In the wee hours of Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill after a great deal of Democrat stalling and a futile effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put forward a separate bill jam-packed with liberal Christmas wish-list items. The bill provides crucial relief to businesses struggling with the social distancing strategy of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It now heads to the House.
The stimulus bill is far from perfect, but its passage unmasked Pelosi’s tactics as a disgraceful waste of time during this crisis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slammed the speaker for her attempt to jam her liberal pipe dreams down Americans’ throats in the midst of a crisis.
“Democrats wanted to use the coronavirus response package to change election law & implement parts of their Green New Deal. The Senate just passed strong bipartisan legislation that scraps those items, & it’s clear. ⇨ Their delay achieved nothing but more pain for Americans,” McCarthy tweeted.
And far from perfect means it was stuffed with egregious special interest pork. Pelosi, of course, tried to block it because it just didn’t have nearly as much special interest pork as she would like.
Nevada’s governor has signed an emergency order barring the use of anti-malaria drugs for someone who has the coronavirus.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order Tuesday restricting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine comes after President Donald Trump touted the medication as a treatment for the virus.
December 6: According to a study in The Lancet, the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was “Dec 1, 2019 . . . 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.” In other words, as early as the second week of December, Wuhan doctors were finding cases that indicated the virus was spreading from one human to another.
December 21: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.”
Snip.
January 15: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission begins to change its statements, now declaring, “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” Recall Wuhan hospitals concluded human-to-human transmission was occurring three weeks earlier. A statement the next day backtracks on the possibility of human transmission, saying only, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
The Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.
Sounds unbelievable?
A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.
“Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems; to as Chinese sources put it, ‘leap-frog’ industrially, ‘overtake around the corner’ strategically, capture the ‘commanding heights’ globally. Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive,” the Horizon report states.
We’re witnessing Beijing’s attempt to scrub its culpability for the pandemic from the world’s memory. Chinese Communist propagandists declare, “China is owed a thank you for buying the world time” and the New York Times dutifully repeats it.
After covering up the novel infection and unleashing it on the world, Beijing’s rulers bought up the world’s supply of protective gear and respirators.
Then they sell these critical goods to Italy while portraying themselves as the heroic humanitarian savior of the world, not unlike a pyromaniac who takes credit for calling the fire department.
To the degree that we are suffering death and economic hurt from COVID-19, we can also attribute the toll to the Chinese Communist Party. Had it just called in the international medical community in late November, instituted early quarantines, and allowed its own citizens to use email and social media to apprise and warn others of the new disease, then the world and the U.S. would probably not have found themselves in the current panic. The reasons China did not act more responsibly may be inherent in communist governments, or they may involve more Byzantine causes left to be disclosed.
Add in the proximity of a Level 4 virology lab nearby Ground Zero of COVID-19, which fueled Internet conspiracy theories; the weird rumors about quite strange animals such as snakes and pangolins birthing the infection in primeval open meat markets stocked with live animals in filthy conditions in cages; and pirated videos of supposed patients dropping comatose in crowded hospital hallways. With all of that, we had the ingredients of a Hollywood zombie movie, adding to the frenzy.
Plus, 2020 is an election year — echoing how the 1976 swine flu was politicized. The Left and its media appendages saw COVID-19 as able to do what John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, the Mueller team, and impeachment could not: destroy the hated Trump presidency.
China will rue what it begat.
That is, it will come to appreciate fully that the supposed efficiency, ruthlessness, and autocracy of the Communist Party — what had so impressed foolish American journalists who once marveled at Beijing’s ability to enact by fiat liberal pet projects such as high-speed rail and solar industries — were China’s worst enemies, ensuring that the virus would spread and that China’s international reputation would be ruined.
It is only since the outbreak of the pandemic that Americans have come to learn that China is the major supplier for U.S. medicines. The first drug shortages, due to dependence on China, have already occurred. Eighty percent of America’s “active pharmaceutical ingredients” comes from abroad, primarily from China (and India); 45% of the penicillin used in the country is Chinese-made; as is nearly 100% of the ibuprofen. Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx,” testified last year to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission about this critical dependence, but nothing has changed in this most vital of supply chains.
The medicine story is repeated throughout the U.S. economy and the world. The unparalleled economic growth of China over the past generation has hollowed out domestic industries around the globe and also prevented other nations, such as Vietnam, from moving up the value-added chain. Many industries are quite frankly stuck with Chinese companies as their only or primary suppliers. Thus, the costs of finding producers other than China, what is known as “decoupling,” are exorbitant, and few countries currently can replicate China’s infrastructure and workforce.
The world never should have been put at risk by the coronavirus. Equally, it never should have let itself become so economically dependent on China. The uniqueness of the coronavirus epidemic is to bring the two seemingly separate issues together. That is why Beijing is desperate to evade blame, not merely for its initial incompetence, but because the costs of the system it has built since 1980 are now coming into long-delayed focus. Coronavirus is a diabolus ex machina that threatens the bases of China’s modern interaction with foreign nations, from tourism to trade, and from cultural exchange to scientific collaboration.
Xi can best avoid this fate by adopting the very transparency that he and the party have assiduously avoided. Yet openness is a mortal threat to the continued rule of the CCP. The virus thus exposes the CCP’s mortal paradox, one which shows the paralysis at the heart of modern China. For this reason alone, the world’s dependence on China should be responsibly reduced.
ere are some people who are useless, especially now: Performance artists, diversity consultants, magic crystal healers, sociology TAs, members of the mainstream media, and gender-unspecified entities who brew kale kombucha.
Here are some people who matter, especially now: Soldiers, nurses, truckers, cops, the guy who stocks the shelves at Ralphs, farmers, and that dude rebuilding your roof.
The Chinese Bat Soup Flu has certainly clarified some of the blurred lines between what is important and what is frivolous garbage. Yet, in a time when millions of Americans are at risk of dying as a direct result of ChiCom conspiracies and the bizarre need of its serfs to eat any weird thing that crawls or slithers within reach of their chopsticks, our useless elite is fixated on making sure we don’t hurt the feelz of the very people who stuck us in this predicament.
Our elite is full of self-important morons who contribute nothing but more dumb in a time when the only thing we have a surplus of is dumb. The real hero is the guy who trucks in a load of whole wheat bread, ribeyes, and low-priced cabernet to the Trader Joe’s, not the Prius-piloting sissy with a Maddow fetish who shops there. The people our elite laughed at, scoffed at, poked at, are the very people who are going to rescue us from the mess that same elite helped make.
Hmm: “Fun facts about Covid Act Now, the org that is mobilizing press, politicians, & citizens to rally behind mass quarantine/lockdown: 1) They were founded by Dem activists. 1 of them, Igor Kofman, works full time to defeat Trump in 2020. Another is a Dem legislator.”
Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve. The model predicted far fewer deaths if lockdown measures — measures such as those taken by the British and American governments — were undertaken.
After just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, crediting lockdown measures, but also revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured.
“After the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
That’s right, the shortage of N95 masks can be traced back to the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic of 2009… when Barack Obama was president.
A different story from the Los Angeles Times published last week goes into more detail about what happened after the swine flu pandemic depleted the supply. According to their story, “After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks […] be replenished by the stockpile.” The problem is that didn’t happen. According to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, about 100 million N95 respirator masks were used up during the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010, but, he said was unaware of any “major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown.”
A place that once gave Democratic native sons Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale 4-1 voting wins and considers the late Sen. Paul Wellstone a local hero has begun to embrace a president who bears little resemblance to them, except that he reversed the “injustice” of an Obama-era order that would have brought the nickel-copper project to a 20-year standstill. On top of that were the 25 percent tariffs Trump imposed on most foreign steel, which provided an initial boost to the 5,000 miners still employed in the region’s numerous iron-ore mines that have served as the backbone to the region’s economy.
All of that put Ely in the middle of a political transformation that makes Minnesota the president’s top target among states he lost in 2016 — and potentially a pivot point in the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost the state by 45,000 votes in 2016, a remarkable feat considering how entrenched Democrats have been in the state.
Remember Hershel “Woody” Williams, the Medal of Honor winner I highlighted last Veterans Day? The Navy just commissioned a ship named after him. “The Medal of Honor presented to Williams by President Harry S. Truman two months after the end of World War II is now enshrined in the galley of the ship named in his honor…The Williams, built at a cost of about $500 million, is the second of three Expeditionary Sea Base ships.” ESB ships are interesting multi-use ships built on oil tanker hulls:
The ESD and ESB ships were originally called the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) and the MLP Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB), respectively. In September 2015, the Secretary of the Navy re-designated these hulls to conform to traditional three-letter ship designations.
The design of these ships is based on the Alaska class crude oil carrier, which was built by General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO). Leveraging commercial designs ensures design stability and lower development costs
The USNS Montford Point (T-ESD 1) and USNS John Glenn (T-ESD 2) are configured with the Core Capability Set (CCS), which consists of a vehicle staging area, vehicle transfer ramp, large mooring fenders and up to three Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) vessel lanes to support its core equipment transfer requirements. With a 9,500 nautical mile range at a sustained speed of 15 knots, these approximately 80,000 tons, 785-foot ships leverage float-on/float-off technology and a reconfigurable mission deck to maximize capability. Additionally, the ships’ size allows for 25,000 square feet of vehicle and equipment stowage space and 380,000 gallons of JP-5 fuel storage.
USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), the first ESB delivered, along with follow ships Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4) and Miguel Keith (ESB 5), are being optimized to support a variety of maritime based missions including Special Operations Force (SOF) and Airborne Mine Counter Measures (AMCM). The ESBs include a four spot flight deck, mission deck and hangar, are designed around four core capabilities: aviation facilities, berthing, equipment staging support, and command and control assets.
I would think this little tidbit would get more play, since the media repeatedly assured us that Wokescold Moppet was The Most Important Person In The World.
Still more efficient and straightforward than ObamaCare:
Thanks everybody for their entries and nominations…..but there’s one clear winner of the internet today…..round of applause please people…#WINternetpic.twitter.com/ToNA7bitpQ
Bernie’s the frontrunner, Bloomberg battered over fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, more slams against #NeverTrump, plus a gratuitous Slashdot joke. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Delegates
They’re still not through counting in Nevada, but right now the delegate count stands at:
Sanders 34
Buttigieg 23
Joe Biden 8
Elizabeth Warren 8
Amy Klobuchar 7
Polls
Omitting anything older than Sunday:
CBS News: Sanders 28, Warren 19, Biden 17, Bloomberg 13, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. 10,000 registered voters should be enough, but I don’t buy Warren in second place.
CBS News (South Carolina): Biden 28, Sanders 23, Steyer 18, Warren 12, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1.
Full blown panic among the Democratic establishment as Sanders takes a firm lead:
“In 30-plus years of politics, I’ve never seen this level of doom. I’ve never had a day with so many people texting, emailing, calling me with so much doom and gloom,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way after Sanders’ win in Nevada.
Bennett said moderates firmly believe a Sanders primary win would seal Donald Trump’s reelection. “It’s this incredible sense that we’re hurtling to the abyss. I also think we could lose the House. And if we do, there would be absolutely no way to stop [Trump]. Today is the most depressed I’ve ever been in politics.”
A renewed sense of urgency washed over establishment Democrats, who fear it’s quickly becoming too late to stop Sanders.
Biden supporters moved to persuade the party to coalesce around him as the best hope of blunting Sanders’ momentum. A super PAC for Biden renewed discussions with jittery donors who had frozen their financial support for the former vice president as they awaited signs of whether billionaire Mike Bloomberg would emerge as the strongest moderate candidate, according to two donors with knowledge of the talks.
Among the pitches from pro-Biden forces to donors: Bloomberg could not overcome past policies that alienated minorities, most prominently the stop-and-frisk policing tactic he embraced as New York City mayor. They argued that if Bloomberg stays in the race, Sanders will clean up on Super Tuesday, then it’s game over.
“For the establishment, I think it’s Joe or bust,” said Simon Rosenberg, New Democrat Network president, who served as a senior strategist for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018.
Good heavens. The Democratic presidential primary just took a giant leap beyond pass-the-popcorn stage. (We were doing that from the moment Beto O’Rourke learned the media wasn’t willing to treat him like he had magical powers anymore because he wasn’t running against Ted Cruz.) We were at hit-record on-your-DVRs when it became clear on Iowa caucus night that no one was going to win. No, the Democratic presidential primary has reached a point few of us outside it ever thought it would reach: They’re having a conversation they actually need to have.
Mike Bloomberg’s campaign just unveiled a web ad making the obvious point that almost everyone else in the Democratic Party would prefer to ignore: There’s a thuggish mentality to Bernie Sanders’s online supporters. After Sanders charged that Bloomberg didn’t have the kind of energy that would be needed to defeat Trump, Bloomberg came back with an ad pointing out that Sanders supporters regularly tweet and offer memes with comments such as “vote Bernie or bad things will happen.” Supporters of Bloomberg are “going on lists.” The 53-second Bloomberg ad calls out Sanders for a seemingly disingenuous or powerless and pointless call for “civil discourse” while his grassroots supporters speak as if they can’t wait to get started on the liquidation of the Kulaks after Election Day.
Throughout his career, Sanders talked about the value of bread lines in Socialist countries, cheered on the Marxist Sandinistas, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, praised Communist China’s progress in “addressing extreme poverty,” talked about his admiration for Fidel Castro, warmly welcomed the Irish Republican Army, saluted Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan regime, and almost never criticized Nicholas Maduro.
And now he’s got a lot a slew of people who want to volunteer to serve as his personal KGB and NVKD.
For a guy who keeps insisting he only wants non-authoritarian socialism, Bernie Sanders has gone out of his way to praise authoritarian socialists. As Jeff Blehar pointed out: “Why honeymoon in Moscow when you can just as easily visit Stockholm instead? C’mon now.” It’s not like Westerners didn’t know about the secret police and show trials and forced labor and the Holomodor and gulags and being sent to Siberia. Praising the Soviet system meant, at minimum, excusing all of that, if not de facto justifying it.
Meanwhile, the New York Times — that allegedly always failing New York Times — pulls back the curtain on the Bloomberg campaign and reveals that some of the biggest and most influential activist groups on the Left just averted their eyes when it came to Bloomberg, because either they wanted or had grown dependent upon his generous contributions.
In the fall of 2018, Emily’s List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women’s group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to Emily’s List over the years.
Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and questioning sexual misconduct allegations against Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor. Senior Emily’s List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg’s invitation, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg.
Remember, kids, bias in law enforcement is bad, unless it’s happening in the jurisdiction of a wealthy donor, and then it — presto-change-o! — turns into something not important enough to mention
One of the most amazing things about American journalism is the continued employment of political pundits whose penchant for failure would disqualify them from being hired in any other field. All the experts who were wrong about the 2016 election are now confidently making predictions about the 2020 election, as if their credibility were undiminished by their previous mistakes.
Max Boot bashing snipped. Aw, who am I kidding? Bring it!
Last week, for example, ex-Republican pundit Max Boot — panicked by the sudden meltdown of Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, which he had failed to anticipate — issued a desperate appeal to prevent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination. “Please, Democrats, do the smart thing and coalesce quickly around one of the three moderates — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, or Michael Bloomberg — who are still standing after the first two contests,” Boot begged on Twitter in the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, adding, “The future of our democracy may depend on it.”
Really? Is “our democracy” in such dire peril that it can only be preserved by one of the three Democrats whom Max Boot has named? Or is it rather the case, as I suspect, that Boot is chiefly concerned about rescuing his own damaged reputation? Boot has squandered his credibility by betting on losing horses for nearly two decades. During the Bush era, Boot left the Wall Street Journal to join the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and was among the most sanguine cheerleaders for the Iraq War, failing to anticipate the brutal terrorist insurgency that ultimately destroyed the neoconservative fantasy of turning Mesopotamia into a Western-style liberal democracy.
