2020 election

To the extent Joe Biden is capable of actually formulating coherent sentences – a questionable proposition – he delivered an attack last night that Bernie Sanders has never really been forced to contend with during either of his presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton was not in a position in 2016 where she had to aggressively attack Bernie. Had she been, she would have almost certainly brought up the fact that he is a self-described 'socialist'. Of course, that’s common knowledge by now. But it's a salient point for Bernie's rivals to press him on, especially considering the overriding concern for Democratic voters at present is 'electability'.

Get your skates on! The Democrats on Ice roadshow rolls into Houston this evening, and the media are poised for a slip-up. Tonight is the night Brooklyn-based content creators have been yearning for: when Joe Biden finally lines up alongside the Anointed One, Elizabeth Warren. Surely it's here, they speculate, that Uncle Joe will commit one blunder too many and the era of Elizabeth will be ushered in. How's he gonna mess it up? Will he call Cory Booker 'Barack'? Maybe both eyeballs will explode this time? Gosh I can't wait! Liberals online are so fixated on the narrative of 'Biden gaffe-Warren competent', that they're not considering a series of other possibilities.

MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted in July what, at surface level, seems an obvious point: 'If I were the DNC, I would be spending a lot of money learning basically everything I could about 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016.' Considering how much Hayes and others on the mainstream left have invested into debunking the current administration, there’s no surprise that, when the rubber meets the road, the Democrats let their collective hatred of Trump cloud their political judgement. Look no further than their treatment of Tulsi Gabbard.

Not such a long time ago, in a galaxy that now appears far, far away, the public space was clearly distinguished from the obscenities of private exchanges. Politicians, journalists and other media personalities were expected to address us with a minimum of dignity, talking and acting as if the common good is their main preoccupation, avoiding vulgar expressions and reference to personal intimacies. There were, of course, rumors about their private vices, but they remained that – private matters mentioned only in the yellow press. Today, however, not only we can read in the mass media about the intimate details of public personalities, populist politicians themselves often regress to shameless obscenity.

When Joe Walsh announced that he’d be running to be the Republicans’ nominee for 46th president of the United States, the phrase 'long shot' came to the minds of more than a few gamblers and political strategists. Regardless of the bookmakers and power brokers, it's more than possible for Walsh to shake up a political landscape dominated by Donald Trump. With the right political strategy, NeverTrumpers, with a Joe Walsh campaign as their representative, could beat Trump in 2020. In the era of Trump, 'long shots' are more than possible. Lest we forget, Trump was once a long shot. The polls said that he could never hit the bullseye. But today, he’s the leader of the free world.

With millions of people unemployed, finding a new job for a well-heeled Washington insider might seem like a low priority for Americans but I still believe it would be sensible and humane to find Bill Kristol another job. The poor fellow has spent years working in politics, and it just isn't working out for him – or anyone else. Mr Kristol is of course the son of neoconservative theorist Irving Kristol. Neoconservative families are unusually rich in political commentators. Irving Kristol's contemporary and ideological comrade Norman Podhoretz produced the columnist and editor John Podhoretz. Right-leaning historian Donald Kagan produced the neoconservative theorists Robert and Frederick. Conservative literary agent Lucianne Goldberg is the mother of conservative columnist Jonah.

If you blinked, you probably missed it: a rather interesting 2020 presidential poll came out this week. Not one of the endless tracking polls that flood RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight – websites anxiously refreshed dozens of times per day by political obsessives. This poll in some sense offers a more illuminating picture of the state of the Democratic primary race. Reporter Tom Lobiondo revealed the results of a secret survey gauging the sentiments not of the general voting public, but the party consultant class. Democratic operative types now overwhelmingly think Elizabeth Warren will be the nominee.

If The Onion didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it. The self-described 'omnipotent' purveyor of current-events satire may not be (as another motto claims) 'America’s finest news source.' But it does have a good claim to the nation’s nicest anatomist of political folly (using, I hasten to add, that capacious word 'nice' not in the sense of 'kind, pleasant' but 'precise, exact, fine'). Consider this headline: 'Anthony Scaramucci talks to Bill Kristol about trying to force Trump off the GOP ticket in 2020.' Can you guess the source? If you said 'The Onion,' you would have made a perfectly rational judgment.

