities, to be replaced by progressives whose views on everything—especially public order—appear to be regressions to the disastrous urban policies of the 1960s and 1970s. The disorder rising in places like San Francisco and Seattle suggests what the fruits of such policies will be.
BOSTON GLOBE: I think that I get the premise of the campaign. You have someone highly educated, very energetic, inspiring on the stump, has some executive experience, with a beautiful, bald head —
CORY BOOKER: Thank you for finally stating the truth!
GLOBE: Oh, well I am talking about Deval Patrick.
BOOKER: [Laughter] Touché! Touché! Another reporter did that to me, like a mayor, Rhodes Scholar, and thank you, thank you. “Oh no, I am talking about Mayor Pete.’’
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. CNN tries to explain his surge in Iowa. “It all has to do with the fact that a lot of caucusgoers had and have a highly favorable view of Buttigieg.” That’s putting the cart before the horse: They have a favorable view of him because he’s poured a ton of money into the state to introduce himself favorably to Iowans. Is he peaking too soon? Maybe, but most of the Democratic candidates this cycle never even broke into double-digits anywhere. He may be up big in Iowa, but South Carolina? Not so much:
The Democratic nomination remains very much up for grabs, but a big question hanging over Buttigieg’s head is whether he can make sufficient inroads with African-American primary voters to capture the nomination.
Black voters make up about a quarter of the Democratic primary electorate, but two thirds of South Carolina primary voters are black, and Buttigieg remains stuck in the single digits in the Palmetto State. A Monmouth poll of South Carolina conducted after the October Democratic debate, where Buttigieg went toe-to-toe with Elizabeth Warren and won, pegged the mayor’s support at 3 percent, while a Change Research poll conducted at the same time showed Buttigieg at 9 percent.
Buttigieg’s weakness in South Carolina is partly a function of the fact that Joe Biden, former vice president to America’s first black president, retains a commanding lead among black voters. But Buttigieg’s weakness is also partly a function of his sexual orientation, as David Catanese reported in The State last month: “Internal focus groups conducted by Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign this summer reveal a possible reason why he is struggling with African-American voters: some see his sexuality as a problem.”
“I’ll go ahead and say it,” one African-American man said in a focus group. “I don’t like the fact that he threw out there that he lives with his husband.”
Buttigieg pitches a plan for black Americans. Unfortunately, he used a stock photograph of black Kenyans in an ad promoting the plan. Oops. Double-oops: Names of supporters of the plan (but not necessarily Buttigieg) appearing in a Buttigieg ad.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But she says that “many, many, many people” want her to run in 2020. I’m sure that’s true: There’s an army of Clinton sycophants, toadies and consultants who would love one last ride on the gravy train. “‘We Would Be Delighted To Have Hillary Clinton Run In 2020,’ Says Democratic Party Chair As Several Laser Dots Dance Around On Forehead.”
Gabbard doesn’t have a ton of supporters: She’s averaging 1 to 2 percent in national surveys and 2 to 4 percent in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire. But she’s managed to meet the higher polling thresholds for debate qualification, so her support has grown at least a little bit — and what’s more, a chunk of it seems to be exclusively considering backing Gabbard. Back in October FiveThirtyEight partnered with Ipsos to dig into candidate support before and after the fourth Democratic debate. Our survey found that 13 percent of Gabbard’s supporters said they were only considering voting for her, a larger share than all Democratic candidates other than former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both of whom have more support overall.
So what do we know about Gabbard’s base? For one thing, it’s overwhelmingly male —according to The Economist’s polling with YouGov, her support among men is in the mid-single digits, while her support among women is practically nonexistent.
This trend is evident in other recent polls as well. Last week’s Quinnipiac poll of Iowa found Gabbard at 5 percent among men and 1 percent among women, and Quinnipiac’s new survey of New Hampshire found her at 9 percent among men and 4 percent among women. A late October national poll from Suffolk University found her at 6 percent among men and 2 percent among women.
Her predominantly male support shows up in other ways, too. An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics found that only 24 percent of Gabbard’s itemized contributions had come from female donors,1 the smallest percentage of any candidate in the race. And while she doesn’t lead on the prediction markets, which tend to skew heavily young and male, as of publication, bettors do give her a slightly better chance of winning the Democratic nomination than Sen. Kamala Harris on PredictIt, though still not better than internet favorite Andrew Yang.
Gabbard’s supporters are also likely to fall outside of traditional Democratic circles. Her supporters, for instance, are more likely to have backed President Trump in 2016, hold conservative views or identify as Republican compared to voters backing the other candidates. An early November poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 24 percent of Democratic primary voters who voted for Trump in 2016 backed Gabbard. By comparison, 12 percent of these voters backed Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 11 percent backed Biden and 10 percent backed Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Primary voters who identified as conservative also overwhelmingly backed Gabbard in that poll (16 percent) — only Biden and Harris enjoyed more support from this group (27 percent and 17 percent, respectively).
All reasons for woke Democrats to hate her even more…
… many privately expressed the view that Harris should begin seriously considering leaving the race to avoid total embarrassment in the state’s early March primary. Her continued weakness in the presidential contest could even have a more damaging effect, several said — encouraging a primary challenger in 2022, when Harris is up for reelection.
“I don’t think she can last until California,’’ says Garry South, a veteran strategist who has advised [CA Governor Gavin] Newsom and former presidential candidate Joe Lieberman. “I don’t wish her ill, but she’s got a decision to make: you limp in here and get killed in your home state, and it damages your reputation nationally. Or you pull out before the primary like Jerry Brown did in 1980 … and you at least avoid the spectacle of being decisively rejected.”
[…]
Interviews with a half-dozen veteran Democratic campaign insiders at the convention who spoke on condition of anonymity — many out of fear of angering a sitting senator — echoed South’s view.
Harris has qualified for both the November and December Democratic debates, so it’s highly unlikely she’ll drop out before then unless she just no longer has the campaign resources to go on.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Probably not? Not seeing any news since last week’s trial ballon, and maybe Patrick’s entry stole any potential thunder he could have generated.
Klobuchar’s rise in Minnesota politics is attributable in good part to her father’s prominence as a sports reporter and daily columnist for the Minneapolis Tribune. By the time she jumped into electoral politics everybody knew the name Klobuchar.
In Minnesota politics Klobuchar has led a charmed life, but so have a few other DFL politicians who lacked the advantage of a widely known name. Her popularity among Minnesota voters is not a credit to us. From my perspective, the most notable fact about Senator Klobuchar is what a phony she is.
She is not nice. She is not funny. She is not a moderate. She is not an accomplished legislator. She is an incredibly boring speaker.
Update: Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Jumped In. Because Massachusetts just isn’t sufficiently represented by Liawatha in the race. 538 articulates the reasoning behind Patrick’s run:
Democrats, as I wrote earlier this week, have a somewhat unorthodox set of front-runners — at least when compared to past nominees. Joe Biden is on the old side (76). Pete Buttigieg is on the young side (37). Elizabeth Warren is very liberal. And Bernie Sanders is both very liberal and old (78). The last two Democrats to win a general election — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — were 40-somethings who ran on somewhat safe ideological platforms.
Patrick, meanwhile, is 63 years old — not young, exactly, but not in his upper 70s either. He served two terms as Massachusetts governor. He’s liberal, but unlikely to push more controversial liberal policies such as Medicare for All or more drastic ones such as a wealth tax. I assume that Patrick, who is friendly with Obama, is himself wary of the current Democratic field and its lack of a Bill Clinton or Barack Obama style figure, and that his circle includes a lot of Democratic Party operatives and donors who see this void and encouraged him to run. (Or at least didn’t discourage him.)
You might think that Patrick’s logical path is to compete with Biden for black voters, and with Warren and Sanders for New Hampshire voters (all three come from neighboring states). And sure, it would help Patrick if he can peel off some of Warren’s well-educated liberal voters, particularly in New Hampshire. And to win the nomination, he will probably have to close the big lead that Biden has with African-Americans. But I think the real opening for Patrick is essentially to replace Pete Buttigieg as the candidate for voters who want a charismatic, optimistic, left-but-not-that-left candidate. Patrick, I think, is betting that there’s a “Goldilocks” opportunity for him — “Buttigieg but older,” or “Biden but younger” — a candidate who is viewed as both safe on policy and safe on electability grounds by Democratic establishment types and voters who just want a somewhat generic Democratic candidate that they are confident will win the general election.
After all, in his rise in Massachusetts politics, Patrick was not that reliant on black support — the Bay State has a fairly small black population (9 percent). Instead, he won a competitive 2006 Democratic primary for governor by emerging as preferred candidate among the state’s white, educated, activist class.
On paper, Patrick seems fairly similar to Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — charismatic, black, left-but-not-that-left. But he has two potential advantages over them. First, Patrick has a last-mover advantage — he’s seen how the other candidates have ran and can begin his candidacy to take advantage of perceived weaknesses. As a new candidate, voters might also give him a fresh look in a way that perhaps the two senators haven’t been able to get. But more importantly, Booker and Harris both spent the first half of the year trying to win some of the more liberal voters, who are likely now with Warren and Sanders. That may have made Harris, in particular, appear as though she was trying to be all things to all people. Patrick can now enter the race knowing that he is trying to win Democrats who self-identify as “moderate” and “somewhat liberal,” basically conceding the most liberal voters to Warren and Sanders.
Patrick currently works at Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Democrats spent 2012 criticizing because Mitt Romney had long worked there. That looked like a huge liability this time last year, when Patrick flirted with but ultimately ruled out a run. Back then, it seemed like the party’s left was ascendant and Patrick’s Bain work would be a deal-breaker. Now, I expect Patrick to be more unapologetic about his work, essentially leaning into the idea that he is more moderate and pro-capitalism than Warren or Sanders.
It all sounds pretty good on paper, right? You can almost see why Patrick decided to launch such a late, long-shot bid.
There is a potential problem, though: I’m not sure voters really want Buttigieg-but-older or Biden-but-younger. Whatever the Democratic elites think, Democratic voters like the current field, as I noted above. That makes me think that people in Iowa, where the South Bend mayor is surging, are not looking for Buttigieg-but-older. They’re probably well aware of how old Buttigieg is — he talks about it all the time! Biden, meanwhile, has led in national polls most of the year and has solid leads in Nevada and South Carolina — it’s possible many voters view his age and related experience as a feature not a bug. Patrick will be a fresh candidate and perhaps have a more honed message, but in the end may register with actual voters not much differently than Booker or Harris or any of the other lower-tier candidates, black or non-black.
Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts and newly-resigned executive of Mitt Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital, has entered the Democratic primary race, which is shaping up to be the biggest ensemble-disaster comedy since Cannonball Run.
Patrick’s entry comes after news that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg put himself on the ballot in Alabama and Arkansas. It also comes amid word from Hillary Clinton that “many, many, many” people are urging her to run in 2020, and whispers in the press that an “anxious Democratic establishment” has been praying for alternate candidacies in a year that had already seen an astonishing 26 different people jump in the race.
A piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago suggested Democratic insiders, going through a “Maalox moment” as they contemplated possible failure in next year’s general election season, were fantasizing about “white knight” campaigns by Clinton, Patrick, John Kerry, Michelle Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder (!), or Ohio’s Sherrod Brown.
The story described “concern” that “party elites” have about the existing field:
With doubts rising about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s ability to finance a multistate primary campaign, persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election and skepticism that Mayor Pete Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., can broaden his appeal beyond white voters, Democratic leaders are engaging in a familiar rite: fretting about who is in the race…
LOL at the non-mention of Bernie Sanders in that passage. If Bernie wins the nomination, “Buttigieg Finishes Encouraging Fourth” is going to be your A1 Times headline.
Snip.
People like Bloomberg and Patrick seem to believe in the existence of a massive electoral “middle” that wants 15-point plans and meritocratic slogans instead of action. As befits brilliant political strategists, they also seem hyper-concerned about the feelings of the country’s least numerous demographic, the extremely rich. A consistent theme is fear (often described in papers like the Times as “concern”) that the rhetoric of Warren and Sanders might unduly upset wealthy folk.
Snip.
From Donald Trump to Sanders to Warren, the politicians attracting the biggest and most enthusiastic responses in recent years have run on furious, throw-the-bums-out themes, for the logical reason that bums by now clearly need throwing out.
Snip.
You can’t capture the widespread discontent over these issues if you’re running on a message that the donor class doesn’t deserve censure for helping create these messes. It’s worse if you actually worked — as Patrick did — for a company like Ameriquest, a poster child for the practices that caused the 2008 financial crisis: using aggressive and/or predatory tactics to push homeowners into new subprime mortgages or mortgage refis, fueling the disastrous financial bubble.
