Posts Tagged ‘David Emadi’

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for June 3, 2019

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Biden continues to lead, the DNC raises the bar for Debate Three, Booker spurns his former best buds rabbi, Williamson attends the world’s lamest rave, and Swalwell and Gillibrand compete to see who can run the most cringe-inducing campaign. It’s your weekly Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

Polls

  • Harvard/Harris (go all the way to page 144): Biden 36, Sanders 17, Harris 8, Warren 5, Buttigieg 5, O’Rourke 4, Booker 3, Hickenlooper 1, Gravel 1, Ryan 1, Yang 1, Castro 1, Bloomberg 1, Inslee 1.
  • Morning Consult: Biden 38, Sanders 20, Warren 9, Buttigieg 7, Harris 7, O’Rourke 4, Booker 3, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delany 1, Gillibrand 1, Hickenlooper 1, Klobucher 1, Yang 1, Williamson 1, Bullock 1, Ryan 1, Gabbard 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • The DNC announced that come the third Presidential debate, Democrats will need to score at least two percent in four polls, as well as “campaign contributions from at least 130,000 donors, including 400 unique donors in at least 20 states,” to make the debate stage.
  • Everyone know who Joe Biden is. Every other candidate in the race? Not so much.
  • 538 on what the candidates are saying and doing.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? The main news this week was a huge subpoena for campaign finances records stemming from last year’s losing gubernatorial campaign.

    The nationally watched race for Georgia governor between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, the winner, was decided months ago. But proxy battles emanating from it still rage on.

    Abrams’ campaign on Friday delivered more than 3,600 pages of bank records to the state ethics commission in response to a far-reaching subpoena looking to turn up campaign violations.

    But a lawyer representing Abrams’ campaign is pushing back on releasing communications with outside individuals and groups, and Abrams’ former campaign manager slammed the investigation as “political revenge” by Republicans.

    The subpoena was one of several targeting liberal groups connected to Abrams. Issued by David Emadi, the new head of Georgia’s ethics commission, it asked for banking records from Abrams’ campaign as well as communications between the campaign and several outside groups working to drive voter registration and turnout.

    Also see the news on Andrew Gillum below. Karl Rove systematically dismantles Abrams claims of “voter suppression” in her losing gubernatorial race.

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a CNN town hall. “If Bennet doesn’t get a noticeable bump in the polls — meaning going from somewhere under 1 percent to anywhere consistently over 1 percent — he probably won’t make it onto the June debate stage in the first round.” Gets a Business Insider profile, which reveals that he was born in New Delhi, India. He was chairman of the Senatorial Campaign Committee from 2013—2015, which included the 2014 election where Republicans regained nine seats to retake the majority. He did vote against restoring the Clinton-era cosmetic “assault weapons” ban in 2013. Both he and Hickenlooper are having trouble finding traction:

    Former governor John Hickenlooper, the wealthy white male moderate who progressives think is too close to the oil industry, and U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, the wealthy white male moderate who progressives think is too close to Wall Street, have both struggled to meet the debate requirements set by the Democratic National Committee.

    Snip.

    But it’s on the donor front that things begin to look truly dire for both candidates. As of March 31, Hickenlooper had received contributions from just 1,093 unique donors, a review of Federal Election Commission disclosures shows. While that figure only includes less than a month’s worth of donations following his campaign announcement on March 4, it puts the governor on pace for only a fraction of the donors he needs to fully guarantee himself a spot on the debate stage in June and July, much less qualify for the September debate.

    Because he announced his presidential bid after the FEC’s first-quarter deadline, Bennet has yet to file a campaign-finance report. Neither campaign responded to a request for comment Wednesday on their total number of unique donors, or their reaction to the DNC’s new, higher threshold for the third debate.

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden looks like a frontrunner in every respect except one: Where are the big crowds? Maybe that’s a reason he’s been strangely absent from the campaign trail. 538 wonders if the Biden bounce is over, but they’re talking about downward shifts of 1-3%, which strikes me as statistical noise. He offered an education policy proposal that shockingly calls for school choice. Ha! Just kidding! It’s the federal government airdropping more money. “Can Joe Biden be the future and the past?

