Bullock and Harris drop Out, Bloomberg rises (though slowly), Booker gets weepy, Tulsi sings, and Democrats have a diversity problem. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Light polling week:
Pundits, etc.
With just under two months until the Iowa caucuses, the already-volatile Democratic presidential race has grown even more unsettled, setting the stage for a marathon nominating contest between the party’s moderate and liberal factions.
Pete Buttigieg’s surge, Bernie Sanders’s revival, Elizabeth Warren’s struggles and the exit of Kamala Harris have upended the primary and, along with Joseph R. Biden’s Jr. enduring strength with nonwhite voters, increased the possibility of a split decision after the early nominating states.
That’s when Michael R. Bloomberg aims to burst into the contest — after saturating the airwaves of the Super Tuesday states with tens of millions of dollars of television ads.
With no true front-runner and three other candidates besides Mr. Bloomberg armed with war chests of over $20 million, Democrats are confronting the prospect of a drawn-out primary reminiscent of the epic Clinton-Obama contest in 2008.
“There’s a real possibility Pete wins here, Warren takes New Hampshire, Biden South Carolina and who knows about Nevada,” said Sue Dvorsky, a former Iowa Democratic chair. “Then you go into Super Tuesday with Bloomberg throwing $30 million out of his couch cushions and this is going to go for a while.”
That’s a worrisome prospect for a party already debating whether it has a candidate strong enough to defeat President Trump next November. The contenders have recently begun to attack one another more forcefully — Ms. Warren, a nonaggressor for most of the campaign, took on Mr. Buttigieg on Thursday night — and the sparring could get uglier the longer the primary continues.
A monthslong delegate battle would also feature a lengthy public airing of the party’s ideological fissures and focus more attention on contentious policies like single-payer health care while allowing Mr. Trump to unleash millions of dollars in attack ads portraying Democrats as extreme.
The candidates are already planning for a long race, hiring staff members for contests well past the initial early states. But at the moment they are also grappling with a primary that has evolved into something of a three-dimensional chess match, in which moves that may seem puzzling are taken with an eye toward a future payoff.
Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, for example, are blocking each other from consolidating much of the left, but instead of attacking each other the two senators are training their fire on Mr. Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor. He has taken a lead in Iowa polls yet spent much of the past week courting black voters in the South.
And Mr. Biden is concluding an eight-day bus tour across Iowa, during which he has said his goal is to win the caucuses, but his supporters privately say they would also be satisfied if Mr. Buttigieg won and denied Ms. Warren a victory.
It may seem a little confusing, but there’s a strategy behind the moves.
Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren each covet the other’s progressive supporters but are wary about angering them by attacking each other. So Ms. Warren has begun drawing an implicit contrast by emphasizing her gender — a path more available now with Ms. Harris’s exit — and they are both targeting a shared opponent whom many of their fiercest backers disdain: Mr. Buttigieg.
The mayor has soared in heavily white Iowa, but has virtually no support among voters of color. So he started airing commercials in South Carolina spotlighting his faith and took his campaign there and into Alabama this past week — an acknowledgment that Iowans may be uneasy about him if he can’t demonstrate appeal with more diverse voters.
As for Mr. Biden, his supporters think he would effectively end the primary by winning Iowa. But they believe the next best outcome would be if Mr. Buttigieg fends off Ms. Warren there to keep her from sweeping both Iowa and New Hampshire and gaining too much momentum. They are convinced she’s far more of a threat than Mr. Buttigieg to build a multiracial coalition and breach the former vice president’s firewall in Nevada and South Carolina.
I don’t think Warren’s winning Iowa or New Hampshire, but since this was actually in the article, and I had to see it, now you have to see it too:
And you thought the Halloween nightmare season was over…
The Times piece didn’t mention the policy initiative upon which Harris launched her campaign: Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All legislation, which would eliminate private and employer-based health insurance. Harris signed on as a cosponsor to the bill last April. It’s haunted her ever since. Medicare for All might look like the sort of “big, structural change” that sets progressive hearts aflutter. For most voters it causes arrhythmia.
