James Carville « Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Posts Tagged ‘James Carville’

It seems that once a year or so, James Carville wanders out of his den to warn Democrats that they’re blowing it by promulgating far-left policies the overwhelming majority of Americans reject, then sees his shadow and returns to his Trump Derangement Syndrome cave until next year.

This year’s outburst came in the form of an interview with (ugh) Vox. Nonetheless it’s worth reading:

James Carville: To me [Biden]’s biggest attribute is that he’s not into “faculty lounge” politics.

Sean Illing: “Faculty lounge” politics?

Translation: Illing is either not very bright or must feign ignorance for fear of being dragged by the social justice warrior types he has to pretend not to understand.

James Carville: You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.

Sean Illing: Is the problem the language or the fact that there are lots of voters who just don’t want to hear about race and racial injustice?

Translation: “I must stay on the reservation. I must stay on the reservation. I must stay—”

James Carville: We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice.

Translation: We’re screwed unless we can keep blacks pulling the (D) lever in overwhelming numbers, and constant talk of racism (and welfare state giveaways) are the only tools we have to do that.

What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them. This “too cool for school” shit doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.

There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it ain’t the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing. That’s what this whole damn thing is about.

Sean Illing; Sounds like you got a problem with “wokeness,” James.

If this were a cartoon, at this point a very dim candle would appear above Illing’s head

James Carville: Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.

Absolutely true. Now let’s skip forward a bit.

Sean Illing: Part of the issue is that Republicans are going to paint the Dems as cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists no matter what they say or do.

That might be because a significant fraction of Democrats are indeed cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists, and they’re the ones driving the conversation. What was the last pro-life Democrat at the national level? Tulsi Gabbard? And it sure as hell isn’t Republicans marching with “All Cops Are Bastards” signs.

So, yeah, I agree that Democrats should be smart and not say dumb, alienating things, but I’m also not sure how much control they have over how they’re perceived by half the country, especially when that half lives in an alternate media reality.

For “alternate” read “those that refuse to march in lockstep with the Democratic narrative.” It isn’t Fox News reporters standing in front of burning buildings and declaring that the riot is “mostly peaceful.”

James Carville: Right, but we can’t say, “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let’s just run as out-and-out socialists.” That’s not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost fucking no one wants to do that.

Yet it is Democrat-dominated city councils in places like Minneapolis, Portland and Austin that have actually voted to defund the police. So clearly someone does indeed want to do that, and they sure as hell aren’t Republicans.

James Carville: Look at Florida. You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent. Has anyone in the Democratic Party said maybe there’s nothing wrong with the state of Florida? Maybe the problem is the kind of campaigns we’re running?

If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. It’s certainly not a political environment I’m destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the US Senate. And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bullshit is a big part of it.

Sean Illing: If you’re a Democrat, you could look at the state of play and say, “We’re winning. We won the White House. We won Congress. We have power. It ain’t perfect, but it ain’t a disaster either.”

James Carville: We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.

Some self-deluded “Oh we Democrats are the good people and Republicans are the bad people” babble snipped.

James Carville: Let me give you my favorite example of metropolitan, overeducated arrogance. Take the climate problem. Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Where’s the identifiable song? Where’s the bumper sticker? Where’s the slogan?

Are you high Mr. Carville? Environmentalism free of emotion? Does the name “Greta Thunberg” ring any bells? Have you never seen a Prius with a “Save The Whales” or “Save the Rainforest” bumper sticker?

There are some good nuggets of truth buried in the Crazy Cajun’s commentary, but a lot of it is the same self-serving “oh we Democrats are just too pure for this world” bullshit that’s a naked lie right out of the gate. (Kavanaugh hearing, anyone?) Democrats overwhelming control of the majority of media outlets lets them continuously get high on their own supply, so much so that a simple revelation already realized by everyone outside that bubble (wokeness is a problem for Democrats) has to be treated as though it were some sort of controversial declaration for fear anyone not reacting that way will be dragged.

Tags:Democrats, Florida, James Carville, Sean Illing, Social Justice Warriors, Vox.com
Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 2 Comments »

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 16, 2020

Monday, March 16th, 2020

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.

Delegates

Right now the delegate count stands at:

Joe Biden 885
Bernie Sanders 732
~~Elizabeth Warren 72~~
~~Michael Bloomberg 61~~
~~Pete Buttigieg 26~~
~~Amy Klobuchar 7~~
Tulsi Gabbard 2

Polls

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.

Real Clear Politics polls.

538 poll average.

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)

Pundits, etc.

Biden won Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho and Washington (where results were close), while Sanders won South Dakota.

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.

Liveblog of the Biden-Sanders debate.

Another one from 538.

Older Democrats and blacks may have pushed Biden over the top, but young and Hispanic Democrats are going socialist:

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!

Heh:

just like the Democratic frontrunners

— Razor (@hale_razor) March 14, 2020

Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. We need to talk about Joe Biden:

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.

I assume you saw my piece on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Speaking of which, welcome to the 21st century, Joe:

man deadass wandered off screen and they cut the camera

just a stutter https://t.co/VwFvGLX7RY

— june (@shoe0nhead) March 14, 2020

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

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 16, 2020

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.

Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. By and large, women don’t like Bernie. “Bernie Bros warn of ‘massive exodus’ if Democrats nominate Joe Biden.” Well, they would. But some said the same in 2016, and a “massive exodus” was not apparent. “Just Like Socialism, Bernie’s Campaign Collapsed Under Its Own Contradictions:

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.

Bernie’s ceiling shows that the limits of socialism in America, even among Democrats:

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.

His response is "I'm not an expert on the current economy in Sweden." pic.twitter.com/Txb3DemHtI

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 9, 2020

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 signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.

Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams

Actor Alec Baldwin

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 California Governor Jerry Brown

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown

Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)

Former one-term President Jimmy Carter

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.

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…

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)

Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)

Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum

Former Vice President Al Gore

Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)

California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)

Former Attorney General Eric Holder

Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)

Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine

Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

Oregon senator Jeff Merkley

Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)

Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)

Former First Lady Michelle Obama

Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)

Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)

Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)

Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)

Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)

California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)

Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey

Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)

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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Andrew Yang, Austin, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, California, coronavirus, debate, Democrats, Ezekiel Emanuel, Harris County, Hawaii, Hillary Clinton, James Carville, James Clyburn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, National Education Association, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, socialism, Stephen King, Texas, Travis County, Tulsi Gabbard
Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for February 10, 2020

Monday, February 10th, 2020

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.

CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 28. Buttigieg 21, Biden 12, Warren 9, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 4, Steyer 2, Bloomberg 1.

Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire): Sanders 23, Buttigieg 20, Warren 16, Biden 14, Klobuchar 6, Yang, Steyer 2, Gabbard 0.

Suffolk (New Hampshire): Sanders 23.8, Buttigieg 21.80, Warren 13.4, Biden 10.4, Klobuchar 8.6, Yang 2.6, Gabbard 2, Steyer 1.8, Patrick .4, Bennet .2.

Emerson College (New Hampshire): Sanders 30, Buttigieg 20, Klobucher 13, Warren 12, Warren 12, Biden 11, Yang 4, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2, Patrick 1.

CBS: Sanders 29, Buttigieg 25, Warren 17, Biden 12, Klobuchar 10, Gabbard 2, Yang 1, Steyer 1, Patrick 1.

Real Clear Politics polls.

538 poll average.

Election betting markets. Sanders 38.9%, Bloomberg 20.2%, and Buttigieg at 13.9%? Betting markets don’t seem overly impressed with Mayo Pete…

Pundits, etc.

Iowa screwing the pooch cocks up everything about the nomination process:

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.)

Low turnout for the Democratic Iowa Caucuses.

Seems like everyone took a shot at Mayo Pete in the New Hampshire debate.

Stephen Green drunkblogged the debate.

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…

A tweet expounded on at length yesterday:

Democrat strategist James Carville panics about 2020: “we’re like talking about people voting from jail cells” and “not having a border”https://t.co/GE1F5Fm6RT pic.twitter.com/euORydHZ6l

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 4, 2020

Foreign policy? Not impressed:

Only in the Democrat Party is killing a brutal terrorist somehow a debate.

Last night Dems agreed on one thing: They would NOT have killed Soleimani.

These people aren't serious about protecting America. Good thing @realDonaldTrump is. pic.twitter.com/NtTQsDZz0g

— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) February 8, 2020

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

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) February 8, 2020

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:

NEW: Joe Biden calls a New Hampshire voter a "lying dog-faced pony soldier" pic.twitter.com/AbAYLDjUie

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) February 9, 2020

Thing is, if you listen to all of that clip, the subtext you hear is “our organization sucked in Iowa.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 starts to pay more attention:

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.

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Suddenly Buttigieg is right behind Bernie in New Hampshire. He’s the master of meaningless pablum. 1,800 people show up to Buttigieg rally in New Hampshire, which are pretty good numbers…for a non-Trump rally…in a small state. A piece on Buttigieg billionaire backer Seth Klarman and his backing of Shadow. The writer is really upset about Klarman being pro-Israel, so caveat lictor. “The Nevada State Democratic Party hired a former Pete Buttigieg campaign staffer as its new Voter Protection Director.” How convenient. Speaking of marijuana, ABC asks Mayor Pete why South Bend police arrest so many black people for smoking the devil’s cabbage.

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)_/¯

Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Newsweek covers where Gabbard stands after Iowa. Gabbard sends best wishes to cancer-stricken Rush Limbaugh. Oooo, basic human dignity has no place in the modern Democratic Party…

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.

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Thinks he has a chance in New Hampshire. Also thinks he has a chance in South Carolina. Why Cory Booker Minus is still wasting our time at this point is anyone’s guess.

Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Once again, everything is coming up Bernie:

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.

California? Sanders. Texas? Sanders. North Carolina? Sanders. Virginia? Sanders. Massachusetts? Sanders. Minnesota? Sanders. Colorado, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho, North Dakota, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Alaska, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island? Ibid.

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.

And the Democratic establishment is in total freakout mode over it:

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.

Two person race?

Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s surging in South Carolina:

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

— Dick Harpootlian (@Harpootlian4SC) February 5, 2020

Evidently “social justice” means it’s forbidden for a white politician to point out a black politician’s graft.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Dark Money Group Behind Elizabeth Warren’s Rise:

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.

Elizabeth Warren, racist. Fake Indian, real Indian casino. Remember, making sacrifices for “climate change” is always for the little people:

Where's Liz, Fat? https://t.co/HRpe5XFl6I

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) February 4, 2020

Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yang is doing well enough that the New York Times published a hit piece on him.