‘Gaffe?’ Who invented this nonsensical term? Its only common usage seems to be among political journalists and pundits, as a euphemistic cliché for politicians’ discrediting behavior. Do normal people, over the course of normal life, ever call it a 'gaffe' when somebody screws up? I’ve never heard a waiter accused of committing a gaffe for misstating a lunch special, or heard a corporate CEO who omits key earnings figures described as 'gaffe-prone'. The word is reserved only for faltering politicians, to place their verbal embarrassments in a special category. Pundits demonstrate their limited vocabulary and laziness when they characterize Joe Biden’s recent struggles in terms of 'gaffes.

Would the Democrats be better off losing the presidency in 2020 and winning the Senate? If you think that the economy is headed for a crash, then Democrats would prosper from having Donald Trump in office to shoulder the blame. In holding both houses of Congress, they could successfully stymie Trump and head towards impeachment. Winning the presidency but losing the Senate, by contrast, might well be an exercise in futility. The grandiose legislation that most of the Democratic candidates for the presidency, apart from former VP Joe Biden, are proposing would be snuffed out. But a trifecta would be even better, putting the Democrats in the same position that the GOP enjoyed for the first two years of the Trump presidency.

Austin, TexasShortly after Pete Buttigieg took to the stage at Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden in downtown Austin, I heard a loud thud from off to my right. A small circle of people crowded around a woman lying passed out on the ground.'She went down like a felled tree,' remarked a journalist next to me. Up front, Buttigieg was in full flow listing America’s many woes that need sorting. People crouched down to help — 'Give her space!

'Why are you so hooked on that?' Joe Biden asked a reporter in Iowa Thursday. She’d asked him to label President Donald Trump a white supremacist. 'You want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I’m not everybody else. I’m Joe Biden.' 'I’ve always been who I am,' the former vice president said. 'It’s like everybody wants everybody to call someone a liar. And then you say - "I don’t call people liars." I say they don’t tell the truth. You want me to say "liar" so you can put it out and you can say "Biden called someone a liar." That’s not who I am. You got the wrong guy.' https://twitter.com/JTHVerhovek/status/1159561051601612802 Of course, this prompted howls of indignation on social media.

The Democratic party, mired in infighting only a week ago, has reunited over racial division. New Jersey senator Cory Booker stated in a speech on Wednesday in Charleston, S.C., that the recent acts of white nationalist violence received a stimulus 'from the highest office in our land, where we see in tweets and rhetoric, hateful words that ultimately endanger the lives of people in our country.' Joe Biden took direct aim at President Trump: in an impassioned speech in Burlington, Iowa, he declared, 'in both clear language and in code, the president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.' A day earlier, Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried to douse the controversy over white nationalism by averring that the phenomenon is a 'hoax.

Sen. Kamala Harris has been positioning herself as a supporter of sex worker rights lately. But listen closely when she talks about the issue and a different story emerges. It's a disconnect that highlights Harris's larger pattern of obscuring her positions, plans, and past. Twice when asked outright about the decriminalization of prostitution — first by Terrell J. Starr of The Root and then during a televised CNN townhall — Harris has answered in a way that's been characterized as supportive. But both times she has described her preferred system as one in which ‘johns’ would still be arrested. That is not decriminalization. Decriminalizing prostitution means neither paying for nor selling sex is illegal so long as it takes place between consenting adults.

Eric Swalwell, we hardly knew ye. And we might add that what we did know did not leave us pining for more. Swalwell, a fourth-term congressman from California, became the first candidate to drop out of the Democratic primary last month, citing his poll numbers, which were hovering around zero percent. He’ll be remembered mostly for the armory of rakes that he upended into his own face, from his Twitter push poll on banning ‘assault weapons’ that’s still recording a sizable pro-gun majority to the awkward silence that greeted his ‘I’ll be bold without the bull!’ campaign motto to his informing CNN that they might have to leave Georgia over the state’s new abortion law.

It’s no great mystery why Tulsi Gabbard chose to focus her ire on Kamala Harris last night in Detroit. For months, Harris has gotten away with empty identity-related sloganeering and shallow performative stunts, like the one she pulled on Joe Biden in the previous round of debates – which of course was received rapturously by much of the media, leading to bogus claims of a Harris 'surge.' Meanwhile, left unexamined was the phony central conceit of Harris’s campaign: that she is a ‘progressive prosecutor’ and therefore supremely well-qualified to make the case against Trump. This mantra has long been ripe for a proper dissection, given its utter ridiculousness.