Joe Biden's Moment

On May 8, 1987, the day Gary Hart was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination campaign in the wake of a sex scandal, ABC News' Peter Jennings asked political commentator Hal Bruno who, among the seven remaining 1988 Democratic candidates for the Presidency, would likely become the front runner in Hart's absence. Bruno scarcely hesitated in answering, "Joe Biden."

Thirty-three years ago today, June 9, 1987, Joe Biden announced that he was a candidate for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.  At the time Biden embarked on his first bid for the White House, Donald Trump was a boorish New York real estate developer who was just beginning to cultivate a reputation outside his hometown.  Nancy Pelosi was a first-term congresswoman (being sworn in that very day, June 9, after winning a special election), and Mitch McConnell was a first-term U.S. Senator from Kentucky whose only major achievement was having been elected in an upset.  Anthony Fauci, already Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was waging a fight against a major epidemic - the AIDS crisis.  William Barr was a Washington lawyer.  Bernie Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and many of the supporters of his future presidential campaign hadn't even been born yet.  Beto O'Rourke was a high school student who occasionally wrote nihilistic poetry.  Cell phones were as large as a brick and had retractable antennas.  The Internet had not been made available for civilian use yet, and the only "social media" we had was MTV.  Personal computers were green-screen contraptions used as word processors, and data was stored on removable "floppy discs" that really were floppy.  Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was in fourth grade, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was three months away from starting kindergarten, and "going digital" referred to buying record albums on compact discs, such as the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released on CD for the first time eight days before Biden declared his candidacy.

Biden's first bid for the Presidency was derailed by a plagiarism scandal, and he would spend the next twenty years cultivating a record of accomplishment in the Senate before beginning the 2008 electoral season as a presidential candidate for a second time and ending it being elected Barack Obama's Vice President.  The twin failures of his earlier presidential bids suggested that neither time was his moment.  But this past weekend Biden won enough delegates to win the Democratic presidential nomination at last - at the age of 77.  With the country rocked by two major crises - a coronavirus pandemic and institutional racism run amok - Biden finds himself hoping to realize his lifelong ambition to become President of the United States at a time far less settled than 1988, a year of relative prosperity that showed some disturbing undercurrents - such as a budding meteorological phenomenon that would come to be known as climate change, as well as the last battles of a nine-year war in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupiers that would embolden a Saudi militiaman named Osama bin Laden.   This time is even less settled than 2008, the year of a great financial crisis that brought the stock market down 4.4 percent in a single day and almost led to the collapse of the economy.  The year 2020 has been a disaster for America and the world.  Biden, despite his age and his awkwardness, would be forgiven to recall the disparaging words about the Presidency from, of all people, Grover Cleveland, the only U.S. President to serve two nonconsecutive terms.  "My God, what is it about this office that would make anyone want to enter it?"  

A lot has obviously changed since America first learned of Joe Biden the summer of 1987, but as I wrote back in November 2019, Biden hasn't.   Staunchly progressive by 1987 standards, he entered the 2020 campaign viewed as a centrist by people who apparently confused him with Bill Clinton.  His policies and positions were out of step with an increasingly radicalized Democratic base energized by Bernie Sanders, whose ideas only recently became mainstream.   Hoping to restore the country to its time under Obama when he began this third presidential campaign, Biden now plans to embrace the most liberal policy agenda since Franklin Roosevelt, or maybe even Lyndon Johnson, to restore a country wrecked by COVID-19 and racial unrest into a country people can be proud to live in.

He wants to make America great again.

And he's just the guy to do it.  His age signifies wisdom, and his experience in Washington betrays a steady hand.  And as we trudge though what may be the worst year in American history of recent memory - and who knows what 2021 will bring! - that's exactly what we need.  I regret that we never got Martin O'Malley's new leadership the same way Bernie Sanders supporters regret that we won't get a revolution, but old leadership to serve an evolution into a freer and most just society will do just fine. 

This is your moment, Joe Biden.

Bye Bye Bernie

Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, and he urged his supporters to continue to vote for him in the remaining states with primaries (and by the way, New Jersey goes dead last again, with its primary rescheduled to July 7 thanks to that damn virus)  in order to accrue more delegates to the Democratic convention to have an impact on the platform.

