Posts Tagged ‘Laphonza Butler’

Let the Harris Campaign Postmortems Begin!

Wednesday, December 4th, 2019

Most campaign postmortems are of the “failure to launch” variety, but the Kamala Harris campaign achieved liftoff, started climbing, and then fell back down to earth followed by a giant explosion.

So let’s dig into her campaign’s cataclysmic demise!

First up, Charles C. W. Cooke can barely contain his glee over her departure:

Kamala Harris is no longer running for president. This is excellent, welcome news — the cause for celebration. Good riddance! May Harris’s failed attempt to find higher office destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.

I’m told that I’m not supposed to feel like this — or, at least, that if I do feel like this, I’m not supposed to say so in public. People worked on that campaign, you see. People tried really hard. But that, I’m afraid, is a load of old nonsense. Harris was running for the presidency, which is another way of saying that she was running to acquire power. I did not want her to have that power. It is true that some people tried their best to help her gain that power. They’re probably upset today. But they’ll get over it. She’s not that special.

On the contrary: She’s a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far has been to fight “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors”; who has openly promised to act without Congress; and who showed us exactly who she is during the Kavanaugh hearings, at which she implied that she knew something terrible about the nominee for the sole purpose of sharing the insinuation on her Twitter feed. Harris is a woman who, if successful (“successful”), would have overseen the mass confiscation of millions of firearms, the seizing of patents, the federalization of abortion law, and, depending on the polling, the elimination of (her word) the private health insurance plans of 180 million people.

Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question. Nothing good has come from her election. She has nothing of value to offer America.

Tell us what you really think.

Jim Geraghty wonders not why Harris departed, but why so many of the no hopes stay in the race:

After you’ve heard Jim Gilmore insist he’s going to win the New Hampshire primary after getting twelve votes in the entire Iowa caucus, treating no-hope candidates as if they still have a shot starts to feel like we’re all enabling delusional people and playing along with their denial.

John Delaney? Senator Michael Bennet? Guys, I don’t know how to break it to you, but most people forgot you were running. Julian Castro? Sorry, pal. On paper, you had a shot, but in reality, people just weren’t interested in buying what you were selling. Tom Steyer? It’s your money, but most Democrats would prefer you spent it in other ways, and the longer you hang around, the more they’ll see you as a fool using up valuable resources on a narcissistic Quixotic effort.

This is precisely why I urge Steyer to stay in the race.

This largely sympathetic piece suggests that she had no core ideological convictions:

Harris routinely insisted that she was still introducing herself to Americans. But Harris’s campaign, dogged for months by questions about her health-care stance, her political ideology, and, ultimately, her staff’s infighting, never seemed to settle on a single consistent answer to a question voters kept asking: What was she about? At times on the trail, she presented herself as a matter-of-fact progressive, a comforter-in-chief, and an unapologetic prosecutor. Harris, and those who’ve known her for decades, insist all of these are accurate descriptors, but that at her core she’s a results-oriented pragmatist with a long-running disdain for ideological boxes. That, they often said, is precisely what the country could have used right about now. Yet as Harris tried appealing to as broad a swath of the Democratic electorate as possible, she found that in an overflowing field led by three far better-known characters, being a consensus-style candidate who can offer something to everyone meant it was especially difficult to offer everything to anyone.

When Harris sat down over the weekend to re-evaluate her plans and dig deep into her campaign’s financial state after a pair of brutal reports from the New York Times and Washington Post, she saw an operation quickly running out of cash and low on realistic paths to victory, even though she already qualified for the December debate. She spoke with family and close aides, and considered both her short-term options and her political future beyond the primary race. On Monday, she determined there was no politically acceptable way for her sputtering campaign to keep competing. She opted for an abrupt halt to a fall that would have been unfathomable back in Oakland in January, but which could have worsened in the unforgiving Iowa winter.

It would soon get harder, but at the time, the aftermath of the Detroit debate felt like a new low for Harris’s campaign. Looking back four months later, that stretch crystalized what went wrong. As she struggled to find a meeting of minds with the voters she needed between spring and fall — while Biden held onto his support and Elizabeth Warren gained steam — Harris and her team tried out a series of different messages. They didn’t stop trying until they ultimately settled on “Justice Is on the Ballot” late this year. Some political allies urged her to return to the “fearless” message she’d used while running for Senate in 2016. (“Fearless” was also the name of a TV ad she’d ran that was based around footage of Warren praising her.) Others grumbled that her early focus on “truths” meant little to voters, and that her subsequent “3 A.M. Agenda” wasn’t ambitious enough. “Sometimes her over-preparation comes across as a lack of preparation,” said one of her advisors. Still, most in Harris’s corner were convinced that she was close to hitting the right note. “The political consultant class gnashes their teeth over this — they have to market a product,” a Harris friend and longtime political ally told me this fall. “The problem that they have is: She is what she is. She’s complicated.” After the second debate, her team advised her to start telling more personal stories on the campaign trail, fearing the career prosecutor who was campaigning on her toughness was coming across as too lawyerly.

