Biden’s phony-baloney polls are running behind Hillary’s phony-baloney polls of four years ago, more China policy weakness, more anti-police rhetoric, and Slow Joe comes in many days and dollars short denouncing the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
On election day, Hillary Clinton polled 6.5 points ahead of Trump in Wisconsin in the Real Clear Politics average (an aggregate of polls). Trump ended up winning the state by 0.7 points. Biden currently leads by 3.5 points in Wisconsin in the RCP.
The story is the same in North Carolina and Michigan. In North Carolina Trump lead Hillary by only 0.8 points on election day but ended up winning by 3.6. Biden is tied with Trump currently in the polls. In Michigan, Clinton lead by 3.6 points on election day, but Trump won by 0.3. Biden currently leads by 2.6 points.
Or more accurately, “supposedly leads.”
If we measure Hillary’s polling averages as of August 26th instead of election day, as the National Review’s David Harysanyi notes: Biden is +5.5 in Pennsylvania today [the 26th]. Hillary was +9.2 the same day in 2016. Florida is the only battleground state where Biden (+3.7) is outperforming Clinton (+2.7).
In mid-August, a Pew Research Center poll found that the issue of violent crime ranks fifth in importance to registered voters—behind the economy, health care, the Supreme Court, and the pandemic, but ahead of foreign policy, guns, race, immigration, and climate change. The poll found a large partisan gap on the issue: three-quarters of Trump voters rated violent crime “very important,” second behind only the economy. Nonetheless, nearly half of Biden voters also rated it “very important.” Other polls show that, over the summer, Biden has lost some of the support he gained among older white Americans in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.
With some exceptions, the media have been reluctant to shine a bright light on the summer’s violence—both the riots and the concurrent spike in violence. The New York Times ignored or downplayed the subject for weeks. One of its first major articles appeared in mid-August, under the headline “In the Wake of Covid-19 Lockdowns, a Troubling Surge in Homicides.” The piece argued that the crime surge had to do with the end of the lockdown that coincided with the beginning of summer, citing the skepticism of criminologists that “the increase is tied to any pullback by the police in response to criticism or defunding efforts,” and pointing to economic disruption and the spread of despair. But it also offered a different explanation, contradicting the thesis: “Police officials in several cities have said the protests have diverted officers from crime-fighting duty or emboldened criminals.”
After the 2016 election, the Times admitted that it had somehow missed the story, and it earnestly set about at self-correction. Like many other outlets, the paper sent reporters to talk to Americans who had put Trump in the White House. It was a new beat, almost a foreign bureau—heartland reporting—but that focus soon faded as the president’s daily depredations consumed the media’s attention. This election year, news organizations grown more activist might miss the story again, this time on principle—as they avoid stories that don’t support their preferred narrative. Trump supporters are hoping for it.
I think I speak for all Trump supporters when I say hat we want a news media that honestly and fairly reports the news. But that ship sailed a long, long time ago. (What was the last Republican President who got unbiased reporting in the media? Eisenhower?) But I do agree that the MSM’s unsuccessful attempts to enforce preference falsification turns out to be a major advantage for Republicans.
Speaking of Chuck DeVore, he has a piece on how well President Trump is doing when it comes to foreign policy, how bad Biden’s foreign policy record has been, and how weak Biden is on China:
Biden’s lifetime of foreign policy miscues include:
Opposing Ronald Reagan’s military buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative
Voting to invade Iraq in 2002, saying in 2003, “I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again.”
Early support for the 1999 bombing of Serbia which pushed Serbs to back the authoritarian leader there while stifling the nascent pro-democracy movement.
Criticism of President Trump’s authorization to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the man responsible for paying bounties to the Taliban for the killing of American troops in Afghanistan.
Advising President Obama to wait for more information before approving the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011—advice, that if acted upon, might have led to bin Laden’s escape.
Reviewing Biden’s campaign statements and materials for clues on his foreign policy proposals suggests a Biden administration would major on the minors. In a sprawling 4,444-word essay entitled, “Why America Must Lead Again,” Biden sets out his vision. He mentions China 13 times:
Suggesting U.S. tech giants shouldn’t be aiding China’s repression.
Claiming his foreign policy will help the middle class “…win the competition for the future against China or anyone else… (author’s italics).”
Saying “There is no reason we should be falling behind China or anyone else (author’s italics) when it comes to clean energy, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, 5G, high-speed rail, or the race to end cancer as we know it.”
That, “The United States, not China, should be leading…” with new trade deals.
Admitting that “The United States does need to get tough with China…” or else China will “…keep robbing the United States and American companies of their technology and intellectual property,” with the best way to address the challenge being to “…build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security.”
Working with “…China, to advance our shared objective of a denuclearized North Korea…”
Ensuring that “the rules of the digital age (aren’t) written by China and Russia.”
And working with China on climate change.
Absent is any mention by Biden of China’s massive military build up of modern missiles, ships, aircraft, and space systems and its growing willingness to use that military power against virtually all neighboring nations. It’s as if, by closing one’s eyes to the threat, one can wish the dragon away.
So while the People’s Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party is methodically preparing for a military conquest of the free island of Taiwan, to slice off more Himalayan territory from India, to take islands from Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia (all while holding the U.S. military at bay with an increasing array of long range missiles), Biden stresses the importance of climate change and getting the Chinese to use less coal.
President Trump is paying attention to the true nature of the existential threat from communist China, while Joe Biden focuses on lesser irritants from an earlier era.
The Democratic Party’s presidential nominee Joe Biden is “dangerous” when it comes to offshoring American jobs and because of his past relationship issues with China, and the United States needs a tough president like Donald Trump to stand up against the country’s bullying behavior, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Friday.
“The problem with Joe Biden is he has a record, 44-year record,” Navarro said on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” “In 2001, he voted to allow China into the World Trade Organization. That created a tsunami of offshoring, where we lost over 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs. This also happened on his watch when he was vice president.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to “bully this country into submission through threats on Huawei and medical supplies,” Navarro said.
“What we learned from this pandemic is we need to bring home our supply chains and manufacturing, not just for our essential medicines or medical supplies like masks or medical equipment like ventilators but for everything,” Navarro said. “China is bullying Australia right now for daring to question how that virus was created. Australia wants to do an investigation of China about where the virus came from. The next thing you know China is punishing Australia and New Zealand. It is a bully.”
No post-convention bump for Biden. “Getting no boost after a convention has happened only a few times in modern Democrat Party history. By John Kerry in 2004 and George McGovern in 1972. Kerry ended up losing to George W. Bush and McGovern got thrashed by Nixon in an historic landslide beaten only in scale by Presidents FDR and Ronald Reagan.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
C-SPAN changed their open phone line labels after an overwhelming number of Democratic viewers called on Wednesday night proclaiming their support for President Donald Trump in the upcoming election.
“I’m a longtime Democrat, born and raised … After watching tonight … I have made up my mind. I am definitely gonna vote for Donald Trump,” said one of the many voters who dialed in.
Before the Republican National Convention, C-SPAN’s open phone lines were labeled as open for “Democrats,” “Republicans,” and “Other” viewers to call into and share their opinions on-air. After Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, however, C-SPAN received an influx of callers who identified as Democrat but said they would be voting for Trump in November.
Due to the increasing nature of these calls, the network adjusted the phone lines to encompass those who “Support Trump,” “Support Biden,” and “Support Others.”
The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:
1. Ben Shapiro 2. Ben Shapiro 3. Blue Lives Matter 4. Ben Shapiro 5. David J. Harris Jr. 6. Ben Shapiro 7. Ben Shapiro 8. SportsCenter 9. Shaun King 10. NPR
Is Joe Biden for or against defunding the police? Yes:
We should begin with Joe Biden who said he would redirect budgeted police money to non-police areas. That’s right. Biden made that statement on July 8, when he replied, “Yes, absolutely” to an interviewer who asked him, “But do we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?”
But this defunding of the police, or “redirecting” as Biden spins it, contradicts a June 8 statement by his campaign claiming that Biden “does not believe that police should be defunded.”
When that contradiction and doublespeak raised eyebrows, Biden then reversed on both prior positions, claiming he would give more money to the police to handle the “god-awful problems” they face in the line of duty. Talk about a pandering, wishy-washy politician who will say anything to get elected. Can anyone believe Biden now?
The president of the top lobbying group representing police and law enforcement officers tore into Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, calling them the “most radical anti-police ticket in history.”
Michael McHale, the president of the National Association of Police Organizations, decried what he described as a rash of violence against police officers in recent months and railed against “failed” elected officials in cities such as Minneapolis, New York and Chicago who he said had made “the conscious decision not to support law enforcement.”
Biden, he said, would follow their lead.
“Joe Biden has turned his candidacy over to the far-left, anti-law enforcement radicals,” he said. “And as a senator, Kamala Harris pushed to further restrict police, cut their training, and make our American communities and streets even more dangerous than they are.”
Nor are they attempting to lower the rhetoric:
This statement is vile. It doesn't take down the temperature; it raises it. It explicitly jumps to conclusions in the absence of evidence. It's racial demagoguery of the highest order. And this is supposedly the man who will restore calm and normalcy to the country? pic.twitter.com/mWCtoxl4pd
.@JoeBiden did not condemn the riots in #Kenosha in his statement this morning, but condemned the police. Effectively, he gave a green light to the nationwide mayhem. Disqualifying. #2020
Biden and Harris want to monkey with your 401Ks. I don’t know a single person who contributes to a 401K who goes “You know what the problem is? I’m just saving too much in taxes!”
Nothing says you’ll fight for black people quite like being endorsed by white supremacist Richard Spencer. Hey, the MSM insisted on linking this loon to the Republican Party for four years, so it’s only fair Republicans return the favor.
Noted for the record: “Joe Biden to visit Southwestern Pennsylvania Monday; location, details not announced.” My experience has been that most presidential campaigns announce a time and place for a candidate’s appearance well more than a day in advance.
Good question:
At what point does anti-Trumpism cost too much for Democrats?
Cities are being destroyed. Businesses torched. Police officers attacked & even killed.
All because woke Democratic mayors and Governors are refusing to ask for the National Guard.
Biden voters threatening to burn down a church the day after the media went to bat for his catholicism will be a good photo op. https://t.co/wsuNvfQOyx
Joe Biden just went on CNN and alleged Kyle Rittenhouse was a member of an Illinois white supremacist militia. Does he have any evidence of that? What is their name?
Michael Moore thinks President Trump is going to win again. He was right about this in 2016 as well. “The Biden campaign just announced he’ll be visiting a number of states— but not Michigan. Sound familiar?”
Speaking of Michigan: Trump 47, Biden 45. It’s almost like the working class is never returning to the Democrat Party. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Also, I note for the record that no notable Kamala Harris links made their way across my desktop this week. I wasn’t trying to exclude them, but after the DNC was over, it seemed like the media universe at large just sort of lost interest in her. She generates a palpable lack of excitement.
As with most cultural revolutions that wish to start things over at “year zero,” the violence is aimed at America’s past in order to change its present and future.
The targets are not just the old majority culture but also classical statues and buildings, hallowed institutions, religious icons, the renowned names of streets and plazas, and almost every representation of tradition and authority.
For the majority of Americans who do not buy into the revolution, it all seems so surreal — and hypocritical.
Only a despised, dynamic American economy allows millions to divorce from it for a summer of protest.
A ridiculed U.S. Constitution ensures that looters and arsonists have due process.
The Bill of Rights guarantees peaceful assembly and electrically amplified profanity rarely protected elsewhere.
Affirmative action; federally ensured and subsidized college grants and loans; and cheap smartphones, headphones and laptops all give youth choices unimagined in the past.
No matter — cultural revolutions are incoherent and nihilist.
Those who signed up for the Jacobin Reign of Terror wanted violence, not a constitutional republic to replace the French monarchy.
The Bolsheviks were less interested in substituting an elected prime minister for the Russian czar than in grabbling power and murdering millions of their enemies.
Mao Zedong did not just hate the warlords, landlords, Mandarins and Nationalists. He wished to reinvent 1 billion Chinese in his own narcissistic image by first killing millions.