The proposal is liberals’ fool’s gold. It appears valuable but is actually worthless. It gets the progressive politician coming and going: Not only do voters recoil at the notion of having their insurance canceled, but candidates look awkward and inauthentic when they begin to move away from the unpopular idea they mistakenly embraced. That’s what happened to Harris earlier this year and is happening to Elizabeth Warren today.
Harris moved into second place nationwide after her ambush of Joe Biden over busing during the first Democratic debate. But her position soon began to erode. Her wavering position on eliminating private insurance dissatisfied voters. She had raised her hand in support of the policy during the debate, but the next day she walked it back. Then she walked back the walk-back. Then, ahead of the second debate, she released an intermediary plan that allowed for certain forms of private insurance. She stumbled again when Biden called her to account for the cost of the bill. Tulsi Gabbard’s pincer move on incarceration, using data first reported by the Free Beacon, made matters worse. By September, Harris had fallen to fifth place.
This was around the time that Warren, bolstered by adoring press coverage and strong retail politics, began her ascent. For a moment in early October, she pulled slightly ahead of Biden in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Her rivals sensed an opportunity in her refusal to admit that middle-class taxes would have to increase to pay for Medicare for All. The attacks took their toll. Support for Warren fell. She then released an eye-popping payment scheme that failed to satisfy her critics. In early November, she released a “first term” plan that would “transition” the country to Medicare for All. In so doing, she conceded the unreality of her initial proposal. She came across as sophistical and conniving. Her descent continues.
The national front-runner, Joe Biden, and the early-state leader, Pete Buttigieg, both reject Medicare for All in favor of a public option that would allow people to buy into Medicare.
Disappointed Democrats groused that you obviously had to be rich to compete in the 2020 race — because [Harris] was gone, while two billionaires remained — and pointed to the potentially all-white, un-diverse lineup at the party’s next debate as proof that the qualifying criteria put too much of a premium on fund-raising.
But Harris had made the cut for that debate. And she entered the presidential sweepstakes with a higher net worth ($6 million, according to Forbes) than Bernie Sanders ($2.5 million), Amy Klobuchar ($2 million) or Pete Buttigieg ($100,000), who are still in the hunt and are among the six contenders slated to be sparring onstage on Dec. 19. What’s more, Sanders and another of the six, Elizabeth Warren, have raised buckets of money without courting plutocrats.
Many Democrats blamed the media for Harris’s demise. They have a point, inasmuch as some news organizations never had the kind of romance with her that they did with Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, two white men. I noted as much in a column last May, pointing to O’Rourke’s placement on the cover of Vanity Fair and Buttigieg’s on the cover of Time.
But the media fell quickly out of love with O’Rourke and is picking Buttigieg apart for his lack of support among African-Americans and his past employment as a McKinsey consultant. And Harris was hardly ignored: Her initial campaign rally in Oakland, Calif., in January was covered live, in its entirety, on MSNBC and CNN. That same month, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC told her, in a face-to-face interview, “I think there is a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.” And after the Democratic debate in June, when Harris stirringly confronted Joe Biden about his past opposition to federally mandated busing to integrate schools, she received a bonanza of media attention and rapturous reviews.
I get that this Democratic primary isn’t playing out as anyone predicted or in remote accordance with the party’s image of itself and with its priorities. None of the top four candidates — Biden, Warren, Buttigieg and Sanders — is a person of color, three of them are 70 or older, and the billionaires, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg, are dipping into their personal fortunes in their efforts to gain ground. For a party that celebrates diversity, pitches itself to underdogs and prides itself on being future-minded and youth-oriented, that’s a freaky, baffling turn of events.
But some of the conclusions being drawn and complaints being raised don’t fully hold water.
Take the fears about the nomination being purchased. Without question, running for office is too expensive. That dynamic can definitely favor candidates with lucrative connections. And candidates are forced — unless they’re Steyer or Bloomberg — to devote ludicrous and possibly corrupting sums of time to political panhandling.