But then, and throughout the campaign, the advice wasn’t always consistent. “I don’t know who’s in charge,” one former Harris aide who remains close with her team told me repeatedly over the summer and fall. Harris has long been surrounded by a wide array of advisors — in addition to campaign chair Maya Harris (her sister), and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez, there were strategists Sean Clegg, Ace Smith, and Laphonza Butler, former chief of staff Rohini Kosoglu, adman Jim Margolis, and pollster David Binder, among others. “It’s a Kamala thing to have 9,000 people whispering in her ears, thinking they’re running the show,” said another of her ex-aides.

That doesn’t sound like an effective strategy for running a campaign, or governance. Indeed, it sounds like even more reasons to celebrate the demise of her incompetent campaign long before she could inflict that dysfunction on the White House.

More on the “no core convictions” theme:

Kamala Harris has ended her presidential campaign. Thus fades into history one of the most overhyped candidates in recent memory.

It’s not hard to see why Harris failed.

She was half the aggressive prosecutor and half the noble social justice warrior, half practical Democrat and half proud progressive, and it was never clear where she stood. With Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders consolidating the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, and Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg fighting over the center ground, Harris’s uncertain political identity denied her a foundation to build on. Instead, the California senator appeared to copy policies that she assumed would be popular in any one moment: most ignominiously, her call to ban President Trump’s Twitter account.

For a Democratic Party craving authenticity, as well as a candidate who can beat Trump, Harris’s strategic ingredients were a poor match for success. The basic point is this: As my colleague Tiana Lowe noted back in the summer, Harris simply wasn’t ready for prime time. She was too desperate to win and lacked established values.

It’s interesting that both Harris and Beto O’Rourke were hyped early and heavily, but both ended up bowing out even before the first primary votes were cast. (You could put Kirsten Gillibrand in this category as well, but honestly, the only people hyping her seemed to be female journalists from New York; everyone else seemed to regard her as a hopeless lightweight.) Neither seem to have ideas or convictions important enough to run a low-cost insurgency campaign ala Jerry Brown in 1992. For Harris and O’Rourke, it was either First Class or nothing.

And now some tweets:

Finally: “Kamala Harris Demoted To Meter Maid After Failed Campaign.”

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for October 7, 2019

Monday, October 7th, 2019

Ukraine revelations are pummeling the Biden campaign, furthering his slump, Q3 fundraising numbers drop, Yang rises, and rumors fly that Grandma Death is about to escape from her crypt yet again. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Q3 Fundraising

It’s that time again! Fundraising totals came gushing out of the campaigns last week:

  1. Bernie Sanders: $25.3 million.
  2. Elizabeth Warren: $24.6 million.
  3. Pete Buttigieg: $19.1 million.
  4. Joe Biden: $15.2 million.
  5. Kamala Harris: $11.6 million.
  6. Andrew Yang: $10 million.
  7. Cory Booker: $6 million.
  8. Marianne Williamson: $3 million.
  9. Steve Bullock: $2.3 million.
  10. Michael Bennet: $2.1 million.

Those are good numbers for Yang, bad numbers for Harris, and terrible numbers for Biden. As the presumed front-runner and DNC insider candidate, Biden should be rolling in donor dough. He’s not. And he had two-and-a-half months to raise money before the whole Ukraine thing really broke open. This suggests serious organizational impairment by the Biden campaign, or that Biden himself is simply phoning it in.

Sanders topped the list, but everything hings on how well, and how quickly, he comes back from his heart attack. Warren is in line with expectation: The bump from beating Biden has to be tempered with the disappointment of losing to Sanders. More than half of the media seems ready to anoint Warren The Chosen One, but her performance isn’t yet justifying it yet.

As for Yang, between this and his rising poll numbers, there’s no reason to treat him as any less serious a candidate than Harris.

