Paul Volcker, Inflation Slayer, RIP

December 10th, 2019

July 1979.

Disco still rules, with Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” topping the singles chart. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has declared an Islamic Republic in Iran, but the Iranian hostage crisis remains months in the future, as does the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Hotly contested presidential races are getting underway among both Democrats (incumbent Jimmy Carter, Senator Edward Kennedy, and Governor Jerry Brown) and Republicans (Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Connally, and Phil Crane). John Wayne just died of cancer at age 72. Horror films are big, with Alien and The Amityville Horror ruling summer box offices.

Know what else was big in July of 1979? Inflation. It was running over 11%, up from 9% to start the year, and would reach nearly 15% in 1980. Indeed, the 70s saw the birth of a new word, stagflation, indicating both high unemployment and high inflation, something believed to be impossible under Keynesian economics.

It’s hard for people who didn’t live through it to imagine just how pervasive the idea was that this was the New Normal, that we’d just have to live with high levels of inflation for the rest of our lives. In 1970 gold went for under $40 an ounce; by 1980, after Nixon had severed the last Bretton Woods ties to the dollar and inflation was raging, it peaked around $600. Inflation was a dark, all-encompassing force that ate away family budgets and destroyed life savings.

On July 25, Carter nominated Paul Volcker to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. Once in office, Volcker oversaw a series of federal fund interest rate hikes, peaking at 20% in 1981. This tough but necessary medicine sent the economy into a recession (two, technically), but managed to kill inflation dead. That, and the Kemp-Roth tax cuts signed into law by Newly elected President Ronald Reagan, primed the American economy for long-term growth. Reagan gave Volcker political cover, refusing calls for his head, despite the short term pain of high interest rates and a serious recession, then renominated Volcker to a second term as Fed chair in 1983.

Volcker was 6’7″, smoked cheap cigars, and died yesterday at age 92. He was the right man for the right job at the right time, and that made all the difference in the world.

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for December 9, 2019

December 9th, 2019

Bullock and Harris drop Out, Bloomberg rises (though slowly), Booker gets weepy, Tulsi sings, and Democrats have a diversity problem. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Polls

Light polling week:

  • UC Berkeley (California): Sanders 24, Warren 22, Biden 14, Buttigieg 12, Harris 7.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 98): Biden 27, Warren 18, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 12, Harris 4, Bloomberg 3, Booker 3, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Williamson 1, Patrick 1.
  • Politico/Morning Consult: Biden 29, Sanders 20, Warren 15, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 5, Harris 5, Yang 4, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Steyer 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Williamson 1.
  • The Hill/Harris X: Biden 31, Sanders 15, Warren 10, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 6, Harris 2, Yang 2, Klobuchar 2, Castro 2, Steyer 2.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • New York Times salivates over the possibility of a marathon campaign:

    With just under two months until the Iowa caucuses, the already-volatile Democratic presidential race has grown even more unsettled, setting the stage for a marathon nominating contest between the party’s moderate and liberal factions.

    Pete Buttigieg’s surge, Bernie Sanders’s revival, Elizabeth Warren’s struggles and the exit of Kamala Harris have upended the primary and, along with Joseph R. Biden’s Jr. enduring strength with nonwhite voters, increased the possibility of a split decision after the early nominating states.

    That’s when Michael R. Bloomberg aims to burst into the contest — after saturating the airwaves of the Super Tuesday states with tens of millions of dollars of television ads.

    With no true front-runner and three other candidates besides Mr. Bloomberg armed with war chests of over $20 million, Democrats are confronting the prospect of a drawn-out primary reminiscent of the epic Clinton-Obama contest in 2008.

    “There’s a real possibility Pete wins here, Warren takes New Hampshire, Biden South Carolina and who knows about Nevada,” said Sue Dvorsky, a former Iowa Democratic chair. “Then you go into Super Tuesday with Bloomberg throwing $30 million out of his couch cushions and this is going to go for a while.”

    That’s a worrisome prospect for a party already debating whether it has a candidate strong enough to defeat President Trump next November. The contenders have recently begun to attack one another more forcefully — Ms. Warren, a nonaggressor for most of the campaign, took on Mr. Buttigieg on Thursday night — and the sparring could get uglier the longer the primary continues.

    A monthslong delegate battle would also feature a lengthy public airing of the party’s ideological fissures and focus more attention on contentious policies like single-payer health care while allowing Mr. Trump to unleash millions of dollars in attack ads portraying Democrats as extreme.

    The candidates are already planning for a long race, hiring staff members for contests well past the initial early states. But at the moment they are also grappling with a primary that has evolved into something of a three-dimensional chess match, in which moves that may seem puzzling are taken with an eye toward a future payoff.

    Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, for example, are blocking each other from consolidating much of the left, but instead of attacking each other the two senators are training their fire on Mr. Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor. He has taken a lead in Iowa polls yet spent much of the past week courting black voters in the South.

    And Mr. Biden is concluding an eight-day bus tour across Iowa, during which he has said his goal is to win the caucuses, but his supporters privately say they would also be satisfied if Mr. Buttigieg won and denied Ms. Warren a victory.

    It may seem a little confusing, but there’s a strategy behind the moves.

    Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren each covet the other’s progressive supporters but are wary about angering them by attacking each other. So Ms. Warren has begun drawing an implicit contrast by emphasizing her gender — a path more available now with Ms. Harris’s exit — and they are both targeting a shared opponent whom many of their fiercest backers disdain: Mr. Buttigieg.

    The mayor has soared in heavily white Iowa, but has virtually no support among voters of color. So he started airing commercials in South Carolina spotlighting his faith and took his campaign there and into Alabama this past week — an acknowledgment that Iowans may be uneasy about him if he can’t demonstrate appeal with more diverse voters.

    As for Mr. Biden, his supporters think he would effectively end the primary by winning Iowa. But they believe the next best outcome would be if Mr. Buttigieg fends off Ms. Warren there to keep her from sweeping both Iowa and New Hampshire and gaining too much momentum. They are convinced she’s far more of a threat than Mr. Buttigieg to build a multiracial coalition and breach the former vice president’s firewall in Nevada and South Carolina.

    I don’t think Warren’s winning Iowa or New Hampshire, but since this was actually in the article, and I had to see it, now you have to see it too:

    And you thought the Halloween nightmare season was over…

  • Over at NRO, Matthew Continetti has a Grand Unfied Theory of Harris Warren Suckage: It’s the socialized medicine, stupid!

    The Times piece didn’t mention the policy initiative upon which Harris launched her campaign: Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All legislation, which would eliminate private and employer-based health insurance. Harris signed on as a cosponsor to the bill last April. It’s haunted her ever since. Medicare for All might look like the sort of “big, structural change” that sets progressive hearts aflutter. For most voters it causes arrhythmia.

    The proposal is liberals’ fool’s gold. It appears valuable but is actually worthless. It gets the progressive politician coming and going: Not only do voters recoil at the notion of having their insurance canceled, but candidates look awkward and inauthentic when they begin to move away from the unpopular idea they mistakenly embraced. That’s what happened to Harris earlier this year and is happening to Elizabeth Warren today.

    Harris moved into second place nationwide after her ambush of Joe Biden over busing during the first Democratic debate. But her position soon began to erode. Her wavering position on eliminating private insurance dissatisfied voters. She had raised her hand in support of the policy during the debate, but the next day she walked it back. Then she walked back the walk-back. Then, ahead of the second debate, she released an intermediary plan that allowed for certain forms of private insurance. She stumbled again when Biden called her to account for the cost of the bill. Tulsi Gabbard’s pincer move on incarceration, using data first reported by the Free Beacon, made matters worse. By September, Harris had fallen to fifth place.

    This was around the time that Warren, bolstered by adoring press coverage and strong retail politics, began her ascent. For a moment in early October, she pulled slightly ahead of Biden in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Her rivals sensed an opportunity in her refusal to admit that middle-class taxes would have to increase to pay for Medicare for All. The attacks took their toll. Support for Warren fell. She then released an eye-popping payment scheme that failed to satisfy her critics. In early November, she released a “first term” plan that would “transition” the country to Medicare for All. In so doing, she conceded the unreality of her initial proposal. She came across as sophistical and conniving. Her descent continues.

    The national front-runner, Joe Biden, and the early-state leader, Pete Buttigieg, both reject Medicare for All in favor of a public option that would allow people to buy into Medicare.

  • Could all this sound and fury just boil down to Bernie vs. Biden? “Warren’s early October high has worn off, while Sanders has steadily crept back up in the polls. The result is that the two are in a virtual heat for second place.”
  • It’s a weird race:

    Disappointed Democrats groused that you obviously had to be rich to compete in the 2020 race — because [Harris] was gone, while two billionaires remained — and pointed to the potentially all-white, un-diverse lineup at the party’s next debate as proof that the qualifying criteria put too much of a premium on fund-raising.

    But Harris had made the cut for that debate. And she entered the presidential sweepstakes with a higher net worth ($6 million, according to Forbes) than Bernie Sanders ($2.5 million), Amy Klobuchar ($2 million) or Pete Buttigieg ($100,000), who are still in the hunt and are among the six contenders slated to be sparring onstage on Dec. 19. What’s more, Sanders and another of the six, Elizabeth Warren, have raised buckets of money without courting plutocrats.

    Many Democrats blamed the media for Harris’s demise. They have a point, inasmuch as some news organizations never had the kind of romance with her that they did with Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, two white men. I noted as much in a column last May, pointing to O’Rourke’s placement on the cover of Vanity Fair and Buttigieg’s on the cover of Time.

    But the media fell quickly out of love with O’Rourke and is picking Buttigieg apart for his lack of support among African-Americans and his past employment as a McKinsey consultant. And Harris was hardly ignored: Her initial campaign rally in Oakland, Calif., in January was covered live, in its entirety, on MSNBC and CNN. That same month, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC told her, in a face-to-face interview, “I think there is a good chance that you are going to win the nomination.” And after the Democratic debate in June, when Harris stirringly confronted Joe Biden about his past opposition to federally mandated busing to integrate schools, she received a bonanza of media attention and rapturous reviews.

