Politics

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.

At one point in tonight’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, Mike Bloomberg referred to the other candidates as ‘contestants’. The evening certainly felt like a raucous gameshow. The moderators had no control whatsoever. Everybody had a good time. There will be some nice parting gifts, such as nominations to secretary of State or other offices, should there be a Democratic win.Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is dead — it has been for weeks — but she insists on dragging it around and sticking its rotting corpse in the faces of the other candidates. She’s not happening and no ‘selfie line’ (actually just a photo line) is going to change that.

It’s after 2 a.m. in Club 38, a nightspot in an old railway shed in Beirut. The DJ is in the cab of a rusty train. Lights sweep across a dense crowd below. My host is Andy Khawaja, a Lebanese-American businessman. We’re sitting at the club’s VIP table and he’s scrolling through photographs on his phone. Here he is with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser. Here, he’s shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office. The men he’s with in the club have shaved heads, bushy beards, tattoos. I wonder if they’re mafia, militia, or mukhabarat (secret police). When I get up and walk to the restroom, a burly minder with a Glock in his waistband follows a step behind. He turns on the tap and hands me a towel.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas. Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money. In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior.

The Bern is getting scorching. Bernie Sanders didn’t just defeat his opponents in Nevada — he crushed them. The bedwetters in the Democratic party are becoming ever more incontinent as Sanders notches victory after victory. But what if primary voters have it right? What if Bernie is the only one among the bunch who has the cojones to take on Trump? Trump’s whole re-election bid rests upon his skills as a branding master. The establishment Democrats would try to defeat him on policy grounds. But Hillary Clinton already tried that. What’s needed is someone who will get in Trump’s grill, day after day, week after week.

‘If we put our trust in Him, if we place this miracle of democracy from sea to shining sea. then He will bless America beyond all that we could ask or imagine.’ That’s how Vice President Mike Pence ended his remarks as he introduced President Trump in Colorado Springs. Pence was of course referring to the Almighty, but you wouldn’t know it. In the small maxed-out arena, the large crowd was there to listen to Trump’s sermon. Colorado Springs is known as one of the most religious cities in America. NPR dubbed the city a ‘Mecca for Evangelical Christians’, while the Guardian labeled it ‘a playground for pro-life, pro-gun evangelical Christians’. There were gloves in back pockets and more work-boots than Birkenstocks present.

Roger Stone was well-turned out for his sentencing in a Washington courthouse, sporting a blue overcoat with a dark velvet collar and a black Homburg that was first popularized by the British prime minister Anthony Eden. Two rows of supporters showed up in the courtroom to cheer him on. My guess is that he was delighted by the 40-month sentence and $20,000 fine handed down by Judge Amy Berman Jackson. Now Stone gets to emulate his heroes in the Nixon administration such as G. Gordon Liddy, who served time in the hoosegow and were able to demonstrate their loyalty to the boss. Going to jail would be one of the best things ever to happen to Stone. It would be the capstone to his self-mythologization as an adversary of the liberal elite.

Unlike the previous snoozers where all the candidates pretended to like each other, the debate in Nevada ahead of their caucuses, was exciting. It’s what happens when six politicians, picked to be on a stage together, stop being polite and start being real. But it’s unlikely to make a blip of difference. For one thing, most of the candidates didn’t do what was in their self-interest. Joe Biden had one real job — take the nomination away from runaway train Bernie Sanders. Instead, he let the Mike Bloomberg media campaign get into his head. Bloomberg isn’t on the ballot in Nevada and he isn’t on the ballot in the next contest in South Carolina either.

You wait decades for a Jewish candidate for the White House, and then two come along at once — like buses, except these two are running in different directions. With Biden having no idea where he’s heading, and Warren and Buttigieg going nowhere with swathes of the primary voters, the nomination race may, like a round of golf in Boca Raton, turn into a struggle to the death between two elderly Jewish men from the Northeast. It’ll also be a public airing of the American Jewish split over Israel. What happens in Vegas on Wednesday night won’t stay there.Sanders and Bloomberg have nothing in common ideologically. Both of them, however, have had as little to do with the Democratic party as possible.