But at least at present, neither Steyer nor Bloomberg is exactly barreling toward victory. And while Cory Booker drew a connection between Harris’s departure and a process warped by wealth, the link is tenuous. Booker, whose campaign presses on despite his failure to qualify for the December debate, said of Harris’s withdrawal, “Voters did not determine her destiny.”
Actually, they kind of did. They’re the ones who are or aren’t excited enough about a candidacy to donate money and keep it alive. They’re the ones responding to pollsters and, by flagging their preferences, determining which candidates take on the air of plausibility that often generates the next round of donations. I keep seeing, on Twitter and Facebook, laments about Harris’s fate from Democrats who chose to support candidates other than her. Well, she couldn’t succeed on generalized, ambient good will.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Joe Biden asserted that he never heard worries that his son Hunter Biden’s role on a Ukrainian gas company could create a conflict of interest.
“Nobody warned me about a potential conflict of interest,” Biden said Friday in an interview with NPR. “I never, never heard that once at all.”
Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father was vice president and working on Ukrainian policy. President Trump asked the Ukrainian president this year to investigate the Bidens, prompting Democrats to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump.
George Kent, a top State Department official, testified during impeachment hearings in November that he raised conflict of interest concerns after he learned Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board.
Is pathos supposed to distract us from the fact that Biden is too incompetent to keep his own house in order? Or are we just supposed to assume that so much graft and self-dealing went on the Obama White House that Hunter’s piddling $50 grand a month Ukrainian sinecure was side hustle chump change next to the scams others were running? Speaking of Ukraine, John Kerry endorses his stepsons’s business partner’s father. “Here Are The Billionaires Backing Joe Biden’s Presidential Campaign.” Prominent names include Google’s Eric Schmidt, eBay’s Meg Whitman, Valve’s Gabe Newell, and George Lucas’ wife. He gets testy in a town hall and calls a retired farmer “fat.” Speaking of horrifying images lodged in your brain:
“Biden’s Popularity Skyrockets Among Coveted 1920s Working Class Demographic.”
After two weeks in the presidential race, Mike Bloomberg now employs one of the largest campaign staff rosters, has spent more money on ads than all the top-polling Democrats combined and is simultaneously building out ground operations in 27 states.
But when the former New York mayor showed up to get the endorsement of Augusta Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. on Friday, only two of the 10 chairs initially placed before the lectern were occupied. When Bloomberg joked about his college years, saying he “was one of the students who made the top half of the class possible,” he was met by silence.
“You’re supposed to laugh at that, folks,” Bloomberg said to a room at the city’s African American history museum filled mostly with staff and media.
For a normal presidential campaign, such moments would be a worrying sign, a potentially viral metaphor for a struggling effort. But with the Bloomberg campaign, it is not at all clear what established rules apply, if any. Everything he is doing is so unlike what has been done for decades that it is difficult to decipher how voters will react.
Rather than focus on the early states, he is campaigning for votes deep in the 2020 calendar, in places where voters are less tuned in to the nominating process. Rather than worry about a budget, he has put no limit on the money he is prepared to spend. Rather than run in a Democratic primary by appealing to ideological die-hards or partisan flag bearers, he describes himself as “basically nonpartisan.”
Although far outside the box, the effort is not easily dismissed. As a former three-term New York mayor, he comes to the race with more executive governing experience and has represented more voters than most of his competitors, as well as a philanthropic record he has emphasized in campaign ads while pushing several core liberal priorities, including increased gun regulation and the reduction of carbon pollution. His campaign message is focused on his own competence and electability.
It’s ironic that he’s focusing on “competence and electability” while pushing two of the democratic Party policies most likely to lose him votes in swing states. Gun grabbing and carbon taxes are electoral poison in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Tired of pieces that do nothing but rip into Bloomberg? Me neither:
Everyone will have their least favorite figure in the Democratic presidential primary. Mine might be Michael Bloomberg, for sheer self-regard, narcissism, condescension, and arrogance.
