2020 democratic primaries

Why is Bernie Sanders running for president? The 70-some-year-old pop culture curmudgeon has gone through all the motions of showing up, dancing on Ellen and alongside Larry David on Saturday Night Live and the Today Show. He got a multimillion-dollar book deal and a new house out of his last presidential run, which was launched with the blessing of the DNC establishment as little more than a tune-up for Hillary Clinton. But something went amiss. Bernie caught fire, particularly with the loudest online contingent of the left, on college campuses and dirtbag alternative-media podcasters.

The stench of beer and cheap deodorant filled the bar in which the ‘Bernie Bros’ were meeting. The scene looked straight out of Fight Club except that the young men assembled there were hairier and none of them had abs.Your humble correspondent watched as the barman prepared a cocktail that combined Jack Daniel’s and Monster Energy.‘What's that?’‘Our speciality,’ he said, ‘It's called “Hillary Clinton's Tears”.’‘I'll have a Coke,’ I said. (I was driving.)‘What are you?’ he sneered, ‘some kind of woman?’I surveyed the crowd. Most of the men were bearded. About half of them were bespectacled. They were all either obese or rail thin. Some of them were gaming. Some of them were podcasting.

We were four minutes in, somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who I crossed at The Spectator that I’m asked to watch these damn Democrat debates each month. Just 19 days before the Iowa caucuses, we finally reached the inevitable: Andrew Yang getting the boot, as the white savior party shed the last of its racial minority aspirants, having decided that none was qualified to take the helm this cycle. Better luck in 2024, blacks.

The next time Elizabeth Warren offers you a beer, be sure not to turn your back on her lest she crack you across the back of the head with it. That's the message the Warren camp has sent out with the latest Liz-Bernie spat — just in time for the seventh (I know!) Democratic debate in Iowa tonight. Pulling a dirty trick worthy of Roger Stone, Warren's associates briefed CNN about a December 2018 meeting between the two senators, during which Sanders allegedly said 'he did not believe a woman could win.' Saagar Enjeti of The Hill lays out the apparent Warren strategy nicely: 'Progressives. Allow me introduce you to the media ecosystem that has bedeviled conservatives in the Trump age: Step 1) Leak a bullshit smear sans any real confirmation to CNN.

There’s a funny silence where the complaints about ‘money in politics’ used to be. The latest numbers on amounts spent on TV ads have billionaires Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer at $153.1 million and $116.5 million, respectively. Yet no viral pieces have been written, no passionate speeches given about their corrupting influence. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have given lip service to them, sure, but it’s been very muted. Warren told Rachel Maddow that Bloomberg is ‘skipping the democracy part of this’ because his lack of fundraising means he can’t participate in the debates. Of course, anyone who tells you they believe Warren actually would want Bloomberg in the debates is lying to you.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If we can’t be governed, we may as well be entertained. That’s become the ethos behind the Donald Trump presidency. The national debt might continue to bulge, our military might remain pointlessly overextended, our healthcare system might stay ablaze, but at least politics has become funny in a nothing-matters, Rick and Morty kind of way. Americans upvoted a man who’d spent hours on the Howard Stern show boasting about his sexual prowess, and we expect to be amused, dammit. So why has the news lately been so dreadfully boring? The fault certainly doesn’t lie with Trump.

Tulsi Gabbard is looking pretty good right now. I mean, even better than usual. The veteran and Hawaii congresswoman has stood out from the crowded Democratic field with her peacenik foreign policy-focused campaign. And now President Trump, with his impulsive killing of Qasem Soleimani, has become the Big Bad Hawk Gabbard has described him as all along. When she entered the race in February of last year, Gabbard pledged to strike out against the military-industrial complex: 'We must stand up.

It may be only the third time in American history the president has been impeached but it’s the first time no one gives a damn, not even the Democratic party itself. If that preamble didn’t perfectly set the tone for the last Democratic debate of the decade, a bubbling labor union dispute that nearly shut down the event at Loyola Marymount University this week in Los Angeles, certainly did. Couple that with the troublemakers who vandalized the LMU hillside monogram with large ‘Trump 2020’ letters, visible from the busy Pacific Coast Highway.Also ahead of the debate, a mopey splash on CNN’s front page, one of two networks to broadcast it, bemoaned ‘the smallest and least diverse Democrat debate.