It would be difficult to list everything Max Boot has been wrong about over the years, and perhaps it’s easier to just say “everything,” but certainly the Yale-educated CFR senior fellow is not alone in his propensity for false prophecy. He was part of the Never Trump crowd that tried to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination and then, confident that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, yelled “all in,” shoving their entire pile of chips onto a losing bet.
Any experienced poker player can perhaps sympathize with the plight of Never Trump Republicans; I once went all-in with a full house and lost when the other guy turned over four of a kind. But I’ve never claimed to be an “expert” on poker, the way Boot and his cohort assert their expertise about politics and policy. The whole crowd — including former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Bush-era campaign operative Rick Wilson, and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, to name a few — simply could not believe that Trump might actually be elected, and they have never forgiven him (or the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him) for proving them wrong. None of Trump’s policy successes — crushing ISIS, promoting a robust economy, appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices and numerous other federal judges, and more — can ever redeem him in the eyes of the self-appointed political “experts” whose credibility is further diminished every time Trump wins again.
Having lost any ability to influence Republicans, the Never Trump crowd has now begun offering advice to Democrats, and it’s tempting to hope Democrats will listen to these “experts.” If Max Boot has always been wrong about everything, then what should we conclude about his claim that “the smart thing” for Democrats would be to nominate a moderate candidate to oppose Trump in November?
Highlights of the Nevada debate, mainly the times the knives went in deepest.
Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren each started the month scraping perilously close to the bottom of their campaign bank accounts, posing an existential threat to their candidacies as the Democratic primary goes national.
They’re up against well-funded machines threatening to dominate the Democratic race: Bernie Sanders, whose recent rise in the polls has come during a major spending streak fueled by his online donors, and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose fortune has vaulted him into the middle of the campaign to take on President Donald Trump.
While Sanders started February with nearly $17 million in the bank, according to campaign finance disclosures filed Thursday night, his next closest rival (nonbillionaire class) was Biden, at $7.1 million. Warren was closest to the red, with just $2.3 million left in her account, while Buttigieg ($6.6 million) and Klobuchar ($2.9 million) were in between.
The cash crunch comes at a critical time in the race, with nearly one-third of the delegates available in the primary up for grabs on Super Tuesday on March 3 — and only a handful of candidates able to marshal resources to advertise to voters in those 14 states. It’s why super PACs, demonized at the beginning of the 2020 primary, are suddenly jumping in to assist most Democratic candidates, and it’s why the campaigns are now making ever more urgent pleas for financial help.
The Democrat Party has turned hard left. By doing so, the party has unintentionally exposed itself.
Ambiguity and obfuscation are the Democrats’ stock in trade. They distort words, and they abuse the English language. They use words and phrases that sound good but are impossible to define — for example, environmental justice, intergenerational justice, climate change, and sustainability.
Such deception is crucial for the party’s survival. But the deception has become harder to sustain.
More than anyone else, Donald Trump is responsible for exposing the Democrats. They detest him and his achievements so much that their judgment has been annihilated. With new clarity, their reactions say far more about themselves than him. He is causing them to take leave of their sanity.
They hate Trump so much that they can’t celebrate his accomplishments. They even demeaned the killing of an evil and savage terrorist, Qassem Soleimani. But their insane hatred has put them in a bind.
Donald Trump has set up camp inside their brains. They should not have let him do that. They will live to regret it.
I think three things happened to Mike tonight. Number one, he just found out he’d make the debate yesterday. There were two times when I wasn’t sure I was going to make the debate and my team got me together to prepare. And you’re really not sure if you’re preparing because you’re not sure if you’re going to be in the debate. So Mike, even though he was I’m sure getting coached and prepared, he’s like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be in this debate.” And so, I don’t think he was coached hard enough.
Number two, he was clearly instructed to keep his cool no matter what. But that ended up presenting as lethargic and uninterested for a big chunk of the debate. And the third most telling thing is that if I’m his team, you know he’s going to get a stop and frisk question, like a gender discrimination or mistreatment question. So, you coach him and you have him give you 60, 75-second answers over and over again until he can do it in his sleep. And the fact that he did not have those answers at his fingertips lets me know categorically he was not properly prepared for this debate.
Over the course of the past two weeks I sat down and attempted to watch every single ad and ad-adjacent piece of video content that the Bloomberg campaign has released on its official YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account. (I only dipped my toes into Instagram, because I had to draw the line somewhere.) Then, after rejecting a few for redundancy, I ranked them from best to worst, based solely on my own idiosyncratic criteria. (I surely missed some, and I stopped trying to find new ones a few days ago, for sanity’s sake.) Why did I do this? Because I wanted to mainline the means by which a late primary entrant with unimaginable sums of money has become a possible Democratic frontrunner.
Here’s what I learned: For one thing, that watching nearly 200 campaign ads in a short period is sort of like being brainwashed, which I suppose is the goal of all advertising. At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m aboard the Bloomberg train, but I think I would feel a little less uncomfortable buying a ticket. Many of the ads are very good. Many more of them are not. The quality of any individual ad, though, is ultimately less important than the breadth of the entire corpus. It’s not that Bloomberg doesn’t have some good ideas—he does—or that he would not be a more competent executive than our current president. The point is that the campaign’s goal is to very quickly achieve messaging saturation in lieu of the monthslong ground game Bloomberg didn’t bother to run. I hate to say it, but it’s working!
Being from a slate writer, it’s not at all surprising that the ones he likes best are all of the “Orange Man Bad!” variety. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Tried of all the Bloomberg bashing? Me neither.
What a catastrophe Wednesday night was for Mike Bloomberg. The New York plutocrat was kicked in the teeth by Elizabeth Warren in the first minutes — she denounced him as a Trump-like “arrogant billionaire” who called women “horse-faced lesbians” — and never made it back to his feet.
Bloomberg stood in mute fury as his $400 million campaign investment went up in smoke. His contempt for democracy and sense of entitlement surpass even Donald Trump, who at least likes crowds — Bloomberg’s joyless imperiousness makes Trump seem like Robin Williams.
That Bloomberg has been touted as a potential Democratic Party savior across the top ranks of politics and media is an extraordinary indictment of that group of people.
Some endorsements were straight cash transactions, in which politicians who owe their careers to Bloomberg’s largess repaid him with whatever compliments they could muster. How much does a man who radiates impatience with the idea of having to pretend to equal status with anyone have to spend to get someone to say something nice?
California Congressman Harley Rouda called him a “legendary businessman”: Bloomie gave her more than $4 million. New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill got more than $2 million from Bloomberg’s Independence USA Super PAC, and in return the Navy vet said Bloomberg embodies “the integrity we need.”
Georgia’s Lucy McBath, a member of the congressional black caucus, got $4 million from Bloomberg PACs, and she endorsed him just as an audio clip was coming out of the ex-mayor talking about putting black men up “against the wall” in stop-and-frisk. News accounts of the endorsement frequently left out the financial ties.
That’s fine. If you give a politician $2 million or $4 million, it must be expected that he or she will say you approximate a human being.
But how does New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman excuse writing “Paging Michael Bloomberg”? (Well, Bloomberg philanthropies donated to Planet Word, “the museum my wife is building,” says Friedman, so there’s that.) How about Jonathan Chait at New York, who wrote, “Winning the election is starting to look hard. How about buying it instead?” Or John Ellis in The Washington Post, who declared Bloomberg the “dream candidate”?
These pundits clung to a triumvirate of delusions: Bloomberg “gets things done,” he’s more electable than a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because he can spend unlimited amounts, and he has the “toughness” to take on Trump.
Far from showing “toughness,” Bloomberg on Wednesday wilted under attacks from his five Democratic opponents.
Snip.
Trump has clear authoritarian tendencies and has wrapped his hands around autocrats, but for all the fretting about him perhaps not leaving office in 2020 if voted out, it’s Bloomberg who has already tossed term limits aside, and it’s Bloomberg who is openly trying to buy an election. There is zero evidence he will be any less of a threat to democracy or an agent for rapacious corporate interests than Trump.
Even assuming one could cross into believing that Bloomberg is somehow less revolting or dangerous than the current president — I don’t, but let’s say — Wednesday exploded the idea that he would have a superior chance at beating him than Sanders or a conventional, non-plutocrat politician like Warren or Pete Buttigieg. Bloomberg was a total zero charisma-wise, had trouble thinking on his feet, and failed to find even one issue where he sounded confident and convincing. His only distinguishing characteristic is his money, and fuck his money.
Bloomberg’s reason to be in this contest is to be the last non-Bernie non-Warren candidate standing. Biden doesn’t have it in him. While he had some good lines, he was a sideshow and a sad figure. If anyone is done after last night, it’s Amy Klobuchar. Her performance was whiny and weak — please Mayor Pete and Elizabeth, stop criticizing me!
Bloomberg didn’t help himself last night, but I don’t see that he ended his campaign provided he’s still willing to finance it.
I am one of the many women Mike Bloomberg’s company tried to silence through nondisclosure agreements. The funny thing is, I never even worked for Bloomberg.
But my story shows the lengths that the Bloomberg machine will go to in order to avoid offending Beijing. Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LP, is so dependent on the vast China market for its business that its lawyers threatened to devastate my family financially if I didn’t sign an NDA silencing me about how Bloomberg News killed a story critical of Chinese Communist Party leaders. It was only when I hired Edward Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong that Bloomberg LP eventually called off their hounds after many attempts to intimidate me.
In 2012, I was working toward a Ph.D. in sociology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and my husband, Michael Forsythe, was a lead writer on a Bloomberg News article about the vast accumulation of wealth by relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping, part of an award-winning “Revolution to Riches” series about Chinese leaders.
Soon after Bloomberg published the article on Xi’s family wealth in June 2012, my husband received death threats conveyed by a woman who told him she represented a relative of Xi. The woman conveying the threats specifically mentioned the danger to our whole family; our two children were 6 and 8 years old at the time. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos reports a similar encounter in his award-winning book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China,” when the same woman told Osnos’s wife: “He [Forsythe] and his family can’t stay in China. It’s no longer safe,” she said. “Something will happen. It will look like an accident. Nobody will know what happened. He’ll just be found dead.”
Snip.
My husband had been working for many months on another investigative report for Bloomberg about financial ties between one of China’s richest men, Wang Jianlin, and the families of senior Communist Party officials, including relatives of Xi. Bloomberg editors had thus far backed the story. A Bloomberg managing editor, Jonathan Kaufman, said in an email in late September 2013, “I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. … It’s a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line,” according to an account published by the Financial Times.
Then Bloomberg killed the story at the last minute, and the company fired my husband in November after comments by Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matt Winkler were leaked. “If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,” Winkler reportedly said on a company call.
Mike Bloomberg, then New York City mayor and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, was asked on November 12, 2013, about reports that his company had self-censored out of fear of offending the Chinese government and he dismissed the question.
“Nobody thinks that we’re wusses and not willing to stand up and write stories that are of interest to the public and that are factually correct,” Bloomberg told a press conference.
Yet, days after Bloomberg made those comments to reporters in New York, Bloomberg lawyers in Hong Kong threatened to devastate my family financially by forcing us to repay the company for our relocation fees to Hong Kong from Beijing and the advance on my husband’s salary that we took out, leave us with no health insurance or income, and take me to court if I did not sign a nondisclosure agreement — even though I had never been a Bloomberg employee.
Snip.
On December 20, they sent a letter to my husband demanding that I sign a nondisclosure agreement. If I didn’t agree, we might owe the company thousands of dollars. I might even have had to pay Bloomberg’s legal bills. The thought of Bloomberg possibly ruining our family financially if I didn’t give in to their threats made me sick, but I was also infuriated that they had kept us in harm’s way after we received threats, forbidden me from speaking publicly about the death threats we received in Beijing, and now were trying to take away my freedom of speech forever.
It was only when I hired Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong — Albert Ho and Jonathan Man offered me a low rate because it was a “good cause” — that Bloomberg finally backed off. In the meantime, they had sent me several more threatening letters. One letter from Mayer Brown JSM on January 8, 2014, spelled out that “by virtue of the knowledge that she retains (in her head) of our client’s [Bloomberg’s] Confidential Information she has an ongoing duty of confidentiality to our client.
Mini Mike Bloomberg’s debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones. He was stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent. If this doesn’t knock him out of the race, nothing will. Not so easy to do what I did!
Ann Althouse was not impressed with Bloomberg in the debate. “He’s dull and he looks like death.” Bloomberg racks up three congressional endorsements: “Reps. Nita Lowey of New York, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Pete Aguilar of California.” Daily Caller laughably calls them “major” endorsements, but Aguilar is the only one I already had a tag for. “After Taking Brutal Beating In Debate, Bloomberg Rushed To Tiny Hospital In Tiny Ambulance.” “He’s recovering nicely in a matchbox.” “We are all individuals!”
Another West Side resident, Cornish Miller, 62, said of Buttigieg, “Rating him 1 to 10, I’d give him a 2.”
“Buttigieg talked about all the improvements he made, but he hardly made a dent,” said Miller, who works for a military supply company.
“The West Side is the most neglected part of town. The street I live on is the only street around here that has lights. That’s because we’re a gateway to Notre Dame.”
Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is claiming there are inconsistencies in the reported results in Nevada, as the former South Bend, Ind., mayor tries to claw his way to second place in Saturday’s caucuses.
In a letter sent to Nevada Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II and obtained by POLITICO, Buttigieg’s campaign is calling for the state party to publicly release a tranche of data and recalculate some precincts, a call the state party largely rebuffed.
“In light of material irregularities pertaining to the process of integrating early votes into the in-person precinct caucus results, we request that you” release early and in-person votes, correct “errors identified by presidential campaigns” and “explain anomalies in the data,” Buttigieg’s national ballot access and delegate director Michael Gaffney wrote in the letter sent late Saturday.
Buttigieg’s campaign is not challenging Bernie Sanders’ runaway win in the state. Instead, the Buttigieg camp is pointing to the battle further down the standings.
“Given how close the race is between second and third place, we ask that you take these steps before releasing any final data,” Gaffney wrote.
Those “close second” finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire already seem like ancient news…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But: “Ex-Bill Clinton adviser: Bloomberg and Hillary cooking up ‘scheme’ for her to become Democratic nominee.” Not buying it, but enjoy another week in the clown car, Grandma Death.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s mired in single digits but the few news stories I’m finding focued on her are like “Watch Amy Klobuchar’s full speech after Nevada caucus defeat” (No), “Video: Senator Amy Klobuchar speaks with the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board” (No), and “President Amy Klobuchar: Here’s what it would mean for California” (Yes, we know weed is legal there.) Ah, this promises some blue-on-blue action: “How Amy Klobuchar’s Signature Bill Became a Disaster for Her Own Party.” Alas, no, it’s just another “she treats her staff like shit” piece, this time by throwing them under the bus for some technical abortion language in a bill the writer doesn’t bother to detail.
This is a decisive victory for Sanders, who more than doubled Biden’s total, and a major setback for Warren and Klobuchar, both of whom needed to show some kind of momentum to keep their campaigns viable. While it is possible that Biden could still bounce back with a win next Saturday in the South Carolina primary, even the most enthusiastic supporters of Warren and Klobuchar must see they now have no path to the nomination. Their money is running out, whereas Buttigieg (who at least got a narrow win in Iowa) could continue if he does well on Super Tuesday. Unless two or three of the non-Sanders candidates drops out before Super Tuesday, however, there will still be multiple candidates splitting the “Anybody But Bernie” vote with billionaire Mike Bloomberg, and that means Sanders could emerge with an insurmountable delegate lead after March 3. And this means . . . panic time!
