Progressives kick Jews out of the club, San Francisco cleans up for a communist dictator (but not mere citizens), FBI busts a brothel catering to politicians…then refuses to divulge their clients, and The Marvels crashes and burns on opening weekend. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
To sustain the alliance between leftists and Islamists, something had to give. And that something was Jews.
After a while, it became a parody worthy of classic comedy skits: the Biden administration’s reflexive need to launch into a condemnation of “Islamophobia” every time the discomfiting topic of antisemitism came up — which, you may have noticed, it does quite a bit these days.
Progressives hate antisemitism. Not, unfortunately, the concept . . . the word. It holds a mirror up to their internal contradictions.
Jews have been among the most consequential, cutting-edge progressives in history. A few months back, I reviewed Democratic Justice, Brad Snyder’s biography of Felix Frankfurter, who may have been as responsible for forging the dominance of American progressivism as Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president he zealously served. Alas, Frankfurter would not be welcome today in what’s become of his movement — not least because of another project on which he collaborated with his mentor and fellow Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis: Zionism. That project is anathema to today’s progressives. It honors the old order and the uniqueness of a people reified in their ancestral homeland, one in which they dwelled for millennia — before Islam existed and, 14 centuries later, the notion of “Palestinians” was conceived.
Moreover, to highlight antisemitism is intolerably inconvenient to the collaboration of highest priority for modern progressives: Their partnership with sharia supremacists — so-called Islamists, adherents to “political Islam.”
Snip.
Ostensibly, it’s an unlikely partnership: Sharia supremacists despise many signal progressive causes — e.g., abortion, equality for women, civil rights for homosexuals, and “gender fluidity.” (How long do you figure the “activists” waving their “Queers for Palestine” placards would actually last in Gaza?) And it seems odd for progressives, infamously intolerant of religious liberty, to make common cause with unabashed theocrats who would impose on society a systematically discriminatory legal code enforced by barbaric punishments — of the terrorizing kind that, not coincidentally, the Brotherhood’s Hamas jihadists inflicted on Israeli men, women, and children on October 7.
But let’s dig deeper. The ne plus ultra for sharia supremacists and leftists is the extirpation of the established order. Yes, they have very different ideas about what should replace that order; but that’s an argument for later (at which point progressives would find themselves in the unenviable position of the appeaser after the crocodile is done devouring everyone else). For now, it is a marriage of convenience, a joint war of conquest against Western civilization.
Marriages of convenience are not big on commitment and loyalty. Hence, Jews — predominantly on the left, with legions of stalwart progressives who would as reflexively rebuke Islamophobia as any good Democrat — have become a casualty of that war.
The sharia-supremacist hatred of Jews is doctrinal. As the Hamas Charter relates, Islamic eschatology is consumed by an end-of-times war in which even trees and stones will help Muslims kill their mortal enemies, the Jews. The Islamic claim on the land “from the River to the Sea” also stems from scripture: Mohammed’s night ride from Mecca to Jerusalem and on to heaven. And Muslim scripture further holds that Islam’s prophet died upon being poisoned to death by a Jewish woman.
This is all very uncomfy for progressives. They really don’t do doctrine, let alone submit — or at least allow themselves to appear to be submitting — to religious doctrine. Thus must they engage in euphemistic games to sidestep reality.
“Democrat Media Arm Scrambles As It Becomes Clear They Knew About Hamas Invasion Of Israel Before It Happened. “Reports have been bubbling up that the various tentacles of the Democrat hacktivist media actually had pro-Hamas activists ‘journalists’ embedded with Hamas before and on October 7th.”
Democrats wouldn’t clean up San Francisco for mere citizens, but they did it for a communist dictator.
Apparently, the city of San Francisco can indeed clear out the tent cities of homeless, remove the human feces and hypodermic needles from the sidewalks, and make the downtown look sparking clean and shiny in just a matter of days. All it takes is sufficient motivation — like hosting a visit from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Even the New York Times can’t deny the irony that the arrival of Xi and a plethora of overseas leaders is spurring efforts that, presumably, could have been started and carried out at any point with enough motivation:
On Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, maintenance workers resurfaced uneven sidewalks and installed plywood over empty tree wells.
Nearby, a crew gave a long-derelict plaza a makeover by turning it into a skateboard park and outdoor cafe with ping-pong tables, chess boards and scores of potted plants. Elsewhere, workers painted decorative crosswalks and new murals, wiped away graffiti, picked up piles of trash and removed scaffolding to show off a refurbished clock tower at the Ferry Building. . . .
Perhaps the most obvious change has been seen at the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building at the corner of Seventh and Mission Streets, less than a mile from the conference center.
Before we go any further, can I just point out how infuriating it is that we live in a country with so many genuinely heroic, inspiring, and under-recognized figures, and yet we name things after politicians whose greatest achievements were bringing back a lot of federal funds to their constituents? I realize in the state of West Virginia, that statement is blasphemy.
In a perfect irony, in August, “Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advised hundreds of employees in San Francisco to work remotely for the foreseeable future due to public safety concerns outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building on Seventh Street.” As Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst noticed, to protect the building named after the House speaker who said that border walls are “immoral,” federal officials put up a high chain-link fence.
In other words, the official assessment of the federal government is that the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is not a safe place for anyone, which strikes me as a heavy-handed metaphor.
Anyway, back to the Xi-driven cleanup:
For two years, a stubborn fentanyl market at the corner and a sprawling homeless encampment across the street became neighborhood fixtures. People regularly used drugs in an adjacent alley.
Most have seemingly disappeared in a poof…
It’s almost like the city government of San Francisco perceives Xi Jinping as the boss it needs to impress, instead of the voters whose exorbitant taxes (including an 8.625 percent sales tax!) pay city employees’ salaries. If the city is worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for a visit by Xi, President Biden, and a whole bunch of diplomats . . . why isn’t it worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for the full-time residents?
“Californians Set Up President Xi Dummy So Newsom Will Keep The Cities Clean All The Time.”
Thinks that make you go Hmmmm: “DOJ Protects D.C. Brothel Customers… As Congress Votes For New FBI Facility.”
Two tightly connected things happened in Washington, D.C., on November 8: a “high-end” brothel serving “elected officials” was shut down by the FBI, and the U.S. House approved a controversial $300 million new headquarters building for the weaponized agency.
In announcing the brothel’s bust, the Department of Justice explained that the sex-trafficking operation served “elected officials, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, attorneys, scientists and accountants, among others.”
The press release named the brothel operators: Han “Hana” Lee, 41, of Cambridge, MA; James Lee, 68, of Torrance, CA; and Junmyung Lee, 30, of Dedham, MA.
In lurid detail, the Department of Justice explained how the operators advertised their services—primarily young Asian women—for high-end customers. In order to utilize the prostitution services of the brothel, prospective clients allegedly completed “a form providing their full names, email address, phone number, employer and reference if they had one.”
Not mentioned in the press release were the names of the customers.
