2020 election

Joe Biden ran two presidential campaigns alongside Barack Obama and served as vice president for eight years, yet his decades-old position on federal busing never seemed to come up during that extensive time period. If it did, it was confined to niche left-wing media. Certainly the denizens of MSNBC or the blue-check Twitter spinmeisters seldom, if ever, evinced concern for that aspect of Biden's record which they now claim to find so morally abominable. So the onslaught of attacks on Biden, like the one launched at last night's debate by Kamala Harris, come across as having a tinge of bad faith.

Who was the last person you felt genuinely sorry for? A newly unemployed blue-collar worker who’s been ‘innovated’ out of a job by mechanization, perhaps. Or that elderly widower in an old folks’ home whose family never seems to visit. Maybe even a single mother in the Rust Belt, trapped in the bleak throes of opioid addiction. There’s enough suffering in this country to go around – it’s not hard to pick someone. Then ask yourself this: what about the real victims? Those struggling through the hardship of sleepless nights and non-stop travel, met with at best indifference, at worst disdain wherever they go. When have you given them a moment’s thought?

Anton Gunn was holding court at the South Carolina Democratic Convention this weekend, eager to regale journalists with tales of the vaunted Barack Obama primary campaign in 2008. Obama’s landslide victory in South Carolina over Hillary Clinton that year propelled him to indomitable front-runner status, and Gunn, per his own telling, was the very first person Obama hired in the state. 'The first time he landed in South Carolina, I picked him up in my car and I drove him to his first event,' Gunn said.

When America’s educated elite imagines what the Republican party will look like after Donald Trump, whether he’s defeated next year or leaves office in 2025, they think in terms of the past. The Grand Old Party will once more be the party of Mitt Romney and the Bush dynasty, those formerly reviled figures now celebrated by the center-left as decent Republicans in contrast to Trump. They are the obvious and inevitable alternative to him. Aren’t they? If you don’t have Mr Hyde, then you must have Dr Jekyll. If you topple Saddam Hussein, then you obviously get a tolerant, pluralistic liberal democracy. America’s educated elite is not really in truth well-educated at all, and it has the moral sophistication of a Star Wars movie.

Most candidates for the Democratic nomination are struggling to be noticed in a crowded field. Elizabeth Warren details policy proposals. Bernie Sanders rails against the establishment. Beto O’Rourke stands on tables and flails his arms.Joe Biden, on the other hand, has not had to do a lot to garner attention. The career politician and former vice president has a big enough and successful enough brand that he was guaranteed to be the favorite merely by existing. American liberals love to soak in a warm bath of nostalgia for the innocent, pre-Trump Obama era, and if they cannot have Barack back, Joe is the next best thing.

Why did Donald Trump choose Orlando, near Disney World, for his campaign kickoff Tuesday night? Because he appears to be living in a fantasy land.Trump reached the White House by promising a border wall, a national industrial policy and a restrained foreign policy. He has delivered near none of those things, but the Mickey Mouse president is running for re-election anyway.Trump repeated some familiar cartoons on Tuesday, ridiculing Hillary Clinton a mere three years after defeating her. But it was a night for the hits. He also served up an old slapstick favorite, claiming that the media deflate his crowd sizes. The New York Times confirmed the number in attendance to be north of 20,000. Trump's goofy claim that there were 'over 100,000 requests' to get in remains unconfirmed.

Donald Trump is on the skids. It won’t take much to knock him out. So far, Democrats appear to be sticking with Joe Biden rather than casting more than flirtatious glances at other, more left wing candidates. Not so fast. As Henry Olsen reminds us in the Washington Post today, Trump is far from finished. The heck with the popular vote. The only votes that count are getting to 270 in the electoral college. Trump squeaked by in 2016. He could do it again. Trump, after all, may be most dangerous when he appears to be on the ropes. Tomorrow night Trump will kick off his re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida. He’ll be pumped. Fox News says that his supporters are already lining up to see the great man. Trump has a lot to prove.

Remember Betomania? It seems an age away, yet just three months ago, Beto O’Rourke was still being hailed as the Democratic messiah. There was all that gush about how his campaign in Texas inspired the country, even though he lost. There was the mad drooling over his Medium and Instagram posts. There was that appalling, emetic Vanity Fair cover through which he revealed he was running: ‘I was born to be in it.’ There was that competing rally with Trump on the Texan border, where he stood for openness as opposed to bigotry.He was cool, he was cute, he was impeccably progressive on issues such as climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights. But he wasn’t too dangerously threateningly left to freak out the elites.

In recent weeks, Elizabeth Warren has emerged as the mainstream media’s favorite candidate – for now, at least. Warren’s polling has largely been stagnant over the course of the race for the Democratic nomination, but you wouldn’t know it from the fawning coverage – coverage that just so happens to consistently echo the Warren campaign’s exact talking points. The New York Times asks ‘Elizabeth Warren is running an ideas-first campaign. Will it work?’ The Washington Post writes, ‘Warren’s nonstop ideas reshape the Democratic presidential race — and give her new momentum.

They warn generals not to fight the last war. The same admonition might apply to presidential races. Donald Trump was out on the White House lawn attacking Joe Biden with his usual battery of epithets — ‘dummy,’ ‘loser,’ and so forth — and it sounded like déjà vu all over again. Even as he derides Biden as ‘slower than he used to be,’ it is Trump who is starting to look as though he’s losing his mojo. In 2016, Trump ran a guerrilla campaign in which he was able to sneak up on the enemy, first the Republicans vying for the nomination, then Hillary Clinton. No one took Trump that seriously.