If we count Bloomberg, Patrick marks the 28th person to run in the 2020 Democratic race. Pundits from the start have hyped a succession of politicians with similar/familiar political profiles, from Beto O’Rourke to Kamala Harris to Buttigieg to Amy Klobuchar to John Delaney, and all have failed to capture public sentiment, for the incredibly obvious reason that voters have tuned out this kind of politician.
They’ve heard it all before. Every time a long-serving establishment Democrat gets up and offers paeans to “hope” and “unity” and “economic mobility,” all voters hear is blah, blah, blah. They’re not looking for what FiveThirtyEight.com calls a “Goldilocks solution,” i.e. “Buttigieg, but older,” or “Biden, but younger” (or, more to the point in the case of this Bain Capital executive, “Mitt Romney, but black”); they’re looking for something actually different from what they’ve seen before.
The party’s insiders would have better luck finding a winning general election candidate if they randomly plucked an auto mechanic from Lansing, Michigan, or a nail salon owner from Vegas, or any of a thousand schoolteachers who could use the six months of better-paid work, than they would backing yet another in the seemingly endless parade of corporate-friendly “Goldilocks solutions.” That’s assuming they can’t see past themselves long enough to at least pretend they can support someone with wide support bases like Sanders or Warren.
Our military is excellent in many regards, but it is insufficient in its readiness to meet all the threats of the 21st century and needs to be truly transformed. You can see this in the U.S. commander of the Pacific’s comment that China now commands the Western Pacific. In the face of a rising China, along with authoritarian regimes from Brazil to the Philippines to Turkey to Russia, and the constant presence of belligerent non-state actors, we need to reform our military to deal with asymmetrical threats.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren climbs onboard the free health care for illegal aliens train. “Medicare for All, as I put this together, covers everyone regardless of immigration status…And that’s it. We get Medicare for All, and you don’t need the subsidies because Medicare for All is fully paid for, and that’s the starting place.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.) But she’s also ever-so-slightly scaled back her $40 trillion socialized medicine scheme, and Sweet Jesus are the loony left upset over it. And I’ve got to hand it to Team Bernie for this one:
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is expanding her staff in Texas, giving her easily the biggest organization devoted to the state of any primary campaign.
In an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune, her campaign named six senior staffers Friday morning who will work under its previously announced state director, Jenn Longoria. The staff for now will be spread across offices in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth.
The campaign also announced it will hire full-time organizers in north, central, east and south Texas.
The Texas team, according to the campaign, “will focus on traditional, digital and data-driven voter contact and dedicated outreach to communities of color across the Lone Star State.” The delegate-rich Texas primary is on March 3, or Super Tuesday.
Here are the senior staffers that Warren’s campaign announced Friday morning, starting with where they will be based:
San Antonio area: Matthew Baiza, deputy organizing director. Baiza was the 2019 campaign manager for San Antonio City Councilwoman Ana Sandoval and an organizer for Gina Ortiz Jones’ 2018 bid for the 23rd Congressional District.
Austin area: Sissi Yado, organizing director. Yado most recently worked as senior field manager for the Human Rights Campaign in Texas and previously was training manager for the Florida Democratic Party.
Austin area: Michael Maher, operations and training director. Maher has worked for Battleground Texas in a number of roles, including 2018 programs director and 2016-2019 operations and finance manager.
Austin area: Beth Kloser, data director. Kloser was managing director of Battleground Texas from 2015-2018 and a regional organizer for Wendy Davis’ 2014 gubernatorial run.
Dallas area: Jess Moore Matthews, mobilization director. Matthews most recently served as chief content officer for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and previously was digital director for de Blasio’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Houston area: Andre Wagner, community organizing director. Wagner is a former staffer for state Sen. Carol Alvarado of Houston and Houston City Councilman Dwight Boykins whose campaign experience includes organizing for Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 U.S. Senate bid.
Yes, Battleground Texas, Wendy Davis and Bill de Blasio alums, that’s your surefire ticket to success in Texas…
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Project Veritas managed to get a man inside CNN to cover the bias there, and he came back with a whole lot of footage.
The first two videos, about how crime against rich white people than poor black people, probably won’t be a shock to anyone paying attention.
However, the bits on Democratic Presidential candidates, and how CNN treats some candidates it likes (Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris) differently than others it doesn’t (Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard), have a bit more bite.
But the bits about how boring Biden’s rallies are dead on.
Ukraine revelations are pummeling the Biden campaign, furthering his slump, Q3 fundraising numbers drop, Yang rises, and rumors fly that Grandma Death is about to escape from her crypt yet again. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Q3 Fundraising
It’s that time again! Fundraising totals came gushing out of the campaigns last week:
Those are good numbers for Yang, bad numbers for Harris, and terrible numbers for Biden. As the presumed front-runner and DNC insider candidate, Biden should be rolling in donor dough. He’s not. And he had two-and-a-half months to raise money before the whole Ukraine thing really broke open. This suggests serious organizational impairment by the Biden campaign, or that Biden himself is simply phoning it in.
Sanders topped the list, but everything hings on how well, and how quickly, he comes back from his heart attack. Warren is in line with expectation: The bump from beating Biden has to be tempered with the disappointment of losing to Sanders. More than half of the media seems ready to anoint Warren The Chosen One, but her performance isn’t yet justifying it yet.
As for Yang, between this and his rising poll numbers, there’s no reason to treat him as any less serious a candidate than Harris.
Polls
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 41, Warren 12, Sanders 10, Harris 4, Steyer 4, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. Has Steyer been making ad buys in South Carolina?
Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire): Warren 25, Biden 24, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 5, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 2, Yang 2, Booker 1. Sample size of 423. Castro received zero votes.
Candidates will need to clear 3 percent in four DNC-approved polls, up from the 2 percent required to qualify for the September and October debates. But the committee also created an additional early-state path to qualify: garnering 5 percent in two approved polls conducted in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.
Additionally, candidates now need to receive donations from 165,000 unique donors — up from 130,000 from the September and October debates — with 600 unique donors in 20 different states, territories or the District of Columbia.
The top fundraiser in the Democratic presidential field was hospitalized for a heart attack, the longtime polling leader and his son sit at the center of an impeachment inquiry, and the one candidate with clear momentum faces persistent doubts among some party leaders that she is too liberal to win the general election.
With breathtaking speed, the events of the past two weeks have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race, shaking a party desperate to defeat President Trump next year and deeply fearful of any misstep that risks reelecting a president many Democrats see as dangerously unfit for office.
Concerns have risen in recent days that the potential Democratic slate has been weakened by events largely out of the candidates’ control. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) promised a speedy return to the campaign trail after leaving the hospital Friday, but it was unclear whether the 78-year-old would be able to replicate his previously frenetic travel schedule. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has spent most of the race as the leader in the polls, has faced daily attacks from Trump over largely unfounded allegations about his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings, highlighting a potential vulnerability for the candidate many saw as the best hope for beating Trump.
Snip.
But they point to several worrying factors, including questions about whether Biden is equipped to mount an effective defense against Trump’s attacks and whether the surging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would alienate moderate voters and donors if she were the nominee. Some fear that Sanders’s health problems put a spotlight on the advanced age of the top contenders, all of whom are in their 70s. Others expressed skepticism that any Democrat would be able to compete against Trump’s unmatched ability to shift the public’s focus.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Launches ads attacking “Medicare for All.” It’s open question to whether the majority of the Democratic Party’s total voting membership (as opposed to the hard left activist base) supports fully socialized medicine and destroying private health insurance. If Biden falters, Bennet and Bullock would be two candidates with a good shot to pick up his moderate voters. Well, that is, assuming they can get past Buttigieg’s giant spiked walls of money…
For Mr. Biden’s campaign, no attack could have been more difficult to deal with than one involving the candidate’s son.
Mr. Biden nearly did not run for president because of the effect it would have on his family — and particularly on Hunter Biden and his children, according to multiple advisers to the former vice president. Hunter Biden has struggled for years with substance addiction and had recently gone through a very public divorce from his first wife.
In separate interviews, Mr. Coons and his fellow senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, both said they had warned Mr. Biden that the president would target his family.
“He expected his family to be attacked,” Mr. Carper said, adding that Mr. Biden assured him he was braced for “the onslaught.’’
Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, encouraged him to enter the race, knowing the attacks were inevitable. But as Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, put it: “When it happens, it still feels pretty lousy.”
The Biden campaign has attempted to handle the candidate’s son with great sensitivity. Mr. Biden made clear at the outset that Hunter, a lawyer who had long advised his father on his campaigns, should not be made to feel excluded, people who spoke with him said. One adviser to Mr. Biden recently telephoned his son to solicit advice on the upcoming debate in Ohio.
But to most of Mr. Biden’s aides, Hunter Biden has been a spectral presence. He is living in Los Angeles and stayed away from Mr. Biden’s campaign launch in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden quietly attended the last two debates and appeared with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, at a July fund-raiser in Pasadena, Calif.
Still, Mr. Biden’s advisers are aware that Hunter Biden carries political vulnerabilities. His business career has intersected repeatedly with his father’s political power, through roles he had held in banking, lobbying and international finance. Working for a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month while his father was vice president, and some of Mr. Biden’s admirers worry that, while Mr. Trump’s accusations are without merit, voters may view Hunter Biden’s actions as problematic.
“Without merit.” “Problematic.” You can always count on the press to put lipstick on a Democrats’ pig. More on Hunter Biden:
There’s an old saying about addiction. The man takes a drink (or a sniff), then the drink takes a drink, until the drink takes the man. It will take the bystanders, too, if they let it. Addiction is ravenous. But there was always someone in Joe Biden’s life to help him out with Hunter. It’s heartwarming when family and friends swoop in to care for the boys while Daddy serves the people of Delaware. But little boys have little needs, while big boys have bigger needs.
Soon enough, directionless Hunter has a six-figure job at a bank run by Biden supporters. When Hunter grows bored, there’s another lucrative job under the tutelage of a former Biden staffer. When Hunter wants a house he can’t afford, he receives a loan for 110 percent of the purchase price. And when he goes bust, another friendly banker mops up the damage.
Then his brother Beau contracts fatal brain cancer, and the last wobbly wheels come off Hunter Biden’s fragile self. At this point, the New Yorker piece becomes a gonzo nightmare — much of it narrated by Hunter himself — of hallucinations, a car abandoned in the desert, maxed-out credit cards, a crack pipe, a strip club and a brandished gun.
If, as the magazine headline put it, Hunter Biden now jeopardizes his father’s campaign, the article makes clear Joe Biden feels a share of the blame. Yet, by the time the senator was vice president, the folks still willing to help Hunter were of a sketchier variety. There was a Chinese businessman who, Hunter said, left him a large diamond as a nice-to-meet-you gift. And a Ukrainian oligarch who hired Hunter at a princely sum to do nothing much. (Neither the firm nor Hunter Biden identified any specific contribution he made). Joe Biden’s response, according to his son, was: “I hope you know what you are doing.”
Hope! What family of an addict hasn’t fallen back to that last trench? Denial, they say, is not just a river in Egypt.
And don’t look now, but there’s more Rudy going after Hunter coming down the pike: “We haven’t even talked about Romania yet.” Evidently 38% of Biden’s Q2 fundraising came from just 2,800 people.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. His $6 million is enough to keep him in the game, but not enough to make any headway in closing with the frontrunners, but both Biden and Harris flaming out (a definite possibility at this point) would open a couple of those hypothetical “lanes” for him. Booker calls on TV stations to not air Trump ad attacking Biden over Ukraine.” More grist for the idea he’s running for VP.
Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city (South Bend) half the size of Des Moines, is acing the listening test. His words, even in a stump speech, tend to be more thoughtful and more surprising than the standard political applause lines of his rivals. Elizabeth Warren often elicits cheers, Joe Biden gets the occasional affectionate chuckle, but Buttigieg summons up a different reaction. I first noticed it while seeing him at a Des Moines house party on a sparkling Saturday morning in June. As with Obama in 2006, members of the audience leaned forward to listen to Buttigieg speak rather than sitting back to applaud politely. What struck me at the time was that Buttigieg was pulling off this listening trick even though he lacked the national political profile that Obama boasted back in 2006, from his electrifying speech to the 2004 Democratic convention.
Right now, the pair are each below 2.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages, with O’Rourke at 2.2 and Castro at 1.4 percent respectively. Even businessman Andrew Yang has eclipsed the pair.