    I get that this Democratic primary isn’t playing out as anyone predicted or in remote accordance with the party’s image of itself and with its priorities. None of the top four candidates — Biden, Warren, Buttigieg and Sanders — is a person of color, three of them are 70 or older, and the billionaires, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg, are dipping into their personal fortunes in their efforts to gain ground. For a party that celebrates diversity, pitches itself to underdogs and prides itself on being future-minded and youth-oriented, that’s a freaky, baffling turn of events.

    But some of the conclusions being drawn and complaints being raised don’t fully hold water.

    Take the fears about the nomination being purchased. Without question, running for office is too expensive. That dynamic can definitely favor candidates with lucrative connections. And candidates are forced — unless they’re Steyer or Bloomberg — to devote ludicrous and possibly corrupting sums of time to political panhandling.

    But at least at present, neither Steyer nor Bloomberg is exactly barreling toward victory. And while Cory Booker drew a connection between Harris’s departure and a process warped by wealth, the link is tenuous. Booker, whose campaign presses on despite his failure to qualify for the December debate, said of Harris’s withdrawal, “Voters did not determine her destiny.”

    Actually, they kind of did. They’re the ones who are or aren’t excited enough about a candidacy to donate money and keep it alive. They’re the ones responding to pollsters and, by flagging their preferences, determining which candidates take on the air of plausibility that often generates the next round of donations. I keep seeing, on Twitter and Facebook, laments about Harris’s fate from Democrats who chose to support candidates other than her. Well, she couldn’t succeed on generalized, ambient good will.

  • New York times race roundup.
  • Voters’ Second-Choice Candidates Show A Race That Is Still Fluid. This is tedious, micro-fluctuation analysis of polls with low sample sizes that’s one step above reading chicken entrails.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Michael Bennet says he’s shifting national health care debate.” No, at 1% he’s not even shifting molehills…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another piece warning than if Biden places out of the money in Iowa and New Hampshire his campaign dies. “Biden: ‘Nobody warned me’ about Hunter and Ukraine because Beau was dying.”

    Joe Biden asserted that he never heard worries that his son Hunter Biden’s role on a Ukrainian gas company could create a conflict of interest.

    “Nobody warned me about a potential conflict of interest,” Biden said Friday in an interview with NPR. “I never, never heard that once at all.”

    Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father was vice president and working on Ukrainian policy. President Trump asked the Ukrainian president this year to investigate the Bidens, prompting Democrats to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump.

    George Kent, a top State Department official, testified during impeachment hearings in November that he raised conflict of interest concerns after he learned Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board.

    Is pathos supposed to distract us from the fact that Biden is too incompetent to keep his own house in order? Or are we just supposed to assume that so much graft and self-dealing went on the Obama White House that Hunter’s piddling $50 grand a month Ukrainian sinecure was side hustle chump change next to the scams others were running? Speaking of Ukraine, John Kerry endorses his stepsons’s business partner’s father. “Here Are The Billionaires Backing Joe Biden’s Presidential Campaign.” Prominent names include Google’s Eric Schmidt, eBay’s Meg Whitman, Valve’s Gabe Newell, and George Lucas’ wife. He gets testy in a town hall and calls a retired farmer “fat.” Speaking of horrifying images lodged in your brain:

    “Biden’s Popularity Skyrockets Among Coveted 1920s Working Class Demographic.”

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bloomberg is hitting the ground running:

    After two weeks in the presidential race, Mike Bloomberg now employs one of the largest campaign staff rosters, has spent more money on ads than all the top-polling Democrats combined and is simultaneously building out ground operations in 27 states.

    But when the former New York mayor showed up to get the endorsement of Augusta Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. on Friday, only two of the 10 chairs initially placed before the lectern were occupied. When Bloomberg joked about his college years, saying he “was one of the students who made the top half of the class possible,” he was met by silence.

    “You’re supposed to laugh at that, folks,” Bloomberg said to a room at the city’s African American history museum filled mostly with staff and media.

    For a normal presidential campaign, such moments would be a worrying sign, a potentially viral metaphor for a struggling effort. But with the Bloomberg campaign, it is not at all clear what established rules apply, if any. Everything he is doing is so unlike what has been done for decades that it is difficult to decipher how voters will react.

    Rather than focus on the early states, he is campaigning for votes deep in the 2020 calendar, in places where voters are less tuned in to the nominating process. Rather than worry about a budget, he has put no limit on the money he is prepared to spend. Rather than run in a Democratic primary by appealing to ideological die-hards or partisan flag bearers, he describes himself as “basically nonpartisan.”

    Although far outside the box, the effort is not easily dismissed. As a former three-term New York mayor, he comes to the race with more executive governing experience and has represented more voters than most of his competitors, as well as a philanthropic record he has emphasized in campaign ads while pushing several core liberal priorities, including increased gun regulation and the reduction of carbon pollution. His campaign message is focused on his own competence and electability.

    It’s ironic that he’s focusing on “competence and electability” while pushing two of the democratic Party policies most likely to lose him votes in swing states. Gun grabbing and carbon taxes are electoral poison in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Tired of pieces that do nothing but rip into Bloomberg? Me neither:

    Everyone will have their least favorite figure in the Democratic presidential primary. Mine might be Michael Bloomberg, for sheer self-regard, narcissism, condescension, and arrogance.

    Bloomberg did his first televised interview as a presidential candidate with CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King. Some of the highlights, or depending upon your perspective:

    No other Democrats is even remotely as good Michael Bloomberg, according to Michael Bloomberg.

    MIKE BLOOMBERG: I watched all the candidates. And I just thought to myself, “Donald Trump would eat ’em up.”

    GAYLE KING: You think all the candidates who are running today, he would eat them up?

    MIKE BLOOMBERG: Let me rephrase it. I think that I would do the best job of competing with him and beating him.

    His ego is justified because of his accomplishments, he explained.

    MIKE BLOOMBERG: Does it take an ego? Yeah, I guess it takes an ego to think that you could do the job. I have 12 years of experience in City Hall. And I think if you go back today and ask most people about those 12 years, they would say that the– not me, but the team that I put together made an enormous difference in New York City. And New York City benefited from it and continues to benefit from it today from what we did then.

    Even his flip-flops are a demonstration of his intelligence, competence, and guts, he explained.

    GAYLE KING: Stop and frisk. You recently apologized for that. Some people are suspicious of the timing of your apology.

    MIKE BLOOMBERG: The mark of an intelligent, competent person is when they make a mistake, they have the guts to stand up and say, ‘I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’

    Bloomberg complimented the remaining African-American candidate in the race for being “very well-spoken.”

    GAYLE KING: the next debate is December And Cory Booker– said that it could possibly be on that debate stage no one of color. There would be more billionaires in the race than black people. Is that a problem to you?

    MIKE BLOOMBERG: Well, Cory Booker endorsed me a number of times. And I endorsed Cory Booker a number of times. He’s very well-spoken. He’s got some good ideas.

    To be fair, if fellow New York City mayor Bill de Blasio were still in the race, Bloomberg would only be the second most loathed figure in the race…

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets all weepy in Iowa:

    The tears started flowing near the end of Saturday night’s town hall, as Cory Booker knew they would. The senator from New Jersey had started closing his events with a story about a mentor calling for him from his hospital bed, sharing his last six words.

    “He said to me: I see you, I love you,” Booker said. “I see you. I love you.”

    Some people had started wiping their eyes. “A family moving up from the South, distressed. Neighbors that didn’t know them helped my family out. I see you. I love you. Slaves trying to escape from the South find white families opening their barns up, pulling together to build the greatest infrastructure project this county has ever known, the Underground Railroad. I see you. I love you.”

    The crowd of around 50 Iowans is silent, except for the sniffles and tissue packets. Booker has done this repeatedly, over a year-long campaign that has made him well-liked across the state — a popular second choice for voters whose top pick is Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg.

    But Booker is an infrequent first choice, and it’s about to cost him. Unless something dramatic happens by Thursday, he’ll be knocked out of the sixth Democratic debate. Even Democrats who aren’t voting for Booker say they’re upset about that, wondering how the most diverse primary field in party history could become all white. The end of Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s campaign rattled some Democrats, and Booker wants them to think about why. That starts with his own story, about a father who fought segregation to help his family, and a Stanford graduate who became a poor city’s mayor. That — hint, hint — was what would be left offstage.

    White liberal Democrats will do anything for black candidates except vote for them.

    “It’s unfair to voters,” Booker said about the debate rules in an interview after a stop in Iowa City. “One of the most significant campaign presences here, and not be able to be on the debate stage? That’s unacceptable. The attitude from even local media here has been saying things like: Look, if you’re polled, choose Cory Booker, he deserves to be on the stage. There’s a backlash that’s going on here, where people are turning to our campaign, saying this is not right, we want to help.”

    In front of voters, Booker was even more direct: “If you sit there and you see a caller I.D. and don’t recognize the number, for the next week or so, answer the phone.”

    Booker is not the only nonwhite Democrat who could get onstage. Andrew Yang and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii closer to qualifying than Booker is, based on polling. (Candidates must hit 4 percent in four polls, or 6 percent in two polls of early states, to qualify.) All three have hit the DNC’s fundraising marker and attracted at least 200,000 donations, as has Julián Castro, who was bumped out of the last debate.

    Booker talks about how racist his party is:

    Senator Cory Booker, one of two black Democrats still running for president, thinks the Democratic Party has created a primary contest that’s “going to have the unintended consequence of excluding people of color” while benefiting the white billionaires in the race.

    “Is that really the symbol that the Democratic party wants to be sending out? That this is going to be made by money and elites’ decisions, not by the people? That’s a very problematic message to send,” Booker told BuzzFeed News in an interview outside his Cedar Rapids campaign office on Sunday morning.

    After Sen. Kamala Harris dropped out of the race last week, Booker has said he thinks the primary has been hijacked by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who are able to use their considerable wealth to reach voters quickly. For instance, despite launching his campaign much later than other candidates, Steyer has a spot on the Democratic debate stage next week, while none of the four candidates of color have met the DNC’s requirements to qualify.

    “When you watch an election, even in Iowa here when you’re staying in hotels here, you see Steyer and Bloomberg’s ads wall to wall and you see Kamala not making it now because of money,” he said.

    Steyer’s spending millions to suck. Harris raised millions, and stopped raising them when people found out how badly she sucked.

  • Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Dropped Out. Twitter. Facebook. Dropped out December 2, 2019, seemingly right after I hit publish on last week’s Clown Car update, and says he’s not running for the senate. 538 does a failure analysis of both Bullock and Sestak:

    On paper, he coulda been a contender: He’s a sitting governor, and governors have historically done well in presidential nominating contests. (Although it’s likely the 2020 nominee will not be a current or former governor — with Bullock’s departure, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is the only remaining current or former governor in the race.) And as the former chair of the Democratic Governors Association, he’s friendly with the establishment and even enjoyed the endorsement of Iowa’s most prominent statewide Democratic officeholder. He could also make a convincing case for his electability against President Trump, something that is very important to Democratic voters this cycle, as Bullock won reelection as Montana governor by 4 percentage points at the same time that Trump carried the state by 20 points.

    But as with so many other candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden overshadowed Bullock. Biden has proven more durable in the primary than many pundits expected, which has limited the ability of similar candidates (center-left, white, male, perceived as electable, possessing executive experience) to get a foothold. And, for whatever reason, donors and other party leaders who are leery of Biden have chosen to recruit new candidates to enter the race rather than get behind a candidate like Bullock. And with his polling average in Iowa barely better than it was nationally, Bullock may have concluded that his path to the White House no longer existed.

    An editorialist at The Hill wonders if this means an exodus of conservative voters from the Democratic Party:

    Even with 12 Democratic candidates out, 16 remain in. No, Democrats do not have a quantity problem. What they have is a diversity problem – one of ideology – the only diversity problem they do not long to discuss.

    To understand Democrats’ ideological diversity problem, compare two of this week’s casualties: Bullock and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).

    Bullock was a popular two-term governor from red state Montana, the kind of state Democrats hope to flip to win in 2020. Harris is a first-term senator from bluest of blue California, the kind of state Democrats could not lose if they tried. Bullock is a white man; Harris, a minority woman. Bullock’s support remained low and flat throughout his brief campaign; Harris experienced a brief boom-let.

    None of those differences mattered much. The only one that mattered was the ideological one. Men and women, whites and minorities, and extreme liberals and less-extreme liberals remain in the race. Bullock was the contest’s only conservative. Harris was an undisguised liberal. Still, according to the Real Clear Politics average of national polling, just before their exits, Bullock stood at 0.5 percent; Harris was at 4 percent. That numerical difference is indicative of the race’s content.

    Bullock’s exit will be written off discreetly as a failure to gain “traction.” That is no more than face-saving fiction. If “traction” means what it objectively should – a significant increase in enthusiasm for their candidacy – then the whole Democratic field lack it. By such a standard, they should all be gone.

    Honestly, how many conservatives are even left in the Democratic Party?

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. More from the “Gay Media Says Gay Buttigieg Not Gay Enough” file, this time for daring to work with that insidious force of hetronormative oppression: the Salvation Army. His retirement proposal would raise taxes on the middle class.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He hit the fundraising threshold for the December debate, but I don’t see him hitting the polling threshold. Here’s him whining about how mean reporters were to Harris. At least reporters noticed her…
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Still refuses to rule out a run. Went out Howard Stern and denied she was a lesbian. What ho? “Clinton Foundation whistleblowers have come forward with hundreds of pages of evidence.” Dick Morris thinks she’s going to get in.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Last week we saw his beefcake, this week he’s talking about his endurance in the race. Maybe he should walk on stage to a Barry White tune. Actually, he should totally do that, because it would be hilarious, and at 1% he can’t possibly do any worse.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s the complete Joe Rogan interview with Gabbard (his second) that I merely posted an excerpt from last week:

    She sings “imagine.” I hate that song, but she’s not cringy:

  • Update: California Senator Kamala Harris: Dropped Out. Twitter. Facebook. Dropped out December 3, 2019. A snarky analysis of her campaign failure:

    Senator Kamala Devi Harris, who survived growing up in the segregated deep south of Berkeley and then Montreal, was a sure lock to be the next President of the United States.

    And then, after raising $36 million from gullible idiots and greedy special interests, she dropped out without even facing a single primary. It was her single greatest act of courage since being bused across the Mason-Dixon line from Berkeley into Thousand Oaks. Sadly, she just wasn’t bused far enough.

    There were many high points in the presidential campaign of the woman who would be Obama.

    Her estranged father came out to condemn her for suggesting that his family was a bunch of pot smokers. It’s not everyday a presidential candidate’s father states that her great-grandmothers are “turning in their grave” over her “identity politics” and that her Jamaican family wish to “dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” The travesty being the Kamala Harris presidential campaign.

    It took a while, but Kamala Harris also disassociated herself from her travesty of a campaign.

    Snip.

    The problem with Kamala Harris for the People was that the people didn’t want Kamala. Toward the end, Kamala was polling at 2% in the HarrisX poll (no relation) alongside winners like Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and the guy who promises to tell the truth about the secret UFO base on the moon.

    If Moon Base Guy has a Twitter feed, I give him good odds to beat Delaney in Iowa.

    By then her campaign had broken out in spasms of vicious infighting between her sister Maya and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez who were only speaking to each through media leaks. Rodriguez had run Kamala’s Senate campaign and had the requisite skills to win elections in a corrupt one-party state. He was out of his depth competing in a national election and the dysfunctional campaign showed it.

    But the real brains behind Kamala Harris for the People was, predictably, a member of the family.

    Maya Harris had headed the ACLU in Northern California, then had a plum spot at the Ford Foundation, before becoming a senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and then as campaign chair for her sister. “Hillary really trusted her instincts,” John Podesta said of Maya. So did Kamala.

    Too bad for her.

    With her ACLU and Ford Foundation background, Maya had been billed as Kamala’s “progressive link”. It was more like the weakest link. While her campaign manager was out of his depth, her campaign chairwoman kept pushing her sister far leftward. And while that strategy worked in California where socialized medicine can pass without anyone having a clue how to pay for it: it didn’t work nationally.

    Kamala Harris for the People, the campaign brand, played off Kamala’s background as a prosecutor. But under Maya, that part of her resume, the biggest part that doesn’t involve Willie Brown, got buried. Maya pushed Kamala into the same radical policy space as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren while trying to compete for Joe Biden’s black voters. But Kamala and Maya were too detached from the black community to realize that South Carolina black voters wanted a more conservative candidate.

    Instead of winning over leftists and black voters, Kamala lost both.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) “I will admit that seeing a liberal accuse the Democratic base of being racist is a delicious and refreshing change of pace, but it’s as lazy here as it is when they lob this nonsense at Republicans. Kamala Harris’s biggest problem was always Kamala Harris.” Powerline: “The substance was Harris’s record as a prosecutor in California. The problem wasn’t just that Harris was a zealous prosecutor at times. That’s to her credit as far as I’m concerned. The biggest problem was her over-zealousness. Some of her practices were offensive even to a die hard law and order type like me.” This piece identifies four fatal flaws with her campaign:

    1. Mismanaging Campaign Funds: “Harris raised an ample amount of cash early in the campaign but didn’t husband her resources well and failed to adjust in time when her fundraising slowed. The New York Times reported that at the time she dropped out, Harris would have had to go into debt to continue her campaign.”
    2. Choosing the Wrong Ground on which to Fight (i.e., going after Biden for his opposition to forced busing)
    3. Trying to Have It Both Ways on Medicare for All
    4. Waging a Front-Runner’s Campaign When She Needed to Wage an Insurgent’s: “Biden, the de-facto front-runner from the beginning, has proven to be much more durable in national polls than many expected, and his support among African-American voters in South Carolina kept Harris from ever really taking off in the first-in-the-South primary. Yet Harris kept on campaigning as if she were leading the race, focusing on national media, limiting her early events in Iowa, sticking to stage-managed appearances, and, worst of all, appearing thoroughly scripted.”

    All true, though left unsaid is the fact that she sucked as a campaigner, an uncomfortable truth papered over by a fawning media desperate to boost the candidacy of a black liberal women.

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Is she gaining traction in Iowa?

    The result has been an influx of money that has allowed her to build up her Iowa staff, though not on the scale of her rivals. Still, Klobuchar had added five offices around the state to the 10 she had.

    Also noteworthy, this week she added to her team veteran Iowa Democratic campaign operative Norm Sterzenbach, a former Iowa Democratic Party executive director who had been an adviser to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s 2020 presidential campaign.

    Klobuchar was on a three-day trip through Iowa, including lightly populated counties in her quest to campaign in each of Iowa’s 99 counties before the Feb. 3 caucuses. By Saturday, she planned to have campaigned in her 70th.

    Snip.

    There are signs it’s got potential. The Des Moines Register-CNN-Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted last month showed Klobuchar rising to a distant fifth, behind Buttigieg, Warren, Biden and Sanders. A brighter spot for her: Nearly 40% of likely caucus participants were still considering her, a jump of more than 10 percentage points in the past month.

    Of all the longshots, Klobuchar is best situated to compete in Iowa. She also campaigned in Denver.

  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS profile, which notes he opposes socialized medicine. He’s running a very organization-light campaign:

    To call Deval Patrick’s campaign a shoestring operation would be insulting to shoestrings.

    Attend a Patrick event and there’s not a bumper sticker or pin to be found, let alone organizers with clipboards collecting names of would-be voters. His ground game looks to be nonexistent: The entire campaign appears to consist of a handful of volunteers and one publicly announced staffer, campaign manager Abe Rakov. In comparison, other campaigns have several hundred paid staffers and dozens of offices combined — and that’s just in New Hampshire.

    Patrick has spent the first dozen days of his campaign trying to persuade senior Democratic leaders in the early voting states to take him seriously. They want to give the former Massachusetts governor with an inspirational life story and friendship with Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. But Patrick has a way to go before they fully buy in.

    “A lot of the talent has already been acquired here, professional talent to run his campaign,” said former New Hampshire Chief Justice John Broderick, a Joe Biden supporter. “He’s not going to be on the debate stage, most probably. It’s pretty damn difficult.”

    The campaign hasn’t publicized the few staff hires it has made, so far divulging only two names: Rakov and LaJoia Broughton, who will serve as South Carolina state director.