Polls

  • Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 41, Warren 12, Sanders 10, Harris 4, Steyer 4, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. Has Steyer been making ad buys in South Carolina?
  • Fox News (Wisconsin): Biden 28, Warren 22, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5. Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Bullock 1, Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1.
  • PPIC (California): Warren 23, Biden 22, Sanders 21, Harris 8, Buttigieg 6, Yang 3, Booker 2, Castro 2, Klobuchar 1, O’Rourke 1, Steyer 1.
  • Emerson (Ohio): Biden 29, Warren 27, Sanders 21, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Yang 3, O’Rourke 2, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Bullock 1. Sample size of 353. Klobuchar, Sestak, Steyer, Castro and Messam all got zero votes.
  • Monmouth: Warren 28, Biden 25, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 5, Harris 5, Williamson 2, Yang 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Klobuchar 1, O’Rourke 1, Steyer 1.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 167): Warren 25, Biden 22, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5, Yang 3, O’Rourke 3, Bennet 2, Gabbard 2, Booker 2, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Steyer 1.
  • Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire): Warren 25, Biden 24, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 5, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 2, Yang 2, Booker 1. Sample size of 423. Castro received zero votes.
  • Morning Consult/Politico: Biden 32, Warren 21, Sanders 19, Harris 6, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • DNC tightens the debate requirements again.

    Candidates will need to clear 3 percent in four DNC-approved polls, up from the 2 percent required to qualify for the September and October debates. But the committee also created an additional early-state path to qualify: garnering 5 percent in two approved polls conducted in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.

    Additionally, candidates now need to receive donations from 165,000 unique donors — up from 130,000 from the September and October debates — with 600 unique donors in 20 different states, territories or the District of Columbia.

  • Uncertainty leads the field:

    The top fundraiser in the Democratic presidential field was hospitalized for a heart attack, the longtime polling leader and his son sit at the center of an impeachment inquiry, and the one candidate with clear momentum faces persistent doubts among some party leaders that she is too liberal to win the general election.

    With breathtaking speed, the events of the past two weeks have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race, shaking a party desperate to defeat President Trump next year and deeply fearful of any misstep that risks reelecting a president many Democrats see as dangerously unfit for office.

    Concerns have risen in recent days that the potential Democratic slate has been weakened by events largely out of the candidates’ control. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) promised a speedy return to the campaign trail after leaving the hospital Friday, but it was unclear whether the 78-year-old would be able to replicate his previously frenetic travel schedule. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has spent most of the race as the leader in the polls, has faced daily attacks from Trump over largely unfounded allegations about his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings, highlighting a potential vulnerability for the candidate many saw as the best hope for beating Trump.

    Snip.

    But they point to several worrying factors, including questions about whether Biden is equipped to mount an effective defense against Trump’s attacks and whether the surging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would alienate moderate voters and donors if she were the nominee. Some fear that Sanders’s health problems put a spotlight on the advanced age of the top contenders, all of whom are in their 70s. Others expressed skepticism that any Democrat would be able to compete against Trump’s unmatched ability to shift the public’s focus.

  • Warren overtakes Biden in poll of college students. Caveat: It’s an online polls with 586 respondents, so my working assumption is it’s garbage.
  • Speaking of online polls of college students, this one has it Sanders 30, Warren 26, Yang 10 and Biden 9.
  • Forbes writer argues that it’s a six man race: Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg and Yang.
  • “Dems Worried If Impeachment Fails They’ll Have To Nominate Electable Candidate.”
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Launches ads attacking “Medicare for All.” It’s open question to whether the majority of the Democratic Party’s total voting membership (as opposed to the hard left activist base) supports fully socialized medicine and destroying private health insurance. If Biden falters, Bennet and Bullock would be two candidates with a good shot to pick up his moderate voters. Well, that is, assuming they can get past Buttigieg’s giant spiked walls of money…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Giuliani Hits Bidens With New $3 Million “Ukraine-Latvia-Cyprus” Money Laundering Accusation.” “Five Times Hunter Biden’s Business Dealings Presented a Conflict of Interest for Joe Biden. Including this, which we might not have covered heretofore: “Hunter Biden was on MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Andrew Stein: “Joe Biden’s corrupt dealings in Ukraine and those of his son must be investigated, and the time has come for him to drop out of the presidential race.” Get past the requisite New York Times “orange man bad” talking points and this piece shows a Biden campaign struggling to frame an effective response on the Ukraine attacks:

    For Mr. Biden’s campaign, no attack could have been more difficult to deal with than one involving the candidate’s son.