The announcement was made just ahead of a vote in the U.S. House, which would have defunded the $300 million new headquarters building proposed for the FBI. The facility, to be built in Maryland, will reportedly be larger than the Pentagon. The Pentagon has a total floor area of 6.5 million square feet and offices 23,000 military and civilian employees.
Dispatches from the Biden Recession: “Stellantis offers buyouts to roughly half of U.S. salaried workers.” Stellantis consumed the corpse of Chrysler several years back.
“Taibbi: According To Pundits, ‘Ignorance’ Makes Americans Give “Wrong” Answers To Economic Confidence…The Guardian editorial Krugman linked to explains: Americans continue to believe the economy sucks, even though they’ve been told over and over it doesn’t! Why won’t they listen?…I can’t remember an instance of newspapers polling Americans about their feelings, then telling them their answers are not only wrong, but ignorant!
“Pro-Palestinian” protestors are anti-American protestors:
This is a weird story: “Congressman Pat Fallon (R-TX-4), who had filed to run for Texas Senate District (SD) 30, has now backed out and will instead run for re-election to his currently held congressional seat.” Being a state senator is all well and good, but who steps down from a U.S. Congressional seat to a state senate seat?
A BuzzFeed feature story from 2018 about a journalist who told a group of schoolchildren that he was gay was taken down just a day after it was announced that he had been brought up on child pornography charges.
Slade Sohmer, 44, the former editor-in-chief of the left-leaning video-driven news site The Recount, was freed on $100,000 bail on Monday after he was charged in Massachusetts court with possessing and disseminating “hundreds of child pornography images and videos.”
He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of dissemination of child pornography.
Asianometry takes a deep dive into Nvidia’s radical new computational lithography method for generating semiconductor masks. I know a whole lot of eyes just glazed over, but this stuff is important, and I don’t think any other bloggers are covering semiconductors. And speaking of eyes…
Speaking of disasterous superhero films, Critical Drinker goes over the compounding errors of the never-to-be-released Batgirl movie. Surprisingly, the film itself was reportedly not that bad, it’s just a cascading series of studio decisions made the film nonviable.
Snoop Dogg says he’s giving up weed. And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
When the data ends up giving you results that are different than what you expected, it’s time to step back and try to figure out whether your data is wrong or your theory is wrong.
The theory was that Republicans were going to enjoy a red wave election year, with some analysts going so far as to predict a red tsunami.
That didn’t happen.
Republicans will probably take the House, while control of the senate might not be decided until the Georgia runoff, and Republicans seem to have lost a couple of governorships.
Other widely hailed trends that didn’t happen:
There seemed to be no dramatic swing in Hispanic votes toward the GOP.
There seemed to be no notable movement of white suburban women back into the GOP fold.
Independents did not seem break dramatically for the GOP either.
The only place Republicans really seemed to have overperformed is in Florida, where DeSantis whomped turncoat Charlie Crist in the governor’s race (a far cry from the squeaker he won against Andrew “Gay Meth Orgy” Gillum in 2018), and added either four or five U.S. House seats. (They say four, but seem to be counting FL28 (a newly created seat) as a GOP “hold.”)
If there’s a previous election year this reminds me of, it’s 1978. Despite raging inflation and Jimmy Carter’s feckless policies, Republicans picked up only three senate seats and 15 house seats. (Remember, this was a time when Democrats held a much larger advantage in the House than today.) They would do much better in 1980.
But so far, 2022 is a big disappointment for Republicans.
One evergreen takeaway: Never trust polls, no matter whether they’re good or bad for your side.
Ted Cruz posted this classic Saturday Night Live skit to his Facebook page, and since I had been looking for an embeddable copy for a while, I’m passing the joy onto you:
For younger viewers: Yes, once upon a time, Saturday Night Live was willing to make fun of Democratic presidents…
Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.
We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.
Snip.
For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.
Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.
During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,
Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.
Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?
That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.
Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.
Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.
The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.
The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.
Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.
The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.
The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.
Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?
As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.
The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.
To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.
Snip.
Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).
But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.
Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.
Snip.
Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.
For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.
The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.
And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.
This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.
The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).
While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.
They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.
On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.
The usual history snipped.
The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.
Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.
Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.
The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.
Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:
The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.
Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”
This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.
The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.
Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
“AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
“19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden economy kicks in, China behaves badly (again), and rock stars are fed up with woke. Let’s lead off with this weird photo people have been taking about all week:
How did you make the Carters look like tiny puppets?
Puppet people aside, what better image for the week in which Biden seems to be bringing stagflation back?
If you were wondering when the Trump boom would end and the Biden bust begin, it just did:
U.S. job growth for the month of April fell far below what experts had predicted, as data reported Friday showed an increase of 266,000 jobs, versus an estimate of 1 million — the largest miss relative to expectations since at least 1998.
Economists had suggested a positive outlook for the report, with the White House hoping for a gain of at least 700,000 jobs — making Joe Biden the first president ever to hit 2 million new jobs in his first 100 days. But expectations came crashing back to reality with data showing an overestimation of nearly 800,000 — the worst miss in decades.
The U.S. unemployment rate rose slightly from 6.0 percent to 6.1. March’s payroll gains were also revised downward by nearly 150,000 jobs, from an initial print of 916,000 to 770,000. Labor force participation rate rose slightly, to 61.7 percent.
Huh, irresponsible tax-and-spend policies, rampant inflation and paying people not to work evidently aren’t a recipe for economic success. Who knew?
Speaking of inflation, it looks like it’s back, baby! Rising metal, oil, and ag commodity prices all point to inflation. “Wood prices are at an all-time high at over $1,370 per 1,000 board feet.”
Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm owns stock in “Proterra, an electric vehicle company that is being actively promoted by the Biden administration. Further, Granholm being the Secretary of Energy means she gets to make regulations that can directly enrich herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Joe Biden said today, “Most people don’t know: you walk into a store and you buy a gun, but you go to a gun show you can buy whatever you want and no background check.”
This isn’t even close to being true. In fact, gun shows are subject to the same rules as apply everywhere else, which are that:
commercial transfers require federal background checks, but that
private transfers only require federal background checks if they are conducted within one of the thirteen states that superintend non-commercial firearms transactions
There are no special rules for gun shows. The same set of laws applies to them as applies to, say, your kitchen table: If you are in the business of selling guns, you are federally obliged to run a check. If you are not, you are not — unless your state requires you to. That’s it. There’s no “loophole” here, and nothing about gun shows that separates them from the broader debate about private sales.
A new poll from ABC and the Washington Post published on Wednesday found a significant drop in support for new gun-control laws, especially among young people.
The number of Americans supporting enacting new gun laws over protecting gun rights fell from 57 percent to 50 percent, a seven-point drop from when the poll was last conducted in 2018. The number of Americans favoring gun rights jumped from 34 to 43 percent, a nine-point jump. The difference between the two positions narrowed by 16 points overall.
The sharpest decline in support for new gun-control measures came among 18 to 29-year-olds and Hispanics. Both groups saw a 20 percent drop. Rural Americans and strong conservatives saw a 17-point drop.
Worker shortage is so acute that a Tampa MacDonald’s is paying people $50 just to interview for a job. “Some 17 million Americans remain on jobless benefits. Perhaps many of these people want jobs but are getting paid more to sit on the couch.”