“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:

Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti

Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams

Actor Alec Baldwin

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)

Former California Governor Jerry Brown

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown

Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)

Former one-term President Jimmy Carter

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.

Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)

Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)

Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum

Former Vice President Al Gore

Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)

California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)

Former Attorney General Eric Holder

Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)

Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine

Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

Oregon senator Jeff Merkley

Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)

Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)

Former First Lady Michelle Obama

Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)

Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)

Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)

Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)

California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)

Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey

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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Deval Patrick, Dick Harpootlian, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Iowa, James Carville, Jerry Govan, Joe Biden, Jonathan Chait, marijuana, Matt Taibbi, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pete Buttigieg, Seth Klarman, Social Justice Warriors, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Ukraine, Van Jones
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | 2 Comments »

James Carville Is Right, But Not In The Way He Thinks

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Key Bill Clinton political advisor James Carville is not high on the current Democratic Party presidential field…or their policies:

“I’m 75 years old. Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death — that’s why!” Carville said on MSNBC.

“We’ve got to decide what we want to be. Are we going to be an ideological cult? Or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?” he went on to say.

Over the course of his lengthy interview, Carville declared that the Democratic Party needs to “wake up;” compared Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Jeremy Corbyn, a radical liberal who recently resigned as the head of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party; admitted Democratic voters are less than enthusiastic about their 2020 options; said DNC Chairman Tom Perez should be canned; and declared the Democratic Party was hurt by the media who have become “AOC crazy.”

Carville said he would vote for Sanders if he wins the Democratic nomination, but only begrudgingly because he wouldn’t have “another choice.”

“But look at the British Labour Party. We’re like talking about people voting from jail cells. We’re talking about not having a border. I mean, come on people,” Carville said.

In the end, Carville said that Democrats should focus on running smart campaigns that focus on retaking control of the Senate.

“You and I know that 18% of the country elects 52 senators,” he said, addressing former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. “The urban core is not gonna get it done. What we need is power! Do you understand? That’s what this is about!”

All this is true, especially the part about needing power, but not in the way Carville means it.

Broadly speaking, there are two wings to the modern Democratic Party: The corrupt wing, represented by the Clintons, and the insane wing, currently represented by Bernie Sanders. (The insane wing is, itself, probably split into two factions, the socialists and the social justice warriors, but the significance of that particular split is less important to the topic at hand.) The split in the factions dates back at least to the anti-Vietnam War New Left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy facing off as their champion against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, where the foundational myth of a racist, oppressive America was baked into the faction’s core beliefs. The New Left has been carrying out it’s long march through both the Party and various Democratic institutions ever since. George McGovern was its champion against Humphrey and Edmund Muskie in 1972, and the last insane wing factional candidate to win the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Obama was a fusionist candidate, with a background in both Alinsky radical politics and Chicago Daley machine corrupt wing politics. That, and a huge store of white liberal guilt, let him appeal to both wings, and Obama filled his cabinet with corrupt wing figures (Biden, Clinton, Kerry, etc.).

Sanders, a hardcore socialist who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, is the clear favorite of the insane wing, though almost half of the candidates who jumped into the race (Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Tom Steyer, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, etc.) were vying for the insane wing’s “lane.” Sanders supporters were left very bitter by the DNC putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they’re determined not to let it happen again.

If you read their writings, the insane wing is absolutely convinced that America is naturally a left-wing nation and that their triumph is “inevitable” thanks to changing demographics. George Soros and his ilk have been pumping money into the insane wing infrastructure for over twenty years, and they believe that only the inertia and opposition of the corrupt wing (which they refer to as “neoliberalism”) has halted their inevitable rise.

Before they can seize control of the means of production, they must first seize control of the Democratic Party. Only then can they assure that their personnel, and their ideas, take key positions in the Party. The corrupt wing, more in tune with electoral reality, more concerned with the immediate graft, and currently controlling most of the Party apparatus, stands in their way.

Just as the Bolsheviks purged the Mensheviks almost immediately upon taking power, the insane wing must push the corrupt wing out to seize control of the Party, something they were too poorly organized to carry out in 1972. (At the state level, liberal Democrats purged moderates and conservatives from the Party in Texas, encouraging them to vote in the Republican primary, because they calculated (correctly) that they could never seize control of the state Party as long as they were there. They calculated incorrectly that the Party rank and file would continue to vote for Democrats after their takeover; the result was over two decades of Republican control.)

The corrupt wing knows it’s toast if the insane wing takes over, which is why Tom Perez immediately purged all Sanders supporters after taking over as head of the DNC. That’s why the corrupt wing has Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg as its champions. Both sides in the fight see the other as an existential threat to their control of the Party, and both sides have control of the Party as their most important and immediate goal. To quote Blazing Saddles, “Gentlemen, we have to protect our phony baloney jobs!”

To be sure, both sides hate Trump with the sort of white hot fury only reached by people whose Facebook friends seem to do nothing but share anti-Trump memes all day. But Trump isn’t the enemy at hand, or even really the enemy. (Old Cold War joke: An army general asks a colonel to name the enemy. “The Soviet Union,” says the colonel. “No!” says the general. “The Soviets are the opponent. The navy is the enemy!”) When push comes to shove, both sides see four more years of a Trump presidency as more survivable than letting the other faction control the Party.

Being creatures of the corrupt wing, the mainstream media hasn’t been covering this split, since Trump Derangement Syndrome sells better than interfactional fights. The irony is that this has let the Sanders brigades get to the foot of Mount Doom while nobody was paying attention. An additional irony is that the entire impeachment farce, designed to protect corrupt wing champion Biden, has backfired spectacularly, making Sander’s nomination much more likely.

If the DNC didn’t try to screw Sanders in the Iowa caucuses, they certainly gave every impression they were. It’s entirely possible that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that the DNC will try to screw Bernie even more this year than they did in 2016. Expect dirty tricks to make 1968 and 1972 look like a cakewalk in comparison.

The insane wing is probably correct in that they make up a majority of voting Party activists. The corrupt wing is probably also correct in that Sanders is much too far left for the American electorate.

All that points to President Donald Trump winning in a 1972-style electoral blowout in November.

Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Communism, Democratic Party, Democrats, DNC, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Hillary Clinton, Hubert Humphrey, James Carville, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Social Justice Warriors, Tom Perez
Posted in Communism, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | 9 Comments »

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for December 16, 2019

Monday, December 16th, 2019

This week’s debate is set, Biden’s back on top in Iowa, the Klobuchar boomlet continues, Delaney waits for the sweet release of death, and Castro is in sixth place…in Texas. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Polls

Fox News: Biden 30, Sanders 20, Warren 7. Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 5, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 3, Yang 3, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1. With Bloomberg already in fifth place with infinite money to spend, the other candidates may already be hearing the Jaws theme…

Post & Courier (South Carolina): Biden 27, Sanders 20, Warren 19, Buttigieg 9, Steyer 5, Booker 5, Gabbard 4, Bloomberg 3. Sample size of 392.

CNN (Texas): Biden 35, Sanders 15, Warren 13, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 5, Castro 3.

CNN (California): Biden 21, Sanders 20, Warren 17, Buttigieg 9, Yang 6, Bloomberg 5, Booker 3, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Castro 1, Steyer 1.

Marquette (Wisconsin): Biden 23, Sanders 19, Warren 16, Buttigieg 15, Booker 4, Yang 3, Klobuchar 3, Bloomberg 3, Gabbard 1. What I don’t understand is that they have Yang and Booker each receiving 12 votes, but they give Booker 4%, and Yang 3%. 🤔

Emerson (Iowa): Biden 23, Sanders 22, Buttigieg 18, Warren 12, Klobuchar 10, Booker 4, Steyer 3, Bloomberg 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 2. Biden back on top! But sample size of only 325…

WBUR (New Hampshire): Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Sanders 15, Warren 12, Gabbard 5, Yang 5, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Bloomberg 2, Booker 1, Williamson 1, Bennet <1, Patrick <1.

Economist/YouGov (page 167): Biden 26, Warren 21, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 11, Bloomberg 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 3, Booker 3, Klobuchar 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Steyer 1.

Quinnipiac: Biden 29, Sanders 17, Warren 15, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 5, Yang 4, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Williamson 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1.

Monmouth: Biden 26, Sanders 21, Warren 17, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 5, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Booker 2, Castro 1, Patrick 1, Steyer 1. Gabbard <1, Williamson <1.

Politico/Morning Consult: Biden 30, Sanders 22, Warren 16, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 6, Yang 4, Booker 3, Steyer 3, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Williamson 1.

Real Clear Politics

538 has a new poll average that they totally want you to know is super duper bestest, for Reasons.

Election betting markets.

Pundits, etc.

In Thursday’s debate: Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren, Klobuchar, Steyer, Yang.

But all seven Democrats who have qualified for the debate are threatening to boycott it over a union dispute.

And they want to change debate standards to let more candidates qualify. Because that’s been the big problem with the debates so far: Just not enough candidates on the stage!

One barrier to making the stage: fewer qualifying polls. “Most debates have seen anywhere from five to nine polls released in the last two weeks, but for the upcoming debate, it seems as if there will be less than five.” Blame Thanksgiving.

The left’s nightmare scenario:

“We wanted to propel others to jump in,” she said. “We cannot sit on the sidelines as we watch this primary play out and allow a neoliberal be elected. If we stay divided, the corporate Democrats will pick the nominee.”

That was the left’s nightmare scenario, and it was getting more believable at the worst possible time. The year began with a weak-looking Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) posing no threat to Sanders; by summer, Warren had jumped past Sanders and the rest of the field. Now, with Warren’s momentum fading, the two Democrats most broadly acceptable to the left have been splitting endorsements and capturing separate swaths of the electorate.

Centrists who had worried about Warren romping in Iowa and New Hampshire are less nervous now, with South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg surging in those states and former vice president Joe Biden holding his lead in upcoming Southern primaries.

“The far-left bloc is smaller than the candidates expected,” said Jim Kessler, the co-founder of the business-friendly centrist group Third Way, which Sanders feuded with this summer. “They haven’t expanded their base. It feels a lot like 2018: The left was ascendant, and then suddenly, when voters came in, they voted for mainstream candidates.”

The primary debate has moved further left than Third Way wanted. No leading candidate has embraced the ideas, like a “small-business bill of rights,” offered at the centrists’ conferences. Buttigieg, who has been attracting most of the left’s fury recently, has embraced some of its less economically disruptive ideas, such as banning private prisons and legalizing marijuana while helping victims of the war on drugs. And both Biden and Buttigieg get big applause when they single out Amazon, a target of both Warren and Sanders, to argue for higher, fairer corporate taxes. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

But the left began this year with its eye on the nomination; the movement’s gatekeepers, strengthened during the Trump years, wanted to pick the nominee. That has been getting harder. Groups that grew out of electoral politics, and close combat with the Democratic Party’s establishment, have generally sided with Warren, who combined populist politics and good relationships with Democrats. The Working Families Party endorsed her. MoveOn members have preferred her to Sanders in their straw poll, as have readers of the Daily Kos. While the Progressive Change Campaign Committee has endorsed Warren, the similarly aligned Democracy for America has stayed neutral, explaining that its membership is enthusiastic about both candidates.

“A supermajority of our members support both Bernie and Warren,” DFA’s Charles Chamberlain said. “They’re competing against a corporate wing that has all the money and power and can’t get more than 25 percent of voters behind one candidate. Let’s be clear: They have more candidates than us splitting the vote. If I were Third Way, I’d be more concerned with their side than ours.”

(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

After Harris drops out, Democrats panic over diversity:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An Asian guy, two black guys, three white women (one of whom spent much of her life claiming to be Native American), a Pacific Islander woman, a gay guy, a Hispanic guy, two elderly Caucasian Jews (one a billionaire, the other a socialist), a self-styled Irishman, and a few nondescript white guys walk into a bar, and the bartender yells, “Get the hell out! We value diversity here!”

I didn’t say it was a good joke, but it’s kind of funny all the same, because some folks in the press and the Democratic party are freaking out over the shrinking diversity of the Democratic field.

The diversity panic was set off by the withdrawal of California senator Kamala Harris on December 3. In the words of Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, “The famously inclusive party wasn’t looking very inclusive anymore.”

The real issue is that not many people of color [Here’s an example of linguistic drift from Trump-skeptic Jonah Goldberg; “of color” is a SJW neologism designed to assign everyone who’s not white into a single category for the benefit of the Democratic Party, and is thus best avoided. -LP] qualified for the December 19 debate in Los Angeles. As New Jersey senator Cory Booker, an African American, complained, “There are more billionaires than black people who’ve made the December debate stage — that’s a problem.”

It’s debatable whether it’s a problem for anyone other than Booker himself, which is why he’s been raising this alarm vociferously. So has former HUD secretary Julian Castro, who is of Mexican descent.

“What we’re staring at is a DNC debate stage with no people of color on it,” Castro complained. “That does not reflect the diversity of our party or our country. We need to do better than that.”

Since Castro made his remarks, Andrew Yang, a Chinese-American entrepreneur whose parents immigrated from Taiwan, has qualified for the debate.

Perhaps a broader perspective would help. All of the first 43 presidents were white men. About half were Episcopalian or Presbyterian, most of the rest belonged to other prominent denominations, and three were Christians of no formal affiliation. Then, in 2008, Barack Obama (of the United Church of Christ, for what it’s worth) became the first African-American president, winning two terms. In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the Democrats’ first female nominee. She won the popular vote but lost the election to Donald Trump.

Given these facts, it’s hard for me to see a diversity crisis. The top four candidates right now are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren. Biden would be only the second Catholic president. Sanders would be the first Jewish president and the first socialist one. Buttigieg would be the first openly gay (and youngest) president. Warren would be the first female president (and if her DNA test had gone another way, the first Native American one).

What a devastating blow to diversity!

Chronicle of a death foretold:

One lesson from the UK: if the Democrats don't stop their hard-left slide, they'll suffer the same fate as Labour. If they don't move off their support for mass immigration, they're toast. Ditto the wokeness. Left Twitter is not reality.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 12, 2019

On the same theme, see this piece from two days ago.

Veepstakes. Don’t think much of the list, because I doubt any likely candidate wants such a bad campaigner as Kamala Harris on the ticket. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

For Democrats, there’s no One Punch Man.

Now on to the clown car itself:

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Billionaires backing Bennet, including a Walton heir. “U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet from Colorado was being talked up by former Clinton whisperer James Carville and influential journalist Al Hunt on their popular podcast, 2020 Politics War Room. Both are bullish on Bennet, even though the guy can’t seem to move north of the 1% neighborhood in the polling.” Plus some Joe Biden Authentic Frontier Gibberish.

Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Funny how none of Biden’s Democratic competitors are going after him on Hunter Biden and Ukraine. Almost like they don’t really want to win. CBS has Biden ahead in Super Tuesday projected delegates. “Joe Biden Wants To Allow States And Localities To Issue Immigration Visas.” What do you want to bet the Democratic locales would start issuing them like mad? One term Joe?

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. How Bloomberg created a network of friendly mayors through grants. Bloomy on Boris: “”Maybe this is the canary in the coal mine. I think that beating Donald Trump is going to be more difficult after the U.K. election. That to me is pretty clear. The public clearly wanted change in the U.K. and change that is much more rapid and greater magnitude than anyone predicted.” The change they wanted was for politicians to keep their freaking promises, which is, granted, a pretty radical change. #BloombergStyle:

Your wish is my command. pic.twitter.com/fmOpkMZFKE

— Andrew Wimsatt (@ajwimsatt) December 13, 2019

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s scaling back his campaign in New Hampshire to go all in on Iowa and South Carolina. A rational decision, but he’s probably toast in Iowa; going all in on South Carolina would probably be a slightly-higher-percentage desperation play. Here’s a piece that outlines his “hail Mary” chance to win…but also discusses his “strong ground game in New Hampshire.” Oops! Gets a Chicago Tribune profile.

Three key attributes:

1) Big donor ties: Booker’s early candidacies for mayor and U.S. Senate were heavily backed form big-dollar donors on Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Booker also famously reeled in a $100 million donation to Newark schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that was announced on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”. Booker also drew criticism in 2012 when he defended Bain Capital against attacks during President Barack Obama’s reelection bid against Mitt Romney.

2) Hired Garry McCarthy: Before Garry McCarthy became former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s controversial police superintendent in Chicago, Booker hired him to be Newark’s top cop. The two were stars in the documentary “Brick City,” whose production crew later would go on to produce the CNN series “Chicagoland” — a documentary largely in name only — that focused on Emanuel and McCarthy. In Newark, McCarthy favored the use of “stop and frisk,” which resulted in complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that found illegal stops, searches and use of force. Booker cooperated with the investigation and agreed to a federal consent decree. Former Vice President Joe Biden attacked Booker in an early presidential debate for hiring “Trump’s guy” to run his police department, a reference to Trump calling McCarthy a “great guy” at a political rally. Emanuel used the footage of Trump in attack ads against McCarthy in 2018 before abandoning a run for a third term.

3) Bachelor candidate: Booker has never been married and, if elected, would become just the third U.S. president elected unmarried. He has, however, confirmed he is dating actress Rosario Dawson.

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Is Alfred E. Newman too young to be President? Another reminder of how incestuous our ruling class is: “Ganesh Sitaraman is one of Elizabeth Warren’s closest advisors. He’s also one of Pete Buttigieg’s best friends.” Here’s a lengthy “Buttigieg doesn’t get black people” piece. Be sure to strap on your intersectionality wading boots first…

Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro just barely made it onto the Virginia primary ballot when they located his paperwork. He was very, very upset that President Donald Trump mocked St. Greta.

Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She tops an online Harris poll for which candidates Democrats want. Key word there is “online.” “I guess a bit of me hopes Hillary does run to muck up the Democratic primary even more and the fact that Trump would easily cruise to a second term.” She has a new look and it’s ghastly.

Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Interview with Fox Business. Delaney didn’t make the filing deadline for the Virginia Super Tuesday primary on March 3rd. I think he’s already mentally checked out of the race and is just waiting for Iowa to give his campaign the sweet release of death.

Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a Chicago Tribune profile. They finally found an unflattering photo of her to run (closeup from below). She’s pledged to skip the December debate even if she met the inclusion criteria (she didn’t), choosing to spend the time in New Hampshire and South Carolina. BoldMoveCotton etc. It would have made a bigger statement if she had actually qualified, or done it after she qualified for the last debate. Could she oppose impeachment? Do the Afghanistan Papers justify her antiwar stance?

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another piece on the Klobuchar boomlet:

In the past two weeks, she has doubled her number of [Iowa] field offices to 20, with the possibility of more expansion. She has about 60 staffers on the ground, up from 40 in late August but about half the number reported by Warren, Biden and Buttigieg. Still, she has made key hires, including Norm Sterzenbach, a former Iowa Democratic Party executive director and expert on caucus turnout who previously worked for former congressman Beto O’Rourke’s campaign.

Klobuchar’s rise comes as moderate Democrats have reasserted their power in a presidential race that for months was dominated by sweeping liberal ideas, including Sanders’s call for a political revolution and Warren’s pitch for big, structural change. Democratic Party leaders and voters here have openly worried that expensive policies such as Medicare-for-all could prove to be too polarizing and lead to Trump’s reelection next year.

Klobuchar has made the same unwavering argument for months on the campaign trail, describing Medicare-for-all as a “pipe dream” and criticizing proposals such as free college as something the nation can’t afford. She has criticized other Democrats in the 2020 race, arguing that their liberal policies will doom them in the general election. She presents herself, in contrast, as a political realist and, during her stump speech, often ticks through a litany of bills she has passed as a member of the Senate, many with the support of Republicans.

She’s peaking at the right time, but she’s also starting waaaaaay far back from the frontrunners. Is her boom significant? This piece brings up some painful historical analogies:

Klobuchar had previously received at least five percent support in each of the four public polls of Iowa Democrats released in November by Monmouth University, CBS News, Des Moines Register/CNN, and Iowa State University.

But will hitting this double-digit mark ultimately be a big deal, little deal, or no deal for Klobuchar with less than two months before the caucuses?

To be sure, in recent election cycles there have been many presidential candidates who at some point reached the 10 percent mark in an Iowa poll, but ultimately did not carry a single state in the subsequent primaries or caucuses:

2004 (Democrats): Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt
2008 (Republicans): Fred Thompson, Rand Paul, and Rudy Giuliani
2008 (Democrats): Tom Vilsack and Bill Richardson
2012 (Republicans): Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry
2016 (Republicans): Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Ben Carson

In the 2020 cycle, Democrats Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris can be added to that list and each has already suspended their campaign.

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inside his time at Bain Capital.

Oh wait, that’s Bane Capital. Never mind.

He’s not going to make the Michigan ballot. Honestly, at this point he’s fighting Delaney, Castro, Steyer and Williamson for last place.

Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Franklin Foer wants you to know that Bernie is totally, totally, totally different from Jeremy Corbyn, for Reasons. Sanders withdrew his endorsement of Cenk Uygur (who’s running a carpetbagger campaign for Katie Hill’s seat) for various Twitter crimes against social justice. Seeing cancel culture come after Uygur is certainly a savory “told ya” moment. Gets mocked by Rep. Dan Crenshaw over his student debt cancellation plan.

Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Lefties accuse Steyer of running a donor scam: “He has spent $47 million of his own money in what amounts to a scam. Since he needs donors only to meet the DNC’s bizarre debate criteria, he has essentially purchased his donor base, through tactics such as selling $1 swag with free shipping—usually items worth far more than $1—that has nothing to do with him or his presidential campaign.” This leaves out that the natural demand for Steyer swag is zero. Now, if Make-A-Wish Tommy started stapling a $20 bill to every shirt he sold…

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren and Sanders have a problem: each other:

In Iowa and nationwide, they are the leading second-choice pick of the other’s supporters, a vivid illustration of the promise and the peril that progressives face going into 2020: After decades of losing intraparty battles, this race may represent their best chance to seize control from establishment-aligned Democrats, yet that is unlikely to happen so long as Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders are blocking each other from consolidating the left.

For center-left Democrats, that’s exactly their hope — that the two progressives divide votes in so many contests that neither is able to capture the nomination. Moderates in the party fear that if Mr. Warren or Mr. Sanders pull away — or if they ultimately join forces — the ticket would unnerve independent voters and go down in defeat against President Trump.

Interviews with aides from both camps — who spoke on the condition they not be named because they warn their own surrogates not to criticize the other — produce a common refrain. The two candidates are loath to attack each other because they fear negativity would merely antagonize the other’s supporters. The only way to eventually poach the other’s voters, each campaign believes, is by winning considerably more votes in the first caucuses and primaries.

Liberal leaders, acknowledging the mixed blessing of having two well-funded, well-organized progressive Democrats dividing endorsements and poised to compete deep into the primary calendar, are now beginning discussions about how best to avert a collision that could tip the nomination to a more centrist candidate.

At informal Washington dinners, on the floor of the House and on activist-filled conference calls, left-leaning officials are deliberating about how to forge an eventual alliance between Mr. Sanders, of Vermont, and Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts. Some are urging them to form a unity ticket, others want each to stay in the race through the primary season to amass a combined “progressive majority” of delegates, and nearly every liberal leader is hoping the two septuagenarian senators and their supporters avoid criticizing each other and dividing the movement.

“Investors could pay twice as much in capital gains just to raise the funds for Ms. Warren’s levy.” I’m sure there’s no way that would damage the economy…

Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Facepalm.

Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s qualified for the December debate. Says he’s not getting media attention because he’s Asian. Meet the Yang Gang.

Yang launched his quixotic quest for the presidency more than two years ago. At the time, he was a fairly successful but little-known entrepreneur. The New York Times described his bid, which he bolstered with the marquee issue of a universal basic income, as having a “longer-than-long” shot. As recently as this spring, Yang couldn’t crack a single percentage point in most national polling.

He’s now polling around 3%, good enough for fifth or sixth place nationally, and at more than 3% in the Granite State as well as in Nevada and California. Now, this virtual unknown and political neophyte has already outlasted three senators, three governors, five representatives, and two mayors in the less-and-less-crowded Democratic presidential field. Couple that with surging fundraising — Yang’s campaign is on track to beat his $10 million third-quarter earnings for the end of this year — and he’s a genuinely impressive candidate.

Perhaps the most important asset to the campaign has been the Yang Gang.

Joe Rogan, the massively popular podcast host, introduced Yang to most of the pundit class and plenty of his most vocal eventual supporters. Yang’s February appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the same show that landed Yang-endorser Elon Musk in hot water with NASA for smoking marijuana on air, earned more than 4 million views on YouTube. His Twitter following went from 34,000 to more than a quarter million. It’s now well over a million.

Yang proudly deems himself a Democrat. He supports unfettered abortion access and financial giveaways. But his central message, that the government must temper the effects of the automation revolution with a universal basic income rather than socialist safety nets, has resonated with some on the Right.

Out of the Running

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

Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti

Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams

Actor Alec Baldwin.

Former California Governor Jerry Brown

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown

Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)

Former one-term President Jimmy Carter

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)

Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum

Former Vice President Al Gore

Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)

California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)

Former Attorney General Eric Holder

Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)

Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine

Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

Oregon senator Jeff Merkley

Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)

Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)

Former First Lady Michelle Obama

Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)

Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)

Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)

Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)

California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey

Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:

Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Al Hunt, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Cenk Uygur, Cory Booker, Dan Crenshaw, Democrats, Deval Patrick, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Franklin Foer, Ganesh Sitaraman, Greta Thunberg, Iowa, James Carville, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Biden, Jonah Goldberg, Julian Castro, Marianne Williamson, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, New Hampshire, Norm Sterzenbach, Pete Buttigieg, South Carolina, Texas, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Virginia
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | 1 Comment »

Clinton Corruption Update for November 1, 2016

Tuesday, November 1st, 2016

Obviously there’s too big a flood of Clinton corruption news to do this weekly, so this might be a daily feature (or pretty close to it) until the election, which is (finally!) just a week away.

The top 100 most damaging Wikileaks. If you want a single page to get people up to speed on all the Clinton corruption, this is a good one. (As is this one.)

Evidently there are 650,000 emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop to scour through.

And they now have a warrant to go through them. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

Peter Kadzik, a friend of Clinton’s Campaign chair John Podesta, will head Huma Abedin probe.

And guess what? His son actually asked to work on Hillary’s campaign!

Hey @FBI, isn't this the guy in charge of the Huma Abedin emails? Isn't this a DIRECT CONFLICT OF INTEREST?!?!?!!? WTF?#PodestaEmails25 pic.twitter.com/EBj7Ak9cK5

— prince hubris (@ShawnMichaelR) November 1, 2016

More on the Podesta-Kadzik relationship. (Hat tip: Hot Air, which asks: “At this point, is there anyone working at the Justice Department who hasn’t been tainted by the stench of Clinton corruption?”)

And remember: Abedin swore under oath she had given up all devices with State Department emails. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

Hmmmmmmm: “Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has not been on Clinton’s campaign plane for the last three days, CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin reported Monday.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

John Podesta tells Cheryl Mills “We Are Going To Have To Dump All Those Emails.”

Scott Adams: “Allow me to offer an interpretation of events that casts Comey as more of a patriot and hero than an ass-covering weasel….In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation.”

“The only reason that Comey figures in the election at all is that Democrats knowingly nominated someone under FBI investigation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

For those keeping track on the home game, there are now four FBI investigations involving the Clintons going on. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Oh wait! Make that five. (Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)

“Happy Halloweiner, the night when Anthony Weiner’s undead penis rises from its grave to bite Hillary’s campaign.”

The Podesta emails offer a revealing glimpse of America’s ruling elite.

More evidence of the Clinton campaign colluding with their “friends and allies” in the media.

Google head Eric Schmidt was already collaborating with Hillary Clinton’s team in 2014 to help her Presidential run.

“Hillary’s inner circle knew Weiner was messaging underage girl on Twitter in 2011, did nothing.” (Hat tip: Adam Baldwin on Twitter.)

James Carville melts down, “Asserts FBI, GOP, and KGB in Cahoots.” He may be the first Clinton toady to completely lose it this election cycle, but I doubt he’ll be the last. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

OK, I’ve got to go ahead and put this up before another giant wave of Clinton Corruption news breaks…

Tags:2016 Election, 2016 Presidential Race, Anthony Weiner, Democrats, EmailGate, Eric Schmidt, FBI, Google, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Huma Abedin, James Carville, James Comey, John Podesta, Media Watch, Peter Kadzik, Wikileaks
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Some Analysis of the Republican Victory in the New York Ninth Congressional District Special Election

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

I’m a sucker for wonkish political analysis of voting results, so here are some of the more notable results-scrying for Bob Turner’s win over David Weprin in New York’s Ninth Congressional District after Rep. Anthony “look at my bulge” Weiner resigned in disgrace. A race Weprin lost despite $485,000 of DCCC ad buys and having Bill Clinton and New York Governor Andrew Coumo campaign for him. I’m going to ignore the usual “weak candidate, ran a bad race” blather liberals always trot out when a Democrat loses, because it’s become a tautology that doesn’t explain anything. He lost? Bad candidate that ran a bad campaign. He won? A good candidate who ran a good campaign.

Speaking of incompetence, let’s also dismiss DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz laughable assertion that a district where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 3-1 “is difficult for Democrats.” Even more risible is Wasserman Schultz’s claim that Obama has an “incredibly strong record on Israel.” She truly is the gift that keeps giving to Republicans.

So why did Weprin lose? Some theories:

Much has been made of former Democratic Mayor Ed Koch’s support for Turner and Obama’s abysmal record on Israel turning off the districts heavy Jewish population.

Over at Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende suggests that the win might be seen in light of Obamas slipping popularity with white voters.

Over at National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez thinks Weprin’s support of gay marriage may have done him in. Her theory gets support from, of all places, The Village Voice.

Finally, there’s the theory that Obama is so unpopular that he’s dragging down all Democratic candidates with him, no matter where they run. And who’s floating this particular theory? That would be Weprin himself.

Democratic strategist James Carville says it’s time for Obama to panic, but his advice is on the lines of firing people, find some scapegoats, and return to Ye Olde Big Government Religion. (He also seems to regard a $1.25 trillion budget deficit as “austerity.”) Walter Russell Mead isn’t impressed with the advice: “This President doesn’t do ‘tough’ very well….he isn’t convincing as a Chuck Norris impersonator. Often when he tries to sound tough he comes out tinny. Also, teleprompters don’t work when the goal is to project spontaneous, righteous and passionate rage.”

If NY9 is indeed a bellwether for 2012 (a big if), Democrats are in for some pretty rough storms over the next 14 months…

Tags:Anthony Weiner, Bob Turner, David Weprin, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrats, Elections, Israel, James Carville, Jews, New York City, New York's Ninth Congressional District, Obama
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans | No Comments »

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Clinton Corruption Update for November 1, 2016

Some Analysis of the Republican Victory in the New York Ninth Congressional District Special Election

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