If I were tracking the 2024 Republican Presidential Primaries the way I tracked the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries (I’m not; the Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update was a huge pain in the ass and I don’t have the time to spend on it), Vivek Ramaswamy is exactly the sort of fringe candidate I’d give some time and attention to.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the millionaire entrepreneur and author of Woke, Inc., told National Review on Monday that he is “strongly considering” a run for president and expects to make a decision “very soon.”
Ramaswamy said he’s been drawn to the idea of running to address a “national identity crisis” that has left Americans hungry for purpose, meaning, and identity.
“We are at a point in our national history when the things that used to fill that void — faith, patriotism, hard work, even family — have disappeared,” he said, adding that in its absence, “wokeism, climate-ism as an ideology, radical gender ideology, Covidism” have become secular religions that fill that “black hole of identity.”
Conservatives have gotten too good at pointing out the problem and “trying to stamp out the poison without actually addressing the real problem,” said Ramaswamy, who has been dubbed the “CEO of Anti-Woke Inc.” The solution, he says, is to “fill that identity void with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep, that it dilutes the secular agendas to irrelevance.”
Those such as President Biden who deliver a vision of national unity by beginning in the middle and calling for compromise are doing it wrong, Ramaswamy said. In order to build unity, the country must return to the “extremism of the ideas that set America into motion: free speech, unbridled meritocracy,” he said.
“I think most people believe these ideals and most people think their neighbors and their colleagues believe these ideals to be true as well, but they can’t be sure anymore, because they don’t feel free to talk about it,” he said. “And so that’s been one of the hallmarks for me, is to start talking openly, again, to lead the way by actually doing it.”
Ramaswamy founded biotech company Roivant Sciences in 2014 and served as its CEO until 2021. That year, he published Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, which says that despite “rosy promises of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world,” stakeholder capitalism “robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity.”
In May 2022, Ramaswamy announced the launch of his new financial firm, Strive, which would focus on “excellence capitalism” rather than encouraging American corporations to get involved in social or environmental issues.
The Ohio-based firm was created to solve what it says is a fiduciary problem created by investment companies such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which have used clients’ funds to “exercise decisive influence over nearly every U.S. public company to advance political ideologies that many of their clients disagree with.”
“Over the last two years, I have traveled the country and listened to the concerns of everyday Americans who want to be heard in the places where they shop, work and invest,” Ramaswamy said in a statement at the time. “We want iconic American brands like Disney, Coca-Cola and Exxon, and U.S. tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google to deliver high-quality products that improve our lives, not controversial political ideologies that divide us. The Big 3 asset managers have fueled this polarizing new trend in corporate America, and that’s why we’re going to compete with them head-on to refocus American companies on the shared pursuit of excellence over politics.”
In September, Ramaswamy published his second book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.
He told National Review on Monday that he has been working to create a space for open conversations about a return to American ideals in recent years.
“I wasn’t free to speak as an elite CEO or the other environments I had been in, but I purposefully stepped aside from my job as a CEO to make this my mission over the last three years, to start talking openly,” he said.
He wants to “revive the American dream in the 21st-century context,” a vision that is of personal importance to Ramaswamy who has “lived the full arc of the American dream” as a first-generation Indian American. Ramaswamy, who attended Harvard for undergrad before attending Yale Law, is the son of a General Electric engineer and a geriatric psychiatrist.
Another box he checks is “Can self-fund,” as he is reportedly worth $500 million. That’s the sort of money that can easily get you to the finish line…in a senate or governor’s race. As Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg proved, spending $50 to $200 million
Is he a better speaker than Steyer or Bloomberg? That’s a pretty low bar, but yes:
That’s the latest video from his YouTube channel. Which, as of this writing, has 44 views.
So you can begin to see the scope of the problem.
Ramaswamy is a guy who might make a serious candidate for a lower-level job, but who wants to run for President as an outsider message candidate. In that sense, he’s a lot like Andrew Yang was for Democrats in 2020. But while Yang’s message was a bit eclectic for Democrats, Ramaswamy’s seems to be a lot closer to the default position for Republicans. It’s hard to see the necessary war against radical social justice being a wedge he can use to calve votes from higher profile and more experienced candidates.
It would be great if there were a Republican candidate in the 2024 Presidential race who was running to destroy wokeness…and who was also a proven elected leader of a large, successful state.
Like, say, Florida.
That’s the sort of candidate a majority of Republicans could get behind…
On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf [a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland], following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”
The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.
Demaneuf began searching for patterns in the available data, and it wasn’t long before he spotted one. China’s laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S. and other developed countries. But Demaneuf soon discovered that there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occuring at a top laboratory in Beijing. Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated, had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor. A graduate student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.
Demaneuf published his findings in a Medium post, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a review of SARS Lab Escapes.” By then, he had begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre. A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busy debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “laboratory” at all. In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses. Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office.
Read on to see mostly what those of you reading this blog knew last year, albeit with some new details. Such as…
It seems that even The State Department tried to block investigation of the lab leak hypothesis:
A report in Vanity Fair details actions by some members of the U.S. State Department to block efforts to investigate the origins of the coronavirus because the inquiry could open “a can of worms.” An internal memo sent to department heads by Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, warned “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19.”
The “can of worms” in question was the extensive funding by the U.S. government into the Wuhan Virology Lab’s “gain-of-function” virus research. It’s unclear whether DiNanno was concerned that an investigation would uncover evidence of a lab leak or the extent to which the U.S. was funding dangerous research.
Indeed, there’s a lot more going on with this gain-of-function research than has ever been revealed. There appears to be a powerful lobby within the U.S. government that is heavily invested in the dangerous research and is serious about keeping it quiet. Former CDC chairman Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab.
The pro-lockdown “experts” were shocked. If a state as big as Texas joined Florida and succeeded in thumbing its nose at “the science” – which told us that for the first time in history healthy people should be forced to stay in their houses and wear oxygen-restricting face masks – then the lockdown narrative would begin falling apart.
President Biden famously attacked the decision as “Neanderthal thinking.” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa warned that, with this order, Abbott would “kill Texans.” Incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky tearfully told us about her feelings of “impending doom.”
When the poster child for Covid lockdowns Dr. Fauci was asked several weeks later why cases and deaths continued to evaporate in Texas, he answered simply, “I’m not sure.” That moment may have been a look at the man behind the proverbial curtain, who projected his power so confidently until confronted with reality.
Now a new study appearing as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, highlighted recently in Reason Magazine, has found “no evidence that the reopening affected the rate of new COVID-19 cases in the five-week period following the reopening. …State-level COVID-19 mortality rates were unaffected by the March 10 reopening.”
Hunter Biden said he couldn’t remember his baby mama. Turns out she worked for him. And he fired her.
Every time Hunter is in the news, the MSM asks Joe Biden about…ice cream. “The record is now rife with individuals associated with foreign governments and intelligence organizations giving millions to Hunter and his uncle as well as luxurious expenses and gifts.”
Rashard Turner, founder of St. Paul chapter of #BlackLivesMatter learns better:
That was made clear when they publicly denounced charter schools alongside the teachers union. I was an insider in Black Lives Matter. And I learned the ugly truth. The moratorium on charter schools does not support rebuilding the black family. But it does create barriers to a better education for black children. I resigned from Black Lives Matter after a year and a half. But I didn’t quit working to improve black lives and access to a great education.
Congressional Democrats just hit a snag in trying to cram through lots of budget busting bills using reconciliation.
While the Democrats have high, if not delusional hopes of fundamentally changing every aspect of American life, from federal voting dictates to essentially outlawing sub-contracting, the actual rules of the Senate have stood in their way. The filibuster, which Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (among others who are laying low) have pledged to not touch, means that Chuck Schumer and his merry band can’t force through things on a simple 50-50 vote.
The Democrats were given a shot of life a few months ago, though, in the form of a parliamentarian ruling that Schumer claimed greenlit most of his agenda. I expressed skepticism at the time in an article discussing the infrastructure package.
Chuck Schumer recently claimed the Senate parliamentarian gave him free rein, yet that decision has not been made public, and there’s probably a reason for that.
Well, it appears my skepticism was warranted. In what is claimed as a “new ruling,” the parliamentarian effectively rips the heart out of the Democrat agenda.
the ruling ALSO said Congress would have to start over. Repass budget in committees and bring them to the floor. in the senate, that would trigger another vote-a-rama. This would be exceedingly time consuming, and potentially politically risky.
Reconciliation is a very narrow process, and the Byrd Rule requires that anything included in a reconciliation bill must deal with taxes and budgetary issues. You also have stipulations about deficit offsets that must be taken into account. You can not pass regularly legislative items under the guise of reconciliation.
Given that, this ruling essentially defeats HR1, the ProAct, and much of what is included in the current “infrastructure” bill. Of course, none of those bills were likely getting support from Manchin anyway, but with reconciliation off the table to get this stuff passed, Schumer is now officially out of options.
Corn, soybeans, and wheat have been trading at multiyear highs, with corn having risen from around $3.80 per bushel in January 2020 to approximately $6.75 now. Chicken wings are at all-time record highs. It is getting more expensive to eat.
Copper prices have risen to an all-time high. Steel, too, recently traded at prices 35 percent above the previous all-time high set in 2008. Perhaps most famously, the price of lumber has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2020 and has nearly doubled just since January.
Naturally, with raw materials prices soaring, prices of manufactured goods are jumping, too. That is especially noticeable in the housing market, where the median price of existing homes rose to $329,100 in March—a whopping 17.2 percent increase from a year earlier.
The cost of driving is soaring, too. According to J.D. Power, cited in the Wall Street Journal, the average used car price has risen 16.7 percent and new car prices have risen 9.6 percent since January.
My answer would’ve been blunt – What I like about being white is I’m free to think anything I like; believe anything politically and not be prejudged by liberals for it. I don’t have people assuming I vote a specific way, for a particular party, simply because of my skin color. That no matter what I believe, I won’t be called a traitor to my race, a sell-out, or some racial slur like “Uncle Tom,” or “Uncle Tim.”
What I like about being white is I don’t have to suffer the bigotry of leftists demanding I conform to how they insist I must think.
Hill and pretty much every left-wing pundit, TV personality, reporter, academic, actor, etc., do not extend that same courtesy to, say, any black conservative. Ever.
In that answer, it would have exposed Hill for what he was trying to do to Rufo, and it shows what the left is now: you are your skin color. If you refuse to conform, if you won’t be what they demand you must be, you are their enemy.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid announced that he is able to form a new government, in another step towards ousting longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Lapid’s coalition is made up of parties from the left and right wings of the political spectrum, many of whom would not normally sit together in the same government. For the first time in Israel’s history, an Arab political party—the Islamic conservative United Arab List—signed on as part of the prospective governing coalition.
The new government must survive a vote of confidence in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, but the Knesset will not be in session for another twelve days. This means that members of Lapid’s coalition may defect in the meantime, potentially sending Israel to another round of elections.
Before Democrats start celebrating the fall of their designated bogeyman, the man likely to replace Netanyahu in the new government is Naftali Bennett, who is even harder right than Bibi:
Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett have reached an agreement to rotate the prime minister’s position between them as they race to meet a Wednesday midnight deadline to finalize a coalition government to end Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year rule.
Under the agreement, Bennett will take the premiership first, but the two are still working on finalizing their ruling coalition, which would include parties from across the political spectrum. The Associated Press reported that as of 6 p.m. Wednesday in Israel, there was still no sign of progress.
Bibi would be going into the opposition. This isn't American politics, where losing a presidential election confines you to the outskirts of politics (usually). From the opposition, Bibi, who runs the largest party in Israel, is well-positioned to become PM again in the mid-term.
A-listers including actress Gwyneth Paltrow and director Steven Spielberg have raised the stakes with their backing of candidates. Spielberg and his wife have finally supported activist Maya Wiley, while Paltrow has supported Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive, Bloomberg reports.
The majority of those identified as actors or part of the entertainment industry have opted to join Paltrow in backing McGuire, who has vowed to boost film tax credits, Bloomberg reports. Figures who have donated to McGuire include “Despicable Me” producer Chris Meledandri, filmmaker Spike Lee and comedic actor Steve Martin. McGuire is also the only candidate not accepting public matching funds, Bloomberg notes.
Other candidates getting attention from Tinseltown include Scott Stringer and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Actress Scarlett Johansson has donated to Stringer, while Yang has reportedly received financial backing from actor Michael Douglas.
Also: “Recent polls, however, show Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the lead.”
“Google’s Diversity Chief Removed for Decrying Jews’ ‘Insatiable Appetite for War and Killing.’ No doubt they’ve moved him to their Republican Deplatforming division…
Welcome to a special Christmas day LinkSwarm! And by “special,” I mean “because Christmas falls on Friday.”