Bloomberg did his first televised interview as a presidential candidate with CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King. Some of the highlights, or depending upon your perspective:
No other Democrats is even remotely as good Michael Bloomberg, according to Michael Bloomberg.
MIKE BLOOMBERG: I watched all the candidates. And I just thought to myself, “Donald Trump would eat ’em up.”
GAYLE KING: You think all the candidates who are running today, he would eat them up?
MIKE BLOOMBERG: Let me rephrase it. I think that I would do the best job of competing with him and beating him.
His ego is justified because of his accomplishments, he explained.
MIKE BLOOMBERG: Does it take an ego? Yeah, I guess it takes an ego to think that you could do the job. I have 12 years of experience in City Hall. And I think if you go back today and ask most people about those 12 years, they would say that the– not me, but the team that I put together made an enormous difference in New York City. And New York City benefited from it and continues to benefit from it today from what we did then.
Even his flip-flops are a demonstration of his intelligence, competence, and guts, he explained.
GAYLE KING: Stop and frisk. You recently apologized for that. Some people are suspicious of the timing of your apology.
MIKE BLOOMBERG: The mark of an intelligent, competent person is when they make a mistake, they have the guts to stand up and say, ‘I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’
Bloomberg complimented the remaining African-American candidate in the race for being “very well-spoken.”
GAYLE KING: the next debate is December And Cory Booker– said that it could possibly be on that debate stage no one of color. There would be more billionaires in the race than black people. Is that a problem to you?
MIKE BLOOMBERG: Well, Cory Booker endorsed me a number of times. And I endorsed Cory Booker a number of times. He’s very well-spoken. He’s got some good ideas.
To be fair, if fellow New York City mayor Bill de Blasio were still in the race, Bloomberg would only be the second most loathed figure in the race…
The tears started flowing near the end of Saturday night’s town hall, as Cory Booker knew they would. The senator from New Jersey had started closing his events with a story about a mentor calling for him from his hospital bed, sharing his last six words.
“He said to me: I see you, I love you,” Booker said. “I see you. I love you.”
Some people had started wiping their eyes. “A family moving up from the South, distressed. Neighbors that didn’t know them helped my family out. I see you. I love you. Slaves trying to escape from the South find white families opening their barns up, pulling together to build the greatest infrastructure project this county has ever known, the Underground Railroad. I see you. I love you.”
The crowd of around 50 Iowans is silent, except for the sniffles and tissue packets. Booker has done this repeatedly, over a year-long campaign that has made him well-liked across the state — a popular second choice for voters whose top pick is Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg.
But Booker is an infrequent first choice, and it’s about to cost him. Unless something dramatic happens by Thursday, he’ll be knocked out of the sixth Democratic debate. Even Democrats who aren’t voting for Booker say they’re upset about that, wondering how the most diverse primary field in party history could become all white. The end of Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s campaign rattled some Democrats, and Booker wants them to think about why. That starts with his own story, about a father who fought segregation to help his family, and a Stanford graduate who became a poor city’s mayor. That — hint, hint — was what would be left offstage.
White liberal Democrats will do anything for black candidates except vote for them.
“It’s unfair to voters,” Booker said about the debate rules in an interview after a stop in Iowa City. “One of the most significant campaign presences here, and not be able to be on the debate stage? That’s unacceptable. The attitude from even local media here has been saying things like: Look, if you’re polled, choose Cory Booker, he deserves to be on the stage. There’s a backlash that’s going on here, where people are turning to our campaign, saying this is not right, we want to help.”
In front of voters, Booker was even more direct: “If you sit there and you see a caller I.D. and don’t recognize the number, for the next week or so, answer the phone.”
Booker is not the only nonwhite Democrat who could get onstage. Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii closer to qualifying than Booker is, based on polling. (Candidates must hit 4 percent in four polls, or 6 percent in two polls of early states, to qualify.) All three have hit the DNC’s fundraising marker and attracted at least 200,000 donations, as has Julián Castro, who was bumped out of the last debate.