How Michael Dell used several financial maneuvers to turn $3.6 billion into more than $50 billion.
The Who’s frontman Roger Daltry says that the woke are ruining the world. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere.”
And Daltry wasn’t the only rock star calling BS on the woke. Also taking aim: punk rock icon John Lydon:
Johnny Rotten blames ‘wokeness’ for US ‘collapse’
Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Lydon had some rotten things to say about “wokeness.”
In a recent profile with the Times UK, the aging punk rocker decried “cancel culture” and the activists who campaigned to tear down national monuments which they say promote historical racism. The statues include that of Winston Churchill, one of the UK’s most revered prime ministers.
He also blamed academia as well as the media for giving “the space” to “tempestuous spoilt children.”…
Addressing calls to tear down Churchill’s statue in London, Lydon dismissed criticism that the wartime prime minister was racist. However, critics point out that the leader once referred to Indians as “the beastliest people in the world next to Germans,” and thought that black people are “[not] as capable or as efficient as white people.”
“This man saved Britain,” Lydon asserted. “Whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue in hand.”
If there are any bigger haters in history than today’s cancel culture, Lydon conceded, it’s the Nazis — and Churchill took care of that.
Florida “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones is a big fat liar. “NPR describes Jones as a ‘top scientist’ leading Florida’s pandemic response. In fact, Jones has held three jobs in her field; all three have ended in her being terminated and criminally charged.”
Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.
Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.
Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.
It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.
In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how to make new friends.
Sad news (and possibly foul play). “University of Texas linebacker Jake Ehlinger, the younger brother of former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger, was found dead Thursday.”
Biden wins again, Gabbard drops out, Slow Joe makes himself scarce, and everybody hunkers down due to The Current Unpleasantness. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
By now the clown car has shrunk so far that all the occupants could fit in a Smart Car. (Note: That reflects the name brand of the car, not the mental acuity of the occupants.)
In theory, there’s nothing insurmountable about Biden’s 300+ delegate lead. In reality, it would take something extremely drastic (like Biden keeling over or wandering naked in front of a camera) to change the dynamics of the race. 538 gives Biden a 98% chance of winning the nomination. On the other hand, everyone thought they knew how the 2016 election would turn out as well…
The political world is practically giddy at the failed campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The Democratic primary’s billionaire candidates rediscovered an age-old truth: money can’t buy love.
It couldn’t buy love for Hillary Clinton, who nearly doubled Donald Trump’s spending in 2016 and had three times as many positive ads. Or for Jeb Bush’s wealthy backers in the Republican primary preceding that race. Or for self-funders from years past like Meg Whitman, Linda McMahon, and Steve Forbes. Money can help a campaign’s message get heard, but it doesn’t mean that listeners will like what they hear. Yet fears of campaign spending “buying” elections continue to drive our campaign-finance laws. The result is bad law and poor policy.
Last year, the House passed H.R. 1, a sweeping rewrite of campaign-finance and election laws. The bill would have imposed a variety of new restrictions on paid political speech. Its authors asserted that current law lets wealthy individuals and special interests “dominate election spending, corrupt our politics, and degrade our democracy through tidal waves of unlimited and anonymous spending.”
But as Bloomberg and Steyer found out, voters easily reject messages and campaigns with which they disagree. Congress shouldn’t assume that voters just buy whatever is advertised. They don’t.
How much money did Bloomberg waste on his presidential run? Would you believe…
As funny as it may be on the surface, there is something dark and sad about Biden’s rise. The Democratic Party establishment knows Biden is unfit for office. They don’t care. With Biden, the political machinery that usually operates in hiding, in the shadows, has come out into the light, in aviator sunglasses and a sunny grin. The powers-that-be are declaring, openly, that their right to rule will not be reined in by anything, least of all the perception that they are incompetent and out of touch.
Thanks to decades of failed and corrupt leadership, many Americans are developing a creeping and cynical feeling that they don’t have a voice, that voting is like choosing from a carefully crafted menu of options with the same mediocre results. President Biden would prove them right. He would eliminate the mystique that once allowed them to believe our political system is one worth respecting and complete the decline into decadence that characterizes American managerial democracy, which is now at such a late stage of decay it no longer matters if a presidential nominee can tell his wife and sister apart.
Biden’s comeback proves that many things which people thought mattered in the great American clown show of presidential politics actually don’t.
The standards are through the floor: Biden has no policies, no core philosophy, and no special qualities to recommend him other than a perception of “electability” that is driven almost entirely by a sycophantic news media.
A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to remove Trump from office, not to elect Joe Biden. He would be the first president who upon election everyone, most of all his supporters, knows would not be calling the actual shots.
Sanders supporters have now learned a harsh lesson: power, not ideology, is what matters most.
This just in: Grandpa Simpson ain’t popular with the youn’uns. Biden plans to start vetting his affirmative action veep pick in the next few weeks. Incumbent Michigan governor Grethen Whitmer says it’s not going to be her. (A previous Michicgan governor, Jennifer Granholm, is constitutionally ineligable, being born in Canada to Canadian parents.) “Hunter Biden Trips Cost Taxpayers Nearly $200,000.”
Gabbard entered the race in January 2019 with an intriguing profile: a woman of color, a military veteran, a millennial who advocated for new voices within the Democratic Party (despite a congressional voting record that skewed more moderate than the rest of the party, she resigned as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders).
But it was hard for Gabbard to make inroads with Democratic voters — the more Democrats got to know her over the course of the campaign, the less they liked her. This was probably compounded by the fact that perhaps the most attention Gabbard received all cycle long was when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Republicans were “grooming” her to be a third-party spoiler and when Gabbard was one of only three Democrats who did not vote in favor of impeaching President Trump.
There were many other long-shot candidates in 2020, but what set Gabbard apart was how long she stayed in the race despite not winning more than 4 percent of the vote in any contest except tiny American Samoa (where she was born). Other candidates stuck in the 1 to 2 percent range in national polls dropped out once voting began, if not before. She even gave up a safe House seat to stay in the presidential race, announcing in October that she would not run for reelection even though Hawaii is one of the few states that allows candidates to run for Congress and president at the same time. Even by March, after candidates like former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who were polling above 10 percent nationally, were dropping out of the race, Gabbard pushed on.
By then, Gabbard’s campaign looked more like a protest campaign than one with any intention of winning. She did not contest multiple key states on the primary calendar, including Iowa, where she did not hold a public event after Oct. 24, 2019. In early March, she told ABC News she was staying in the race in order to speak to Americans “about the sea change we need in our foreign policy” and promote her pet issue of ending military intervention abroad. It was beginning to look like Gabbard would take her campaign almost all the way to the convention, following in the footsteps of past presidential candidates who were misfits in their own party, like former Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. But money may have been an issue for Gabbard; in January, she raised only $1.1 million but spent $1.8 million, an obviously unsustainable rate.