    Biden sought to reassure people that he views the changing climate as an existential threat to the planet, something he would take seriously and deal with aggressively. He also told his audience that the “first and most important plank” of a Biden climate policy could be summed up in two words: “Beat Trump.”

    His argument was hardly specious. He pointed to all the things that he — and the 22 other Democrats seeking the party’s nomination — are talking about, all they would do if they gain power in 2020. “As long as Donald Trump’s in the White House,” he said, “none of these critical things are going to get done.”

    What was left unsaid but obvious was the bare-bones rationale for his candidacy, that he’s the candidate in the best position to deny Trump a second term. Biden will have to prove this over the coming months. He won’t be able to avoid his rivals, nor engage solely in a debate with the president. But right now, he wants Democrats to believe he has a far better chance of taking back the White House, if only because he would play well in the three states that secured Trump’s presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

    Snip.

    At a time when the Democratic Party is being reshaped, Biden is a link to what came before Trump. He calls himself an Obama-Biden Democrat, which can be an asset in the primaries but perhaps less so in the general election. He will not have negatives as high as Hillary Clinton had in 2016 (or Trump for that matter). But Obama, for all his esteem and popularity among Democrats, was part of what brought about the reaction that gave the country the Trump presidency.

    The biggest problem with Biden’s goal of being the candidate of both the past and the future is his inability to obtain the Time Stone…

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker was closed friends with an Orthodox rabbi he met at Oxford. Now they don’t even speak. Why? Booker supported Obama’s Iran deal. (It’s a long, interesting piece, assuming you can get around the Post paywall/adblocker blocker combo.) Booker wants you to know that his gun control proposals would totally end mass shootings. Which proposals? “My proposals. You know, proposals. That I have. That will totally work. Because I say so.”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Impeachment? Nah. Says he can totally win back Trump states. You know, for Reasons. Bullock: “I’m against getting all dark money out of politics. Except all that sweet, sweet union money that benefits me personally. That stuff is A-OK!” He also hired ten more Iowa staffers.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Buttigieg’s brother in law says he’s lying about his rags to riches story and being shunned by his family. The lefties at Truthout are unimpressed with Mayor Pete:

    The only millennial on Earth to sincerely describe themselves as a “laid-back intellectual,” Buttigieg has made it impressively far on identity alone. His website has a meme generator, for example, but no actual platform, leaving journalists to cobble one up out of tweets and interviews.

    What’s emerged in the past six months is a brazenly conservative agenda.

    To start, he doesn’t want single-payer health care because he can’t imagine a world without private insurance — one of the highest-profile symbols of the inhumanity of privatization. Instead, he wants “Medicare-for-all-who-want-it” to compete in the marketplace. “I don’t think we have to make it that complicated,” he says, sounding unnervingly like our current president.

    The rest of his policies are likely informed by his personal life (same-sex marriage) or his military career, the latter of which dominates his worldview. If he’s for gun control, it’s only because he “didn’t carry an assault rifle around a foreign country just to come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen.” Indeed, Buttigieg carried an assault rifle to oversee the murder of Brown people, not his own electorate.

    Buttigieg’s decorated service transforms him from a bootlicker into an actual boot-on-the-ground. He abandoned his elected duties to go to Afghanistan over a decade after everyone knew it was a phony war. Few “laid-back intellectuals” volunteer for war; fewer still come back believing in it. But Buttigieg can’t get enough: He’s afraid of Iran, blames Hamas for the devastating conditions in Gaza and thinks the U.S. has a lot to learn from how Israel “handles threats.”

    In April, he took it upon himself to suggest a “national service” program for every U.S. teenager. Maybe he means clean-up-your-rivers and volunteer-to-read service work, but it’s the military that swallows up his praise, and previous presidents’ time in the war machine that he idolizes. I can already see the Republicans back home in Mississippi nodding along.

    It’s always nice to have reminders that the hard left still hates ordinary Americans.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Houston Chronicle offers up the latest “Why isn’t Julian Castro doing better?” piece. (It’s a rich genre.)

    On paper, Castro checks so many boxes. He’s young, he’s Latino, he has as much experience as Beto and Mayor Pete, he can appeal to the right with his strong religious beliefs.

    But even Castro’s time as a former U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development can be read as problematic.

