Politics Archives

Wednesday

March 4, 2020

2020, the Year of the Drunken Uncle

How in the world did Chris Matthews get himself fired? To be sure, the man did stick his foot in his mouth so often that the word ‘Keds’ is probably embossed on the inside of his cheek. But hadn’t the good people at MSNBC heard? Brand Matthews is hot right now! ’Tis the season for motor-mouthed men who begin sentences with ‘Now this isn’t something you should say around your mother but…’2020 is shaping up to be the Year of the Drunken Uncle. And according to my astrological observations of the planet Jupiter as well as a star that just moved and might actually be a plane, that augurs great nuttiness ahead.

Melissa Chen

Is Joe Biden really a sure thing?

How quickly the campaigns of Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar — all billed as moderates — have assimilated into the the unwieldy, sputtering Borg of the Democratic establishment. On Super Tuesday, Joe Biden was anointed as the new favorite of this collective, sweeping most of the primaries, scoring majority of the delegates and picking up vital support from many senior Democrats. After a stumbling start in Iowa and poor performances in New Hampshire and Nevada, Biden’s campaign was mostly written off as the last gasp of a long but fading political career. He’d never won primary.

Chadwick Moore

Dispirited Democrats rally behind zombie campaign on Super Tuesday

Joe Biden crawled ahead early in Tuesday night’s thrilling electric scooter race between two near-octogenarians, whereas of midnight Biden took the majority of delegates in the Super Tuesday primaries, including a sweep in Southern and Midwestern states. But goofy Democratic party apparatchiks posing as journalists in the mainstream media needed to dust the obvious under the rug and inject a little pizzazz and intrigue. Uttered without a tinge of sardonicism, they called it ‘the Biden phenomenon’. While staffers may need to continually check that Biden doesn’t think he’s actually president now, this was, of course, part of the plan all along as the doddering former Vice President and establishment favorite became ever more irrelevant in recent weeks.

Daniel DePetris

The Democratic primary is now a two-man race between Biden and Bernie

With the votes still being accumulated and the final counts in California and Texas still to be determined, it’s a fool’s errand to declare vice president Joe Biden the indisputable winner of the Super Tuesday slugfest. Bernie Sanders proved formidable in the west, is competitive in the Lone Star State, and could very well turn in an impressive delegate haul in the Golden State. But there is no disputing that Biden, a dying animal only two weeks ago, is now on the invigorated lion that has found his prey. 'Joementum' is real. But let’s look at the losers. You could make a case that Michael Bloomberg squandered hundreds of millions of dollars for a few delegates in places like American Samoa, Tennessee, Utah, Colorado and Texas.

Tuesday

March 3, 2020

Amber Duke

A night in Elizabeth Warren’s Arlington stronghold

Arlington, Virginia A special type of Democratic voter lives in the suburbs of DC that conservatives heavily caricature whose existence I couldn't confirm until now. Overwhelmingly white, young, progressive, desperately out of touch, and they love Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren fans are hard to come by nowadays, but I was lucky enough to find one of her last pockets of support at an Arlington Democrats and Arlington Young Democrats election night party. Nearly a hundred of the club's members gathered at William Jeffrey's Tavern, a bar with plenty of craft beers on tap and a projector screen set up to display live Super Tuesday results. Local news crews swarmed the small section of the bar reserved for the group.

Dominic Green

In Massachusetts, Warren fails to pull rabbit from hat

BostonElizabeth Warren has all the answers, a plan for every disaster and the hectoring manner of a professor whose class are dozing off after lunch. Unfortunately, the voters don’t believe any of it.‘I'm in this race because I believe I will make the best president of the United States of America,’ Warren insisted at a rally in Detroit, Michigan on the afternoon of Super Tuesday. Meanwhile the voters of Massachusetts went to the polls and disagreed.How could Warren have seriously believed this? She’d already been immolated in Iowa, handily neutralized in New Hampshire and sourly creamed in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders was always going to win Vermont, but the Vermont exit polls showed Warren being beaten into fourth place and single figures by Michael Bloomberg.

Freddy Gray and Matt McDonald

The center holds: Biden thrives on Super Tuesday

Joe Biden doesn't have the organization that Bernie Sanders has behind him. He doesn't have the money that Michael Bloomberg has. But he does have 'Joementum' and that could be all that matters. It's been more than enough for him on Super Tuesday so far. Having had his campaign written off in almost all media quarters, Biden suddenly finds himself with the kind of 'comeback narrative' energy that wins elections. Bloomberg's expensive experts can only look on jealously: Bloomberg has. Bernie Sanders had invested quite a lot of time and money in Virginia, the first state to announce results. But with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out, it seems Biden has hovered up the vast majority of their support.

