2020 election

BaltimoreRepublicans are an oddity in Baltimore. Perhaps some older Americans remember Spiro Agnew, but that’s more or less it — until now.About a year ago, Kim Klacik was a local GOP leader in Baltimore County. Today, she has nearly 400,000 Twitter followers along with an endorsement from President Trump in her campaign for Maryland’s 7th district. What exactly sparked this fame? Klacik showcased the rat-infested, crime-ridden streets of Baltimore for the nation.‘Do you care about black lives?’ Klacik asked in a viral campaign video. ‘The people that run Baltimore don’t. I can prove it. Walk with me.

Over the last month, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has proposed roughly $4 trillion in new tax hikes. That is meant to the cover, at least partially, the $7 trillion in spending increases he’ll impose if he wins the White House. As part of his tax hike plan, Biden promises his tax increases won’t hit any American who earns under $400,000. But they will. Even the Washington Post analysis of Biden’s tax plan concedes that his tax plan will impact 82 percent of American earners if enacted as proposed.The reason it will hit so many Americans is because of the change he proposes to corporate taxes. There is broad consensus among tax experts that such an increase will lead to corporations ‘reducing investment returns and cutting working wages’.

The unthinkable happened on Tuesday night: a Kennedy lost an election in Massachusetts for the very first time. Thirty-nine-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy, III, the only prominent member of his storied family’s fifth generation, lost his primary bid for his state’s Senate seat. He was bested by incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, 74, who has held it since John Kerry resigned to become Secretary of State in 2012. Together with his 36 previous years in the House of Representatives, Markey has served in Washington longer than his freckled opponent has been alive. Given Massachusetts’s solidly blue politics, Markey will certainly win reelection in November, leaving him in the Senate until he is an octogenarian, while young Joe will be consigned to political oblivion as of January.

Seattle My local post office in suburban Seattle seems to be rigged to obstruct customers these days. After standing motionless for half an hour awaiting my turn, I find that I've lost the will to live even before the inevitable altercation with the masked clerk squinting back at me through a sheet of plastic. When you ask for the slightest bit of 'consumer assistance' — as their cheerful mission statement on the wall promises they’re only too happy to provide — they seem to get ferociously cross. Not long ago I was read the Riot Act by a young USPS employee because I politely asked if I might be allowed an inch or two of Scotch tape from one of the dozen or so open rolls of it I could see on the shelf behind her.

Bill Clinton, in a speech heralding China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, remarked that ‘by joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.’It is by now glaringly obvious that this vision didn’t come to pass. For far too long, ‘End of History’ hubris dominated western engagement with China, and hubris led to nemesis.

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.

In most cases, prediction in politics is a mug’s game. Maybe that is why it is such a popular game. I forbear to speculate. But if you step back from the fray and ponder, I think you’ll agree that politics (like most human things) is so fraught with uncertainties that accurate prediction is well nigh impossible. Of course, you might be right in any given case. And if you make more than a couple of correct guesses, you can look forward to being hailed as a genius. But deep down you know that your predictions, whatever elaborate models you deployed to lend them an air of inevitability, remain but guesses.  Luck, not rational probability, is the primary motor of your success.

Convention season ain’t over till the dead cat bounces.  A dead cat bounce, as followers of the animal spirits of the market know, is a small recovery in the value of a declining asset. As the wisdom of those who work in tall buildings has it, even a dead cat bounces if you drop it from a high window.The week before the Democratic convention, the polls showed Donald Trump trimming Biden’s double-digit lead into single figures. The numbers varied, but they averaged out to suggest that Biden was 7 or 8 percent ahead — not yet within the margin of error, but trending toward it.The Democrats’ non-conference that was nearly in Milwaukee was meant to arrest that decline.

Free Melania? She made her jailbreak tonight. Whether or not President Trump wins re-election, she was out to save, as far as possible, her own reputation. The voice was soothing, the sentiments compassionate and the delivery emollient. She found her voice. Her good fortune was to be preceded by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who blabbered from the roof of Jerusalem's King David Hotel about Trump’s great foreign policy victories. The media complained about Pompeo breaking norms, but the only thing he really helped break were his own presidential ambitions by coming across as a dullard. His eminently forgettable speech set Melania up perfectly. The mainstream media could barely constrain its enthusiasm for her.

The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in the hope of offering voters an alternative to the unfocused, self-serving Democratic counterpart that took place last week. President Trump's best chance of accomplishing this lies in following the blueprint of a speech he gave in Pennsylvania this past Thursday. The Democratic party's convention attempted to appeal to everyone and thus appealed to no one, stacking excessively woke and anti-American screeds in the daytime with establishment figures giving vapid, hyperbolic anti-Trump speeches during the primetime national broadcast. Missing was an expression of a cohesive policy platform, which would seem key in a year where a division between the moderates and progressive left defined the primary.