    Mr. Biden nearly did not run for president because of the effect it would have on his family — and particularly on Hunter Biden and his children, according to multiple advisers to the former vice president. Hunter Biden has struggled for years with substance addiction and had recently gone through a very public divorce from his first wife.

    In separate interviews, Mr. Coons and his fellow senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, both said they had warned Mr. Biden that the president would target his family.

    “He expected his family to be attacked,” Mr. Carper said, adding that Mr. Biden assured him he was braced for “the onslaught.’’

    Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, encouraged him to enter the race, knowing the attacks were inevitable. But as Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, put it: “When it happens, it still feels pretty lousy.”

    The Biden campaign has attempted to handle the candidate’s son with great sensitivity. Mr. Biden made clear at the outset that Hunter, a lawyer who had long advised his father on his campaigns, should not be made to feel excluded, people who spoke with him said. One adviser to Mr. Biden recently telephoned his son to solicit advice on the upcoming debate in Ohio.

    But to most of Mr. Biden’s aides, Hunter Biden has been a spectral presence. He is living in Los Angeles and stayed away from Mr. Biden’s campaign launch in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden quietly attended the last two debates and appeared with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, at a July fund-raiser in Pasadena, Calif.

    Still, Mr. Biden’s advisers are aware that Hunter Biden carries political vulnerabilities. His business career has intersected repeatedly with his father’s political power, through roles he had held in banking, lobbying and international finance. Working for a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month while his father was vice president, and some of Mr. Biden’s admirers worry that, while Mr. Trump’s accusations are without merit, voters may view Hunter Biden’s actions as problematic.

    “Without merit.” “Problematic.” You can always count on the press to put lipstick on a Democrats’ pig. More on Hunter Biden:

    There’s an old saying about addiction. The man takes a drink (or a sniff), then the drink takes a drink, until the drink takes the man. It will take the bystanders, too, if they let it. Addiction is ravenous. But there was always someone in Joe Biden’s life to help him out with Hunter. It’s heartwarming when family and friends swoop in to care for the boys while Daddy serves the people of Delaware. But little boys have little needs, while big boys have bigger needs.

    Soon enough, directionless Hunter has a six-figure job at a bank run by Biden supporters. When Hunter grows bored, there’s another lucrative job under the tutelage of a former Biden staffer. When Hunter wants a house he can’t afford, he receives a loan for 110 percent of the purchase price. And when he goes bust, another friendly banker mops up the damage.

    Then his brother Beau contracts fatal brain cancer, and the last wobbly wheels come off Hunter Biden’s fragile self. At this point, the New Yorker piece becomes a gonzo nightmare — much of it narrated by Hunter himself — of hallucinations, a car abandoned in the desert, maxed-out credit cards, a crack pipe, a strip club and a brandished gun.

    If, as the magazine headline put it, Hunter Biden now jeopardizes his father’s campaign, the article makes clear Joe Biden feels a share of the blame. Yet, by the time the senator was vice president, the folks still willing to help Hunter were of a sketchier variety. There was a Chinese businessman who, Hunter said, left him a large diamond as a nice-to-meet-you gift. And a Ukrainian oligarch who hired Hunter at a princely sum to do nothing much. (Neither the firm nor Hunter Biden identified any specific contribution he made). Joe Biden’s response, according to his son, was: “I hope you know what you are doing.”

    Hope! What family of an addict hasn’t fallen back to that last trench? Denial, they say, is not just a river in Egypt.

    The story of that golf outing with Hunter’s Ukrainian paymasters Joe Biden lied about. And just in case you missed this from Friday’s LinkSwarm:

    And don’t look now, but there’s more Rudy going after Hunter coming down the pike: “We haven’t even talked about Romania yet.” Evidently 38% of Biden’s Q2 fundraising came from just 2,800 people.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. His $6 million is enough to keep him in the game, but not enough to make any headway in closing with the frontrunners, but both Biden and Harris flaming out (a definite possibility at this point) would open a couple of those hypothetical “lanes” for him. Booker calls on TV stations to not air Trump ad attacking Biden over Ukraine.” More grist for the idea he’s running for VP.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. $2.3 million is enough to keep the lights on, but very little more. Speaking of fundraising, he wants to ban fundraising during the first half of any elected official’s term. Given how this disadvantages incumbents, I don’t see the idea making any headway…
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Buttigieg conendrum continues: He’s raising money like a topline candidate, but his poll numbers still don’t reflect it. Gets a fawning profile in The New Republic:

    Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city (South Bend) half the size of Des Moines, is acing the listening test. His words, even in a stump speech, tend to be more thoughtful and more surprising than the standard political applause lines of his rivals. Elizabeth Warren often elicits cheers, Joe Biden gets the occasional affectionate chuckle, but Buttigieg summons up a different reaction. I first noticed it while seeing him at a Des Moines house party on a sparkling Saturday morning in June. As with Obama in 2006, members of the audience leaned forward to listen to Buttigieg speak rather than sitting back to applaud politely. What struck me at the time was that Buttigieg was pulling off this listening trick even though he lacked the national political profile that Obama boasted back in 2006, from his electrifying speech to the 2004 Democratic convention.