Booker talks about how racist his party is:
Senator Cory Booker, one of two black Democrats still running for president, thinks the Democratic Party has created a primary contest that’s “going to have the unintended consequence of excluding people of color” while benefiting the white billionaires in the race.
“Is that really the symbol that the Democratic party wants to be sending out? That this is going to be made by money and elites’ decisions, not by the people? That’s a very problematic message to send,” Booker told BuzzFeed News in an interview outside his Cedar Rapids campaign office on Sunday morning.
After Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the race last week, Booker has said he thinks the primary has been hijacked by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who are able to use their considerable wealth to reach voters quickly. For instance, despite launching his campaign much later than other candidates, Steyer has a spot on the Democratic debate stage next week, while none of the four candidates of color have met the DNC’s requirements to qualify.
“When you watch an election, even in Iowa here when you’re staying in hotels here, you see Steyer and Bloomberg’s ads wall to wall and you see Kamala not making it now because of money,” he said.
Steyer’s spending millions to suck. Harris raised millions, and stopped raising them when people found out how badly she sucked.
On paper, he coulda been a contender: He’s a sitting governor, and governors have historically done well in presidential nominating contests. (Although it’s likely the 2020 nominee will not be a current or former governor — with Bullock’s departure, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is the only remaining current or former governor in the race.) And as the former chair of the Democratic Governors Association, he’s friendly with the establishment and even enjoyed the endorsement of Iowa’s most prominent statewide Democratic officeholder. He could also make a convincing case for his electability against President Trump, something that is very important to Democratic voters this cycle, as Bullock won reelection as Montana governor by 4 percentage points at the same time that Trump carried the state by 20 points.
But as with so many other candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden overshadowed Bullock. Biden has proven more durable in the primary than many pundits expected, which has limited the ability of similar candidates (center-left, white, male, perceived as electable, possessing executive experience) to get a foothold. And, for whatever reason, donors and other party leaders who are leery of Biden have chosen to recruit new candidates to enter the race rather than get behind a candidate like Bullock. And with his polling average in Iowa barely better than it was nationally, Bullock may have concluded that his path to the White House no longer existed.
An editorialist at The Hill wonders if this means an exodus of conservative voters from the Democratic Party:
Even with 12 Democratic candidates out, 16 remain in. No, Democrats do not have a quantity problem. What they have is a diversity problem – one of ideology – the only diversity problem they do not long to discuss.
To understand Democrats’ ideological diversity problem, compare two of this week’s casualties: Bullock and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).
Bullock was a popular two-term governor from red state Montana, the kind of state Democrats hope to flip to win in 2020. Harris is a first-term senator from bluest of blue California, the kind of state Democrats could not lose if they tried. Bullock is a white man; Harris, a minority woman. Bullock’s support remained low and flat throughout his brief campaign; Harris experienced a brief boom-let.
None of those differences mattered much. The only one that mattered was the ideological one. Men and women, whites and minorities, and extreme liberals and less-extreme liberals remain in the race. Bullock was the contest’s only conservative. Harris was an undisguised liberal. Still, according to the Real Clear Politics average of national polling, just before their exits, Bullock stood at 0.5 percent; Harris was at 4 percent. That numerical difference is indicative of the race’s content.
Bullock’s exit will be written off discreetly as a failure to gain “traction.” That is no more than face-saving fiction. If “traction” means what it objectively should – a significant increase in enthusiasm for their candidacy – then the whole Democratic field lack it. By such a standard, they should all be gone.
Honestly, how many conservatives are even left in the Democratic Party?
She sings “imagine.” I hate that song, but she’s not cringy:
Imagine. #johnlennon #imagine #beatles @johnlennon pic.twitter.com/yEoTy8vA6Q
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) December 8, 2019
Senator Kamala Devi Harris, who survived growing up in the segregated deep south of Berkeley and then Montreal, was a sure lock to be the next President of the United States.