James Carville and Chris Matthrews meltdown bits snipped.
Why are the MSNBC talking heads so despondent? Because they are convinced that if Democrats nominate Sanders, they’ll alienate middle-class moderate voters and thereby guarantee Trump’s re-election. I wish I believed this as much as they do, but can we trust the conventional wisdom dispensed by cable-news “experts”? These are the same people who thought Trump could never win the GOP nomination, and then believed Hillary Clinton could easily defeat Trump, so when they start predicting future political events, my hunch is they’re wrong again.
Glenn Reynolds seems to share my concern: “You can assume that Trump would crush Bernie, and you’re probably right. But any major-party nominee, however lame, has a nonzero chance of becoming President, and that’s bad when we’re talking about a commie.”
As much as I want to believe Trump would score a slam-dunk victory over Sanders in November, I’m disturbed by the fact that MSNBC talking-heads have the same opinion. Maybe I’m just being a worry-wart about this, though. In an all-out battle between a socialist Democrat and a capitalist Republican, Trump wins — if the American people are still the American people. If Bernie were to win, we might as well call ourselves “Southern Canada.” Meanwhile, Bill Kristol and the cruise-ship contingent of #NeverTrump ex-Republicans have reached a fatal reckoning; having committed to 100% opposition to Trump, they must now find a way to make the “principled conservative” argument for Bernie Sanders. They didn’t have much credibility left to lose, but once you sell your soul to Pierre Omidyar, you must pay that debt in full.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. In a shocking and completely unexpected turnabout, Warren now says that SuperPAC money is just fine and dandy! She calls Bloomberg “ a big threat — not a tall one, but a big one.” I’m sure the media that’s Margaret Dumonted an endless stream of “Well I never!”s over Trump tweets will quickly chastise Warren for this vicious personal attack.
🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗
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:
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020. One of the more interesting and least pandering of the candidates, Yang ran much better than anyone (myself included) expected, but never broke out of single digits. He gets an exit interview in the New York Times. Might run for New York City mayor. It would be nearly impossible for him to do a worse job than Di Blasio…
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
Three contests, three Bernie wins. Sanders wins Nevada with 46% of the convention delegates (and 39% of the popular vote), Biden comes in second (with 19.5% of delegates and 18.6% of popular votes), and Buttigieg third with 15.3% of delegates (and 18.4% of the popular vote).
The Biden showing is good enough that he has no reason to get out of the race, ditto for Buttigieg, and Super Tuesday is where Bloomberg has put all his money.
Whether Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer withdraw is an open question, but I suspect they’re all in through Super Tuesday, just in case. I suspect Tulsi Gabbard stays in through the convention, but she’s not even an afterthought now.
At this point there are only two likely outcomes: 1. An outright Bernie win, or 2. A brokered convention.
More in tomorrow’s Clown Car update (which may be super late).
The Justice Department charged four Chinese intelligence officers on Monday with a 2017 hack of credit-reporting giant Equifax, which compromised the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans.
“This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” Attorney General William Barr said in a press conference on the announcement.
Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei, members of the People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute, are charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit economic espionage, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as well as two counts of unauthorized access and intentional damage to a protected computer, one count of economic espionage, and three counts of wire fraud.
The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Atlanta last week, alleges that the soldiers used a vulnerability in Equifax’s online dispute portal to access its secure servers over several weeks. The group ran approximately 9,000 queries while routing traffic through 34 servers to secretly obtain names, birth dates, and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens, before compressing and exporting the data.
“There were 11 bodies pulled from the wreckage,” said one official privy to the panicked conversations that swirled through the corridors of power that morning. “We are talking about the entire inner sanctum of the Quds Force. This wasn’t just Hajj Qassem [Suleimani] and Abu Mahdi [al-Muhandis]. This was everyone who mattered to them in Iraq and beyond.”
Another source, a western intelligence agency, was more circumspect, suggesting that those killed may have been less decisive in the Iranian nexus than the Iraqis believed. “However, the [assassinations] may have significant repercussions for the relationship between the [Quds Force] and Iran-aligned groups in Iraq in the near term,” an official said.
In the 40-day mourning period to mark the Iranian general’s death, which ended last Thursday, the fallout in Iraq has barely subsided. If anything, its impact has become more acute there, as well as in Suleimani’s homeland of Iran, and elsewhere in a region he had come to dominate like no other figure.
From the bunkers of south Beirut to the battlefields of northern Syria and the combustible streets of Iraq, the loss of Suleimani and his entourage has derailed much of Iran’s momentum in the region and exposed to rare vulnerability the opaque Quds Force it has used to project its influence over two decades.
The assassination has also shone a light on the complicated relationship between the Iranian leadership and the Iraqi government, senior members of which have scrambled ever since to resurrect Suleimani’s core regional projects located as far away as the Lebanese capital and Damascus. The reckoning started as soon as the dead were buried.
Plus attempts by Iran to get Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to help fill the void.
In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.
In a major speech about the future of Europe, delivered in Bruges on September 20th, 1988, she “began with a grand historical sweep, taking in the Romans, Magna Carta, the Glorious revolution and much more, all designed to show that Britain was part of European civilization.” Thatcher also made it clear that “Britain wanted no ‘cosy, isolated existence’ on the fringes: ‘Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’”
What Thatcher did oppose was the project of “ever-closer union,” and the resulting weakening of the influence of nation states. She believed that Europe should not be a centralizing power that incubated supranational institutions—particularly as this model of centralization was just then in the throes of spectacular failure within the Soviet Union. Instead, as she outlined in a speech at The Hague on May 15th, 1992, she favored a looser form of European co-operation, by which states retained their sovereign freedoms—including control of their borders. This, she believed, would accommodate the political and cultural diversity of Europe, including the eastern European countries that, she hoped, would be offered full EC membership. As Moore notes, in fact, she was one of the few prominent European politicians of the 1980s who had recognized that cities such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest were very much European cities that had been cut off from their historical and cultural roots.
In her speech at The Hague, as Moore summarizes it, “she prophesied that large-scale immigration caused by free movement would cause ‘ethnic conflict,’ and bring about the rise of extremist parties, that there would be ‘national resentment’ because of one-size-fits-all financial and economic policies under a single currency, and that a more centralized EC would not be able to work with the influx of new member states from the former Eastern Bloc.”
ICE said in a statement that California’s law doesn’t supersede federal law and “will not govern the conduct of federal officers acting pursuant to duly enacted laws passed by Congress that provide the authority to make administrative arrests of removable aliens inside the United States.”
“Our officers will not have their hands tied by sanctuary rules when enforcing immigration laws to remove criminal aliens from our communities,” David Jennings, ICE’s field office director in San Francisco, said in the statement.
Clayton Williams, RIP. He was that close to beating Ann Richards for Texas governor in 1990 before he shot his mouth off, not realizing that you can never trusts journalists to keep something that hurts a Republican quiet. Had he won, it’s extremely doubtful that George W. Bush gets elected governor in 1994, and the modern history of America turns out very differently…
“The 25-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing a library security officer to death had been released without bail after being accused of trying to rape a woman at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in November.” Thanks to Democratic “reforms,” attempting to rape a woman in a hospital in New York is now effectively a misdemeanor.
“Ilhan Omar DID marry her brother, reveals Somali community leader, who says both she and her husband told him Ahmed Elmi was her sibling and she would do what she had to do to get him ‘papers’ to keep him in US.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Speaking of pointing and laughing: How #NeverTrumpers are the waterboys of the D.C. elite. “All of their predictions are based on the conventional wisdom and assumptions of an insulted and excluded D.C. intelligentsia, and all are wrong.”
This was Rusty. For 10 years he comforted patients and staff at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg. Yesterday, one day after his eighteenth birthday, Rusty passed away. Flowers and a pair of his trademark glasses were left on his favorite chair. He is our fifteenth 15/10 ❤️ pic.twitter.com/LylNq0tCSu
I heard a little more barking than normal from the puppy corral, so I went to check it out. It was Rocky, letting me know that his brother Ryman… might need a little help. pic.twitter.com/iu605vulW7
Bloomberg channels Barney, Yang, Bennet and Patrick are Out, enjoy the Buttigieg Platitude Generator, Bernie bros break out the blacklist for Bloomberg hires, and Mayor Pete has a fake Nigerian problem. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
The Nevada caucus looms, but not until Saturday.
There are now six candidates left in the race with a theoretical chance to earn the nomination (Sanders Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Biden, and Warren), plus Gabbard and Steyer. I don’t see Warren getting any traction, but I do see the DNC working desperately behind the scenes to make sure she keeps siphoning votes away from Sanders…
Delegates
After New Hampshire, the actual delegate count stands at:
Buttigieg 22
Sanders 21
Elizabeth Warren 8
Amy Klobuchar 7
Joe Biden 6
It’s a neat trick, Buttigieg leading the delegate count after coming in second in the first two states…
St. Pete Polls (Florida): Bloomberg 27.3, Biden 25.9, Buttigieg 10.5, Sanders 10.4, Klobuchar 8.6, Steyer 1.3. First state with a poll lead for Bloomberg. Sample size of 3,047, which should be excellent for a state poll.
A brokered convention would be a lot of fun to watch but devastating for Democrats. The chances of Bernie Sanders coming out on top in a brokered convention seem slim to me—and if Bernie goes into the convention with the most delegates but doesn’t leave the convention as the nominee, Bernie supporters are going to be livid. Whoever the candidate is, if the Democrats have to wait until mid-July to know for sure who their nominee is going be, it puts their party at a significant disadvantage.
The problem for Democrats is that Sanders leads, but most Democrats are voting against him:
While the far-left or more liberal candidates — including Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — collectively earned 35 percent of the New Hampshire vote, the center-left and more moderate candidates — including Biden, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) — collectively earned more than one-half of the vote, with 53 percent between the three of them.
Indeed, while Sanders may have eked out a victory, a majority of the New Hampshire voters aligned with the moderate bloc of the party.
This discrepancy poses a serious problem for Democrats as the primary season continues. In order to build a broad-based coalition of voters to defeat Trump, there needs to be an understanding within the party that the message will be inclusive, will encourage unity and will eventually focus on supporting the nominee.
Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020, after a dismal rounding-error showing in New Hampshire. Not really seeing any post mortem pieces out there, but here’s a piece on his last few days on the campaign trail. The most interesting part is finding out his New Hampshire office is in the same building as Buttigieg and Steyer’s state offices. He’s perhaps the most forgettable politician making a serious run for President this century. If you stuck a gun to the head of each Democratic Party voter and demanded they pick Bennet out of a list of candidates, 99% of those people would be dead.
It was not the first time — or the last — during his long career that Jim Biden turned to Joe’s political network for the kind of assistance that would have been almost unimaginable for someone with a different last name. Campaign donors helped him face a series of financial problems, including a series of IRS liens totaling more than $1 million that made it harder to get bank financing. Jim Biden took out two more loans from WashingtonFirst before its sale in 2018.
These transactions illuminate the well-synchronized tango that the Biden brothers have danced for half a century. They have pursued overlapping careers — one a presidential aspirant with an expansive network of well-heeled Democratic donors; the other an entrepreneur who helped his brother raise political money and cultivated the same network to help finance his own business deals.
Jim Biden, 70, has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.
A meeting with nearly 80 black pastors in Detroit. A speech before a black Democratic organization in Montgomery. A rally at a historically black university. A tour of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. An early voting kickoff at an African American museum. All in the past two weeks.
While Mike Bloomberg’s rivals battled it out in majority-white Iowa and New Hampshire, the billionaire presidential candidate aggressively courted the black voters critical to any Democrat’s chance of winning of the nomination. The effort, backed by millions of dollars in ads, has taken him across Southern states that vote on March 3, from Montgomery, Alabama, and this week Raleigh, North Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, states where African American voters can decide a Democratic primary.
His pitch is one of electability and competence — hoping to capitalize on black Democrats’ hunger to oust President Donald Trump. But as he courts black voters he’ll also have to reconcile his own record as mayor of New York and past remarks on criminal justice.
Bloomberg’s outreach aims squarely at former Vice President Joe Biden, who is banking on loyal black voters to resuscitate his bid after poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“Who can beat Donald Trump? That’s what people care about,” said former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who is among the black leaders endorsing Bloomberg. Nutter says Bloomberg’s record of accomplishments outweighs the damage of flawed policing.
Bloomberg has no doubt been helped by his limitless financial resources and his strategy to focus on states conducting primaries on Super Tuesday. One of the world’s richest men thanks to a net worth of roughly $60 billion, Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million of his own money on advertising, including spots on black radio stations, a Super Bowl ad that featured an African American mother who lost her son to gun violence and a national ad touting his work with President Barack Obama on gun legislation and a teen jobs program.
The Democratic presidential candidates raced on Sunday to make the most of their final weekend day before the Nevada caucuses, selling their messages and tearing into their opponents.
But the rival they focused on most intently was one who isn’t even competing in the state.
“I got news for Mr. Bloomberg,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said at an event in Carson City, Nev., taking aim at the former New York City mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, within five minutes of opening his remarks. “The American people are sick and tired of billionaires buying elections.”
In a rarity, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. echoed his progressive counterpart. “Sixty billion dollars can buy you a lot of advertising, but it can’t erase your record,” he said of Mr. Bloomberg in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired on Sunday.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another moderate, had similar thoughts. “I’m here getting votes,” Ms. Klobuchar said in an interview on Sunday. “It’s not something where I can just — what would be the word — transport in a bunch of ads.” She called on Mr. Bloomberg to “go on the shows that every other candidate goes on, on the Sunday shows and the like.”
She added: “I don’t think I’m going to beat him on the airwaves, but I can beat him on the debate stage.” At a forum on Sunday focused on infrastructure, Ms. Klobuchar, who won the endorsement of The Las Vegas Sun last week, mentioned Mr. Bloomberg early on, referring to President Trump’s comments about his height as she stood to speak. “I am the only candidate that is 5-foot-4,” she joked. “I want that out there now.”
The fixation on Mr. Bloomberg, the free-spending multibillionaire, reflected his rising prominence in the Democratic race, even though he is skipping the first four nominating contests and focusing on the 14 Super Tuesday states that will vote on March 3.
As early voting continued in Nevada on Sunday, some of the criticism seemed to be sticking.
“Bloomberg just has bad connotations that come along with him,” Leah Garwood said as she waited in line with her husband on Sunday in Las Vegas for roughly 45 minutes to vote for a different billionaire, Tom Steyer of California. “It’s just at the back of my mind. It makes me uncomfortable, uneasy.”
Don’t believe it; Most of the people backing Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar (i.e., the Corrupt Wing) would choose Bloomberg over Sanders without hesitation. The meme machine. Bloomy can buy memes, but can he buy good memes? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Tolerant Bernie Bros want to Blacklist Bloomberg staffers:
it's very important for us to create a black list of every operative who works on the bloomberg campaign
(Tweet has since been deleted, but there’s plenty of reference to it on Twitter.) Are you an old person with cancer? Bloomberg just wants to let you die:
Bloomberg explaining how healthcare will “bankrupt us,” unless we deny care to the elderly.
“If you show up with cancer & you’re 95 years old, we should say…there’s no cure, we can’t do anything.
A young person, we should do something. Society’s not willing to do that, yet.” pic.twitter.com/7E5UFHXLue
Pete Buttigieg really speaks in platitudes a lot. Last night brought, “[You’re] ready to vote for a politics defined by how many we call in, instead of by who we push out . . . So many of you chose to meet a new era of challenge with a new generation of leadership . . . A fresh outlook is what makes new beginnings possible. It is how we build a new majority . . . The answers, they lie in a vision that brings Americans together not only in the knowledge of what we must stand against, but in the confidence of knowing what we are for.”