    It’s all pretty unconvincing. “Mayor Pete Is Starting to Annoy Almost Everyone Else in the 2020 Race.” Caveat: The Daily Beast, so take with several grains of salt.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro Presidential Campaigns Continue to Flounder.”

    Right now, the pair are each below 2.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages, with O’Rourke at 2.2 and Castro at 1.4 percent respectively. Even businessman Andrew Yang has eclipsed the pair.

    In Texas, O’Rourke has held a slight hold on second place for months — 10 points behind Biden and slightly ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — until the recent Quinnipiac poll, which showed Warren had moved ahead of O’Rourke and put him in third place in his home state.

    Meanwhile, while Castro is outperforming his national poll numbers in Texas, he has failed to hit higher than 4 percent in any Texas polls taken thus far.

    Castro praises Cesar Chavez, calling him a hero and ignoring the fact he was passionately opposed to illegal immigration.

  • Update: Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Following Sanders’ heart attack, the Intertubes are rife with rumors that Grandma Death is going to jump into the race, so I moved her up here from the also-rans. Also, she just passed Buttigieg in election betting odds, and is in third place there behind Warren and Biden. Here’s a recent piece speculating on Clinton entering the race, but it’s from a Norwegian-owned site that used to focus on cryptocurrency, so caveat lictor.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. He’s not in the debates…again. Now it’s just a question of how much of John Delaney’s money does John Delaney want to spend to kept pretending that John Delaney is running for President.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She made the next debate. “The Hawaii congresswoman’s debate performances haven’t done much to break her out of the asterisk category, but boy, can she dissect an opponent’s record in a devastating fashion. You could argue that Gabbard more than anyone else triggered the slide of Kamala Harris since the second debate.” If Sanders drops out, could Gabbard pick up some of his supporters? I’ve noticed some overlap there, but I doubt she could pick up enough to be even remotely viable.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Kamala Harris Is Burning Down“:

    Out of all the Democratic candidates, there is perhaps none more inauthentic and grating as Kamala Harris. To be fair, she doesn’t have the shrillness of Hillary Clinton, but she has every other bad quality in spades. She can’t hold a consistent position, she’ll do anything for support, and everything she says sounds like it was focus grouped. None of those things are good descriptors to be attached to one’s campaign.

    After being fluffed as the presumptive front runner following the first debate (which I called a sucker’s bet at the time), Tulsi Gabbard kneecapped Harris in the second debate and she has never recovered. Since then, it’s been a steady stream of desperation from her campaign….Her campaign is hemorrhaging cash, the donors have dried up, and she’s old news to the media.

    But now things are getting even worse. Her campaign is literally breaking down. The upper levels of her campaign staff are being changed up and she’s bringing over people from the Senate side to try to rescue her.

    More on that:

    California Sen. Kamala Harris plans to restructure her struggling presidential campaign, sources with knowledge of the staffing plans tell CNN.

    The changes represent the clearest sign to date that Harris, who has seen her poll numbers consistently fall over the last three months, feels changes are needed to jumpstart her presidential bid and streamline an operation that one source said has been been bogged down by bureaucratic hurdles.

    Harris will elevate Rohini Kosoglu, her Senate chief of staff, and senior adviser Laphonza Butler into senior leadership positions within the campaign, the sources said, splitting responsibilities for the day to day management of the operation.

    Juan Rodriguez will remain Harris’ campaign manager, but the addition of Kosoglu and elevation of Butler shifts some of the longtime Harris aide’s responsibilities to different staffers.

    Adding more cooks to the slop kitchen won’t help. The problem with the Kalama Harris campaign is Kamala Harris. Heh: “Kamala Harris Undergoes Heart Surgery After Seeing Positive Reception For Sanders.” Heh 2:

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Dings Biden: “Klobuchar Would Not Be Comfortable With VP’s Child On Board of Foreign Company.” Dodges impeachment question.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets interviewed by WMUR (along with Tim Ryan), where he offers up some education/STEM/entrepreneurial platitudes. Also worried that self-driving cars will result in unemployment for Uber and Lyft drivers. Wouldn’t they theoretically make money off their self-driving cars?