Upon dropping out of the race, Gabbard also endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, despite the fact that her 2016 pick, Sanders, is still in the race, albeit a heavy underdog. It was an interesting olive branch to the establishment wing of the party with which Gabbard has openly feuded so much in the past. It would also seem to foreclose the possibility that Gabbard will run as a third-party candidate in the general election.
Farewell to the last Democratic candidate in the race born after World War II…
Four years ago, Bernie Sanders put up a surprisingly strong fight against Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support among white working-class voters, who proceeded to desert Clinton in November. On the basis of those two elections, the left quickly formed a series of conclusions. The working class had become alienated by neoliberal economics and was searching for radical alternatives. Because the Democrats had failed to offer the kind of progressive radical alternative Sanders stood for, voters instead opted for Trump’s reactionary attack on globalism. In order to win them back and defeat Trump, Democrats needed to reorganize themselves as a radical populist party.
On the left, this explanation was accepted so widely it became foundational, a premise progressives would work forward from without questioning its veracity. The Sanders campaign argued that its connection to the white working class would enable Bernie to compete in areas that had abandoned Democrats years ago. “Some in the Sanders camp envision possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as states such as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Montana,” reported Politicoone year ago. Every left-wing indictment of the Democratic mainstream was made in explicit or implicit contrast to this imagined counterfactual of a Sanders-led party riding triumphant through the heartland of red America.
Snip.
The second Sanders campaign has shown conclusively how badly the left misunderstood the electorate. It is not just that Sanders has failed to inspire anything like the upsurge in youth turnout he promised, or that he has failed to make meaningful headway with black voters. White working-class and rural voters have swung heavily against him. In Missouri and Michigan, those voters turned states he closely contested four years ago into routs for his opponent. Some rural counties have swung 30 points from Sanders 2016 to Biden 2020. The candidate in the race who has forged a transracial working-class coalition is, in fact, Joe Biden.
The factor that actually explains 2016, as some of us chagrined liberals insisted at the time, was Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic personal unpopularity. It turned out large portions of the public, even of the Democratic electorate, simply detested her.
True, but not the entire truth. More and more of the electorate loathes Democratic policies as well, no matter how many carefully-worded, crosstab-slanted, cherry-picked polls say otherwise. And they hate the naked disdain the SJW-infected leftwing elites display when it comes to ordinary Americans. But this final quote rings true: “Sanders has inspired a sizable faction of one party. But his vision of mobilizing a hidden national majority is, and always was, a fantasy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, a couple of whose commenters make some cognizant points: First: “The ‘chagrined liberals’ were unable to point out Hillary’s unpopularity because the woke feminists saw Hillary as their champion to ‘break the glass ceiling’ allegedly preventing a female President. Anyone like Jonathan Chait who might express misgivings about Hillary’s electability was promptly dismissed as ‘a cis white man’ who had no right to express his opinion on the issue.” Second: “There is another explanation, that Trump has basically dominated the populist lane by delivering on much of the agenda he had that overlapped with Bernie, you know, the popular and effective part of it. But that would require giving Trump some credit, so it won’t receive much consideration.”) The New York Times already has a prebituary piece on his campaign, the sort where insiders leak self-flattering “if only he had listened to my advice” tidbits while preparing to swim away from the wreckage:
In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.
The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.
And there’s your primary leaker/spinner.
But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.
And there’s your “But good old Bernie was just too high-minded!” positive spin.
Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.
The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.
While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination. His efforts to regain traction have faltered in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has frozen the campaign, and perhaps heightened the appeal of Mr. Biden’s safe-and-steady image.
In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events — most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.
Sanders Raised $2 million for “coronavirus relief”. But look closer: “The money raised will go to No Kid Hungry, One Fair Wage Emergency Fund, Meals on Wheels, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.” With the possible exception of Meals on Wheel, it looks like all those are adjuncts to lefty organizing causes.
Bulwerker hyperventilates that Bernie continuing his campaign is a threat to the Republic. Because mere voters must of necessity bow to the DNC’s candidate preferences. As if playing footsie with Castro wasn’t enough, Sanders has now been endorsed by history’s greatest monster. You know that “focusing on the crisis” he talked about?
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Biden continues to lap the field, Buttigieg’s boomlet bottoms out, O’Rourke stabilizes, Messam registers, Klobucher shows a tiny bit of life, and mentions of John McCain, Jimmy Carter and Alannis Morissette. It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
My original idea behind doing this update was to show at a glance which candidates were in, which were out, and what all of them were doing. With so many declared candidates in the race, I’ve decided it was high time to move all of the declared Out names, as well as those for whom there was zero buzz, down to the Out of the Running section below the clown car list proper. This should make it a bit easier to read, with less repetition from week to week.
Polls
Echelon Insights: Biden 38, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 5, Warren 5, O’Rourke 5, Harris 5, Klobucher 2, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Yang 1, Gillibrand 1, Castro 1, Messam 1. Messam actually registering 1% is far and away his best showing. Also interesting breakdowns on the voters backing each candidate (Biden old, Sanders young, Buttigieg suburban women, Warren whites with Bachelor’s degrees, etc.).
Monmouth: Biden 33, Sanders 15, Harris 11, Warren 10, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 4, Klobucher 3, Booker 1, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1, everyone else below 1%. However, the information they lead with on the poll is who is doing best in early voting states: Biden 26, Sander 14, Harris 14, Warren 9, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Williamson 1, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delany 1, Hickenlooper 1, Ryan 1.
The Hill/HarrisX: Biden 33, Sanders 14, Warren 8, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, O’Rourke 5. “Several aspirants were not named by any participant: Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Mont.), former Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, Gov. Jay Inslee (D-Washington), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), Florida mayor Wayne Messam, and author Marianne Williamson.”
Florida Atlantic University for the Florida primary: Biden 29, Sanders 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 9, Harris 7, O’Rourke 5. (In the 2020 general matchup, Trump ties Biden and beats everyone else.)
Quinnipiac: Biden 35, Sanders 16, Warren 13, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3, Klobucher 2, O’Rourke 2, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1. Interesting nugget: Harris does better among white votes (9) than non-white voters (7).
Progressives think they can still take Biden down. “Biden’s initial strength was always expected, they said. They maintain that the progressive nature of the Democratic electorate will soon make itself known, to his detriment.” Whistling past the graveyard…
“Young voters have Buttigieg and Beto. So why do they prefer old socialists?” Boiled down: Because they want free stuff. Unstated: And they’re easier to fool into thinking they can get it.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Teflon Joe” continues to crush the opposition in early polling. “He also leads in all of the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and is clobbering rivals in South Carolina.” Some democratic strategists you’ve never heard of are mystified by his popularity. “Why Joe Biden Is the Only True Progressive Candidate.” As in 1924 progressives like Robert LaFollett. I’m sure “He’d be a progessive 96 years ago!” is a battle cry that will stir the woke base to the Biden barricades…
Amanda Perez, who worked as the policy director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, will serve as Booker’s national policy director. Jen Kim, who has worked on national campaigns to engage communities of color in elections, has signed on as Booker’s states chief of staff.