But - and Sanders was clear about this - he wants to make sure that Joe Biden, as the sole remaining candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and thus the likely nominee, is elected in November because, apart from that damn virus, nothing is more important now than defeating Donald J. Trump.  Sanders hasn't officially endorsed Biden yet, but he will likely do so once the very last primary - again, that would be the New Jersey primary - is held.

Sanders said he lost the nomination but won the ideological battle.  That's about right.  Biden will almost certainly be the nominee, but he will also likely endorse several of Sanders' ideas, and he's already backed Sanders' college tuition reform proposals.  And even though Biden will have a hard time getting Bernie Bros to back him, he won't have an impossible task - not like Hillary Clinton did in 2016.  Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were not friendly with each other and they formed an uneasy alliance in their opposition to Trump. Sanders and Biden, by contrast, are good friends and they have a deep respect for each other.  Party unity won't be so difficult for the Democrats this time,. even though there will always be some Bernie bros who will never vote for Biden because, well, they literally hate him.     

And if they help Trump get elected, I will literally hate them.

Not to worry, though.  Bernie ought to be able to get them to do the right thing. Not him, bros - us.    

Tulsi's Out

Last week, Tulsi Gabbard finally ended her impractical residential campaign.  What was as telling as who didn't get out is who Gabbard endorsed for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination upon her exit.

Gabbard, a darling of the far left, endorsed Joe Biden for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, which is an indication that she understands how crucial it is for her party and her country to unseat Donald Trump.  Even though Bernie Sanders remains resolutely in the 2020 presidential campaign despite the fact that he can't catch up to Biden's delegate count, Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, knows that now is not the time for a revolutionary, progressive political agenda; that can come later.  She knows in this time of a global pandemic and a need for steady leadership that we have to return to where we were before those two dual infections - COVID-19 and Trumpism - took over.  She's a patriot who put party and country over politics.  Her endorsement of Biden was her way of telling Bernie to take a hint.

In addition to being the last woman, the last person of color, and the last millennial in the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, Gabbard, a Hawaii congresswoman, is the last candidate from the West.  So, unless Biden gets California's Kamala Harris to be his running mate (not entirely out of the question), the Democratic national ticket will once again have no candidate from the Western states.  Colorado's Gary Hart, the last Democratic presidential candidate from a Western state who had any realistic chance of winning (well, except maybe New Mexico's Bill Richardson), once said in 1987 that the West was the future of America . . . and in terms of Democratic presidential politics, it likely always will be.  Oh, well, maybe Hart, who turned 83 in November 2019, may still live to see a President from west of the Rockies.  Or maybe we can have an Elton John fan in the White House so we can have a President who's from rock of the Westies. ;-)        

Biden Versus Sanders

So how did what may be the last debate of the Democratic presidential primary season go?

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were able to have spirited debate with no spin, no filters, and, most important of all, no live audience.  Biden showed real strength in dealing with the coronavirus issue and mostly was able to keep his stammer under control.  He held his own against Bernie Sanders' strident attacks on his record, and he did a pretty good job of defending himself.  But he didn't go on the offense often enough, despite some fine points on issues such as climate change and women's issues, and in the times he did go on the offensive, he seemed to be too mannered.  Sanders made valid points on numerous issues, particularly on single-payer health care.  He was also very tenacious and did a great deal to solidify his base.  But he seemed too aggressive and less presidential than Biden, who took advantage of the coronavirus issue and used it as a prime example of why we need to fix things now and worry about great transformative change later, and Sanders was unable to convince me that we can handle radical change when incremental change is more urgently needed thanks to four years of Donald J. Trump.

In short, neither candidate scored a knockout punch.  But both of them came out standing tall.  The voters will have a say on this soon enough.

A Gracious and Polite Man Versus an Angry and Defiant Man

Joe Biden won most of the states selecting delegates to the Democratic National Convention this past Tuesday, including the biggest state, Michigan.  Speaking in Philadelphia, Biden, with his wife Jill beside him, said that he wanted to extend a hand to the newer, more diverse generations coming up in the Democratic Party.  He complimented Bernie Sanders for his own presidential campaign and said he wanted to join Sanders supporters in the common goal of defeating Donald Trump. 

And I can count the number of Sanders supporters who were satisfied by Biden's gracious comments on zero fingers.