In Texas, O’Rourke has held a slight hold on second place for months — 10 points behind Biden and slightly ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — until the recent Quinnipiac poll, which showed Warren had moved ahead of O’Rourke and put him in third place in his home state.
Meanwhile, while Castro is outperforming his national poll numbers in Texas, he has failed to hit higher than 4 percent in any Texas polls taken thus far.
Castro praises Cesar Chavez, calling him a hero and ignoring the fact he was passionately opposed to illegal immigration.
Update: Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Following Sanders’ heart attack, the Intertubes are rife with rumors that Grandma Death is going to jump into the race, so I moved her up here from the also-rans. Also, she just passed Buttigieg in election betting odds, and is in third place there behind Warren and Biden. Here’s a recent piece speculating on Clinton entering the race, but it’s from a Norwegian-owned site that used to focus on cryptocurrency, so caveat lictor.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. He’s not in the debates…again. Now it’s just a question of how much of John Delaney’s money does John Delaney want to spend to kept pretending that John Delaney is running for President.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She made the next debate. “The Hawaii congresswoman’s debate performances haven’t done much to break her out of the asterisk category, but boy, can she dissect an opponent’s record in a devastating fashion. You could argue that Gabbard more than anyone else triggered the slide of Kamala Harris since the second debate.” If Sanders drops out, could Gabbard pick up some of his supporters? I’ve noticed some overlap there, but I doubt she could pick up enough to be even remotely viable.
Out of all the Democratic candidates, there is perhaps none more inauthentic and grating as Kamala Harris. To be fair, she doesn’t have the shrillness of Hillary Clinton, but she has every other bad quality in spades. She can’t hold a consistent position, she’ll do anything for support, and everything she says sounds like it was focus grouped. None of those things are good descriptors to be attached to one’s campaign.
After being fluffed as the presumptive front runner following the first debate (which I called a sucker’s bet at the time), Tulsi Gabbard kneecapped Harris in the second debate and she has never recovered. Since then, it’s been a steady stream of desperation from her campaign….Her campaign is hemorrhaging cash, the donors have dried up, and she’s old news to the media.
But now things are getting even worse. Her campaign is literally breaking down. The upper levels of her campaign staff are being changed up and she’s bringing over people from the Senate side to try to rescue her.
California Sen. Kamala Harris plans to restructure her struggling presidential campaign, sources with knowledge of the staffing plans tell CNN.
The changes represent the clearest sign to date that Harris, who has seen her poll numbers consistently fall over the last three months, feels changes are needed to jumpstart her presidential bid and streamline an operation that one source said has been been bogged down by bureaucratic hurdles.
Harris will elevate Rohini Kosoglu, her Senate chief of staff, and senior adviser Laphonza Butler into senior leadership positions within the campaign, the sources said, splitting responsibilities for the day to day management of the operation.
Juan Rodriguez will remain Harris’ campaign manager, but the addition of Kosoglu and elevation of Butler shifts some of the longtime Harris aide’s responsibilities to different staffers.
Adding more cooks to the slop kitchen won’t help. The problem with the Kalama Harris campaign is Kamala Harris. Heh: “Kamala Harris Undergoes Heart Surgery After Seeing Positive Reception For Sanders.” Heh 2:
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets interviewed by WMUR (along with Tim Ryan), where he offers up some education/STEM/entrepreneurial platitudes. Also worried that self-driving cars will result in unemployment for Uber and Lyft drivers. Wouldn’t they theoretically make money off their self-driving cars?
With just four months until the first-in-the-nation caucuses, Sanders is in trouble. As he delivered his populist gospel to large crowds of camouflage-clad high schoolers, liberal arts college students, and trade union members across Iowa last week, a problematic narrative was hardening around him: His campaign is in disarray and Elizabeth Warren has eclipsed him as the progressive standard-bearer of the primary. He’s sunk to third place nationally, behind Warren and Joe Biden, and some polls of early nomination states show him barely clinging to double digits. He’s shaken up his staffs in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s lost the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a left-wing group that backed him in 2016, to Warren.
Dismissed out of the gate in 2016 as a nonfactor against Hillary Clinton — only to single-handedly shift the Democratic Party’s ideological center of gravity — Sanders is quite familiar with being left for dead. His top brass’ official line is that pundits and political elites are writing him off because they have no clue what’s happening at kitchen tables and picket lines across America. Sanders and his team have argued some polls that are bad for him are out of whack and several polls that are good for him are ignored by the media.
Meanwhile, his aides say, Sanders remains a fundraising and organizing juggernaut. In its classic big-big-big-numbers style, the campaign announced this month that it had both contacted 1 million voters in Iowa and received donations from 1 million people throughout the United States — a milestone he reached faster than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.
For a guy who’s supposed to be slowly fading into the second tier, Bernie Sanders had a good third quarter of fundraising, announcing this morning that his campaign raised $25 million in the past three months. (One wrinkle: Sanders’ campaign did not specify how much cash on hand he has left.)
The upshot is that Bernie Sanders will probably have enough financial resources to stay in the presidential race as long has he likes, all the way to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee if he wants. As of this morning, he’s still a respectable third nationally in the RealClearPolitics average nationally (17.8 percent), third in Iowa (12 percent), third in New Hampshire (18.8 percent), second in Nevada (21.7 percent), and third in South Carolina (15 percent, and Elizabeth Warren is at 15.7 percent). And fairly or not, a lot of Democratic race-watchers see Joe Biden’s campaign as a ticking time-bomb with a gaffe-prone candidate and the Hunter Biden stuff now getting more play.
From an early age, Tom Steyer has hopscotched from one rarified sphere of American prestige and privilege to the next. His resume starts at the Upper East Side of New York’s The Buckley School, a private K-9 that educated Franklin Roosevelt and a young Donald Trump. Next stop was Phillips Exeter, the patrician New Hampshire boarding academy. Then Yale, where Steyer studied economics, played soccer and graduated at the top of his class. A brief stint at Morgan Stanley, a business degree at Stanford and a job at Goldman Sachs rounded out Steyer’s gilded early resume.
And that was before he became a billionaire.
In San Francisco, Steyer teamed up with the banjo-playing financier Warren Hellman and started a hedge fund. It would eventually be named Farallon Capital and grow from $15 million to more than $20 billion investing diversely: corporate mergers, distressed Asian banks, pharmaceutical companies.
Today Forbes estimates Steyer’s net worth at $1.6 billion. But Farallon’s past investments in coal mines, private prison companies and aquifer-pumping land deals may not jibe with Democratic voters. Neither might Steyer himself — a white guy from high finance.
“The whole issue of income inequality has become a fairly major talking point with Democrats,” said Garry South, a California political strategist. “Why would you think that a billionaire is the best person to deal with income inequality? It’s sort of a contradiction in terms.”
Steyer is a bit of a contradiction himself. In the mold of Warren Buffet, he is famously restrained in his spending habits (to a point). His sartorial style could be described as “Boomer dad”: He regularly wears the same tartan tie and a colorful beaded belt he bought on a trip to Kenya. He flies commercial, for environmental reasons. Speaking to CalMatters over the phone from Iowa, he recalls meeting a “slick-as-could-be” energy lobbyist a few years back who was wearing a “$5,000 suit.” As if Steyer couldn’t drop ten times that on a new outfit every morning for the rest of his life.
Snip.
In 2010, he co-chaired the committee to defeat a repeal of the state’s cap-and-trade emissions reduction program, putting $5 million into the effort. He struck Dan Logue, a former Republican Assemblyman who sponsored the measure and debated Steyer that year, as a true believer “committed to the cause.”
In 2012, Steyer ratcheted up his financial involvement, spending $30 million on a ballot measure to close a tax loophole, effectively raising rates on businesses with out-of-state facilities. In 2016, he spent millions more on an unsuccessful bid to overturn the death penalty, and successful initiatives to raise cigarette taxes and reduce sentences for non-violent crimes.
Steyer’s early focus on voter-initiated policy change runs through into his presidential campaign. He’s proposing to give voters the power to directly make federal law twice each year.
Snip.
Many California voters may not know who Steyer is, but California politicians do.
He’s spent the past decade putting massive sums of cash toward supporting progressive candidates and boosting voter registration.
Starting in 2013, Steyer began throwing his considerable financial weight behind individual candidates across the country through NextGen Climate Action Committee, a super PAC he started to help make climate change a winning issue for progressives.
In the lead-up to both the 2014 and 2016 elections, Steyer’s family firm, Fahr LLC, was the biggest contributor of publicly disclosed political cash of any organization in the country. (Fahr, his middle name, was his mother’s maiden name.) In 2018, Fahr slipped to second place. So far in the 2020 cycle, the Steyers are back in the top spot.
That largesse has endeared him to some Democrats.
“I know the difference between talkers and doers and Steyer is a doer,” said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California.
“Some candidates can come and be the main speaker at a dinner and that’s nice. But if you can write big checks…,” he said, trailing off.
The piece notes he’s sometimes “not been a team player”…but only in the sense that he backs farther left challengers against Democratic incumbents. Picked up a state rep endorsement in South Carolina. “Steyer’s campaign says state Rep. Jerry Govan has signed on as a senior adviser. Govan is chairman of South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus.”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let no one say she’s not pandering to left-wing interest groups hard enough, as she came out for eliminating right-to-work laws. Democrats couldn’t even implement card check when they had the White House, House and Senate, what makes her think she can pass a big labor pander a hundred times more radical? Or that a nation full of non-unionized employees would ever elect her? Union membership has been declining for decades, down to some 6.5% of private sector jobs. Most states are right-to-work states. Does Warren really think “vote for me and I’ll force you to join a union” is a winning campaign slogan? Once again, Warren maneuvers to win the primary at the cost of winning the election. Well well well: “Elizabeth Warren Fires National Organizing Director Over ‘Inappropriate Behavior.'” “Over the past two weeks, senior campaign leadership received multiple complaints regarding inappropriate behavior by Rich McDaniel.” He “was also Hillary Clinton’s primary states regional director.” Should we assume McDaniel: A.) Tried to get jiggy with new recruits, B.) Forced all new hires to eat a bug, or C.) Proclaimed his love of Nickleback*? She keeps ducking admitting that she’s going to hike your taxes until your eyes bleed. She also got caught lying about being fired for getting pregnant. Indeed, “lying” seems to be the theme of Warren’s entire career. Dissecting all of her pie-in-the-sky promises:
From stem to stern, the senator from Massachusetts has marketed herself as the candidate with everything thought out. For every problem facing our nation, her slogan says she “has a plan for that.” Warren is running on a myriad of big government programs including Medicare for all, student loan debt cancellation, and free college tuition. Her plan to pay for these promises includes a wealth tax of 2 percent on fortunes above $50 million and 3 percent on fortunes above $1 billion.
To many voters, her plans sound attractive, and her years in academia lend to her pitch. She is articulate and crafty enough to crib off Sanders, while arguing that she just wants capitalism with a human face. In reality, however, the former Harvard professor is hoping you will not do the math yourself when it comes to her grandiose pitch. Almost every element of her plans would drive discourse to the left, while weakening our political and economic systems to make it susceptible to crony capitalism.
Even the centerpiece of the Warren campaign platform is obviously unworkable. A wealth tax on fortunes above $50 million is touted as the key funding mechanism for a plethora of new programs. But European nations have attempted numerous such wealth taxes, and none have been successful. Since 1990, the number of European states with such a levy has fallen from a dozen to three, including otherwise low tax Switzerland. Between 2000 and 2012, the burdensome wealth tax in France caused 42,000 millionaires to flee the country. The nation ultimately scrapped the impost in 2018.
While a wealth tax in the United States is likely unconstitutional to begin with, it is certainly unenforceable in the way that Warren desires.
Snip.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the Warren wealth tax plan is that it is estimated to bring in an average of less than $3 trillion over the following decade, which would provide less than 10 percent of the total cost of her Medicare for all plan. Warren will not state the obvious that in order to pay for any of her policy proposals, it would require a massive tax increase on the middle class.
Even worse, Warren proposes a frightening Office of United States Corporations through her Accountable Capitalism Act. Under the plan, workers must represent 40 percent of corporate boards of companies worth more than $1 billion. It also institutes strict controls on political spending and requires a corporate charter approved by the federal government. This idea is Orwellian. After all, the idea of government control of private industry is among the textbook definitions of fascism and its concept of corporatism. That means charters to do business could be revoked by Washington.