And then, after raising $36 million from gullible idiots and greedy special interests, she dropped out without even facing a single primary. It was her single greatest act of courage since being bused across the Mason-Dixon line from Berkeley into Thousand Oaks. Sadly, she just wasn’t bused far enough.
There were many high points in the presidential campaign of the woman who would be Obama.
Her estranged father came out to condemn her for suggesting that his family was a bunch of pot smokers. It’s not everyday a presidential candidate’s father states that her great-grandmothers are “turning in their grave” over her “identity politics” and that her Jamaican family wish to “dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” The travesty being the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.
It took a while, but Kamala Harris also disassociated herself from her travesty of a campaign.
Snip.
The problem with Kamala Harris for the People was that the people didn’t want Kamala. Toward the end, Kamala was polling at 2% in the HarrisX poll (no relation) alongside winners like Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and the guy who promises to tell the truth about the secret UFO base on the moon.
If Moon Base Guy has a Twitter feed, I give him good odds to beat Delaney in Iowa.
By then her campaign had broken out in spasms of vicious infighting between her sister Maya and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez who were only speaking to each through media leaks. Rodriguez had run Kamala’s Senate campaign and had the requisite skills to win elections in a corrupt one-party state. He was out of his depth competing in a national election and the dysfunctional campaign showed it.
But the real brains behind Kamala Harris for the People was, predictably, a member of the family.
Maya Harris had headed the ACLU in Northern California, then had a plum spot at the Ford Foundation, before becoming a senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and then as campaign chair for her sister. “Hillary really trusted her instincts,” John Podesta said of Maya. So did Kamala.
Too bad for her.
With her ACLU and Ford Foundation background, Maya had been billed as Kamala’s “progressive link”. It was more like the weakest link. While her campaign manager was out of his depth, her campaign chairwoman kept pushing her sister far leftward. And while that strategy worked in California where socialized medicine can pass without anyone having a clue how to pay for it: it didn’t work nationally.
Kamala Harris for the People, the campaign brand, played off Kamala’s background as a prosecutor. But under Maya, that part of her resume, the biggest part that doesn’t involve Willie Brown, got buried. Maya pushed Kamala into the same radical policy space as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren while trying to compete for Joe Biden’s black voters. But Kamala and Maya were too detached from the black community to realize that South Carolina black voters wanted a more conservative candidate.
Instead of winning over leftists and black voters, Kamala lost both.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) “I will admit that seeing a liberal accuse the Democratic base of being racist is a delicious and refreshing change of pace, but it’s as lazy here as it is when they lob this nonsense at Republicans. Kamala Harris’s biggest problem was always Kamala Harris.” Powerline: “The substance was Harris’s record as a prosecutor in California. The problem wasn’t just that Harris was a zealous prosecutor at times. That’s to her credit as far as I’m concerned. The biggest problem was her over-zealousness. Some of her practices were offensive even to a die hard law and order type like me.” This piece identifies four fatal flaws with her campaign:
- Mismanaging Campaign Funds: “Harris raised an ample amount of cash early in the campaign but didn’t husband her resources well and failed to adjust in time when her fundraising slowed. The New York Times reported that at the time she dropped out, Harris would have had to go into debt to continue her campaign.”
- Choosing the Wrong Ground on which to Fight (i.e., going after Biden for his opposition to forced busing)
- Trying to Have It Both Ways on Medicare for All
- Waging a Front-Runner’s Campaign When She Needed to Wage an Insurgent’s: “Biden, the de-facto front-runner from the beginning, has proven to be much more durable in national polls than many expected, and his support among African-American voters in South Carolina kept Harris from ever really taking off in the first-in-the-South primary. Yet Harris kept on campaigning as if she were leading the race, focusing on national media, limiting her early events in Iowa, sticking to stage-managed appearances, and, worst of all, appearing thoroughly scripted.”
All true, though left unsaid is the fact that she sucked as a campaigner, an uncomfortable truth papered over by a fawning media desperate to boost the candidacy of a black liberal women.