Explosion rocks downtown Nashville. “Around 6:30 a.m., police received a call for a suspicious RV with no tags parked across from the Davidson County courthouse. As officers arrived, the RV exploded, blowing out the windows of nearby buildings and leaving extensive damage.” They’re calling it an “intentional act.” Maybe, especially across the street from a courthouse. But it could still be a meth lab cooking off. As always, remember that much of the early reporting around such events are usually wrong.
Update: Assuming the message in this video is real, it does appear to be a premeditated act of which authorities were warned:
WATCH: “If you can hear this message, evacuate now.”
This is allegedly video of the explosion in Nashville this morning, with a woman’s voice recording over a PA beforehand…
The deal comes in just eight days short of the hard-Brexit deadline. Rather than erecting trade barriers to which some had resigned themselves, the two sides are looking toward a more cooperative than contentious relationship, reports the Wall Street Journal:
Under the terms of the accord, both sides will continue to trade free of tariffs but there will be significant new bureaucracy for importers and exporters. The free flow of workers between the two economies will end and trade in services will be much reduced. London’s vast financial center will no longer have guaranteed access to European markets.
The deal gives Britain significant freedom to depart from EU regulations and sign free-trade deals with countries like the U.S. But as the price for securing a deal without tariffs, the U.K. agreed that it wouldn’t seriously undercut EU standards on issues such as labor and the environment and would maintain similar constraints on the subsidizing of private industry.
The agreement must formally be ratified by the European and U.K. parliaments and signed off by EU leaders before the end of the year. Capitals have insisted they need proper time to comb through the text before approving it. Though their approval is likely, France has warned it could veto a deal if some of its key concerns, including access to British waters for its fishing fleet, aren’t met.
Here’s the short version: One main problem is that the 5,500-plus page legislative package was drafted behind closed doors by party leaders, then quickly unveiled hours before a vote.
As voices as disparate as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash have pointed out, this meant that most members of Congress had to vote for or against the package before actually getting to read the legislation.
Congress is expected to vote on the second largest bill in US history *today* – $2.5 trillion – and as of about 1pm, members don’t even have the legislative text of it yet.
That’s right: Trillions of taxpayer dollars were doled out, and the members of Congress who voted for it don’t even know where much of it is going.
This bill pours hundreds of billions of dollars into preexisting stimulus programs that were rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, without meaningfully addressing any of the problems. You can expect more stimulus checks sent to dead people and more runaway fraud to plague the expanded unemployment benefits.
“Tables Turned: Detroit Sues Black Lives Matter Group for ‘Civil Conspiracy’ to Riot and Attack Police.” The group in question is Black Lives Matter umbrella group Detroit Will Breathe. Discovery should be extremely interesting… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Andrew Yang is running for mayor of New York City. It would be very difficult indeed for Yang not to be a vast improvement over the burning Porta-Potty stuffed with dead clowns that is the De Blasio administration. As a moderate Democrat, I would expect Yang to be a better mayor than de Blasio or David Dinkins, but not as good as Rudy Giuliani or Ed Koch. I would expect a Yang mayoralty to be about on par with Bloomberg’s, with maybe more upside if he’s willing to shake up the corrupt status quo and not push his disasterous pet guaranteed income idea.
In an address to the UN Security Council on Monday during a monthly session on the Middle East, US Ambassador Kelly Craft asserted that President Donald Trump’s policies had “overturned” long-held views about diplomacy in the region.
“For decades, the prevailing assumption was that the world would only see normalized international relations with Israel following a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” Craft told the virtual meeting. “But we have proven this assumption wrong.”
She touted the Trump administration’s pursuit of “economic and cultural ties” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which has led to normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Similar deals with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Oman, among others, could also be in the offing.
“All of us here should think long and hard about what else we may have missed or misinterpreted over the years.”
“Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress ‘Hyper-Partisan Sites’ in Favor of ‘Mainstream News’ (The NYT) is a Fraud:
The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.
Snip.
The conceit that outlets like The New York Times, CNN and NPR are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is one you would be eager to believe, or at least want to induce others to believe, if you were a tech reporter at The New York Times, furious and hurt that millions upon millions of people would rather hear other voices than your own, and simply do not trust what you tell them. Inducing Facebook to manipulate the algorithmic underbelly of social media to artificially force your content down the throats of citizens who prefer to avoid it, while rendering your critics’ speech invisible — all in the name of reducing “hyper-partisanship,” “divisiveness,” and “misinformation” — is of course a highly desirable outcome for mainstream outlets like the NYT.
The problem with this claim is that it’s a complete and utter fraud, one that is easily demonstrated as such. There are few sites more “hyper-partisan” than the three outlets which the NYT applauded Facebook for promoting. In the 2020 election, over 70 million Americans — close to half of the voting population — voted for Donald Trump, yet not one of them is employed by the op-ed page of the “non-partisan” New York Times and are almost never heard on NPR or CNN. That’s because those news outlets, by design, are pro-Democratic-Party organs, who speak overwhelmingly to Democratic readers and viewers.
It is hard to get more partisan than the news outlets which the NYT tech reporters, and apparently Facebook, consider to be the alternatives to “hyper-partisan” discourse. In April, Pew Research asked Americans which outlet is their primary source of news, and the polling firm found that the audiences of NPR, CNN and especially The New York Times are overwhelmingly Democrats, in some cases almost entirely so.
As Pew put it: “about nine-in-ten of those who name The New York Times (91%) and NPR (87%) as their main political news source identify as Democrats, with CNN at about eight-in-ten (79%).” These outlets speak to Democrats, are built for Democrats, and produce news content designed to be pleasing and affirming to Democrats — so they keep watching and buying. One can say many things about these news outlets, but the idea that they are the alternatives to “hyper-partisan pages” is the exact opposite of the truth: it is difficult to find more hyper-partisan organs than these.
The Establishment decided that instead of having a vigorous debate and discussion over the safety and efficacy of these prophylactic potions, they would just short circuit the whole messy truth determination process that Western civilization has relied upon for a millennium – argument, debate, and eventually consensus after everything is fully and freely hashed-out – and move right to the Official Truth. All the smart set decided that the Official Truth would be that these vaccines were all perfect and necessary and that we needed to stamp out any hint of dissent lest people pause and think for themselves and thereby disrupt the plan by raising unapproved notions. And the tech overlords would do their part by ensuring that any info, ideas, or interplay that was not inline with the narrative would be suppressed.
It’s so much more efficient, you know, to tell people what they think than to take the time to convince them and refute counter-arguments.
Not everyone was foolish. It was very smart and good leadership for Mike Pence to take the shot in public in front of cameras. That a couple of tentacles didn’t sprout out of his clavicles was reassuring. That’s leadership, and that’s what our leaders should be doing. But most of our ruling class instead thinks that if they lie to us and suppress our debates and call us stupid enough, we’ll fall into line.
When has that worked for long?
A roundup of climate predictions for 2020 that were horribly wrong. Remember how snowfall would be a thing of the past?
Among Paul’s instances of waste were several health studies, including more than $36 million spent on studying why stress makes hair turn gray, more than $1 million spent studying whether people will eat ground-up bugs, and more than $3 million spent interviewing San Franciscans about their edible cannabis use.
As far as taxpayer dollars spent aiding other countries, $8.62 billion was spent in Afghanistan on counternarcotics efforts, more than $37 million was spent helping deal with truant Filipino youth, and more than $3 million was spent on sending Russians to American community colleges for a “gap year.”
Among funds spent on the environment, energy, and scientific research, more than $1 million was spent walking lizards on a treadmill, nearly $200,000 was spent studying how people cooperate while playing e-sport video games, and more than $2 million on developing a wearable headset to track eating behaviors.
The military had several particularly high expenditures this year that Paul listed as waste, including repurposing $1 billion in coronavirus response funds for unrelated acquisitions, more than $ 715 million in lost equipment designated for Syrians fighting ISIS, and $174 million on drones that were lost over Afghanistan.
Other eyebrow-raising expenses included more than $4 million spent on spraying alcoholic rats with bobcat urine, more than $10 million spent on would-be coronavirus test tubes that turned up as used soda bottles, and nearly $6 million spent building three bicycle storage facilities at Washington, D.C. Metro stations.
Man of the year: Jeffrey Toobin. “Toobin’s grip on the media was relentless. In 2002 he joined CNN and became the network’s chief legal analyst, a cocksure critic of Republicans…” (Hat tip: HashtagGriswold.)
A three hour interview. Yeah, I know I’m not making things any easier on you.
Still, I suggest watching it, even though I think Rogan and Weinstein are wrong on some fundamentals (see my notes below) because Weinstein, having lived through the Evergreen State College nightmare, has a far better (and scarier) understanding of what outlandish ideas animate the unholy Social Justice Warrior alliance that has set America’s cities aflame.
Some of the money quotes:
“We were in a faculty meeting [at Evergreen], and I said that the proposals that were moving through were a threat to the Enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the Enlightenment but on the idea of enlightenment. I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that Enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.”
“If you end up in Critical Theory, any one of these fields, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, whatever, it is you have already foregone this option [of studying STEM]. You don’t end up in Critical Theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect you have people who don’t stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider, because they wouldn’t go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.”
“An excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette. Odette is half black her mom is Afro-Caribbean, she was known to be my student and Heather [Haying, Weinstein’s wife and also a teacher at Evergreen]’s student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened.”
“If #BlackLivesMatter just simply meant what those words imply, I’d be on board with it. It doesn’t. It means a great deal more than that, and we’re beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks.”
“There’s something in us that thinks that the Great Leap Forward in China cannot happen here. That what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here. That Nazi Germany cannot happen, and that the Soviet Union couldn’t happen here. I don’t know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible. I don’t think it’s impossible. I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure it is the Constitution.” (I would contend that widespread gun-ownership and ingrained American individualism make it very unlikely. I also wonder if he means the Cultural Revolution rather than the Great Leap Forward.)
“The proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish. The strategy is incredibly smart.”
“If there’s one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it’s that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we are also seeing in Seattle.”
“The idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane.”
“Joe Biden is an influence peddler. He is not an idea guy. He’s the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology. Who cares? This is not an answer to any known question. This is stay the course at a moment when we could not afford to stay the course less right. How dare the Democratic Party do this to us again at this moment?”
“Hillary Clinton advanced Trump’s candidacy because she wanted to run against him. So if you if you have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament.”
The biggest thing Weinstein and Rogan get wrong: The lack of opportunity in inner cities isn’t an effect of mass incarceration, but of the breakdown in the black nuclear family brought about by the perverse incentive structures of Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, which preceded rising black crime rates and increased incarceration. Widespread black economic progress was proceeding and converging toward white norms before the Great Society. Once again, read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, which goes into great statistical detail to prove the case.
Also, Occupy Wall Street was in no way, shape or form an “organic” movement, it started out battlespace preparation by the Obama team to face Mitt Romney in 2012, but quickly became the prototype for the organizational insurrection we saw first in Ferguson and which has now been rolled out nationwide.
His argument for a “radical centrist duo” to run for President and Vice President outside the two-party system just isn’t going to work, for political, cultural and (most important) Constitutional issues. And it can’t work this year for calendar/ballot access issues. (And the idea that former Admiral William McRaven is even remotely possible as a center-right white horse savior is laughable. Weirdly, Andrew Yang strikes me as much more plausible candidate, even if Universal Basic Income is wrong, but he’s neither rich nor famous enough to pull it off.) When he starts talking about that, feel free to skip to 1 hour and 44 minutes in for Rogan to start talking about Biden’s cognitive decline.
To be honest, I made it about an hour and fifty minutes in, only because I need to post this do other stuff. I fully intend to watch the rest this weekend.
Still more evidence that Tara Reade complained about Biden surfaces, plus stories of just how extensively Beijing Joe pandered to China. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Remember all those polls showing Biden up big over Trump? Fugitaboutit. “According to an extensive survey by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government released in late April, only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president, with just 8 percent saying they have a “very favorable” opinion of Biden. In the same survey, 47 percent of young people said they have an unfavorable view of Biden.”
The advantages for the Democrats in swapping in a different candidate should be obvious. While many, like DNC Chair Tom Perez, seem to be immune to embarrassment and can blithely ignore charges of hypocrisy, the public isn’t going to be so easily deceived. Holding Biden to the same standard that Brett Kavanaugh was (or at least giving the impression of doing that) would at least make them consistent.
But there’s more to the story than that. Without intending to do so, Tara Reade could wind up providing a plausible cover story for removing a candidate that has a lot more problems than one sexual assault allegation. The fact that Uncle Joe has been locked up in his basement by the pandemic is probably the only thing stopping his campaign from turning into even more of a trainwreck. The few live interviews he’s done recently have ranged from being mild and uninteresting to downright alarming when his mind appears to wander, he stumbles over his words and careens from one topic to another.