There is, of course, reason to oversee the police more effectively.
Universities are partly culpable for a collective $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.
Globalization eroded the middle class. Inner-city America is far too violent — and far too neglected.
But these are not the apparent concerns of those who carry off shoes and phones in U-Hauls, kick the unconscious on the pavement, destroy art and sculpture, or seek to torch public buildings with public servants inside.
The point of the mob is to wipe out what it cannot create.
It topples what it can neither match nor even comprehend.
It would erode the very system that ensures it singular freedom, leisure and historic affluence.
The brand of the anarchist is not logic but envy-driven power: to take it, to keep it, and to use it against purported enemies — which would otherwise be impossible in times of calm or through the ballot box.
More fundamentally: where do you think the country would be without him? Even if you’re disappointed with less than 200 miles of wall, remember that leading Democrats not only insist that every single new inch is a moral atrocity, they want to tear down sections that already exist.
Think the trade agenda is progressing too slowly? Well, President Trump already renegotiated two of our worst trade deals. How many new, bad ones do you think a Hillary administration would have signed by now? Trump not tough enough on China for you? A little too much talk about his “good friend” Xi Jinping? I sympathize. But he’s still done more than all the last four presidents combined. More than that, he’s reversed the China policy of the last four presidents combined. Have you heard how Joe Biden kowtows to China?
And I know that some will insist that, so long as a single American soldier, sailor, airman, or marine is deployed anywhere in the Middle East, then Trump has failed—or worse, betrayed them. But in fact, the president has mostly succeeded at the tasks he promised for that region: defeating ISIS, revitalizing our alliances while requiring more from our allies, and prudently disengaging from existing conflicts while not starting any new ones.
All of these trends, changes, policies, and initiatives, and many others—however incomplete—would be reversed in the event of a Trump loss. The ruling class would hail the president’s defeat as a historic repudiation of his (allegedly) “racist and xenophobic” vision, etc., as a vindication of every charge and complaint they’ve made against him and his supporters since Day 1. Their goal would be to erase the last four years and the 2016 election as if they never happened. If think-tank conservatives want above all to get into a DeLorean and go back to 1985, the ruling class wants to cram America into a Prius and force us back to 2015. And then resume the trajectory the country had been on back then, i.e., the road to woke managerial tyranny.
Password is: “Enthusiasm Gap,” with six times as many CSPAN viewers for the RNC than the DNC. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
President Trump’s poll numbers rise in swing states. Adjust by the usual 3% polls historically favor Democrats over election results, and Trump is tied or ahead in all of them. And that was before the RNC. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
The reason I fight so hard against the Fine People Hoax and race hoaxers in general is that it was always obvious it would escalate to mass shootings. A legitimate press could have stopped all of this months ago.
This is how cities die: “Shaken by summer looting in affluent neighborhoods, some Chicagoans are moving away.”
Jerry Seinfeld tries to refute that New York City is dead piece, but it just amounts to “New York is awesome and we’re tough” yadda yadda, and doesn’t address the insanely high taxes or actually changes in economic justification that used to make living in the city a requirement that isn’t there anymore. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Powerline has additional thoughts on that New York Times article mentioned yesterday that shows that, amazingly, riots, looting and arson aren’t popular with average Americans.
If you believe the mainstream media, Donald Trump is involved in a nefarious scheme to somehow make the USPS into something inefficient and incompetent, which comes close on the heels of his plot to make the sun start setting in the West. If that’s his plan, he already pulled it off decades before he first hit the cover of the New York Post. We conservatives think the president has done a lot of great stuff since humiliating Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit in 2016, but not even the most hardcore Trump Train engineer would go as far as Trump’s frothy pie-holed critics and credit the president with the mastery of time and space.
The correspondence conspiracy is pretty much liberal Q, except the eccentric Q folks at least like America.
And here’s a special shout-out to the Democrats pushing this intellectual fentanyl for deciding it is a good idea to choose the competence of the post office as their hill for the crusty crustacean’s campaign to die on. Please, continue pointing to the USPS as an example of what you’ll make the entire government into if we’re dumb enough to elect Gropey J. Good thinking, because if there’s anything that real people outside the MSNBCNN bubble love, it’s the post office. It’s the federal DMV, except with stamps.
Snip.
What is clear is that the real goal of this conspiracy theory is to launch a preemptive attempt to find another excuse for a Democrat defeat. Last time it was PUTIN PUTIN PUTIN and this time it’ll be POSTAGE POSTAGE POSTAGE.
Apparently, his plan is to somehow make it so the post office will be unable to deliver vote by mail ballots in order to prevent Democrats from winning the election that their senile old weirdo nominee is in the process of blowing. It might be interesting to examine the details of this conspiracy theory if there was even a coherent conspiracy theory to examine, but there’s not. It’s mostly “Trump bad!,” then low and undecipherable mumbling, then “And that’s how he will steal the election!”
The specifics of the alleged plot, to the extent you can identify them, are puzzling and elusive. What exactly is Trump going to do again? Is he going to order the mailmen to toss ballots in the shredder? Seems like it would be hard to pull off that flex with all those crack journalists out there. We are also told that he is rounding-up blue mailboxes from America’s street corners, and that this has been going on for a couple of decades is only further proof of his evil plan, somehow. What is not clear is how this might work in practice – so, the idea is that the Democrat voter comes home, ballot in hand, weeping because there are no blue mailboxes anymore to place his ballot into, and then he walks back inside his house past … his own mailbox? And then he just gives up? He sits at his dinner table, head in hands, sobbing at his inability to figure out how to drop a piece of correspondence into the postal system?
Good news! Yaser Abdel Said, the man accused of murdering his own two daughters in an Islamic honor killing, has finally been apprehended after a 12 year manhunt.
Reporter: Why are the NBA’s ratings down? Expert: Woke politics and China. Reporter: Do you have any idea? Expert: Woke politics and China. Any idea at all? Expert: WOKE POLITICS AND CHINA! Reporter: 😑.
Funny how the P word seems to be used by those too lazy to make anything out of their lives so they make up a term to label people so they can play victim to their own laziness. https://t.co/IJK0XOd8pW
Biden promises to shovel trillions into Social Justice and green energy ratholes, how Democrats plan to steal the election, more Slow Joe verbal stumbles, and a potential VP pick has a commie past. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Joe Biden says he wants equality. Who could be against that? But if just declaring yourself in favor of equality were enough, we would not still be arguing about equality in 2020. As always, when politicians talk about inequality, watch your wallet. And in this case, watch the Constitution, too.
In the past week, the Biden campaign has announced plans of Castro-esque length aimed at racial equality and women’s equality. We suppose we should at least welcome Biden’s continued willingness to use that old-fashioned word “women.” But Biden is so stuck in the past that he would pronounce the Equal Rights Amendment already ratified based on state legislative approvals in the 1970s. The deadline for the expiration of those long-ago votes was so clear, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg considers them dead letters. Biden would go further, demanding Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a radical-feminist 1970s treaty under which even Scandinavian countries get hectored for allowing women to assume the primary role in child-rearing. Biden would also restore the Obama-era unilateral executive fiat under which domestic violence and sexual violence are made the basis for political asylum, a position with no basis in the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and no limiting principle.
Human rights get rough treatment under the plans. Biden proposes to roll back due-process protections for the accused in campus sexual-assault cases. The secret ballot for union elections is to be replaced by reviving “card check” elections. Biden once posed as a pro-lifer reluctantly supporting legal abortion, while opposing — for four decades — taxpayer-funded abortion. So much for that. He pledges that “his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade,” and that he will “restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” restore U.S. funding to the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund, and “restore the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate” to ignore the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and restart the government’s assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Many of the proposals boil down to the same old thing: more federal spending of taxpayer money, more power and goodies for unions, more workplace regulations, more dividing people up by race. The price tag of all these initiatives adds up to some $7 trillion in new spending, most of it permanent. Right off the bat, a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” is pledged in a “clean energy future,” with the restriction that “disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment” — a telltale sign that this is more about spreading money around to favored constituencies than about “science.”
The Biden plan requires we eliminate all greenhouse gases from the electricity grid that powers the country by 2035. As is usual, Biden is an underachieving. We’re all supposed to be dead in 10 years if you believe the climate alarmists. This deadline is just more proof that no one does.
As Reason editor Nick Gillespie pointed out, the current plan is just another way to pander to organized labor. He also correctly pointed out that there is no way we should be spending $2 trillion after all the pandemic spending. However, you can be sure that it will not deter Biden.
However, the Guardian is also pointing out what serious opposition the plan will face. The program requires building tens of thousands of new wind turbines and millions of new solar panels. These numbers are likely an underestimate. Renewable energy sources are very low-density and not well suited to powering urban areas. There are also some areas of the country where neither would be particularly efficient.
Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda had reached the most elite quarters of U.S. foreign policy. Aguirre had started out of school as a fellow in the White House and a decade later had become chief of staff to U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Chadda, who joined the Pentagon out of college as a speechwriter, had become a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in even less time. Now, Chadda had a long-shot idea.
They turned to an industry of power-brokering little known outside the capital: strategic consultancies. Retiring leaders often open firms bearing their names: Madeleine Albright has one, as do Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Their strategic consultancies tend to blur corporate and governmental roles. This obscure corner of Washington is critical to understanding how a President Joe Biden would conduct foreign policy. He has been picking top advisers from this shadowy world.
Snip.
The problem for Aguirre and Chadda was that neither young man was a marquee name. Chadda realized that the latest crop of senior officials hadn’t yet started their own named consultancies. “The thought for us was to build a living and breathing platform, with those who are enthusiastic about serving again,” he said. Staying up late one night, they drafted a plan and came up with the first target they would pitch.
Michèle Flournoy had served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012. Both Aguirre and Chadda had known her well in the Obama administration. Since leaving office, she’d spent several years in consulting and was hitting her stride. With Flournoy as senior adviser, Boston Consulting Group’s defense contracts grew from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. Before she joined, according to public records, BCG had not signed any contracts with the Defense Department.
Flournoy, while consulting, joining corporate boards, and serving as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, had also become CEO of the Center for a New American Security in 2014. The think tank had an annual budget of about $9 million, and defense contractors donated at least $3.8 million while she was CEO. By 2017, she was making $452,000 a year.
If a Democrat were to win office, she would likely become the first woman defense secretary. She had considered an offer to serve as deputy to Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, but ultimately withdrew from the vetting process and stuck to consulting. “That’s more of a labor of love,” she told me. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important.”
Intrigued by Aguirre and Chadda’s idea of starting her own shop, she had one condition: find another big name, so it wouldn’t just be Flournoy and Associates.
They needed another co-founder. Establishing a new firm was an investment and a risk, and many Obama officials were already spoken for, some headhunted by corporations or consultancies, others returning to academic appointments or finding respite in research institutions—many wearing all those hats at once.
Flournoy could carry her own private practice, but she didn’t want a firm with her name on it alone. The trio reached out to defense and intelligence honchos, but with no luck. Then a particular Washington fixture came to light.
He had been Vice President Joe Biden’s right-hand man for almost two decades and finished out the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state. He was known for his unimpeachable ethics. Having written Biden’s speeches for years, he had started to enunciate with the vice president’s drawl when he appeared on CNN. He had never cashed in on his international connections, years of face time with Saudi, Israeli, and Chinese leaders.
His name was Tony Blinken. With his commitment to join Flournoy as founding partner, a new strategic consultancy was born. They called it WestExec Advisors.
Add Avril Haines, another Obama alumnus, to the list of names.
If you believe that personnel is policy, it’s worth reading the whole thing. WestExec sucked up a lot of defense contractor consulting cash.
They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around economically. They feel Covid-19 was not Trump’s fault, and he’s doing the best he can to contain it. They conflate the Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail shops. They don’t want historic monuments torn down. And they dismiss defunding the police as ridiculous.
These voters tell me they want America finally to be put first; they oppose immigration and trade policies they say give benefits to foreigners at their expense. And they want a non-politician who relentlessly fights back, after witnessing too many office holders fold in the face of special interests.