Buttigieg is the ultimate candidate of the country’s post-2016 trauma. He is not a woman. He is not a socialist. He is decidedly not a revolutionary. He does not make big, sweeping promises, except one: that nothing much will change, only Donald Trump won’t be President. “What I like about Mayor Pete is that he is not a strong ideologue,” Tod Sedgwick, a volunteer who had gone to New Hampshire to canvass for Buttigieg, told me. Sedgwick, who is seventy-one and the former U.S. Ambassador to the Slovak Republic, was canvassing with his girlfriend, Christina Brown, a seventy-three-year-old community activist from Louisville, Kentucky. Sedgwick lives in Washington, D.C.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Drudge floated a trial balloon suggesting Bloomberg would tap her as his veep pick. Which presents the tiny problem that it violates Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, since both are from New York. Plus:
Pretty sure that picking Hillary Clinton to serve as your Vice President will void any life insurance policies
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says U.S. military should scale back overseas operations. She blames a total media blackout for her faltering campaign. Eh, she has a point, the Democratic Media Complex does hate her, but her failure to break through that barrier is on her. I mean, if you’re a youngish, attractive woman, how do you lose the Outsider Excitement Race to a 79-year old socialist?
#CombSaladAmy pronounces the word “blizzard” in the oddest way. This supercut of her doing a robotic retelling of the same lame campaign trail joke is Stepford level creepy. pic.twitter.com/sOh6Jlz5tA
Patrick focused his campaign entirely on New Hampshire, hoping the familiarity of a neighboring state would help boost his chances in the race. He offered what aides felt was a unique message in a field that ultimately boiled down largely to career politicians with little executive or private sector experience: that he had the track record as governor and through years of business experience to deliver on Democratic priorities like fighting climate change and reforming health care.
You would think the failure of several other governors to run viable campaigns might have deterred him, but no. Patrick got into the race in November, made no impression whatsoever, and sank without a trace. Mike Gravel and Wayne Messam had more compelling reasons to run…
We have previously discussed the efforts of the Democratic establishment and some in the media to (again) derail the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, including the raw bias against Sanders shown by CNN reporter Abby Phillip in a prior presidential debate. Now, with Sanders’ victory in New Hampshire and rising polls, figures from both politics and media are putting on a full-court press to stop Sanders. Everyone from James Carville to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews are sounding alarms over Sanders. His victory last night was called the “doomsday scenario” by a Democratic Super PAC. The most shocking was MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd who used a quote form a columnist to compare Sanders supporters to Nazi brown-shirted thugs. It is a technique used before by Todd who reads letters or quotes from others to preserve the patina of neutrality like his recent attack on Trump supporters.
“There is overall uncertainty which is growing. The real fear for Texas D’s remains Sanders,” Bill Miller, a longtime Austin lobbyist who has worked with both Democrats and Republicans, said of a Sanders ticket. “’We’d be fucked’ — that’s what they’re saying. The drain at the top goes down to the bottom.”
Texas may not be a presidential battleground, but a wave of GOP retirements in Congress, shifting demographics and Donald Trump’s lightning-rod presidency offer Democrats a shot at real power after two decades of Republican dominance. And to insiders like Miller, plans to nationalize the health care and electricity sectors will spook voters and weigh down local Democrats who are trying to thread a needle in this still deeply conservative state.
“Sure you can see my medical records! And by ‘sure’ I mean ‘no way.'” Topless PETA protestors interupt his speech.
Elizabeth Warren’s straggling campaign is cutting ad buys worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in key early states after bruising losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The retrenchment follows a dismal fourth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, down from third place in Iowa.
“We were hoping for a better result in New Hampshire,” Warren’s campaign conceded in an email to supporters Wednesday. “It hurts to care so much, work so hard, and still fall a little short.”
The campaign has cut more than $300,000 worth of ads in Nevada and South Carolina, according to two advertising trackers. The Massachusetts U.S. senator appears to be shifting her focus to Maine, with ad buys worth tens of thousands of dollars there on Wednesday, according to FCC filings.
Her New Hampshire finish behind U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has also raised concerns about whether Warren can sustain the national organizing effort her campaign is relying on for success on Super Tuesday on March 3.
“She put her eggs in a New Hampshire basket. That was the right thing to do, but it didn’t pan out,” said Democratic strategist Scott Ferson. “She’s entering a period of darkness and belt tightening and hard choices about options.”…
Warren’s much-lauded ground game has now failed her twice, making it harder to generate the millions of dollars needed to sustain her massive operation, strategists say. Warren entered 2020 with $13.7 million in the bank and raised more than $5 million after Iowa. But her campaign also spent $12 million more than it took in at the end of 2019, FEC reports show.
Maybe Warren had a great ground game, and she just sucks too hard as a candidate to take advantage of it… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Update: Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020. One of the more interesting and least pandering of the candidates, Yang ran much better than anyone (myself included) expected, but never broke out of single digits. He gets an exit interview in the New York Times. Might run for New York City mayor. It would be nearly impossible for him to do a worse job than Di Blasio…
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:
Iowa screws everything up, the Bernie juggernaut gathers momentum, there was another debate, and Biden calls a voter a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Delegates
So Sanders got 6,000 more votes than Buttigieg in Iowa…and, somehow, two less delegates. That puts the actual delegate count at:
Buttigieg 14
Sanders 12
Elizabeth Warren 8
Joe Biden 6
Amy Klobuchar 1
Klobuchar got her delegate with 12.3% of the vote. I guess the way Iowa did things that 15% threshold didn’t matter? Is that only for primaries? Or did it only matter at the precinct level? It seems like the DNC has rigged the process for maximum opaqueness…
Polls
The Iowa cock-up scrambled things so badly I’m ignoring most of these this week. All these are from Sunday and are for New Hampshire.
Maybe there will eventually be a decent-sized Iowa bounce despite all of this. But there’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan. To repeat: There’s very little importance in a mathematical sense to who wins 41 delegates. Iowa is all about the media narrative it produces and all about momentum, and that momentum, whoever wins, is likely to have been blunted.
Who might this help? Let’s pretend for a moment we don’t have any hints about how the results might have turned out. In fact, let’s pretend that Iowa didn’t happen at all. I reran our forecast model as though the Iowa caucuses were canceled….
The presence of Iowa was helpful to Bernie Sanders, whose chances of winning a national delegate majority would have been 24 percent without Iowa — as compared to the 31 percent chance that he had with Iowa, as of Monday afternoon. Iowa was hurtful to Joe Biden, however, whose chances of a delegate majority would have been 50 percent without it, rather than 43 percent with it.
And Iowa was extremely helpful to Buttigieg, whose chances of winning the delegate majority were fairly low even with Iowa — keep in mind that he had slipped to third in polls of Iowa and fifth in national polls — but would have been virtually nonexistent (less than 1 percent) without it.
By giving the winning candidates a boost, the presence of Iowa also reduced the chance of an unstructured race and a potential brokered convention. The chance of there being no delegate majority was 17 percent without Iowa, but would have been 20 percent with it.
Granted, none of those changes — say, 24 percent versus 31 percent — are necessarily that large. But that’s partly because, as of Monday afternoon, four or five candidates appeared to have a shot at winning Iowa. For the candidate who actually won Iowa, it would have been a much bigger deal. We estimate that Sanders’s chances of a majority would have shot up to from 31 percent to 58 percent with an Iowa win, Warren’s from 5 percent to 32 percent, and Buttigieg’s from 4 percent to 22 percent.
And in some ways that still discounts Iowa’s impact, because several of the campaigns — for better or worse — built their entire strategy around the state. Would Buttigieg have been a major player in the race without Iowa? Considering his lack of support among black voters, probably not. Would candidates such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julian Castro have dropped out so soon? That’s a harder call, since Harris, Booker and Castro weren’t polling particularly well anywhere. But the Democratic field might have remained a little more diverse.
So we’ve arrived at a point of some ambivalence. On the one hand, candidates such as Buttigieg, who seemingly did well there, are liable to be injured by the muddled storylines in Iowa following the results-reporting disaster on Monday night. On the other hand, it’s not clear why Iowa was afforded so much importance in the first place, and Buttigieg possibly owed his entire presence in the campaign to this quirk in the nomination process. Nonetheless, these were the rules of the game, as every candidate understood them. So if Iowa turns out not to matter very much because of the results-reporting snafu, they have every right to be upset.
To be even more blunt: The Iowa Democratic Party’s colossal screw-up in reporting results will potentially have direct effects on the outcome of the nomination process. The failure to report results will almost certainly help Biden, assuming that indications that he performed poorly in Iowa are correct, as they won’t get nearly as much media coverage. And they’ll hurt whichever candidate wins the state — most likely Sanders or Buttigieg. (Although if Sanders winds up finishing in second place or lower, he also might not mind a reduction in the importance of Iowa, especially with one of his best states, New Hampshire, coming up next.)
What if burying bad Biden news was the entire point of engineering the cockup? After all, the DNC is backing Biden and battling Bernie.
Matt Taibbi: “Yesterday’s Gone: Iowa Was Waterloo for Democrats. In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party faceplants in Iowa.”
After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.
Coinciding with the flatulent end of the party’s impeachment gambit, and the related news that Donald Trump is enjoying climbing approval ratings, the Blue Party was exposed as an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit.
Snip.
Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything. The poking incidents were bad, but then one of his chief surrogates, John Kerry, was overheard by NBC talking about the possibility of jumping in to keep Bernie from “taking down” the party.
“Maybe I’m fucking deluding myself here,” Kerry reportedly said — mainstream Democrats may not have changed their policies or strategies much since Trump, but they sure are swearing more — then noted he would have to raise a “couple of million” from people like venture capitalist Doug Hickey.
Kerry later said he was enumerating the reasons he wouldn’t run, though those notably did not include humility about his own reputation as a comical national electoral failure, or because there’s already a candidate in the race (Biden) he’d been crisscrossing Iowa urging people to vote for, but instead because he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up paid speeches. French aristocrats who shouted “Vive le Roi!” on the way to the razor did a better job advertising themselves.
With days, hours left before the caucuses, there were signs everywhere that the party establishment was scrambling to find someone among the remaining cast members to stop what Kerry called the “reality of Bernie.”
But who? Yang said smart things about inequality, so he was out. Tulsi Gabbard was Russian Bernie spawn. Tom Steyer was Dennis Kucinich with money. Voters had already rejected potential Trump WWE opponents like the “progressive prosecutor” (Kamala Harris), the “pragmatic progressive” (John Delaney), “the next Bobby Kennedy” (Beto O’Rourke), “Courageous Empathy” (Cory Booker), Medicare for All can bite me (John Hickenlooper), and over a dozen others.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case in a cover story the magazine’s Twitter account summarized as: “Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who’s gay and speaks Norwegian.” (The “Here’s something random the Democrats need to beat Trump” story became an important literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico’s “Can the “F-bomb save Beto?”).
Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey consultant with “moderates.” Reporters dug Pete; he’s been willing to be photographed holding a beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a “killer instinct,” i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.
Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete’s name had not been read out in a Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the “gold standard” survey. The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid bare.
However, Pete’s numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about “concern” that Buttigieg would not be able to win.
Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked “billionaires” in one stop, emphasized “unity” in the next, and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” or to chants of “It’s time for a woman in the White House”). Was she an outsider or an insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?
A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn’t win didn’t help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders “hot mic” story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to take on Trump.
“It’s like we all have PTSD from 2016.”
Read the whole thing for a detailed breakdown of how Democrats suddenly changed the caucus rules on people, followed by “a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude.” And even if I disgree with some of his lefty conclusions, you have to love this sentence: “Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners — everyone but donors.”
“If You Think It’s Bad for Mainstream Democrats Now, Just Wait“:
It is always darkest, John McCain used to say, before it gets totally black. So it is for the American center-left right now. Bernie Sanders is currently favored to win the nomination, a prospect that would make Donald Trump a heavy favorite to win reelection, and open the possibility of a Corbyn-esque wipeout. While Sanders has not expanded beyond a minority of the party, he has consolidated support of the party’s left wing, and while its mainstream liberal wing is split between numerous contenders, it is hard to see how the situation is likely to improve soon. Indeed, it could get worse, much worse.
The liberal conundrum begins with Joe Biden. The former vice-president led national polls until very recently, and has been the most plausible mainstream liberal candidate. At the same time, doubts about his ability to handle the rigors of the campaign at an advanced age have caused the Democratic Party to withhold the institutional support it gave Hillary Clinton. Yet his name was big enough to preclude a younger, more vigorous Democrat from emerging in the ideological space he occupied. Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris all tried and failed to run as ideological heirs of Barack Obama, because Obama’s actual partner was still there.
Actually all failed because all sucked to various degrees.
Yet Biden underperformed in Iowa, and his campaign appears to be deflating, at least momentarily. So what to do?
One strategy would be to rally around him, on the grounds that no other candidate has or will have his name recognition and ties to black voters. The other strategy is to hope his campaign collapses as quickly as possible, so that another contender can emerge. (More about them below.) At the moment it is not clear which strategy makes sense. And in the absence of an effective party to coordinate, the most likely scenario is a combination of the two: Some Democrats back Biden, others defect, and others wait to see what happens. That would be the worst possible outcome: a long, slow, painful death that prevents another liberal from taking his place and allows Sanders to gain unstoppable momentum.
In the meantime, it seems hard to imagine how Biden or a Biden alternative could emerge in the next three contests. The next contest is in New Hampshire, which borders the home states of both Sanders and his closest ideological counterpart, Elizabeth Warren. After that comes Nevada — which, like Iowa, uses the caucus system, which has a fraction of the voting participation of primaries and reward the kind of intense organization Sanders has mastered.
Then comes South Carolina. Biden has been pointing to this state, where he has always led, as his firewall. But will it hold if he is coming off three straight defeats? It is possible that by this point, Biden will have been supplanted in the center-left lane by Pete Buttigieg or even Amy Klobuchar. However, neither has the inroads to the state’s black community that Biden built, which means neither would be able to count on its support as a bulwark against the left-leaning electorates in the previous states. Also, as an additional morbid touch, the South Carolina primary will feature an organized influx of Republicans voting for Sanders in a specific plan to boost what they see as Democrats’ weakest nominee.
I suspect any “Operation Chaos” effects will be widely overstated.
So it is entirely possible that, following South Carolina, Sanders will have won three or all four of the contests. If nobody has emerged as a viable alternative by then, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign will be stepping in. It is extremely hard to estimate the probability of success of a candidate who has skipped the first four races. FiveThirtyEight’s model currently gives Bloomberg less than a one percent chance of winning.
To be sure, if Bloomberg is the last Democrat standing against Sanders, he may well attract substantial support from Democratic elected officials and put up a strong fight. Still, he would face enormous opposition from the left. This is, after all, a billionaire who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004. And while the left has previously whipped itself into an angry frenzy against, successively, O’Rourke, Biden, Harris, and Buttigieg, the rage against Bloomberg would reach a new level.
At that point, the victory scenario would involve a long, bloody struggle all the way to the convention, with the Sanders movement claiming at every step of the way that the party is rigging the race against them, culminating in a convention where his enraged supporters will again try to shout down the proceedings. Unless one of the non-Bloombergs can somehow get off the mat and defeat Sanders, this is probably the best-case scenario for liberals at this point. It seems more probable that Sanders crushes the field and brings his historically unique suite of liabilities to the ticket.