As Peter Beinart has trenchantly observed in The Atlantic, formerly moderate Generation X Democratic candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have chosen to turn their backs on policies they once championed. Booker no longer talks up his successful expansion of charter schools as mayor of Newark, while Harris has run away from her common-sense decision, as San Francisco district attorney, to enforce truancy laws as a means to get the attention of parents of disadvantaged students. But there’s another Gen X candidate, unmentioned by Beinart, who’s run away from past successes: Andrew Yang.
While he promotes government-led efforts to redistribute income, Yang has been silent about his own groundbreaking efforts to help declining cities — not through government, but through civil society. In 2011, after a successful career as corporate lawyer and business-school test-prep entrepreneur, Yang founded Venture for America (VFA). Modeled on Teach for America, VFA aimed to attract applicants from elite colleges to work as paid interns at start-up companies in poor cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Birmingham, and Baltimore. Its funding came entirely from philanthropists, most importantly Detroit’s Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans. Like Dan Markowits, the author of the new The Meritocracy Trap, Yang saw the best and brightest as having “too limited a vision of what career success looks like,” and got to work fixing the problem.
Today, VFA is still in operation, with fellowships in 14 different cities around the country. The organization has supported more than 1,000 fellows, working in business incubators and often going on to found start-ups of their own. It says that 51 percent of them continue to live in the cities where their fellowship was based, and they’ve been involved in starting 129 new companies.
Bringing graduates of some 300 colleges to cities that ambitious young people have long been fleeing is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a record of success that gives Yang, if he’d only use it, a ready-made, positive message on the stump: Talented people can start new businesses, help power established ones, and in the process, make cities thrive. This message is all the more powerful when juxtaposed with generations of failed local, state, and federal policies based on the idea that subsidies to attract business are the best way of rejuvenating cities in decline.
Indeed, what is striking about Yang’s Venture for America is its fundamental separation from those failed government policies and from government itself.
I suspect that’s the very reason he doesn’t talk about it to Democrats. He blasted China for blasting the Houston Rockets for Daryl Morey posting a pro-Hong Kong tweet, which has engendered big controversy, because the Rockets have a lot of business deals in China thanks to the Yao Ming era. But Morey (and Yang) was right the first time. Funny how CNN and MSNBC just keeps leaving Yang out of infographics:
Yang raised $10 million, but MSNBC shows Booker in fourth at $6 million. https://t.co/N1tf7NBI9q
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
*I was only vaguely aware of Nickleback in their heyday, and only became aware of them after all the memes talking about how much they sucked. Now that I’ve been forced to listen to “Photograph” to keep up with current events, eh, I don’t hate it. Solid piece of nostalgic pop rock. Honestly, what strikes me most is how the chorus of a song from 2005 sounds exactly like every “hot country” song circa 2014…
Shortly after House Democrats launched an unofficial official impeachment inquiry for the now-laughable “whistleblower” scandal, President Donald Trump released the transcript of the conversation at the heart of the non-scandal showing there was no talk of freezing Ukraine aid or of any “quid pro quo.”
2)As to call transcript itself: Trump’s actual “favor” is that Ukraine look backward, to what happened in the 2016 election. This is a legitimate ask, since election meddling looks to have come from both Russia and Ukraine.
4)It is actually Zelensky who brings up Rudy Giuliani—saying they can’t wait to “meet him.” And it is Zelensky who references “that investigation,” as he goes on to promise that “all investigations will be done openly and candidly.”
6)Trump's several references to Giuliani are mostly to say what a great guy he is. He says he will have Giuliani and AG Barr call. He asks Zelensky to speak/work with both.
8)Meanwhile, the IG back in August referred this to DOJ as potential violation of campaign finance law, based on whistleblower complaint. Criminal Division evaluated and determined no violation: “All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion.”
The irony is that Democrats actually did what they laughable accused President Trump of doing:
Democrat Senator Chris Murphy gave a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, earlier this month: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats' support for future U.S. aid to Kievhttps://t.co/IqUo6ZruZN
WIll this cause Democrats to close their impeachment proceedings and apologize? Of course not. They’ll keep it humming along until their extensions in the media can gin up another fake scandal for them to hype until that nothingburger explodes in their face as well. Repeat until November 2020.
It’s nothingburgers all the way down, forever and ever amen.
Welcome to a Friday the 13th LinkSwarm! Try to avoid hockey-mask-wearing serial killers today.
Although I feel slightly dirty putting up a link to Vox, this piece on how Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend warps the politics of the state is worth reading, even if you have to factor in Vox’s anti-conservative bias. And I was unaware that Alaska now has the highest unemployment rate in the country…
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York are among the worst-run cities in the country, and residents are leaving. If only there was one single common (D)enominator to all those cities…
President Trump seeks a ban on flavored vaping. This is a very stupid approach to something that is largely a non-problem. It’s not the government’s purpose to protect people from themselves, even if it were vaping is several orders of magnitude less dangerous to your health than smoking, and this is appropriately handled at the state or local (not national) level. Plus there is a sufficient framework of laws to making sales to minors illegal anywhere they’re not already illegal. President Trump is simply wrong here.
Brexit is already changing the British economy. For the better.
The economy overall expanded by 0.3 per cent in July, significantly faster than the 0.1 per cent expected, and better than most of our main rivals. Next, we found out that the trade deficit narrowed slightly as imports fell. Finally, we learned that employment was at record highs and that wages were still growing at record rates. Add in a Chancellor who is about to start spending money with carefree abandon and there is no reason why it shouldn’t improve from here. It isn’t fantastic. But it is a decent performance from a mature economy facing what is meant to be its biggest economic challenge in a generation.
The best data we have suggest that the vast majority of Americans view political correctness as a problem, and that, contra the claim of many progressives, this is not a battlefield consisting of resentful ranting whites on one side and oppressed people on the other, the latter simply asking to be treated and spoken of with decency. In fact, the people most enthusiastic about intense forms of language-policing tend to be more privileged and more white, according to a national political-correctness survey conducted by the firm More in Common that made headlines last year. As Yascha Mounk wrote in his writeup in The Atlantic, “While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.” Moreover, “Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.”
Now, people have criticized that survey on the grounds that if you ask people whether “X is a problem,” where X is a culture-war buzzword, you’re likely to get a lot of positive responses. I think there’s something to this critique, but the numbers are too overwhelming to fully discount it. I also think that if you’re going to argue that PC is just a synonym for “being a decent person” you should then explain why so many Americans think that concept is a problem. Are Americans that invested in indecency?
Plus, it would be one thing if this survey were some sort of strange outlier, but if you look at the data we have on specific culture-war blowups of relevance to the PC and/or cancel-culture debates, you find the same pattern over and over. Almost always, the opinions most commonly represented in mainstream progressive outlets are not held by the masses, including by the groups seemingly with the most at stake. I’ve written about this before: On issues ranging from Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal to the Washington football team name to what term(s) should be used to refer to people of recent Latin American descent, woke-progressive opinion is often very out of line with that of the majority of members of the groups in question. Not only do the wokest progressives not speak for Americans; they don’t speak for the groups they’re claiming to want to protect. A 40-year-old American Indian from Oklahoma — that paragon of wealth and privilege and white resentment, of course — made this point pretty succinctly when he was interviewed for a focus group which accompanied the release of the More In Common survey: “It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.”
“It’s new,” Stone says of cancel culture, the term used to refer to boycotts started (usually via social media) when a person or group is offended by a star or brand. “I don’t want to say it’s the same as it’s always been. The kids are fucking different than us. There’s a generational thing going on.” Currently, Dave Chappelle is in the crosshairs for his latest Netflix stand-up special, Sticks and Stones. “I know some people have been canceled for genuinely, like, personal behavior, but Dave is not getting canceled anytime soon,” Stone says, joking that South Park and Chappelle are “grandfathered” out of the culture.
Stone also shared his theory as to why critics were so hard on the latest Chappelle special, while viewers seemed to enjoy it far more. “I feel bad for television critics and cultural critics,” he explains. “They may have laughed like hell at that, and then they went home and they know what they have to write to keep their job. So when I read TV reviews or cultural reviews, I think of someone in prison, writing. I think about somebody writing a hostage note. This is not what they think. This is what they have to do to keep their job in a social media world. So I don’t hold it against them.”
Also:
One of the most notable aspects from last season was the lack of any political dealings, specifically the nearly total absence of Donald Trump via the Mr. Garrison persona. “It was nice for us,” Parker says. “It was nice to not come in and talk about Donald Trump. And I think it was nice for people to watch and go, ‘Oh, yeah, there is still comedy outside of fucking Donald Trump. There is still funny shit as the world goes on.’ And you can get your Trump comedy on so many other shows.”
Every segment they air is selected because they think/hope it will damage President Trump and disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who voted for and support him. They don’t report news. They select only stories that they think will damage President Trump, and ignore or otherwise downplay and dilute the stories that don’t.
MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.
Snip.
Financial institutions are supposed to ignore or reject payment instructions that don’t comport with precise formatting required by the National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA), the not-for-profit organization that provides the backbone for the electronic movement of money in the United States. But Slavkin said a number of financial institutions ended up processing both reversal requests, meaning a fair number of employees at companies that use MyPayrollHR suddenly saw a month’s worth of payroll payments withdrawn from their bank accounts.
Fake influencer exposed. Oh wait, let me rephrase that: More fake than usual influencer exposed. I’m not on Instagram, and I’m incredulous that “influencer” is even a thing. Maybe I could start an “anti-influencer” channel, with just videos of me reading a book while occasionally sipping from a can of off-brand diet root beer. Maybe I could get famous brands to me not to wear their clothing…
Permit me to list just a few of the more troubling accounts I was privy to during the committee’s meeting. Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.
(Hat tip: Greg Benford on Facebook.)
Poland frowns on Greenpeace’s shenanigans:
No messing about 💪
Armed Polish border guards board Greenpeace 'Rainbow Warrior' ship blocking the delivery of coal to the port of Gdansk.
Greenpeace have accused Polish authorities of using excessive force.
Democrats want to ban cheeseburgers, Biden’s eye fills with blood, the third debates loom, and Williamson is shocked to find out that leftist activists are mean liars. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
CBS battleground states: Let’s shotgun all these in one line. New Hampshire: Warren 27, Biden 26, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7. Iowa: Biden 29, Sanders 26, Warren 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 6. South Carolina: Biden 43, Sanders 18, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4. Nevada: Sanders 29, Biden 27, Warren 18, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3.
Texas Lyceum (Texas): Biden 24, O’Rourke 18, Warren 15, Sanders 13, Harris 4, Castro 4, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, McAuliffe (lolwut) 1, Moulton 1, Williamson 1. Keep in mind that the Lyceum poll always oversamples Democrats, but their intra-Democratic poll numbers aren’t necessarily inaccurate. And Biden beating Beto in his home state, and Castro garnering a puny 4%, are both hilarious…
The presidential ambitions of the leading Democrat candidates may not survive CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Townhall.
It was a man-made disaster, created in the fevered swamps of CNN and fueled by pledges of allegiance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
The candidates came across as not-serious-people. Worse, they came across as nanny-state monsters who really do want to take away your plastic straws and cheeseburgers to save the planet. It was a self-parody of what woke totalitarianism sounds like, with an abnormal focus on meat.
Republican attack-ad makers have hours of footage that can be sliced and diced to make any of the candidates who appeared at the Townhall look insane. And they wasted no time.
Ban all the things! “Here is a comprehensive list of everything the left wants to have banned for the sake of human survival:
One of Yang’s supporters, Scott Santens, has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter: an MSNBC graphic with other candidates polling at 2 percent but not Yang, oddly unbalanced graphics that seem to include just enough candidates to get in the media favorites but exclude Yang. As Axios recently pointed out, Yang is sixth in the polling average yet 14th in terms of the number of articles written about his candidacy.
Clearly, something is going on here. But what I’ve noticed is that Yang is not alone in facing media contempt. Without fail, every candidate who has come from outside the Democratic establishment, or who has dared to question the Democratic establishment, has been smeared, dismissed or ignored by most media.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who resigned from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in protest of its treatment of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and dares to challenge the bipartisan pro-war foreign policy consensus, has been smeared as “unpatriotic.” This despite the fact that she is an Iraq War veteran who, to this day, serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. The Daily Beast published an absurd article titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign is Being Boosted By Putin Apologists” about how three of her donors, among tens of thousands, had tangential connections to Russia. NBC News published a piece on how Russian bots were boosting Gabbard’s campaign. It cited one expert, a group that reportedly faked Russian bot activity in an Alabama election.
Gabbard had the distinction of being the most-Googled candidate in both of the first two debates. The media, however, have shown little interest in understanding why her pro-peace message might hold appeal.