Booker’s campaign, headquartered in Newark, N.J., is also adding Jenna Kruse, a former vice president of research at EMILY’s List, who will serve as Booker’s research director. Emily Norman, an Obama 2012 alum who served on analytics teams at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee, will be chief innovation officer.
Simon Vance, who previously worked from Ohio on Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and as deputy campaign manager in Rich Cordray’s unsuccessful Ohio gubernatorial run, will be chief analytics officer. In 2016, Vance was Clinton’s national targeting director and Iowa caucus analytics director.
n addition, Booker is bringing on on Jenn Brown, the former executive director of Civic Nation, as a deputy campaign manager. Josh Wolf, a former director of operations for MoveOn.org, will serve as chief operations officer.
Other hires include: Bridgit Donnelly, who worked with early vote data for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Michael Fisher, as chief technology officer. Fisher previously served in roles at the DNC and on the 2016 Clinton campaign.
The only name in that group that rings a bell is Jenn Brown, because she got demoted as executive director of Battleground Texas after the debacle of 2014. Booker is also making his third trip to Nevada tomorrow.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got interviewed by WBUR. “In order to win in 2020, we’ve got to win back some of the places that voted for Trump.” And then he offers up your standard let-wing talking points.
Buttigieg is encouraging moneyed supporters to juice his campaign’s fundraising with a new bundling program, details of which were recently circulated to some donors and obtained by POLITICO. Members at different levels of the program pledge to raise anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 for Buttigieg over the course of the primary campaign and receive special perks, including briefings with the candidate and senior campaign staff.
Unusual only in its blatantness. Being gay just isn’t gay enough for a Yale professor complaining about Buttigieg’s Time magazine cover. And he accused President Trump of faking an injury to avoid the Vietnam draft. Because all those attacks on stuff did Trump did 20 or 30 years ago worked so well, let’s go back 50 years instead. It didn’t work against Clinton in 1992, why would it work against Trump in 2020? He also attacked Joe Biden over voting for the 1994 crime bill, a line of attack that I suspect will be equally ineffectual.
De Blasio’s one applause line on the stump now—repeated at each stop where so far staffers and New York reporters have tended to outnumber supporters—has been that “there’s plenty of money. It’s just in the wrong hands.”
He’d know! De Blasio—born Warren Wilhelm Jr.—was elected mayor with a huge under-the-table assist from UNITE HERE, the national hospitality workers union previously run by his cousin John Wilhelm. This organization gave $175,000 to a group crusading to ban carriage horses from New York and is led by a real-estate executive who insists that cause has nothing to do with the insanely lucrative development opportunity that would open up if Manhattan’s horse stables were to close.
That group, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS, promptly cut its own check for $175,000 to New York City Is Not for Sale, an outside PAC whose potent ads helped take down frontrunner Christine Quinn. No other candidate had any comparable outside money operation, and none of that money—which appeared to be a naked attempt to evade the city’s strict cap on direct donations to candidates, and ban on coordination with outside groups—was disclosed until after the election.
Even as the FBI began looking into that set-up, Mayor de Blasio was, well, off to the races, setting up the Campaign for One New York to raise money for his political agenda and direct-dialing fat cats with city business to get them to “donate” to his cause.
He finally shut that operation down as the feds and local prosecutors and city agencies investigated it, before prosecutors reluctantly decided not to charge him even as they publicly scolded him—no “allegedly”—for hitting up people with business before the city for big bucks for his political operation.
As the bribe-taker got off, his bribe-makers keep going to prison, with one of them sentenced to four years and two others pleading guilty the same week that de Blasio announced his presidential run.
Bonus! Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler became physically ill at a de Blasio presser.
Two and a half hours. Did I watch it all? I did not. There are only so many hours in the week. She wants to return to Obama’s expensive, failed nuclear deal with Iran. Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi hits the Daily Beast over their “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists” piece. “The Gabbard campaign has received 75,000 individual donations. This crazy Beast article is based on (maybe) three of them.”
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. A former donor (and Biden backer) condemned Gillum: “You lost by 30k votes and kept the money from people who trusted you so that now you can go around the state with a staff preparing for your next run,” Morgan tweeted. “I will tell you that is a huge mistake. Your donors are very disappointed. This is a huge ethical lapse.”
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. He issued tweets slamming Bill Kristol and John McCain, and manages a slam on Klobuchar in the process:
"Stalinism means having to apologize for promoting a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people" – Bill Kristol, "respected intellectual" https://t.co/pquhJYZakE
McCain's image has been sanctified by an old David Foster Wallace article, a nonfactual "maverick" image, and a few cherrypicked memories of his old campaigns. He was a bad guy. If @amyklobuchar wasn't so busy abusing her workers, she could have done research and found that out.
“I don’t know why she’s not caught fire. But she hasn’t,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. “I think everybody is sampling and taking a look at everybody. But for now, she’s a regional candidate. A California candidate.”
Snip.
Joining Harris at [the Democratic Party’s California state convention] will be more than half the announced Democratic field: Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sanders; Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind.; Reps. Eric Swalwell of Dublin and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; former Reps. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and John Delaney of Maryland; former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and current Washington Gov. Jay Inslee; and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.
Her Oakland kickoff rally was expensive. “Harris’ campaign has so far paid $65,000 on the city police tab and has until next month to send the more than $122,000 remaining, according to the city.” She also regurgitated the pay gap myth. “This is not a good measure of equal pay because it doesn’t take into account workers’ labor choices, such as profession, education, hours worked, or many other work preferences — preferences that we should want people to be able to express and take into account when selecting work. This statistic isn’t a signal of systematic sex discrimination in our economy.” Hell, even Polifact dinged her for it being mostly false. Oh, and evidently she talked about it on Colbert last week, and I only found out about it when I went to do this roundup, which suggests that neither she nor he are as hot as they once were…
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar said that she recently received some words of encouragement about her poll numbers from former President Jimmy Carter.” And if there’s anyone with sure political instincts… Klobuchar also tells a “Just So” story about John McCain reciting the names of dictators during Trump’s inaguration speech. Though it’s so weird I suspect it might be true.
In May 2013, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien against the couple for $32,652 in unpaid 2007, 2008, and 2010 taxes. Records show the lien was withdrawn in October 2013. But three years later, the IRS filed yet another lien. In December 2016, the Messams received notice that they owed $69,795 from 2014. The couple paid the government in August 2017, according to court documents.
Polifact also gave him a “mostly false” for saying that “in Florida, it’s illegal for mayors to even bring up gun reform for discussion.” They simply can’t impose their own laws (good) due to state preemption.
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke says that if he becomes president he will:
-Ban all semi-automatic firearms -Will push for unconstitutional red flag laws, which allows for firearm confiscation without due process -Will look into creating a national gun registry pic.twitter.com/oP7gYu0Mco
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “While teaching, Warren worked on about 60 legal matters, far more than she’d previously disclosed.” Including advising Getty Oil and Dow Chemical. New York Magazine looks at her rise to third place:
Elizabeth Warren has emerged as the solidly third-place candidate behind Biden and Bernie Sanders. That’s evident in horse-race polls: In the Real Clear Politics average of national surveys, she’s at around 10 percent, comfortably ahead of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, with the rest of the field (including the steadily fading Beto O’Rourke) not making much of an impression so far.