It just seems to be increasingly obvious that Joe Biden is well past his Best Sell By Date. And this is the guy that will have to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump on the debate stage sooner or later. Swapping him out for someone younger, sharper, and preferably without a sexual assault scandal dogging their heels would probably pay big benefits.
More on the same subject. “By now, it can’t genuinely be disputed that Reade told others about being sexually harassed while working for Biden. And although the husband didn’t mention assault or Biden himself, others have said that Reade alleged assault by Biden.”
Reade says she didn’t use “sexual harassment” (or “rape”) in the original announcement because she “chickened out.”
Remember how New York unilaterally cancelled it’s Democratic presidential primary? A federal judge says “Not so fast.”
Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang challenged New York’s decision to cancel its Democratic primary, scheduled for June 23. The state chose to do so because it’s obvious former Vice President Joe Biden will win the nomination and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the state.
Judge Analise Torres ruled that New York must have its Democratic primary, finding the cancellation unconstitutional, and it must include “all qualified candidates.”
New York removed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) because he suspended his campaign in April. He wanted to stay on the remaining ballots to gain delegates as a way to pressure the Democratic Party to bend its platform to his radical ideas.
Tara Reade claims to be a loyal Democrat, and she might be doing her party a huge favor. Her accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 gives Democrats a plausible excuse to ditch the former vice president as their 2020 presidential nominee, thus sparing themselves a likely disaster in the fall campaign. To put it as bluntly as possible, Biden’s mental decline is so obvious as to be an embarrassment, as he stumbles in every interview, even with the most friendly journalists. Democrats and their friends in the media attempting to push Biden’s candidacy forward resemble nothing so much as the cast of the 1989 comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, hauling around their dead boss’s corpse and trying to pretend he’s still alive.
Many Democrats, of course, claim that Biden’s mind is unimpaired, or at least not bad enough to prevent him from defeating President Trump in November. Such Democrats apparently believe that Trump is so unpopular that doubts about Biden’s mental acuity will make no difference. This attitude is part of what can be called the “referendum” perspective on the fall campaign. Rather than seeing the election as a choice between two candidates, instead these Democrats expect voters to go to the polls to vote against the incumbent. The success of Democrats in the 2018 midterm election encourages this view, which was the subject of an Associated Press article over the weekend, reporting that “Biden campaign aides say they are bullish on the prospects of winning states Trump carried in 2016.”
Maybe so, but maybe these Biden campaign aides are just blowing smoke. It is impossible to believe they haven’t noticed that their candidate is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Every TV interview provides further evidence that the 77-year-old Biden is non compos mentis.
The impossible dream: Making Joe Biden go viral (for reasons other than his Senior Moments). His team’s solution? Pure pablum. It’s the strategy that combines the honesty of a bank’s email laying out its Covid-19 strategy with the homespun forthrightness of an insurance company email announcing its Covid-19 strategy…
Is it any wonder that Democrats are starting to wonder if they’ve bought a pig in a poke, and just how to pawn him off on somebody else?
Just as bad for the Dems on the electability issue, a new poll shows that young voters — a key party constituency — just aren’t that into the 77-year-old who first ran for president before any of them were born. The Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics poll shows that “only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president,” with just 8 percent at “very favorable.” Nearly half — 47 percent — said they have an unfavorable view of the former Veep.
Trump voters might skew older, but they’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for POTUS in November. A recent Emerson poll found that Trump has a 19-point advantage in the enthusiasm gap, 64%-45%.
After New York canceled its primary vote last week, we learned that while it would be both risky and difficult, it is still possible for Democrats to nominate someone other than Biden:
As of April 27, the former vice president has 1,305 of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch a first-round coronation at the party’s convention. New York offered 320 delegates up for grabs, 274 pledged to the primary winner; a prize that would have brought Biden closer to the nomination.
If New York’s decision triggers other states to cancel their own primaries, it is entirely possible that Biden could arrive at the Democratic convention without a guarantee of the nomination.
Larger states with upcoming primary votes include Georgia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, plus a few medium-size states like Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Pennsylvania and Indiana have already delayed their votes, but if they and a few others like them decide instead to cancel as New York did, then that would be a clear indication that the DNC has decided to shove Biden out onto an ice floe for an ignominious retirement from presidential politics.
Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.
Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater, and an even worse campaigner. He often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the interior of the United States.
The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden. Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept retread, a blowhard, and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic party.
On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters, using insults such as “fat,” “damn liar,” and, weirdly, “lying dog-faced pony soldier.”
Long ago he spun tall tales about how in his youth he had taken on a Delaware street gang with a 6-foot chain or slammed a bully’s face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.
Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the shoulders or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of sexual harassment must be believed.
The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden’s wheeler-dealer son Hunter, the more Biden’s own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny followed from Biden’s boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked.
During the year-long rise, fall, and rise of his campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally unable to remember names, places, or dates. Biden would try to speak extempore but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.
The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.
With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.
At first, the media complied — as it always had with Biden’s troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental lapses, and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment, Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.
But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the media’s utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.
So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden’s increasingly obvious cognitive decline.
In other words, the media was most certainly not going to be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.
Meanwhile, Lisa Bloom says she believes Tara Reade but is voting for Biden anyway. “Shut up and vote for the rapist!”
Reade, at this point, has more people who she told around the time of the assault than Ford has had ever. She has more credibility than Ford ever had.
What is remarkable is not the leftwing pundits and Democrats who deny this. It is expected that the very Democrats who condemned Kavanaugh would try to obfuscate on this. What is remarkable is the media. Where is Ronan Farrow or the New Yorker or Jane Meyer or NBC News or the rest of them? The only prominent talking head who currently has a justification for silence is Michael Avenatti and that’s because he is in jail. The very people who tried to bring down Kavanaugh hiding behind the veneer of objective reporters are now no where to be found or are trying to throw up Potemkin Villages of obfuscation to avoid having to deal with Reade’s allegations.
If you realize that Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Joe Biden, and the laundry list of others were never about #metoo or sexual harassment or assault, but over whether or not people should be able to murder babies, you’ll understand the double standard. The Brett Kavanaugh attacks and Joe Biden defenses have never been about the patriarchy or power. They have always been about preserving the right to kill kids.
Democrats should see themselves in the mirror when they see Trump supporters. So long as their guy can beat the right, they’ll embrace whatever it is. They’ll never admit it, but they’ll know it is true even as they try to distinguish.
On January 5, 2017, a meeting was held in the Obama White House in the Oval Office. Both President Obama and Vice President Biden attended. This meeting, it turns out, was critical to the anti-Trump operation by the Obama administration, reports Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. “It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration,” she wrote.
Also in attendance at this meeting was then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-national security adviser Susan Rice, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and other members of the national security council.
It was at this meeting that Barack Obama spoke with Yates and Comey about wiretapped conversations of Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition, indicating that President Obama was directly knowledgeable of the efforts to surveil the Trump campaign and undermine the incoming administration.
It was 2012 and Joe was thinking about his future. A year earlier his best friend, Senator Chris Dodd, had left the Senate to run the MPAA. The MPAA was Hollywood’s trade association and the movie industry, reading its own writing on the wall, wanted into China, and was willing to sell its soul to make a deal.
Biden wanted Hollywood cash for a future presidential campaign.
Dodd had been one of the sleaziest figures in the Senate, even by the low standards of the era, eager to do favors for any well-heeled industry from finance to entertainment. His friendship with Biden gave him a direct pipeline into the Obama administration. And Dodd gave Biden a pipeline into Hollywood.
“Joe was our champion inside the White House,” Dodd later said.
Two years later, in 2014, Biden began an address to the MPAA by joking, “there have been the rumors all those years when Chris and I served in the Senate that although I was chairman, he controlled me.”
“We’ve just given new life to those rumors,” he continued, describing how he had left a meeting with Obama and Chancellor Merkel, telling Obama that he had to address the MPAA.
“There is no question that you’ve got the right guy with the right influence,” Biden concluded.
And that’s exactly what Biden had been proving in Los Angeles as he surrounded Xi with Hollywood tycoons, especially Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major donor to his 2020 campaign, and cut a deal with the Chinese thug to increase the quota of Hollywood movies allowed in by the Chinese Communist regime.
Funny how the sleaziest Democrats have such lucrative employment after they leave office. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Remember, Scott Adams pegged Harris as the veep pick back in December, despite the fact that “Adams thinks Harris is the worst candidate to ever be in any presidential race.”
Michigan Democratic Governor Grethen “Obergruperfuhrer” Whitmer says she’s “quite comfortable” in believing that Joe Biden is innocent because “he has a (D) after his name.” (I may be paraphrasing a tad…)
Between almost everyone dropping out, Biden continuing to rack up victories, and the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic, almost all the air has been sucked out of the Democratic Presidential race. So this is going to be a relatively short and subdued Democratic Presidential clown car update.
Eh, not posting any individual polls this week, as Biden is stomping Sanders in every single one of them, usually by just shy of a 2-1 ratio. The closest thing to a surprise is that Hill/Harris X has Gabbard at 5% nationally, which suggests that 4% is the level of “Operation Chaos”-type effects.
Election betting markets. Biden’s first at a whopping 87.3%. However, second place is not Sanders, it’s Hillary at 5.1%. (strokes chin)(stops)(washes hands annoyingly long period of time) (strokes chin again)
Coronavirus is one of the topics that dominated last night’s Biden-Sanders debate, as well it should, as both Biden and Sanders are part of the target demographic most likely to drop dead of it. Plus coronavirus provides Biden the perfect excuse to run the first “front porch” campaign since Warren G. Harding.
The electoral patterns in Texas, which Biden narrowly won, were marked by divisions of age and ethnicity. Voters over 65 went for Biden nearly four to one, according to Washington Post exit polls. By contrast, among voters under 30, Sanders cleaned up, beating Biden 59 percent to 13 percent. African-Americans, who constitute 20 percent of the state’s electorate, gave nearly three-fifths of their votes to Biden, almost four times Sanders’s share. Carroll Robinson, who served on the Houston City Council for six years and is chairman of the Coalition of Black Democrats, notes that Sanders failed to connect, particularly with older black voters; he cites in particular his being the only major candidate not to attend the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as reflective of his “signaling problem” with African-American voters.
Black voters, Robinson notes, were critical to Biden’s small margin of victory, boosting his totals in Harris County, which includes Houston, and in Dallas County. In contrast, Latinos, already roughly one-third of the state’s Democratic voters, voted heavily for Sanders. The Vermont senator won roughly 40 percent of Latino voters, compared with about a quarter who opted for Biden. Sanders won easily in heavily Latino Bexar (San Antonio), Hidalgo (the Rio Grande Valley), and El Paso Counties.
Sanders also appealed to younger voters in Texas, as elsewhere, beating Biden among voters under 30—making up some 15 percent of the electorate—by almost four to one. He won hugely in Austin, the state’s epicenter of millennial culture, with its high concentration of tech workers. Sanders easily took Travis County over Biden, 83,000 to 52,000.
Moderate Texas Democrats can take heart in halting the momentum of a socialist candidate, but the broader trend is against them. According to exit polls, some 56 percent of Texas Democrats view socialism favorably. In Houston, voters elected an inexperienced 27-year-old progressive, Lina Hidalgo, as judge of Harris County in 2018. Despite its title, the role is nonjudicial; Hidalgo is actually the chief executive of the nation’s third most-populous county. This year, Christian Menefee, a young social-justice advocate, won the primary for Harris County Attorney over more mainstream opposition, on a platform of progressive criminal-justice reform. “There’s an incipient change among the grassroots activists,” notes Bill White, former Houston mayor and deputy energy secretary under Bill Clinton. “There’s a whole new group who are very anti-establishment and gaining influence.” White suspects that the ascendency of these forces may just be beginning. Sanders and Warren—before she dropped out of the race on Thursday—enjoyed a combined 40 percent support of the Texas Democratic electorate, running strongest among the fastest-growing demographic groups.
This leftward transformation is even further along in California. As Morley Winograd, a longtime Democratic activist and former aide to Al Gore, suggests, the state is not only “unique politically, but also big enough to have its own weather system. Democrats in the state feel the economy is strong enough to allow it to maintain its current high-tax, high regulation environment without causing a major downturn.” Socialism remains in vogue. At last year’s state party convention, when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, then a presidential aspirant, suggested that “socialism is not the answer,” he was lustily booed.
As in Texas, Sanders won biggest among Latinos and millennials, who represent the party’s future. He won an astounding 55 percent of Latino voters, according to New York Times exit polls, compared with a mere 21 percent for Biden. He won 72 percent of voters under 30 and 57 percent of voters in the 30-to-44 age range, beating Biden by wide margins. Biden did win older voters and among African-Americans, but blacks constitute only 7 percent of the state’s Democratic electorate, barely a third of their Texas share.