These voters may sound like typical Fox News watchers, but, significantly, the overwhelming majority are not. Many are, instead, people who get their news disproportionately from local television, regional websites and Facebook. Compared to the kinds of people who seek out news from national cable channels, many swing voters reside in a national politics desert.
Reading between the lines: “These people are beyond the reach of, or see through, the national MSM preference falsification system.”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pledged $20 million this cycle to oppose Democratic-backed efforts to ease voting restrictions while Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said his campaign has assembled 600 attorneys as a bulwark against election subterfuge.
With a little more than three months until Election Day, the voting rules in key battleground states are the focus of bitterly partisan court fights that could influence the outcome of the presidential race. These include lawsuits to expand mail-in voting in Texas, extend vote-by-mail deadlines in key Rust Belt swing states and restore the voting rights of up to one million indigent Floridians with felony records.
At present, the Democrats are attempting to unseat an incumbent president by devising a plan where their candidate doesn’t have to be seen in public for most of the general election campaign. They’re desperate to keep Joe Biden hidden until as many early and mail-in votes as possible are cast for him because they know that the first time he’s on his own in public he’s going to pull down his mask and start sniffing strangers, all the while barking, “Barack likes me!”
On the rare occasions when the idiot in the basement is let off-leash by his wife and handlers, he’s babbling about President Trump trying to “steal” the election. He keeps saying it, too, most recently at a virtual fundraiser hosted by one of the celebrities Hillary Clinton thought would wish her to victory.
Snip.
In each one of these “steal the election” rants, Biden immediately rambles on about mail-in ballots. Again, that’s all they’ve got and they know it. That’s where the real election-stealing can happen and it’s not going to be done by the Republicans.
The Democrats have shown — especially in the Trump era — that most of what they throw at the Republicans is just a bunch of twisted political psychological projection.
For example, take the absurd notion that Dems have recycled from 2016. They are again insisting that President Trump won’t accept the election results, giving it a minor update, saying that he won’t leave the White House now that he’s the incumbent.
This from the party whose vanquished alcoholic grandmother from 2016 is still going on television and saying that the election was stolen from her. Throw in Stacey Abrams and her ongoing psychotic break about being the real governor of Georgia and I think we can see which side has a difficult time accepting the results of an election.
In fact, the violence we’re seeing now has more to do with hating Trump than it does with the death of George Floyd. The Democrats began their “peaceful protests” almost the moment Trump was elected and have been ranging back and forth between simple public incivility and violence ever since. It’s been one long tantrum about not accepting the 2016 election results.
“It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of s–t in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still s–t’, ” Sanders co-chair Nina Turner told The Atlantic.
Turner, a former Ohio state senator, was quoted in an article analyzing Trump’s paths to re-election, including by exploiting disaffected supporters of Sanders’ socialist campaign, which lost to Biden despite winning the first three state Democratic contests this year.
UK’s Sunday Expresshas a poll up showing President Trump leading Biden by a couple of points:
The third in a series of monthly Democracy Institute/ Sunday Express polls has given President Trump a surprise lead over his Democrat rival of 48 percent to 46 percent, his clearest lead yet.
Crucially, President Trump has a lead of 48 percent to 43 percent in the swing states Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which would put him back in the White House with an electoral college tally of 309 to Biden’s 229.
Specifically, in Florida Trump has a 47 to 45 point lead, Minnesota (where the black lives matters protests began) a 46/45 lead, and New Hampshire a 46/43 lead.
The polling suggests Mr Trump is emerging as the race leader because of a belief he is best in handling the economy.
With a third of voters putting the economy as the top election issue and 66 percent thinking that the economy is bouncing back after coronavirus, voters believe that Trump is better for the economy by 57 percent to 43 percent.
Snip.
According to the poll 71 percent of Trump voters are “shy” to admit it compared to 66 percent a month ago.
However, 79 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 41 percent of Biden voters, two points lower than a month ago.
Meanwhile, only 4 percent of Trump voters believe they could change their mind while 10 percent of Biden voters could switch.
And here’s a Twitter thread on just that question:
Joe Biden last year in Keene, New Hampshire: "I’ve been here a number of times…I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?” pic.twitter.com/YZBP4ybQ3z
Democrats are waking up to the terrifying realization that if #HollowJoe debates, he's done. And if he doesn't debate, he's done because he didn't debate.
Dems also suspect they really DID push Trump supporters to lie to pollsters. #Landslide2020
Bill Clinton’s ex-pres secretary (not him, not her, yeah, him) wants you to know that Biden can still lose. But you have to wade through Democratic Party talking points to get to that, so I’ve saved you some time…
‘Squad’ Member Tlaib Won’t Endorse Biden. She supported Sanders in the primaries.
“Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close To A VP Pick He Can Smell Her.”
Over 90 field organizers for the Florida Democratic Party signed a scathing letter Friday to the party’s leadership, claiming among other things that the campaign is “suppressing the Hispanic vote” in Central Florida.
The seven-page internal letter, obtained by the Miami Herald, contains eight allegations from field organizers about what they say is a lack of a “fully actionable field plan” from the Biden campaign as it transitions into the Florida party to coordinate voter outreach efforts.
This letter comes 100 days out from the general election and as recent polls show enthusiasm about voting among Latinos in battleground states like Florida could be waning in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the claims: mistreatment of field organizers, relocating trained staff members without explanation, lack of organizing resources and taking on volunteers who are then left in limbo.
In a battleground state where elections are historically won by thin margins — and as presidential campaigns ramp up outreach efforts in Florida’s Hispanic communities — organizers claim that the Coordinated Campaign lacks key infrastructure and perpetuates a “toxic” work culture that is hurting morale among on-the-ground staffers.
One big issue is that at least a handful of organizers were recently transferred from a heavily-Puerto Rican part of the state to counties with a small percentage of Hispanics.
“Four of five Spanish-speaking organizers along the I-4 corridor who were moved to North Florida were Puerto Rican,” the letter says.
Field organizers add that input from staffers connected to Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida is often dismissed.
“The [Coordinated Campaign of Florida] is suppressing the Hispanic vote by removing Spanish-speaking organizers from Central Florida without explanation, which fails to confront a system of white-dominated politics we are supposed to be working against as organizers of a progressive party,” the letter adds.
A Democratic official familiar with internal discussions who asked not to be named said the letter comes amid negotiations between the Coordinated Campaign in Florida and the field organizers’ union, the IBEW Local 824.
So the Biden campaign is plagued by internal dissension thanks to Social Justice pandering, ethnic identity groups, and unions.
“Trump neck and neck with Biden, 45%-47%, approval equal with Obama’s in 2012.” The usual “polls are meaningless” caveats apply, along with the perception that Rasmussen favors Republicans. As opposed to all the other polls, which favor Democrats by about 3% in a good year… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
We’ve all heard the rumors. Joe Biden is running for president. Joe Biden has a huge lead in the polls. Joe Biden can tie his own shoes.
All are difficult to prove or understand.
I know that Joe Biden’s Twitter account is running for president. It’s a horrible candidate, by the way, maybe worse than he is in person. As for the shoe-tying thing, I’d wager good money that, if you asked Joe to tie his shoes he would try to shove a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up his nose.
The lead in the polls is the most mystifying, however. It’s true that many of us have a well-founded distrust of pollsters. In the past, however, when they’ve been deliberately skewing things one could at least find the occasional supporter of the candidate they were trying to prop up. They were ridiculously off about Granny Maojackets in 2016, but most of us at least met some Hillary voters.
Joe Biden is a different thing altogether. Last week, a friend of mine who is well-placed on Capitol Hill remarked that no one in D.C. is talking about Joe Biden. In the ensuing four days, three other friends whose opinions I also respect mentioned that nobody ever meets a Biden supporter in person.
I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the most liberal city in Arizona. It’s left-wing bumper sticker (Coexist!) and yard sign hell here. None of them mention Joe Biden. Bernie bumper stickers abound, however. Heck, I have a neighbor up the street who still has a Bernie 2016 sign up, so it’s not like the local folk aren’t dedicated.
This is all anecdotal, of course, but so were the rumors about flyover country support for Trump in 2016.
Snip.
What we’re looking at now is a candidate who is, according to polling, a juggernaut but one whose real world support is nigh on invisible. It hasn’t been that long since the national pollsters were really, really wrong, of course. However, this disconnect between Biden’s poll numbers and the nonexistent enthusiasm for his candidacy is weird even when you factor in the plague year and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The leftist loons that run the New York Times editorial board wonder who Biden listens to. It’s pretty tiresome, but it does let us capture the names of some of Biden’s advisors.
The Democratic Party’s activist base, especially its younger members, harbors grave doubts about Mr. Biden and has vowed to keep the pressure on as he charts a path forward. One big, basic question on many people’s minds is, Just how far left will Joe go?
Snip.
Skepticism about Mr. Biden runs deep on the left. During more than four decades in public office, he earned a reputation as a pragmatic centrist (sorry!) — the guy President Obama sent to negotiate deals with congressional Republicans that no one else wanted to be in the room with. Some progressives regard him as just the sort of compromised, compromising, politics-as-usual establishment tool standing in the way of meaningful change, and they fear that he has surrounded himself with other establishment tools who see the activist base as a threat to the existing power structure that must be neutralized.
“There’s a whole wing of the Democratic Party establishment that doesn’t simply want an electoral victory,” they want it on terms that let them “weave a narrative” to discredit the left, said Mr. Mitchell. “They want to defeat Trump and progressives in one fell swoop.”
Conversely, the Social Justice Warriors in the party’s insane wing are just as willing to lose this election if it means getting to control the party’s levers of power.
As the saying goes: Personnel is policy. But the campaign has been cagey about who is advising it and how the policy sausage gets made. Members of its extended economics team, for instance, were ordered to keep quiet about their campaign work. They can tell friends and colleagues, according to a memo acquired by The Times, but should not mention their affiliation “on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn or in your professional bio.” And they should steer clear of the news media. Period.
Some names have trickled out. Progressives are not happy that Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff/congressman/mayor of Chicago is advising the campaign on economic policy and political strategy. (The left’s grievance list against this former Clintonite is long, and his mayoral tenure was marred by serious police scandals, including the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, which prompted protests and an investigation by the Justice Department.) “Not the sign we want to see,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of the grass roots group MoveOn.
Even more explosive was the April news that Lawrence Summers has been offering his economic insights. A veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses, Mr. Summers is viewed as a neoliberal, business-cozy monster by the left, his name invoked with a level of distaste normally reserved for child predators.
In early May, more than two dozen progressive groups sent an open letter to Mr. Biden, demanding that he remove Mr. Summers from any campaign advisory role and “exclude him from a future Biden administration.” Charging that Mr. Summers had “put the interests of large corporations ahead of working families in the United States and around the world, fueled the climate crisis, and undermined efforts to ensure gender equality,” they declared it “hard to imagine a worse person than Larry Summers to guide the next President toward an economy that works for all.”
The Biden campaign has met such criticisms with assurances that it is listening to a wide range of voices.
Translation: “Run along, little girl, the adults are trying to speak.”
With Mr. Biden having spent the last half-century collecting friends, aides and advisers, not to mention this campaign’s fast-growing official staff, the org chart for Team Biden can be hard to decipher. His inner circle is defined differently depending on whom you ask, and even reasonably senior staffers aren’t always clear about who does what. But whether you think in terms of concentric circles or Venn diagrams or pyramids of power, there are legions of people offering counsel.
For instance, the campaign is consulting with more than 100 left-leaning experts on economic policy. The nominee’s regular briefings are conducted by a smaller core of liberal economists, former Obama officials and advisers to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Former Clinton 2016 advisors: There’s a surefire recipe for victory!
On foreign policy, the nominee has a large network of working groups subdivided according to specialty: nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, China, etc. Who is running these groups, and how much real influence they have, is hard to pin down. For all Mr. Trump’s ravings about China, international matters typically receive less play in presidential races than do domestic issues such as jobs or health care — meaning the Biden campaign is facing relatively little leftward pressure. When Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders formed a collection of working groups in the spring to hammer out joint proposals on various policy issues, foreign policy was not even among the topics tackled.