Yesterday, Sanders emerged to announce his plans for the short term.  Acknowledging his losses in Tuesday's primaries and caucuses, he sounded like he was prefacing a withdrawal announcement with a final show of resistance, in the style of Gary Hart ("I'm not a beaten man, but I am an angry and defiant man").  Well, Sanders let out his anger and defiance, stressing the need to defeat Trump in November and vowing to do what he could to defeat him, but he did not end his presidential candidacy.  Instead he declared that, while he was losing most of the primary elections and caucuses, he was winning the ideological campaign, as the increasing majority of Americans under 50 agreed with his positions on health care, the environment, and economic justice.  And he demanded that Biden answer the question as to what he, as a moderate who sees no reason to fundamentally change the structure of American democracy, what he was going to do about all that.

Sanders might as well have given Biden his briefing book for Sunday's debate - which Sanders says he looks forward to - for all of the advance questions he threw at him.

Well, then, good.  The debate between Biden and Sanders should be the best Democratic debate of the 2020 election cycle.  Not only will it be the first one-on-one debate between the two men, it will be held only with a moderator and possibly a panel, with no audience and no spin room for reporters because of the coronavirus.  That's a good thing.  It will be a classic debate like the old Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, which also took place without an audience.  It will be a serious discussion between the center-left candidate and the progressive candidate as to where America should go into the 203rd decade of Christendom.  Mano a mano.  Biden versus Sanders.

Sorry, Tulsi.    

A Plea For Sanity

It looks like Joe Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee-in waiting.  He's expected to win the Michigan primary today be a wide margin, though who knows if that's the case until it happens.

Already I see Bernie bros online attacking Biden as a tool of the Establishment and as an untrustworthy centrist who won't bring needed change to this country as President.  Some may be even thinking of going third party on him in November.  Bernie bros?  Please don't!  I'm not saying Biden will definitely be the nominee, and as a registered independent, I remain neutral in this primary election process, but if Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee, as it now seems likely, I urge you to vote for Biden in November because this time we really don't have a choice!  A third-party candidate will only help Trump, especially in swing states.  Yeah, I went third party in a safe state when the idea of "President Trump" was just that - an idea.  But now it's reality, not a reality show, and even Democratic-leaning voters in safe Democratic states can't take a chance on voting Green or whatever this time.  A second Trump term would be a disaster - especially with the coronavirus outbreak going on.  If we can't have a social democratic revolution at this time - and I still insist that, for now anyway, we can't -we should at least get back to normal.

Look, a Biden Presidency would not only help us do that, it would put back together the Obama legacy, which a more liberal successor to Biden can build upon like Bernie Sanders could have done had he been elected President in 2016. Sanders can't get much done as President if elected anyway; he may still have to deal with a Republican Senate and possibly moderate House Democrats to get anything done. He has not spent one ounce of energy to build consensus or expand his base. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if he's not the nominee, it's a moot point. So if Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee, than dammit, don't go crazy - vote for him!

Oh yeah, and if Bernie Sanders is the nominee . . .

. . . I'll vote for him.

The Gift of Gabbard

When CNN's promotional ads for the next Democratic presidential debate on March 15 said it was "down to two" candidates, it became obvious that Tulsi Gabbard became in 2020 what Martin O'Malley became in 2016 - the Democratic presidential candidate no one wants to talk about unless the talk turns comical.

Gabbard says that she's continuing her long-shot run for the Presidency because she says she has "an opportunity to speak to Americans every single day about the sea change we need in our foreign policy," such as our military spending. Uh, don't we have Bernie Sanders for that? In fact, Sanders' positions on both domestic and foreign policy have made her redundant.  And while she doesn't have Joe Biden's unfortunate ability to make gaffes, her favorable comments about Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and her past comments about gay marriage more than equal every stupid thing Biden has said.  She mostly exists as a candidate for the entertainment value.

The difference between Gabbard and O'Malley, though, mostly comes down to Gabbard being less grounded in reality.  I have long had this theory that, when the Russians released e-mails from the Democratic National Committee through Wikileaks, O'Malley intercepted an e-mail from Debbie Wasserman Schultz to John Podesta that said Martin was the most insufferable boor in the entire Democratic Party and that everyone hated him.  And so, with tears in his eyes, O'Malley realized right then and there that he had no chance of winning the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.  But at least O'Malley isn't oblivious to the truth of what people think of him.  By contrast, I think Tulsi Gabbard is utterly clueless about how people view her.  Even though Hillary Clinton reportedly said that the Russians were "grooming" Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to take enough votes away from the Democratic nominee to help Trump win a second term, even though the Democratic National Committee has made it impossible for her to qualify for the primary debates, and even though progressives have completely abandoned her for Sanders, she remains under this delusion that she actually matters.

