Michael Tracey

Most State of the Union responses by the opposition party are painfully awkward. Stacey Abrams managed not to be, so that alone is an achievement. It’s hard not to grimace when reflecting on past responses featuring down-home heartland governors inexplicably sitting in diners, or perhaps Marco Rubio’s infamous water-bottle sipping episode, which earned him a life-long reputation for unquenchable thirst. Abrams seemed natural and amiable, without resorting to any especially tedious gimmicks (other than the silly backdrop of random people standing behind her. Why is this necessary?). She also made some compelling substantive points.

Bernie Sanders will imminently announce a campaign for president in 2020, according to a Yahoo News report last night. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as all indicators have pointed in this direction for months, if not years. But Sanders skeptics and antagonists have expended major energy sowing doubts about his viability – mostly around his age, race, gender, and party registration. Still, none of these cheap talking points have ever detracted from the fundamental reality that Sanders has a large, existing base of supporters, many of whom desperately want him to run and will work on his behalf. Were Sanders to bow out under pressure, it would reasonably be interpreted as a woeful capitulation.

The first micro-scandal of the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign has already erupted, and he hasn’t even formally declared he’s running yet. Appearing on CNN last week, Sanders was asked about a report in the New York Times that chronicled the ways in which the 2016 version of his campaign allegedly failed to respond to sexist discomforts experienced by female staffers. Pressed if he had been aware of these apparent issues, Sanders reacted curtly: ‘I was a little bit busy.’ One of the allegations detailed in the NYT article was a staff member complaining that she had been saddled with suboptimal lodging arrangements ahead of the Illinois primary.

By most conventional pundit metrics, Bernie Sanders should be the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. To state the obvious, he was last cycle’s runner-up, having won 46 percent of elected delegates, 23 states, and smashed small-dollar fundraising records. His policy platform has taken hold across the party, with most every nationally ambitious figure now calling for universal Medicare, free public college tuition, and a host of other measures that were closely associated with his 2016 run. He has consistently polled as the most popular politician in America, he just won re-election in his home-state by a massive margin, and his social media engagement is off-the-charts. So what’s the problem? Simply put, large sections of the party still view him as a threat.

One interpretation of the midterm election results in the Rust Belt, where Democrats made substantial gains (though not across the board), is that Trump’s unpopularity dragged down Republicans. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania propelled Trump to victory in 2016, and his inability to sustain a base of support there cost Republican candidates for state and federal office – or so the interpretation goes. There’s probably a measure of truth to this. Trump’s approval in Michigan, for instance, lags at 44 percent, according to CNN exit polls; the state re-elected a Democratic senator without much fanfare, as well as a new governor, and several well-established GOP House incumbents were ousted.

Paying homage to Republican national security officials and touting your allegiance to intelligence agencies might seem like an odd strategy to channel the enthusiasm of anti-Trump voters this election cycle but it’s the course chosen by a handful of CIA-operatives-turned-Democrats with decent odds to win House seats today. Foremost among them is Elissa Slotkin, a former ‘Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy’ in the Obama administration who is quick to point out that she also served dutifully under George W. Bush, and apparently assumes that will have electoral appeal among voters in Michigan’s 8th congressional district.

Shortly after yesterday’s outlandish Oval Office episode, several national political reporters under age 40, such as the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, claimed total ignorance of Kanye West’s discography — as though impressed with themselves for being oblivious to one of American pop culture’s most titanic figures of the past decade and a half. Maybe they’ve really somehow never heard ‘Jesus Walks,’ ‘Gold Digger,’ or ‘Power,’ which would cast slight doubt on their ability to gauge the political sentiments of the population they purport to cover. Or maybe they just feel compelled to throw Kanye down the memory hole now that he’s taken up with Donald Trump.

It’s just as well that Bob Woodward’s latest exposé seems to have already faded into irrelevancy. The news cycle has briskly lunged forward to new outrages (real or perceived). His supposedly game-changing revelations have been left behind. Still, Woodward’s brief time in the limelight proved highly profitable. His dramatically titled Fear sold 1.1 million copies in just a week, and once again Woodward was bathed in cultural adulation. ‘Seriously Bob, you seem to outdo yourself every time,’ swooned ‘Morning’ Joe Scarborough, as if expressing gratitude on behalf of the collective punditocracy.

Andrew Cuomo has spent the better part of his tenure in New York engulfed by corruption and governance failure. As he lurches toward a third term of quasi-imperial gubernatorial rule, he has chosen to follow what has become the standard playbook for blemished Democrats needing self-absolution: just attack Trump. Even when Trump has nothing especially to do with the issues at hand, just attack him and hope it suffices for a plurality of the electorate. And so that’s what Cuomo has been doing at the few begrudging campaign stops he’s made in recent days, with actor Cynthia Nixon forcing him to at least give the appearance of seeking popular approval.

The centre of political gravity in the early 2000s moved comprehensively toward default, unrelenting hawkishness, but not necessarily because of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. If liberals went along with the Bush/Cheney foreign policy project, it was often reluctantly and begrudgingly, out of a sense of duty — and in friction with their residual grief over a recent presidential election deemed stolen. The figure who instead inspired the genuine trust of liberals, and gave them confidence in the righteousness of America’s aggressive military path, was John McCain.

Ardent opponents of Donald Trump spend their days proclaiming in ever-shriller tones what a dire threat he poses, not just to the American Republic, but the entire international order. His ardent supporters tell themselves a similar story, but with different inflections; in the mythical rendering that exists only in their minds, Trump is a lonely crusader against “globalism,” constantly under siege by hordes of paedophilic “deep state” vipers hell-bent on sabotaging his efforts to put America first. Both these versions of Trump are quite exciting as competing Homeric tales, and each provide fodder for click-hungry media entities desperate to portray even the most piddling news event as the latest installment in some epic saga.