This likely suits Mr. Biden just fine. Foreign policy is kind of his thing. His expertise runs deep. He knows the players and the issues. As vice president, his instincts were more cautious and minimalist than those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Times once described the two as representing “the yin and the yang of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.”
But, in this as in so many areas, Mr. Biden is a solidly establishment player, and he relies on a clutch of trusted hands, including Julie Smith, Tom Donilon and Tony Blinken, who sits atop the campaign’s foreign policy shop. Mr. Blinken has been with Mr. Biden for nearly two decades and served as his national security adviser in the Obama White House.
Don’t expect his team to be taking on the military-industrial complex or taking up calls to slash funding for the Pentagon. The nominee’s message thus far has been mainstream and soothing, with talk of rebuilding frayed alliances and restoring American leadership on issues ranging from nuclear arms to the Middle East to global warming.
Other top policy dogs: Stef Feldman is the campaign’s official policy director, while Jake Sullivan serves as a combination gatekeeper and air traffic controller, gathering input, coordinating info and bringing order to the chaos across fields and working groups. Bruce Reed, one of Mr. Biden’s chiefs of staff in the Obama White House and a former head of the now-defunct centrist Democratic Leadership Council, also plays a central advisory role. (He used to brief Mr. Biden on campaign trips — in the pre-Covid days when people could still travel.)
Many of those with the most influence operate outside any official lines of authority. Mr. Biden’s inner circle includes longtime loyalists like Mr. Klain; Mike Donilon (brother of the aforementioned Tom), Mr. Biden’s political guru; Steve Ricchetti, who was another of his chiefs of staff in the Obama administration, and Ted Kaufman, who has been with Mr. Biden since his 1972 Senate race. These are the kitchen cabinet folks who make progressives super nervous. They are considered establishment fogies unlikely to challenge the nominee or push him to think big.
The inner ranks are not entirely closed to newcomers. Anita Dunn, a veteran of Obamaworld, effectively took control of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign in the shake-up following his loss in Iowa, and continues to wield serious clout. But Ms. Dunn is herself a Washington fixture and an object of suspicion for some on the left.
“He’s not listening to the folks he needs to listen to,” said Yvette Simpson, who leads the political action committee Democracy for America.
“Wah! He’s not listening to the right leftwing lunatics! Wah!”
It’s all tedious inside baseball stuff, but I’m harvesting and tagging those names so I can track them for future reference if, say, one of them testifies at a future congressional hearing on illegal Chinese contributions to the Biden campaign, just to pluck a random hypothetical out of thin air.
Also mentioned: Sister Valerie Biden Owens and wife Jill Biden.
Instead of telling people Biden is not competent, let Biden continue to show it. The former vice president will misspeak a lot in the coming weeks and months. Let the American people see by his words and actions that he’s not all there. Leave it to surrogates to draw attention to his gaffes. They should do so with sadness rather than ridicule. The message should be: We’ve all seen loved ones struggle with memory loss as they age. No one likes to see it, or point it out. But in Biden’s case, it can’t be ignored. Because our loved ones aren’t asking to be given the nuclear codes. Biden is.
It all started when, after about 40 minutes of an almost-continuous Biden monologue at an April event, Frank Fahey, a Claremont, N.H., teacher, asked Biden: “What law school did you attend and where did you place in that class?”
Here’s Biden full answer:
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”
Biden didn’t even mention where he went to law school, but it was at Syracuse University. The problem was, as Newsweek revealed:
Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
Gallup says there’s little reason Biden will appeal more or less to Catholics, being the first Catholic Vice President and supporting abortion. Maybe. But it’s pretty obvious that Social Justice is the only allowed religion of the Democratic Party…
“Senate Republicans secure impeachment witness who flagged concern about Hunter Biden.” That would be George Kent. Remember that the Burisma scandal never went away…
Biden says Trump is wrong to hold China accountable for coronavirus because Americans can’t distinguish “between a South Korean and someone from Beijing.”
The patronizing view of voters aside, not sure what that has to do with the CCP, or anything. pic.twitter.com/hWUbIRK910
Tara Reade would still like to look at Biden’s records at the University of Delaware. So would Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of itself and the Daily Caller News Foundation against the University of Delaware for former Vice President Joe Biden’s Senate records, which are housed at the university’s library (Daily Caller News Foundation v. University of Delaware (N20A-07-001 CEB)). The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware.
The university said it will not release the records until two years after Biden has retired from public life.
The Daily Caller and Judicial Watch filed requests on April 30 for all of Biden’s records and for records about the preservation and any proposed release of the records, including communications with Mr. Biden or his representatives.
If current trends continue until Election Day, the economy will be surging, vaccinations will be imminent, and Biden will no longer be allowed to use cutlery at dinner.
This is the poll that purports to show Joe Biden beating Donald Trump by five points and Senator John Cornyn under 50% against either M.J. Hegar or Royce West.
The nice thing about this Dallas Morning News/UT Tyler poll is that it tells you how the poll weighting is skewed right up front:
Democrat 39%
Republican 42%
So it oversamples Democrats by at least 7% compared to the 2016 Presidential election. I assume that they’re using Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss in a semi-blue-wave year against Ted Cruz in the 2018 U.S. Senate race as the baseline, not Lupe Valdez’s twelve point pasting by Greg Abbott in the Governor’s race. Neither Hegar are West are going to be awash in money and fawning media coverage the way O’Rourke was.
Presidential year voter turnout has distinctly different patterns than off-year election turnout. The 2020 general election is more likely to resemble the 2016 election, when Trump beat Clinton by nine points in Texas, than the 2018 election.
Even money says that the next Texas Tribune and Texas Lyceum polls you see will be just as skewed.
There are plenty of things to worry about in November. Trump and Cornyn losing Texas should not be among them.
Biden comes out of his basement and sees his shadow, more questions about China and Ukraine, more veepstakes, and questioning just how much of that #BlackLivesMatter money ActBlue is raking in goes to Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
After reaching the BLM homepage, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chooses to donate, they’re rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”
Joe Biden is the top beneficiary of the ActBlue’s fundraising efforts.
Is there any evidence that BLM funds donated through ActBlue aren’t going to Biden? If so, who are the recipients?
Reminder: Biden once had a very different view of street disorder and black lives:
I’m not sure that highlighting the 1994 crime bill will actually cost Biden votes, but showing videos like this does provide a stark contrast of the Joe Biden of today and the Joe Biden of the past who obviously had a far more functional brain…
Creepy Joe Biden is beginning to emerge from the basement again, and the results have not been auspicious thus far.
Cut to Philadelphia, Wednesday. He was sporting the de rigueur mask, but it was dangling loosely from his left ear, as if he’d forgotten it. That made his statement attacking President Trump (I think) all the more bizarre.
All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:
“You know, the rapidly rising uh, um, uh, in with the — with the — I don’t know, uh uh,” he said, finally looking up in utter confusion from his notes.
“His, his just inability to focus on any federal responsibility,” Biden mumbled, and I don’t believe he’s been seen outside the basement since.
That latest stumble got a good leaving alone from approximately 99% of the media’s Democrat stenographers. So the next day the Trump campaign manager put out an email demanding that the press’s Democrat rump swabs “stop protecting Biden.”
“The failure to expose the American people to these rambling displays of incoherence, ineptitude and forgetfulness is depriving voters of a clear picture of Biden’s inability to execute the duties of the office he seeks.”
Which is exactly why Biden’s comrades in the media are doing their damnedest to keep him under wraps.
Staying out of the limelight is good for Biden because the election is not about him. It’s about Trump and his missteps, and Biden is the generic Democratic alternative to another four years of the current administration.
Biden’s campaign is explicitly trying to define the election based on whether or not to give Trump four more years in office. A slide in a Biden campaign strategy briefing last month said, “This election is a referendum on Trump.”
“If the country is asked to have an up or down vote on whether or not Donald Trump should receive four more years, the country would say no, and [the Trump campaign] themselves admit it,” Biden campaign strategist Mike Donilon said during the presentation.
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe plainly explained why Biden does not need to be out in the open during a video call with a local Democratic group over the weekend.
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, we got to get the vice president out of the basement,’ He’s fine in the basement,” McAuliffe said. “Two people see him a day: his two body people. That’s it.”
Will a Joe Biden presidency derail housing reform and the “recap and release” of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
The answer is a resounding “yes,” according to housing analysts who have ties to Biden’s economic advisers and their thinking on what might happen to the housing giants, if as current polls suggest, the former vice president unseats Donald Trump and becomes president in November….affordable housing is a significant issue to Biden and he would like to expand Fannie and Freddie’s mandate and likely keep them under government control.
Of course they do. How else are Democrats supposed to rake off the graft?
We all agreed that Trump has been too tepid lately and not using the instincts that blew up the political world in 2016.
We are all aware that Joe Biden has benefited greatly from his pandemic-induced basement quarantine. He’s such a train wreck that his handlers are no doubt working overtime to come up with excuses to keep him away from the campaign trail and — more importantly — from sharing a debate stage with President Trump.
The three of us agreed that President Trump needs to seize the initiative now and start goading Biden to get back in the public eye and into a debate. One of Trump’s greatest gifts is the thing that drives old guard Republicans crazy — his ability to drive a narrative on social media. Now is the time for him to use that bully pulpit and relentlessly bait Biden and force his hand.
Biden can’t win a Twitter throwdown with Trump. His handlers are tweeting for him and they are not the most inventive lot. His Twitter feed reads like something that came from a book titled “Democrat-y Stuff Candidates Should Say.” It would be very easy for the president to make Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep look awful all day, every day. The end game is to get Biden back in public, of course, but there is an immediate return on investment in a Twitter flame war.
In my five years of watching Donald Trump in the political arena, the only thing I’ve learned is that Trump probably isn’t going to do what I expect him to do, or think he should, and that what he ends up doing will probably be more effective than what I suggested. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Biden spent over three decades opening American markets to Chinese goods, ignoring China’s abhorrent human rights record, and dismissing the challenge posed by our greatest rival for global leadership. The “made in China” era coincided with the closure of tens of thousands of American factories, stagnant working-class wages, and the loss of America’s ability to produce essential goods domestically — a vulnerability that took on incredible significance when we learned that we were dependent upon China to produce the medical equipment needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
This disaster was facilitated by politicians of both parties, and no one was more gung ho than Joe Biden, the poster child for the globalism that reigned supreme until the 2016 presidential election, which Donald J. Trump won by campaigning on a platform diametrically opposed to the “open markets and open borders” philosophy of the D.C. establishment. In the White House, President Trump became the first American leader in decades to take a firm stand against China’s malfeasance and demand a genuinely fair and reciprocal trade deal for American workers.
While Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, conversely, he was downplaying the consequences of China’s rise — even as his own family tried to get rich through deals with Chinese state-owned companies.
Biden leading in swing states, yadda yadda yadda. Consider this your periodic reminder that polls are pretty much meaningless this election season. The one poll I dug into, for Texas, undersampled Republicans by about seven points, so expect widespread media falsification of just about every media to help drag Biden over the line.
Another reason not to believe those polls: When you ask people who they think will win, a majority agree that President Trump will beat Biden, 51%-37%. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
As data show recent riots and the months-long COVID-19 economic shutdown hurt black-owned businesses more than any other racial group, the Trump campaign slammed rival presidential candidate Joe Biden for a “weak” response to these challenges.
Democratic governors generally have been more hesitant to reopen their states’ economies than Republicans, leading to criticism from President Trump and his campaign, which argues that delays hurt black-owned enterprises.
The Trump campaign pointed to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing there has been a a 41% decline in the number of black business owners from February to April of this year, driven by the COVID-19 shutdown.