You may have wondered “With everyone else out, will Tulsi Gabbard start picking up protest votes?” Looking at the various vote totals, the answer appears to be “No.” She does not appear to have broken 1% in any state last week.
Here’s a piece that argues that Cory Booker could have been the nominee if only he hadn’t taken that hard-left turn. There’s a bit of truth to it, but Booker was already looking a little goofy before the pandering began, and primaries are littered with candidates who looked formidable on paper.
Bloomberg last month: Oh sure, I’m going to pay you campaign staffers through the end of the year whether I stay in or not. Bloomberg this month: Psych!
Joe Biden is clearly not well. The comeback front-runner for the Democratic nomination hasn’t lost a step; he’s lost the plot. You’re not supposed to diagnose or psychoanalyze people from afar, I know. It is rude. Having any conversation about the frailty of an elderly public figure always feels rude. Such conversations are difficult to have even about elderly family members, behind closed doors.
But this subject needs to be broached right now. Accusations that Hillary Clinton was unwell were treated as a conspiracy theory up until the moment she seemed to collapse at a 9/11 memorial and was pushed into the side of a van like a sack of meat. Though that viral clip surely hurt Clinton, it was a one-day story and she performed reasonably well on the campaign trail afterward. Biden is amassing a series of viral clips that are much worse. He’ll forget the name of former president Barack Obama, or the state he’s in, or stock phrases of American oratory: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women created by . . . you know . . . you know the thing.” He’ll announce to a baffled crowd that “I’m Joe Biden’s husband and I work for Cedric Richmond” (Richmond is a congressman, in case you were wondering.)
Yes, we need to make room for verbal slip-ups among people who are tirelessly barnstorming around the country and giving public speeches. But any look at a video of Biden in a previous campaign for president shows that the former vice president has diminished.
For some damn reason, Biden decided that he needed to put Beto O’Rourke’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon in charge of his campaign. Certainly the lackluster Biden campaign has needed a shakeup for a long time (current run of success notwithstanding), but why you’d hire the person who couldn’t even get their candidate to the primary is beyond me. (Who he should be hiring is Buttigieg’s head of fundraising.) In the debate, Biden promised to pick a woman as Veep, which is exactly the sort of pander you expect of Democrats these days:
Pledging to "pick a woman" for VP doesn't deserve praise, it deserves ridicule because it's insultingly superficial — just like all bullshit attempts to elevate the primacy of identity traits
James Clyburn and James Carville say the quiet part out loud, that debates should be shut down so Biden doesn’t embarass himself. Thanks to the Wuhan Coronavirus, Biden’s fundraising is now being done on the intertubes. Also: “According to campaign finance records, Biden raised $11 million immediately after his South Carolina primary win and $7 million following his Super Tuesday victories. The victories helped alleviate some of the campaign’s money woes, but it’s unclear how a ban on actual campaign events and fundraisers may impact his ability to raise money.” Those are good but not out-of-the-park numbers. He got endorsed by the NEA. Also endorsed by Andrew Yang. Joe Biden’s “bioethics advisor” (and ObamaCare architect) Ezekiel Emanuel wants people to die at age 75 (i.e., younger than Biden is now).
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.
A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
I’m sure that will go over great with Biden’s core of supporters…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Does Tulsi have any chance in the race? I could say “if both Biden and Bernies keeled over dead,” but even then I would expect someone like Warren or Bloomberg to jump back into the race and do better than Gabbard. She goes full Andrew Yang in calling for a Universal Basic Income, which should douse any remain fires for her on the right. “Tulsi Gabbard Says Her Sick Friend and Three Others Were Denied Coronavirus Testing in Hawaii.” Interesting (especially since Democrats absolutely dominate Hawaii), but rather peripheral to the race.
What can only be characterized, at best, as an election-year makeover campaign began to fall apart on Feb. 23 in an interview Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” Among other things, Sanders stated: “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Right afterward, Sanders doubled down, which was really his only play, lest he come off as a flip-flopper. Despite his proclamation “Truth is truth,” his point wasn’t clear. Does improved literacy that occurred in the context of indoctrinating the population in communist ideology redeem Cuba in any way? Should the United States become more like such countries? Ultimately, these remarks went nowhere, perhaps because there wasn’t anywhere to go but down.
Again, these remarks aren’t new and are entirely consistently with Sanders’ history. But, as even left-wing Vox conceded, it made for a bad look: “The other read, though, is more in line with Sanders’ past. Time after time, he has apologized for the actions of brutal left-wing dictatorships from Cuba to Nicaragua to the Soviet Union, partly out of a critique of America’s meddling in these countries but also – some argue – because of his ideological sympathies toward them.”
In a single interview, Sanders may’ve forever demolished the effort to convince the American electorate the 78-year-old career politician is a perfectly benign “democratic socialist” and not the hard-left socialist he’s always been.
Sure, socialism carries much less of a stigma in Democratic politics than it did a decade ago. Polling continually indicates that America’s young people have a much more positive attitude toward socialism than their parents and grandparents did. But that is a separate question from whether an openly socialist candidate can win elections — though it is worth noting that the two biggest Democratic Socialists of America victories in 2018 came from the wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the Democratic primaries of deep-blue House districts.
The response of the rest of the party to Sanders’s rise proved illuminating. Democrats feared that a 2020 cycle with Sanders atop the ticket would risk their House majority, destroy them in swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania, and obliterate them in red states.
In theory, socialism is supposed to appeal to the working class, including the white working class, which drifted toward Trump in 2016. But on Super Tuesday, Joe Biden ran ahead of Sanders among white non–college graduates in the states that Biden won, and the former vice president largely kept it close among this demographic in the states that Sanders won.
Bernie doesn’t let facts get in the way of True Belief:
This is your must watch clip from the Bernie townhall.@marthamaccallum explains to Bernie that Sweden and Denmark are not even remotely close to being socialist countries.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
li>Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Stated again and again she’s not running, but there’s still a cottage industry in predicting she’ll displace Biden at the DNC or be the veep pick. Not really seeing either, but stranger things have happened this year…
Bernie’s the frontrunner, Bloomberg battered over fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, more slams against #NeverTrump, plus a gratuitous Slashdot joke. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Delegates
They’re still not through counting in Nevada, but right now the delegate count stands at:
Sanders 34
Buttigieg 23
Joe Biden 8
Elizabeth Warren 8
Amy Klobuchar 7
Polls
Omitting anything older than Sunday:
CBS News: Sanders 28, Warren 19, Biden 17, Bloomberg 13, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. 10,000 registered voters should be enough, but I don’t buy Warren in second place.
CBS News (South Carolina): Biden 28, Sanders 23, Steyer 18, Warren 12, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1.
Full blown panic among the Democratic establishment as Sanders takes a firm lead:
“In 30-plus years of politics, I’ve never seen this level of doom. I’ve never had a day with so many people texting, emailing, calling me with so much doom and gloom,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way after Sanders’ win in Nevada.
Bennett said moderates firmly believe a Sanders primary win would seal Donald Trump’s reelection. “It’s this incredible sense that we’re hurtling to the abyss. I also think we could lose the House. And if we do, there would be absolutely no way to stop [Trump]. Today is the most depressed I’ve ever been in politics.”
A renewed sense of urgency washed over establishment Democrats, who fear it’s quickly becoming too late to stop Sanders.
Biden supporters moved to persuade the party to coalesce around him as the best hope of blunting Sanders’ momentum. A super PAC for Biden renewed discussions with jittery donors who had frozen their financial support for the former vice president as they awaited signs of whether billionaire Mike Bloomberg would emerge as the strongest moderate candidate, according to two donors with knowledge of the talks.
Among the pitches from pro-Biden forces to donors: Bloomberg could not overcome past policies that alienated minorities, most prominently the stop-and-frisk policing tactic he embraced as New York City mayor. They argued that if Bloomberg stays in the race, Sanders will clean up on Super Tuesday, then it’s game over.
“For the establishment, I think it’s Joe or bust,” said Simon Rosenberg, New Democrat Network president, who served as a senior strategist for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018.
Good heavens. The Democratic presidential primary just took a giant leap beyond pass-the-popcorn stage. (We were doing that from the moment Beto O’Rourke learned the media wasn’t willing to treat him like he had magical powers anymore because he wasn’t running against Ted Cruz.) We were at hit-record on-your-DVRs when it became clear on Iowa caucus night that no one was going to win. No, the Democratic presidential primary has reached a point few of us outside it ever thought it would reach: They’re having a conversation they actually need to have.
Mike Bloomberg’s campaign just unveiled a web ad making the obvious point that almost everyone else in the Democratic Party would prefer to ignore: There’s a thuggish mentality to Bernie Sanders’s online supporters. After Sanders charged that Bloomberg didn’t have the kind of energy that would be needed to defeat Trump, Bloomberg came back with an ad pointing out that Sanders supporters regularly tweet and offer memes with comments such as “vote Bernie or bad things will happen.” Supporters of Bloomberg are “going on lists.” The 53-second Bloomberg ad calls out Sanders for a seemingly disingenuous or powerless and pointless call for “civil discourse” while his grassroots supporters speak as if they can’t wait to get started on the liquidation of the Kulaks after Election Day.
Throughout his career, Sanders talked about the value of bread lines in Socialist countries, cheered on the Marxist Sandinistas, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, praised Communist China’s progress in “addressing extreme poverty,” talked about his admiration for Fidel Castro, warmly welcomed the Irish Republican Army, saluted Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan regime, and almost never criticized Nicholas Maduro.
And now he’s got a lot a slew of people who want to volunteer to serve as his personal KGB and NVKD.
For a guy who keeps insisting he only wants non-authoritarian socialism, Bernie Sanders has gone out of his way to praise authoritarian socialists. As Jeff Blehar pointed out: “Why honeymoon in Moscow when you can just as easily visit Stockholm instead? C’mon now.” It’s not like Westerners didn’t know about the secret police and show trials and forced labor and the Holomodor and gulags and being sent to Siberia. Praising the Soviet system meant, at minimum, excusing all of that, if not de facto justifying it.
Meanwhile, the New York Times — that allegedly always failing New York Times — pulls back the curtain on the Bloomberg campaign and reveals that some of the biggest and most influential activist groups on the Left just averted their eyes when it came to Bloomberg, because either they wanted or had grown dependent upon his generous contributions.
In the fall of 2018, Emily’s List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women’s group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to Emily’s List over the years.
Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and questioning sexual misconduct allegations against Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor. Senior Emily’s List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg’s invitation, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg.
Remember, kids, bias in law enforcement is bad, unless it’s happening in the jurisdiction of a wealthy donor, and then it — presto-change-o! — turns into something not important enough to mention
One of the most amazing things about American journalism is the continued employment of political pundits whose penchant for failure would disqualify them from being hired in any other field. All the experts who were wrong about the 2016 election are now confidently making predictions about the 2020 election, as if their credibility were undiminished by their previous mistakes.
Max Boot bashing snipped. Aw, who am I kidding? Bring it!
Last week, for example, ex-Republican pundit Max Boot — panicked by the sudden meltdown of Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, which he had failed to anticipate — issued a desperate appeal to prevent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination. “Please, Democrats, do the smart thing and coalesce quickly around one of the three moderates — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, or Michael Bloomberg — who are still standing after the first two contests,” Boot begged on Twitter in the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, adding, “The future of our democracy may depend on it.”
Really? Is “our democracy” in such dire peril that it can only be preserved by one of the three Democrats whom Max Boot has named? Or is it rather the case, as I suspect, that Boot is chiefly concerned about rescuing his own damaged reputation? Boot has squandered his credibility by betting on losing horses for nearly two decades. During the Bush era, Boot left the Wall Street Journal to join the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and was among the most sanguine cheerleaders for the Iraq War, failing to anticipate the brutal terrorist insurgency that ultimately destroyed the neoconservative fantasy of turning Mesopotamia into a Western-style liberal democracy.
It would be difficult to list everything Max Boot has been wrong about over the years, and perhaps it’s easier to just say “everything,” but certainly the Yale-educated CFR senior fellow is not alone in his propensity for false prophecy. He was part of the Never Trump crowd that tried to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination and then, confident that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, yelled “all in,” shoving their entire pile of chips onto a losing bet.
Any experienced poker player can perhaps sympathize with the plight of Never Trump Republicans; I once went all-in with a full house and lost when the other guy turned over four of a kind. But I’ve never claimed to be an “expert” on poker, the way Boot and his cohort assert their expertise about politics and policy. The whole crowd — including former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Bush-era campaign operative Rick Wilson, and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, to name a few — simply could not believe that Trump might actually be elected, and they have never forgiven him (or the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him) for proving them wrong. None of Trump’s policy successes — crushing ISIS, promoting a robust economy, appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices and numerous other federal judges, and more — can ever redeem him in the eyes of the self-appointed political “experts” whose credibility is further diminished every time Trump wins again.