The result has been an influx of money that has allowed her to build up her Iowa staff, though not on the scale of her rivals. Still, Klobuchar had added five offices around the state to the 10 she had.
Also noteworthy, this week she added to her team veteran Iowa Democratic campaign operative Norm Sterzenbach, a former Iowa Democratic Party executive director who had been an adviser to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Klobuchar was on a three-day trip through Iowa, including lightly populated counties in her quest to campaign in each of Iowa’s 99 counties before the Feb. 3 caucuses. By Saturday, she planned to have campaigned in her 70th.
Snip.
There are signs it’s got potential. The Des Moines Register-CNN-Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted last month showed Klobuchar rising to a distant fifth, behind Buttigieg, Warren, Biden and Sanders. A brighter spot for her: Nearly 40% of likely caucus participants were still considering her, a jump of more than 10 percentage points in the past month.
Of all the longshots, Klobuchar is best situated to compete in Iowa. She also campaigned in Denver.
To call Deval Patrick’s campaign a shoestring operation would be insulting to shoestrings.
Attend a Patrick event and there’s not a bumper sticker or pin to be found, let alone organizers with clipboards collecting names of would-be voters. His ground game looks to be nonexistent: The entire campaign appears to consist of a handful of volunteers and one publicly announced staffer, campaign manager Abe Rakov. In comparison, other campaigns have several hundred paid staffers and dozens of offices combined — and that’s just in New Hampshire.
Patrick has spent the first dozen days of his campaign trying to persuade senior Democratic leaders in the early voting states to take him seriously. They want to give the former Massachusetts governor with an inspirational life story and friendship with Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. But Patrick has a way to go before they fully buy in.
“A lot of the talent has already been acquired here, professional talent to run his campaign,” said former New Hampshire Chief Justice John Broderick, a Joe Biden supporter. “He’s not going to be on the debate stage, most probably. It’s pretty damn difficult.”
The campaign hasn’t publicized the few staff hires it has made, so far divulging only two names: Rakov and LaJoia Broughton, who will serve as South Carolina state director.
Can that sort of campaign succeed in the 21st century? Possibly, if either you have an unusually compelling candidate (think Donald Trump), or message campaign that resonates with primary voters (think McGovern 72); Patrick doesn’t check either of those boxes.
👀 Whoa…
This is quite the admission from Elizabeth Warren on previously identifying as Native American:
“I shouldn’t have done it. I am not a person of color, I am not a citizen of a tribe. And I have apologized for confusion I have caused”pic.twitter.com/ErjPhVb62h
— Nathan Brand (@NathanBrandWA) December 6, 2019
Gee, think maybe you should have done that four years ago? And note that she never confesses to the sin of using the benefits of Affirmative Action to advance her own career. Warren simply isn’t hard enough left for The Guardian. “Elizabeth Warren — under pressure from rival Pete Buttigieg to reveal her past compensation from corporate clients — announced Sunday that she’s received $1.9 million from private legal work since 1986.” That works out to just under $83,000 over 23 years. Pretty good money for most people (though less than I make), but (and I know this is going to sound weird coming from me) that’s really not an overwhelming amount of legal consulting billing, where good attorneys can bill $400 an hour an up, and a high profile lawyer like Warren before she ran for the senate, $1,000+ is not unheard of. On the oher hand, she hasn’t broken up how it was earned, exactly when, and for whom; maybe the bulk came after she was elected to the senate. How socialists soured on her:
It wasn’t so long ago that you could read an article in Jacobin that argued, “If Bernie Sanders weren’t running, an Elizabeth Warren presidency would probably be the best-case scenario.” In April, another Jacobin article conceded that Warren is “no socialist” but added that “she’s a tough-minded liberal who makes the right kind of enemies,” and her policy proposals “would make this country a better place.” A good showing by her in a debate this summer was seen as a clear win for the left in the movement’s grand ideological battle within, or perhaps against, the Democratic Party. Even staff writer Meagan Day, probably the biggest Bernie stan on Jacobin’s masthead, found nice things to say about Warren.