“President Trump’s background as an entrepreneur and builder shapes his passion for protecting, supporting and empowering American black-owned business owners, especially right now,” Paris Dennard, Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member told Just the News. “Every day Joe Biden fails to strongly call an end to the looting, and rioting in urban cities, more black-owned businesses are destroyed. Every day Joe Biden fails to support efforts to safely and expeditiously re-open the economy, more black businesses are destroyed. The data shows a prolonged economic shutdown hurts black American entrepreneurs, so Joe Biden’s opposition is standing in the way of black generational wealth, growth and opportunities.”
More veepstakes pandering. “Among the candidates who have progressed to the point of more comprehensive vetting or have the potential to do so are Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), former national security adviser Susan E. Rice and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, all of whom are black. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is white, is also in that group, as is New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is Latina.”
The search committee has been in touch with roughly a dozen women, and some eight or nine are already being vetted more intensively.
Among that group are two contenders who have recently grown in prominence, Representative Val Demings of Florida and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. One well-known candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has lost her perch as a front-runner. And some lower-profile candidates, like Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are advancing steadily in the search process.
Some of the contenders who have advanced furthest in the process are well known, including Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But The Times confirmed that several other women — whose names have been repeatedly floated but who have not publicly confirmed that they agreed to be vetted for the job — are under active consideration as well.
Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren have been interviewed at length by Mr. Biden’s team, as has Ms. Baldwin, who was the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the Senate.
Two women with distinctive national-defense credentials have also been interviewed and asked for documents: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war combat veteran who is Asian-American, and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and the first black woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.
As the vetting process advances to a newly intense phase, the political currents of the last few weeks are also leaving a mark on the Biden team’s deliberations. The wave of demonstrations touched off by the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer there, has elevated a pair of black women long regarded as intriguing long-shot candidates: Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms.
Though Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms are far less known to the national electorate than other figures on Mr. Biden’s list, they have played crucial roles in a cascading civil rights crisis: Ms. Demings, a former police chief in Orlando, Fla., has become a major figure in the law-enforcement debate, while Ms. Bottoms’s handling of chaotic demonstrations in her city earned her national acclaim.
For “national acclaim” read “less incompetent than other Democratic mayors.
Craig Coopersmith was up early that morning as usual and typed his daily inquiry into his phone. “Good morning, Team Covid,” he wrote, asking for updates from the ICU team leaders working across 10 hospitals in the Emory University health system in Atlanta.
One doctor replied that one of his patients had a strange blood problem. Despite being put on anticoagulants, the patient was still developing clots. A second said she’d seen something similar. And a third. Soon, every person on the text chat had reported the same thing.
“That’s when we knew we had a huge problem,” said Coopersmith, a critical-care surgeon. As he checked with his counterparts at other medical centers, he became increasingly alarmed: “It was in as many as 20, 30 or 40 percent of their patients.”
One month ago when the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. They’ve since seen how covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.
Read the whole thing.
A coronavirus map based on self-reported symptoms. I note that Williamson County has only about 0.32%.
Over on Borepath, there’s a good discussion of all the known unknowns of the Wuhan Coronavirus, and all the data we don’t have.
Only 38 of the 58 SSEs that I recorded were documented in a way that permitted me to determine their date with any specificity. (And even in these cases, I sometimes had to make educated estimates because of the vague nature of the reporting.) In the case of multi-day SSEs, such as religious festivals, I picked a day corresponding to the middle of the event. Unfortunately, some of the largest SSEs, such as those at North American meat processing plants, can’t be usefully pinpointed at all because the infections span multiple weeks (or even months), and the employers haven’t released detailed date-tagged data.
Of the 38 SSEs for which dates could be usefully identified, about 75 percent (29/38) took place in the 26-day span between February 25th and March 21st, roughly corresponding to the period when thousands of infected COVID-19 individuals were already traveling around the world, but before social distancing and event-cancelation policies had been uniformly implemented in many of the affected countries. (A notable early outlier is Steve Walsh, who spread COVID-19 from a Singapore corporate meeting to a French ski resort to his native UK in late January and early February.) No doubt, a vast number of SSEs occurred in January and February without being reported as such, because public-health officials and journalists weren’t alive to the nature or scale of the coming pandemic. But it is reassuring that, so far, April has been almost entirely bereft of publicly reported SSEs.
I was struck by how few of the SSEs originated in conditions stereotypically associated with the underclass (though a March outbreak at a Qatari migrant workers camp in the industrial area north of Doha offers one such example). Many of the early SSEs, in fact, centered on weddings, birthday parties, and other events that were described in local media as glamorous or populated by “socialites.” Examples here include a March 7th engagement party at a Rio de Janeiro “mansion” that attracted “high society” fly-ins from around the world, and a similarly described birthday party in Westport, CT.
It is theoretically possible that socioeconomically privileged individuals really do lack some immune-response mechanism that protects individuals who have been exposed to a wider array of infectious pathogens. (A recent report on COVID-19 surveillance testing at a Boston homeless shelter contained the stunning disclosure that 36 percent of 408 screened individuals tested positive for COVID-19. Yet the vast majority were asymptomatic, and even the few who were symptomatic did not diverge statistically from the 64 percent of tested individuals who were COVID-19-negative.) But absent more data, the more obvious explanation is that these early SSEs are linked to the intercontinental travel practices of the guests. (In the case of the Connecticut event, reports the New York Times, “a visitor from Johannesburg—a 43-year-old businessman—fell ill on his flight home.” And the Rio party was attended by guests who’d traveled recently from, or through New York, Belgium and Italy.) Moreover, COVID-19 outbreaks in poor communities are simply less likely to be reported, because the victims have less access to testing, high-end medical care, or media contacts.
In fact, the truly remarkable trend that jumped off my spreadsheet has nothing to do with the sort of people involved in these SSEs, but rather the extraordinarily narrow range of underlying activities. And I believe it is on this point that a close study of SSEs, even one based on such a biased and incomplete data set as the one I’ve assembled in my lay capacity, can help us:
Of the 54 SSEs on my list for which the underlying activities were identified, no fewer than nine were linked to religious services or missionary work. This includes massive gatherings such as February’s weeklong Christian Open Door prayer meeting in Mulhouse, France, which has been linked to an astounding 2,500 cases; and a massive Tablighi Jamaat Islamic event in Lahore that attracted a quarter-million people. But it also includes much smaller-scale religious activities, such as proselytizing in rural Punjabi villages and a religious meeting in a Calgary home.
Nineteen of the SSEs—about one-third—involved parties or liquor-fueled mass attendance festivals of one kind or another, including (as with the examples cited above) celebrations of weddings, engagements and birthdays.
Five of the SSEs involved funerals.
Six of the SSEs involved face-to-face business networking. This includes large-scale events such as Biogen’s notorious Boston leadership meeting in February, as well as one-on-one business meetings—from the unidentified “traveling salesperson” who spread COVID-19 in Maine to Hisham Hamdan, a powerful sovereign-wealth fund official who spread the disease in Malaysia.
All told, 38 of the 54 SSEs for which activities were known involved one or more of these four activities—about 70 percent. Indeed, the categories sometimes overlap, as with patient A1.1 in Chicago, who attended both a party and a funeral in the space of a few days; or the New Rochelle, NY man who covered the SSE trifecta of Bar Mitzvah party, synagogue services, and local funeral, all the while going to his day job as a lawyer in New York City.
But even that 70 percent figure underestimates the prevalence of these activities in COVID-19 SSEs, because my database also includes five SSEs involving two warships and three cruise ships—the USS Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Diamond Princess, Grand Princess and Ruby Princess—at least three of which (and probably all five) featured onboard parties.
These parties, funerals, religious meet-ups and business networking sessions all seem to have involved the same type of behaviour: extended, close-range, face-to-face conversation—typically in crowded, socially animated spaces.
So you probably want to avoid such events for the near future. Snip.
In the case of religious SSEs, Sikhs, Christians, Jews and Muslims are all represented in the database. The virus makes no distinction according to creed, but does seem to prey on physically intimate congregations that feature some combination of mass participation, folk proselytizing and spontaneous, emotionally charged expressions of devotion. In the case of Islam, it is notable that the same movement, Tablighi Jamaat, has been responsible for massive outbreaks at completely separate events in Lahore (noted above), Delhi and Kuala Lampur. At Mulhouse, the week’s schedule included Christian “choir performances, collective prayer, singing, sermons from preachers, workshops, and testimony from people who said God had cured their illnesses… Many people came day after day, and spent hours there.” And in Punjab, dozens of Sikhs died thanks to the itinerant rural preaching of a single (now deceased) infamous septuagenarian named Baldev Singh.
It’s worth scanning all the myriad forms of common human activity that aren’t represented among these listed SSEs: watching movies in a theater, being on a train or bus, attending theater, opera, or symphony (these latter activities may seem like rarified examples, but they are important once you take stock of all those wealthy infectees who got sick in March, and consider that New York City is a major COVID-19 hot spot). These are activities where people often find themselves surrounded by strangers in densely packed rooms—as with all those above-described SSEs—but, crucially, where attendees also are expected to sit still and talk in hushed tones.
Again, read the whole thing.
Speaking of things you’re not supposed to do: “Bangladesh: Over 100,000 gather for funeral of Islamic teacher, defying coronavirus lockdown.” What could possibly go wrong? (On the other hand, if this doesn’t turn into a superspreader event, then we have some valuable data about that seemingly invariant infection curve and/or the role of sunlight/warm climates in preventing infection.)
Speaking of superspreader events, want to guess who owned that South Dakota meat packing plant with the heavy infection rate? “In September 2013 Smithfield Foods was acquired by China’s biggest meat processor, Shuanghui International Holdings, in the largest acquisition ever of a U.S. company by a Chinese one.”
Speaking of China’s perfidy, while they rest of the world was struggling with the Wuhan coronavirus, they thought it was the perfect time to arrest dissidents in Hong Kong:
Fifteen activists between 24 and 81 years old were rounded up on suspicion of organizing, publicizing or taking part in several unauthorized assemblies between August and October and will face prosecution, the police said on Saturday without disclosing their names, following protocol.
The arrested democratic heavyweights included the veteran lawyers Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, the media tycoon Jimmy Lai and the former opposition legislators Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Leung Kwok-hung, political parties and aides said.
Half the residents of a Boston homeless shelter had the Wuhan Coronavirus, but none showed any symptoms.
If the Malevolent Donkey Party was actively seeking to plunge the country into an economic tailspin, while still maintaining some level of deniability to the credulous suckers out there, exactly what would it be doing differently? It would be pretty much doing exactly what it is doing right now – shilling for the bat-gobbling ChiComs, delaying needed assistance to keep America working, and generally trying to keep us all locked in the dark in perpetuity.
It’s fair to assume that you intend the expected consequences of the actions you take, and the consequence of the actions the Democrats are taking is economic ruin. The indisputable fact is that they’re totally cool with that if that is what gets them back into power.
Democrats are never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, and this Wuhan Flu is a very good crisis indeed if your goal is leftist hegemony. The Trump economy was booming after the near-decade of the Obama doldrums, and people were getting a taste of prosperity. But a happy, prosperous America is something the Democrat dudes can’t abide. All the Democrats had to sell were recycled cries of “RACISM!” and “RUSSIA!” and their standard-bearer was that sinewy weirdo Grandpa Badfinger, who was promising to drag us all back into the nightmare of globalist failure. The future looked grim, which means it actually looked bright for the rest of us.
So, the Chinese coronavirus was a dream come true, a deus ex pangolin that finally, after an endless series of leaks, impeachments, investigations, and media meltdowns, might be the magic bullet that actually takes Trump down.
Am I saying that the Democrats are exploiting the pandemic for their own cheesy advantage? Well, yeah. Everything they are doing is consistent with that. Everything. No, in the abstract, many of them would probably not prefer that tens of thousands of Americans die (I get enough Twitter death wishes to know, from their own filthy mouths, that some absolutely do want us to die), but their attitude seems to be that if life gives you tens of thousands of dead Americans, make political lemonade.
How can Nancy Pelosi worry about your piddling lives when there’s so much ice cream to eat?
“U.S. Intelligence Knew Russia Preferred Hillary to Trump, But John Brennan Hid the Truth, Ex-NSC Chief Says.” This story probably deserves more attention than I can give it right now…
Iran: Watch our tiny boats harass the Great Satan! President Trump: I hope you like your gunboats getting destroyed.