    Can that sort of campaign succeed in the 21st century? Possibly, if either you have an unusually compelling candidate (think Donald Trump), or message campaign that resonates with primary voters (think McGovern 72); Patrick doesn’t check either of those boxes.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s not just that the 2016 presidential campaign never ended, the 2016 Democratic Primary is still being fought over, with Sanders and Clinton still trading barbs. Given how far she and the DNC went to rig 2016 in her favor, she has a lot of damn gall complaining about Sanders hurting her chances, especially since he ended up campaigning for her. Another day, another Democratic staffer (Darius Khalil Gordon) fired for tweets, including “Working hard so one day i can make that Jew money.” He wants to dump $150 billion into government owned broadband. Just when you think nothing could be worse than Comcast or Spectrum, Bernie proves you wrong!
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the December debate. He campaigned in South Carolina and Iowa.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. By the shores of gutterrama, by the gently toppling 9 pin, by the rolling blackball thunder, confessed the sins of Liawatha:

    Gee, think maybe you should have done that four years ago? And note that she never confesses to the sin of using the benefits of Affirmative Action to advance her own career. Warren simply isn’t hard enough left for The Guardian. “Elizabeth Warren — under pressure from rival Pete Buttigieg to reveal her past compensation from corporate clients — announced Sunday that she’s received $1.9 million from private legal work since 1986.” That works out to just under $83,000 over 23 years. Pretty good money for most people (though less than I make), but (and I know this is going to sound weird coming from me) that’s really not an overwhelming amount of legal consulting billing, where good attorneys can bill $400 an hour an up, and a high profile lawyer like Warren before she ran for the senate, $1,000+ is not unheard of. On the oher hand, she hasn’t broken up how it was earned, exactly when, and for whom; maybe the bulk came after she was elected to the senate. How socialists soured on her:

    It wasn’t so long ago that you could read an article in Jacobin that argued, “If Bernie Sanders weren’t running, an Elizabeth Warren presidency would probably be the best-case scenario.” In April, another Jacobin article conceded that Warren is “no socialist” but added that “she’s a tough-minded liberal who makes the right kind of enemies,” and her policy proposals “would make this country a better place.” A good showing by her in a debate this summer was seen as a clear win for the left in the movement’s grand ideological battle within, or perhaps against, the Democratic Party. Even staff writer Meagan Day, probably the biggest Bernie stan on Jacobin’s masthead, found nice things to say about Warren.

    No more. A selection of Jacobin headlines from November: “Elizabeth Warren’s Head Tax Is Indefensible,” “Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Finance Medicare for All Is a Disaster” and “Elizabeth Warren Is Jeopardizing Our Fight for Medicare for All.” In October, a story warned that a vote for Warren would be “an unconditional surrender to class dealignment.” Even a recent piece titled “Michael Bloomberg? Now They’re Just Fucking with Us” went out of its way to say that Warren is insufficiently confrontational to billionaires.

    At some level, the picks and pans of an activist magazine with only a fraction of the readership of, say, pre-2016 Breitbart might not seem of much consequence as America heads into its next presidential election. But as the Democratic Party faces its intramural battle over how best to respond to the Trump presidency—with measured centrism, or an opportunistic and disruptive lurch to the left— Jacobin has emerged as a hard-to-ignore voice in defining what the latter should look like.

    Actually, I’ve done a pretty good job ignoring it.

    The change in the publication’s treatment of Warren, Sunkara told me, was not a conscious decision or directive from higher-ups like himself. The publication, as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, cannot formally endorse political candidates.

    But it does reflect, he said, what Jacobin’s mostly young left-wing writers and contributors, many of whom are open Sanders supporters and even campaign volunteers, are thinking. Where a previous generation might have been more than satisfied with a candidacy that would have been a socialist dream a mere decade ago, a younger generation tired of tempering its hopes is hungry for what it thinks could be a more revolutionary outcome.

    Warren’s ginger concessions to the center—be it her proclamations of “ faith in markets” or her refusal to say she’d raise middle class taxes to pay for single-payer health care—thus seem like a betrayal of necessary convictions.

    “There probably has been, among certain writers, a disillusioning with certain parts of the Warren approach to things, and also it’s probably an attempt to push her to be more resolute,” Sunkara said. There’s a reason, after all, why the candidate who said she is a “capitalist to her bones” was not the socialists’ favorite to begin with.

    Man, the show trials where Jacobian writers purge DailyKos writers for rightist deviationism is going to be lit!

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She said something stupid about vaccines, but the only link choices are Vice or The Mary Sue, so, nah, I’m just telling you about it. She’s angling for an apperance on Joe Rogan, which would be a great move for her (or, honestly, probably anyone but Biden or The Billionaire Boys).
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He raised $750,000 in 24 hours. He calls impeachment a loser issue.

    “Not a single Republican has given any indication that they’re in fact-finding mode. They’re all in defend-the-president mode. You need literally dozens of Republican senators to switch sides when the trial starts, which we’ve gotten zero indication is going to happen.”

    “The more this drags on, the more danger there is of two things: Number one, Donald Trump comes out of this and says, ‘Vindicated! Totally exonerated!’ And number two, we are wasting precious time where we should be creating a positive vision that Americans are excited about solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected, and beat him in 2020,” he added.

    He went on: “If all that happens is all of the Democrats are talking about impeachment that fails, then it seems like there is no vision. It seems like all we can do is throw ineffective rocks at Donald Trump, and then it ends up leading, unfortunately, toward his reelection.”

    Could he and Gabbard make the December debate stage? Deadline is December 12. He’s expanded his campaign team:

    Andrew Yang expanded his presidential bid’s digital operations with two senior hires, including an alum of the Obama and Hillary Clinton White House campaigns.

    Yang brought on Ally Letsky, a senior vice president and strategist at Deliver Strategies, to lead the campaign’s direct mail efforts and Julia Rosen, a partner at Fireside Campaigns, to helm the campaign’s digital strategy.

    “While other campaigns are scaling back or trying to sustain their current levels, our campaign is rapidly growing and adding experience and know-how to ensure that we peak at the right time,” Yang said in a statement. “We’re absolutely thrilled that Ally and Julia — two of the most experienced and respected professionals in their fields — are bringing their expertise to the Yang Gang to help us compete and win.”

    Letsky is a veteran of the Obama and Clinton presidential campaigns in 2012 and 2016, respectively. She helped former President Obama with his direct mail efforts during his reelection bid and served as the director of direct mail for Clinton’s failed 2016 bid….Rosen has also worked with several Democratic organizations and establishment groups prior to joining Fireside Campaigns, including ActBlue and MoveOn.

    The piece also says that “Julián Castro laid off staffers in New Hampshire and South Carolina earlier this month to narrow his focus on Iowa and Nevada.”

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • 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)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder (Haven’t seen anything since his trial balloon a month ago, so I’ve moved him back down here.)
  • 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:





    Terrorist Cartels And The War On Drugs

    December 8th, 2019

    Last week President Donald Trump “announced his intentions to designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), just weeks after nine American were ambushed and gunned down less than 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border by cartel members.” Sarah McConnell at The Texan has details on legislation to enact that proposal:

    After the president said he was considering designating Mexican cartels as FTOs in February, Texas Rep. Chip Roy(TX-R-21) supported by other members of the Texas delegation introduced legislation intended to do just that.

    According to the Department of State, the FTO designation is granted by the Secretary of State in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as a means of helping to fight terrorism by “curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business.”

    The Bureau of Counterterrorism within the State Department (CT) monitors foreign organizations known to be connected to terrorist activities, including engaging in, planning, and preparing attacks.

    In addition, the CT carries the responsibility of identifying potential targets for designation based on capability and intent to conduct terrorist activities.

    After the CT identifies a potential FTO designation and demonstrates that the foreign organization in question engages in or is capable of terrorist activity through a detailed record, the Secretary of State in partnership with the Attorney General and Secretary of the Treasury then decides whether or not to grant the designation.

    If the designation is granted, Congress is notified and given one week to review under the terms of the INA.

    The designation officially takes effect when published to the Federal Register provided Congress does not vote to block the designation within the allotted time frame.

    An entity legally fits the criteria for FTO designation under the terms of the INA if it:

  • Is a foreign organization,
  • Engages in terrorist activity as defined in the INA, or
  • Threatens the national security of the United States or U.S. nationals through terrorist activities.
  • In effect, the FTO designation authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to freeze all assets and block financial transactions conducted by the terrorist organization.

    That’s great and all, but I doubt Mexican drug cartels keep the majority of their funds in the United States. Some, yes, but I bet the bulk are in Mexico, Caribbean tax havens and Switzerland. In addition to those giant piles of cash they keep around for washing cars, buying drugs, exchanging hostages and buying politicians.

    (That photo of a giant pile of cash was taken from accused Chinese-Mexican Sinaloa Cartel druglord Zhenli Ye Gon, was seized in 2007, and has $207 million in U.S. currency alone. It’s been circulating a while, and recent pieces that claim it was seized from someone else or is worth more (I’ve seen $22 billion) are untrustworthy.)

    Additionally, the designation restricts the ability of foreign organizations and their affiliates to travel to the United States and makes it illegal to provide resources to the terrorist organization.

    The designation also has foreign policy implications, as it stigmatizes terrorist organizations, brings awareness to other nations of the dangers of said terrorist organizations, and helps to curb terrorism financing internationally by encouraging other countries to also consider designating organizations as such.

    This will help some, but drug organizations tend to be fairly nimble about moving their money around, and have so much of it that it’s easy to bribe officials up and down the line to make look the other way, an advantage most Islamic terrorist organizations don’t have.

    After announcing his intentions to designate Mexican cartels as FTOs last week, President Trump has been met with resistance from Mexican government officials despite the president’s offers to provide added border security measures and other forms of assistance to the country.

    Citing concerns over U.S. intervention in the country, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcel Ebrard issued a statement following President Trump’s announcement saying, “Mexico will never admit any action that means the violation of its national sovereignty. We will act firmly. The position has already been transmitted to the US as well as our resolution to deal with transnational organized crime. Mutual respect is the basis of cooperation.”

    Mexican President Andrew Manuel Lopez Obrador has also declined aid and other forms of assistance offered by President Trump.