I’ve talked quite a bit about media bias against Sanders. The latest, most egregious case involved a Washington Post “fact check” that found Sanders accurately cited academic research — but managed to give him three Pinocchios anyway.
Marianne Williamson, an author and activist, is definitely off the beaten path for a candidate, but she is an incredibly accomplished woman, with seven New York Times bestsellers to her name and decades of activism under her belt. Perhaps it would be interesting to hear more of her thoughts on national healing and reconciliation rather than just casting her as a weirdo and mocking her for a tweet about the power of prayer, something to which many, if not most, Americans subscribe.
These candidates occupy much different poll positions and have wildly different approaches, styles and philosophies. Yang, the cheerful prophet of doom; Williamson, the spiritual healer; Gabbard, the teller of hard truths about American imperialism; and Sanders, well, he’s just Bernie. But they have something important in common: They don’t fit the mold. They aren’t in the club. They defy the rules.
Asian techies are supposed to develop the latest AI, not lead the revolution to put humanity first. Democratic female veterans are supposed to burnish the party’s hawkish cred, not doggedly pursue diplomacy and engagement and call out the American war machine. Spirituality is not supposed to be mixed with politics on the left, even though religion is fully weaponized by the right. And septuagenarian democratic socialists who are not fashionable in any way are not supposed to be rock stars with youths or be top-polling presidential contenders.
Rather than deal with these contradictions — which, by the way, clearly fascinate the public, judging by Google and Twitter trends — it’s easier for many in the media to mock, smear or ignore.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida are four states likely to determine the 2020 presidential race, and Donald Trump won each by a percentage point or less. “Of course, we’re deprived of any painfully honest discussion of how much the Democrats need black voters in big cities to control the electoral votes of the swing states and why they’re having trouble getting these votes in the post-Obama era.”
Perhaps part of it is due to the pressure of being an old white man who’s posing as the standard-bearer of a political party whose sole agenda these days is the extermination and debasement of old white men. How taxing must it be to run on the premise of, “Well, sure, everything I represent sucks, but at least I acknowledge it, so vote for me, anyway”? I could see how that could take its toll on a fella.
But most of it is due to the fact that he has always been a liar who jumbled the facts, compounded by a septuagenarian brain that is rapidly fermenting.
Biden is often referred to as a “gaffe machine,” and although that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. A gaffe, by definition, is an unintentional mistake. There was the time when, in front of a crowd, he told wheelchair-bound Missouri state senator Chuck Graham to stand up. There was the time he called Barack Obama the “first sorta mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Those are simply dumb, clumsy mistakes.
But throughout his career, he has also blatantly lied about himself:
He claimed he finished in the top half of his law-school class; he actually finished 76th out of 85.
He has repeatedly claimed that both he and members of his family were coal miners. He even plagiarized sections of a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock about how his ancestors would work in the coal mines for 12 hours and then come up to play football for four hours. He was ultimately forced to admit he was lying.
He plagiarized portions of a law-school essay so extensively he had to beg administrators not to expel him.
He implied that Osama bin Laden’s men “forced down” his helicopter in Afghanistan, when the truth is that the pilot landed safely as a precaution to avoid a snowstorm.
He claims he was “shot at” in Iraq, when the truth is that a mortar landed several football fields away from where he was safely ensconced in a Baghdad motel.
He claims he participated in sit-ins and boycotts during the Civil Rights era and then was later forced to acknowledge that, no, he didn’t do any of that, although he did briefly work at a predominantly black swimming pool.
Joe Biden did not bring his fastball tonight. Nor did he know what sport he was playing or when the game was supposed to start. I think he was accidentally wearing someone else’s clothes.
The returns, which Booker released in April as part of his presidential campaign, show that he donated more than $110,000 of stock in Yandex, a Russian search-engine firm, from April 5, 2013 to October 11, 2013. In the middle of that stretch, on May 16, 2013, Booker filed a financial disclosure report. Yet on the report, an accounting of Booker’s assets and liabilities, he did not list Yandex. How could Booker have given away stock in the company if he did not own it?
“I certainly would be interested in hearing the campaign’s explanation,” said Brendan Fischer, director of the federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group. “It’s not uncommon for candidates to divest financial holdings that could be controversial or pose a conflict of interest, but if a candidate does hold assets at the time the financial disclosure report is filed, they have to be reported. And it’s not clear that that’s what happened here.”
Hey, remember all the way back to earlier this year when media companies told us that playing footsie with Russians was the worst thing in the world? Buzzfeed offers up a failure to launch piece.
There’s a world you can imagine where a candidate like Booker would be running strong with younger voters, especially young black voters. Research, such as a recent report titled the Black Millennial Economic Perspectives Report, published just this month found 36% said criminal justice was their top domestic issue — a top Booker issue. (A similar study from two Democratic PACs found that “despite having every reason to be disenchanted with politics and the political process, unregistered black millennials remain aspirational and committed to protecting and empowering their families and communities.”)
But Booker didn’t have strong black support in the race the moment he jumped in, and he can’t bank on it coming later. There is another leading black candidate in the primary, and that’s to say nothing of the high levels of support right now for Joe Biden, or the affinity for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders among some younger black activists and voters.
You can get a good sense of the intellectual vacuity (and religious sterility, if you’re interested in that) of this mode of politics from, e.g., Kirsten Powers’s banal and illiterate conversation with Buttigieg, written up for general amusement in USA Today. (You will not be surprised to read that Mayor Pete has “started a crucial conversation,” and has proceeded from cliché to cliché.) Powers, when she is not half-chiding her fellow Christian for showing what she considers excessive grace to people who have naughty political ideas (one wonders what she would consider insufficient grace), hits the reader with a few insights that are not exactly blistering in their originality: Jesus, she says, never mentioned abortion (but then, neither does the Constitution), while He did speak a great deal about looking after the poor. Powers writes this as though Christianity had been planted in a cultural vacuum and as though “feed my sheep” were synonymous with “vote for the party of the welfare state no matter what other horrifying business may be on their agenda” — and as though these kinds of issues had not been the subject of centuries of Christian inquiry. The New Testament is silent on the questions of, among other things, child pornography and cannibalism, but Christians are not expected to maintain a morally indifferent attitude toward these. Still less would Christians be expected to maintain such indifference in the face of the Supreme Court’s happening upon a right to cannibalism lurking in some unexplored constitutional penumbra and the subsequent establishment of a franchised chain of coast-to-coast cannibalism outlets enjoying public subsidies.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He wants to tax robots. He may throw in the towel if he doesn’t make the October debates. “I’m going to go and try to get into the October debates, and if I can, I think that’s a good reason to keep going forward. And if I can’t, I think it’s really tough to conceive of continuing.” They add: “Should de Blasio make good on his promise and drop out of the campaign in October, he’ll be forced to head back to his day job in New York City—likely to both his and his constituents’ chagrin.” Along those same lines: “NYC Mayor De Blasio Logged Just 7 Hours At Work For Entire Month.” De Blasio is running for President because it gives him an excuse to stay away from the city that hates his guts.
We have an interest, obviously, in Hong Kong. There’s a lot of economic activity that flows through Hong Kong. Obviously, U.S. businesses have a lot of interest in Hong Kong. So we clearly have an interest in Hong Kong maintaining the autonomy that they were promised.
But there’s also a bigger issue, and that is the role the United States has in providing some moral leadership, and standing up for people who are fighting for their rights and for their ability to have some self-governance, particularly self-governance that’s been assured to them, or at least was assured to them. So I think we not only have a direct interest in actually how things unfold in Hong Kong, particularly around their—the rule of law and their legal system that they have that’s very unique, and we have a lot of interest, but more broadly I think we have a leadership role around the world to stand up not only for human rights—which is another, obviously, issue related to China—but also for individuals who are fighting for their right to self-governance. And I think they have it, and I think we should be making our voice clear on this issue.
Snip.
I think it’s right to be a lot tougher on China. In my opinion, China’s acted in many ways like pirates across the last several decades, right? They’ve stolen things. They’ve stolen intellectual property. They haven’t played by the rules, particularly rules that they gave assurances that they would play by. You know, and they are taking islands in the South China Sea.
I mean, so there is a response that’s necessary because China’s become our economic rival by doing, in my judgment, three things. They worked really hard. Good for them. They made very smart investments, in some ways smarter than we did. Good for them. But they didn’t play by the rules. And we can’t allow the next several decades for them to continue to not play by the rules because I think that’ll put us in a very, very significant kind of difficult economic position.
So I think it’s appropriate to draw a hard line with China on a lot of these practices. And I think the president was actually right in raising this issue, but I think his diagnosis of the problem is entirely wrong and the way he’s approaching it is wrong.
You could call it meaningless blather, and you’re not far from wrong, but it’s still more coherent than 99% of prominent Democrats have been on the challenge posed by China.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Opposes impeachment. It is “important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further tear our country apart.”
Kamala Harris entered the presidential race with impressive credentials – a popular black woman with an inspiring story who hailed from a large Democratic state and drew accolades for her fiery questioning of President Donald Trump’s nominees.
Yet despite a shot of adrenaline after confronting front-runner Joe Biden in the first debate, she has failed to catch fire with Democratic voters who are torn between a nostalgic fondness for Biden and a revolutionary desire for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Harris’ attempt to replicate her feat in the second debate backfired among Democrats who say she went too negative on Biden. The Californian also suffers from a perception that she lacks a deep ideological well to guide her policy ideas, in contrast to her three main rivals who are better-defined. And her past as a prosecutor has earned her supporters and detractors.
Harris and Senator Cory Booker “really went after vice president Biden – it redounded to their detriment that they went after Biden so much. Because it also looked like they were not just going after Biden, but they were going after the Obama legacy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is neutral in the primaries.
Weingarten said many Democrats left the June debate thinking, “Kamala seems really feisty and let’s look at her.” But in the July debate they were turned off by Harris and other aggressors because “it looked like they were burning the house down, as opposed to building on what Democrats believe in.”
Harris surged from about 7% to 15% in averages of Democratic polls immediately after the first debate in late June, putting her in second or third place in the crowded field. But it was a sugar high – she’s back to the 7% she had when summer began.
For Harris, the danger is that she’s another Marco Rubio. The Florida senator, too, had a potentially history-making candidacy during the Republican nomination battle in 2016 and was hailed by the party establishment as presidential timber, before he failed to translate that on the ground.
Ouch! And like Rubio, Harris has a senate career to fall back on. “Kamala Harris claimed she ‘sued Exxon Mobil’ as California AG. She didn’t.” Ha ha! “Harris Only Three Points Ahead of Gabbard After Ridiculing Her Poll Numbers a Month Ago.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s not wild about the process, which I can understand from someone stuck in very last place in a field this ridiculously large. But it’s not like he’s run even a minimally competent campaign:
The mayor of Miramar, Florida, has not found much of an audience or appeared in any debates. He has raised a mere $93,812 and assembled a small campaign staff. And now, according to internal campaign documents and interviews with eight former Messam campaign staffers and contractors, his campaign appears to be in near-total disarray.
The documents as well as staffers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect future employment prospects, depicted a no-hope campaign that nonetheless was embroiled in bitter disputes over money and control — a “D-list version of The Sopranos,” in one description. In particular, staff members claim that Wayne and his wife, Angela Messam, have refused to pay them for their work. All of the staffers and vendors that BuzzFeed News spoke with said they were never fully compensated for their work on the campaign and, in some cases, weren’t paid at all for expenses they’d fronted from their own bank accounts, including business cards for the campaign and flights, hotel rooms, and security costs for a trip to the Middle East. In some instances, staffers were told by the Messams that the couple believed them to be “volunteering” for the campaign, despite emails from senior staff to the Messams telling them about start dates for employees, and what staff members say were verbal agreements and offer letters from the campaign for their positions.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently the Odessa shooter was not, in fact, a Beto backer, which I rather suspected when this made the rounds; never beleive something that seems too pat without verifying it. (And yeah, Snopes, but the piece cites some actual, non-risible sources.)
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) And just like with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, you can bet that all that population control is aimed firmly at “undesirable” black and brown kids.
A former ThinkProgress writer took to Twitter to condemn billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer after receiving a job notice for his campaign following news that the liberal news site is shutting down.
Rebekah Entralgo, a writer who covered immigration policy and detention at ThinkProgress, said she received a LinkedIn message that attempted to recruit her after the activist group the Center for American Progress (CAP) said it could not find a new publisher for the site.