As with other would-be Presidents who will never occupy the White House, a cult following has developed around Gabbard.  In a way, that's rather nice; she still has a small cadre of people who believe in her and still think she can be President. It's also sort of sad.

Ask someone who knows from personal experience of having supported Martin O'Malley. :-( 

What a Difference a Week Makes

I didn't want to comment on the Super Tuesday Democratic presidential vote until now because, not only did I have a lot of other things I wanted to get off my plate, I wanted to wait and see how the results of Tuesday's voting would unfold.  

And after four days, I never thought it would unfold like this!

A week and change ago, Joe Biden was looking at either a possible loss or merely a narrow win in the South Carolina primary, and when he got the big win he needed, pundits - oh, those silly pundits! - doubted that he wouldn't get a bounce quickly enough to fare well in the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses just three days after.  When the dust settled, four of his opponents said farewell to the campaign and withdrew as candidates, all but one of them backing Biden.  And while Bernie Sanders is still in the campaign, the polls and the trends indicate that running against Biden will not be as easy for him as running against Hillary Clinton in 2016.  

For one thing, Sanders has to persuade voters why his massive spending proposals make sense at a time when the deficit is skyrocketing and he has no foundation to build them on, thanks to Trump's dismantling of the Obama legacy.  Also, a lot of people who voted for Sanders didn't so much vote for him as vote against Hillary Clinton.  Biden is likely to get more votes simply because more people like him.  Another thing is that Sanders has a problem getting more people to back him.  He should have spent the past several weeks expanding his base and giving skeptical centrist voters reasons to follow him instead of Biden, but he apparently couldn't think of any.  His supporters, though, did give people tons of reasons not to vote for Joe Biden.  Bernie may not have enough people willing to vote for him just because they dislike Biden as passionately as his base does, but for anyone who doesn't like either one of them, there's always Tulsi Gabbard. :-D 

Unless you give Sanders points for being Jewish, Tulsi Gabbard is the last example of diversity in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign. She's a woman, she's a Hindu, and she's part Samoan.  But she has no chance of wining the nomination and everyone in America knows it.  She's made too many controversial foreign-policy statements, and her domestic-policy positions seem redundant in light of Sanders' campaign.  The departure of Elizabeth Warren has led women to bemoan the failure of any of the female Democratic candidates to become the party's nominee and lament that the United States won't have a female President in 2021.  Some have have blamed misogyny for the failure of the female candidates' campaigns in this cycle.  

Ladies?  At the risk of sounding like I'm "mansplaining" here, let's review.  It's not Amy Klobuchar's fault or Elizabeth Warren's fault that they won't be the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.  Klobuchar got a lot of momentum, but her failure to capitalize on it had less to do with her campaign abilities than a lamebrained primary/caucus calendar that constrained her.  Neither she nor Warren had the support in South Carolina they needed to go forward.  Warren, the only female candidate to make it to Super Tuesday, only competed in eighteen states.  She might have been a contender at the convention or even won enough delegates for a majority beforehand if the other thirty-two states got to weigh in in a national primary.    I would have voted for either Klobuchar or Warren in November if one of them been nominated.  Despite the underlying fear of a repeat of 2016 - a female presidential nominee losing to Trump - we have to remember that Hillary Clinton was a more polarizing figure than either Klobuchar or Warren, yet she won the popular vote.  Warren would have been a perfect candidate to take on Trump.  Look what she did to Michael Bloomberg.

And that was the really big surprise of the past week.  Bloomberg had the money and the organization, but, as pundits didn't quite figure out until he got out, he didn't have the love and the devotion from voters. Heck, even Martin O'Malley in 2016 had all that!  Bloomberg based his campaign on the idea that the center-left wing of the Democratic Party would abandon Biden, and he calculated that he could fill the gap.  It was all calculation and no passion.  Good grief, people were taking paying jobs with his campaign and actually spent their free time canvassing for someone else, as reported in both the liberal magazine The Nation and the conservative National Review.  But, if you counted the number of Bloomberg supporters who volunteered their own time to the campaign, you'd likely have been disappointed.  