Won’t someone please spare a moment to think about how the coronavirus outbreak has derailed the Austin politicians’ plans to spend billions on their toy trains? (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
Speaking of Austin, the coronavirus has closed landmark Austin restaurants Threadgill’s…
Is Apple moving to ARM for Mac? They’re planning to have their own Apple-designed chips fabbed at TSMC on the latter’s 5nm process. Intel, the current supplier for Mac CPUs, isn’t slatted to hit 5nm until 20203, and there’s long been talk that bringing up yield on their existing 10nm process has been in a world of hurt for a while.
Since Bernie Sanders dropped out, Slow Joe Biden is the default Democratic Party nominee for President in 2020, despite not having yet reached the required delegate threshold to clinch the nomination.
That means the Clown Car Update has finally come to an end. But in its place, behold the birth of BidenWatch!
This is going to be an ongoing roundup of Biden link, tweets, videos, etc. I plan to keep this up until the election, or the DNC replaces Biden at the convention, or Biden’s brain explodes, whichever comes first.
But before we get to the BidenWatch itself, let’s list all the declared Democratic politicians Biden defeated for the nomination.
The List of the Vanquished
Listed in the order they dropped out:
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Dropped out January 29, 2019
California Representative Eric Swalwell: Dropped out July 8, 2019
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Dropped out August 2, 2019
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped out August 21, 2019
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Dropped out August 23, 2019
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Dropped out August 15, 2019
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Dropped out August 29, 2019
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: Dropped out September 20, 2019
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: Dropped out October 24, 2019
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Dropped out November 1, 2019
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: Dropped out November 20, 2019
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: Dropped out December 1, 2019
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Dropped out December 2, 2019
California Senator Kamala Harris: Dropped out December 3, 2019
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: Dropped out January 2, 2020
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: Dropped out January 10, 2020
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Dropped out January 11, 2020
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: Dropped out January 31, 2020
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Dropped out February 12, 2020
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Dropped out February 11, 2020
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped out February 11, 2020
Billionaire Tom Steyer: Dropped out February 29, 2020
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Dropped out March 1, 2020
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Dropped out March 2, 2020
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Dropped out March 4, 2020
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: Dropped out March 5, 2020
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: Dropped out March 19, 2020
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: Dropped out April 8, 2020
(Doing this list as a cheat-sheet for myself, and for (as Dwight likes to say) the Historical Record.)
Ever since Brett Kavanaugh was falsely accused of sexual assault in 2018, the Third-Wave Feminist Shrieking Harridan Brigade has been telling us we must “believe all women” who level any charges. Due process be damned, all men are guilty, and that’s that.
Until the Biden thing.
The same media types who have been leading the #MeToo finger-wagging for a couple of years have now adopted an “ignore this woman” approach. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that they would circle the wagons for the presumptive Democratic nominee.
And then NYT whitewashes their own story:
There's no evidence of misconduct from Joe Biden beyond (checks article) hugs, kisses, and *touching.*
Do you recall the Times searching the Twitter feed of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford? Or spending weeks digging up dirt that could make her seem a flake, as the Lerer-Ember story does with Reade?
Reade is making charges about events in 1993, when she was in her 20s and Biden was 51. Ford’s claims were even older, about events in 1982, when all involved were in high school.
Unlike Reade, Ford had no one confirming she’d told the same story at the time — indeed, everyone she cited as a witness said that nothing like the party she described had ever happened.
Yet the Times (and ideological allies at other publications as well as in politics) played up every allegation against Kavanaugh, pumping up their apparent credibility exactly as it seeks to undermine Reade’s credibility now. Even months after he won confirmation, it ran a column presenting yet another “accusation” — without mentioning that the “accuser” didn’t remember it happening, and in fact wouldn’t even be interviewed.
The Gray Lady is hardly alone in this hypocrisy: The actress and #MeToo leader Alyssa Milano, for example, has suddenly discovered due process now that a candidate she favors stands accused. “We have to societally change that mindset to believing women, but that does not mean at the expense of not giving men their due process and investigating situations,” Milano said in an interview. “It’s got to be fair in both directions.”
It isn’t hard to come to the conclusion that for Republicans, it’s “guilty when accused.” Only Democrats deserve the benefit of doubt.
For starters, there’s money. Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee already have $225 million in the bank. That’s 17 times more than Joe Biden’s campaign has on hand now.
The coronavirus has prohibited the kinds of back-slapping, elbow-cupping, look-them-right-in-the-eye access for solicitations that donors cherish in person. So, Biden is left to play catch-up from his Delaware mansion via time-consuming Skyping or Facetiming with small bands of rich people.
Snip.
Do you have any sense of exactly what a President Biden would do once he no longer had a Donald Trump to kick around?
No, you don’t. Because all the six-term ex-senator and two-term ex-vice president has done recently is endorse whatever House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer want. Which is also what would likely happen once Nancy and Chuck had their own presidential puppet in the Oval Office.
An incumbent of either party has a built-in fundraising advantage based on his prominence and accumulated power. The odds of incumbents winning are excellent in modern times.
Perhaps you’ve noticed President Trump on TV daily talking about the national health crisis and anything else that crosses his mind. Perhaps you also remember the summer of 2012 when incumbent Barack Obama was assuring us that al-Qaeda was on the run just before militants sacked the Benghazi consulate and killed four Americans..
With his built-in fundraising advantage, Obama’s campaign spent that summer on TV defining Mitt Romney as a wealthy elitist who transported the family dog on his car roof and may have caused cancer in elderly women. The under-funded Romney could not respond until his official nomination the last week of August gave him access to federal funds and general election donations. Too late.
Come this June or July at the latest, expect to see the immense Trump campaign treasury financing a barrage of anti-Biden ads that make D-Day’s pre-invasion bombardment look like a beach picnic. Biden’s very long public record, his family’s sometimes shady shenanigans and his own unique panoply of verbal gaffes and garbled syntactical nonsense provide a target-rich environment of damaging video clips.
Oh, look! That invisible virus just conspired to prompt Democrats to delay their national convention by five weeks to mid-August. That’s five fewer weeks of federal funding for the Biden camp to respond. With the Summer Olympics also postponed, that leaves the entire summer wide open for Trump’s team to define old Joe as, well, old, perhaps too old mentally for the demands of the commander-in-chief job.
“For $1,500, Joe, what year did the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 occur?” Joe: “1917?” “No. 10 seconds, Joe.” “1916?”
There’s rambling, and then there’s Joe Biden rambling:
“We should be making it easier, not harder, to make sure, to se-, to make sense. Let me put it another way, it makes no sense.”
May we quote you on that, Lunch Bucket Joe?
After apparently winning the Wisconsin primary, Biden went on CNN with Fredo Cuomo to take a bow, or something, about the results:
“But look, it’s been done. We’re gonna get the election results in about, what, another week, in another week or so after that this… I forget the date, the 13th? And, uh, I you know but I I think that uh uh you know I I if if there’s an election, was an election, if people, depending on how many showed up, I think I will have done well but who knows?”
Joe Biden says that you can never postpone an election because it's a danger to democracy, then SECONDS LATER he accuses Wisconsin Republicans of being partisan for not postponing the election: pic.twitter.com/b6EXNMPXKM
Biden endorsed by Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis, who always gets described as “Civil Rights Icon” rather than “17 term congressman.” The endorsement came last week while Sanders was still in the race. From here on out I don’t think additional Democrats endorsing Biden is newsworthy.
John Yoo says that Biden doesn’t understand the chain of command. But it’s over the whole Brett Crozier/Theodore Roosevelt situation, which is a pretty abnormal peg to hang a sweeping opinion piece on.
Joe Biden’s campaign is offering to help states receive coronavirus resources through its own private connections.
Let me repeat that for the CNN-impaired… Joe Biden is offering to help states get their hands on coronavirus resources through his own private connections.
In other words, rather than offer these much-needed resources to the federal government or even the state and local governments, Biden’s connections are offering them to his campaign so Biden can pretend to be president while he hides out in his Delaware basement. And Joe Biden is okay with that.
This is not a joke. This is really happening during the worst week of a pandemic where we are losing upwards of a thousand Americans a day:
In the early hours of Monday morning, Joe Biden’s campaign sent an email to state leaders offering to connect them with desperately needed coronavirus resources.
In the email obtained by The Post, Biden’s political chief of staff Stacy Eichner told state officials that the former veep’s presidential campaign had received a “significant number of offers” from organizations and people eager to offer resources.
In 1920, Harding was his generation’s “stay at home” candidate. Meanwhile, his opponent, Democrat James A. Cox barnstormed the nation. What did that get him? Cox lost the popular vote by 26 points and was swamped in the Electoral College (404-127).
The point of this: the “less is more” that some experts think would work best for Biden – limited public appearances, abbreviated comments and media interaction – doesn’t work today. Especially not with an opponent who would be calling him out daily (hourly) on social media (”Lazier Joe”?) if Biden opted for a lower profile.
Veepstakes piece. All the usual XX chromosome names: Harris, Warren, Klobuchar, Whitmer, Abrams, Michelle Lujan Grisham, and The Tammys (Baldwin and Duckworth). No mention of Grandma Death.
“Can Joe Biden build the excitement for his candidacy amid coronavirus?” Yes, nothing says excitement quite like Sleepy Joe…
The Trump campaign dropped this devastating video on Biden and China:
The usual leftists types are spooked: “Democrats Fear Trump’s New 2020 Strategy Is Working. The president and his team aren’t hiding their plans to make Beijing the main villain in America’s fight against the pandemic.” Ya think? In other news, President Trump’s plan to depict Darth Vader as the main villain of Star Wars also appears to be working…
A common viewpoint expressed:
With the caveat that Twitter is not representative of anything and currently in a pronounced collective tailspin, there sure seems to be more preemptive recrimination re: The Left Blowing It For Biden than there is any excitement for Biden's run, or his prospective presidency.
The Des Moines Register, CNN and Selzer & Co. have made the decision to not release the final installment of the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll as planned Saturday evening.
Nothing is more important to the Register and its polling partners than the integrity of the Iowa Poll. Today, a respondent raised an issue with the way the survey was administered, which could have compromised the results of the poll. It appears a candidate’s name was omitted in at least one interview in which the respondent was asked to name their preferred candidate.
While this appears to be isolated to one surveyor, that could not be confirmed with certainty. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution, the partners made the difficult decision not to move forward with releasing the poll. The poll was the last one scheduled by the polling partners before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential caucuses, which are Monday.
J. Ann Selzer, whose company conducts the Iowa Poll, said, “There were concerns about what could be an isolated incident. Because of the stellar reputation of the poll, and the wish to always be thought of that way, the heart-wrenching decision was made not to release the poll. The decision was made with the highest integrity in mind.”
The New York Times reported that Pete Buttigieg’s campaign complained the former mayor’s name was left off the list of candidates in one interview, leading the media partners to throw the poll out entirely.
Again, who cancels a poll because one partisan complained something was off? More:
Underscoring the attention paid to the poll, CNN had planned an hourlong TV program around its release. Instead, at 9 p.m. Eastern, the network’s political director, David Chalian, went on the air to explain why the poll wasn’t being issued.
Something stinks here. My guess is they saw something in the poll they didn’t want the public to see, mostly likely that Bernie Sanders was clobbering the other candidates, and CNN told them to pull the plug.
Some tweets (usual rumor caveats apply):
So you're telling me that a single individual who was polled was responsible for cancelling the Des Moines Register poll? This reeks of censorship. #ReleaseThePollhttps://t.co/YGd9qK381r
The truth about the Des Moines Register poll. Bernie Sanders is up, and up YUGGEEE. We had the biggest rally of any presidential candidate today. We knocked on 500,000 doors in IOWA. Our surge isn’t even at its peak, we are going to take Iowa by a LARGE margin. #IowaForBernie
Andrew Yang: “We were all waiting in the back for a new Des Moines Register poll that was supposed to come out a few minutes ago, and then they said they’re not releasing it – so all these rumors are flying, and one of the rumors we’ve gotten is that we did really really well.”
lol. CNN can't find room on its front page for the biggest story in politics: the killing of their Iowa poll with the DM Register. pic.twitter.com/Jrt4QkzYQ6
I’m waiting for a video where he brags “So I said to the Dem Moines Register, I says there’s no way you’re releasing that poll…and sonuvabitch – what do know….”