    It’s hard to get more hands-on with Mexican drug cartels when the Mexican government wants you to stay hands-off.

    Can such declarations win the War on Drugs?

    No.

    Human desire for illegal drugs is so strong that even the death penalty hasn’t prevented a thriving illegal drug trade in China, and there was even one in the Soviet Union. A further problem is that large swathes of Mexico’s government is believed by many to be in the pay of various drug cartels. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman claimed that he had paid a $100 million bribe to then-Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto, and Guzman also claimed to have bribed a onetime campaign associate of current president Lopez Obrador. And those are just allegations from one trial of one cartel head. Mexico itself has proescuted many more officials for cartel bribery charges. “Would you prefer to take a million dollars from us, or to see your entire family tortured to death in front of you?” is a powerfully persuasive argument to many Mexicans.

    Is there any way to win the war on drugs? As a science fiction writer, I could spin up a scenario where our military and/or mercenaries (think letters of marque and reprisal) simultaneously decapitate all the major cartels by taking out their leaders and lieutenants, while simultaneously seizing control of all the known coca fields, and maybe clandestinely blowing up an illegal Chinese fentanyl factory or ten, and simultaneously legalizing drugs, and offering zero-cost drug fixes in safe surroundings for registered addicts and whisking a certain number off to giant treatment/rehabilitation/internment facilities off in Montana or Idaho or someplace where gangs wouldn’t immediately bribe someone to start dealing to the suddenly isolated addicts, and massive job programs for registered/ex-addicts to clean up America’s cities at below minimum wages while they complete treatment programs while also retraining for better jobs to integrate them back into the community. I can see that cutting illegal drug use by 80% of more while draining all the profit from the cartels, all at a cost of only, oh, about four or five political and/or constitutional impossibilities. It might not work, but it probably wouldn’t fail any worse than the system we have now, especially in the places where Democratic Party mayors already let drug addicts openly shoot up in the street.

    I would also like a pony.

    Short of that, or some technological fix (one injection and the nanoassemblers in a junkie’s bloodstream to produce a heroin rush whenever desired for the rest of his life), or even less probable Social Darwanist solutions (such as John W. Campbell’s proposal to put free barrels of heroin on every street corner; by the evening everyone who couldn’t handle it would be dead and the rest of us could get on with our lives), I don’t see any government policy short of full legalization of all illegal drugs making any significant difference in the problem.

    But as much as I support drug legalization, I suspect I’ll get two ponies before that happens.

    Would declaring the cartels terrorist organizations make a big difference? If it actually lets us take out the cartels, then briefly, and marginally, until new cartels form to fill the vacuum. During that time, Mexico might indeed improve to become a less violent place, possibly only temporarily, or the new cartels might be more circumspect in their violence, or more willing to peacefully carve up business. If, however, it results in a permeant American military presence fighting the cartels, then it would probably make things worse.

    As a persuasion play for the current cartels to knock off the violence and take a lower profile, then it might indeed have some value.

    Our Stupid Media: An Update

    December 7th, 2019

    Fiction writing usually demands that you eschew “punch in the face” irony as too unsubtle to deploy. Life itself heeds no such constraints.

    Two Business Insider stories featured back-to-back on Althouse provide an example lesson.

    The “all in to destroy Trump” media suffered more job losses, some 7,700 this year. Media companies shedding jobs include Gannett, the CBC, BuzzFeed, Verizon, Vice Media, McClatchy, Disney and something called Highsnobiety. I’ve never heard of Highsnobiety, but they mention it in the very first paragraph. Evidently it’s some sort of men’s fashion thing, which lost…six jobs. Really, six jobs? That’s a post-Christmas staff reduction at General Dollar. Did they lay off the writer’s best friend? Plus this is the image they used to illustrate the story:

    Based on that single image, everyone there deserves to lose their job.

    Next up she links a “story” that “broke” yesterday, that President Donald Trump sometimes had bigger salt and pepper shakers than others at the dining table.

    Stop the presses!

    Thank God our brave firefighter press is focusing on the really important things.

    The Democratic Media Complex is shedding jobs because they collectively decided that supporting the far left wing of the Democratic Party was far more important than objectively reporting the truth.

    Get woke, go broke.

    LinkSwarm for December 6, 2019

    December 6th, 2019

    Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday! We’ve entered the portion of the year where everything gets compressed, rushing to finish up before Christmas or the new year, and work gets weird because everyone starts taking vacation. Yesterday I remember thinking “Hey, looks like I’ll finally have time to finish up that huge book catalog I’m working on!” only to have life pop up and go “Psych!”

  • The impeachment documents are embarrassing…for Democrats. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Evidently Adam Schiff can make private phone records public…even those with a man’s lawyer. Evidently privacy laws are non-existent if they inconvenience a Democrat…
  • This is a horrifying story:

    Lawyers from a Fort Worth hospital are harassing a conservative organization in North Texas as part of their plan to combat a judge’s interference in killing a 9-month-old baby.

    Tinslee Lewis was born with congenital heart disease. She is currently at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth and relies on a ventilator to live. On October 31, against the objections of Tinslee’s mother, the hospital announced it would remove the ventilator from Tinslee on November 10, thus killing her. No reasons relating to bodily health were given by the hospital. Instead, only a vague “quality of life” argument was provided.

    Fortunately, Cook Children’s Medical Center’s plans to murder a nine month old baby are currently on hold thanks to judicial intervention.

  • Speaking of medical horror stories, this harrowing tale of a back-injury operation gone wrong on a major league baseball closer is both horrifying and infuriating.
  • R.S. McCain really tears into #NeverTrumpers:

    The “Never Trump” crowd lack the political skill necessary to successfully run a winning primary campaign and yet, when all of their schemes to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination came to naught, the “Never Trump” crowd didn’t blame themselves for this failure. Instead, they blamed — well, you, if you voted for Trump.

    Among other things, this is poor sportsmanship. Auburn beat Alabama on Saturday, but Auburn wasn’t to blame — no, ’Bama lost that game, far more than Auburn won it, and no player on the Crimson Tide could deny that they failed, both individually and as a team. So, in 2008 and 2012, Republicans could have nominated anyone for president, but instead they nominated first John McCain and then Mitt Romney. Well, who is to blame that those two losers lost? Did John McCain ever admit his own political incompetence? Did Mitt Romney ever accept responsibility for his role in re-electing Obama? No, of course not. John McCain (and his supporters, including Nicolle Wallace) made a scapegoat of Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney . . . well, he spent six years campaigning for the GOP nomination (counting the two years he put into his failed bid for the 2008 nomination) and you might have thought that somewhere during that time he might have gotten a clue. But no, he was clueless the whole time and — hang on, I’ll check — yeah, he’s still clueless.

    What is it that these #NeverTrump losers don’t understand? Well, OK, everything — they’re completely without a clue. But what they specifically don’t understand is that Bushism is over. It’s finished. It failed. It’s “pining for the fjords,” so to speak. The so-called “center-right” strategy of Bush-era Republicanism (i.e., be nice and try not to offend liberals) never actually worked. Recall that Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, and that Bush just barely edged John Kerry in 2004. The illusion of “success” for the center-right strategy is what inspires the tantrums of the #NeverTrump crowd, who want to go back to what they see as the Golden Era of Republican prestige, when we had half-a-million troops in Iraq and middle-class suburbanites were all re-financing their homes and investing with Lehman Brothers. What Trump did in 2016 was to throw away the Karl Rove playbook and go after the votes of people who were sick and tired of “nice” Republicans.

    And, oh, by the way, how many kids does your typical Republican have? Because somewhere along the line, it seems that America developed a shortage of children, and this in turn led to the idea that we should just import foreigners as substitutes for children Americans weren’t having. Did John McCain or Mitt Romney — or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush — ever say anything about demographics?

    Much discussion of crashing white demographics snipped. I’m a lot more concerned with the GOP’s apparent inability to convince Asians and other nonwhite Americans of the value of their platform.

    Six years ago, Sen. Lamar Alexander’s chief of staff was arrested for child pornography. Ryan Loskarn was into “sexually explicit” videos of little boys. Loskarn committed suicide at age 35. That’s an extreme example of the degeneracy among Republicans in D.C., but less extreme cases are a dime a dozen. The extent to which the GOP machinery is staffed with drunks and perverts is not trivial. And, to return to my theme, this problem is related to the sociopathic tendency of some Republicans to scapegoat others for their own failures. There are a lot of people earning six-figure incomes as Republican operatives who are fundamentally incompetent, and who resort to blame-game rationalizations to explain away their failures. Bullies and backstabbers proliferate in the toxic environment of GOP politics, where consultants care more about getting paid than they do about winning elections.

    And I omitted the Ted Bundy comparison…

  • “Americans Bought Enough Guns on Black Friday to Arm the Marine Corps – Yet Again!”: “According to the FBI, over 200,000 background check requests associated with the purchase of a firearm were submitted to the agency on Black Friday, marking the second highest gun sales day ever.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “France Paralyzed By Largest General Strike In Decades.” But this time it’s pension reform rather than taxes…
  • Hunter Biden’s lawyer abruptly quit on Monday after the former Vice President’s son and Ukraine energy expert failed to show up for a child support hearing regarding his out-of-wedlock child with a D.C. stripper from Arkansas.” He’s really padding his lead in the “Father of the Year” standings…
  • Speaking of which:

  • Social Justice Warriors have even ruined sex worker support:

    In recent years, I have watched sex-work activism of the type PACE practices become co-opted by social-justice ideology, whose elements include intersectional feminism, critical race theory and radical socialism. The same hypocrisy that was captured on video when Jabbour denigrated an Asian event attendee plays out, writ large, in the way some activists now regularly prioritize their own moral grandstanding over a reasoned and tempered approach to advocacy. While sex-worker activism once was its own unique activist subculture, deeply informed by women with real experience in the field, it now has become just another branch office of the generalized, Twitter-mediated progressive movement that has colonized liberal politics. And sex workers are suffering for it.