It’s harder to get a grip on the infrequently polled early states, though Warren does seem to be running a bit behind her national averages in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. But on the other hand, she has invested the most of any candidate in early-state staff and infrastructure, and has an especially impressive organization in Iowa, as the New York Times reported earlier this month:
[Warren has] about 50 paid staff members … already on the ground in Iowa, far more than any other Democratic candidate is known to have hired in the state. The growing Warren juggernaut reflects a bet that rapidly hiring a large staff of organizers will give the senator an advantage over her rivals who are ramping up their efforts at a slower pace.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile at The Cut. Including this nugget: “Alannis Morissette wrote and recorded a song for Williamson’s campaign, titled, ‘Today.'” Which reminds me that it’s been 20 years since Dogma came out…
“MATH” hats. Fox News. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Andrew Yang knows how to run an insurgent presidential campaign. The 44-year-old candidate, once barely known outside New York and Silicon Valley, is now leader of the “Yang Gang,” a growing following of online fans and IRL admirers rallying to Yang’s campaign cry of “humanity first.”
Yang is now outpolling seasoned pols like Kirsten Gillibrand, averaging 1% in recent surveys. Despite being “neither popular nor well-known,” as a FiveThirtyEight story puts it, he’s disturbing the forces of the Democratic establishment. His rallies are attracting thousands of people. A two-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February garnered almost 3 million views. He’s winning over betting markets, which have given the long-shot candidate 2.3% odds at taking the White House, besting senator Corey Booker and Texas phenom Beto O’Rourke. Despite his distance from Washington, Yang’s surge shows that a candidate seemingly assembled from the musings of a Silicon Valley Reddit thread can take on the Democratic establishment.
Yang’s done it in part by stealing the most effective tactics from Trump’s electoral victory. Need a visible symbol for your followers? Sell $30 MATH hats (“Make America Think Harder”) and own the meme game. Need to vanquish better-known primary opponents? Flood every media outlet that will give you an interview. No one is talking about a controversial, radical idea? Turn it into your signature issue, rechristening universal basic income, a guaranteed payment to every American, as a $1,000 “freedom dividend” (and force primary rivals like Bernie Sanders and O’Rourke to come out against it). As other candidates play it safe, Yang doubles down on policies that no reasonable wonk would touch, and promotes them on Republican turf such as Fox News (a tactic his fellow long-shot candidates have adopted).
Quibble: Doing better than rock-bottom does not, in fact, constitute “winning.” Yang is running an interesting campaign that’s attracting more than expected attention because the expectations were zero. Whether this can translate into actually winning delegates in primaries remains to be seen.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running (and I’ve even gone back and put in names that were mentioned as possibilities for running that I’ve dropped, just for the sake of completeness):
Biden is up big, Bennet is In, Beto is down and de Blasio is about to unite all of America together in ridicule against him. Plus the raw sex appeal of Walter Mondale. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
In a Harvard-Harris poll, Biden leads his Democratic opponents by a whopping 30 points. Biden 44, Sanders 14, Harris 9, Warren 5, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 3. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Quinnipiac: Biden 38, Warren 12, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 8, O’Rourke 5. First poll I’ve seen Warren edge Sanders. Maybe all that “free everything for everybody” pandering is paying off for her…
Election betting markets. Warren (5.7%) is now up over Yang (5.3%) who is now up over O’Rourke (5.1%).
The Eight Tiers In This Race
People usually sort candidates into “First Tier, Second Tier, Third Tier,” but that’s not applicable to a race this crowded:
Right now Biden is alone in the first tier, and…
Sanders is alone in the second.
The third tier is Warren, Buttigieg and Harris all bunched up together (Warren is enjoying a little bounce, Buttigieg’s bounce faded as soon as Biden joined, and Harris is just barely hanging on as the media-boosted SJW darling).
O’Rouke has probably free-fallen alone into the fourth tier, his telegenic hype long over and people scratching their heads as to why people ever thought he was exciting when not running against Ted Cruz.
The fifth tier consists of Booker and Klobucher, who seem to be running competent, unexciting campaigns awaiting their turn to catch fire in a hype cycle.
The sixth tier is Interesting Weirdos, lead by a rising Yang and a hasn’t-showed-us-anything-yet Williamson. Let’s also stick Gabbard here, since she generates tons of buzz only because the Democratic base seems to actively hate her, and she seems to have more followers than the lower tiers.
The seventh tier is Dead in the Water, people who have resumes that suggest they should be credible Presidential candidates (mostly senators and governors), but somehow aren’t: Castro, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, and probably the newly-joined Bennet.
The eighth and lowest tier (sorry Dante) is Wasting Our Time, including all the representatives other than Gabbard: Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, Delany, Messam. Maybe one could break out, but I rather doubt it.
Pundits, etc.
How much a candidate’s announcement coverage boosts them in polls. Caveat: They relied on cable news coverage, which leaves out a lot of things, like legacy MSM outlets slathering fawning coverage on Harris like ketchup on french fries.
“If you have an appetite for schadenfreude, one of the pleasures of the ongoing 2020 Democratic primary will be watching once-highly-touted politicians realize just how limited their appeal is, as they struggle to reach 5 percent in a crowded field.” Special mention of Castro, Gabbard and Gillibrand.
Stephen Green on electability. “If the economy is still booming in November 2020, maybe none of this year’s massive crop of Dems is electable. Maybe they’re all Mondales, albeit with far less of Walt’s raw sexual magnetism.”
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s not running for the senate. Maybe she’s regretting turning down that Biden VP trial balloon. She also got a voter suppression pander from O’Rourke.