Reminder: That same poll missed a late Ted Cruz surge four years ago. Given the way the DNC and media put it’s thumb on the scales for Hillary, and how consistently the media has destroyed what little credibility it still had left pushing every anti-Trump narrative that flowed down the sewer pipe, they no longer get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen. Our default assumption now is that you’re lying for partisan advantage. Especially with CNN. You’re worthless garbage and we hope AT&T fires everyone and shuts down your entire network in embarrassment.
Right now this poll is 92% not believing the Register‘s explanation:
Do you believe the Des Moines Register when they say they are not releasing their poll bc of a problem with the questioning?
Booker drops Out, Warren and Sanders feud, Steyer money-bombs his way to contention, Bennet idles at 500 milliMondales, and Patrick hits a new high of 1%. Plus a gratuitous shot at Franklin Pierce. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Too damn many polls this time around.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 36, Steyer 15, Sanders 14, Warren 10, Buttigieg 4, Bloomberg 2, Yang 2, Booker 2. Steyer at 15% is eye-opening. That money-bombing must really be making a difference.
Emerson (New Hampshire): Sanders 23, Buttigieg 18, Biden 14, Warren 14, Klobuchar 10, Yang 6, Gabbard 5, Steyer 4, Delany 1, Patrick 0, Bennet 0. Sample size of 657, which strikes me as pretty good for a state that size. That’s the highest Klobuchar has ever polled in New Hampshire.
Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire) (page 25): Biden 26, Sanders 22, Warren 18, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 4, Gabbard 4, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Steyer 2, Booker 1. I also want to note that Franklin Pierce is one of the worst Presidents in American history, signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act with uncommon zeal…
In the run-up to tonight’s Democratic presidential debate in Iowa, the last such contest before primary voting begins, one of the big storylines is about who won’t be among the half-dozen candidates on stage.
“This debate is so white, it’s not allowed to bring the potato salad,” cracked Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher. “The smallest, whitest one yet,” concurred Politico.
With Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) exiting the race Monday, and both Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) failing to meet the qualification thresholds, the resulting lineup is not just pale, it’s ancient—the three highest-polling of the six debaters would each be the oldest president ever sworn into office. A fourth, Tom Steyer, is a hedge fund billionaire who literally bought his way to the podium, after an entire season in which Democrats debated whether billionaires should even exist. (An even older white billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, currently sits fifth in national polls but is not bothering with early primary/caucus states.)
So you can see why the younger, more progressive voices who punch above their weight in Democratic political discourse would be dismayed. “Bad for democracy,” pronounced Salon’s David Daley. “The system they have designed has suppressed the most loyal base of the Democratic Party,” charged Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson in The Washington Post. “Anyone with an understanding of civil rights law understands how the rules can be set up to benefit some communities. The Democratic Party should look at the impact of these rules and question the results.”
That is certainly one theory. But I would suggest at least considering another. Cory Booker was one of five Gen X candidates (only one white male among them) who came into the race with ideologically mixed pedigrees—including not a small amount of what progressives would deride as “neoliberal” policy positions on deficits, trade, and education—but then competed with varying levels of believability on being the most woke, before eventually collapsing.
First Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.), then Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Julián Castro, and now Booker all made the affirmative choice to either tack heavily left on economics or just downplay their past heresies in favor of talking up issues such as slavery reparations, Medicare for all illegal immigrants, and the racism/sexism of President Donald Trump. The abject failure of this approach is one of the greater underexplored storylines of the 2020 presidential nominating season.
Eleven months ago, this group accounted for about one-quarter of voter support in national polls: Around 12 percent for Harris, 6 percent for O’Rourke, 5 percent for Booker, and 1 percent each for Castro and Gillibrand. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who would eventually vault herself up to near-frontrunner status, was then just a face in this crowd: 7 percent. Democrats were making similar murmurs of pride about their energetic and historically diverse field that you heard among Republicans in the first half of 2015.
What happened next? While Warren went on a white-paper spree of policy “plans” for every economic and regulatory issue under the sun, the Gen X Five engaged in more identity-politics emoting than a campus struggle session, only with less sincerity. O’Rourke agonized publicly about his ancestors owning slaves. Harris the cop tried gruesomely to rebrand herself as a hip Jamaican pot smoker. Gillibrand spent valuable debate-stage time talking about the need to educate people about her white privilege. Booker pushed for reparations and policed Joe Biden’s language, while Castro was busy shaking his damn head that all these leftward lurches didn’t go nearly left enough.
The late-night comedy skits wrote themselves. And by August, Warren was outpolling all five whippersnappers combined.
It’s not that the more successful septuagenarian progressives shied away from calling Trump a racist—far from it. But voters did not have to guess about what got the northeastern senators up early every morning: It’s the economic policy, stupid. What, exactly, was Kirsten Gillibrand’s selling proposition? Why were O’Rourke and Booker (at least until the last of the latter’s debates) running away from much of the stuff that made them interesting in the first place?
What makes their choice that much more curious is the persistent math of this race: The progressive bloc in the 2020 Democratic field has persistently lagged the centrists by about 10 percentage points. The RealClearPolitics running national averages for Biden (27.4 percent), Pete Buttigieg (7.8 percent), Bloomberg (6.2), and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (3.0) (D–Minn.) combine for 44.4 percent; Sanders (18.8 percent) + Warren (16.8) + Steyer (2.2) = 37.8. Instead of using their ideological dexterity to compete against a very old-looking frontrunner for the scared-of-socialists vote, the Gen Xers chased whatever progressive crumbs hadn’t already been hoovered by two strong candidates.
“All the talk in the Democratic presidential race these last few days has been ‘Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!’ But all the action says “Biden! Biden! Biden!‘”
While the chattering classes are wetting themselves over a single poll, party bigwigs are coalescing around Biden.
I reported to you last week that Barack Obama and his former lieutenants “worry that Sanders is crazy enough to win the Dem nomination, but too crazy to win the general election.” The only thing Team Obama doesn’t have is a plan to actually stop him.
But maybe Nancy Pelosi does….
By delaying this thing from December and into the kickoff of the primary season, Pelosi has sucked much of the oxygen out of the room for challengers to Biden’s frontrunner status. The rest of the establishment appears to be lining up behind Biden as well. John Kerry — about as Establishment as it gets, and an early Biden backer — just blasted Sanders for “distorting” Biden’s record on Iraq. Democratic Congressman Colin Allred just became the tenth member of the Congressional Black Caucus to endorse Biden. Biden also just scored endorsements from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, and Iowa Rep. Finkenauer, whose district encompasses the kind of blue-collar voters the eventual Dem nominee will need to win back from Trump in November.
The superdelegates do not get to vote in the first round this year unless a candidate has a majority. Unlike 2016 when they all went to Hillary, this year they don’t vote until round 2 unless it is already decided.
California is now part of Super Tuesday. In 2016, the California primary was held on June 7. This year, the survivor bias bandwagon effect will be significantly reduced and possibly eliminated.
Following NH there will be two debates, and likely 4 candidates minimum at each. Currently there are six.
This will likely not be a two-way races headed into Super-Tuesday. Elizabeth Warren may have little overall chance, but she does have a chance of getting 15% in many states.
Progressive Split: Bernie Sanders are battling each other for the Progressives. Bernie will get most of this vote, but Warren will likely have enough money to stay in until the end if she wants.
Bloomberg and Steyer may target a couple of states hard: Texas, Colorado perhaps? They may each pull 15% in a couple of them.
Graphical representation of Bloomberg and Steyer’s saturation money bombing campaign. Across the nation, TV station ad executives are toasting them from the behinds the wheels of their new Mercedes. (interestingly, Steyer seems to be throwing more money into cable TV ads than Bloomberg. Seems to be working in South Carolina.)
More nuanced analyses of the Sanders-Warren conflict suggest that maintaining a nonaggression pact would be mutually beneficial because otherwise Biden could run away with the nomination. But the word “mutually” is debatable. I’d argue nonaggression toward Warren is pretty clearly in the best interest of Sanders, who was in the stronger position than Warren heading into the debate and who would probably prefer to focus on Biden. But it’s probably not beneficial to Warren. Any scenario that doesn’t involve Warren winning Iowa will leave her in a fairly rough position — and winning Iowa means beating Sanders there.
My youngest said that Warren “seems like the kind of grandma that doesn’t make cookies.” Basically, he’s saying she seems cold, but I like his phrasing better.
Michael Bennet is polling in 10th place. He hasn’t made a debate stage since July and won’t disclose how much money he raised last quarter.
And he can be awkward on the stump: In one 45-minute stretch at a recent town hall, Bennet swung his hands so wildly while making a point that he hit a woman in the leg, he tripped over a stool holding his water, and he nearly tangled himself in a microphone cord while trying to take off his sport coat.
Yet a small number of New Hampshire’s voters and political elites have found themselves drawn to his message, demeanor and experience, hoping almost despite themselves that Bennet could be the ultimate dark horse primary candidate.
Even his supporters admit there’s no clear path to winning the nomination.
Joe Biden (almost certainly) had a better week than you did. Over the past seven days, the ramblin’ septuagenarian has seen his two top rivals for the Democratic nomination focus their fire on each other, his poll numbers in Iowa jump, his final debate before the the Hawkeye State’s caucus go off without hitch (or, at least, with no more than the normal number of hitches), and his former boss do his campaign a big favor.
The Democratic front-runner was already doing perfectly fine last Friday. But his campaign still faced the looming threat of Tuesday night’s oratorical smackdown in Des Moines. At the last two debates, Biden’s top rivals had largely held their fire, ostensibly calculating that it was better to avoid going negative on the former vice-president if at all possible; maybe the old man would find a way to beat himself. But now, with Biden’s lead in national polls sturdy as ever — and Tuesday’s debate, his adversaries’ last, best chance to bloody him before the first ballots are cast — surely Uncle Joe was going to take some fire.
After all, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had both previewed new, anti-Biden attack lines in the run-up to the event. The Vermont senator began sewing his many substantive critiques of Biden into a larger narrative challenging the front-runner’s electability. Warren, meanwhile, released a bankruptcy reform plan that was clearly intended to function as a jumping-off point for a searing indictment of Biden’s work on the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill — a piece of legislation that had privileged credit companies over consumers to such an egregious extent, it had radicalized a humble legal academic who had once considered herself a conservative.
And then, Warren learned that the Sanders campaign was (somewhat gently) challenging her electability in a call script. And then CNN reported on a private conversation Sander and Warren had apparently had. And then the rest is (disputed, incredibly stupid) history. On Tuesday night, both Warren and Sanders seem to have become too preoccupied with their feud to properly execute their hits on Biden.
Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign, and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the U.S. Senate, he would bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like Ireland, Rome and Africa.
When Joe became vice president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.
Consider the case of HillStone International, a subsidiary of the huge construction management firm, Hill International. The president of HillStone International was Kevin Justice, who grew up in Delaware and was a longtime Biden family friend. On November 4, 2010, according to White House visitors’ logs, Justice visited the White House and met with Biden adviser Michele Smith in the Office of the Vice President.
Less than three weeks later, HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the firm as an executive vice president. James appeared to have little or no background in housing construction, but that did not seem to matter to HillStone. His bio on the company’s website noted his “40 years of experience dealing with principals in business, political, legal and financial circles across the nation and internationally…”
James Biden was joining HillStone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build 100,000 homes. It was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project deal won by TRAC Development, a South Korean company. HillStone also received a $22 million U.S. federal government contract to manage a construction project for the State Department.
David Richter, son of the parent company’s founder, was not shy in explaining HillStone’s success in securing government contracts. It really helps, he told investors at a private meeting, to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner,” according to someone who was there.
