Michael Tracey

When asked by the New York Times why her presidential bid ended in such spectacular failure, Kirsten Gillibrand said, ‘I don’t know… My campaign may well have been ahead of its time.’ Well, that’s one way of putting it. An alternative explanation is that it was a poor choice to construct a campaign specifically to align with the sensibilities of hyper-woke professional class Democratic consultants. Unfortunately for Gillibrand, other female candidates have done perfectly well, with one (Elizabeth Warren) now hovering at second or third place nationally and on a consistent upward trajectory. That kind of precludes Gillibrand from blaming her failure on the unwillingness of voters to embrace a woman as their party’s standard bearer.

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.

‘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.

Does anyone in their right mind really think the ‘War on Terror’ waged by the United States since 9/11 has been a successful policy? , The terrorist group the US claimed it was most determined to destroy, al-Qaeda, has surged in strength over the last few years. ISIS sprouted in Iraq and Syria as a direct consequence of the general ‘War on Terror’ posture, which had its most egregious manifestation in the 2003 invasion. Today, the US bombs countries and stations troops all over the world with the nebulous goal of ‘defeating terrorism,’ which of course is just a tactic and can never be truly ‘defeated’ – or so we once thought.Back in the George W.

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.

Did someone give Bernie Sanders a hit of speed or was he just especially animated? Last night's debate performance was among the most adept he’s ever delivered. CNN, in its infinite objective wisdom, chose to structure the debate such that he was 'pitted' against the 'moderates', and Bernie parried off the ensuing 'moderate' attacks with unusual gusto. Large segments of the population are by now safely accustomed to Bernie’s stump speech, but they’re perhaps less accustomed to him vigorously defending his positions amid a wave of naysayers. He demonstrated that he has the mental and logical acuity to do this more than capably.

Over eight million Americans received an unsolicited marketing email on Tuesday. But unlike the random vacation offers and buy-one-get-one-free enticements that regularly flood the nation’s inboxes, this email arrived to announce the presidential campaign of a pious billionaire. Tom Steyer had very cleverly cultivated the email list for several years on false pretenses, putting himself front-and-center of a PR initiative to impeach Donald Trump well before most in the Democratic party were willing to entertain that notion. By October 2017, Steyer had already launched his ‘Need to Impeach’ organization, which exhorted the public to sign up for his email updates or else risk collapse of the American constitutional order.

The candidate whom Americans should be the most ironically happy is running for the Democratic presidential nomination is surely Eric Swalwell, the goofball California congressman. Of all the contenders, Swalwell best embodies the brand of performative liberal politics that has been in vogue since the election of Donald Trump. It’s at essence the sensibility of MSNBC, which focuses incessantly on Trump’s vulgar personal traits and the never-ending Russia/Mueller saga at the expense of every other issue. So too does Swalwell, which is why he has become one of MSNBC’s most frequent and cherished guests.

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.

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.

It looks more and more like a foregone conclusion that impeachment proceedings will be initiated against Donald Trump in the near future. Bernie Sanders became the latest Democratic presidential candidate to call for this on Thursday, joining a cast of characters that includes Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Seth Moulton, and Wayne Messam. Bernie’s quandary is a particularly fraught one. He had equivocated for months on impeachment, lagging behind his chief ‘progressive’ competitor Warren, who was first to call for proceedings after the Mueller report’s release. You may not agree with Warren’s analysis, but at least she read the report and formed an independent conclusion.

Bill de Blasio is the only candidate running for president whose entry into the race is perhaps a tad surprising. With the others, even those with miniscule odds of actually securing the Democratic nomination, there is some modicum of sense: get your name out there, promote your pet issues, accrue some political capital to burnish a future bid for another elected office, and if worst comes to worst you’ll still have ‘former presidential candidate’ in your title – which is sure to bring forth generous speaking fees and book deals. MSNBC might even give you a TV show. But with de Blasio, at least at first blush, the logic gets much hazier. His liabilities are so manifestly obvious that even his own staff reportedly begged him not to run.

A common fallacy circulating among the pundit class is that every presidential election cycle will be as ‘disruptive’ as 2016 undoubtedly was. Or in other words, the lessons of that year – which marked a genuine ideological upheaval across the political spectrum in the United States – are extrapolated into the aphorism that such all-consuming disruption will be the ‘new normal’ going forward. But there’s a decent chance that 2020 instead brings a reversion to the predictable and the banal.

Since the release of the Mueller report, with each passing day comes a new and increasingly strident demand to impeach Donald Trump. The New York Times, Washington Post, and various prestige magazines are cluttered with such demands, casting impeachment as an imperative for the survival of American democracy. Mueller might have affirmatively concluded that no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia ever came close to being established, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats and their journalist allies from barreling full-steam ahead down this rabbit hole.

If the report released Thursday proved anything, it was that Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors had an extremely broad mandate to investigate all conceivable angles of the theory that Donald Trump and/or his associates colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Page after page of the report describes the elaborate lengths Mueller went to ascertain whether there was any truth to this theory. And using the most emphatic language available to a prosecutor working within the confines of his legal remit, Mueller concluded with virtual certainty: No. There was no collusion.

Here’s an intense irony for you. The journalistic activity for which Julian Assange has been indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia led to the exposure of blatant American war crimes and official deceit in Iraq: the very war Donald J. Trump vociferously decried during his successful presidential campaign. Over and over again in 2016, Trump lamented ‘Iraqi kids blown to pieces’ and pilloried Hillary Clinton for backing the invasion. And yet now, by seeking the extradition and prosecution of Assange on charges that stem directly from the revelation of those crimes, Trump has chosen to shunt all this aside and do the bidding of his besmirched GOP predecessor, George W. Bush.

Can you think of a more vulgar and disgraceful manifestation of Trump-Russia media malfeasance than Rachel Maddow? Her deluded nightly conspiratorial rants may have been lucrative for MSNBC, but she fed viewers a complete fraud for three years. Now her show is undergoing a genuine existential crisis after Robert Mueller’s exoneration of Trump. The harm Maddow inflicted is unforgivable and she should obviously resign, go into exile, and take up some other line of work: perhaps gardening. That said, she has also become something of a scapegoat. It’s convenient to disavow Maddow’s excesses if you’re a journalist who wants to pretend that the media failures which gave rise to Trump-Russia weren’t a full-scale indictment of their entire profession.