  • EU court upholds restrictions against private gun ownership. You would think that most Europeans have already seen this movie, and aren’t going to like how it ends. At least they’re not calling the law Verordnung gegen den Waffenbesitz der Juden this time around…
  • U.S. Navy seizes Iranian missile parts being shipped to Houthi rebels in Yemen. (Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.)
  • Syria’s currency hits an all-time low against the dollar.
  • Smoking weed can lead to testicular cancer. Joe Rogan hit hardest… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Convicted murderer Lee Hall executed. Hall chose to die by the electric chair, which is still an option in Tennessee. Since he burned estranged girlfriend Traci Crozier alive, there’s a certain symmetry to his exit…
  • “New Greta On The Shelf Doll Will Track Your Climate Sins.”
  • Programmers: Beware finger traps.
  • “India farmer paints dog to look like tiger to protect coffee crop from monkeys.” Dogs, tigers, monkeys: What more do you need from a headline? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Heh:

  • Peak Woke

    December 5th, 2019

    Could anything possibly be more woke than a white #BlackLiveMatter activist snatching a microphone away from an actual black woman for the crime of backing Pete Buttigieg?

    Evidently the disruptor is one Igor Rodriguez and he’s a Bernie Bro:

    To imagine the future of intersctionality, imagine the bootheel of a white activist stamping on the face of an insufficiently leftwing black woman, forever…

    Let the Harris Campaign Postmortems Begin!

    December 4th, 2019

    Most campaign postmortems are of the “failure to launch” variety, but the Kamala Harris campaign achieved liftoff, started climbing, and then fell back down to earth followed by a giant explosion.

    So let’s dig into her campaign’s cataclysmic demise!

    First up, Charles C. W. Cooke can barely contain his glee over her departure:

    Kamala Harris is no longer running for president. This is excellent, welcome news — the cause for celebration. Good riddance! May Harris’s failed attempt to find higher office destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.

    I’m told that I’m not supposed to feel like this — or, at least, that if I do feel like this, I’m not supposed to say so in public. People worked on that campaign, you see. People tried really hard. But that, I’m afraid, is a load of old nonsense. Harris was running for the presidency, which is another way of saying that she was running to acquire power. I did not want her to have that power. It is true that some people tried their best to help her gain that power. They’re probably upset today. But they’ll get over it. She’s not that special.

    On the contrary: She’s a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far has been to fight “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors”; who has openly promised to act without Congress; and who showed us exactly who she is during the Kavanaugh hearings, at which she implied that she knew something terrible about the nominee for the sole purpose of sharing the insinuation on her Twitter feed. Harris is a woman who, if successful (“successful”), would have overseen the mass confiscation of millions of firearms, the seizing of patents, the federalization of abortion law, and, depending on the polling, the elimination of (her word) the private health insurance plans of 180 million people.

    Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question. Nothing good has come from her election. She has nothing of value to offer America.

    Tell us what you really think.

    Jim Geraghty wonders not why Harris departed, but why so many of the no hopes stay in the race:

    After you’ve heard Jim Gilmore insist he’s going to win the New Hampshire primary after getting twelve votes in the entire Iowa caucus, treating no-hope candidates as if they still have a shot starts to feel like we’re all enabling delusional people and playing along with their denial.

    John Delaney? Senator Michael Bennet? Guys, I don’t know how to break it to you, but most people forgot you were running. Julian Castro? Sorry, pal. On paper, you had a shot, but in reality, people just weren’t interested in buying what you were selling. Tom Steyer? It’s your money, but most Democrats would prefer you spent it in other ways, and the longer you hang around, the more they’ll see you as a fool using up valuable resources on a narcissistic Quixotic effort.

    This is precisely why I urge Steyer to stay in the race.

    This largely sympathetic piece suggests that she had no core ideological convictions:

    Harris routinely insisted that she was still introducing herself to Americans. But Harris’s campaign, dogged for months by questions about her health-care stance, her political ideology, and, ultimately, her staff’s infighting, never seemed to settle on a single consistent answer to a question voters kept asking: What was she about? At times on the trail, she presented herself as a matter-of-fact progressive, a comforter-in-chief, and an unapologetic prosecutor. Harris, and those who’ve known her for decades, insist all of these are accurate descriptors, but that at her core she’s a results-oriented pragmatist with a long-running disdain for ideological boxes. That, they often said, is precisely what the country could have used right about now. Yet as Harris tried appealing to as broad a swath of the Democratic electorate as possible, she found that in an overflowing field led by three far better-known characters, being a consensus-style candidate who can offer something to everyone meant it was especially difficult to offer everything to anyone.

    When Harris sat down over the weekend to re-evaluate her plans and dig deep into her campaign’s financial state after a pair of brutal reports from the New York Times and Washington Post, she saw an operation quickly running out of cash and low on realistic paths to victory, even though she already qualified for the December debate. She spoke with family and close aides, and considered both her short-term options and her political future beyond the primary race. On Monday, she determined there was no politically acceptable way for her sputtering campaign to keep competing. She opted for an abrupt halt to a fall that would have been unfathomable back in Oakland in January, but which could have worsened in the unforgiving Iowa winter.

    It would soon get harder, but at the time, the aftermath of the Detroit debate felt like a new low for Harris’s campaign. Looking back four months later, that stretch crystalized what went wrong. As she struggled to find a meeting of minds with the voters she needed between spring and fall — while Biden held onto his support and Elizabeth Warren gained steam — Harris and her team tried out a series of different messages. They didn’t stop trying until they ultimately settled on “Justice Is on the Ballot” late this year. Some political allies urged her to return to the “fearless” message she’d used while running for Senate in 2016. (“Fearless” was also the name of a TV ad she’d ran that was based around footage of Warren praising her.) Others grumbled that her early focus on “truths” meant little to voters, and that her subsequent “3 A.M. Agenda” wasn’t ambitious enough. “Sometimes her over-preparation comes across as a lack of preparation,” said one of her advisors. Still, most in Harris’s corner were convinced that she was close to hitting the right note. “The political consultant class gnashes their teeth over this — they have to market a product,” a Harris friend and longtime political ally told me this fall. “The problem that they have is: She is what she is. She’s complicated.” After the second debate, her team advised her to start telling more personal stories on the campaign trail, fearing the career prosecutor who was campaigning on her toughness was coming across as too lawyerly.

    But then, and throughout the campaign, the advice wasn’t always consistent. “I don’t know who’s in charge,” one former Harris aide who remains close with her team told me repeatedly over the summer and fall. Harris has long been surrounded by a wide array of advisors — in addition to campaign chair Maya Harris (her sister), and campaign manager Juan Rodriguez, there were strategists Sean Clegg, Ace Smith, and Laphonza Butler, former chief of staff Rohini Kosoglu, adman Jim Margolis, and pollster David Binder, among others. “It’s a Kamala thing to have 9,000 people whispering in her ears, thinking they’re running the show,” said another of her ex-aides.

    That doesn’t sound like an effective strategy for running a campaign, or governance. Indeed, it sounds like even more reasons to celebrate the demise of her incompetent campaign long before she could inflict that dysfunction on the White House.

    More on the “no core convictions” theme:

    Kamala Harris has ended her presidential campaign. Thus fades into history one of the most overhyped candidates in recent memory.

    It’s not hard to see why Harris failed.

    She was half the aggressive prosecutor and half the noble social justice warrior, half practical Democrat and half proud progressive, and it was never clear where she stood. With Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders consolidating the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, and Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg fighting over the center ground, Harris’s uncertain political identity denied her a foundation to build on. Instead, the California senator appeared to copy policies that she assumed would be popular in any one moment: most ignominiously, her call to ban President Trump’s Twitter account.

    For a Democratic Party craving authenticity, as well as a candidate who can beat Trump, Harris’s strategic ingredients were a poor match for success. The basic point is this: As my colleague Tiana Lowe noted back in the summer, Harris simply wasn’t ready for prime time. She was too desperate to win and lacked established values.

    It’s interesting that both Harris and Beto O’Rourke were hyped early and heavily, but both ended up bowing out even before the first primary votes were cast. (You could put Kirsten Gillibrand in this category as well, but honestly, the only people hyping her seemed to be female journalists from New York; everyone else seemed to regard her as a hopeless lightweight.) Neither seem to have ideas or convictions important enough to run a low-cost insurgency campaign ala Jerry Brown in 1992. For Harris and O’Rourke, it was either First Class or nothing.

    And now some tweets:

    Finally: “Kamala Harris Demoted To Meter Maid After Failed Campaign.”

    NEWSFLASH: Kamala Harris Drops Out

    December 3rd, 2019

    Naturally, as soon as I predict she’ll be in through South Carolina and Nevada, Kamala Harris drops out of the presidential race.

    California Democrat Senator Kamala Harris has ended her bid to become the next President of the United States.

    “I’ve taken stock and looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life. My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue,” Harris stated in a letter posted at Medium. “I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.”

    “In good faith, I can’t tell you, my supporters and volunteers, that I have a path forward if I don’t believe I do.”

    The only surprise her is the timing, given she had been in freefall for quite a while. She peaked at 20% in one poll on July 2nd, just two points back of Biden, on July 2 after months of media boosting and one good debate performance. With hard left policies and multitudinous intersectionality brownie points, she was an early favorite of many Social Justice Warrior media types, until the relentless glare of the campaign trail showed her manifest organization incompetence (see Monday’s clown car update) and the fact that she actually sucks as a candidate, something not exposed in the friendly confines of her previous one-party California electoral campaigns. She’d been in the low single digits (and still falling) for a while before she pulled the plug.

    This is just a quick lunchtime update, and I might do a longer piece on her epic implosion tomorrow.

    Predicting The Order Democrats Exit the Clown Car

    December 3rd, 2019

    Ann Althouse noted Steve Bullock’s departure from the presidential race and asked what will be the order the next candidates drop out in?

    Here’s my guess.

    Before the primaries:

    • Michael Bennet
    • Julian Castro

    After Iowa:

    • John Delaney
    • Marianne Williamson

    After New Hampshire:

    • Deval Patrick

    After South Carolina/Nevada:

    • Kamala Harris
    • Cory Booker

    After Super Tuesday:

    • Tom Steyer
    • Amy Klobuchar
    • Andrew Yang

    Taking their campaign all the way to the convention floor:

    • Joe Biden
    • Bernie Sanders
    • Pete Buttigieg
    • Elizabeth Warren
    • Michael Bloomberg
    • Tulsi Gabbard

    I believe Bloomberg and Gabbard will soldier on despite no hope of winning. There’s a chance Yang takes this route as well. There’s also a chance Castro and Harris stay in until Super Tuesday in hopes of winning home state delegates in Texas and California, but I think they’re already toast. And with Patrick’s campaign essentially stillborn, there’s a chance he packs it up before Iowa as well.