Warren may have gone, but she took Bloomberg down with her in the debates.  But she also did Biden a favor.  Now Mike is ready to help Joe win the White House and defeat Donald Trump by pulling out his wallet and spending lots of money on Biden's behalf.  And that may be Bloomberg's greatest achievement.

And now that the dust has settled, so have I.  Until next time . . . 

Game Changers!

Of all the Democratic presidential candidates who might have gotten out of the 2020 campaign before or as a result of Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg was the least likely candidate, in my estimation, to do so.  But that's exactly what he did this past Sunday night.

Mayor Pete suspended his campaign when it became apparent that he could not win a cross-section of Democratic primary voters after having failed to get much if any traction in the South Carolina primary, where blacks are the majority of the Democratic Party.  He put party and country before his own personal ambition, choosing instead to make it easier for the moderate faction of the party to get behind someone who can win.  Buttigieg has endorsed Joe Biden.

It must be embarrassing for former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley to see all three of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates he singled out for being the future of the party fall by the wayside - first Eric Swalwell, then Beto O'Rourke, whom O'Malley supported (Beto is backing Biden now too!), and now Buttigieg, whom O'Malley backed for Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017.  But Buttigieg may be the best hope for the party in 2028 and beyond.  You might want to take note that he is 38, the same age in 2020 that Franklin Roosevelt was in 1920 when he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee (Roosevelt was born in January 1882; Buttigieg was born in January 1982).  FDR did as 1920 Democratic presidential nominee James Cox's running mate what Buttigieg has already done as a presidential candidate - make connections, show loyalty to the party, run hard, and do favors to be owed for in the future.  The difference is that Roosevelt did it purely for personal ambition; he knew the party had no chance against the 1920 Warren Harding/Calvin Coolidge Republican ticket.  Mayor Pete has been campaigning not just for himself but to help defeat Donald Trump, and by withdrawing, he's made it clear that he can put personal ambition aside and concentrate on the main objective the party has - to defeat Trump.  In other words, he's taking one for the team.

Mayor Pete's exit is indeed a game changer.  It will likely have an impact on today's primaries and caucuses, though it's not quite certain who will benefit.  Some people may even vote for Buttigieg anyway, because his name is on the ballot.  Every vote he does get will be an affirmation of his staying power in the party.

But wait! There's more! Amy Klobuchar also dropped out, and she too endorsed Biden.  All of a sudden, Joe Biden looks like the winner he wasn't only last week, with Michael Bloomberg the only threat to Biden's effort to dominate the center-left lane against Bernie Sanders in the progressive lane.  Bloomberg is on the ballot for the first time today in the states voting for Super Tuesday.  It remains to be seen whether he can parlay his spending into real votes.  But with the rest of the moderates in the party coalescing Biden's improbably successful campaign, it's likely to come down to a two-man race between Biden and Sanders.  Things just changed a whole lot.  

Biden Blowout

One of the old lions of the Democratic Party just stormed into March like one.  Joe Biden won a decisive victory in South Carolina primary.

He came close to winning a majority of the popular vote, something Tom Steyer - who has since withdrawn as a presidential candidate - likely prevented him from doing after spending money on TV ads in the state like a working stiff who drank a lot of take-home pay (is that a great Billy Joel lyric, or what?).  But a win is a win, and this was a big win for Uncle Joe.  As of this writing, Biden has won for delegates in South Carolina for every one delegate Bernie Sanders - who came in a distant second at 28 percentage points behind - picked up, 28 to 7.  Biden's speech about restoring decency and goodness to America encapsulated what this campaign is and should be about, as Donald Trump represents the exact opposite.

U.S. Representative James Clyburn (above, with Biden) introduced Biden at the victory party for the former Vice President as a good man and as a man one can trust. Biden showed how much he earned that trust by urging people to consider what's at stake in November and reaffirming his commitment to the very virtues of America that Trump has undermined.  Clyburn underlined all that in his introduction of the former Vice President by reminding people that only a good nation can be a great nation.  Biden's speech got him some favorable free media that could compensate for his lack of money, for now at least, and it could help him in key Super Tuesday contests coming up this week.

