Elizabeth warren

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.

I almost gave tonight’s DNC performance a miss. How could they top the fey chap pretending to be a bat while miming to a poor rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s 'For What It’s Worth' as a collage of kneeling athletes in 'Black Lives Matter' t-Shirts flitted by behind him? It was...special. I’d say that the chap who tweeted that it was 'the moment Trump won reelection' was right, except that there have been so many such moments: positive ones like President Trump’s magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore last month, as well as negative ones like the Biden campaign’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate. One wag said that that decision was a huge in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That sounds right to me.

The oddities of Joe Biden’s third presidential campaign are impossible to ignore. He is the oldest man ever nominated by a major political party, and the first nominee since 1992 to lose both Iowa and New Hampshire. He has been in seclusion inside his Delaware home since March, rarely venturing out of his basement. After winning the primary as a moderate, he has tacked left for the general, reversing the traditional sequence of presidential nominees. Nor has Biden played it safe as his lead grows over President Trump. On the contrary: he has become more ambitious. In April, in a bid for the Bernie Sanders vote, Biden proposed lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare and forgiving some student loan debt.

This COVID-infected campaign season has brought more than its fair share of surprises. Virtual conventions, turnover at the top of the Trump campaign, sudden swings in previously steady polls. It’s a year like no other, Still, one pillar of presidential electioneering remains: Joe Biden needs to pick a running mate.The vice presidency is a peculiar office: at once vestigial and essential. The office has few defined duties. We’ve all read the quote of John Nance 'Cactus Jack' Garner — FDR’s first VP — who described it as 'not worth a bucket of warm piss’. Yet as Garner’s successor’s successor Harry Truman showed, who a candidate picks to play second fiddle can be one of a presidential aspirant’s most monumental decisions.

Elizabeth Warren did not die in a tragic accident yesterday. But judging by the reactions of America’s journalists and academics, you would be forgiven for thinking she had. Instead, she suspended her presidential campaign after a string of self-inflicted, humiliating failures. Yet huge swathes of the overeducated US intelligentsia responded the news as though their entire worldview had been shattered. I don’t see much of a difference in the reactions of Warren’s elite opinion-maker supporters to her campaign suspension and the way Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash was processed by NBA fans: raw trauma and disbelief, with some anger and desperation mixed in.

Being president just wasn’t in Elizabeth Warren’s DNA. The New York Times’s favorite candidate has nevertheless stopped persisting. After finishing third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday, all the smoke signals were there, and the media could no longer circle the wagons around her. The question was never about if Warren was going to fold her tent and go home, it was simply a case of when. Warren was supposedly considering taking her candidacy all the way to the convention, but that would have been quite the gamble for both her and her party.

With the votes still being accumulated and the final counts in California and Texas still to be determined, it’s a fool’s errand to declare vice president Joe Biden the indisputable winner of the Super Tuesday slugfest. Bernie Sanders proved formidable in the west, is competitive in the Lone Star State, and could very well turn in an impressive delegate haul in the Golden State. But there is no disputing that Biden, a dying animal only two weeks ago, is now on the invigorated lion that has found his prey. 'Joementum' is real. But let’s look at the losers. You could make a case that Michael Bloomberg squandered hundreds of millions of dollars for a few delegates in places like American Samoa, Tennessee, Utah, Colorado and Texas.

Arlington, Virginia A special type of Democratic voter lives in the suburbs of DC that conservatives heavily caricature whose existence I couldn't confirm until now. Overwhelmingly white, young, progressive, desperately out of touch, and they love Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren fans are hard to come by nowadays, but I was lucky enough to find one of her last pockets of support at an Arlington Democrats and Arlington Young Democrats election night party. Nearly a hundred of the club's members gathered at William Jeffrey's Tavern, a bar with plenty of craft beers on tap and a projector screen set up to display live Super Tuesday results. Local news crews swarmed the small section of the bar reserved for the group.

At one point in tonight’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, Mike Bloomberg referred to the other candidates as ‘contestants’. The evening certainly felt like a raucous gameshow. The moderators had no control whatsoever. Everybody had a good time. There will be some nice parting gifts, such as nominations to secretary of State or other offices, should there be a Democratic win.Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is dead — it has been for weeks — but she insists on dragging it around and sticking its rotting corpse in the faces of the other candidates. She’s not happening and no ‘selfie line’ (actually just a photo line) is going to change that.