It’s interesting how little Chait mentions Buttigieg, almost as if he’s nothing more than a placeholder. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Van Jones says that President Trump is serious about trying to win over black voters. “That was a warning to us. A warning shot across the bow to Democrats that he’s going after enough black votes to cause us problems. It’s not just the white suburban voters, he’s going after black votes.”
Who got the biggest bang for their buck in Iowa spending? It’s no surprise that Steyer and Bennet wasted their money. More interesting is the fact that Biden actually got one of the best returns on his $4 million in TV ad spending. Which is another way of saying if his campaign wasn’t so bad at fundraising, he might not have been so embarrassed in Iowa…
Where candidates stand on legalizing weed. Biden and Nurse Bloomberg against, all the other Dems they bothered with for. Gabbard, Bennet and Patrick all ignored. Biggest caveat: This is from The Motley Fool, whose every ad I glimpse on those occasions I websurf without adblock seems to be pumping some marijuana-related stock.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of James Carville, he endorsed Bennet. So, you think Bennet’s going to bow out of the race Tuesday night, or will he wait until Wednesday morning?
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He released an attack ad against Buttigieg:
Former Mayor Pete doesn’t think very highly of the Obama-Biden record. Let’s compare. pic.twitter.com/132TB7MHaq
Pretty devastating to Buttigieg. But also pretty devastating to Biden, tying him as it does to two of the Obama Administration’s most outstanding failures: ObamaCare and the Iran Deal. Shockingly, the Biden campaign is gobsmacked by their own incompetence in Iowa:
Days before Iowa Democrats went to their precinct caucuses, the news dropped like a bomb.
Leaked poll numbers from what would have been the final Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed Joe Biden in fourth place with 13 percent.
Biden’s Iowa staffers were floored, according to a person familiar with discussions among several aides at the time.
“None of us thought we were at 13 percent,” the person said. “We can’t be in fourth place. That just cannot be right.”
But it was right. And it confirmed what rival campaigns had whispered for months — Biden wasn’t inspiring Iowa voters and his support was inch-deep.
While the full Iowa caucus results still aren’t in, Biden’s unexpectedly weak performance Monday — he’s in fourth place with 16 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting — has provoked frustration and recriminations within the campaign, according to interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides and surrogates.
Bet it did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Quid Pro Joe gets testy over Ukraine. Everyone thought the impeachment farce was meant to protect Biden, but what it may end up doing is dooming him. Oh, and he did this:
Bloomberg is a tricky candidate to forecast, given that his strategy of essentially skipping the first four states but then spending enormous amounts of money on the race is fairly unprecedented. Although Bloomberg is at only 11 percent in national polls right now — below the 15 percent threshold required to pick up delegates in states and congressional districts — he’s getting close enough to the threshold that the model actually has him picking up a decent number of delegates in its average simulation.
Forecast omitted, but they have him doing better in the delegate count than Klobuchar.
On the other hand, the model thinks it’s quite unlikely that Bloomberg can get a majority of delegates because he’s getting off to a late start. It’s not that skipping out on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina is itself all that costly; those states have relatively few delegates. Rather, it’s that Bloomberg is unlikely to have a huge surge before Super Tuesday.
Here’s why that matters. Bloomberg could certainly do reasonably well on Super Tuesday and get a surge in later states. But at that point, 38 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. Say Bloomberg wins 30 percent of the delegates on Super Tuesday; that would certainly get him some attention, probably make him a real contender, and perhaps knock other moderate candidates out of the race. Bloomberg, however, would need to get 64 percent of the delegates in all the states beyond Super Tuesday to earn a majority of pledged delegates, which is an awfully high bar to clear.
Bloomberg getting a plurality of pledged delegates, on the other hand, is more likely. (There’s a 1 in 40 chance of that, or about 3 percent, according to our model — as compared to a roughly 1 in 100 chance he gets a majority.) More likely still is that Bloomberg appears to be the strongest candidate at the end of the process, even though he doesn’t necessarily have a plurality. There’s a 5 percent chance that Bloomberg will be leading in national polls at the end of the race, our model estimates.2 Being able to point to indicators like that could be helpful to Bloomberg in the not-at-all-unlikely event of a contested convention.
He’s really against marijuana legalization. He met with some Democratic governors, who might be looking for a new horse now that Biden looks like he’s going to be euthanized on the track.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Veep spot? Two different headlines, about the same Ellen DeGeneres apperance on the same day: “Hillary Clinton says her joining Democratic ticket as VP nominee is ‘not going to happen.’ “Hillary Clinton on being vice president: ‘Never say never.'” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Klobuchar joins the swelling ranks of Democrats with a shot.” Ah, no. She got one delegate in Iowa. One. Uno. Exceeding expectations doesn’t mean she gets anywhere close to sniffing the nomination (though it probably does help raise her status as a possible veep pick). She tried to pop the Buttigieg bubble at the debate. I see little evidence she succeeded.
Bernie Sanders has by far the best chance of any candidate to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, according to the Nate Silver model. Moreover, the odds that Sanders wins that prize outright are twice as good as the odds for a brokered convention in Milwaukee, in Silver’s view. Sanders has a better chance than anyone else to win the Nevada caucuses, according to Silver’s site, FiveThirtyEight, and a better chance than Joe Biden to win the South Carolina primary.
At the moment, Silver gives Sanders a 44 percent chance of winning Delaware, against 40 percent for Biden.
Could Silver be wrong? Of course. Could Sanders slip? Certainly. Could Biden regain his momentum? It could happen. Could voters take a second look at Mike Bloomberg (whom Silver gives less than a 1 percent shot at winning the nomination)? Sure. But at the moment there is little doubt that Bernie Sanders is your Democratic Party frontrunner.
Sanders backers contend he is the only candidate capable of bringing out young people and others who normally wouldn’t vote. While there is evidence that Sanders did pull in more young voters in Iowa, overall turnout was significantly below record numbers posted in 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama rode a wave of enthusiasm to the White House. That casts doubt on Sanders’ argument that his brand of left-wing populism can inspire enough new voters to defeat Trump, said Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and the ex-mayor of Chicago.
“There wasn’t this magic army” that materialized in Iowa, Emanuel said. “The cavalry wasn’t coming.”
Snip.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell called the bungled count a “fiasco.”
“We don’t look very good when one of our biggest arguments against Donald Trump is that he’s incompetent, and every day something happens where we screw something up,” Rendell, a Biden supporter and former DNC chair, told Reuters.
Tom Steyer has blanketed South Carolina in cash. Over the past seven months, he’s spent $14 million in TV and radio ads, spent over $100,000 on ads in black-owned newspapers, hired 93 staffers, an army of volunteers and assembled the largest state-wide operation of any other campaign.
The billionaire activist has poured more money into South Carolina in a short period of time than anyone in the state can remember — and it’s beginning to reshape the contours of the Feb. 29 primary.
“The unemployment rate in South Carolina has probably dropped an entire percentage point thanks to the Tom Steyer campaign,” said Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist based in South Carolina. “Every YouTube video that comes on in South Carolina has a Tom Steyer ad in front of it. And he says things that every Democrat agrees with.”
While there hasn’t been much public polling in the state, Steyer’s been in double-digits in all three surveys released this month. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Steyer is second only to Joe Biden in the state, with Bernie Sanders a close third.
In a state where African Americans are expected to cast more than half of the primary vote, the Biden campaign has long held up South Carolina as his firewall due to the large amount of black voter support he has there. Rival campaigns have struggled to close the gap. But as Steyer continues to not only spend big on TV ads but also on local minority media, he’s been able to steadily gain ground among some African American voters.
He calls for $22 an hour minimum wage; enjoy your new $10 Big Macs, America. Steyer went after a Biden surrogate (SC State Sen. Dick Harpootlian) over allegedly saying something racist, but actually Harpootlian pointed out that Steyer “hiring” a black SC state rep for $50,000 a month looks shady as hell:
Mr. Money Bags a.k.a @TomSteyer has paid S.C. State Rep. Jerry Govan almost $50,000 for a month worth of work? Is he pocketing the dough or redistributing the wealth? cc: Steyer FEC report
As the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Obama administration’s consumer watchdog, Warren rewarded Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), which pressured the Obama administration to appoint her to the post in the first place. She gave the group unparalleled access to the CFPB while she led the agency, meeting with AFR associates on twice as many occasions as she did with any other Washington, D.C., interest group. As a member of the Senate, she has supported bills backed by the group. On the campaign trail, she has issued proposals that would benefit leaders of the group.
AFR, which represents more than 200 deep-pocketed liberal organizations including the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, is not required to disclose its donors. In 2010, it drummed up both grassroots and institutional support for Warren’s appointment to the CFPB. AFR representatives went on a media blitz to support Warren and directed rank-and-file members to sign pro-Warren petitions that were submitted to the Obama administration. One letter to the White House sent by AFR’s sister organization was signed by nearly two dozen of D.C.’s most powerful liberal interest groups.
“In his life before politics, they said they saw in Mr. Yang a man who was smart, had good ideas, was a persuasive speaker and was occasionally inspiring. But he sometimes stumbled in his dealings with gender and race, expressing what the former employees said were antiquated and unnerving views for a presidential candidate seeking the nomination from a Democratic Party that has been moving to the left,” the Times reported.
Former employees alleged that there was a “collective shrug” about previous reports on how Yang “treated women who worked for him” and that his “cavalier use of racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans” and a “lack of attention of his record as a chief executive” have “gnawed” at staffers who claim they “watched their boss similary fumble delicate topics and conversations for years.”
Sounds like he didn’t bow and scrape to Social justice Warrior pieties enough. He’s sounding better and better all the time…
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:
Remember Solyndra, the solar energy company with Democratic Party connections that sucked up some half a billion dollars worth of green energy loans before going belly up?
If you liked Solyndra, you’re gonna love the Crescent Dunes solar plant near Tonopah, Nevada. Thanks to the efforts of Obama energy secretary Steven Chu and then-majority leader Harry Reid, it sucked up $737 million in federal loan guarantees.
Tiny problem: It was obsolete before it ever came online:
Ten thousand mirrors form a spiral almost 2 miles wide that winds around a skyscraper rising above the desert between Las Vegas and Reno. The operation soaks up enough heat from the sun’s rays to spin steam turbines and store energy in the form of molten salt.
In 2011 the $1 billion project was to be the biggest solar plant of its kind, and it looked like the future of renewable power. Citigroup Inc. and other financiers invested $140 million with its developer, SolarReserve Inc. Steven Chu, the U.S. Department of Energy secretary at the time, offered the company government loan guarantees, and Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader and senior senator from Nevada, cleared the way for the company to build on public land. At a Washington celebration of SolarReserve’s public funding, Chief Executive Officer Kevin Smith told the assembled politicians, “We’re proud to be doing our part to win the future.”
SolarReserve may have done its part, but today the company doesn’t rank among the winners. Instead, it’s mired in litigation and accusations of mismanagement at Crescent Dunes, where taxpayers remain on the hook for $737 million in loan guarantees. Late last year, Crescent Dunes lost its only customer, NV Energy Inc., which cited the plant’s lack of reliability. It’s a victim, ironically, of the solar industry’s success over the past decade. The steam generators at Crescent Dunes require custom parts and a staff of dozens to keep things humming and to conduct regular maintenance. By the time the plant opened in 2015, the increased efficiency of cheap solar panels had already surpassed its technology, and today it’s obsolete—the latest panels can pump out power at a fraction of the cost for decades with just an occasional hosing-down.
“Green energy” subsidies aren’t carefully evaluated projects designed to advance technology, they exit to transfer money from the pockets of taxpayers to the pockets of those tied into what Ayn Rand called “The Aristocracy of Pull.” This is why government should stay out of the business of picking winners and losers.
Are SolarReserve Inc. executives connected to the Democratic Party? And how!
Chairman Lee Bailey donated tons of money to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer and (naturally) Harry Reid.
CEO Tom Georgis has only sent money to two candidates: Barack Obama and Harry Reid.
Board member James McDermott? Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, John Kerry, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Bart Stupak (remember him?).
Yes, it’s a great mystery how SolarReserve Inc. got all those federal subsidies…
Bullock and Harris drop Out, Bloomberg rises (though slowly), Booker gets weepy, Tulsi sings, and Democrats have a diversity problem. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
With just under two months until the Iowa caucuses, the already-volatile Democratic presidential race has grown even more unsettled, setting the stage for a marathon nominating contest between the party’s moderate and liberal factions.
Pete Buttigieg’s surge, Bernie Sanders’s revival, Elizabeth Warren’s struggles and the exit of Kamala Harris have upended the primary and, along with Joseph R. Biden’s Jr. enduring strength with nonwhite voters, increased the possibility of a split decision after the early nominating states.
That’s when Michael R. Bloomberg aims to burst into the contest — after saturating the airwaves of the Super Tuesday states with tens of millions of dollars of television ads.
With no true front-runner and three other candidates besides Mr. Bloomberg armed with war chests of over $20 million, Democrats are confronting the prospect of a drawn-out primary reminiscent of the epic Clinton-Obama contest in 2008.
“There’s a real possibility Pete wins here, Warren takes New Hampshire, Biden South Carolina and who knows about Nevada,” said Sue Dvorsky, a former Iowa Democratic chair. “Then you go into Super Tuesday with Bloomberg throwing $30 million out of his couch cushions and this is going to go for a while.”
That’s a worrisome prospect for a party already debating whether it has a candidate strong enough to defeat President Trump next November. The contenders have recently begun to attack one another more forcefully — Ms. Warren, a nonaggressor for most of the campaign, took on Mr. Buttigieg on Thursday night — and the sparring could get uglier the longer the primary continues.
A monthslong delegate battle would also feature a lengthy public airing of the party’s ideological fissures and focus more attention on contentious policies like single-payer health care while allowing Mr. Trump to unleash millions of dollars in attack ads portraying Democrats as extreme.
The candidates are already planning for a long race, hiring staff members for contests well past the initial early states. But at the moment they are also grappling with a primary that has evolved into something of a three-dimensional chess match, in which moves that may seem puzzling are taken with an eye toward a future payoff.
Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, for example, are blocking each other from consolidating much of the left, but instead of attacking each other the two senators are training their fire on Mr. Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor. He has taken a lead in Iowa polls yet spent much of the past week courting black voters in the South.
And Mr. Biden is concluding an eight-day bus tour across Iowa, during which he has said his goal is to win the caucuses, but his supporters privately say they would also be satisfied if Mr. Buttigieg won and denied Ms. Warren a victory.
It may seem a little confusing, but there’s a strategy behind the moves.
Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren each covet the other’s progressive supporters but are wary about angering them by attacking each other. So Ms. Warren has begun drawing an implicit contrast by emphasizing her gender — a path more available now with Ms. Harris’s exit — and they are both targeting a shared opponent whom many of their fiercest backers disdain: Mr. Buttigieg.
The mayor has soared in heavily white Iowa, but has virtually no support among voters of color. So he started airing commercials in South Carolina spotlighting his faith and took his campaign there and into Alabama this past week — an acknowledgment that Iowans may be uneasy about him if he can’t demonstrate appeal with more diverse voters.
As for Mr. Biden, his supporters think he would effectively end the primary by winning Iowa. But they believe the next best outcome would be if Mr. Buttigieg fends off Ms. Warren there to keep her from sweeping both Iowa and New Hampshire and gaining too much momentum. They are convinced she’s far more of a threat than Mr. Buttigieg to build a multiracial coalition and breach the former vice president’s firewall in Nevada and South Carolina.