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets some audience pushback on guns and illegal aliens. Goes after Buttigieg on guns, because there’s nothing quite so exciting as the ninth place guy launching an attack on the fourth place guy. Had a rally in Phoenix, which is odd, since Arizona’s primary isn’t until March 17.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he’s in it until the end. And a silly food challenge story.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. I assume you noticed his heart attack last week. Pre-heart attack analysis: “Bernie Sanders Is in Trouble“:

    With just four months until the first-in-the-nation caucuses, Sanders is in trouble. As he delivered his populist gospel to large crowds of camouflage-clad high schoolers, liberal arts college students, and trade union members across Iowa last week, a problematic narrative was hardening around him: His campaign is in disarray and Elizabeth Warren has eclipsed him as the progressive standard-bearer of the primary. He’s sunk to third place nationally, behind Warren and Joe Biden, and some polls of early nomination states show him barely clinging to double digits. He’s shaken up his staffs in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s lost the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a left-wing group that backed him in 2016, to Warren.

    Dismissed out of the gate in 2016 as a nonfactor against Hillary Clinton — only to single-handedly shift the Democratic Party’s ideological center of gravity — Sanders is quite familiar with being left for dead. His top brass’ official line is that pundits and political elites are writing him off because they have no clue what’s happening at kitchen tables and picket lines across America. Sanders and his team have argued some polls that are bad for him are out of whack and several polls that are good for him are ignored by the media.

    Meanwhile, his aides say, Sanders remains a fundraising and organizing juggernaut. In its classic big-big-big-numbers style, the campaign announced this month that it had both contacted 1 million voters in Iowa and received donations from 1 million people throughout the United States — a milestone he reached faster than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.

    Pre-heart attack counterpoint:

    For a guy who’s supposed to be slowly fading into the second tier, Bernie Sanders had a good third quarter of fundraising, announcing this morning that his campaign raised $25 million in the past three months. (One wrinkle: Sanders’ campaign did not specify how much cash on hand he has left.)

    The upshot is that Bernie Sanders will probably have enough financial resources to stay in the presidential race as long has he likes, all the way to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee if he wants. As of this morning, he’s still a respectable third nationally in the RealClearPolitics average nationally (17.8 percent), third in Iowa (12 percent), third in New Hampshire (18.8 percent), second in Nevada (21.7 percent), and third in South Carolina (15 percent, and Elizabeth Warren is at 15.7 percent). And fairly or not, a lot of Democratic race-watchers see Joe Biden’s campaign as a ticking time-bomb with a gaffe-prone candidate and the Hunter Biden stuff now getting more play.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. WBUR profile.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the November debate. Lefty-site-that-pretends they’re not a lefty site Cal Matters offers up an extensive profile of Steyer’s political activities:

    From an early age, Tom Steyer has hopscotched from one rarified sphere of American prestige and privilege to the next. His resume starts at the Upper East Side of New York’s The Buckley School, a private K-9 that educated Franklin Roosevelt and a young Donald Trump. Next stop was Phillips Exeter, the patrician New Hampshire boarding academy. Then Yale, where Steyer studied economics, played soccer and graduated at the top of his class. A brief stint at Morgan Stanley, a business degree at Stanford and a job at Goldman Sachs rounded out Steyer’s gilded early resume.

    And that was before he became a billionaire.

    In San Francisco, Steyer teamed up with the banjo-playing financier Warren Hellman and started a hedge fund. It would eventually be named Farallon Capital and grow from $15 million to more than $20 billion investing diversely: corporate mergers, distressed Asian banks, pharmaceutical companies.

    Today Forbes estimates Steyer’s net worth at $1.6 billion. But Farallon’s past investments in coal mines, private prison companies and aquifer-pumping land deals may not jibe with Democratic voters. Neither might Steyer himself — a white guy from high finance.

    “The whole issue of income inequality has become a fairly major talking point with Democrats,” said Garry South, a California political strategist. “Why would you think that a billionaire is the best person to deal with income inequality? It’s sort of a contradiction in terms.”

