Democratic primaries 2024

A week from today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to make an announcement in Philadelphia that will almost certainly entail running for president as a third-party candidate. The signs have been there for months that RFK’s politically unique appeal would be crushed by the Democratic Party’s process, which is heavily skewed toward renominating Joe Biden by acclamation. The possibility of Biden debating Kennedy was always out of the question — not because they don’t take his challenge seriously, but because for all their dismissiveness, Democratic leadership takes it very seriously indeed.

It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that Gavin Newsom is shifting toward the middle in preparation for a national campaign. The only question is how soon that campaign will emerge — and whether his decisions will lead to animosity from the cultural left that could bar him from the Democratic nomination, or help him find success with more mainstream voters found in states outside of California. The most prominent recent decision was Newsom’s decision to veto a bill requiring parental affirmation of trans identification in the context of child custody disputes — one that was passed by a party line vote of 57-16 in the Democrat-dominated California Assembly.

President Biden has declared he’s running for a second term, but it’s far from certain he actually will. His infirmity and low poll numbers raise serious doubts. His physical decline shows when he walks or climbs the stairs of Air Force One. His cognitive decline shows when he refuses to hold press conferences or answer even the simplest questions, like how he feels about the devastating fires in Maui. His decline in the public’s estimation shows when pollsters ask Americans how they’re doing. Four out of five answer, “Not good. Not good at all.” Voters also say they don’t want another general election choice like the last one. So many votes in 2020 were negative ones “against the worse candidate,” not in favor of the better one.

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.

For all the vagaries of presidential contests, we know two things about 2024: Joe Biden's age and Donald Trump's legal troubles are the unavoidable dynamics of this election. Both are impossible to ignore, and are the first things everyone brings up about the current and the former president. Absent an incredible legal sprint through the courts or the discovery of the long-rumored fountain of youth in the great marshes of Rehoboth, these two factors are set in stone. As stories, one clearly overtakes the other in new developments. While the media understands that "Biden trips again" is going to get clicks, it won't get anywhere near as many as the latest intrigue about Trump.

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.

Did you know that the Biden’s State Department is run by neocons? Or that Biden’s foreign policy is “bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive”? Ask the people of Afghanistan suffering under the Taliban or the millions of Ukrainians trying to fend off an imperialist Russia. They would tell you that that is news to them. Those assessments come not from the soft-isolationist right, but rather from Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who joined Elon Musk, David Sacks, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Shellenberger and others for a Twitter Spaces chat on Monday.

California governor Gavin Newsom wants to be president. If he claims otherwise — and he has — that’s Gavin. Integrity is not his strong suit. According to the RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls, the Democratic Party’s leading 2024 candidates are in preferential order: Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, Sanders, Clinton, Warren, Newsom, Ocasio-Cortez and Klobuchar. There’s also talk of a Michelle Obama draft. Newsom’s poll numbers remain low. His state is a mess and his budget surpluses have turned into a $30 billion deficit. He is a whitey-white Anglo heterosexual in an identity-mad party. But the Democratic field is weak, and the Biden candidacy tentative. The little girl on the school bus, Kamala Harris, is the most widely disdained vice president in decades.

Newly-minted Maryland Senate candidate David Trone threatened to “execute” a delivery worker at one of his business locations in Tempe, Arizona, according to a police report exclusively obtained by The Spectator. Trone, who has accumulated millions of dollars as the founder and co-owner of the country’s largest independent wine and spirits retailer, Total Wine & More, was in Arizona on December 15, 2021. It was there that he allegedly threatened to execute Crescent Crown Distributing merchandiser Cody Huard, who was at the time making a delivery at the Total Wine Tempe location; Huard called the police following a heated run-in with Trone.

“What a revoltin’ development this is.” That catch phrase from the 1950s sitcom The Life of Riley succinctly describes America’s political morass today. It sums up Washington’s diddling over the debt ceiling, the administration’s inability to close the southern border and, most of all, the dismal quality of the two presidential frontrunners. The phrase, “what a revoltin’ development,” was Chester A. Riley’s description of his woeful situation at the end of each episode — sitting on his front steps, bemoaning his fate over the consequences of some bad decision or ill-conceived scheme. Then, we sympathized as viewers. Now, we identify as American citizens, looking at the country’s leadership. Let’s begin with the sitting president.