Unlike the previous snoozers where all the candidates pretended to like each other, the debate in Nevada ahead of their caucuses, was exciting. It’s what happens when six politicians, picked to be on a stage together, stop being polite and start being real. But it’s unlikely to make a blip of difference. For one thing, most of the candidates didn’t do what was in their self-interest. Joe Biden had one real job — take the nomination away from runaway train Bernie Sanders. Instead, he let the Mike Bloomberg media campaign get into his head. Bloomberg isn’t on the ballot in Nevada and he isn’t on the ballot in the next contest in South Carolina either.

After her paltry showing in New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren will soon be gone, a victim of her faux personality, her failure at identity politics, her badgering, eat-your-spinach style, and her crucial mistake of telling voters how much her healthcare program will actually cost. Bernie Sanders followed Marx’s pattern: explain how dreadful the current situation is, paint a glorious, gauzy picture of the idealized future, and never explain how it will work in practice or how we can get there without a bloodbath. That’s Bernie’s approach. He steadfastly refuses to say what his gigantic federal programs will cost. The media, initially eager to boost any Democrat against Trump, hasn’t really pressed him on that omission, with the exception of CBS’s Norah O’Donnell. Yet.

'Is there a concert on tonight?', a bystander asked a cop at a traffic light outside the Southern New Hampshire University arena. If only. In fact Democrats from all over New Hampshire (and, let's face it, probably Boston and Vermont too) descended on Manchester's Elm Street for the McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club dinner. Supporters of various candidates stood out in the bitter cold, cheering the names and slogans of their choice for president. A small contingent of Trump supporters also braved the weather in hoodies, one of whom had brought along a large cereal box labeled 'Biden's Corn Pops'. While branded as a dinner, in truth what unfolded was more like a sporting event. Think WWE without the surprise guests, or drama.

Just four months ago, Elizabeth Warren seemed poised to storm the Democratic nomination. In the first days of October, she briefly eclipsed Joe Biden atop the polls. Her supposed rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, had just suffered a heart attack. His candidacy appeared to be fading. Suddenly, Warren was all the rage: she was a woman, which matters a lot to the Democratic media. She talked like a radical leftie, but she didn’t frighten the establishment horses in the way Bernie did. The bookmakers made her strong favorite to win: everybody assumed Warren would hoover up Sanders’s votes as his presidential aspirations vanished once again. Well, the opposite has happened. Bernie Sanders’s campaign has ended up devouring Warren’s.

Their blazers are bright, but their futures are not. Elite women Democrats have faced a brutal reckoning over the past five years. It seemed, as Barack Obama might have put it, that the arc of history was bending in their direction. Half the electorate are female, and feminist identity politics seemed the natural destination for America’s progressive party. It hasn’t worked out that way. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton signaled the beginning of the end for the Pantsuit Nation™. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the DC media bubble crowned her successor to Barack Obama’s Democratic party and a shoo-in for the presidency. The American electorate disagreed.

The stench of beer and cheap deodorant filled the bar in which the ‘Bernie Bros’ were meeting. The scene looked straight out of Fight Club except that the young men assembled there were hairier and none of them had abs.Your humble correspondent watched as the barman prepared a cocktail that combined Jack Daniel’s and Monster Energy.‘What's that?’‘Our speciality,’ he said, ‘It's called “Hillary Clinton's Tears”.’‘I'll have a Coke,’ I said. (I was driving.)‘What are you?’ he sneered, ‘some kind of woman?’I surveyed the crowd. Most of the men were bearded. About half of them were bespectacled. They were all either obese or rail thin. Some of them were gaming. Some of them were podcasting.

The next time Elizabeth Warren offers you a beer, be sure not to turn your back on her lest she crack you across the back of the head with it. That's the message the Warren camp has sent out with the latest Liz-Bernie spat — just in time for the seventh (I know!) Democratic debate in Iowa tonight. Pulling a dirty trick worthy of Roger Stone, Warren's associates briefed CNN about a December 2018 meeting between the two senators, during which Sanders allegedly said 'he did not believe a woman could win.' Saagar Enjeti of The Hill lays out the apparent Warren strategy nicely: 'Progressives. Allow me introduce you to the media ecosystem that has bedeviled conservatives in the Trump age: Step 1) Leak a bullshit smear sans any real confirmation to CNN.