Having lost any ability to influence Republicans, the Never Trump crowd has now begun offering advice to Democrats, and it’s tempting to hope Democrats will listen to these “experts.” If Max Boot has always been wrong about everything, then what should we conclude about his claim that “the smart thing” for Democrats would be to nominate a moderate candidate to oppose Trump in November?
Highlights of the Nevada debate, mainly the times the knives went in deepest.
Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren each started the month scraping perilously close to the bottom of their campaign bank accounts, posing an existential threat to their candidacies as the Democratic primary goes national.
They’re up against well-funded machines threatening to dominate the Democratic race: Bernie Sanders, whose recent rise in the polls has come during a major spending streak fueled by his online donors, and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose fortune has vaulted him into the middle of the campaign to take on President Donald Trump.
While Sanders started February with nearly $17 million in the bank, according to campaign finance disclosures filed Thursday night, his next closest rival (nonbillionaire class) was Biden, at $7.1 million. Warren was closest to the red, with just $2.3 million left in her account, while Buttigieg ($6.6 million) and Klobuchar ($2.9 million) were in between.
The cash crunch comes at a critical time in the race, with nearly one-third of the delegates available in the primary up for grabs on Super Tuesday on March 3 — and only a handful of candidates able to marshal resources to advertise to voters in those 14 states. It’s why super PACs, demonized at the beginning of the 2020 primary, are suddenly jumping in to assist most Democratic candidates, and it’s why the campaigns are now making ever more urgent pleas for financial help.
The Democrat Party has turned hard left. By doing so, the party has unintentionally exposed itself.
Ambiguity and obfuscation are the Democrats’ stock in trade. They distort words, and they abuse the English language. They use words and phrases that sound good but are impossible to define — for example, environmental justice, intergenerational justice, climate change, and sustainability.
Such deception is crucial for the party’s survival. But the deception has become harder to sustain.
More than anyone else, Donald Trump is responsible for exposing the Democrats. They detest him and his achievements so much that their judgment has been annihilated. With new clarity, their reactions say far more about themselves than him. He is causing them to take leave of their sanity.
They hate Trump so much that they can’t celebrate his accomplishments. They even demeaned the killing of an evil and savage terrorist, Qassem Soleimani. But their insane hatred has put them in a bind.
Donald Trump has set up camp inside their brains. They should not have let him do that. They will live to regret it.
I think three things happened to Mike tonight. Number one, he just found out he’d make the debate yesterday. There were two times when I wasn’t sure I was going to make the debate and my team got me together to prepare. And you’re really not sure if you’re preparing because you’re not sure if you’re going to be in the debate. So Mike, even though he was I’m sure getting coached and prepared, he’s like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be in this debate.” And so, I don’t think he was coached hard enough.
Number two, he was clearly instructed to keep his cool no matter what. But that ended up presenting as lethargic and uninterested for a big chunk of the debate. And the third most telling thing is that if I’m his team, you know he’s going to get a stop and frisk question, like a gender discrimination or mistreatment question. So, you coach him and you have him give you 60, 75-second answers over and over again until he can do it in his sleep. And the fact that he did not have those answers at his fingertips lets me know categorically he was not properly prepared for this debate.
Over the course of the past two weeks I sat down and attempted to watch every single ad and ad-adjacent piece of video content that the Bloomberg campaign has released on its official YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account. (I only dipped my toes into Instagram, because I had to draw the line somewhere.) Then, after rejecting a few for redundancy, I ranked them from best to worst, based solely on my own idiosyncratic criteria. (I surely missed some, and I stopped trying to find new ones a few days ago, for sanity’s sake.) Why did I do this? Because I wanted to mainline the means by which a late primary entrant with unimaginable sums of money has become a possible Democratic frontrunner.
Here’s what I learned: For one thing, that watching nearly 200 campaign ads in a short period is sort of like being brainwashed, which I suppose is the goal of all advertising. At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m aboard the Bloomberg train, but I think I would feel a little less uncomfortable buying a ticket. Many of the ads are very good. Many more of them are not. The quality of any individual ad, though, is ultimately less important than the breadth of the entire corpus. It’s not that Bloomberg doesn’t have some good ideas—he does—or that he would not be a more competent executive than our current president. The point is that the campaign’s goal is to very quickly achieve messaging saturation in lieu of the monthslong ground game Bloomberg didn’t bother to run. I hate to say it, but it’s working!
Being from a slate writer, it’s not at all surprising that the ones he likes best are all of the “Orange Man Bad!” variety. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Tried of all the Bloomberg bashing? Me neither.
What a catastrophe Wednesday night was for Mike Bloomberg. The New York plutocrat was kicked in the teeth by Elizabeth Warren in the first minutes — she denounced him as a Trump-like “arrogant billionaire” who called women “horse-faced lesbians” — and never made it back to his feet.
Bloomberg stood in mute fury as his $400 million campaign investment went up in smoke. His contempt for democracy and sense of entitlement surpass even Donald Trump, who at least likes crowds — Bloomberg’s joyless imperiousness makes Trump seem like Robin Williams.
That Bloomberg has been touted as a potential Democratic Party savior across the top ranks of politics and media is an extraordinary indictment of that group of people.
Some endorsements were straight cash transactions, in which politicians who owe their careers to Bloomberg’s largess repaid him with whatever compliments they could muster. How much does a man who radiates impatience with the idea of having to pretend to equal status with anyone have to spend to get someone to say something nice?
California Congressman Harley Rouda called him a “legendary businessman”: Bloomie gave her more than $4 million. New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill got more than $2 million from Bloomberg’s Independence USA Super PAC, and in return the Navy vet said Bloomberg embodies “the integrity we need.”
Georgia’s Lucy McBath, a member of the congressional black caucus, got $4 million from Bloomberg PACs, and she endorsed him just as an audio clip was coming out of the ex-mayor talking about putting black men up “against the wall” in stop-and-frisk. News accounts of the endorsement frequently left out the financial ties.
That’s fine. If you give a politician $2 million or $4 million, it must be expected that he or she will say you approximate a human being.
But how does New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman excuse writing “Paging Michael Bloomberg”? (Well, Bloomberg philanthropies donated to Planet Word, “the museum my wife is building,” says Friedman, so there’s that.) How about Jonathan Chait at New York, who wrote, “Winning the election is starting to look hard. How about buying it instead?” Or John Ellis in The Washington Post, who declared Bloomberg the “dream candidate”?
These pundits clung to a triumvirate of delusions: Bloomberg “gets things done,” he’s more electable than a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because he can spend unlimited amounts, and he has the “toughness” to take on Trump.
Far from showing “toughness,” Bloomberg on Wednesday wilted under attacks from his five Democratic opponents.
Snip.
Trump has clear authoritarian tendencies and has wrapped his hands around autocrats, but for all the fretting about him perhaps not leaving office in 2020 if voted out, it’s Bloomberg who has already tossed term limits aside, and it’s Bloomberg who is openly trying to buy an election. There is zero evidence he will be any less of a threat to democracy or an agent for rapacious corporate interests than Trump.
Even assuming one could cross into believing that Bloomberg is somehow less revolting or dangerous than the current president — I don’t, but let’s say — Wednesday exploded the idea that he would have a superior chance at beating him than Sanders or a conventional, non-plutocrat politician like Warren or Pete Buttigieg. Bloomberg was a total zero charisma-wise, had trouble thinking on his feet, and failed to find even one issue where he sounded confident and convincing. His only distinguishing characteristic is his money, and fuck his money.
Bloomberg’s reason to be in this contest is to be the last non-Bernie non-Warren candidate standing. Biden doesn’t have it in him. While he had some good lines, he was a sideshow and a sad figure. If anyone is done after last night, it’s Amy Klobuchar. Her performance was whiny and weak — please Mayor Pete and Elizabeth, stop criticizing me!
Bloomberg didn’t help himself last night, but I don’t see that he ended his campaign provided he’s still willing to finance it.
I am one of the many women Mike Bloomberg’s company tried to silence through nondisclosure agreements. The funny thing is, I never even worked for Bloomberg.
But my story shows the lengths that the Bloomberg machine will go to in order to avoid offending Beijing. Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LP, is so dependent on the vast China market for its business that its lawyers threatened to devastate my family financially if I didn’t sign an NDA silencing me about how Bloomberg News killed a story critical of Chinese Communist Party leaders. It was only when I hired Edward Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong that Bloomberg LP eventually called off their hounds after many attempts to intimidate me.
In 2012, I was working toward a Ph.D. in sociology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and my husband, Michael Forsythe, was a lead writer on a Bloomberg News article about the vast accumulation of wealth by relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping, part of an award-winning “Revolution to Riches” series about Chinese leaders.
Soon after Bloomberg published the article on Xi’s family wealth in June 2012, my husband received death threats conveyed by a woman who told him she represented a relative of Xi. The woman conveying the threats specifically mentioned the danger to our whole family; our two children were 6 and 8 years old at the time. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos reports a similar encounter in his award-winning book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China,” when the same woman told Osnos’s wife: “He [Forsythe] and his family can’t stay in China. It’s no longer safe,” she said. “Something will happen. It will look like an accident. Nobody will know what happened. He’ll just be found dead.”
Snip.
My husband had been working for many months on another investigative report for Bloomberg about financial ties between one of China’s richest men, Wang Jianlin, and the families of senior Communist Party officials, including relatives of Xi. Bloomberg editors had thus far backed the story. A Bloomberg managing editor, Jonathan Kaufman, said in an email in late September 2013, “I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. … It’s a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line,” according to an account published by the Financial Times.
Then Bloomberg killed the story at the last minute, and the company fired my husband in November after comments by Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matt Winkler were leaked. “If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,” Winkler reportedly said on a company call.
Mike Bloomberg, then New York City mayor and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, was asked on November 12, 2013, about reports that his company had self-censored out of fear of offending the Chinese government and he dismissed the question.
“Nobody thinks that we’re wusses and not willing to stand up and write stories that are of interest to the public and that are factually correct,” Bloomberg told a press conference.
Yet, days after Bloomberg made those comments to reporters in New York, Bloomberg lawyers in Hong Kong threatened to devastate my family financially by forcing us to repay the company for our relocation fees to Hong Kong from Beijing and the advance on my husband’s salary that we took out, leave us with no health insurance or income, and take me to court if I did not sign a nondisclosure agreement — even though I had never been a Bloomberg employee.
Snip.
On December 20, they sent a letter to my husband demanding that I sign a nondisclosure agreement. If I didn’t agree, we might owe the company thousands of dollars. I might even have had to pay Bloomberg’s legal bills. The thought of Bloomberg possibly ruining our family financially if I didn’t give in to their threats made me sick, but I was also infuriated that they had kept us in harm’s way after we received threats, forbidden me from speaking publicly about the death threats we received in Beijing, and now were trying to take away my freedom of speech forever.
It was only when I hired Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong — Albert Ho and Jonathan Man offered me a low rate because it was a “good cause” — that Bloomberg finally backed off. In the meantime, they had sent me several more threatening letters. One letter from Mayer Brown JSM on January 8, 2014, spelled out that “by virtue of the knowledge that she retains (in her head) of our client’s [Bloomberg’s] Confidential Information she has an ongoing duty of confidentiality to our client.
Mini Mike Bloomberg’s debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones. He was stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent. If this doesn’t knock him out of the race, nothing will. Not so easy to do what I did!
Ann Althouse was not impressed with Bloomberg in the debate. “He’s dull and he looks like death.” Bloomberg racks up three congressional endorsements: “Reps. Nita Lowey of New York, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Pete Aguilar of California.” Daily Caller laughably calls them “major” endorsements, but Aguilar is the only one I already had a tag for. “After Taking Brutal Beating In Debate, Bloomberg Rushed To Tiny Hospital In Tiny Ambulance.” “He’s recovering nicely in a matchbox.” “We are all individuals!”
Another West Side resident, Cornish Miller, 62, said of Buttigieg, “Rating him 1 to 10, I’d give him a 2.”
“Buttigieg talked about all the improvements he made, but he hardly made a dent,” said Miller, who works for a military supply company.
“The West Side is the most neglected part of town. The street I live on is the only street around here that has lights. That’s because we’re a gateway to Notre Dame.”
Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is claiming there are inconsistencies in the reported results in Nevada, as the former South Bend, Ind., mayor tries to claw his way to second place in Saturday’s caucuses.
In a letter sent to Nevada Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II and obtained by POLITICO, Buttigieg’s campaign is calling for the state party to publicly release a tranche of data and recalculate some precincts, a call the state party largely rebuffed.
“In light of material irregularities pertaining to the process of integrating early votes into the in-person precinct caucus results, we request that you” release early and in-person votes, correct “errors identified by presidential campaigns” and “explain anomalies in the data,” Buttigieg’s national ballot access and delegate director Michael Gaffney wrote in the letter sent late Saturday.