    “Consider … his relationship with Hillary Clinton, his time in politics, and I think compared to the two others mentioned, Julián Castro is considered to be a part of the establishment that needs to change,” journalist Shahrazad Maria Encinias told me, via Facebook, echoing the sentiments of other journalists I reached out to in order to discuss Castro’s campaign.

    And, for that matter, many think that, despite Castro’s resume, there’s not a lot of “there” there.

    Also this: “I don’t know who would be identified as his base.” Wait, you mean twenty years of endless “Hispanics are a super-powerful political force just waiting for the right candidate to wake them up” pieces were just lies? (Spoiler: Yes.) He also promised not to take oil and gas money:

    Because oil companies are just lining up to donate to a guy polling at 1%. He’s scheduled for a Fox town hall on June 13.

  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Daily Beast: “Here’s Why Bill de Blasio Thinks He Can Be President. And Here’s Why He’s Wrong.” It’s actually pretty weak tea by the standards of de Blasio-bashing. (Speaking of rich genres…) Oh, and NYPD cops hate him too. “‘As you can see, a President Bill de Blasio would be an unmitigated disaster, not just for union members, but for any American who wants a functioning government,’ NYC Police Union President Patrick Lynch wrote in a letter the union shared with media.”
  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Naturally Delany is not happy that his dead-in-the-water campaign is going to be excluded from the third round of debates going forward.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tulsi Gabbard Is Not A Centrist, No Matter How Much You Like Her.”

    When one examines Gabbard’s politics, the only difference between Gabbard and the right’s least favorite leftist ideologies is that she has spoken out articulately about online censorship and anti-interventionism.

    Both talking points, however, are a means of pushing economically and politically left-wing policy.

    Snip.

    Speaking of constitutional rights, Gabbard picks and chooses what to support. In the words of her own campaign website, Gabbard seeks to “ensure that the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited.”

    She has demonstrated her desire to disarm the American population by continually pushing gun control legislation, including H.R.5087, a congressional bill that proposes a full ban on all “semiautomatic assault weapons,” with a pages-long definition that effectively includes every semiautomatic weapon in existence.

    Her website also clearly states her support of the “concept of” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” a proposal that was (rightfully) relentlessly mocked by the right for its unrealistic goals and childish language (“cow farts.”)

    Gabbard’s public support of the same bill is overlooked however, because she is viewed as more mature, reasonable, and eloquent than Ocasio Cortez.

    But her goals are not much more grounded than those of Ocasio-Cortez. She is currently pushing the “OFF Fossil Fuels Act,” a bill that if passed would mandate a 100 per cent transition to “zero-emission” vehicles in just 16 years. The same bill would require that the United States transition to 100 per cent “clean energy” within the same 16-year period.

    Gabbard’s environmental goals practically mirror those of Ocasio-Cortez. She’s just less bombastic about it.

    Also look at Shoe0nHead’s callout to Gabbard as her queen in Saturday’s video if you haven’t already.

  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Failure to launch:

    At this point, Gillibrand isn’t focused on winning the primary. She’s worried about surviving the next few months.

    Despite a soaring national profile in the U.S. Senate[{{citation needed}}], Gillibrand has failed to achieve liftoff as a presidential prospect. She has not broken 2 percent in a single national poll since officially declaring her candidacy in mid-March, and her 0.4 percent average in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of surveys places her behind the likes of Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard and even geeky long shot Andrew Yang.

    This is the point where I’d usually do a snip and quote another big block of biographic info on Gillibrand, but the pandering here is laid on too thick to let it pass: “Gillibrand gained national attention upon entering the political arena for possessing a rare combination of big brains [No], telegenic looks [she’s OK] and personal magnetism [No].” She’s “telegenic” only by “politics is Hollywood for ugly people” standards. She’s got middling blond sorority girl looks, her “soaring national profile” seems limited to a few political reporter fangirls, and before she launched her presidential campaign, the average non-New Yorker couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup. She’s a political lightweight that a small group of dedicated party hacks has insisted we treat as a heavyweight. She Peter Principled her way into a senate seat and her Presidential aspirations are laughable. She’s Beto O’Rourke without the gravitas and 90% less goofy charisma, and her campaign failure is entirely predictable. And if you thought she was a bad politician, you haven’t heard her singing:

    She seems like one of those drunks at karaoke night who is absolutely sure she’s nailing it, much to the amusement of everyone else. She’s also tried some tranny pandering.