“Sorry to learn about ThinkProgress,” the message said in a screenshot Entralgo posted. “Tom Steyer 2020 is hiring for digital and comms roles — we do pay a relocation fee…”
Steyer (a CAP board member whose 2020 run could have funded TP for a decade as @ryanlcooper pointed out) is now trying to capitalize off of the site’s demise. You truly cannot make this stuff up pic.twitter.com/r5dJAhJUVJ
There are plenty of jobs I’ve been solicited for that I didn’t apply for, but in none of the cases did I declare “Screw you, you should have funded my last job!”
Warren is not overwhelmingly popular among women right now, but she has had a small, consistent edge among women in recent polls. Our average of national polls1 taken between Aug. 1 and Sep. 1 do show Warren getting some extra support from women, though not to a huge degree. Women were 2.9 points more likely than men to support Warren on average, while both Biden’s and Harris’s backers were nearly identically split between men and women — with Biden getting the most backing from both groups. And according to Morning Consult’s weekly national primary poll, Biden’s support is particularly strong among black women, too.
Biden will once again be the piñata at Thursday’s debate because the best way for any of his nine rivals to gain ground is to beat up on him, as Sen. Kamala Harris proved in the first debate.
But Warren is the one to watch this time. Most national polls have her second, with two recent ones showing her trailing the former vice president by just four points.
She is drawing by far the largest crowds and is focused, energized and organized. Biden, on the other hand, had a terrible week, with a growing realization in the party that his flubs and memory lapses are not passing problems.
Both his blood-filled eye and his gibberish remarks about climate change added to doubts he can go the distance. His team wants to cut back on his schedule and lowered expectations for Iowa and New Hampshire, moves that smell like panic.
“I know this sounds naive. I didn’t think the left was so mean. I didn’t think the left lied like this,” Williamson told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview. “I thought the right did that. I thought we were better.”
Williamson accused the left of lying about her use of crystals and “crystal gazing,” telling Remnick that there has “never been a crystal on stage” at any of her events and “there is no crystal” in her home.
She accused those on the left of also falsely accusing her of having told AIDS patients not to take their medicines or implying that “lovelessness” causes diseases and “love” is “enough to cure their diseases.”
“I’m Jewish, I go to the doctor,” Williamson said, ripping those on the left for labeling her as an anti-science candidate who does not believe in modern medicine.
Mr. Yang has attracted an ideologically eclectic coalition that includes progressives, libertarians, disaffected voters and Trump supporters who have swapped their red MAGA hats for blue ones that say MATH — “Make America Think Harder.” Those who have come into his camp say his presence on YouTube, on podcasts and in the nationally televised debates helped them begin to see the logic behind giving people free money.
His performance in Houston could be crucial to sustaining his campaign’s newfound momentum. In the days immediately after the July debates, Mr. Yang’s campaign raked in about $1 million — more than a third of what his team had raised during the entirety of the second quarter. About 90 percent of the people who gave were new donors.
The campaign is now on track to raise more than $5.5 million in the third quarter of the year, according to Yang advisers — more than the total amount Mr. Yang had raised during the previous 20 months that he spent as a candidate. While his operation does not rival the size or scale of his more established rivals’ campaigns, his team has ballooned to over 50 staff members from around 10 initially, as new offices have opened in Nashua and Portsmouth, N.H., and Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa. At the New York headquarters, the campaign has leased additional office space and is building an in-house digital team.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”
That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.
Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.
Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.
Snip.
Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.
Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.
Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.
Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.
First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.
He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.
Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.
Well, it’s about time!
It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.
Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.
No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.
“It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.
He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”
If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.
The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.
The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:
Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.
We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.
Snip.
In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.
They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.
Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.
If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.
Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.
Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.
WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.
And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.
Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.
With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.
“Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.
But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.
This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.
To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.
And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.
Malice.
Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
“When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”
I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.
As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It hit 107°F in Austin this week, but it was probably only 104° when I rode my bike. Cleared up my sinuses!
David Brock’s ShareBlue Media certainly seems to be freaking out over the Epstein “suicide,” sends out talking points to Democratic loyalists to downplay the possibility of conspiracy. Hmmmmm…
Democrats are convinced that a wave of Republican retirements is going to help them flip Texas’ congressional delegation. Don’t count on it. “If they nominate a candidate like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, or somebody like, God forbid, Bernie Sanders, if they nominate somebody who is extremely left of center, they’re not going to get there.”
Disillusioned liberal sees Obama as a lying tool of corporate greed. “Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It’s why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It’s a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. That is a cruise missile that Mr. Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.
As envisioned by Mr. Putin, who played animated video of the missile at a state-of-the-union speech in 2018, the Skyfall is part of a new class of weapons designed to evade American missile defenses.
Lots of Russian military superweapons turn out to be vaporware. This one turned out to be vaporizedware. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Inside the Polar Star, America’s antiquated rustbucket of an icebreaker.
Speaking of ice: President Trump contemplates buying Greenland. On the one hand, in the long run, land purchases have worked out very well for the United States. On the other, Liebensraum is bunk and we’ve got plenty of development left to do with Alaska.
My instructions were to claim that all the produce was local, although nothing was or could be local: It was early June in northwestern New Jersey’s Kittatinny Mountains, and the produce had been shipped from warmer parts of the world to the distributor who’d sold it to my boss. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs; it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over.
For the first time in my life, I heard about the naturalness, tradition and superior flavor of New Jersey produce. “Taste-wise, nothing compares to Jersey Silver Queen,” the New Yorkers declared, clawing at ears of a fat-kerneled, North Carolina-grown supersweet hybrid, all sugar and no corn flavor, nothing like Silver Queen. They tossed the husks on the ground for me to rake up.
“Give me Jersey peaches over Georgia peaches any day.” Those were Georgia peaches they were palming to their kids, whispering, “eat up,” before the fruit had been weighed and paid for.
“I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. You can’t get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn’t get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks, greased with mineral oil to an enticing sheen and petroleum fragrance. Didn’t they notice the absence of any roses-and-resin tomato-y perfume?
CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the lesser son of a greater father, gets called “Fredo” and hilarity ensues:
A man in NY yesterday approached CNN's Chris Cuomo and called him "Fredo"
Cuomo: "You're going to have a problem"
Man: "What are you going to do about it?"
Cuomo: "I'll fuckin ruin your shit. I'll fucking throw you down these stairs"
I gotta say that the threshold for personal insults and threats triggering an actual fistfight is somewhat higher in New York than the rest of the country
New Yorker #1: hey f*** you pal! New Yorker #2: up yours, douchebag! Texans: FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT : : *3 hours later* New Yorker #1: so's your mother! New Yorker #2: kiss my ass! Texans: fight fight *yawn* fight
The next debates loom, Gabbard sues Google, Moulton shoots people in a graveyard, billionaire Steyer begs for pennies, a lot of polls, and your periodic reminder that polls are useless.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Also, consider this advanced notice that you’re not going to get nearly as lengthy a Clown Car Update next Monday, as Armadillocon and work-related duties are going to be soaking up an inordinate amount of my time late this week and early next.
Monmouth (South Carolina): Biden 39, Harris 12, Sanders 10, Warren 9, Buttigieg 5, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Bennet 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1. “Biden has widespread support among black voters (51%), a group that makes up more than 6-in-10 likely primary voters. His support among white voters (24%) is less than half that level. Among the top five candidates, two earn significantly higher support among white voters than black voters: Warren (21% white and 2% black) and Buttigieg (11% white and 1% black). The remaining candidates draw equal support from both groups: Harris (12% white and 12% black) and Sanders (10% white and 10% black).” Those are disasterous numbers for Harris and Booker, who were game-planning for a South Carolina boost.
With the second round of debates looming this week, a whole lot of candidates seem to be angling for a “Kill Biden” strategy. Understandable, but not sufficient, and one wonders how many lines of attack will rehash the culture wars clashes of the last half century (crime, busing, etc.) that Democrats lost the first time around.
Exactly twelve years ago, on July 29, 2007, national opinion polls declared the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination to be one Rudolph Giuliani, the bombastic former New York City mayor. In second place, seven points back, was a retired Tennessee senator and actor, Fred Thompson. Languishing in third place, another five points behind, was the eventual G.O.P. nominee, John McCain. Over on the Democratic side, on the same date, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama by nearly thirteen points. Everyone knows how that turned out.
Twenty Democratic candidates are set to debate in Detroit this week, as countless Democratic voters wonder, with knotted stomachs, whether anyone will emerge to defeat Donald Trump, in November, 2020. So what do the early polls tell us? I asked around and found an array of specialists firm in their beliefs that the polls are iffy. “These numbers are fun, but I wouldn’t put money on anything,” Lydia Saad, a senior Gallup research director, told me. “Historically, among Democrats, if you had to bet at this point, you’d do a better job betting against, than for, the front-runner.” Which can’t be good news for Joe Biden, who is ahead but who slipped after his shaky debate performance, last month.
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, didn’t mince words: “Right now, it’s just too bumpy. There are too many candidates. There’s too much back-and-forth. ‘Oh, the polling shows Joe Biden is the best candidate to win the election.’ And then, after the first debate, ‘Oh, Kamala Harris came up, and she can win.’ And all of it is just bullshit.” At this stage, he said, polls can offer indications of what might happen, but he wouldn’t take them to the bank. One problem is that so little is known about so many of the Democratic candidates. Another is that so few people are paying close attention. And then there is the fact that a Presidential campaign is a bruising, billion-dollar proving ground. No candidate sails to victory untested and unscathed.
“Inside the Democrats’ Podcast Presidential Primary, Where Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang Rule.” Biden comes in third, but evidently because he has his own podcast. Or maybe “had,” since the last one seems to be dated October 23, 2018. It seems to be just some guy (not Biden) reading political news stories. It’s super-boring.
CNN did a “power ranking” of the top 10 Democratic contenders where they ranked Harris second, because of course they did.
Washington Post‘s The Fix did one that’s even stupider, with Warren first, Harris second, and Biden sixth. Yang and Williamson aren’t on it, but Kirsten “dead in the water” Gillibrand is. It’s naked gamesmanship disguised as analysis.
Speaking of which, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog takes on the field. Most of it is pretty lame, but there was this: “Kristen is the candidate for everyone who would say, ‘I love Hillary Clinton but she’s just too likable.'”
Rolling Stonedoes the ranking thing as well, but it much more closely tracks polls, going Biden-Warren-Harris-Sanders-Buttigieg. Has Yang too low and Messam over Sestak down at the bottom of the list.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She told her usual voter suppression fairy tales to the NAACP, who I’m sure lapped it up. Eh. I’m going to give her two weeks to give any indication she’s running, and if not I’m going to move her to the “not running” list.
The political calculation driving Biden’s campaign — and the main reason he has been assumed by many to be the most electable Democrat — is the belief that the Scranton native can win back enough of those voters to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and deny Trump a second term. “The issues that are front and center now,” he told me, “are issues that have been in my wheelhouse for a long time,” citing what he said was his advocacy on behalf of the middle class. Some who voted for Trump, he went on, were starting to realize that Trump’s tax cuts were tailored for the wealthy and for corporations; to take note of his unceasing effort to dismantle Obamacare; to grasp that he was a false tribune of the forgotten man. “When the carnival comes through town the first time, and the guy with the shell and the pea game, and you lose — the second time they come around, you’re a little more ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, I saw what happened last time,’ ” he said. Trump voters might be unwilling to admit out loud to buyer’s remorse, he allowed. “They don’t want to turn to their buddy and say, ‘I’m taking off my Make America Great Again [hat].’ ” But Trump’s base, he argued, isn’t as solid as it appears: “Not all of them, but I think they’re persuadable, yes.”
Biden and his advisers are convinced that the general election will mostly be a referendum on Trump and his fitness for office. “This is really about character and values as opposed to issues and ideology,” says Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist. He acknowledges that Hillary Clinton tried and failed to make Trump’s suitability the pivotal question of the 2016 election. The difference this time, he says, is that Trump is now president and has demonstrated his inadequacy. Biden made a similar point. “Even when he was running,” Biden told me, “I don’t think anybody thought he would be as bad as he is.”
Orange man bad! Note that he’s not trying to run on “this lousy economy.” Biden loves him some ObamaCare. Huh: “Harris’s close friendship with Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, is giving an unusually personal tone to the growing rivalry between Biden and Harris (D-Calif.), which will be on display again at Wednesday’s debate.”
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown says he doesn’t think Biden will be the nominee, and makes noises about getting in himself, because if there’s anything this field needs, it’s one more guy running. (Also see the entry on Steyer below.)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Plans to go after Biden in the debates. Also says he’s near the 130,000 donor threshold for the next round of debates. The Chicago Tribune says he’s foolish to go after Biden for the 1994 crime bill. “Americans were keenly aware of the growing danger, and they wanted something done about it — whatever it took to make them safer.” And a lot of people calling for harsher penalties were black Democratic politicians.