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for December 2, 2019

    December 2nd, 2019

    Biden noms his wife in public, an ex-staffer reveals how badly Camp Harris sucks, Sestak drops Out (or at least stops pretending he was in), Gabbard weaponizes Joe Rogan, and New Hampshire voters beg Tom Steyer to make it stop. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    At little lite, as you would expect after Thanksgiving week. Who wants to talk about any of these turkeys over real turkey?

    Update: Shortly after I posted this, I learned Steve Bullock also dropped out.

    Polls

  • Economist/YouGov (page 181): Biden 23, Warren 17, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 12, Harris 4, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Bloomberg 3, Gabbard 2, Booker 2, Williamson 1, Castro 1, Patrick 1, Steyer 1, Delaney 1, Bullock 1.
  • Emerson (New Hampshire): Sanders 26, Buttigieg 22, Biden 14, Warren 14, Gabbard 6, Yang 5, Harris 4, Steyer 3, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Bloomberg 1, Williamson 1.
  • CNN: Biden 28, Sanders 17, Warren 14, Buttigieg 11, Bloomberg 3, Harris 3, Steyer 3, Yang 3, Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, Castro 1.
  • Survey USA: Biden 32, Sanders 117, Warren 16, Buttigieg 12, Harris 5, Yang 4, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Steyer 2, Castro 1.
  • Quinnipiac: Biden 24, Buttigieg 16, Warren 14, Sanders 13, Harris 3, Bloomberg 3, Klobuchar 3, Yang 2, Booker 2, Bennet 2, Castro 2, Gabbard 1. Warren’s fall to third in this poll is pretty relevant, since Quinnipiac was the only national poll that ever showed Warren up over Biden. Biden maintains his frontrunner status, but it’s essentially a dogfight for second among Buttigieg, Warren and Sanders. There’s a significant possibility that all four of them have enough money, popularity and organization to take their four-way fight all the way to the convention floor.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • “The Democratic presidential campaign has produced confusion rather than clarity.” Really? What first tipped you off?

    Early in the year, the party’s liberal wing seemed to be ascendant, defined by the candidacies of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and the embrace of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health-care program. Sanders and Warren were calling for other dramatic changes to the system — economic and political — and their voices stood out. Some other candidates offered echoes of their ideas.

    That proved to be a misleading indicator of where the Democratic electorate stood on some of the issues, particularly health care, in part because fewer moderate voices were being heard. Former vice president Joe Biden didn’t join the race until April. South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg wasn’t being taken very seriously. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wasn’t breaking through.

    The candidate debates provided the setting for the arguments to play out before a larger audience. Warren and Sanders came under attack from moderate Democrats at the first debate in June in Miami, with former Maryland congressman John Delaney the most vocal. But Warren and Sanders more than held their own. The progressive wing appeared to be on solid ground.

    Subsequent debates, however, have produced a different impression. The progressives have been much more on the defensive and the moderates more assertive. Biden tangled with Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) in the Detroit debate over the issue of health care. Harris subsequently modified her position, moving toward the center. On the issue of Medicare-for-all, the ground has shifted.

    During the Atlanta debate in late November, even Sanders seemed to be tempering his overall message. Asked about comments by former president Barack Obama, who had earlier told some wealthy Democratic donors that the country wasn’t looking for a revolution, Sanders replied, “He’s right. We don’t have to tear down the system, but we do have to do what the American people want.”

    Judged by the current polling in the four early states, the more-moderate candidates are prospering. To the surprise of many, Buttigieg is at the top of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. No one would have predicted that last spring.

    Maybe not. But it was possible to do it when he led Q2 fundraising.

  • Democrat’s nightmare scenario: Bloomberg can’t win, but he can choose which Democrat to make lose:

    What is the worst-case scenario for Democrats in their upcoming primary? Is it a contested primary all the way to the convention, where no candidate gets enough delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot?…

    Is it Joe Biden hanging on, leaving a lot of progressives disappointed and uninspired, a sense that they’re counting on a man who just turned 77, and who’s looked not so sharp in the debates, to beat Trump? It’s not hard to imagine a “grumpy old men” general election, where Trump is his usual wildly unpredictable self with raucous, incendiary rallies, and Biden responds with his own meandering stories about “Corn Pop,” implausible anecdotes, un-woke language, cringe-worthy gaffes, and repeated insistence that his son did nothing wrong by joining Burisma’s board.

    With Elizabeth Warren tumbling fast, Bernie Sanders locked in around the high teens in most places, and Pete Buttigieg still a long way from frontrunner status, Biden stumbling his way to the nomination doesn’t seem so implausible. Lots of people comment on how Buttigieg is struggling to gain support among African Americans, but Warren and Sanders aren’t doing that much better than him among this demographic.

    But there’s one other new factor that could make things go even worse for Democrats. As noted on The Editors podcast, I don’t think Mike Bloomberg can be the king, but he could become the kingmaker. Having $30 million or so to spend on television advertising every week means Bloomberg can more or less take a sledgehammer to any rival whenever he wants. For Democrats, the nightmare scenario is that Bloomberg spends his millions tearing down anyone in his way, driving up voter disapproval of all the other candidates, but proves too unpopular to win the nomination himself — leaving the party angry and full of recriminations as Biden accepts the nomination on July 16 of next year.

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Appeared on the CBS Intelligence Matters Podcast. Insert your own Deep State joke here.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He launched a “no malarkey” tour of Iowa, eveidently because that tested better than “Cut the Jibber Jabber,” “Dagnabit,” or “I Wore An Onion On My Belt, Because That Was The Style At The Time” as a tour name. On that tour, he chewed on his wife’s fingers while she was speaking like a playful Rottweiler puppy. Can the “black left,” AKA #BlackLivesMatters, stop Biden? Given that Harris was their champion, and they haven’t achieved any significant victories themselves, I’m going to go with “no.”
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Jumped In. Twitter. Facebook. Too bad for Bloomy he’s the most unpopular and unelectable candidate in the race.

    But that’s not stopping him from carpet bombing the race with money:

    Brace yourselves, America. This week you’re getting $30 million in television ads touting former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg to be the Democratic nomination. And don’t think that you’ll be missing out if you live in some small television market — Bloomberg’s campaign is spending $52,000 in Fargo, N.D., and $59,000 in Biloxi, Miss.

    The most enthusiastic supporters of Bloomberg’s bid appear to be television-station-ad sales reps, Bloomberg employees, and the Republican National Committee. Don’t think of it as an election, America; think of it as an acquisition by Bloomberg LP. Don’t listen to the people who say Bloomberg is trying to buy the nomination and the presidency; think of it as buying hearts and souls.

    Democrats complain a great deal about how terrible money in politics is, while secretly accepting the assistance of $140 million in “dark money” in the 2018 midterm elections. Bloomberg is going to be a great test of whether Democrats think and make decisions the way they want to believe that they do. On paper, Bloomberg is a terrible candidate. But if he gets traction in this race, it means Democratic primary voters are as easily persuaded by slick television ads as much as any other demographic. Note that Tom Steyer, a diminutive billionaire who is a walking vortex that no charisma can escape from, qualified for the last two debates and is at 2.5 percent in Iowa, 3 percent in New Hampshire, 3.5 percent in Nevada and 4 percent in South Carolina. But the most recent poll in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina all put Steyer at 5 percent. TV ads build name recognition.

    Bloomberg does not seem like the most natural choice for a party that is hell-bent on beating an incumbent president they see as an egomaniacal billionaire from New York with authoritarian impulses. You don’t have to be a conservative to recoil from Bloomberg (although it helps); you just have to dislike any smug billionaire who believes the rules don’t apply to him and that he knows what’s best for everyone.

    He says that Xi Jinping is not a dictator:

    I also can’t see this winning him many friends, well, anywhere:

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Had a mini-campaign telethon on Face the Nation because, like an 80-year old millionaire on a honeymoon with his new 20-something stripper wife, he needs all the help he can to keep going.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another GOP attack ad against him…for the senate campaign he hasn’t launched yet. Update: He suspended his Presidential campaign this morning and says he’s not running for the senate.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He once sought the support of the Tea Party. I’m sure Democratic Party activist will be sympathetic and understanding about that. “Our Poll Shows That Buttigieg’s Post-Debate Bump Is Still Just His Base.”

    If Buttigieg was hoping his high debate marks would help him diversify his base of support, that hasn’t happened yet. The demographic cross-tabs in our poll show that he mainly made inroads among groups where he already enjoyed a disproportionate amount of support, like the college-educated, white voters and older voters. He had little success winning people over among groups where he has tended to struggle, like with black and Hispanic voters.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mark your calendar, as Castro actually said something that wasn’t absurd left-wing pandering: He wants to reform opiod laws so people that actual need them can get them, and says he’s open to decriminalizing drugs. I hope he enjoys probably the only “attaboy” he’ll receive from me until he inevitably ends his moribund campaign.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? No time for Grandma Death this week.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. BEEEEEFCAAAAKE!
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Comes in at 6% in a New Hampshire poll. Unfortunately for her, it’s not a debate qualifying poll. She’s “weaponized” her Joe Rogan interview:

    I’m not a Gabbard backer, but she makes several cognizant points in that clip. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. The rats are really complaining about conditions on the sinking ship:

    A blistering resignation letter from a member of the Kamala Harris campaign paints a picture of low morale among staffers of a directionless campaign with “no real plan to win” ahead of the crucial Iowa caucus in 2020.

    According to the New York Times, the sentiments expressed in a letter from now-former state operations manager Kelly Mehlenbacher were corroborated by more than 50 current and former campaign staffers and allies, speaking largely on the condition of anonymity to disclose the campaign’s many flaws and tactical errors, from focusing on the wrong states to targeting the wrong candidates, as a frustrated campaign staff draws closer to 2020 Democratic primaries, which at one point counted the California Senator as a likely star.