Amber Duke

Trump campaign hits the media where it hurts — in court

The Trump campaign named the Washington Post in a libel suit on Tuesday over two articles the paper published last year claiming that the campaign tried to conspire with Russia. The first article, published June 13, asserted that the campaign ‘tried to conspire with’ a ‘sweeping and systematic’ Russian attack on the American electoral system, while a second article published on June 20 questioned ‘who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?

Daniel McCarthy

Why I’m voting for Tulsi in Virginia

Four years ago I cast a vote for Bernie Sanders in the Virginia Democratic Primary. It was a triple protest: against a Republican party that I was certain would cheat Donald Trump out of the nomination; against Trump’s own waffling on torture and foreign policy; and against Hillary Clinton, the hawkish liberal who at that time seemed the inevitable next president of the United States. I am, obviously, a moderate swing voter. Since turning 18 my presidential votes have included a Republican nominee (Bob Dole), a third-party nominee (Pat Buchanan), a Democratic nominee (John Kerry), two write-ins (Ron Paul and Rand Paul), and another Republican nominee (Trump). Add my 2016 primary vote for Bernie, and you have an obvious pattern: I’m a NeverClinton, NeverBush voter.

Monday

March 2, 2020

Michael Tracey

What could divide the Democrats more than conspiring to stop Bernie?

Perhaps the intense wave of establishment Democratic party consolidation around Joe Biden over the past 48 hours isn’t a concerted conspiracy — no smoke-filled rooms, no corrupt deals, no villainous blackmail schemes. But the Democratic party establishment (which we’re often told does not exist) is clearly making every effort to give the appearance of something conspiratorial going on.Take yesterday, for instance. Pete Buttigieg meets for breakfast with 95-year-old Jimmy Carter (?), ensures the visit is well-publicized, then heads home to South Bend and pulls the rug out from under his campaign. Wait, what? Is this the same Pete Buttigieg whose aides just a few days earlier released an elaborate memo detailing his surefire path to a formidable delegate acquisition?

Stephen L. Miller

Katie Hill’s rehabilitation tour is a failure of media ethics

Former congresswoman Katie Hill is currently engaged in one of the biggest public gaslighting campaigns ever seen outside of Trumpworld. And she has the willing assistance of the mainstream media. Since her resignation last October, Hill has been under the cloud of an ethics investigation for abusing her position to have affairs with junior staff members and then using congressional resources to cover her sins up. This includes the payment of a $5,000 bonus to her own campaign finance director, with whom she was also having an affair. Yet somehow, even in the #MeToo era, Hill has become a media darling, both on and off the air. It helps that she’s not a man. In her resignation speech, she blamed a culture of misogyny and bigotry. She blamed a lack of tolerance for bisexuality (Sen.

Charles Lipson

Why did Amy Klobuchar drop out?

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.

Jacob Heilbrunn

All aboard the Biden train

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.

Taki

What makes Bloomie run?

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.

Sunday

March 1, 2020

Matt McDonald

Mayor Pete and the cult of no personality

Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg is dropping out of the Democratic primary ahead of Super Tuesday, according to Politico. The 38-year-old had a sorry showing in the South Carolina primary yesterday, a state which allocates more delegates than the previous three. Buttigieg’s failed campaign was, like Kamala Harris’s, punctuated by flip-flopping. First he was for Medicare-for-All, then he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to address AIPAC, then he was. With members of the vocal Democratic fringes, he never shook the image of a candidate who’d been 3D-printed by billionaire boosters in the hopes of blandly coasting to the nomination on a wash of Obama-light platitudes.

Dominic Green

Can we trust Joe Biden with the nuclear codes?

It’s Joe Biden’s turn to be president, so let’s give it to him and see if he can remember where he left the nuclear football and what the codes are. He’s been waiting long enough: he was born in 1903. And he just oozes presidentiality, doesn’t he? I don’t know if it’s Joe’s facelift, his hair implants or his false teeth or the way he walks like he’s on castors, but geriatric Joe looks the picture of youthful vigor, especially in the aviator shades that make him look like he’s waiting for a cataract operation or has advanced macular degeneration. For there’s nothing degenerate about Joe, is there, or the health of a party and political system that would recommend him as the next president of What Remains of the United States? I’m all in favor of old people.

Saturday

February 29, 2020

Michael Tracey

The media’s clueless coverage of the Biden candidacy

At the time of writing, Joe Biden is on course for an approximately 30 point victory in South Carolina. Not that he won with 30 percent of the vote; rather, he is beating his nearest competitor (Bernie Sanders) by approximately 30 percentage points. That's a truly romping win — but ironically, given his many many decades on the political scene, the American elite media has never known quite how to cover the Biden candidacy. First, if you are a consumer of online political news and commentary, you might have noticed the conspicuous lack of virtually any vocal Biden supporters on social media.

Daniel McCarthy

Biden’s Pyrrhic victory

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.

Charles Lipson

Four takeaways from Joe Biden’s South Carolina victory

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.

Roger Kimball

Biden wins the South Carolina puppy bowl

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.