No more. A selection of Jacobin headlines from November: “Elizabeth Warren’s Head Tax Is Indefensible,” “Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Finance Medicare for All Is a Disaster” and “Elizabeth Warren Is Jeopardizing Our Fight for Medicare for All.” In October, a story warned that a vote for Warren would be “an unconditional surrender to class dealignment.” Even a recent piece titled “Michael Bloomberg? Now They’re Just Fucking with Us” went out of its way to say that Warren is insufficiently confrontational to billionaires.
At some level, the picks and pans of an activist magazine with only a fraction of the readership of, say, pre-2016 Breitbart might not seem of much consequence as America heads into its next presidential election. But as the Democratic Party faces its intramural battle over how best to respond to the Trump presidency—with measured centrism, or an opportunistic and disruptive lurch to the left— Jacobin has emerged as a hard-to-ignore voice in defining what the latter should look like.
Actually, I’ve done a pretty good job ignoring it.
The change in the publication’s treatment of Warren, Sunkara told me, was not a conscious decision or directive from higher-ups like himself. The publication, as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, cannot formally endorse political candidates.
But it does reflect, he said, what Jacobin’s mostly young left-wing writers and contributors, many of whom are open Sanders supporters and even campaign volunteers, are thinking. Where a previous generation might have been more than satisfied with a candidacy that would have been a socialist dream a mere decade ago, a younger generation tired of tempering its hopes is hungry for what it thinks could be a more revolutionary outcome.
Warren’s ginger concessions to the center—be it her proclamations of “ faith in markets” or her refusal to say she’d raise middle class taxes to pay for single-payer health care—thus seem like a betrayal of necessary convictions.
“There probably has been, among certain writers, a disillusioning with certain parts of the Warren approach to things, and also it’s probably an attempt to push her to be more resolute,” Sunkara said. There’s a reason, after all, why the candidate who said she is a “capitalist to her bones” was not the socialists’ favorite to begin with.
Man, the show trials where Jacobian writers purge DailyKos writers for rightist deviationism is going to be lit!
“Not a single Republican has given any indication that they’re in fact-finding mode. They’re all in defend-the-president mode. You need literally dozens of Republican senators to switch sides when the trial starts, which we’ve gotten zero indication is going to happen.”
“The more this drags on, the more danger there is of two things: Number one, Donald Trump comes out of this and says, ‘Vindicated! Totally exonerated!’ And number two, we are wasting precious time where we should be creating a positive vision that Americans are excited about solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected, and beat him in 2020,” he added.
He went on: “If all that happens is all of the Democrats are talking about impeachment that fails, then it seems like there is no vision. It seems like all we can do is throw ineffective rocks at Donald Trump, and then it ends up leading, unfortunately, toward his reelection.”
Could he and Gabbard make the December debate stage? Deadline is December 12. He’s expanded his campaign team:
Andrew Yang expanded his presidential bid’s digital operations with two senior hires, including an alum of the Obama and Hillary Clinton White House campaigns.
Yang brought on Ally Letsky, a senior vice president and strategist at Deliver Strategies, to lead the campaign’s direct mail efforts and Julia Rosen, a partner at Fireside Campaigns, to helm the campaign’s digital strategy.
“While other campaigns are scaling back or trying to sustain their current levels, our campaign is rapidly growing and adding experience and know-how to ensure that we peak at the right time,” Yang said in a statement. “We’re absolutely thrilled that Ally and Julia — two of the most experienced and respected professionals in their fields — are bringing their expertise to the Yang Gang to help us compete and win.”
Letsky is a veteran of the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns in 2012 and 2016, respectively. She helped former President Obama with his direct mail efforts during his reelection bid and served as the director of direct mail for Clinton’s failed 2016 bid….Rosen has also worked with several Democratic organizations and establishment groups prior to joining Fireside Campaigns, including ActBlue and MoveOn.
The piece also says that “Julián Castro laid off staffers in New Hampshire and South Carolina earlier this month to narrow his focus on Iowa and Nevada.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
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