Buttigieg’s campaign is not challenging Bernie Sanders’ runaway win in the state. Instead, the Buttigieg camp is pointing to the battle further down the standings.
“Given how close the race is between second and third place, we ask that you take these steps before releasing any final data,” Gaffney wrote.
Those “close second” finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire already seem like ancient news…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But: “Ex-Bill Clinton adviser: Bloomberg and Hillary cooking up ‘scheme’ for her to become Democratic nominee.” Not buying it, but enjoy another week in the clown car, Grandma Death.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s mired in single digits but the few news stories I’m finding focued on her are like “Watch Amy Klobuchar’s full speech after Nevada caucus defeat” (No), “Video: Senator Amy Klobuchar speaks with the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board” (No), and “President Amy Klobuchar: Here’s what it would mean for California” (Yes, we know weed is legal there.) Ah, this promises some blue-on-blue action: “How Amy Klobuchar’s Signature Bill Became a Disaster for Her Own Party.” Alas, no, it’s just another “she treats her staff like shit” piece, this time by throwing them under the bus for some technical abortion language in a bill the writer doesn’t bother to detail.
This is a decisive victory for Sanders, who more than doubled Biden’s total, and a major setback for Warren and Klobuchar, both of whom needed to show some kind of momentum to keep their campaigns viable. While it is possible that Biden could still bounce back with a win next Saturday in the South Carolina primary, even the most enthusiastic supporters of Warren and Klobuchar must see they now have no path to the nomination. Their money is running out, whereas Buttigieg (who at least got a narrow win in Iowa) could continue if he does well on Super Tuesday. Unless two or three of the non-Sanders candidates drops out before Super Tuesday, however, there will still be multiple candidates splitting the “Anybody But Bernie” vote with billionaire Mike Bloomberg, and that means Sanders could emerge with an insurmountable delegate lead after March 3. And this means . . . panic time!
James Carville and Chris Matthrews meltdown bits snipped.
Why are the MSNBC talking heads so despondent? Because they are convinced that if Democrats nominate Sanders, they’ll alienate middle-class moderate voters and thereby guarantee Trump’s re-election. I wish I believed this as much as they do, but can we trust the conventional wisdom dispensed by cable-news “experts”? These are the same people who thought Trump could never win the GOP nomination, and then believed Hillary Clinton could easily defeat Trump, so when they start predicting future political events, my hunch is they’re wrong again.
Glenn Reynolds seems to share my concern: “You can assume that Trump would crush Bernie, and you’re probably right. But any major-party nominee, however lame, has a nonzero chance of becoming President, and that’s bad when we’re talking about a commie.”
As much as I want to believe Trump would score a slam-dunk victory over Sanders in November, I’m disturbed by the fact that MSNBC talking-heads have the same opinion. Maybe I’m just being a worry-wart about this, though. In an all-out battle between a socialist Democrat and a capitalist Republican, Trump wins — if the American people are still the American people. If Bernie were to win, we might as well call ourselves “Southern Canada.” Meanwhile, Bill Kristol and the cruise-ship contingent of #NeverTrump ex-Republicans have reached a fatal reckoning; having committed to 100% opposition to Trump, they must now find a way to make the “principled conservative” argument for Bernie Sanders. They didn’t have much credibility left to lose, but once you sell your soul to Pierre Omidyar, you must pay that debt in full.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. In a shocking and completely unexpected turnabout, Warren now says that SuperPAC money is just fine and dandy! She calls Bloomberg “ a big threat — not a tall one, but a big one.” I’m sure the media that’s Margaret Dumonted an endless stream of “Well I never!”s over Trump tweets will quickly chastise Warren for this vicious personal attack.
🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020. One of the more interesting and least pandering of the candidates, Yang ran much better than anyone (myself included) expected, but never broke out of single digits. He gets an exit interview in the New York Times. Might run for New York City mayor. It would be nearly impossible for him to do a worse job than Di Blasio…
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
Bloomberg channels Barney, Yang, Bennet and Patrick are Out, enjoy the Buttigieg Platitude Generator, Bernie bros break out the blacklist for Bloomberg hires, and Mayor Pete has a fake Nigerian problem. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
The Nevada caucus looms, but not until Saturday.
There are now six candidates left in the race with a theoretical chance to earn the nomination (Sanders Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Biden, and Warren), plus Gabbard and Steyer. I don’t see Warren getting any traction, but I do see the DNC working desperately behind the scenes to make sure she keeps siphoning votes away from Sanders…
Delegates
After New Hampshire, the actual delegate count stands at:
Buttigieg 22
Sanders 21
Elizabeth Warren 8
Amy Klobuchar 7
Joe Biden 6
It’s a neat trick, Buttigieg leading the delegate count after coming in second in the first two states…
St. Pete Polls (Florida): Bloomberg 27.3, Biden 25.9, Buttigieg 10.5, Sanders 10.4, Klobuchar 8.6, Steyer 1.3. First state with a poll lead for Bloomberg. Sample size of 3,047, which should be excellent for a state poll.
A brokered convention would be a lot of fun to watch but devastating for Democrats. The chances of Bernie Sanders coming out on top in a brokered convention seem slim to me—and if Bernie goes into the convention with the most delegates but doesn’t leave the convention as the nominee, Bernie supporters are going to be livid. Whoever the candidate is, if the Democrats have to wait until mid-July to know for sure who their nominee is going be, it puts their party at a significant disadvantage.
The problem for Democrats is that Sanders leads, but most Democrats are voting against him:
While the far-left or more liberal candidates — including Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — collectively earned 35 percent of the New Hampshire vote, the center-left and more moderate candidates — including Biden, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) — collectively earned more than one-half of the vote, with 53 percent between the three of them.
Indeed, while Sanders may have eked out a victory, a majority of the New Hampshire voters aligned with the moderate bloc of the party.
This discrepancy poses a serious problem for Democrats as the primary season continues. In order to build a broad-based coalition of voters to defeat Trump, there needs to be an understanding within the party that the message will be inclusive, will encourage unity and will eventually focus on supporting the nominee.
Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020, after a dismal rounding-error showing in New Hampshire. Not really seeing any post mortem pieces out there, but here’s a piece on his last few days on the campaign trail. The most interesting part is finding out his New Hampshire office is in the same building as Buttigieg and Steyer’s state offices. He’s perhaps the most forgettable politician making a serious run for President this century. If you stuck a gun to the head of each Democratic Party voter and demanded they pick Bennet out of a list of candidates, 99% of those people would be dead.
It was not the first time — or the last — during his long career that Jim Biden turned to Joe’s political network for the kind of assistance that would have been almost unimaginable for someone with a different last name. Campaign donors helped him face a series of financial problems, including a series of IRS liens totaling more than $1 million that made it harder to get bank financing. Jim Biden took out two more loans from WashingtonFirst before its sale in 2018.
These transactions illuminate the well-synchronized tango that the Biden brothers have danced for half a century. They have pursued overlapping careers — one a presidential aspirant with an expansive network of well-heeled Democratic donors; the other an entrepreneur who helped his brother raise political money and cultivated the same network to help finance his own business deals.
Jim Biden, 70, has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.
A meeting with nearly 80 black pastors in Detroit. A speech before a black Democratic organization in Montgomery. A rally at a historically black university. A tour of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. An early voting kickoff at an African American museum. All in the past two weeks.
While Mike Bloomberg’s rivals battled it out in majority-white Iowa and New Hampshire, the billionaire presidential candidate aggressively courted the black voters critical to any Democrat’s chance of winning of the nomination. The effort, backed by millions of dollars in ads, has taken him across Southern states that vote on March 3, from Montgomery, Alabama, and this week Raleigh, North Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, states where African American voters can decide a Democratic primary.
His pitch is one of electability and competence — hoping to capitalize on black Democrats’ hunger to oust President Donald Trump. But as he courts black voters he’ll also have to reconcile his own record as mayor of New York and past remarks on criminal justice.
Bloomberg’s outreach aims squarely at former Vice President Joe Biden, who is banking on loyal black voters to resuscitate his bid after poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“Who can beat Donald Trump? That’s what people care about,” said former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who is among the black leaders endorsing Bloomberg. Nutter says Bloomberg’s record of accomplishments outweighs the damage of flawed policing.
Bloomberg has no doubt been helped by his limitless financial resources and his strategy to focus on states conducting primaries on Super Tuesday. One of the world’s richest men thanks to a net worth of roughly $60 billion, Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million of his own money on advertising, including spots on black radio stations, a Super Bowl ad that featured an African American mother who lost her son to gun violence and a national ad touting his work with President Barack Obama on gun legislation and a teen jobs program.
The Democratic presidential candidates raced on Sunday to make the most of their final weekend day before the Nevada caucuses, selling their messages and tearing into their opponents.
But the rival they focused on most intently was one who isn’t even competing in the state.
“I got news for Mr. Bloomberg,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said at an event in Carson City, Nev., taking aim at the former New York City mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, within five minutes of opening his remarks. “The American people are sick and tired of billionaires buying elections.”
In a rarity, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. echoed his progressive counterpart. “Sixty billion dollars can buy you a lot of advertising, but it can’t erase your record,” he said of Mr. Bloomberg in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired on Sunday.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another moderate, had similar thoughts. “I’m here getting votes,” Ms. Klobuchar said in an interview on Sunday. “It’s not something where I can just — what would be the word — transport in a bunch of ads.” She called on Mr. Bloomberg to “go on the shows that every other candidate goes on, on the Sunday shows and the like.”
She added: “I don’t think I’m going to beat him on the airwaves, but I can beat him on the debate stage.” At a forum on Sunday focused on infrastructure, Ms. Klobuchar, who won the endorsement of The Las Vegas Sun last week, mentioned Mr. Bloomberg early on, referring to President Trump’s comments about his height as she stood to speak. “I am the only candidate that is 5-foot-4,” she joked. “I want that out there now.”
The fixation on Mr. Bloomberg, the free-spending multibillionaire, reflected his rising prominence in the Democratic race, even though he is skipping the first four nominating contests and focusing on the 14 Super Tuesday states that will vote on March 3.
As early voting continued in Nevada on Sunday, some of the criticism seemed to be sticking.
“Bloomberg just has bad connotations that come along with him,” Leah Garwood said as she waited in line with her husband on Sunday in Las Vegas for roughly 45 minutes to vote for a different billionaire, Tom Steyer of California. “It’s just at the back of my mind. It makes me uncomfortable, uneasy.”
Don’t believe it; Most of the people backing Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar (i.e., the Corrupt Wing) would choose Bloomberg over Sanders without hesitation. The meme machine. Bloomy can buy memes, but can he buy good memes? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Tolerant Bernie Bros want to Blacklist Bloomberg staffers:
it's very important for us to create a black list of every operative who works on the bloomberg campaign
(Tweet has since been deleted, but there’s plenty of reference to it on Twitter.) Are you an old person with cancer? Bloomberg just wants to let you die:
Bloomberg explaining how healthcare will “bankrupt us,” unless we deny care to the elderly.
“If you show up with cancer & you’re 95 years old, we should say…there’s no cure, we can’t do anything.
A young person, we should do something. Society’s not willing to do that, yet.” pic.twitter.com/7E5UFHXLue
Pete Buttigieg really speaks in platitudes a lot. Last night brought, “[You’re] ready to vote for a politics defined by how many we call in, instead of by who we push out . . . So many of you chose to meet a new era of challenge with a new generation of leadership . . . A fresh outlook is what makes new beginnings possible. It is how we build a new majority . . . The answers, they lie in a vision that brings Americans together not only in the knowledge of what we must stand against, but in the confidence of knowing what we are for.”
Buttigieg is the ultimate candidate of the country’s post-2016 trauma. He is not a woman. He is not a socialist. He is decidedly not a revolutionary. He does not make big, sweeping promises, except one: that nothing much will change, only Donald Trump won’t be President. “What I like about Mayor Pete is that he is not a strong ideologue,” Tod Sedgwick, a volunteer who had gone to New Hampshire to canvass for Buttigieg, told me. Sedgwick, who is seventy-one and the former U.S. Ambassador to the Slovak Republic, was canvassing with his girlfriend, Christina Brown, a seventy-three-year-old community activist from Louisville, Kentucky. Sedgwick lives in Washington, D.C.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Drudge floated a trial balloon suggesting Bloomberg would tap her as his veep pick. Which presents the tiny problem that it violates Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, since both are from New York. Plus:
Pretty sure that picking Hillary Clinton to serve as your Vice President will void any life insurance policies
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says U.S. military should scale back overseas operations. She blames a total media blackout for her faltering campaign. Eh, she has a point, the Democratic Media Complex does hate her, but her failure to break through that barrier is on her. I mean, if you’re a youngish, attractive woman, how do you lose the Outsider Excitement Race to a 79-year old socialist?