Like Britain’s disgraced Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders panders to anti-Semites. Bernie isn’t one himself. He supports the existence of a Jewish state and has even acknowledged that anti-Zionism can overlap with anti-Semitism. He comes from a family of Holocaust survivors and spent a stint on a kibbutz in Israel. But in his presidential bid, Bernie is mainstreaming radical anti-Semitism.Last week, four Americans were murdered in an anti-Semitic shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City whose intended target may have been a Jewish school. At first, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Sanders ally, thought there might be political gains in this attack.

Little over a week on from the sad demise of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, the California senator is the bookies' favorite to be the Democratic vice presidential candidate. Yes, despite her candidacy's high-point coming at the expense of Joe Biden in the first debate — shivving the front-runner for holding a stance on busing remarkably similar to her own — there have been rumblings about her being the right woman to balance his ticket. In most presidential elections, the vice presidential candidates do not matter — arguably the only one to move the needle in the past 50 years was Sarah Palin, and not in a good way. But 2020 could be different, especially if Joe Biden ends up as the Democratic nominee.

Just as Hollywood's racist liberals love a Magical Negro, so young socialists love a Magic Grandpa who promises to shake the money tree, annul student debt and hand out free subsidies to the kulaks. Not all socialism is the same, though, and not just because some of it is national socialism. The Chinese communists under Deng Xiaoping declared ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. America's Magic Grandpa, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with American characteristics, a millionaire whose life was recently saved by the insertion of an ingeniously capitalist heart stent into his clogged arteries. Being rich, Bernie could, if he needed it, expect to receive a replacement kidney without it first being cut out of a tax defaulter.

The big news on Monday this week was that latecomer billionaire presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg had ‘surged’ past Sen. Kamala Harris in a new poll by Hill-HarrisX. By Tuesday the big news was that Harris had departed the race. Was it Bloomberg’s stellar 6 percent showing that did it? Unlikely. The Harris campaign had had issues, as documented in a recent New York Times piece detailing the deep mismanagement of her campaign. One of the death blows in the piece was this line: ‘Today, her aides are given to gallows humor about just how many slogans and one-liners she has cycled through, with one recalling how “‘speak truth’ spring” gave way to “‘3 a.m.

Every politician who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is the height of inauthenticity. Fortunately for lovers of comedy, many politicians are too stupid and too full of themselves to notice this. Every election year, another squad marches hopelessly into the enfilade of the inauthenticity firing line. Think of Bush I visiting the National Grocers Association Convention in Florida back in 1992. Bush ambled towards an exhibit where a new type of checkout scanner was the hallowed attraction. The fancy device could read torn barcodes and weigh groceries.

MSNBC dropped all pretenses of neutrality at last week’s debate, not that its pretenses were ever remotely credible to begin with. Most of the time they’d at least attempt to play it straight, however perfunctorily. Of course, no one should have been under the illusion that running a debate well was within the repertoire of Rachel Maddow — one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists — whose very presence as lead moderator undermined the legitimacy of the entire affair from the outset. Even with the albatross of Maddow, though, it is conceivable that they could have striven for something resembling an impartial approach. Not surprisingly, that all went out the window when one particular candidate was targeted for open contempt.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. It’s springtime for billionaires. Former New York mayor and media mogul Michael Bloomberg, who earned fame, among other things, for his abortive crusade against oversized high-calorie sugared drinks, is now joining liberal activist and billionaire Tom Steyer in running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg, who turns 78 in February, has filed to enter the primary in Alabama and plans to skip the first four primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

After months of nuclear-grade wokeness — from open borders, health care for illegals, and  abortions for women with penises — followed by a disastrous LGBT town hall, and one debate from Ohio where they briefly transformed into moderates, we joined the Democrats live from Hotlanta Wednesday night unveiling their current form: bored, exhausted, over it, resigned to lose.The MSNBC/Washington Post debate from Georgia, moderated by three women and Rachel Maddow, should have been an opportunity for Democrats to flex their greatest, rather only, muscle: pandering to blacks. Instead the 10 candidates seemed half present, perhaps preoccupied counting dollars signs for whatever corporate board position they anticipate landing after this long media romp is finally over.