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still nothing since that now four-week old tweet. But his estimated net worth is $85 million, and he was “a political science major at George Washington University (where he ran for student body president and lost).” Baldwin could probably talk himself into a run if he really wanted to…
Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. “Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., announced he will run in the Democratic primary to seek his party’s nomination to go up against President Trump in the 2020 election.” More: “Bennet has built a reputation as a bipartisan, policy-focused senator on Capitol Hill, trending toward the center of the Democratic spectrum. He opposes a single-payer health care system, instead hoping to expand Obamacare.” Oh yeah, that’s just what the Democratic base in crying out for: bipartisanship. Data point: The guy’s a U.S. senator, and I have exactly one entry for him before I started doing the Clown Car update, and that was just a mention in the 2016 election. If you stuck guns to the heads of Democratic voters and said “Pick Michael Bennet out of these photos of all 21 declared Democratic Presidential candidates or die,” then you just killed a greater percentage of Democratic voters than Thanos.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A $1.5 billion sweetheart deal Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured from the state-owned Bank of China is ‘looming on the horizon’ as a potential line of attack against his father’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen.” It’s going to be fun hearing Democrats claim that random contacts by low-level staffers constituted collusion with Russia for Trump, but that $1.5 billion from China to the Vice President’s son was just no big deal. Why Biden is not Jeb Bush. Four of these points I agree with, but the fifth (“unlike Jeb, who was weakened by the presence of his one-time protege Marco Rubio in the field, Biden has no immediate competitor in his primary ‘lane'”) is probably untrue, as Buttigieg, Moulton, Hickenlooper, Ryan and Bennet could all plausibly fill the “white moderate” lane. He appeared on ABC’s The View, where he promised to be less creepy. Biden picked up a very early endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, another example of his strong play for union support. He appeals to forgotten blue collar Democrats. Flashback: In 1998, Joe Biden said Anita Hill was lying. (Right the first time.) Biden the liar. Speaking of which, the Washington Post gave him four Pinocchios for stating that the Trump tax cuts applied only to the rich. Biden’s campaign may be a well-oiled machine. Biden himself? Not so much:
How far will the left wing of the Democratic Party go to drag Biden? Here’s a Newsweek piece dinging him for opposing forced busing in 1974. Here’s a hint: everyone hated forced busing. “We’re going to take your daughter and ship her across town to a school in the ghetto because that’s a whole hell of a lot easier than spending more money to improve ghetto schools or take on teachers unions.” Democrats gave up on forced busing because it was a horrible idea that didn’t actually address the problem and they didn’t want be wiped out in elections.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe? I didn’t think he was going to run if Biden got in, but what the hell is this? It came up as an ad when I Googled “Michael Bloomberg President.” That sure as hell looks like the website of someone who is thinking of running for President. Upgraded from “Probably not” after I stumbled across it.
Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: All But In. “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will announce his bid for the presidency in two weeks, MTN News has learned — adding to the 20 Democrats already running for the 2020 nomination to challenge President Trump.” Upgrade over Leaning Toward In.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Julian Castro hits 65,000-donor threshold to secure spot in first presidential debate.” That’s probably a great relief to him. He’s making a play for Nevada, which falls right after New Hampshire and has a large Hispanic population. That’s a strategically sound decision, and even if it fails, it can’t fail worse than anything else he’s tried…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But she says the 2016 election was “stolen” from her.
Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: All But In. “It’s Now A Clown Bus: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Expected To Announce 2020 Run Next Week.” De Blasio unites all of America in contempt against him. “76 percent of New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run. Politico New York surveyed 30-odd members of Team de Blasio, and all but two said it was a bad idea, with one calling it ‘fucking insane.'” Also this: “He may have a shot if every Democratic candidate is caught sending racy selfies to minors.” Upgrade from Leaning Toward In.
According to the DNC, the max number of candidates participating will be a total of twenty even if all 21 announced candidates qualify as it threatens to eliminate candidates who had already made the cut – so much for “transparent, fair and inclusive.” Ten will appear on June 26 with the next ten on June 27th and selection will be determined by drawing lots. Conceivably, the Main Show of Bernie and Biden may occur on June 26th, or they may be split, appearing on two different nights. In any case, it may be difficult for the public to determine a clear ‘winner’ by virtue of candidate separation from the total field.
Snip.
Given her almost totally hostile reception by every MSM outlet who deigned to interview her, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has experienced, as an opponent of regime change wars, more bad manners and outright personal antagonism than any other candidate. While Gabbard easily qualified for the debates via the $65,000 requirement and continues to attract SRO audiences in NH, Iowa, California and elsewhere, yet until the newest CNN poll, she failed to register any % of public support. Something here does not compute given the ‘favored’ polls past history of favoritism. If the Dems continue to put a brick wall around her, Jill Stein has already opened the Green Party door as a more welcoming venue for a Tulsi candidacy. The Dems, who tend to be unprincipled and vindictive, better be careful what they wish for.
Caveat: Counterpunch, so grains of salt time. On the other hand, the author can smell the stench of the Russiagate corpse, so maybe actual clues are involved here…
Senator Kamala Harris was supposed to be a frontrunner. According to the rules of “the invisible primary,” in which donors and party activists coalesce around their chosen nominees, sending signals about candidate quality that primary voters, more often that not, eventually validate, Harris seemed to check all the boxes of a frontrunner. Her campaign team is full of veterans of the campaign of the last Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. She led the large donor fundraising race, with most of her big donors also being former donors to Clinton. Seth Masket, a political scientist and expert on the party system, conducted an informal poll last December of precisely the sort of party activists who are said to decide these things, and a healthy majority leaned toward supporting Harris. And in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted listing of endorsements, Harris ranked second among the declared candidates, losing out only to Senator Cory Booker (before Joe Biden formally entered the race last week).
Judging by all available polling, though, Harris is not even close to the frontrunner. (And Cory Booker’s campaign seems to be utterly foundering, suggesting that counting up endorsements may not be the best way to measure the viability of a candidate from a state, like New Jersey, with a powerful, old-fashioned party machine.) Most national polls put her in a distant third or fourth place, frequently trailing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a relative neophyte who was polling at basically zero a month ago.
This doesn’t render “the invisible primary” obsolete as an explanatory factor. The seemingly overnight rise of Buttigieg is in fact evidence of the concept’s durability: People have heard of him, and tell pollsters they support him, because his press is managed by Lis Smith, a well-connected Democratic operative who formerly worked for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, and Politico’s big donor analysis shows he is extremely popular among former Obama and Clinton bundlers. The energy around Mayor Pete is partly a reflection of the political press translating its knowledge of his advisers’ records and his popularity with the donor class into stories about his candidacy that create a sort of aura of “viability.” The new frontrunner, the former vice president, has, as you’d expect, even more institutional support behind him, especially among Democratic mega-donors and longtime elected officials.
So, what has, thus far (there is a lot of election left to go), prevented Harris’s campaign from breaking out? And for that matter, how is Elizabeth Warren receiving so much glowing press for her transformative policy agenda, but still polling just as poorly as Harris?
As the horserace quants at FiveThirtyEight explained, both are victims of the Democratic electorate’s fixation on “electability.” Polling broadly shows Democratic voters thinking Joe Biden has the best chance at winning the general election. That is exactly what Biden would like everyone to think, and that belief practically constitutes the sole argument for his candidacy.
Wait, primary voters focus on electability? Do tell. The New Republic writer is pouting because he wanted Harris. That’s why he says “‘Electability’ is a crock of shit,” because he wants hard-left candidates and the majority of Democratic primary voters aren’t having any. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) There’s a ton of “Oh yeah, she went after AG Barr! She’s my hero!” schoolgirl crush media pieces I’m omitting here, since the default setting on Harris coverage is “Fawning.”
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Climate Change Guy offers a pie-in-the-sky “carbon neutral by 2030” that also promises to destroy the coal industry. I guess he figures “Hey, everyone else is offering impossible bullshit! Why not me?”
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. She too unveiled a mental health plan. Funny how people who hang out with Democrats all the time naturally assume that large numbers of Americans are crazy…
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited all four early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina) and got a WGBH profile. “Moulton is a centrist among more aggressively liberal candidates. The progressive base fawns over Bernie Sanders’s calls for economic revolution, and Elizabeth Warren’s lengthening list of plans, but it’s unclear that the majority of primary voters, let alone general-election voters, will opt for radically upending an economy that seems to be humming along pretty well.”