    Steyer is a bit of a contradiction himself. In the mold of Warren Buffet, he is famously restrained in his spending habits (to a point). His sartorial style could be described as “Boomer dad”: He regularly wears the same tartan tie and a colorful beaded belt he bought on a trip to Kenya. He flies commercial, for environmental reasons. Speaking to CalMatters over the phone from Iowa, he recalls meeting a “slick-as-could-be” energy lobbyist a few years back who was wearing a “$5,000 suit.” As if Steyer couldn’t drop ten times that on a new outfit every morning for the rest of his life.

    Snip.

    In 2010, he co-chaired the committee to defeat a repeal of the state’s cap-and-trade emissions reduction program, putting $5 million into the effort. He struck Dan Logue, a former Republican Assemblyman who sponsored the measure and debated Steyer that year, as a true believer “committed to the cause.”

    In 2012, Steyer ratcheted up his financial involvement, spending $30 million on a ballot measure to close a tax loophole, effectively raising rates on businesses with out-of-state facilities. In 2016, he spent millions more on an unsuccessful bid to overturn the death penalty, and successful initiatives to raise cigarette taxes and reduce sentences for non-violent crimes.

    Steyer’s early focus on voter-initiated policy change runs through into his presidential campaign. He’s proposing to give voters the power to directly make federal law twice each year.

    Snip.

    Many California voters may not know who Steyer is, but California politicians do.

    He’s spent the past decade putting massive sums of cash toward supporting progressive candidates and boosting voter registration.

    Starting in 2013, Steyer began throwing his considerable financial weight behind individual candidates across the country through NextGen Climate Action Committee, a super PAC he started to help make climate change a winning issue for progressives.

    In the lead-up to both the 2014 and 2016 elections, Steyer’s family firm, Fahr LLC, was the biggest contributor of publicly disclosed political cash of any organization in the country. (Fahr, his middle name, was his mother’s maiden name.) In 2018, Fahr slipped to second place. So far in the 2020 cycle, the Steyers are back in the top spot.

    That largesse has endeared him to some Democrats.

    “I know the difference between talkers and doers and Steyer is a doer,” said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California.

    “Some candidates can come and be the main speaker at a dinner and that’s nice. But if you can write big checks…,” he said, trailing off.

    The piece notes he’s sometimes “not been a team player”…but only in the sense that he backs farther left challengers against Democratic incumbents. Picked up a state rep endorsement in South Carolina. “Steyer’s campaign says state Rep. Jerry Govan has signed on as a senior adviser. Govan is chairman of South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus.”

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let no one say she’s not pandering to left-wing interest groups hard enough, as she came out for eliminating right-to-work laws. Democrats couldn’t even implement card check when they had the White House, House and Senate, what makes her think she can pass a big labor pander a hundred times more radical? Or that a nation full of non-unionized employees would ever elect her? Union membership has been declining for decades, down to some 6.5% of private sector jobs. Most states are right-to-work states. Does Warren really think “vote for me and I’ll force you to join a union” is a winning campaign slogan? Once again, Warren maneuvers to win the primary at the cost of winning the election. Well well well: “Elizabeth Warren Fires National Organizing Director Over ‘Inappropriate Behavior.'” “Over the past two weeks, senior campaign leadership received multiple complaints regarding inappropriate behavior by Rich McDaniel.” He “was also Hillary Clinton’s primary states regional director.” Should we assume McDaniel: A.) Tried to get jiggy with new recruits, B.) Forced all new hires to eat a bug, or C.) Proclaimed his love of Nickleback*? She keeps ducking admitting that she’s going to hike your taxes until your eyes bleed. She also got caught lying about being fired for getting pregnant. Indeed, “lying” seems to be the theme of Warren’s entire career. Dissecting all of her pie-in-the-sky promises:

    From stem to stern, the senator from Massachusetts has marketed herself as the candidate with everything thought out. For every problem facing our nation, her slogan says she “has a plan for that.” Warren is running on a myriad of big government programs including Medicare for all, student loan debt cancellation, and free college tuition. Her plan to pay for these promises includes a wealth tax of 2 percent on fortunes above $50 million and 3 percent on fortunes above $1 billion.

    To many voters, her plans sound attractive, and her years in academia lend to her pitch. She is articulate and crafty enough to crib off Sanders, while arguing that she just wants capitalism with a human face. In reality, however, the former Harvard professor is hoping you will not do the math yourself when it comes to her grandiose pitch. Almost every element of her plans would drive discourse to the left, while weakening our political and economic systems to make it susceptible to crony capitalism.