I don’t think Warren’s winning Iowa or New Hampshire, but since this was actually in the article, and I had to see it, now you have to see it too:
And you thought the Halloween nightmare season was over…
The Times piece didn’t mention the policy initiative upon which Harris launched her campaign: Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All legislation, which would eliminate private and employer-based health insurance. Harris signed on as a cosponsor to the bill last April. It’s haunted her ever since. Medicare for All might look like the sort of “big, structural change” that sets progressive hearts aflutter. For most voters it causes arrhythmia.
The proposal is liberals’ fool’s gold. It appears valuable but is actually worthless. It gets the progressive politician coming and going: Not only do voters recoil at the notion of having their insurance canceled, but candidates look awkward and inauthentic when they begin to move away from the unpopular idea they mistakenly embraced. That’s what happened to Harris earlier this year and is happening to Elizabeth Warren today.
Harris moved into second place nationwide after her ambush of Joe Biden over busing during the first Democratic debate. But her position soon began to erode. Her wavering position on eliminating private insurance dissatisfied voters. She had raised her hand in support of the policy during the debate, but the next day she walked it back. Then she walked back the walk-back. Then, ahead of the second debate, she released an intermediary plan that allowed for certain forms of private insurance. She stumbled again when Biden called her to account for the cost of the bill. Tulsi Gabbard’s pincer move on incarceration, using data first reported by the Free Beacon, made matters worse. By September, Harris had fallen to fifth place.
This was around the time that Warren, bolstered by adoring press coverage and strong retail politics, began her ascent. For a moment in early October, she pulled slightly ahead of Biden in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Her rivals sensed an opportunity in her refusal to admit that middle-class taxes would have to increase to pay for Medicare for All. The attacks took their toll. Support for Warren fell. She then released an eye-popping payment scheme that failed to satisfy her critics. In early November, she released a “first term” plan that would “transition” the country to Medicare for All. In so doing, she conceded the unreality of her initial proposal. She came across as sophistical and conniving. Her descent continues.
The national front-runner, Joe Biden, and the early-state leader, Pete Buttigieg, both reject Medicare for All in favor of a public option that would allow people to buy into Medicare.
Could all this sound and fury just boil down to Bernie vs. Biden? “Warren’s early October high has worn off, while Sanders has steadily crept back up in the polls. The result is that the two are in a virtual heat for second place.”
Disappointed Democrats groused that you obviously had to be rich to compete in the 2020 race — because [Harris] was gone, while two billionaires remained — and pointed to the potentially all-white, un-diverse lineup at the party’s next debate as proof that the qualifying criteria put too much of a premium on fund-raising.
But Harris had made the cut for that debate. And she entered the presidential sweepstakes with a higher net worth ($6 million, according to Forbes) than Bernie Sanders ($2.5 million), Amy Klobuchar ($2 million) or Pete Buttigieg ($100,000), who are still in the hunt and are among the six contenders slated to be sparring onstage on Dec. 19. What’s more, Sanders and another of the six, Elizabeth Warren, have raised buckets of money without courting plutocrats.
Many Democrats blamed the media for Harris’s demise. They have a point, inasmuch as some news organizations never had the kind of romance with her that they did with Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, two white men. I noted as much in a column last May, pointing to O’Rourke’s placement on the cover of Vanity Fair and Buttigieg’s on the cover of Time.
But the media fell quickly out of love with O’Rourke and is picking Buttigieg apart for his lack of support among African-Americans and his past employment as a McKinsey consultant. And Harris was hardly ignored: Her initial campaign rally in Oakland, Calif., in January was covered live, in its entirety, on MSNBC and CNN. That same month, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC told her, in a face-to-face interview, “I think there is a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.” And after the Democratic debate in June, when Harris stirringly confronted Joe Biden about his past opposition to federally mandated busing to integrate schools, she received a bonanza of media attention and rapturous reviews.
I get that this Democratic primary isn’t playing out as anyone predicted or in remote accordance with the party’s image of itself and with its priorities. None of the top four candidates — Biden, Warren, Buttigieg and Sanders — is a person of color, three of them are 70 or older, and the billionaires, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg, are dipping into their personal fortunes in their efforts to gain ground. For a party that celebrates diversity, pitches itself to underdogs and prides itself on being future-minded and youth-oriented, that’s a freaky, baffling turn of events.
But some of the conclusions being drawn and complaints being raised don’t fully hold water.
Take the fears about the nomination being purchased. Without question, running for office is too expensive. That dynamic can definitely favor candidates with lucrative connections. And candidates are forced — unless they’re Steyer or Bloomberg — to devote ludicrous and possibly corrupting sums of time to political panhandling.
But at least at present, neither Steyer nor Bloomberg is exactly barreling toward victory. And while Cory Booker drew a connection between Harris’s departure and a process warped by wealth, the link is tenuous. Booker, whose campaign presses on despite his failure to qualify for the December debate, said of Harris’s withdrawal, “Voters did not determine her destiny.”
Actually, they kind of did. They’re the ones who are or aren’t excited enough about a candidacy to donate money and keep it alive. They’re the ones responding to pollsters and, by flagging their preferences, determining which candidates take on the air of plausibility that often generates the next round of donations. I keep seeing, on Twitter and Facebook, laments about Harris’s fate from Democrats who chose to support candidates other than her. Well, she couldn’t succeed on generalized, ambient good will.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another piece warning than if Biden places out of the money in Iowa and New Hampshire his campaign dies. “Biden: ‘Nobody warned me’ about Hunter and Ukraine because Beau was dying.”
Joe Biden asserted that he never heard worries that his son Hunter Biden’s role on a Ukrainian gas company could create a conflict of interest.
“Nobody warned me about a potential conflict of interest,” Biden said Friday in an interview with NPR. “I never, never heard that once at all.”
Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father was vice president and working on Ukrainian policy. President Trump asked the Ukrainian president this year to investigate the Bidens, prompting Democrats to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump.
George Kent, a top State Department official, testified during impeachment hearings in November that he raised conflict of interest concerns after he learned Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board.
Is pathos supposed to distract us from the fact that Biden is too incompetent to keep his own house in order? Or are we just supposed to assume that so much graft and self-dealing went on the Obama White House that Hunter’s piddling $50 grand a month Ukrainian sinecure was side hustle chump change next to the scams others were running? Speaking of Ukraine, John Kerry endorses his stepsons’s business partner’s father. “Here Are The Billionaires Backing Joe Biden’s Presidential Campaign.” Prominent names include Google’s Eric Schmidt, eBay’s Meg Whitman, Valve’s Gabe Newell, and George Lucas’ wife. He gets testy in a town hall and calls a retired farmer “fat.” Speaking of horrifying images lodged in your brain:
After two weeks in the presidential race, Mike Bloomberg now employs one of the largest campaign staff rosters, has spent more money on ads than all the top-polling Democrats combined and is simultaneously building out ground operations in 27 states.
But when the former New York mayor showed up to get the endorsement of Augusta Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. on Friday, only two of the 10 chairs initially placed before the lectern were occupied. When Bloomberg joked about his college years, saying he “was one of the students who made the top half of the class possible,” he was met by silence.
“You’re supposed to laugh at that, folks,” Bloomberg said to a room at the city’s African American history museum filled mostly with staff and media.
For a normal presidential campaign, such moments would be a worrying sign, a potentially viral metaphor for a struggling effort. But with the Bloomberg campaign, it is not at all clear what established rules apply, if any. Everything he is doing is so unlike what has been done for decades that it is difficult to decipher how voters will react.
Rather than focus on the early states, he is campaigning for votes deep in the 2020 calendar, in places where voters are less tuned in to the nominating process. Rather than worry about a budget, he has put no limit on the money he is prepared to spend. Rather than run in a Democratic primary by appealing to ideological die-hards or partisan flag bearers, he describes himself as “basically nonpartisan.”
Although far outside the box, the effort is not easily dismissed. As a former three-term New York mayor, he comes to the race with more executive governing experience and has represented more voters than most of his competitors, as well as a philanthropic record he has emphasized in campaign ads while pushing several core liberal priorities, including increased gun regulation and the reduction of carbon pollution. His campaign message is focused on his own competence and electability.
It’s ironic that he’s focusing on “competence and electability” while pushing two of the democratic Party policies most likely to lose him votes in swing states. Gun grabbing and carbon taxes are electoral poison in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Tired of pieces that do nothing but rip into Bloomberg? Me neither:
Everyone will have their least favorite figure in the Democratic presidential primary. Mine might be Michael Bloomberg, for sheer self-regard, narcissism, condescension, and arrogance.
Bloomberg did his first televised interview as a presidential candidate with CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King. Some of the highlights, or depending upon your perspective:
No other Democrats is even remotely as good Michael Bloomberg, according to Michael Bloomberg.
MIKE BLOOMBERG: I watched all the candidates. And I just thought to myself, “Donald Trump would eat ’em up.”
GAYLE KING: You think all the candidates who are running today, he would eat them up?
MIKE BLOOMBERG: Let me rephrase it. I think that I would do the best job of competing with him and beating him.
His ego is justified because of his accomplishments, he explained.
MIKE BLOOMBERG: Does it take an ego? Yeah, I guess it takes an ego to think that you could do the job. I have 12 years of experience in City Hall. And I think if you go back today and ask most people about those 12 years, they would say that the– not me, but the team that I put together made an enormous difference in New York City. And New York City benefited from it and continues to benefit from it today from what we did then.
Even his flip-flops are a demonstration of his intelligence, competence, and guts, he explained.
GAYLE KING: Stop and frisk. You recently apologized for that. Some people are suspicious of the timing of your apology.
MIKE BLOOMBERG: The mark of an intelligent, competent person is when they make a mistake, they have the guts to stand up and say, ‘I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’
Bloomberg complimented the remaining African-American candidate in the race for being “very well-spoken.”
GAYLE KING: the next debate is December And Cory Booker– said that it could possibly be on that debate stage no one of color. There would be more billionaires in the race than black people. Is that a problem to you?
MIKE BLOOMBERG: Well, Cory Booker endorsed me a number of times. And I endorsed Cory Booker a number of times. He’s very well-spoken. He’s got some good ideas.
To be fair, if fellow New York City mayor Bill de Blasio were still in the race, Bloomberg would only be the second most loathed figure in the race…
The tears started flowing near the end of Saturday night’s town hall, as Cory Booker knew they would. The senator from New Jersey had started closing his events with a story about a mentor calling for him from his hospital bed, sharing his last six words.
“He said to me: I see you, I love you,” Booker said. “I see you. I love you.”
Some people had started wiping their eyes. “A family moving up from the South, distressed. Neighbors that didn’t know them helped my family out. I see you. I love you. Slaves trying to escape from the South find white families opening their barns up, pulling together to build the greatest infrastructure project this county has ever known, the Underground Railroad. I see you. I love you.”
The crowd of around 50 Iowans is silent, except for the sniffles and tissue packets. Booker has done this repeatedly, over a year-long campaign that has made him well-liked across the state — a popular second choice for voters whose top pick is Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg.
But Booker is an infrequent first choice, and it’s about to cost him. Unless something dramatic happens by Thursday, he’ll be knocked out of the sixth Democratic debate. Even Democrats who aren’t voting for Booker say they’re upset about that, wondering how the most diverse primary field in party history could become all white. The end of Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s campaign rattled some Democrats, and Booker wants them to think about why. That starts with his own story, about a father who fought segregation to help his family, and a Stanford graduate who became a poor city’s mayor. That — hint, hint — was what would be left offstage.
White liberal Democrats will do anything for black candidates except vote for them.
“It’s unfair to voters,” Booker said about the debate rules in an interview after a stop in Iowa City. “One of the most significant campaign presences here, and not be able to be on the debate stage? That’s unacceptable. The attitude from even local media here has been saying things like: Look, if you’re polled, choose Cory Booker, he deserves to be on the stage. There’s a backlash that’s going on here, where people are turning to our campaign, saying this is not right, we want to help.”
In front of voters, Booker was even more direct: “If you sit there and you see a caller I.D. and don’t recognize the number, for the next week or so, answer the phone.”
Booker is not the only nonwhite Democrat who could get onstage. Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii closer to qualifying than Booker is, based on polling. (Candidates must hit 4 percent in four polls, or 6 percent in two polls of early states, to qualify.) All three have hit the DNC’s fundraising marker and attracted at least 200,000 donations, as has Julián Castro, who was bumped out of the last debate.
Senator Cory Booker, one of two black Democrats still running for president, thinks the Democratic Party has created a primary contest that’s “going to have the unintended consequence of excluding people of color” while benefiting the white billionaires in the race.
“Is that really the symbol that the Democratic party wants to be sending out? That this is going to be made by money and elites’ decisions, not by the people? That’s a very problematic message to send,” Booker told BuzzFeed News in an interview outside his Cedar Rapids campaign office on Sunday morning.
After Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the race last week, Booker has said he thinks the primary has been hijacked by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who are able to use their considerable wealth to reach voters quickly. For instance, despite launching his campaign much later than other candidates, Steyer has a spot on the Democratic debate stage next week, while none of the four candidates of color have met the DNC’s requirements to qualify.
“When you watch an election, even in Iowa here when you’re staying in hotels here, you see Steyer and Bloomberg’s ads wall to wall and you see Kamala not making it now because of money,” he said.
Steyer’s spending millions to suck. Harris raised millions, and stopped raising them when people found out how badly she sucked.
Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Dropped Out. Twitter. Facebook. Dropped out December 2, 2019, seemingly right after I hit publish on last week’s Clown Car update, and says he’s not running for the senate. 538 does a failure analysis of both Bullock and Sestak:
On paper, he coulda been a contender: He’s a sitting governor, and governors have historically done well in presidential nominating contests. (Although it’s likely the 2020 nominee will not be a current or former governor — with Bullock’s departure, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is the only remaining current or former governor in the race.) And as the former chair of the Democratic Governors Association, he’s friendly with the establishment and even enjoyed the endorsement of Iowa’s most prominent statewide Democratic officeholder. He could also make a convincing case for his electability against President Trump, something that is very important to Democratic voters this cycle, as Bullock won reelection as Montana governor by 4 percentage points at the same time that Trump carried the state by 20 points.
But as with so many other candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden overshadowed Bullock. Biden has proven more durable in the primary than many pundits expected, which has limited the ability of similar candidates (center-left, white, male, perceived as electable, possessing executive experience) to get a foothold. And, for whatever reason, donors and other party leaders who are leery of Biden have chosen to recruit new candidates to enter the race rather than get behind a candidate like Bullock. And with his polling average in Iowa barely better than it was nationally, Bullock may have concluded that his path to the White House no longer existed.
Even with 12 Democratic candidates out, 16 remain in. No, Democrats do not have a quantity problem. What they have is a diversity problem – one of ideology – the only diversity problem they do not long to discuss.
To understand Democrats’ ideological diversity problem, compare two of this week’s casualties: Bullock and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).
Bullock was a popular two-term governor from red state Montana, the kind of state Democrats hope to flip to win in 2020. Harris is a first-term senator from bluest of blue California, the kind of state Democrats could not lose if they tried. Bullock is a white man; Harris, a minority woman. Bullock’s support remained low and flat throughout his brief campaign; Harris experienced a brief boom-let.
None of those differences mattered much. The only one that mattered was the ideological one. Men and women, whites and minorities, and extreme liberals and less-extreme liberals remain in the race. Bullock was the contest’s only conservative. Harris was an undisguised liberal. Still, according to the Real Clear Politics average of national polling, just before their exits, Bullock stood at 0.5 percent; Harris was at 4 percent. That numerical difference is indicative of the race’s content.
Bullock’s exit will be written off discreetly as a failure to gain “traction.” That is no more than face-saving fiction. If “traction” means what it objectively should – a significant increase in enthusiasm for their candidacy – then the whole Democratic field lack it. By such a standard, they should all be gone.
Honestly, how many conservatives are even left in the Democratic Party?
