Politics

Minnesota Nice Wasn’t Enough. Neither were Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s center-left positions and bland presentations. And so, today, she left the race for president. Why?The immediate reason is that her chances of winning anything on Super Tuesday were grim. The only exception was her home state, and it was far from certain. Klobuchar’s failures at the ballot box meant she had no plausible path forward. Her donors would stop giving and her backers would begin blaming her (and other also-rans) for blocking Joe Biden, who they now see as the only center-left candidate with a shot at the nomination. Biden’s huge victory in South Carolina and Bloomberg’s disastrous debates cemented that position. Party insiders are desperate for an alternative to Bernie Sanders.

Nobody is banking on Mayor Mike any longer. First Mayor Pete, then Sen. Amy Klobuchar, suspended their campaigns, offering a big boost to Joe Biden as the Democratic establishment seeks to rally behind him and to prevent Bernie Sanders from pulling a Trump.Buttigieg is havering, at least publicly, about whether he’ll endorse Biden. Klobuchar, by contrast, has gone all in. She’ll appear at a rally in Dallas, Texas with Biden tonight. It’s unlikely that she will be tapped to become Biden’s vice-president, but joining him now ensures that Klobuchar would be in line for a plum cabinet post if he’s elected president.Still, it isn’t simply self-interest narrowly defined that’s prompting these moves.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In that great movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles makes it big as a newspaper owner-publisher and then runs for governor of New York. He fails because of hanky-panky with a singer, and we all know the rest. In John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick, the protagonist has aspirations to be president but he, too, falls short. The characters I’ve just mentioned are, of course, fictitious. Mike Bloomberg is not. Nor are his fifty billion big ones. Bloomie recently wrote that unlike Trump he did not inherit a fortune. That he did not. But nor, really, did The Donald. The latter’s father was a comparatively small-time Brooklyn and Queens real-estate developer.

Bernie Sanders just lost his first primary of 2020. He’ll lose a few more on Tuesday. But as of now, in terms of delegates and polling alike, Bernie Sanders remains the Democratic front-runner. And Joe Biden has wound up, ironically, not as the frontrunner but as the 'Stop Bernie!' candidate. South Carolina was Biden’s first primary win in any of the presidential races he’s ever run, which stretch back to 1988. He’s had his eye on the White House for a very long time, and voters have consistently found other Democrats more compelling — other Democrats like Michael Dukakis, not just other Democrats like Barack Obama.

1) Joe Biden lives to fight another day, bloopers, gaffes, and all. But on Tuesday he needs to win a major state or finish a strong second to seize the spot as Bernie Sanders’s chief competitor.Biden’s poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire meant the South Carolina primary was his last stand. His recent polling showed his lead was small and decreasing. So the stakes were high and the situation dire. But the former VP was right to go all-in for South Carolina, which he always called his firewall. His loyalty to President Obama and his endorsement by Rep. James Clyburn were crucial in a state with a large African American population.

The way our politics has shaped up (up? has it shaped up?), the South Carolina primary is a bit like the puppy bowl entertainment that precedes the Big Game with the leatherette ovoid every winter. On Tuesday, the Big Game in politics kicks off with primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. Big stakes. Still, people — some people — like the puppy bowl. It’s cute, and though it doesn’t really matter who wins, the contest is good for laughs and does get some people worked up. I was pretty worked up myself in 2012 when Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary and proclaimed himself the 'obvious' Republican nominee.

Dear Diary, Another day on Team Mike. Or should I say Team Mic? It’s like a reunion around here. Half of our reporters and literally the entire back office staff are aboard the good ship Bloomberg and we are living LARGE. Free pizza for lunch every day that we don’t have to beg for on GoFundMe. Booze flowing like water. Damn sushi. This morning when I got here (and yes, it was still technically morning) there was an omelet station. I literally haven’t had it so good since prep school. Williams was a dump compared to this.Honestly, I’d have left journalism ages ago if I’d known how great life is when you’re making more than 60 grand a year on top of the old trust fund. I moved to Brooklyn.

Last night, as expected, Bernie Sanders’s status as the front-runner invited a pile-on of attacks from the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. The South Carolina debate showed Bernie’s opponents are desperate to stop the anti-establishment juggernaut, which is splitting the party into a #NeverBernie moderate base and a progressivist camp that is increasingly comfortable with embracing the socialist label as a badge of honor. They don’t know how to stop him. The moderators kicked matters off by asking Bernie how a democratic socialist could do better than the incumbent given the strong current economy and record low unemployment.