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation, and spent his time nattering about the Russian Collusion Fantasy, which is far too precious for liberals to give up on despite being complete bunk.
The bill made it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy and get out of debt, a legal change that credit card companies and many major retailers had championed for years. The bill passed Congress with large majorities, but most Democratic senators, including Barack Obama, voted no. Biden voted yes and was widely seen at the time as one of the bill’s major Democratic champions.
So far, her efforts haven’t yet translated into much success. Despite her Hollywood connections, she managed to raise just $1.5 million as of the end of the first quarter — not chump change, but it does put her toward the bottom of the list of serious contenders. Nor has she yet managed to clear the 65,000-donor threshold that would qualify her to participate in the first two Democratic primary debates, although according to her campaign website, she’s about 90 percent of the way there.
And although her books have sold 3 million copies, her name recognition is among the lowest in the field. In a national poll conducted by Change Research in mid-April, 66 percent of likely Democratic voters had never heard of her; the same was true of 53 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers in an early-April Monmouth poll of Iowa. Candidates with low name recognition can still have a shot at the nomination if they’re backed by a decent percentage of the people who have heard of them, but Williamson gets almost no support in horse-race surveys: She has gotten 0 percent support in 27 of the 35 polls in our database that have asked about her. And she is unlikely to become better known as long as cable news networks and newspapers continue to cover her far less often than the candidates with more traditional credentials.
She visited Iowa, where she spoke to about 60 people, and Nevada, where she got interviewed by Politics Now, where it looks like they’re using cameras and a set from 1979.
This week in the clown car update: Lots climbing in, one getting out. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and California Senator Kamala Harris are both In and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey. JR. is Out. Plus a few more no-hope longshots considering a run.
Before we get to the individual candidates, here’s a table from that January 14 Marist poll on Democratic contenders:
Usual poll caveats apply, but Biden has a huge advantage over the rest of the field in both favorability and name recognition. And for all the Betomania among the chattering classes, the majority of possible Democratic voters have never even heard of him. Highest unfavorables are Bernie Sanders (bitter Hillary cadres at work there) and Michael Bloomberg. In fact, Bloomberg is alone in having a net favorability rating of zero.
538 offers up speculation on how longshot Democrats could potentially build a winning coalition, with pentagonal diagrams that look vaguely like cutaways of a Wankel rotary engine. They’re also doing a similar weeekly update of candidate and potential candidate doings that I only noticed when I was about 80% through this post.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. His completely-devoid-of-interest Twitter feed. There was talk of Biden announcing on Tuesday, but he also has an event in Grand Prairie, Texas on Thursday. Chris Smith at Vanity Fair says Biden is the sell high candidate. Since this comes from Vanity Fair, my working assumption is that it must be wrong…
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Making noises like he’s getting in. Says he’s not too old to run (the same age as Bernie Sanders). That National Review piece says “He doesn’t mesh with the Democratic party we see every day in the national media, but he’s intelligent, shrewd, and willing to spend more money than Croesus on securing the nomination and defeating Trump. Only a fool would dismiss him.”
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out. “After two months of considering it, I have concluded that the best way for me to fight for the America that so many of us believe in is to stay in the U.S. Senate and not run for the presidency in 2020.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Campaigning in New Hampshire, he says he would not pardon Trump. Also promises not to punch out Mike Tyson.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not. Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage…
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. He’s sure acting like he’s running. “People who criticize de Blasio for being more interested in national politics than the local scene aren’t wrong.” Translation: As Mayor, he sucks!
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter feed. She announced today, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as befitting the MSM favorite they hope can re-knit the Obama coalition. The New York Times piece says the date was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the black Democratic congressman who ran for President in 1972, which suggests that Harris will come in 7th against a nominee who eventually loses 49 states to Trump. Evidently she’s leaning toward Crack Charm City as her headquarters. National Review has “Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Kamala Harris,” including her being Willie Brown’s mistress, and her anti-civil liberties stance on things like linking collected DNA evidence to family members and charging the parents of truant kids.
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Probably in. No real news, so enjoy the delusional fantasy of two USA Today writers calling for a Hickenlooper-Kaisch national unity ticket. I’m sure the notion was very well-received down at the coffee shop nearest the shuttered offices of The Weekly Standard.
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Probably Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Leaning toward In, playing “the family wants me to run” card.
New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu: Maybe.
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run. Because we just haven’t had enough of the Clintons…
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley: Maybe. Right now he’s making “Fundraising is hard!” sounds. Most recently seen banging the impeachment drum over that Buzzfeed fake Russian collusion “bombshell.”
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Probably In. Says he’s hitting the road because he’s “in a funk,” and I’m presuming it’s not the James Brown kind. Between this and the Instagram dentist visit, I’m wondering if O’Rouke is going to be the presidential candidate equivalent of The Woman Who Overshares Her Depression On Facebook Fishing For Sympathy, because that would be both really sad and weirdly hilarious. An Oprah interview looms next month.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Last week I linked to a prediction market website that had Democratic presidential odds. Last week O’Rourke was on top. This week he’s been eclipsed by Harris. Their current ranked odds on the Dem nominee are:
More Presidential race news popping up left and right, mainly that Tulsi Gabbard and Julian Castro are both officially In, Tom Steyer is Out, and that some of the people I had down as probably out are already grubbing for money and hiring staffers. I’ve also started adding campaign websites where known.
No more categories, just a long, long, long list of candidates. Climb in the clown car, aspiring candidates! It will be a year or so before voters start tossing you out…
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. “Joe Biden has told some top Democrats that he’s running for president, Axios reported Saturday. The former vice president even set Tuesday as a likely announcement date.” Presumably the Trans-Am is suitably waxed…
Former First Lady, New York Senator and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not, despite the fact that she just will not shut up. Other candidates are reportedly seeking her blessing, presumably with the soundtrack to The Godfather playing in the background.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. He announced he hadn’t ruled out a run. I can see his campaign being boosted by New Yorkers who feel his absence from the city can only improve municipal governance. An upgrade from “All But Out.”
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Official website. This piece on why parts of the hard left hate Gabbard, which seems to boil down to “she doesn’t hate Trump enough and was prematurely pro-Syrian pullout, as well as being pro-Bernie,” though I would take the geopolitical analysis with several grains of salt. I like her chances better than Elizabeth Warren, and she’s much prettier than Kamala Harris. And she just received her first hit piece from the left. Someone obviously considers her a threat…
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Leaning toward a run, but I’m not hearing much buzz.
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Probably In. She’s staffing up for a run. An upgrade over Probably Out.
New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Conflicting reports as to whether he’ll run, and one commenter on the last roundup mentioned him. Arguing for no: Ask anyone “What do you love about New Orleans?” and not one person will reply “The honest, efficient governance!”
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run. Another guy looking around for money.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Probably In. Oprah is interviewing him in Times Square next month. Golly, sounds like the perfect time to announce a run, doesn’t it?
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