“My name is Steve, and I work for the state.” That is not the voice of a Democrat who wants to do away with the private health insurance of more than half the population. It is the voice of a Democrat who would go on to expand Medicaid coverage — twice — in a blood red state with a Republican majority legislature, a Democrat committed to keeping rural hospitals open, which probably only matters to people who don’t plan their heart attacks two hours ahead.
His is also not the voice of free college or canceling student debt. It is the voice of a Democrat who has shepherded several tuition freezes for residents at the state universities, thereby minimizing the need for loans in the first place. He also beefed up the Montana Registered Apprenticeship Program, a public-private partnership among the state and tribal colleges and more than 500 businesses whose graduates earn $20,000 more than the state average. In Montana, that’s a year’s mortgage, about three years of a kid’s tuition at one of the aforementioned state schools, 1,700 movie tickets — that’s a life.
Does Mr. Bullock, with his modest but concrete progress in a state hostile to Democrats on issues all Democrats hold dear, sound boring compared to charismatic candidates promising revolutionary change? I don’t know. Is winning boring?
Like some leftist Dr. Dolittle, Mr. Bullock has a talent for knowing how to talk Republicans into doing Democratic things (including voting for him). It resulted in his re-election in 2016 in a state President Trump won by over 20 points. His crafty approach involves good manners, logic and a willingness to compromise when he can (and veto when he won’t). He sees the good in Republicans because there is good to be seen: Several of the conservative legislators who voted to support the public universities attended them.
Sounds like the sort of incremental approach the loudest voices in the Democratic base assure us is passe compared to radical change. He gets a Politico profile. “He thinks Democrats are not doing enough to win over voters who backed Obama and Trump.” Also slammed Warren’s claims of PAC purity. “Everybody can be pure if you transfer over $8 or 10 million from their Senate accounts directly.” Bullock also opposes impeachment.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Has a plan for homesteading vacant property. Not necessarily a bad idea in abstract, but his plan actual sounds like what it will be is the fed airdrops money, the connected scoop up desirable property cheap, and after a year you’ll find that we’ve spent $500 million and created a new federal bureaucracy to actual give 37 homeless people homes. (It doesn’t say that, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it will actually amount to.) “South Bend Cops Warn of ‘Mass Exodus’ as Morale Plummets Over Buttigieg’s Mishandling of Shooting.” Lil Nas X: “No ‘Old Town Road for you!”
(Found the oldest version of this meme to represent the age of the idea.) Now if he wanted to limit it to everyone receiving federal welfare payments, that I could get behind…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris’ post-debate bounce is fading, which you could have learned here, what, three weeks ago? Flip, meet flop. “Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., backtracked on her support for decriminalizing illegal border crossing, then immediately reversed course and said she was in favor of it.” If you like your insurance plan, you can suck it up while government moves you to socialized medicine, but she promises to let insurance companies run parts of it. New York Times wonders what she actually believes:
For the fights she has promised to wage, Ms. Harris prizes two weapons above all: presidential decrees and federal dollars. They are the instruments of an impatient politician — a career prosecutor sensitive to how slow the machinery of government can move, and how unforgiving voters can be.
Ms. Harris’s economic agenda involves trillions of dollars in new spending — exact estimates vary, but well over $3 trillion and perhaps more than $4 trillion — with much of it aimed at distributing cash to people in economic distress. Most of the spending takes the form of a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income taxpayers.
But it also includes hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked for specific purposes: raises for public schoolteachers, tax benefits for people who rent their homes and grants for minority home buyers. On Friday, Ms. Harris’s campaign announced a $75 billion initiative to invest in minority-owned businesses and historically black colleges.
Snip.
Of nearly a dozen major plans Ms. Harris has announced, about a third have also included a kind of a threat: that if Congress did not resolve an issue with sufficient haste, she would take narrower steps with unilateral presidential authority.
Those steps, according to Ms. Harris’s campaign, would bestow new protections on undocumented immigrants, impose new limits on firearm sales, enable the manufacture of cheaper pharmaceuticals and require federal contractors to meet pay-equity standards for women. Together, these plans convey a stark skepticism that Congress can be counted upon to pass important laws — skepticism that other Democratic self-styled pragmatists, like Mr. Biden, do not share.
The decrees she has drafted are a statement, too, of Ms. Harris’s confidence in her own authority as an executor of the law.
That role, Ms. Harris said in the interview, “is my comfortable place.”
Her pitch seems to be “put me in charge so I can spend all the money and rule by decree.”
All happy campaigns are alike; each flailing campaign flails in its own way. And Mr. Hickenlooper’s disappointment runs deeper than most of his peers’. It is easy to imagine him succeeding in a past cycle, as a popular, moderate two-term executive of a purple state, known for brokering deals on environmental issues and gun regulation. He has arrived instead at a moment of celebri-fied elections and simmering progressive opposition to Mr. Trump.
Nowhere is the disconnect more visceral for a long shot than in the rented reception halls in early-voting states across the country. Eyes migrate to the carpet patterns. Campaign stickers sit unstuck. Volunteer sign-up sheets remain wrenchingly white. It is the difference between polite applause and spontaneous affection, abiding a handshake and demanding a selfie. It is the difference between a former governor and a future president.
“I somehow don’t feel he’s got the punch,” said Rachel Rosenblum, 82, of Danbury, N.H., leaving the Hanover event a few minutes early.
A woman nearby noticed the small gathering through a window and approached Ms. Rosenblum, curious to know who had reserved the space. “Is that a private event?” she asked.
“No,” Ms. Rosenblum replied. “He wants to win the election.”
Other indignities have been more public. Before the first Democratic debate in Miami, a security guard mistook Mr. Hickenlooper for a reporter. In an appearance on “The View” last week, a host, Ana Navarro, confused him with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington. “All white people look alike, apparently,” a co-host, Joy Behar, said.
It is a particularly humbling comedown for a man who, just a few years ago, garnered reasonably serious consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate — and who retains outsize status in Colorado as the spindly brewpub owner who made it big.
I imagine that we’ll get lots more “failure to launch” pieces between now and Iowa. He has a plan for rural broadband and development, that may well appeal to all six of the rural Democrats still left in the party.
In May, Inslee signed into law the nation’s first public option, set to go live next fall. Under the plan, the Inslee administration will contract with a private insurer to sell coverage on the state’s Affordable Care Act exchange. The state projects that premiums in the public plan will be 5 to 10 percent cheaper that alternatives because of capped payments to doctors and hospitals. That might not translate into a major enrollment boost, and it remains to be seen whether enough providers will participate in the plan.
Inslee also signed legislation making Washington the first state to add a guaranteed long-term care benefit, addressing a growing challenge for an aging population. The law, which in concept is similar to Social Security, creates a payroll tax to offer a $100-per-day allowance for nursing home care, in-home assistance or another community-based option. It’s not enough to fully fund nursing home care, which can top $100,000 per year, but it may ease some financial pressure on families.
So he favors plans structured like ObamaCare that will no doubt fail like ObamaCare. (See also: “death spiral.”) He has a New York Times op-ed on climate change, just in case you’re out of melatonin.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The presidential campaign of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been accused of delaying staff pay in order to boost the campaign’s cash-on-hand figures at reporting time.” That piece mentions a $55,000 a day burn rate. Since she brought in only $2.9 million in Q2, that burn rate is not sustainable, and that senate transfer money will only last so long. She has a “housing plan” described as “sweeping in scope but scant on details.” File it with Hickenlooper’s rural broadband plan…
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Not only is there no news for him, but I can’t even get his website to come up right now…
On his second combat tour in Iraq, 2nd Lt. Seth Moulton led his platoon in one of the most grueling battles of the war, at a cemetery in Najaf.
“It was intense,” says Nick Henry, who served as a lance corporal under Moulton. “The thing we dealt with in the cemetery was a lot like Vietnam, almost. The insurgency would dig into the cemetery and they would pop out of little tunnels and holes. We would fight through them and then they would end up popping out of tunnels behind us, and we’d have to back up and re-clear, and basically it was 360 all the time.”
Moulton served four tours of combat in Iraq. He’s called it the most influential experience of his life, one he refers to often in his presidential run.
Interviews with those who served with Moulton in Iraq reveal that one quality that has sometimes gotten him in trouble in politics — his ambition — served him well in combat.
Henry says half the men in their platoon saw combat for the first time in the battle of Najaf. He says Moulton was a “very intelligent” platoon commander, sometimes “a little too intelligent,” in the sense that he sometimes tried to implement tactics that were more advanced than entry-level Marines were capable of.
Still, Henry says, everything was relatively well executed. He describes Moulton as always involved, with good command and control in a chaotic situation, someone who would lead from the front most of the time, and not overly controlling.
Henry calls Moulton one of the better platoon commanders he had in five combat deployments.
“He’s very sincere with his caring,” Henry says, and that came across most vitally when Moulton made sure his men were ready for combat. “He spent the time to come up with the plans and the training plan to make sure that we were prepared for anything that we came to, which is, in my personal belief, why our platoon was the most heavily relied on to execute missions during the battle of Najaf.”
Snip.
As measured by the Democratic National Committee, he’s not doing well. The DNC has barred him from two rounds of debates because he has yet to get the required number of financial donors or standing in the polls.
“It’s the longest of long shots,” says Gergen, who believes Moulton has alienated some on the left, ironically because last year, he campaigned successfully to get young Democratic veterans elected to Congress, an effort Gergen says contributed to the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives.
“The people who won were taking back districts that [President] Trump had won in many cases,” he says, “and so naturally, they have to be more mainstream than some of the progressives in the Democratic Party, and that makes Seth a target for some of the progressives, saying he’s too mainstream, he’s too close to the center.”
The Iraq stuff is a whole lot more interesting than the political stuff. He’s for impeachment. He filed a digital privacy bill. “The Automatic Listening and Exploitation Act, or the ALEXA Act for short, would empower the Federal Trade Commission to seek immediate penalties if a smart device is found to have recorded user conversations without the device’s wake word being triggered… Moulton said that he would like to see his legislation spur a greater tech debate within the halls of Congress.” Uh…you’ve got a real issue there, Moulton, but the purpose of legislation is to make the laws of the land, not “spur debate.”
O’Rourke’s second-quarter fundraising total, announced two weeks ago, started to cement the sense of flop from polls that had him down to 1 or 2 percent, after being in third place when he announced in March he was running. He raised $3.6 million from April through June, meaning that after raising a blowout $6.1 million in his first 24 hours in the race, he picked up just $6.9 million in the three and a half months that followed. O’Rourke and his aides know how much is riding on the second debate next week, but they’re also struggling with what to do: He became a national name partly based on a viral video of him defending Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem. Re-creating that in a rapid-fire, multi-podium debate is pretty much impossible.
Plus, he has to compete directly with South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whom he’ll share the stage with for the first time on Tuesday night. Both candidates are young white guys (O’Rourke is 46, Buttigieg 37), branding themselves as the bright, shiny future of the Democratic Party. Buttigieg’s explosion tracks with O’Rourke’s implosion. Any hopes O’Rourke has of rising again may depend on Buttigieg collapsing, which he shows no signs of doing; his polling has remained decent, and he raised $24.8 million for the second quarter, more than anyone else running.
“What Beto O’Rourke’s Dad Taught Him About Losing.” Well, that’s knowledge that’s going to come in handy…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a manucaturing plan that also includes the $15 an hour minimum wage hike, which we already know is a job killer. “Two longtime Biden African American supporters in S. Carolina defect to Tim Ryan.” “Fletcher Smith and Brandon Brown, who played senior roles in Biden’s last presidential campaign in 2008” are the defectees. Given that the Biden 2008 Presidential campaign didn’t even survive long enough to get to South Carolina, it’s hard to see them as must-hire material…
“Whatever you think about Sweden and what we did, you have to realize that we had a great society first,” Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, filmmaker, and Cato Institute senior fellow, said in a recent lecture titled “No, Bernie! Scandinavia Is Not Socialist!”
“We were incredibly wealthy, we trusted each other socially, there was a decent life for everybody. That’s what made it possible to experiment with socialism; then it began to undermine many of those preconditions,” Norberg said during the June 20 event hosted by The Fund for American Studies and the office of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
“That’s the one thing that it’s important for people to get, because if they just look at Sweden and think, ‘Oh look, they’re socialist and seem to be doing quite all right,’ then they’ve sort of missed the point,” Norberg added.