The Iraq project was massive, perhaps the single most lucrative project for the firm ever. In 2012, Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business reported that HillStone officials expected the project to “generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years.” That amounted to more than three times the revenue the company produced in 2011.
A group of minority partners, including James Biden, stood to split about $735 million. “There’s plenty of money for everyone if this project goes through,” said one company official.
The deal was all set, but HillStone made a crucial error. In 2013, the firm was forced to back out of the contract because of a series of problems, including a lack of experience by Hill and TRAC Development, its South Korean associate firm. But HillStone continued doing significant contract work in the embattled country, including a six-year contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
James Biden remained with Hill International, which accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, and elsewhere.
Let’s snip Hunter, just because we’ve been plowing that ground the way Hunter knocks up random women.
It would be a dream for any new company to announce their launch in the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
StartUp Health is an investment consultancy based out of New York City, and in June 2011 the company barely had a website. The firm was the brainchild of three siblings from Philadelphia. Steven Krein is CEO and co-founder, while his brother, Dr. Howard Krein, serves as chief medical officer. Sister Bari serves as the firm’s chief strategy officer. A friend named Unity Stoakes is a co-founder and serves as president.
StartUp Health was barely up and running when, in June 2011, two of the company’s executives were ushered into the Oval Office of the White House. They met with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
The following day the new company would be featured at a large health care tech conference being run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and StartUp Health executives became regular visitors to the White House, attending events in 2011, 2014 and 2015.
How did StartUp Health gain access to the highest levels of power in Washington? There was nothing particularly unique about the company, but for this:
The chief medical officer of StartUp Health, Howard Krein, is married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley.
“I happened to be talking to my father-in-law that day and I mentioned Steve and Unity were down there [in Washington, D.C.],” recalled Howard Krein. “He knew about StartUp Health and was a big fan of it. He asked for Steve’s number and said, ‘I have to get them up here to talk with Barack.’ The Secret Service came and got Steve and Unity and brought them to the Oval Office.”
StartUp Health offers to provide new companies technical and relationship advice in exchange for a stake in the business. Demonstrating and highlighting the fact that you can score a meeting with the president of the United States certainly helps prove a strategic company asset: high-level contacts.
Vice President Joe Biden continued to help Krein promote his company at several appearances through his last months in the White House, including one in January 2017, where he made a surprise showing at the StartUp Health Festival in San Francisco. The corporate event, open only to StartUp Health members, enabled the 250 people in attendance to chat in a closed session with the vice president.
Plus info on Frank Biden and Valerie Biden Owens. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Bill Maher thinks that the impeachment farce is a threat to Biden if he and Hunter have to testify. “If this gets to a trial and they call Biden and his son, trust me, Biden and his son and Ukraine will be the bigger scandal.” This doesn’t sound like the sort of headline that will play to Biden’s base: “Joe Biden Has Advocated Cutting Social Security for 40 Years”:
Biden has been advocating for cuts to Social Security for roughly 40 years.
And after a Republican wave swept Congress in 1994, Biden’s support for cutting Social Security, and his general advocacy for budget austerity, made him a leading combatant in the centrist-wing battle against the party’s retreating liberals in the 1980s and ’90s.
“When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,” he told the Senate in 1995. “I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.” (A freeze would have reduced the amount that would be paid out, cutting the program’s benefit.)
While I’m personally in favor of real entitlement reform, I doubt the average Biden backer is willing to dispassionately contemplate the issue. The danger of nominating the default nominee. Biden opposes legal marijuana.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a second extension on his personal financial filing information, which means Democrats won’t get a look at them until after Super Tuesday. Had a rally at a San Antonio restaurant. All of 45 people attended. Even with Judge Judy! Never mind all that #NeverTrump talk of how moderate Bloomy is, he just pandered to the Social Justice Warrior set. Because that just worked so well for every single candidate that’s dropped out of the race so far. Speaking of pandering, he promised to throw $70 billion at poor black neighborhoods, because there’s another strategy that has such an outstanding record of success. President Donald Trump slammed Bloomberg over dissing church shooting hero Jack Wilson. Bloomberg is very upset that law-abiding citizens are allowed to remain armed. He promises to spend (Dr. Evil)Two BILLION Dollars!(/Doctor Evil) to defeat Trump. How could he possibly fail? Well, take a lot at the sort of thing his social media team is cranking out:
Deep in a dank under-basement at Bloomberg corporate headquarters, an underpaid inter with Photoshop knows he only has 15 minutes to crank an aspiring meme for the Twitter feed before he receives yet another painful electric shock…
Update: New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Dropped Out. Booker was far from the worst of the bunch, but Kimberley Strassel notes that he suffered from a common malady among them: woke politics.
To paraphrase Santayana, Democrats who refuse to acknowledge Hillary Clinton’s failures in the 2016 election were always doomed to repeat them. Why is their primary field littered with the failed bids of woke candidates? Why is #WarrenIsASnake trending on Twitter? Because identity politics remains a political loser.
That’s the takeaway from the rapidly narrowing Democratic field, and smart liberals warned of it after 2016. Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Times, faulted Mrs. Clinton for molding her campaign around “the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop.” Successful politics, he noted, is always rooted in visions of “shared destiny.”
Progressives heaped scorn on Mr. Lilla—one compared him to David Duke—and doubled down on identity politics. Nearly every flashpoint in this Democratic race has centered on racism, sexism or classism. Nearly every practitioner of that factionalist strategy has exited the race.
Booker’s campaign was always doomed. He’s comparable to Julian Castro in his penchant for never finding something not worth pandering over. After initially positioning himself as a moderate much of his career, including doing some across the aisles projects as both the Mayor of New Jersey and a Senator, Booker fell into the same trap everyone not named Joe Biden has fallen into, namely selling out the majority moderate Democrat voting base to please the woke scolds. For example, Booker was for school choice before he was against it.
He was also just not very likable. Perhaps not as much as Elizabeth Warren, but he always seemed to be straining to score points and that’s never a good look. It presents a front of desperation and Booker certainly was that most of his campaign.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Been a bad month for “Mayor Pete.” His momentum stalled, his poll numbers declined, and his “all in on Iowa and New Hampshire” strategy isn’t looking like a winning bet. Plus there’s that likability problem:
Buttigieg is still 17 months younger than Macaulay Culkin of “Home Alone” fame, an attentive reader notes. After all these years, that is a gap that shows no sign of narrowing. On the other hand, he is now a full three years older than Mozart—another prodigy, but who never served one term as mayor of South Bend, Ind., much less two—was at the time of his death.
As early middle age inches into view, Buttigieg is welcoming a new year filled with dazzling possibilities. He’s bunched in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he’s also experiencing a change in the weather that must be uncomfortable for someone who has known since early boyhood that he is very smart and that the Big People invariably find him impressive.
The very traits that usually impress—his fluency in political language; go-getter’s résumé; intense ambition carried in the vessel of a calm, well-mannered persona— are increasingly being greeted with skepticism and even derision. Notably, this is coming from his peers.
“Buttigieg hate is tightly concentrated among the young,” a writer at the Atlantic observed. “Why Pete Buttigieg Enrages the Young Left,” read a headline in POLITICO Magazine. “Swing Voter Really Relates to Buttigieg’s Complete Lack of Conviction,” said a headline in The Onion. For months, the satirical site has been vicious toward him in ways that evoke the wisecracking cool kids at the back of the class mocking the preening overachiever in the front row.
The Buttigieg backlash, by my lights, flows from origins that are less ideological than psychological. I noticed it some time ago with some—certainly not all—younger journalistic colleagues in particular. He torques them in ways that seem personal.
They are well-acquainted with the Buttigieg type. They find his patter and polish annoying. They regard his career to date—Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey, the mayoralty—as a facile exercise in box-checking: A Portrait of the Bullshit Artist as a Young Man.
Above all, they wonder why the artifice and calculation that seem obvious to them are somehow lost on others.
These Buttigieg skeptics, in my experience, typically overlook another possibility: His admirers aren’t oblivious to the fact that he’s partly B.S.-ing. It just doesn’t much bother them. I’ll go a step further: Viewed in the right light, his teacher’s-pet glibness and implacable careerism are desirable traits.
He gets interviewed by the New York Times editorial board. I don’t even like the guy, but they way they’ve interspersed links to refute his answers inside his actual answers, literally mid-sentence in some cases, strikes me as a shoddy hit piece. Want to refute him? Fine, but your reply links after his answers. But let the man speak. His campaign canceled a fundraising event at a gay bar over a stripper pole.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? So I’m all ready to move Grandma Death down into the also-rans when word drops that a new documentary about her is coming to Hulu.
1. This entire debate might go on without anyone pledging to end “failed regime-change wars,” a refrain Gabbard has popularized on the campaign trail thus far. Her saying it in every answer is a bit of a meme at this point, but it’s also of crucial importance. In a time when we have troops engaged in nearly 150 countries and have spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in failed Middle East wars, it’s a message too crucial to overlook.
2. Gabbard’s willingness to buck the party establishment and call out Democrats on their flaws will be missed. From endorsing Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016 to taking on Kamala Harris’s draconian criminal justice record, any mealy-mouthed, weak criticisms we see from the candidates will probably not come anywhere close to the truth bombs Gabbard has regularly dropped.
Plus “The party of identity politics will feature an all-white field.”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a werid co-endorsement (along with Warren) from the New York Times; since the hard left are the only people that still read the Times any more, maybe it will have some effect on voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, but I remain skeptical. Amy sure loves her some big pharma money.(Hat tip: Instapundit.) Five take-aways from her debate appearance. (Actually, the headline is “The five moments that defined Amy Klobuchar’s Iowa debate performance,” which is horribly pretentious twaddle.) New Hampshire state rep Michael Pedersen defects from Warren to Klobuchar. (Hat tip: CutJibNews at Ace of Spades HQ.) Quad City Timesbacks Klobuchar after backing Sanders in 2016.
Johnnie Cordero, chairman of the Democratic Black Caucus of South Carolina, and South Carolina state representative Jerry Govan, chairman of the Black Legislative Caucus, are throwing their support behind the billionaire candidate, Steyer’s campaign told The Root exclusively. The former president of the North Carolina Democratic Party’s African American Caucus, Linda Wilkins-Daniels, is also endorsing Steyer.
Her backstory, famously, is fake. During a time when elite universities like Harvard were under incredible pressure to hire non-white faculty to their law schools, Elizabeth Warren registered as a Cherokee. Eventually she concocted an almost-certainly-false story about anti–Native American prejudice from her father’s parents. Warren plagiarized her contribution to a book of Native American home recipes, Pow Wow Chow, from a French cookbook. Harvard bragged about its hiring of Warren and advertised her as an addition to its diversity, though reporting in recent years has attempted to obscure whether this was a help to her.
Warren’s political persona is entirely false. She claims to be a populist, but her form of social democracy is a kind of class warfare for millionaires and affluent liberals against billionaires and the petit bourgeois entrepreneurs who vote Republican. Her student-debt and free-college plans are absolute boons to the doctors, lawyers, and academics — the affluent wage-earners — who are her chief constituency. Meanwhile, her tax reforms go after not only billionaires but the small entrepreneurs: the guys who own a car wash, or a garbage-disposal service, and tend to vote Republican. Her consumer-protection reforms have hampered and destroyed local banks, and rewarded the bad-actor mega-banks she claims daily to oppose.
“Warren pointed out her defeat of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) in 2012 in an attempt to show she’s electable. This means she is ‘the only person who will be on the debate stage who has beaten a popular Republican incumbent Republican any time in the last 25 years.'” So her claim to beating electable is that she beat a Republican in Massachusetts in an Obama wave year. That’s like bragging that you beat your cousins at pickup basketball without mentioning that Michael Jordan was on your team. Speaking of stupid things she said, she also claimed she was the only one in the race with executive experience. “Warren Rejects Peace Pipe Offered By Sanders.” OK, I laughed:
Poll time! Who will the NYT editorial board endorse?
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:
