What use is April Fools Day when there are so many fools to choose from? That aside, Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam is In, while Biden continues his Hamlet routine. (Given what last week’s Mueller-Avenatti-Smollett smashup was like, I don’t really blame him anyone for not launching their campaign last week.) Eric Swalwell was do disappointed by the Mueller report that he’s going to run for President to ease the pain, sort of like sawing off your own leg to make you forget a toothache. There’s a little Buttigieg boomlet going on. And with the quarter just ended, fundraising totals are starting to trickle out.
Polls
A Quinnipiac national poll has it Biden 29, Sanders 19, O’Rourke 12, Harris 8, and Warren and Buttigieg in a distant fifth tied at 4% each. Most interesting tidbit? O’Roruke has double Harris’ support among black people, and ties it among women.
An Emerson Iowa poll had it Biden 25, Sanders 24, Buttigieg 11, Harris at 10, with Warren, Booker and O’Rourke trailing in single digits.
A Harvard poll of young voters showed they love them some geezers:
America’s youngest voters prefer the oldest 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls over those closer to them in age, and millennial women are showing little problem with former Vice President Joe Biden’s personally touchy style that has drawn the scorn of some #MeToo champions, according to a new survey.
The Harvard Youth Poll found that Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, and Biden, 76, top the choices of voters aged 18-29.
Sanders leads Biden 31 percent to 20 percent, said the survey from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy’s School.
Notably, one of the youngest Democratic candidates, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, registered just 10 percent. But that makes him the third top choice of the younger voters.
Everyone else was back in single digits.
“The one big takeaway from every 2020 Democratic primary poll: The 2020 Democratic primary won’t really start until Joe Biden runs — or doesn’t.”
Democratic Party presidential primary schedule.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Joe Biden is a creepy old goat. Everyone knows this. There is much photographic evidence of him crossing the line with women. He’s also a liar and a buffoon. But the Democratic party’s public-relations arm, aka the mainstream media, has never before had any incentive to hold Biden up to scrutiny. Why bother? When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious.
In 2012, Rosie Castro caused her son a bit of a headache when she told The New York Times Magazine that the Texans at the Alamo were “a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them…I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.” It’s not often you see a mayor’s mother trashing the city’s most famous historical site.
I’m so excited that @KamalaHarris has decided to run for president. I would not be where I am today without her guidance during my first run for political office, and she has continued to mentor me as I work to reform the criminal justice system in Cook County. —KF pic.twitter.com/O241FGKKMs
— Kim Foxx (@KimFoxxforSA) January 21, 2019
In the first speech of his presidential campaign, Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam on Saturday said he’s aiming to “give Americans a second chance at the American Dream.”
The 44-year-old son of Jamaican immigrants said his top priorities are greatly reducing gun violence and preventing mass shootings, eliminating college loan debt, reversing harmful climate change, and rebuilding ties with America’s allies across the planet.
“We will meet this challenge,” Messam told the crowd at the Lou Rawls Center for the Performing Arts at Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens. He used the “Black Panther” movie song “Pray for Me” as his theme music.
With all of five thousand twitter followers, Messam takes the longest of longshots crown from John Delaney. However, as a black mayor with a compelling personal story, the media will be unable to ignore him as they’ve largely ignored Delany, no matter how much Harris and Booker campaigns might wish they would. And the inevitable Obama comparisons won’t hurt, though I don’t see him having anything near that magnetism. Florida’s primary is March 17, fairly early but after Super Tuesday, and it’s possible that Messam’s favorite son bid could make some noise there, especially if Gillum doesn’t jump into the race.
Say hello to Marianne Williamson, a best-selling author who has often been called Oprah Winfrey’s “spiritual guru.” Although she isn’t even a single-digit blip in the national polls, Ms. Williamson’s campaign has already been featured on ABC’s Nightline, and her campaign appearances in Iowa and New Hampshire have received respectful coverage in such local media as the Des Moines Register and the Concord Monitor. Her only previous foray into electoral politics was a fourth-place finish in a 16-candidate California congressional race in 2014, but Ms. Williamson seems to have learned a lot in the past five years. Her campaign website is state-of-the-art, her calendar of public appearances is carefully targeted toward the early primary and caucus states, and she has already hired state campaign directors in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. “We’re getting traction,” Williamson campaign spokeswoman Patricia Ewing told me in a brief telephone interview Thursday. “We’re very happy with it.”
Ms. Ewing said the campaign is “confident” Ms. Williamson will surpass the crucial metric of 65,000 unique donors that the Democratic National Committee has established as the threshold to participate in the first televised debates. She already has more than 25,000 donors, Ms. Ewings said. “It’s not a stress point for us at all. We know we’re going to hit the numbers by the time the DNC wants us to.” Ms. Williamson has spent more than 30 years making public appearances to promote her popular books and, before launching her current campaign, went on a 75-city national tour with an average of 500 people attending each event, Ms. Ewing said. Do the math, and that adds up to nearly 40,000 dedicated supporters. Given how easily an “outsider” candidate like Trump vanquished a field of Republican politicians in the 2016 primaries, it’s not impossible that Ms. Williamson could pull off a similar feat among Democrats in 2020. “We believe that a presidential candidate can come from someone who is not a career politician,” Ms. Ewing said. “Someone who has an understanding of the breadth and width of the country.”
For all the talk about the Religious Right’s role in Republican politics, little attention is paid to the influence among Democrats of the Religious Left, of which Ms. Williamson is a recognized leader. And if the odds against her winning her party’s 2020 presidential nomination are a million-to-one, there are nonetheless serious Democrats who believe she can achieve such a miracle. One of them is Dr. Gloria Bromell Tinubu, state director of the Williamson campaign. An experienced politician who served in the Georgia legislature before returning to her native South Carolina, Dr. Tinubu was twice the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 7th District, getting more than 100,000 votes against Republican Rep. Tom Rice in this deep “red” district. Dr. Tinubu introduced Ms. Williamson at Bethel A.M.E. by saying, “I consider her a sister,” which is about as strong an endorsement as any Democrat needs here.
Snip.
If the “Three B’s” (Biden, Bernie, and Beto) are Trump’s “dream” of a 2020 opponent, Ms. Williamson might just be his worst nightmare. Like him, she’s an outsider, a non-politician without the kind of political baggage that sank Hillary Clinton. And she brings to the campaign a spiritual vibe that could connect with swing voters. “Politics should not be a pursuit disconnected from the heart,” her campaign literature proclaims. “Where fear has been harnessed for political purposes, let’s now harness the power of love.” Sure, conservative readers will roll their eyes at that kind of emotional appeal, but what about suburban “soccer moms”? What about the millions of women who’ve bought Ms. Williamson’s books or seen her many TV appearances with Oprah? What about the congregation at Bethel A.M.E. that applauded Ms. Williamson’s call for reparations for slavery?
All the same pundits who confidently predicted Trump’s defeat would say it is impossible Ms. Williamson could win the Democrats’ 2020 nomination, and that’s the really spooky thing. We are living in a world where impossible things seem to be happening with remarkable frequency, and it’s foolish to say miracles never happen. How odd was it, after all, that Ms. Williamson was speaking Sunday from the pulpit of a black church in South Carolina? Not only is she white, she’s Jewish. (To quote New York Jewish Week: “Should she win the presidency, Williamson, 66, not only would be the first woman president but the first Jewish one.”) She mentioned the Jewish celebration of Purim, which commemorates Esther’s role in saving the Jews of Persia. She didn’t mention the famous question Mordecai asked of Esther: “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Indeed, who knows? In such a time as this, perhaps Ms. Williamson could be the miracle that saves Democrats from themselves.