  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. Biggest news this week was him being hit with federal subpoenas over “his 2018 campaign for governor and his work with a Massachusetts nonprofit organization and a local public relations firm owned by one of his closest advisers.” If I were of a conspiratorial cast of mind, I’d view this and the Stacey Abrams subpoenas mentioned above as part of a coordinated effort against both. However, the rational part of my mind notes that one was state and the other federal, which tends to argue against such a conspiracy.
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. “89-year-old Mike Gravel trolls younger 2020 Democrats for polling beneath him.”

    The Klobuchar zero showing in that poll is probably an anomaly, but yeah, the others are toast.

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. LA Times: “After dazzling debut, Kamala Harris falls from top of presidential pack.” It was never that dazzling, and she was never at the top. She is racking up California endorsements, which are like the Arby’s coupons of politics; you keep them around because every once in a while they’re useful, but mostly they just lie around forgotten until getting tossed out long past their expiration date. Freakshow animal rights protestor grabs the mic from her on stage.
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He calls on his fellow Democrats to reject socialism or lose to Trump. This didn’t go over well:

  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Released an immigration plan, which is your standard “everything Trump does is wrong, plus Amnesty” pander.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She was on Pod Save America, which is big in lefty circles. It’s a whole lot of “Trump won the Midwest, but I can win the Midwest, because I’m the most Midwest Midwest from the Midwest.”
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Center for Public Integrity offers nine random facts on Messam, including his record of political giving and the value of his house ($517,220). It’s not particularly interesting, but Messam news is thin on the ground…
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Had a CNN town hall, where he pandered hard. “If this country wasn’t racist, Stacey Abrams would be governor.” 0-2. He does oppose “Medicare for all.”
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. In case you missed it, here’s my previous post on Kyle Smith’s takedown of Running With Beto, which dropped on HBO last week to rapturous applause from Beto fans, bemusement by a few political junkies, and complete indifference by everyone else. O’Rourke admits he was sometimes “a giant asshole” in it. He tripled his Iowa staff.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another guy who had a CNN town hall. He too performed the requisite diversity pandering (“white male ticket bad!”) and opposes Trump’s China tariffs. He says he’s qualified for the first debate.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders is not doing so well now that he’s not running against Hillary Clinton. “In conversations recently with about a dozen voters who showed up at his events during his longest New Hampshire swing, it’s clear that the kind of ride-or-die support Sanders had in 2016 has dissipated a bit.” Reason covers his commie history.

    Sanders once identified as a socialist who, with reservations, admired the economic achievements of Cuba under Fidel Castro, of Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and of the Soviet Union right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    Running for office as a candidate for the Liberty Union Party in Vermont in the 1970s, Sanders sought a top tax rate of 100%, saying “nobody should earn more than $1 million.”

    Sanders wanted to stop businesses from moving out of their original communities, arguing that the ultimate solution to protect workers was national legislation that would “bring about the public ownership of the major means of production.” He favored the government seizure of “utilities, banks, and major industries,” without compensation to investors or stockholders.

    Shortly after he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1981, Sanders told a room full of charity workers, “I don’t believe in charities,” because only the government should provide social services to the needy.

    He had a San Francisco “grassroots” fundraiser and a San Jose rally. He also took a jab at Biden for not attending the California State Democratic Convention.

  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s like he’s trying to win a bet for running the most cringe-inducing campaign:

    He too had a CNN town hall. “The California congressman said he did not agree with Sanders’ proposal to extend voting rights to people currently in prison.” Also opposes eliminating private health insurance and impeachment. But should Swalwell obtaining these tiny clues temporarily blind you to the fact that he’s still an idiot, there’s also this: “The 38-year-old congressman said on Sunday night that he’s still paying off what was $100,000 in student loan debt.”

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren’s radical wonkery offers “A vision of a government that is at once more responsive and more intrusive.” And radically bigger and more expensive. She proposed a blatantly unconstitutional wealth tax. Well, you can’t expect a former Harvard law professor to understand such arcane trivia as “the Constitution.” She’s all in on Iowa:

    At a half-dozen events in rural Eastern Iowa over Memorial Day weekend, paid organizers and volunteers swarmed every attendee, affixing brightly colored circles to them as proof their contact information had been secured. The sticker patrol circled the room before Warren spoke — and afterward in the selfie line — just in case anyone happened to slip through.