    Even the centerpiece of the Warren campaign platform is obviously unworkable. A wealth tax on fortunes above $50 million is touted as the key funding mechanism for a plethora of new programs. But European nations have attempted numerous such wealth taxes, and none have been successful. Since 1990, the number of European states with such a levy has fallen from a dozen to three, including otherwise low tax Switzerland. Between 2000 and 2012, the burdensome wealth tax in France caused 42,000 millionaires to flee the country. The nation ultimately scrapped the impost in 2018.

    While a wealth tax in the United States is likely unconstitutional to begin with, it is certainly unenforceable in the way that Warren desires.

    Snip.

    But perhaps the biggest problem with the Warren wealth tax plan is that it is estimated to bring in an average of less than $3 trillion over the following decade, which would provide less than 10 percent of the total cost of her Medicare for all plan. Warren will not state the obvious that in order to pay for any of her policy proposals, it would require a massive tax increase on the middle class.

    Even worse, Warren proposes a frightening Office of United States Corporations through her Accountable Capitalism Act. Under the plan, workers must represent 40 percent of corporate boards of companies worth more than $1 billion. It also institutes strict controls on political spending and requires a corporate charter approved by the federal government. This idea is Orwellian. After all, the idea of government control of private industry is among the textbook definitions of fascism and its concept of corporatism. That means charters to do business could be revoked by Washington.

    A short list of all the taxes Warren has proposed. “Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren endorsed a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) policy proposal that includes taxpayer-funded welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.” Wargaming what happens if Warren beats Biden in Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s all church-of-what’s-happening-now speculation, but they do note Howard Dean’s flameout.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Williamson doesn’t want to be your crystal space witch: “I’ve never had a crystal, I’ve never written about crystals. I’ve never talked about crystals. I’ve never had a crystal onstage with me.” How much is Williamson worth? Evidently $1.5 million.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Andrew Yang Shouldn’t Retreat from His Past Success in Revitalizing Depressed Cities“:

    As Peter Beinart has trenchantly observed in The Atlantic, formerly moderate Generation X Democratic candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have chosen to turn their backs on policies they once championed. Booker no longer talks up his successful expansion of charter schools as mayor of Newark, while Harris has run away from her common-sense decision, as San Francisco district attorney, to enforce truancy laws as a means to get the attention of parents of disadvantaged students. But there’s another Gen X candidate, unmentioned by Beinart, who’s run away from past successes: Andrew Yang.

    While he promotes government-led efforts to redistribute income, Yang has been silent about his own groundbreaking efforts to help declining cities — not through government, but through civil society. In 2011, after a successful career as corporate lawyer and business-school test-prep entrepreneur, Yang founded Venture for America (VFA). Modeled on Teach for America, VFA aimed to attract applicants from elite colleges to work as paid interns at start-up companies in poor cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Birmingham, and Baltimore. Its funding came entirely from philanthropists, most importantly Detroit’s Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans. Like Dan Markowits, the author of the new The Meritocracy Trap, Yang saw the best and brightest as having “too limited a vision of what career success looks like,” and got to work fixing the problem.

    Today, VFA is still in operation, with fellowships in 14 different cities around the country. The organization has supported more than 1,000 fellows, working in business incubators and often going on to found start-ups of their own. It says that 51 percent of them continue to live in the cities where their fellowship was based, and they’ve been involved in starting 129 new companies.

    Bringing graduates of some 300 colleges to cities that ambitious young people have long been fleeing is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a record of success that gives Yang, if he’d only use it, a ready-made, positive message on the stump: Talented people can start new businesses, help power established ones, and in the process, make cities thrive. This message is all the more powerful when juxtaposed with generations of failed local, state, and federal policies based on the idea that subsidies to attract business are the best way of rejuvenating cities in decline.

    Indeed, what is striking about Yang’s Venture for America is its fundamental separation from those failed government policies and from government itself.

    I suspect that’s the very reason he doesn’t talk about it to Democrats. He blasted China for blasting the Houston Rockets for Daryl Morey posting a pro-Hong Kong tweet, which has engendered big controversy, because the Rockets have a lot of business deals in China thanks to the Yao Ming era. But Morey (and Yang) was right the first time. Funny how CNN and MSNBC just keeps leaving Yang out of infographics:

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    *I was only vaguely aware of Nickleback in their heyday, and only became aware of them after all the memes talking about how much they sucked. Now that I’ve been forced to listen to “Photograph” to keep up with current events, eh, I don’t hate it. Solid piece of nostalgic pop rock. Honestly, what strikes me most is how the chorus of a song from 2005 sounds exactly like every “hot country” song circa 2014