The biggest loser in South Carolina was probably Donald Trump, who appeared in the state in a really the day before the primary to troll the candidates and tried to get Republicans to vote in the open primary for Sanders to help the candidate he thinks he defeat the most handily (didn't work, did it?), and he made himself look even more foolish than usual.  Biden still has his work cut out for him  He has to face Sanders in upcoming primaries and caucuses and also has to deal with the formidable Michael Bloomberg for dominance of the center-left Democratic faction.  But right now, things are looking up for him.  And it makes sense that one of the greatest soul records ever served as the theme music at Biden's South Carolina victory celebration.       

With a Soulful, Bounding Leap . . .

The most recent polls suggest that Joe Biden is going to win South Carolina and win big. Any Democrats nervous about the possibility of Bernie Sanders as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee and are secretly rooting for Biden but don't want to admit it to avoid being seen as uncool should feel comforted by that.  Because the national polls suggest that, despite the Ukraine flap, Biden could still beat Trump in November like a drum.

Biden hopes to use this Leap Day contest as a springboard for the rest of the 2020 campaign, but problem is that, even if Biden wins the South Carolina primary today, he only has three days to capitalize on his victory for the Super Tuesday contests, and given Sanders' huge support in key states like California, Biden might not get very many delegates out of his momentum.  Even worse, there are still six other candidates for the Democratic residential nomination who show no sign of withdrawing or have no reason to withdraw.  Except for Tulsi Gabbard, who, despite her spectacularly vacant candidacy, is not going to withdraw either.

Tom Steyer may have gotten out by now if he weren't doing so well in South Carolina himself.  Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have pockets of support to sustain them.  Elizabeth Warren is hell-bent on staying in, and Michael Bloomberg has vowed to stay in until "the bitter end."  That is, New Jersey.  The Garden State's last-in-the-nation primary on June 2 may be the Democrats' last chance to avoid a brokered convention, as Super Tuesday will likely resolve nothing.  Bloomberg has the money but not the momentum; after South Carolina, Biden may have the momentum, but he doesn't have the money.  Sanders has both, but the jury is still out whether he can win in November; analysis of his chances in the media is as divided as Americans' political opinions.

Thus, even if one or two candidates do withdraw after Tuesday's fourteen primaries and caucuses, the Democratic presidential nomination campaign will still be as confused as ever.  Thank goodness that, like Leap Day, this ritual only happens once every four years.    

Biden His Time Again

I gotta tell ya, I thought Joe Biden was left for dead on the side of the road to the White House, and I was actually looking very hard at Michael Bloomberg for awhile, but the former Vice President seems to be picking up momentum at just the time he needs it.

South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, the highest-ranking black member of the House of Representatives, endorsed Biden publicly yesterday, and after struggling in the polls against Bernie Sanders and the insufferable Tom Steyer in the Palmetto State, Biden found himself leading in the South Carolina primary in a new Clemson University poll by eighteen points.  Despite a few gaffes in Tuesday's debate that could only be called Bidenesque - he grossly overstated the number of Americans killed since 2007 as a result of gun violence by tens of millions - he came across as confident, knowledgeable, and strong.  He demonstrated the indignation and outrage against the Trump administration that led him to campaign for the Presidency in 2020 in the first place.  If he wins big in South Carolina that could change everything about the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign.  If he loses big in South Carolina, that too could change everything about the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign.

Bloomberg did better in the debate, and he regained some of his footing in my opinion, but his mere existence continues to irk Elizabeth Warren and distracts from some of the more shocking statements made about Fidel Castro and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas coming from Bernie Sanders.  Sanders is proving to be something of a loose cannon that could fire a volley into the Democrats' own chances of winning the Presidency in November, and either Biden or Bloomberg will likely be in a better than position going against Sanders than Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar after Super Tuesday on March 3 depending on what happens on this rare Leap Day primary in South Carolina.  After seeing this debate, I feel a little better about the Democrats' chances of unseating Trump.

Until I see that the the Republican National Committee has twenty dollars for every one dollar the Democratic National Committee has.  That's where Bloomberg's money will come in handy, whether he's the party's presidential nominee of not.         

Viva Las Vegas?

Well - that was a shock!

Bernie Sanders won nearly half of the vote in the Nevada caucuses.  The good news for Joe Biden was that he came in second.  The bad news is that he came in a very distant second.  It was like when an American yacht won what became the America's Cup for the first time in 1851, and Queen Victoria, watching at the finish line, asked who was second, with someone telling her, "Ah, Your Majesty, there is no second."