#CombSaladAmy pronounces the word “blizzard” in the oddest way. This supercut of her doing a robotic retelling of the same lame campaign trail joke is Stepford level creepy. pic.twitter.com/sOh6Jlz5tA
Patrick focused his campaign entirely on New Hampshire, hoping the familiarity of a neighboring state would help boost his chances in the race. He offered what aides felt was a unique message in a field that ultimately boiled down largely to career politicians with little executive or private sector experience: that he had the track record as governor and through years of business experience to deliver on Democratic priorities like fighting climate change and reforming health care.
You would think the failure of several other governors to run viable campaigns might have deterred him, but no. Patrick got into the race in November, made no impression whatsoever, and sank without a trace. Mike Gravel and Wayne Messam had more compelling reasons to run…
We have previously discussed the efforts of the Democratic establishment and some in the media to (again) derail the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, including the raw bias against Sanders shown by CNN reporter Abby Phillip in a prior presidential debate. Now, with Sanders’ victory in New Hampshire and rising polls, figures from both politics and media are putting on a full-court press to stop Sanders. Everyone from James Carville to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews are sounding alarms over Sanders. His victory last night was called the “doomsday scenario” by a Democratic Super PAC. The most shocking was MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd who used a quote form a columnist to compare Sanders supporters to Nazi brown-shirted thugs. It is a technique used before by Todd who reads letters or quotes from others to preserve the patina of neutrality like his recent attack on Trump supporters.
“There is overall uncertainty which is growing. The real fear for Texas D’s remains Sanders,” Bill Miller, a longtime Austin lobbyist who has worked with both Democrats and Republicans, said of a Sanders ticket. “’We’d be fucked’ — that’s what they’re saying. The drain at the top goes down to the bottom.”
Texas may not be a presidential battleground, but a wave of GOP retirements in Congress, shifting demographics and Donald Trump’s lightning-rod presidency offer Democrats a shot at real power after two decades of Republican dominance. And to insiders like Miller, plans to nationalize the health care and electricity sectors will spook voters and weigh down local Democrats who are trying to thread a needle in this still deeply conservative state.
“Sure you can see my medical records! And by ‘sure’ I mean ‘no way.'” Topless PETA protestors interupt his speech.
Elizabeth Warren’s straggling campaign is cutting ad buys worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in key early states after bruising losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The retrenchment follows a dismal fourth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, down from third place in Iowa.
“We were hoping for a better result in New Hampshire,” Warren’s campaign conceded in an email to supporters Wednesday. “It hurts to care so much, work so hard, and still fall a little short.”
The campaign has cut more than $300,000 worth of ads in Nevada and South Carolina, according to two advertising trackers. The Massachusetts U.S. senator appears to be shifting her focus to Maine, with ad buys worth tens of thousands of dollars there on Wednesday, according to FCC filings.
Her New Hampshire finish behind U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has also raised concerns about whether Warren can sustain the national organizing effort her campaign is relying on for success on Super Tuesday on March 3.
“She put her eggs in a New Hampshire basket. That was the right thing to do, but it didn’t pan out,” said Democratic strategist Scott Ferson. “She’s entering a period of darkness and belt tightening and hard choices about options.”…
Warren’s much-lauded ground game has now failed her twice, making it harder to generate the millions of dollars needed to sustain her massive operation, strategists say. Warren entered 2020 with $13.7 million in the bank and raised more than $5 million after Iowa. But her campaign also spent $12 million more than it took in at the end of 2019, FEC reports show.
Maybe Warren had a great ground game, and she just sucks too hard as a candidate to take advantage of it… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Update: Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020. One of the more interesting and least pandering of the candidates, Yang ran much better than anyone (myself included) expected, but never broke out of single digits. He gets an exit interview in the New York Times. Might run for New York City mayor. It would be nearly impossible for him to do a worse job than Di Blasio…
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Amy Klobuchar (only those three pick up delegates)
Elizabeth Warren
Joe Biden
Tom Steyer
Tulsi Gabbard
Andrew Yang
Others
Deval Patrick
Michael Bennet
Two contests, two Sanders wins, two Buttigieg second place finishes, two cases of Amy Klobuchar doing better than expected, two cases of Biden placing fourth or lower.
Are one or both going to drop out? Not this week. I’m pretty sure Biden stays in until Super Tuesday, and I suspect Warren stays in as well just to jam Bernie by siphoning off left-wing voters. And we get to see how much difference Michael Bloomberg’s money makes in the race.
Other fallout:
Andrew Yang, one of the more interesting Democratic candidates, dropped out. he exceeded expectations (none), but never earned a single delegate.
Michael Bennet, one of the least interesting candidates, also dropped out. I would say the least interesting, except I was going through the list of also-rans when I came across Seth Moulton’s name, and it had completely slipped my mine that he had been running at all. Then again, Moulton ran against Pelosi for Speaker, so maybe he’s more interesting than Bennet still…
Word is that Deval Patrick will drop out as well, but since no one noticed he was in the race in the first place, no one will care.
Tom Steyer is not dropping out. Good. I want to see him waste more of his money.
This is interesting:
.@AFSCME Prez Lee Saunders just put out a statement encouraging every remaining candidate to stay in the race: "Millions of voters have yet to choose, and I encourage all remaining candidates to stay the course and give more working people a chance to make their voices heard"
Even organized labor seems scared of Sanders leading the ticket in the fall.
Ideally, we’ll have six theoretically viable candidates (plus Tulsi Gabbard) continue on the campaign after Super Tuesday, raising the tantalizing specter of a brokered convention.
Iowa screws everything up, the Bernie juggernaut gathers momentum, there was another debate, and Biden calls a voter a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Delegates
So Sanders got 6,000 more votes than Buttigieg in Iowa…and, somehow, two less delegates. That puts the actual delegate count at:
Buttigieg 14
Sanders 12
Elizabeth Warren 8
Joe Biden 6
Amy Klobuchar 1
Klobuchar got her delegate with 12.3% of the vote. I guess the way Iowa did things that 15% threshold didn’t matter? Is that only for primaries? Or did it only matter at the precinct level? It seems like the DNC has rigged the process for maximum opaqueness…
Polls
The Iowa cock-up scrambled things so badly I’m ignoring most of these this week. All these are from Sunday and are for New Hampshire.
Maybe there will eventually be a decent-sized Iowa bounce despite all of this. But there’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan. To repeat: There’s very little importance in a mathematical sense to who wins 41 delegates. Iowa is all about the media narrative it produces and all about momentum, and that momentum, whoever wins, is likely to have been blunted.
Who might this help? Let’s pretend for a moment we don’t have any hints about how the results might have turned out. In fact, let’s pretend that Iowa didn’t happen at all. I reran our forecast model as though the Iowa caucuses were canceled….
The presence of Iowa was helpful to Bernie Sanders, whose chances of winning a national delegate majority would have been 24 percent without Iowa — as compared to the 31 percent chance that he had with Iowa, as of Monday afternoon. Iowa was hurtful to Joe Biden, however, whose chances of a delegate majority would have been 50 percent without it, rather than 43 percent with it.
And Iowa was extremely helpful to Buttigieg, whose chances of winning the delegate majority were fairly low even with Iowa — keep in mind that he had slipped to third in polls of Iowa and fifth in national polls — but would have been virtually nonexistent (less than 1 percent) without it.
By giving the winning candidates a boost, the presence of Iowa also reduced the chance of an unstructured race and a potential brokered convention. The chance of there being no delegate majority was 17 percent without Iowa, but would have been 20 percent with it.
Granted, none of those changes — say, 24 percent versus 31 percent — are necessarily that large. But that’s partly because, as of Monday afternoon, four or five candidates appeared to have a shot at winning Iowa. For the candidate who actually won Iowa, it would have been a much bigger deal. We estimate that Sanders’s chances of a majority would have shot up to from 31 percent to 58 percent with an Iowa win, Warren’s from 5 percent to 32 percent, and Buttigieg’s from 4 percent to 22 percent.
And in some ways that still discounts Iowa’s impact, because several of the campaigns — for better or worse — built their entire strategy around the state. Would Buttigieg have been a major player in the race without Iowa? Considering his lack of support among black voters, probably not. Would candidates such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julian Castro have dropped out so soon? That’s a harder call, since Harris, Booker and Castro weren’t polling particularly well anywhere. But the Democratic field might have remained a little more diverse.
So we’ve arrived at a point of some ambivalence. On the one hand, candidates such as Buttigieg, who seemingly did well there, are liable to be injured by the muddled storylines in Iowa following the results-reporting disaster on Monday night. On the other hand, it’s not clear why Iowa was afforded so much importance in the first place, and Buttigieg possibly owed his entire presence in the campaign to this quirk in the nomination process. Nonetheless, these were the rules of the game, as every candidate understood them. So if Iowa turns out not to matter very much because of the results-reporting snafu, they have every right to be upset.
To be even more blunt: The Iowa Democratic Party’s colossal screw-up in reporting results will potentially have direct effects on the outcome of the nomination process. The failure to report results will almost certainly help Biden, assuming that indications that he performed poorly in Iowa are correct, as they won’t get nearly as much media coverage. And they’ll hurt whichever candidate wins the state — most likely Sanders or Buttigieg. (Although if Sanders winds up finishing in second place or lower, he also might not mind a reduction in the importance of Iowa, especially with one of his best states, New Hampshire, coming up next.)
What if burying bad Biden news was the entire point of engineering the cockup? After all, the DNC is backing Biden and battling Bernie.
Matt Taibbi: “Yesterday’s Gone: Iowa Was Waterloo for Democrats. In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party faceplants in Iowa.”
After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.
Coinciding with the flatulent end of the party’s impeachment gambit, and the related news that Donald Trump is enjoying climbing approval ratings, the Blue Party was exposed as an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit.
Snip.
Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything. The poking incidents were bad, but then one of his chief surrogates, John Kerry, was overheard by NBC talking about the possibility of jumping in to keep Bernie from “taking down” the party.
“Maybe I’m fucking deluding myself here,” Kerry reportedly said — mainstream Democrats may not have changed their policies or strategies much since Trump, but they sure are swearing more — then noted he would have to raise a “couple of million” from people like venture capitalist Doug Hickey.
Kerry later said he was enumerating the reasons he wouldn’t run, though those notably did not include humility about his own reputation as a comical national electoral failure, or because there’s already a candidate in the race (Biden) he’d been crisscrossing Iowa urging people to vote for, but instead because he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up paid speeches. French aristocrats who shouted “Vive le Roi!” on the way to the razor did a better job advertising themselves.
With days, hours left before the caucuses, there were signs everywhere that the party establishment was scrambling to find someone among the remaining cast members to stop what Kerry called the “reality of Bernie.”
But who? Yang said smart things about inequality, so he was out. Tulsi Gabbard was Russian Bernie spawn. Tom Steyer was Dennis Kucinich with money. Voters had already rejected potential Trump WWE opponents like the “progressive prosecutor” (Kamala Harris), the “pragmatic progressive” (John Delaney), “the next Bobby Kennedy” (Beto O’Rourke), “Courageous Empathy” (Cory Booker), Medicare for All can bite me (John Hickenlooper), and over a dozen others.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case in a cover story the magazine’s Twitter account summarized as: “Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who’s gay and speaks Norwegian.” (The “Here’s something random the Democrats need to beat Trump” story became an important literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico’s “Can the “F-bomb save Beto?”).
Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey consultant with “moderates.” Reporters dug Pete; he’s been willing to be photographed holding a beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a “killer instinct,” i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.
Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete’s name had not been read out in a Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the “gold standard” survey. The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid bare.
However, Pete’s numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about “concern” that Buttigieg would not be able to win.
Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked “billionaires” in one stop, emphasized “unity” in the next, and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” or to chants of “It’s time for a woman in the White House”). Was she an outsider or an insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?
A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn’t win didn’t help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders “hot mic” story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to take on Trump.
“It’s like we all have PTSD from 2016.”
Read the whole thing for a detailed breakdown of how Democrats suddenly changed the caucus rules on people, followed by “a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude.” And even if I disgree with some of his lefty conclusions, you have to love this sentence: “Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners — everyone but donors.”
“If You Think It’s Bad for Mainstream Democrats Now, Just Wait“:
It is always darkest, John McCain used to say, before it gets totally black. So it is for the American center-left right now. Bernie Sanders is currently favored to win the nomination, a prospect that would make Donald Trump a heavy favorite to win reelection, and open the possibility of a Corbyn-esque wipeout. While Sanders has not expanded beyond a minority of the party, he has consolidated support of the party’s left wing, and while its mainstream liberal wing is split between numerous contenders, it is hard to see how the situation is likely to improve soon. Indeed, it could get worse, much worse.