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Last week we saw his beefcake, this week he’s talking about his endurance in the race. Maybe he should walk on stage to a Barry White tune. Actually, he should totally do that, because it would be hilarious, and at 1% he can’t possibly do any worse.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s the complete Joe Rogan interview with Gabbard (his second) that I merely posted an excerpt from last week:
She sings “imagine.” I hate that song, but she’s not cringy:
Senator Kamala Devi Harris, who survived growing up in the segregated deep south of Berkeley and then Montreal, was a sure lock to be the next President of the United States.
And then, after raising $36 million from gullible idiots and greedy special interests, she dropped out without even facing a single primary. It was her single greatest act of courage since being bused across the Mason-Dixon line from Berkeley into Thousand Oaks. Sadly, she just wasn’t bused far enough.
There were many high points in the presidential campaign of the woman who would be Obama.
Her estranged father came out to condemn her for suggesting that his family was a bunch of pot smokers. It’s not everyday a presidential candidate’s father states that her great-grandmothers are “turning in their grave” over her “identity politics” and that her Jamaican family wish to “dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” The travesty being the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.
It took a while, but Kamala Harris also disassociated herself from her travesty of a campaign.
Snip.
The problem with Kamala Harris for the People was that the people didn’t want Kamala. Toward the end, Kamala was polling at 2% in the HarrisX poll (no relation) alongside winners like Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and the guy who promises to tell the truth about the secret UFO base on the moon.
If Moon Base Guy has a Twitter feed, I give him good odds to beat Delaney in Iowa.
By then her campaign had broken out in spasms of vicious infighting between her sister Maya and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez who were only speaking to each through media leaks. Rodriguez had run Kamala’s Senate campaign and had the requisite skills to win elections in a corrupt one-party state. He was out of his depth competing in a national election and the dysfunctional campaign showed it.
But the real brains behind Kamala Harris for the People was, predictably, a member of the family.
Maya Harris had headed the ACLU in Northern California, then had a plum spot at the Ford Foundation, before becoming a senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and then as campaign chair for her sister. “Hillary really trusted her instincts,” John Podesta said of Maya. So did Kamala.
Too bad for her.
With her ACLU and Ford Foundation background, Maya had been billed as Kamala’s “progressive link”. It was more like the weakest link. While her campaign manager was out of his depth, her campaign chairwoman kept pushing her sister far leftward. And while that strategy worked in California where socialized medicine can pass without anyone having a clue how to pay for it: it didn’t work nationally.
Kamala Harris for the People, the campaign brand, played off Kamala’s background as a prosecutor. But under Maya, that part of her resume, the biggest part that doesn’t involve Willie Brown, got buried. Maya pushed Kamala into the same radical policy space as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren while trying to compete for Joe Biden’s black voters. But Kamala and Maya were too detached from the black community to realize that South Carolina black voters wanted a more conservative candidate.
Instead of winning over leftists and black voters, Kamala lost both.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) “I will admit that seeing a liberal accuse the Democratic base of being racist is a delicious and refreshing change of pace, but it’s as lazy here as it is when they lob this nonsense at Republicans. Kamala Harris’s biggest problem was always Kamala Harris.” Powerline: “The substance was Harris’s record as a prosecutor in California. The problem wasn’t just that Harris was a zealous prosecutor at times. That’s to her credit as far as I’m concerned. The biggest problem was her over-zealousness. Some of her practices were offensive even to a die hard law and order type like me.” This piece identifies four fatal flaws with her campaign:
Mismanaging Campaign Funds: “Harris raised an ample amount of cash early in the campaign but didn’t husband her resources well and failed to adjust in time when her fundraising slowed. The New York Times reported that at the time she dropped out, Harris would have had to go into debt to continue her campaign.”
Choosing the Wrong Ground on which to Fight (i.e., going after Biden for his opposition to forced busing)
Trying to Have It Both Ways on Medicare for All
Waging a Front-Runner’s Campaign When She Needed to Wage an Insurgent’s: “Biden, the de-facto front-runner from the beginning, has proven to be much more durable in national polls than many expected, and his support among African-American voters in South Carolina kept Harris from ever really taking off in the first-in-the-South primary. Yet Harris kept on campaigning as if she were leading the race, focusing on national media, limiting her early events in Iowa, sticking to stage-managed appearances, and, worst of all, appearing thoroughly scripted.”
All true, though left unsaid is the fact that she sucked as a campaigner, an uncomfortable truth papered over by a fawning media desperate to boost the candidacy of a black liberal women.
The result has been an influx of money that has allowed her to build up her Iowa staff, though not on the scale of her rivals. Still, Klobuchar had added five offices around the state to the 10 she had.
Also noteworthy, this week she added to her team veteran Iowa Democratic campaign operative Norm Sterzenbach, a former Iowa Democratic Party executive director who had been an adviser to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Klobuchar was on a three-day trip through Iowa, including lightly populated counties in her quest to campaign in each of Iowa’s 99 counties before the Feb. 3 caucuses. By Saturday, she planned to have campaigned in her 70th.
Snip.
There are signs it’s got potential. The Des Moines Register-CNN-Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted last month showed Klobuchar rising to a distant fifth, behind Buttigieg, Warren, Biden and Sanders. A brighter spot for her: Nearly 40% of likely caucus participants were still considering her, a jump of more than 10 percentage points in the past month.
Of all the longshots, Klobuchar is best situated to compete in Iowa. She also campaigned in Denver.
To call Deval Patrick’s campaign a shoestring operation would be insulting to shoestrings.
Attend a Patrick event and there’s not a bumper sticker or pin to be found, let alone organizers with clipboards collecting names of would-be voters. His ground game looks to be nonexistent: The entire campaign appears to consist of a handful of volunteers and one publicly announced staffer, campaign manager Abe Rakov. In comparison, other campaigns have several hundred paid staffers and dozens of offices combined — and that’s just in New Hampshire.
Patrick has spent the first dozen days of his campaign trying to persuade senior Democratic leaders in the early voting states to take him seriously. They want to give the former Massachusetts governor with an inspirational life story and friendship with Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. But Patrick has a way to go before they fully buy in.
“A lot of the talent has already been acquired here, professional talent to run his campaign,” said former New Hampshire Chief Justice John Broderick, a Joe Biden supporter. “He’s not going to be on the debate stage, most probably. It’s pretty damn difficult.”
The campaign hasn’t publicized the few staff hires it has made, so far divulging only two names: Rakov and LaJoia Broughton, who will serve as South Carolina state director.
Can that sort of campaign succeed in the 21st century? Possibly, if either you have an unusually compelling candidate (think Donald Trump), or message campaign that resonates with primary voters (think McGovern 72); Patrick doesn’t check either of those boxes.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s not just that the 2016 presidential campaign never ended, the 2016 Democratic Primary is still being fought over, with Sanders and Clinton still trading barbs. Given how far she and the DNC went to rig 2016 in her favor, she has a lot of damn gall complaining about Sanders hurting her chances, especially since he ended up campaigning for her. Another day, another Democratic staffer (Darius Khalil Gordon) fired for tweets, including “Working hard so one day i can make that Jew money.” He wants to dump $150 billion into government owned broadband. Just when you think nothing could be worse than Comcast or Spectrum, Bernie proves you wrong!
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. By the shores of gutterrama, by the gently toppling 9 pin, by the rolling blackball thunder, confessed the sins of Liawatha:
👀 Whoa…
This is quite the admission from Elizabeth Warren on previously identifying as Native American:
“I shouldn’t have done it. I am not a person of color, I am not a citizen of a tribe. And I have apologized for confusion I have caused”pic.twitter.com/ErjPhVb62h
Gee, think maybe you should have done that four years ago? And note that she never confesses to the sin of using the benefits of Affirmative Action to advance her own career. Warren simply isn’t hard enough left for The Guardian. “Elizabeth Warren — under pressure from rival Pete Buttigieg to reveal her past compensation from corporate clients — announced Sunday that she’s received $1.9 million from private legal work since 1986.” That works out to just under $83,000 over 23 years. Pretty good money for most people (though less than I make), but (and I know this is going to sound weird coming from me) that’s really not an overwhelming amount of legal consulting billing, where good attorneys can bill $400 an hour an up, and a high profile lawyer like Warren before she ran for the senate, $1,000+ is not unheard of. On the oher hand, she hasn’t broken up how it was earned, exactly when, and for whom; maybe the bulk came after she was elected to the senate. How socialists soured on her:
It wasn’t so long ago that you could read an article in Jacobin that argued, “If Bernie Sanders weren’t running, an Elizabeth Warren presidency would probably be the best-case scenario.” In April, another Jacobin article conceded that Warren is “no socialist” but added that “she’s a tough-minded liberal who makes the right kind of enemies,” and her policy proposals “would make this country a better place.” A good showing by her in a debate this summer was seen as a clear win for the left in the movement’s grand ideological battle within, or perhaps against, the Democratic Party. Even staff writer Meagan Day, probably the biggest Bernie stan on Jacobin’s masthead, found nice things to say about Warren.
No more. A selection of Jacobin headlines from November: “Elizabeth Warren’s Head Tax Is Indefensible,” “Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Finance Medicare for All Is a Disaster” and “Elizabeth Warren Is Jeopardizing Our Fight for Medicare for All.” In October, a story warned that a vote for Warren would be “an unconditional surrender to class dealignment.” Even a recent piece titled “Michael Bloomberg? Now They’re Just Fucking with Us” went out of its way to say that Warren is insufficiently confrontational to billionaires.
At some level, the picks and pans of an activist magazine with only a fraction of the readership of, say, pre-2016 Breitbart might not seem of much consequence as America heads into its next presidential election. But as the Democratic Party faces its intramural battle over how best to respond to the Trump presidency—with measured centrism, or an opportunistic and disruptive lurch to the left— Jacobin has emerged as a hard-to-ignore voice in defining what the latter should look like.
Actually, I’ve done a pretty good job ignoring it.
The change in the publication’s treatment of Warren, Sunkara told me, was not a conscious decision or directive from higher-ups like himself. The publication, as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, cannot formally endorse political candidates.
But it does reflect, he said, what Jacobin’s mostly young left-wing writers and contributors, many of whom are open Sanders supporters and even campaign volunteers, are thinking. Where a previous generation might have been more than satisfied with a candidacy that would have been a socialist dream a mere decade ago, a younger generation tired of tempering its hopes is hungry for what it thinks could be a more revolutionary outcome.
Warren’s ginger concessions to the center—be it her proclamations of “ faith in markets” or her refusal to say she’d raise middle class taxes to pay for single-payer health care—thus seem like a betrayal of necessary convictions.
“There probably has been, among certain writers, a disillusioning with certain parts of the Warren approach to things, and also it’s probably an attempt to push her to be more resolute,” Sunkara said. There’s a reason, after all, why the candidate who said she is a “capitalist to her bones” was not the socialists’ favorite to begin with.
Man, the show trials where Jacobian writers purge DailyKos writers for rightist deviationism is going to be lit!
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She said something stupid about vaccines, but the only link choices are Vice or The Mary Sue, so, nah, I’m just telling you about it. She’s angling for an apperance on Joe Rogan, which would be a great move for her (or, honestly, probably anyone but Biden or The Billionaire Boys).
“Not a single Republican has given any indication that they’re in fact-finding mode. They’re all in defend-the-president mode. You need literally dozens of Republican senators to switch sides when the trial starts, which we’ve gotten zero indication is going to happen.”
“The more this drags on, the more danger there is of two things: Number one, Donald Trump comes out of this and says, ‘Vindicated! Totally exonerated!’ And number two, we are wasting precious time where we should be creating a positive vision that Americans are excited about solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected, and beat him in 2020,” he added.
He went on: “If all that happens is all of the Democrats are talking about impeachment that fails, then it seems like there is no vision. It seems like all we can do is throw ineffective rocks at Donald Trump, and then it ends up leading, unfortunately, toward his reelection.”
Andrew Yang expanded his presidential bid’s digital operations with two senior hires, including an alum of the Obama and Hillary Clinton White House campaigns.
Yang brought on Ally Letsky, a senior vice president and strategist at Deliver Strategies, to lead the campaign’s direct mail efforts and Julia Rosen, a partner at Fireside Campaigns, to helm the campaign’s digital strategy.
“While other campaigns are scaling back or trying to sustain their current levels, our campaign is rapidly growing and adding experience and know-how to ensure that we peak at the right time,” Yang said in a statement. “We’re absolutely thrilled that Ally and Julia — two of the most experienced and respected professionals in their fields — are bringing their expertise to the Yang Gang to help us compete and win.”
Letsky is a veteran of the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns in 2012 and 2016, respectively. She helped former President Obama with his direct mail efforts during his reelection bid and served as the director of direct mail for Clinton’s failed 2016 bid….Rosen has also worked with several Democratic organizations and establishment groups prior to joining Fireside Campaigns, including ActBlue and MoveOn.
The piece also says that “Julián Castro laid off staffers in New Hampshire and South Carolina earlier this month to narrow his focus on Iowa and Nevada.”
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, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Taking their campaign all the way to the convention floor:
Joe Biden
Bernie Sanders
Pete Buttigieg
Elizabeth Warren
Michael Bloomberg
Tulsi Gabbard
I believe Bloomberg and Gabbard will soldier on despite no hope of winning. There’s a chance Yang takes this route as well. There’s also a chance Castro and Harris stay in until Super Tuesday in hopes of winning home state delegates in Texas and California, but I think they’re already toast. And with Patrick’s campaign essentially stillborn, there’s a chance he packs it up before Iowa as well.
Biden noms his wife in public, an ex-staffer reveals how badly Camp Harris sucks, Sestak drops Out (or at least stops pretending he was in), Gabbard weaponizes Joe Rogan, and New Hampshire voters beg Tom Steyer to make it stop. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
At little lite, as you would expect after Thanksgiving week. Who wants to talk about any of these turkeys over real turkey?
Update: Shortly after I posted this, I learned Steve Bullock also dropped out.
Quinnipiac: Biden 24, Buttigieg 16, Warren 14, Sanders 13, Harris 3, Bloomberg 3, Klobuchar 3, Yang 2, Booker 2, Bennet 2, Castro 2, Gabbard 1. Warren’s fall to third in this poll is pretty relevant, since Quinnipiac was the only national poll that ever showed Warren up over Biden. Biden maintains his frontrunner status, but it’s essentially a dogfight for second among Buttigieg, Warren and Sanders. There’s a significant possibility that all four of them have enough money, popularity and organization to take their four-way fight all the way to the convention floor.
“The Democratic presidential campaign has produced confusion rather than clarity.” Really? What first tipped you off?
Early in the year, the party’s liberal wing seemed to be ascendant, defined by the candidacies of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and the embrace of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health-care program. Sanders and Warren were calling for other dramatic changes to the system — economic and political — and their voices stood out. Some other candidates offered echoes of their ideas.
That proved to be a misleading indicator of where the Democratic electorate stood on some of the issues, particularly health care, in part because fewer moderate voices were being heard. Former vice president Joe Biden didn’t join the race until April. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg wasn’t being taken very seriously. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wasn’t breaking through.
The candidate debates provided the setting for the arguments to play out before a larger audience. Warren and Sanders came under attack from moderate Democrats at the first debate in June in Miami, with former Maryland congressman John Delaney the most vocal. But Warren and Sanders more than held their own. The progressive wing appeared to be on solid ground.
Subsequent debates, however, have produced a different impression. The progressives have been much more on the defensive and the moderates more assertive. Biden tangled with Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) in the Detroit debate over the issue of health care. Harris subsequently modified her position, moving toward the center. On the issue of Medicare-for-all, the ground has shifted.