Tom Steyer’s eleventh-hour presidential bid is confounding Democrats. And some party officials are ready for him to butt out.
The billionaire environmental activist is antagonizing Democratic leaders, whacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for going on August recess and criticizing House Democrats for not immediately impeaching the president.
And as Steyer vows to spend as much as $100 million of his own money in the primary to boost his long-shot candidacy, Democrats are growing frustrated that he’ll only further clog the crowded campaign — particularly if he can buy his way onto the debate stage this fall.
“It’s very difficult for me to see the path for Tom Steyer to be a credible candidate,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who has endorsed Pete Buttigieg. “So yes, I would rather that he spend his money taking back the Virginia House, the Virginia Senate and supporting people who can win.”
“I wish he wouldn’t do it. Especially at this late date,” added Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. “Things are set except for those who are going to drop out.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio observed that Steyer is basically “another white guy in the race,” albeit a wealthy one who is “a major progressive player.” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was mostly perplexed by the wealthy Californian’s entry when asked about it: “I kind of wonder why?”
Evidently Senator Brown doesn’t realize that he’s also the other white meat. But notice how he automatically lapses into the racist identity politics framing that infects the Democratic Party today. Whatever happened to judging people on the content of their character? There’s a whole lot of reasons not to vote for Tom Steyer without mentioning the color of his skin. “How Democratic debate rules are forcing a billionaire to plead for pennies.”
About one-fifth of Steyer’s TV spending is on the national airwaves, but the vast majority is concentrated in the four early caucus and primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Positive poll results specifically in those states could help Steyer qualify for the debate, so getting his face on television is of special strategic value there.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a plan to renegotiate trade deals. A small number of good transparency ideas attached to a giant boat anchor of liberal interest group ideas, including a “border carbon adjustment” tax. Her trade plans make Donald Trump sound like Adam Smith. Speaking of economics, she says we’re due for a recession, so she has that in common with Zero Hedge. But economists can’t agree, and the Fed is poised to drop rates, so who knows? Dem analyst for Warren says the race is between Warren and Harris. “Ignore that frontrunner behind the curtain!”
The Democratic Party has long considered itself the standard-bearer of scientific expertise, adopting an almost utopian vision of technological innovation since at least the Kennedy years, Vinsel said.
Practically, this means that Democrats have made technology a bigger part of their image over the years. In the 1980s, for instance, “Atari Democrats” wore fancy watches and promoted Silicon Valley boosterism as an alternative to courting labor unions, said Marc Aidinoff, a history doctoral candidate at MIT who has also worked as a junior policy advisor to Joe Biden. That trend continued under Barack Obama, said Mary Ebeling, a professor of sociology at Drexel University. Obama’s technology advisors were heavily recruited from Silicon Valley and many returned there after serving in his administration. And now, it’s not just the Democratic Party pushing tech-based solutions, Vinsel said. At this point, the ideas of technological innovation and economic growth are so linked in the American mind that neither party can step away from tech as a common good without seeming like they are anti-growth.
But Democrats’ tendency to seek solutions in technology for social problems has not always served them well. Ebeling is currently working on a project that explores how adopting electronic health records as part of the Affordable Care Act affected both patients and workers in the medical industry. The electronic records were pushed as a solution to deep-seated problems that weren’t really about technology — boosters promised they’d make healthcare cheaper and solve problems with patient access to consistent medical care. Instead, Ebeling is finding that we spent billions effectively favoring an industry that could never produce the returns it promised. “And lo and behold, by 2019, you have Kaiser Health News reporting on how much harm electronic health records have caused. Literally the death of patients because of medical errors,” she said.
Says he’ll be running his campaign the entire way. Given slow but steady rise in the polls, I’d say certainly through Super Tuesday, and longer if it looks like Democrats are headed to a brokered convention, because why the hell not? “A recent Fox News poll had Yang ahead of Senators Cory Booker, D-N.J., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., former Colorado Gov. John Hickelnlooper, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in 2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind” blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.
You’d think that this history would inform activists at Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead, Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and identity-politics seminars.
Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.
Snip.
Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates. Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in 2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t want to understand what’s happening in this country.”
It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.
As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35 percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot going into the 2020 election.
Democrats’ strategy against President Trump has been a miserable failure. Even CNN agrees!
President Trump won the Mueller showdown and now is going on offense:
Trump is just beginning to advance his arguments about what has blanketed the country since the summer of 2016. The president is going to argue that the real scandal was the attempt to keep him from winning election and, once having won, from governing. And his opponents did so by shocking means far outside the norms of law and U.S. politics. In this offensive against his tormentors of the past 36 months, the president may be aided by the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to whom Attorney General William P. Barr has entrusted the investigation into what may well become “CoIntelPro 2.0.”
Even if not, Trump will make this argument simply by force of repetition of the facts we already know: The Steele Dossier was a con job from the start — opposition research passed off as intelligence and, at best, stupidly accepted as legitimate by a naive FBI. It could turn out much worse than this. Wise advice during the Mueller investigation was to wait for the endgame and not guess. The same holds for the inspector general and for Durham.
That the attack on Trump has decisively failed is not open to debate — except by people unfamiliar with sunk costs. Many political figures and folks in the commentariat heavily invested in the idea that Mueller would bring forth impeachment, and possibly even conviction and removal of the president. He did not. Impeachment proceedings, much less a successful vote on articles of impeachment, seem unlikely.
Trump has his economic boom, his deregulatory record, his military buildup and his remaking of the judiciary. He has criminal-justice reform to his credit and an overhaul of Veterans Affairs is underway. He now has a spending deal that would guarantee continuing fiscal stimulus via larger deficits, and he has four vacancies (to which he astonishingly has not nominated anyone) on the U.S. courts of appeals for the 2nd and 9th circuits, as well as scores of district court openings to remind his base of the stakes.
Look at the last impeachment, that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to Congress on Sept. 9. The House voted to start impeachment proceedings on Oct. 8. The formal impeachment vote was Dec. 19. The matter then went to the Senate, which voted to acquit Clinton on Feb. 12, 1999. The process took a few days more than five months.
Imagine a similar timeline today. The House stays out on recess until the second week in September. Say they vote to begin proceedings in October. The impeachment vote comes in mid-to-late December, and the Senate verdict in February — probably somewhere between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.
That is a crazy scenario, and that is what would happen if impeachment work got under way immediately after the House returns from recess. If it were delayed further, the whole thing would move weeks or months farther down the road. Why not a Senate trial during Super Tuesday, or the summer political conventions? The possibilities are mind-boggling.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi fears impeachment will backfire on Democrats, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate will never remove Donald Trump from office. Her strategy appears to be to delay and delay until at some point it becomes obvious to all that it is far too late to make impeachment happen. Pelosi will then look at her watch and say, “Oh, my goodness, look at the time!” And that will be that.
The fact is, it is nearly too late for impeachment right now. Yet the possibility of impeachment is still being discussed seriously.
While everyone was watching Robert Mueller ask when Matlock was on, the House, in coordination with the Trump Administration, passed a budget agreement that continues profligate spending as far as the eye can see (or at least two years), and which takes a government shutdown off the table until after the 2020 election. Not what I or any conservative activist would have done, but obviously President Trump feels he can continue to hold off the next cyclical recession long enough to get reelected. Kicking the can down the road has become a global pastime for almost all the nations of the world, and sooner or later there will come a reckoning. In America, this fight may have been lost when Bush41 let Gramm-Rudman-Hollings get whacked in 1990…
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this story of Washington, D.C. therapists whose patients’ Trump Derangement Syndromes are making their equally liberal TDS-suffering therapists depressed as well. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
Dr. Drew told Adams that he had predicted the recent typhus outbreak in Los Angeles, which was carried by rats, transferred by fleas to pets, and from pets to humans.
Bubonic plague, Dr. Drew said, like typhus, is endemic to the region, and can spread to humans from rodents in a similar fashion.
Though commonly recognized as the medieval disease responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of the population of Europe, the last outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. was nearly a century ago, from 1924 to 1925 — also in Los Angeles. Only a “heroic effort” by doctors stopped it, Dr. Drew recalled, warning that conditions were perfect for another outbreak of the plague in the near future.
Los Angeles is one of the only cities in the country, Dr. Drew said, that has no rodent control plan. “And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps. People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.”
Representative Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress for 27 years, rising to become the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He has become a boldface name in the age of President Trump, the linchpin of many Democrats’ hopes of impeachment.
Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.
All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.
Almost a year in advance of the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.
The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.
Texas Democrats have their eyes on taking over Texas, and a newly released plan lays out how they aim to finally turn Texas blue.
In a presentation given to political donors and Austin lobbyists this week, Texas Democrats made their case for heavy political investment in the Lone Star State.
First, they compare Texas to Ohio, a traditional swing state that often receives a heavy influx of cash from national Democrat donors. Both states, the presentation states, voted 43 percent Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. But while Ohio’s trajectory is “successively worse in the last two presidential elections,” Texas Democrats point out that they had their best showing in 20 years. They also highlight demographic differences between Ohio and Texas that they believe make the task easier, such as the Texas’ overall younger and larger minority population.
Snip.
Democrats need not worry, they say, about retaining [12 Texas House seats they flipped], as they claim there is “too much GOP defense to go on offense” in order to take those seats back. Recently released campaign finance reports, however, show that many of the newly elected “Democrat Dozen” have an astoundingly small amount in their campaign accounts, depicting what could be an uphill battle for many of them should Republicans wage serious campaigns to take those seats back.
In addition to John Cornyn’s senate seat, Democrats are targeting six U.S. congressional seats.
On the same theme, this piece says those six districts are:
TX-10 — Mike McCaul
TX-21 — Chip Roy
TX-22 — Pete Olson
TX-23 — Will Hurd
TX-24 — Kenny Marchant
TX-31 — John Carter
Minnesota, the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, is trending Republican.
For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.
Related: “According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, wants to desilo the Corps and reintegrate it into the Navy’s overall structure. CDR Salamander thinks this is a good idea. Maybe. I haven’t followed recent strategic seapower debates much as of late. But it’s a devil-in-the-details move that could badly backfire if improperly implemented. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.
He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.
I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
A long list of Johnson scandals that didn’t even remotely come close to derailing his ascent skipped.
Another quote that’s often dragged up by Boris’s enemies to discredit him is from a Conservative campaign speech in 2005: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” In their minds, this is appallingly sexist, as well as environmentally suspect. But if Orwell is right about the enduring appeal of the “overwhelming vulgarity,” the “smuttiness,” the “ever-present obscenity,” of Britain’s seaside postcards you can see why constantly reminding people of Boris’s politically incorrect remarks won’t necessarily hurt his electoral chances. It just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character whom many people still feel an instinctive affection for: the lovable rogue, the man with the holiday in his eye. He’s the guy that tries to persuade the barman to serve one more round of drinks after time has been called, the 14-year-old who borrows his father’s Mercedes at two o’clock in the morning and takes it up to a 100mph on the motorway with his friends shrieking in the back. He’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Sid James in the Carry On films. He’s a Donald McGill postcard.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s an example:
Israel has reportedly flown a modified version of the F-35 to Iran and back, circling major cities and military bases and taking surveillance photographs without being detected by Iranian radar or intercepted by Russian missiles.
That is the story that has been circulating throughout the Middle East for the past year. No one is certain whether it is true, but it has begun to appear in Western sources, especially since Iran recently fired the head of its air force.
The Israeli version of the F-35, known as the “Adir,” is reportedly the first version of the American-made Joint Strike Fighter that has ever been deployed in combat. But it may have already had a bigger impact in a non-combat role.
That so many believe the story is a sign Iran is already regarded as the “weak horse” in the middle east. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
Social justice warriors defy any and all pushback, calling it “transphobia.” They argue that gender is a social construct. It’s a theory in feminist sociology that states society and culture, not genetics, define whether one is male, female, or “other”.
While the argument about what constitutes “gender identity” and “gender expression” – other confusing facets of gender in contemporary society – remain up for debate, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that those born with male body parts and hormone levels have physical superiority over most biological females. It is settled science.
Speaking of tranny madness, this piece is about a woke and naive Harvard professor who let himself be taken to the cleaners by a “lesbian” divorced from a tranny who had a one-night stand with him and then proceeded to rob him blind because he was too stupid/woke to resist her.
Here’s a horrifying story about how San Luis Obispo police chief Deanna Cantrell losing her gun in a toilet stall led police to conduct a warrantless search of an innocent man’s house and seized his children for “neglect” because the house was dirty.