The liberal conundrum begins with Joe Biden. The former vice-president led national polls until very recently, and has been the most plausible mainstream liberal candidate. At the same time, doubts about his ability to handle the rigors of the campaign at an advanced age have caused the Democratic Party to withhold the institutional support it gave Hillary Clinton. Yet his name was big enough to preclude a younger, more vigorous Democrat from emerging in the ideological space he occupied. Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris all tried and failed to run as ideological heirs of Barack Obama, because Obama’s actual partner was still there.
Actually all failed because all sucked to various degrees.
Yet Biden underperformed in Iowa, and his campaign appears to be deflating, at least momentarily. So what to do?
One strategy would be to rally around him, on the grounds that no other candidate has or will have his name recognition and ties to black voters. The other strategy is to hope his campaign collapses as quickly as possible, so that another contender can emerge. (More about them below.) At the moment it is not clear which strategy makes sense. And in the absence of an effective party to coordinate, the most likely scenario is a combination of the two: Some Democrats back Biden, others defect, and others wait to see what happens. That would be the worst possible outcome: a long, slow, painful death that prevents another liberal from taking his place and allows Sanders to gain unstoppable momentum.
In the meantime, it seems hard to imagine how Biden or a Biden alternative could emerge in the next three contests. The next contest is in New Hampshire, which borders the home states of both Sanders and his closest ideological counterpart, Elizabeth Warren. After that comes Nevada — which, like Iowa, uses the caucus system, which has a fraction of the voting participation of primaries and reward the kind of intense organization Sanders has mastered.
Then comes South Carolina. Biden has been pointing to this state, where he has always led, as his firewall. But will it hold if he is coming off three straight defeats? It is possible that by this point, Biden will have been supplanted in the center-left lane by Pete Buttigieg or even Amy Klobuchar. However, neither has the inroads to the state’s black community that Biden built, which means neither would be able to count on its support as a bulwark against the left-leaning electorates in the previous states. Also, as an additional morbid touch, the South Carolina primary will feature an organized influx of Republicans voting for Sanders in a specific plan to boost what they see as Democrats’ weakest nominee.
I suspect any “Operation Chaos” effects will be widely overstated.
So it is entirely possible that, following South Carolina, Sanders will have won three or all four of the contests. If nobody has emerged as a viable alternative by then, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign will be stepping in. It is extremely hard to estimate the probability of success of a candidate who has skipped the first four races. FiveThirtyEight’s model currently gives Bloomberg less than a one percent chance of winning.
To be sure, if Bloomberg is the last Democrat standing against Sanders, he may well attract substantial support from Democratic elected officials and put up a strong fight. Still, he would face enormous opposition from the left. This is, after all, a billionaire who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004. And while the left has previously whipped itself into an angry frenzy against, successively, O’Rourke, Biden, Harris, and Buttigieg, the rage against Bloomberg would reach a new level.
At that point, the victory scenario would involve a long, bloody struggle all the way to the convention, with the Sanders movement claiming at every step of the way that the party is rigging the race against them, culminating in a convention where his enraged supporters will again try to shout down the proceedings. Unless one of the non-Bloombergs can somehow get off the mat and defeat Sanders, this is probably the best-case scenario for liberals at this point. It seems more probable that Sanders crushes the field and brings his historically unique suite of liabilities to the ticket.
It’s interesting how little Chait mentions Buttigieg, almost as if he’s nothing more than a placeholder. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Van Jones says that President Trump is serious about trying to win over black voters. “That was a warning to us. A warning shot across the bow to Democrats that he’s going after enough black votes to cause us problems. It’s not just the white suburban voters, he’s going after black votes.”
Who got the biggest bang for their buck in Iowa spending? It’s no surprise that Steyer and Bennet wasted their money. More interesting is the fact that Biden actually got one of the best returns on his $4 million in TV ad spending. Which is another way of saying if his campaign wasn’t so bad at fundraising, he might not have been so embarrassed in Iowa…
Where candidates stand on legalizing weed. Biden and Nurse Bloomberg against, all the other Dems they bothered with for. Gabbard, Bennet and Patrick all ignored. Biggest caveat: This is from The Motley Fool, whose every ad I glimpse on those occasions I websurf without adblock seems to be pumping some marijuana-related stock.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of James Carville, he endorsed Bennet. So, you think Bennet’s going to bow out of the race Tuesday night, or will he wait until Wednesday morning?
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He released an attack ad against Buttigieg:
Former Mayor Pete doesn’t think very highly of the Obama-Biden record. Let’s compare. pic.twitter.com/132TB7MHaq
Pretty devastating to Buttigieg. But also pretty devastating to Biden, tying him as it does to two of the Obama Administration’s most outstanding failures: ObamaCare and the Iran Deal. Shockingly, the Biden campaign is gobsmacked by their own incompetence in Iowa:
Days before Iowa Democrats went to their precinct caucuses, the news dropped like a bomb.
Leaked poll numbers from what would have been the final Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed Joe Biden in fourth place with 13 percent.
Biden’s Iowa staffers were floored, according to a person familiar with discussions among several aides at the time.
“None of us thought we were at 13 percent,” the person said. “We can’t be in fourth place. That just cannot be right.”
But it was right. And it confirmed what rival campaigns had whispered for months — Biden wasn’t inspiring Iowa voters and his support was inch-deep.
While the full Iowa caucus results still aren’t in, Biden’s unexpectedly weak performance Monday — he’s in fourth place with 16 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting — has provoked frustration and recriminations within the campaign, according to interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides and surrogates.
Bet it did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Quid Pro Joe gets testy over Ukraine. Everyone thought the impeachment farce was meant to protect Biden, but what it may end up doing is dooming him. Oh, and he did this:
Bloomberg is a tricky candidate to forecast, given that his strategy of essentially skipping the first four states but then spending enormous amounts of money on the race is fairly unprecedented. Although Bloomberg is at only 11 percent in national polls right now — below the 15 percent threshold required to pick up delegates in states and congressional districts — he’s getting close enough to the threshold that the model actually has him picking up a decent number of delegates in its average simulation.
Forecast omitted, but they have him doing better in the delegate count than Klobuchar.
On the other hand, the model thinks it’s quite unlikely that Bloomberg can get a majority of delegates because he’s getting off to a late start. It’s not that skipping out on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina is itself all that costly; those states have relatively few delegates. Rather, it’s that Bloomberg is unlikely to have a huge surge before Super Tuesday.
Here’s why that matters. Bloomberg could certainly do reasonably well on Super Tuesday and get a surge in later states. But at that point, 38 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. Say Bloomberg wins 30 percent of the delegates on Super Tuesday; that would certainly get him some attention, probably make him a real contender, and perhaps knock other moderate candidates out of the race. Bloomberg, however, would need to get 64 percent of the delegates in all the states beyond Super Tuesday to earn a majority of pledged delegates, which is an awfully high bar to clear.
Bloomberg getting a plurality of pledged delegates, on the other hand, is more likely. (There’s a 1 in 40 chance of that, or about 3 percent, according to our model — as compared to a roughly 1 in 100 chance he gets a majority.) More likely still is that Bloomberg appears to be the strongest candidate at the end of the process, even though he doesn’t necessarily have a plurality. There’s a 5 percent chance that Bloomberg will be leading in national polls at the end of the race, our model estimates.2 Being able to point to indicators like that could be helpful to Bloomberg in the not-at-all-unlikely event of a contested convention.
He’s really against marijuana legalization. He met with some Democratic governors, who might be looking for a new horse now that Biden looks like he’s going to be euthanized on the track.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Veep spot? Two different headlines, about the same Ellen DeGeneres apperance on the same day: “Hillary Clinton says her joining Democratic ticket as VP nominee is ‘not going to happen.’ “Hillary Clinton on being vice president: ‘Never say never.'” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Klobuchar joins the swelling ranks of Democrats with a shot.” Ah, no. She got one delegate in Iowa. One. Uno. Exceeding expectations doesn’t mean she gets anywhere close to sniffing the nomination (though it probably does help raise her status as a possible veep pick). She tried to pop the Buttigieg bubble at the debate. I see little evidence she succeeded.
Bernie Sanders has by far the best chance of any candidate to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, according to the Nate Silver model. Moreover, the odds that Sanders wins that prize outright are twice as good as the odds for a brokered convention in Milwaukee, in Silver’s view. Sanders has a better chance than anyone else to win the Nevada caucuses, according to Silver’s site, FiveThirtyEight, and a better chance than Joe Biden to win the South Carolina primary.
At the moment, Silver gives Sanders a 44 percent chance of winning Delaware, against 40 percent for Biden.
Could Silver be wrong? Of course. Could Sanders slip? Certainly. Could Biden regain his momentum? It could happen. Could voters take a second look at Mike Bloomberg (whom Silver gives less than a 1 percent shot at winning the nomination)? Sure. But at the moment there is little doubt that Bernie Sanders is your Democratic Party frontrunner.
Sanders backers contend he is the only candidate capable of bringing out young people and others who normally wouldn’t vote. While there is evidence that Sanders did pull in more young voters in Iowa, overall turnout was significantly below record numbers posted in 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama rode a wave of enthusiasm to the White House. That casts doubt on Sanders’ argument that his brand of left-wing populism can inspire enough new voters to defeat Trump, said Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and the ex-mayor of Chicago.
“There wasn’t this magic army” that materialized in Iowa, Emanuel said. “The cavalry wasn’t coming.”
Snip.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell called the bungled count a “fiasco.”
“We don’t look very good when one of our biggest arguments against Donald Trump is that he’s incompetent, and every day something happens where we screw something up,” Rendell, a Biden supporter and former DNC chair, told Reuters.
Tom Steyer has blanketed South Carolina in cash. Over the past seven months, he’s spent $14 million in TV and radio ads, spent over $100,000 on ads in black-owned newspapers, hired 93 staffers, an army of volunteers and assembled the largest state-wide operation of any other campaign.
The billionaire activist has poured more money into South Carolina in a short period of time than anyone in the state can remember — and it’s beginning to reshape the contours of the Feb. 29 primary.
“The unemployment rate in South Carolina has probably dropped an entire percentage point thanks to the Tom Steyer campaign,” said Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist based in South Carolina. “Every YouTube video that comes on in South Carolina has a Tom Steyer ad in front of it. And he says things that every Democrat agrees with.”
While there hasn’t been much public polling in the state, Steyer’s been in double-digits in all three surveys released this month. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Steyer is second only to Joe Biden in the state, with Bernie Sanders a close third.
In a state where African Americans are expected to cast more than half of the primary vote, the Biden campaign has long held up South Carolina as his firewall due to the large amount of black voter support he has there. Rival campaigns have struggled to close the gap. But as Steyer continues to not only spend big on TV ads but also on local minority media, he’s been able to steadily gain ground among some African American voters.
He calls for $22 an hour minimum wage; enjoy your new $10 Big Macs, America. Steyer went after a Biden surrogate (SC State Sen. Dick Harpootlian) over allegedly saying something racist, but actually Harpootlian pointed out that Steyer “hiring” a black SC state rep for $50,000 a month looks shady as hell:
Mr. Money Bags a.k.a @TomSteyer has paid S.C. State Rep. Jerry Govan almost $50,000 for a month worth of work? Is he pocketing the dough or redistributing the wealth? cc: Steyer FEC report
As the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Obama administration’s consumer watchdog, Warren rewarded Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), which pressured the Obama administration to appoint her to the post in the first place. She gave the group unparalleled access to the CFPB while she led the agency, meeting with AFR associates on twice as many occasions as she did with any other Washington, D.C., interest group. As a member of the Senate, she has supported bills backed by the group. On the campaign trail, she has issued proposals that would benefit leaders of the group.
AFR, which represents more than 200 deep-pocketed liberal organizations including the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, is not required to disclose its donors. In 2010, it drummed up both grassroots and institutional support for Warren’s appointment to the CFPB. AFR representatives went on a media blitz to support Warren and directed rank-and-file members to sign pro-Warren petitions that were submitted to the Obama administration. One letter to the White House sent by AFR’s sister organization was signed by nearly two dozen of D.C.’s most powerful liberal interest groups.
“In his life before politics, they said they saw in Mr. Yang a man who was smart, had good ideas, was a persuasive speaker and was occasionally inspiring. But he sometimes stumbled in his dealings with gender and race, expressing what the former employees said were antiquated and unnerving views for a presidential candidate seeking the nomination from a Democratic Party that has been moving to the left,” the Times reported.
Former employees alleged that there was a “collective shrug” about previous reports on how Yang “treated women who worked for him” and that his “cavalier use of racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans” and a “lack of attention of his record as a chief executive” have “gnawed” at staffers who claim they “watched their boss similary fumble delicate topics and conversations for years.”
Sounds like he didn’t bow and scrape to Social justice Warrior pieties enough. He’s sounding better and better all the time…
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
