2024 presidential election

Miami mayor Francis X. Suarez should pick Gary “Aleppo” Johnson for his 2024 running mate. After a revealing interview on The Hugh Hewitt Show Tuesday morning, it seems the two are both woefully unaware of foreign policy.  Suarez was taking a hardline against China when Hewitt asked him if he would make the Uighurs a part of his campaign. “What — the what, what's a Uighur?” Suarez responded, parroting Johnson’s famous “What is Aleppo?” gaffe during the 2016 election. https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1673687808282697728 After Hewitt scolded the presidential hopeful for his ignorance, Suarez promised, “I’ll look at — what’d you call it, a 'Weeble?’” Cockburn can’t help but think Suarez’s blunder is a bit worse than Johnson.

Seventy-two-year-old entertainment mogul and campaign advisor Jeffrey Katzenberg has some sage advice for President Biden: eighty is the new sixty.  In the Wall Street Journal, Katzenberg encouraged Biden to “own” his age and tout his longevity and wisdom as assets. Katzenberg pointed to Harrison Ford and Mick Jagger, similarly geriatric celebrities who still make splashes in their industries, as style models for Biden. Cockburn can’t help but think Katzenberg is onto something here. Imagine: Joe Biden and the Trials of Burisma — that's sure to help with the youth vote. And as long as there aren’t any sandbags present, Biden could do well to launch a stadium tour when he hits the campaign trail.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie has come out against banning sex changes for minors, putting him at odds not just with the conservative base of the GOP, but with a large majority of Americans. "I don't think that the government should ever be stepping in to the place of the parents in helping to move their children through a process where those children are confused or concerned about their gender," Christie said in a CNN interview Sunday. "The fact is that folks who are under the age of eighteen should have parental support, and guidance, and love as they make all the key decisions of their life, and this should not be one that's excluded by the government in any way.

I think it was the once-renowned critic Clement Greenberg who gratefully acknowledged that his job as a cultural commentator allowed him to conduct his education in public. I suppose we all do it, more or less furtively, though what prompts me to mention it now is the realization that I do not know the answer to any of the questions that have motivated this column. I write in the immediate aftermath of Ron DeSantis’s official announcement that, yes, he is running for the presidency of the United States in 2024. The announcement itself was no surprise — everyone has known DeSantis was running for months.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not an intimidating political opponent. Or at least not on the surface. Yes, he is a scion of Camelot named for his father, a patron saint of American liberalism. But beyond the Kennedy factor, everything about him screams amusing sideshow rather than serious contender. His main contribution to public life over the last few decades has been as the country’s most prominent antivaxxer — a fringe role almost by definition. Many of his policy positions are a long way from mainstream opinion in his party. And his speaking engagements in recent years are as likely to have been at MAGA-friendly conservative organizations as at the sorts of places a Democrat with presidential aspirations tends to want to be seen.

A year after getting its clock cleaned thanks in large part due to abdicating mail-in ballots, everyone in the Republican Party is getting in on the ballot harvesting action. One of the latest entrants is Turning Point USA, which, through its Turning Point Action 501c4 plans to build the “first ever conservative ballot-chasing army,” according to plans obtained by The Spectator — and it won’t come cheap; Turning Point Action estimates that the total cost of its operation will be $108.6 million.

The media should love Jill Casey DeSantis. She’s smart, she’s articulate, she’s attractive and she beat cancer. She’s a mother of three beautiful children and was an Emmy-award-winning journalist, so she was once one of them. She married a man at Disney World, of all places, one who values her opinion; in fact, she is said to be his closest advisor. As the first lady of Florida, she’s spearheaded mental health and substance abuse initiatives as well as innovative plans to lift single mothers and chronically unemployed persons out of poverty. But there’s just one problem: her husband is a Republican. And not just any Republican, but a conservative Republican on a mission to make his state the place where "woke goes to die.

I suspect that Chris Christie’s fondest dream — a dream, that is, not involving calorie intake — is to reprise his barrage against Marco Rubio with Donald Trump as the target. Christie’s preferred rhetorical weapon is the blunderbuss, and he can be quite effective. I used to delight in watching his fusillades against whining public school teachers and, truth be told, I snickered a little watching him blow a hole in Marco Rubio’s presidential aspirations.  Can he do the same thing to Donald Trump? That’s his hope. Christie, who is set to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in New Hampshire today, is basically running as an anti-Trump attack mastiff.  This was not always his role.