    Ms Mehlenbacher’s letter came a few days after a November staff meeting during which aides pressed campaign manager Juan Rodriguez about strategy and finances after sweeping layoffs ahead of the campaign’s movement in Iowa.

    “While I still believe Senator Harris is the strongest candidate” in 2020, Ms Mehlenbacher said, “I have never seen an organisation treat its staff so poorly … I no longer have confidence in our campaign or its leadership. The treatment of our staff over the last two weeks was the final straw.”

    She said it was “unacceptable” to move campaign staff from Washington DC to headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, “only to lay them off without notice” with “no plan for the campaign” and “without thoughtful consideration of the personal consequences to them or the consequences that their absence would have on the remaining staff.”

    I can believe both that departing staffers are unaware how highly uncertain and contingent presidential campaigns are and that Harris treats her staff like shit.

  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Probably not? Keeping him up here one more week so you can taste test this fine whine:

    Former Attorney General Eric Holder is “frustrated” former President Barack Obama did not emphatically encourage his presidential aspirations, those close to Holder and familiar with his thinking say.

    Holder, who has warned Democrats to be “wary of attacking the Obama record,” was reportedly “frustrated” that Obama, who he considers a close friend, did not actively encourage his presidential aspirations.

    Obama has remained notably silent throughout the Democrat primary – a development that should come to no surprise to those closely following the race. The former president signaled he would not endorse a primary candidate or speak out in an overly critical manner of any of the presidential hopefuls. According to Politico, Obama views his role as “providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly and to unite the party when the nominee is clear.”

    Obama has, largely, stuck to that strategy, refusing to endorse his former running mate Joe Biden (D) and refraining from encouraging the presidential aspirations of his “close friend” Holder, who teamed up with Obama’s Organizing For Action to create the All On The Line campaign, a redistricting project “aimed at thwarting the use of so-called gerrymandering across the country.”

    While reports, as recently as early November, indicated Holder was still mulling a last-minute presidential bid, the doors are slowly closing. Politico reported Holder was reportedly “frustrated” Obama did not encourage his plans for a presidential bid, with a source close to Holder telling the outlet that “he’s [Holder’s] still pretty sensitive about it.”

    Bet Obama never encouraged his plans to become an NBA center, either…

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. NYT writer says she’s actually expanding her campaign and may be peaking at the right time.

    As her rivals falter, Ms. Klobuchar has outlasted some national figures, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and former Representative Beto O’Rourke, and she is one of just six candidates, so far, to have qualified for the next debate in December. Enough money has flowed in for her to expand her operation; she has doubled her offices in Iowa and her staff in New Hampshire at a time when many of her rivals are worried about contracting. After months stuck toward the bottom of the polls, she has earned around 5 percent in several recent surveys of early-voting states, as voters give her a second look.

    And in perhaps the highest mark of progress yet, her strong performance in last week’s debate inspired a spoof on “Saturday Night Live,” albeit one largely focused on her quivering bangs. (Ms. Klobuchar said she was standing under an air vent during the debate and hadn’t used enough hair spray.)

    Hoping to ride a wave of post-debate attention, Ms. Klobuchar planned to blaze through New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina this week, stopping briefly in Des Moines for a Thanksgiving Day celebration at the home of her campaign’s state chairwoman.

    “I’m hearing more talk about Amy. It’s picked up in the last couple weeks,” said Laurie McCray, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Portsmouth, N.H. “People have heard from the other candidates and they’re still looking.”

    The fresh interest comes as Democratic leaders express vocal concerns about whether sweeping progressive policies, like Medicare for all, could hurt the party in key battleground states. As some center-left voters seek an alternative to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and as former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York have entered the race, the competition to emerge as the party’s moderate standard-bearer has intensified.

    She’s certainly doing better than Booker, Bullock and Bennet, and the departed Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, and Inslee, and has a real chance to pass Harris…for fifth place. That’s not exactly winning. She might well be peking at the right time and still garner* no delegates…

  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Baby Yoda > Deval Patrick.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ross Douthat, theoretical conservative, makes the case for Bernie Sanders:

    The theory of the Kamala Harris candidacy, whose nosedive was the subject of a withering pre-mortem from three of my colleagues over Thanksgiving, was that she was well suited to accomplish this unification through the elixir of her female/minority/professional class identities — that she would embody the party’s diversity much as Barack Obama did before her, and subsume the party’s potential tensions under the benevolent stewardship of a multicultural managerialism.

    That isn’t happening. But it’s still reasonable for Democratic voters to look for someone who can do a version of what Harris was supposed to do, and build a coalition across the party’s many axes of division.

    And there’s an interesting case that the candidate best positioned to do this — the one whose support is most diverse right now — is the candidate whom Obama allegedly promised to intervene against if his nomination seemed likely: the resilient Socialist from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

    Like other candidates, Sanders’s support has a demographic core: Just as Elizabeth Warren depends on very liberal professionals and Joe Biden on older minorities and moderates, Bernie depends intensely on the young. But his polling also shows an interesting better-than-you-expect pattern, given stereotypes about his support. He does better-than-you-expect with minorities despite having struggled with them in 2016, with moderate voters and $100K-plus earners despite being famously left-wing, and with young women despite all the BernieBro business.

    This pattern explains why, in early-state polling, Sanders shows the most strength in very different environments — leading Warren everywhere in the latest FiveThirtyEight average, beating Biden in Iowa and challenging him in more-diverse Nevada, matching Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire and leading him easily in South Carolina and California.

    Now, I have stacked the argument slightly, and left out a crucial axis of division where Sanders does worse than you expect: He struggles badly with his fellow Social Security recipients, the over-65. This weakness and Biden’s strength with these same voters are obvious reasons to doubt the case for Bernie as the unifier, Bernie as the eventual nominee.

    Real analysis or concern trolling? You make the call. Sanders also gets an interview with WYFF in Columbia, South Carolina.

  • Update: Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: Dropped Out. He dropped out December 1, 2019. “Former Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) announced Sunday that he would drop out of the Democratic primary race after failing to gain traction in national polling despite months of campaigning.” His primary race accomplishments are talking coherently about defense policy and the threat posed by China, and to outlast Wayne Messam in the longshot derby. Plus all the Land of the Lost memes:

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. “New Hampshire voters to Steyer: Make it stop!” (I try, but sometimes you can’t improve on the original headline.)

    Maggie and Libby knew Tom Steyer’s ad by heart: “I’m going to say two words that will make Washington insiders very uncomfortable: Term limits!” they recently chirped in unison at the dinner table.

    Unfortunately for Steyer, their votes can’t be bought — they’re 10 and 13.

    “It was like a comedy act,” the children’s father, Loren Foxx, said. “His ads are on constantly.”

    Some Granite staters said they’re seeing Steyer’s ads dozens of times a day — and it’s become more grating than ingratiating. A POLITICO reporter who watched YouTube music videos this week by Pentatonix, a popular a capella group, endured 17 Steyer ads in just over an hour.

    Even some of Steyer’s local staff privately acknowledge the volume of ads has gone overboard.

    Steyer has massively outspent other Democratic candidates on social media in an effort to gain traction in polls and ensure he makes the debate stage. But the recoiling of some New Hampshire voters suggests there are limits to the strategy — Michael Bloomberg beware. Indeed, some residents feel like they can’t touch a piece of technology without seeing his face.

    “There is a point of no return in terms of visibility,” said Scott Spradling, a New Hampshire media analyst. “At some point, you become the uninvited guest. He uniquely is becoming dangerously close.”

    Little Tommy Steyer is bringing his special type of campaign to Nevada. And he wants Bloomberg to drop out, in much the same way the Miami Dolphins’ third string quarterback would like the first string quarterback to retire…

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Watching the Warren campaign burn down to the water-line:

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s downfall has begun and it’s not happening gradually. New polling shows that her support has been nearly cut in half, a sure sign that, as voters get to know her more, they find her less and less palatable.

    I actually wrote a piece speculating about Warren’s issues a little over a month ago.

    The last debate exposed Warren for who she is. She’s inauthentic, whiny, and way too rehearsed. Democrats love her and the media swoon when she’s reading off her talking points. When she’s pressed and shows no ability to answer real questions, she suddenly is revealed for the weak candidate she is…

    …For now, she’s still in the thick of things, but the longer the status quo drags on, the tougher it will be for her. The hype train is beginning to go off the tracks.

    It looks like the hype train has not only come off the tracks now, but plummeted into a ravine followed by explosions. Quinnipiac has a new poll out that shows Warren’s support has been cut in half since their last survey. Further, support for so called “Medicare for All” has cratered.

    Snip.

    But I’m not even sure this is all about policy realities. Warren’s fall coicindes with her last debate performance. I’ve been saying for a long time that she’s just plain unlikable. She’s Hillary Clinton but angrier. The running to her campaign rallies, dance moves, and rant sessions all just come off as incredibly inauthentic. Two decades ago, Warren was basically a Republican. Now, we are supposed to believe she’s a progressive warrior? Democrat primary voters certainly are beginning to suspect it’s all an act.

    Her socialized medicine plans may be ludicrous, but on the other hand, so is her plan for forgiving student debt.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Her campaign event seem to take place exclusively in yoga studios now. Here’s one at Heartland Yoga in Iowa City, and she also spoke at at Body and Soul Wellness Center in Dubuque. BoldStrategyCotton.jpg.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He raised $750,000 in 24 hours. Honestly, of all the candidates outside the big four, I like Yang’s chances the best, as he seems to have run the smartest and most focused campaign. Problem: Bloomberg garnered* more media mentions in a week than Yang has all year. Maybe the DNC-led media really does hate him. Also got a hit piece about a woman claiming she fired her after she complained about pay disparity in his company in 2011. “The woman, who had worked for Yang’s Manhattan GMAT for two years when she made her complaint, said she was making $87,000 a year when Yang asked her to send employment offers to two men he wanted to hire. The men were offered $125,000 per year and a $50,000 ‘relocation bonus.'” Eh, eight years ago and no name attached. Hard to think the charge carries much juice.
  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • 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)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • 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)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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    *Ann Althouse has been complaining about the word “garner,” so I feel compelled to throw it in every now and then…