    The campaign’s hyper-vigilance about capturing data on every potential supporter isn’t unique to Iowa, but the sheer number of people dedicated to the task certainly is. Warren has made an early wager on the state unrivaled by other Democratic hopefuls, aiming to strike early in the nomination contest by out-organizing the competition.

    She already has more than 50 staffers in Iowa, and more are coming: A “significant” number of hires will be announced on June 15, according to Jason Noble, her Iowa communications director. The national campaign said its Iowa payroll would total at least 60 after the additions.

    Plenty of other Democrats are investing heavily and ramping up their presence in Iowa, including Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Kamala Harris. But no candidate has hired nearly as many staffers or made the Hawkeye State as central to their hopes for the nomination from the very start.

    Snip.

    But the up-front investment by Warren — who so far has lagged behind Biden, Bernie Sanders, Harris, O’Rourke, and Pete Buttigieg in fundraising — isn’t without risk. Committing to so many salaries from the outset could leave the campaign without much cash for TV and digital advertising in the critical weeks before voting begins. That danger is even greater given that Warren has sworn off high-dollar fundraisers.

    Warren’s camp says she’ll be fine, pointing out that she transferred $10.4 million from her Senate reelection account to give her a healthy financial cushion.

    Could work, or could leave her dead broke after coming fourth behind Biden, Sanders and (rolls dice) Klobuchar and no way to pivot to must-win New Hampshire.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She appeared at a “rave.” I use quotes because “The event, ‘Ethereal Spring,’ is being thrown by Daybreaker, a three-hour sober morning rave held every few weeks in cities across the world. Like other Daybreaker events, this one consists of an hour-long fitness class followed by two hours of (sober, morning) dancing.” That resembles a “rave” about as much as an afternoon tea party resembles an orgy. (Cue a bitter old journalist penning the obligatory “Millennials Ruin Raves” piece.) Six paragraphs in we learn this takes place in Manhattan. Then Williamson talks about the importance of dancing. Welcome to Hell. She also gets a Washington Post profile. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know she was campaigning in Fairfield, Iowa, home to a lot of people who practice Transcendental Meditation. Om, om on the range…
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Time headline proclaims “Inside Andrew Yang’s Outsider Campaign” but there’s precious little insider info:

    Yang, 44, was born in New York to two immigrants from Taiwan. He graduated from high school in Exeter, N.H., in 1992, got an undergraduate degree from Brown and went to law school at Columbia, which he graduated from in 1999. His career got off to a tough start: He spent mere months working as a corporate lawyer at Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York before, he says, he quickly became bored with it. Next he launched a failed Internet company called Stargiving, which raised money for charity by auctioning off celebrity experiences. He worked for a mobile software company called Crisp Wireless as vice president of their business and legal department and at a health-care start-up called MMF Systems. Then he ran a tutoring company that was acquired by test-prep giant Kaplan in 2009 for an undisclosed amount. (On the trail, Yang refers to it as a “modest fortune.”)

    In 2011, Yang founded an organization called Venture for America. His vision was to train entrepreneurs and dispatch them around the country to help create job growth. He was later named one of the Obama White House’s Champions of Change for that work. Along the way, Yang married and had two kids, including an autistic son.

    In a way, Yang credits the latter experience with fueling his campaign for president. “As first-time parents, you don’t know what’s normal versus what’s not normal,” he recalls. ”Is it normal for a three-year-old to freak out when the texture of the ground changes?” It was a growing experience for him. Until then, Yang had suffered only minor adversity. The idea that a single mother would have to care for an autistic child with no resources was heartbreaking, he says, and helped shape his belief in universal basic income—the core of his platform and the idea that’s helped him gain traction.

    Also: “To win the nomination, Yang will have to convince Democrats that he’s got the best chance at beating Trump.” Yeah, I don’t see that happening.

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running (and I’ve even gone back and put in names that were mentioned as possibilities for running that I’ve dropped, just for the sake of completeness):

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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