During the Atlanta debate in late November, even Sanders seemed to be tempering his overall message. Asked about comments by former president Barack Obama, who had earlier told some wealthy Democratic donors that the country wasn’t looking for a revolution, Sanders replied, “He’s right. We don’t have to tear down the system, but we do have to do what the American people want.”
Judged by the current polling in the four early states, the more-moderate candidates are prospering. To the surprise of many, Buttigieg is at the top of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. No one would have predicted that last spring.
Maybe not. But it was possible to do it when he led Q2 fundraising.
Democrat’s nightmare scenario: Bloomberg can’t win, but he can choose which Democrat to make lose:
What is the worst-case scenario for Democrats in their upcoming primary? Is it a contested primary all the way to the convention, where no candidate gets enough delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot?…
Is it Joe Biden hanging on, leaving a lot of progressives disappointed and uninspired, a sense that they’re counting on a man who just turned 77, and who’s looked not so sharp in the debates, to beat Trump? It’s not hard to imagine a “grumpy old men” general election, where Trump is his usual wildly unpredictable self with raucous, incendiary rallies, and Biden responds with his own meandering stories about “Corn Pop,” implausible anecdotes, un-woke language, cringe-worthy gaffes, and repeated insistence that his son did nothing wrong by joining Burisma’s board.
With Elizabeth Warren tumbling fast, Bernie Sanders locked in around the high teens in most places, and Pete Buttigieg still a long way from frontrunner status, Biden stumbling his way to the nomination doesn’t seem so implausible. Lots of people comment on how Buttigieg is struggling to gain support among African Americans, but Warren and Sanders aren’t doing that much better than him among this demographic.
But there’s one other new factor that could make things go even worse for Democrats. As noted on The Editors podcast, I don’t think Mike Bloomberg can be the king, but he could become the kingmaker. Having $30 million or so to spend on television advertising every week means Bloomberg can more or less take a sledgehammer to any rival whenever he wants. For Democrats, the nightmare scenario is that Bloomberg spends his millions tearing down anyone in his way, driving up voter disapproval of all the other candidates, but proves too unpopular to win the nomination himself — leaving the party angry and full of recriminations as Biden accepts the nomination on July 16 of next year.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He launched a “no malarkey” tour of Iowa, eveidently because that tested better than “Cut the Jibber Jabber,” “Dagnabit,” or “I Wore An Onion On My Belt, Because That Was The Style At The Time” as a tour name. On that tour, he chewed on his wife’s fingers while she was speaking like a playful Rottweiler puppy. Can the “black left,” AKA #BlackLivesMatters, stop Biden? Given that Harris was their champion, and they haven’t achieved any significant victories themselves, I’m going to go with “no.”
#Bloomberg2020: Combines the thrilling excitement of a school board meeting with the sheer joy of listening to your dentist deliver a 30 minute condescending lecture on your improper flossing technique.
Brace yourselves, America. This week you’re getting $30 million in television ads touting former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg to be the Democratic nomination. And don’t think that you’ll be missing out if you live in some small television market — Bloomberg’s campaign is spending $52,000 in Fargo, N.D., and $59,000 in Biloxi, Miss.
The most enthusiastic supporters of Bloomberg’s bid appear to be television-station-ad sales reps, Bloomberg employees, and the Republican National Committee. Don’t think of it as an election, America; think of it as an acquisition by Bloomberg LP. Don’t listen to the people who say Bloomberg is trying to buy the nomination and the presidency; think of it as buying hearts and souls.
Democrats complain a great deal about how terrible money in politics is, while secretly accepting the assistance of $140 million in “dark money” in the 2018 midterm elections. Bloomberg is going to be a great test of whether Democrats think and make decisions the way they want to believe that they do. On paper, Bloomberg is a terrible candidate. But if he gets traction in this race, it means Democratic primary voters are as easily persuaded by slick television ads as much as any other demographic. Note that Tom Steyer, a diminutive billionaire who is a walking vortex that no charisma can escape from, qualified for the last two debates and is at 2.5 percent in Iowa, 3 percent in New Hampshire, 3.5 percent in Nevada and 4 percent in South Carolina. But the most recent poll in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina all put Steyer at 5 percent. TV ads build name recognition.
Bloomberg does not seem like the most natural choice for a party that is hell-bent on beating an incumbent president they see as an egomaniacal billionaire from New York with authoritarian impulses. You don’t have to be a conservative to recoil from Bloomberg (although it helps); you just have to dislike any smug billionaire who believes the rules don’t apply to him and that he knows what’s best for everyone.
He says that Xi Jinping is not a dictator:
How is Bloomberg’s apologism on behalf of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party not automatically disqualifying?pic.twitter.com/So8dhMtOtz
I also can’t see this winning him many friends, well, anywhere:
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: “Higher taxes should have a higher impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves…”
Bloomberg says when leftists raise taxes on the poor, it’s good because then the poor will live longer because they can’t afford as many things that “kill them.” pic.twitter.com/SaPkvp1fB8
If Buttigieg was hoping his high debate marks would help him diversify his base of support, that hasn’t happened yet. The demographic cross-tabs in our poll show that he mainly made inroads among groups where he already enjoyed a disproportionate amount of support, like the college-educated, white voters and older voters. He had little success winning people over among groups where he has tended to struggle, like with black and Hispanic voters.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mark your calendar, as Castro actually said something that wasn’t absurd left-wing pandering: He wants to reform opiod laws so people that actual need them can get them, and says he’s open to decriminalizing drugs. I hope he enjoys probably the only “attaboy” he’ll receive from me until he inevitably ends his moribund campaign.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? No time for Grandma Death this week.
✅ Veteran ✅ Woman ✅ Minority ✅ Lifelong Dem ✅ Crossover appeal to Independents, Libertarians, Republicans The Dem Establishment shld be excited about my candidacy. But they'd rather lose to Trump than win with me, cuz they can’t control me & that scares the hell out of them pic.twitter.com/wTWBGlwumo
A blistering resignation letter from a member of the Kamala Harris campaign paints a picture of low morale among staffers of a directionless campaign with “no real plan to win” ahead of the crucial Iowa caucus in 2020.
According to the New York Times, the sentiments expressed in a letter from now-former state operations manager Kelly Mehlenbacher were corroborated by more than 50 current and former campaign staffers and allies, speaking largely on the condition of anonymity to disclose the campaign’s many flaws and tactical errors, from focusing on the wrong states to targeting the wrong candidates, as a frustrated campaign staff draws closer to 2020 Democratic primaries, which at one point counted the California Senator as a likely star.
Ms Mehlenbacher’s letter came a few days after a November staff meeting during which aides pressed campaign manager Juan Rodriguez about strategy and finances after sweeping layoffs ahead of the campaign’s movement in Iowa.
“While I still believe Senator Harris is the strongest candidate” in 2020, Ms Mehlenbacher said, “I have never seen an organisation treat its staff so poorly … I no longer have confidence in our campaign or its leadership. The treatment of our staff over the last two weeks was the final straw.”
She said it was “unacceptable” to move campaign staff from Washington DC to headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, “only to lay them off without notice” with “no plan for the campaign” and “without thoughtful consideration of the personal consequences to them or the consequences that their absence would have on the remaining staff.”
I can believe both that departing staffers are unaware how highly uncertain and contingent presidential campaigns are and that Harris treats her staff like shit.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder is “frustrated” former President Barack Obama did not emphatically encourage his presidential aspirations, those close to Holder and familiar with his thinking say.
Holder, who has warned Democrats to be “wary of attacking the Obama record,” was reportedly “frustrated” that Obama, who he considers a close friend, did not actively encourage his presidential aspirations.
Obama has remained notably silent throughout the Democrat primary – a development that should come to no surprise to those closely following the race. The former president signaled he would not endorse a primary candidate or speak out in an overly critical manner of any of the presidential hopefuls. According to Politico, Obama views his role as “providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly and to unite the party when the nominee is clear.”
Obama has, largely, stuck to that strategy, refusing to endorse his former running mate Joe Biden (D) and refraining from encouraging the presidential aspirations of his “close friend” Holder, who teamed up with Obama’s Organizing For Action to create the All On The Line campaign, a redistricting project “aimed at thwarting the use of so-called gerrymandering across the country.”
While reports, as recently as early November, indicated Holder was still mulling a last-minute presidential bid, the doors are slowly closing. Politico reported Holder was reportedly “frustrated” Obama did not encourage his plans for a presidential bid, with a source close to Holder telling the outlet that “he’s [Holder’s] still pretty sensitive about it.”
Bet Obama never encouraged his plans to become an NBA center, either…
As her rivals falter, Ms. Klobuchar has outlasted some national figures, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and former Representative Beto O’Rourke, and she is one of just six candidates, so far, to have qualified for the next debate in December. Enough money has flowed in for her to expand her operation; she has doubled her offices in Iowa and her staff in New Hampshire at a time when many of her rivals are worried about contracting. After months stuck toward the bottom of the polls, she has earned around 5 percent in several recent surveys of early-voting states, as voters give her a second look.
And in perhaps the highest mark of progress yet, her strong performance in last week’s debate inspired a spoof on “Saturday Night Live,” albeit one largely focused on her quivering bangs. (Ms. Klobuchar said she was standing under an air vent during the debate and hadn’t used enough hair spray.)
Hoping to ride a wave of post-debate attention, Ms. Klobuchar planned to blaze through New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina this week, stopping briefly in Des Moines for a Thanksgiving Day celebration at the home of her campaign’s state chairwoman.
“I’m hearing more talk about Amy. It’s picked up in the last couple weeks,” said Laurie McCray, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Portsmouth, N.H. “People have heard from the other candidates and they’re still looking.”
The fresh interest comes as Democratic leaders express vocal concerns about whether sweeping progressive policies, like Medicare for all, could hurt the party in key battleground states. As some center-left voters seek an alternative to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and as former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York have entered the race, the competition to emerge as the party’s moderate standard-bearer has intensified.
She’s certainly doing better than Booker, Bullock and Bennet, and the departed Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, and Inslee, and has a real chance to pass Harris…for fifth place. That’s not exactly winning. She might well be peking at the right time and still garner* no delegates…
The theory of the Kamala Harris candidacy, whose nosedive was the subject of a withering pre-mortem from three of my colleagues over Thanksgiving, was that she was well suited to accomplish this unification through the elixir of her female/minority/professional class identities — that she would embody the party’s diversity much as Barack Obama did before her, and subsume the party’s potential tensions under the benevolent stewardship of a multicultural managerialism.
That isn’t happening. But it’s still reasonable for Democratic voters to look for someone who can do a version of what Harris was supposed to do, and build a coalition across the party’s many axes of division.
And there’s an interesting case that the candidate best positioned to do this — the one whose support is most diverse right now — is the candidate whom Obama allegedly promised to intervene against if his nomination seemed likely: the resilient Socialist from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
Like other candidates, Sanders’s support has a demographic core: Just as Elizabeth Warren depends on very liberal professionals and Joe Biden on older minorities and moderates, Bernie depends intensely on the young. But his polling also shows an interesting better-than-you-expect pattern, given stereotypes about his support. He does better-than-you-expect with minorities despite having struggled with them in 2016, with moderate voters and $100K-plus earners despite being famously left-wing, and with young women despite all the BernieBro business.
This pattern explains why, in early-state polling, Sanders shows the most strength in very different environments — leading Warren everywhere in the latest FiveThirtyEight average, beating Biden in Iowa and challenging him in more-diverse Nevada, matching Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire and leading him easily in South Carolina and California.
Now, I have stacked the argument slightly, and left out a crucial axis of division where Sanders does worse than you expect: He struggles badly with his fellow Social Security recipients, the over-65. This weakness and Biden’s strength with these same voters are obvious reasons to doubt the case for Bernie as the unifier, Bernie as the eventual nominee.
Real analysis or concern trolling? You make the call. Sanders also gets an interview with WYFF in Columbia, South Carolina.
Update: Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: Dropped Out. He dropped out December 1, 2019. “Former Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) announced Sunday that he would drop out of the Democratic primary race after failing to gain traction in national polling despite months of campaigning.” His primary race accomplishments are talking coherently about defense policy and the threat posed by China, and to outlast Wayne Messam in the longshot derby. Plus all the Land of the Lost memes:
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. “New Hampshire voters to Steyer: Make it stop!” (I try, but sometimes you can’t improve on the original headline.)
Maggie and Libby knew Tom Steyer’s ad by heart: “I’m going to say two words that will make Washington insiders very uncomfortable: Term limits!” they recently chirped in unison at the dinner table.
Unfortunately for Steyer, their votes can’t be bought — they’re 10 and 13.
“It was like a comedy act,” the children’s father, Loren Foxx, said. “His ads are on constantly.”
Some Granite staters said they’re seeing Steyer’s ads dozens of times a day — and it’s become more grating than ingratiating. A POLITICO reporter who watched YouTube music videos this week by Pentatonix, a popular a capella group, endured 17 Steyer ads in just over an hour.
Even some of Steyer’s local staff privately acknowledge the volume of ads has gone overboard.
Steyer has massively outspent other Democratic candidates on social media in an effort to gain traction in polls and ensure he makes the debate stage. But the recoiling of some New Hampshire voters suggests there are limits to the strategy — Michael Bloomberg beware. Indeed, some residents feel like they can’t touch a piece of technology without seeing his face.
“There is a point of no return in terms of visibility,” said Scott Spradling, a New Hampshire media analyst. “At some point, you become the uninvited guest. He uniquely is becoming dangerously close.”
Little Tommy Steyer is bringing his special type of campaign to Nevada. And he wants Bloomberg to drop out, in much the same way the Miami Dolphins’ third string quarterback would like the first string quarterback to retire…
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s downfall has begun and it’s not happening gradually. New polling shows that her support has been nearly cut in half, a sure sign that, as voters get to know her more, they find her less and less palatable.
I actually wrote a piece speculating about Warren’s issues a little over a month ago.
The last debate exposed Warren for who she is. She’s inauthentic, whiny, and way too rehearsed. Democrats love her and the media swoon when she’s reading off her talking points. When she’s pressed and shows no ability to answer real questions, she suddenly is revealed for the weak candidate she is…
…For now, she’s still in the thick of things, but the longer the status quo drags on, the tougher it will be for her. The hype train is beginning to go off the tracks.
It looks like the hype train has not only come off the tracks now, but plummeted into a ravine followed by explosions. Quinnipiac has a new poll out that shows Warren’s support has been cut in half since their last survey. Further, support for so called “Medicare for All” has cratered.
Snip.
But I’m not even sure this is all about policy realities. Warren’s fall coicindes with her last debate performance. I’ve been saying for a long time that she’s just plain unlikable. She’s Hillary Clinton but angrier. The running to her campaign rallies, dance moves, and rant sessions all just come off as incredibly inauthentic. Two decades ago, Warren was basically a Republican. Now, we are supposed to believe she’s a progressive warrior? Democrat primary voters certainly are beginning to suspect it’s all an act.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He raised $750,000 in 24 hours. Honestly, of all the candidates outside the big four, I like Yang’s chances the best, as he seems to have run the smartest and most focused campaign. Problem: Bloomberg garnered* more media mentions in a week than Yang has all year. Maybe the DNC-led media really does hate him. Also got a hit piece about a woman claiming she fired her after she complained about pay disparity in his company in 2011. “The woman, who had worked for Yang’s Manhattan GMAT for two years when she made her complaint, said she was making $87,000 a year when Yang asked her to send employment offers to two men he wanted to hire. The men were offered $125,000 per year and a $50,000 ‘relocation bonus.'” Eh, eight years ago and no name attached. Hard to think the charge carries much juice.
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, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