Sanders won fair and square, forging a multi-racial and multi-generational coalition that showed greater strength than pundits previously realized.  He has proven that, despite his controversial policy proposals, he is more than willing and able to take on Donald Trump in November.  Maybe.

It's not over yet.  Michael Bloomberg may have stumbled badly in his first debate, but he has another chance tomorrow in the CBS debate ahead of the South Carolina primary on February 29, and he isn't even on the ballot until Super Tuesday on March 3.  Also, Biden could jump-start his faltering campaign with a decisive win in South Carolina, which is still possible.

(One thing that is not possible: Elizabeth Warren regaining her favorite-aunt image.  I noted that in the debate last week, she came across as the nasty aunt who says your model train set is a piece of junk and then says she's kidding - a real-life moment of mine by the way - but since she started making fun of Bloomberg's height, she comes across as something worse than a nasty aunt.  She's now like a mother-in-law.)   

One caveat to those who want to stop Sanders; the opera may not be over, but the fat lady is warming up.  I still have my doubts about Sanders as the Democratic nominee, but I have a lot of friends who think he can win.  At this point, I have only one thing to say in response to that and I'll say it again and again and again until November if Sanders wins the Democratic presidential nomination:

You'd better be right about this! 

Rolling Craps?

The bruising bloodbath that was the 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas this past Wednesday night may have helped Donald Trump more than any of the Democratic candidates, though, thanks to a few bright moments here and there - none of which involved Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar - I'm not quite ready to build my Kon-Tiki raft and set sail for Europe just yet.

The biggest winner of the debate was probably Bernie Sanders, who won by not losing.  He basically held his own and didn't make any poll-changing mistakes.  But among Democrats - Bernie Sanders is an independent - I would have to say that Joe Biden was the big winner, if only because he was poised, confident, and articulate - three qualities he hasn't been known for in this election cycle.  Also, he gave a shout-out to passenger rail.  What other candidate does that? 

And Elizabeth Warren?  Warren is believed to have won the night for a fiery performance fueled by righteous indignation against Michael Bloomberg, but the quality that always made her so endearing was missing.  Even at her most assertive in previous debates, Warren always came across as the favorite aunt who always bakes chocolate cake for family gatherings because she knows you like it; this past Wednesday night, she was more like the nasty aunt who says that your model train set is a piece of junk and then says she was only kidding.  Except that Aunt Liz wasn't kidding; she really laid into Bloomberg for his "stop and frisk" policy as mayor of New York City and went after him hard over reports of misogynistic practices at his company.  She wanted to prove how she could go hard against Trump, and she turned Bloomberg into a Trump stand-in.

Which brings me to the biggest loser of the night, Michael Bloomberg.  Being the target of withering attacks doesn't make you a martyr, especially when you come to a political debate expecting a policy discussion and find yourself at a shouting match.  And Bloomberg's record has demonstrated that he has a lot of baggage to shout about.  The millions of dollars he spent in carefully crafting an image of a benevolent CEO in his TV ads went down the drain, and he went from being a messiah to being a pariah as he demonstrated his inability to defend himself verbally when the moment isn't scripted.  He knew as soon as Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez changed the rules for qualifying for the debates, which was awhile ago, that he might qualify for this one.  He had ample time to prepare for the debate and knew what to expect; this was the best performance he could come up with?

To be fair, it was Bloomberg's first political debate in over a decade, and there's always next time, right?  Getting it right the second time may not be as good as the first time, but at least Bloomberg knows what not to do should he participate in the next debate on February 25.

But, the Democrat who made out the best wasn't on the stage.  He isn't even running for President.  He's practicing law in Baltimore and promoting a book on online media.

As far as I'm concerned, Martin O'Malley is the big winner because Democrats are left thinking about what could have been, if only they'd listened to those of us who were ready to rally for O'Malley.

All derogatory comments about the former Maryland governor will be deleted.

The Bernie Perplex

The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign is down to two candidates - Bernie Sanders and everyone else.

I should be for Sanders, because he supports single-payer health care, taxing the rich to the level they were taxed at back in the 1950s, and pushing a moon-shot-type program to move to renewable energy.  But I, like many others, fear he can't beat Trump  because he's too far to the left.  A lot of people are afraid that, as President,  he'd spend too much money on free amenities and give away the store.  But Sanders' supporters don't want to hear that.  They are as loyal to him as the MAGA crowd is to Trump, they nitpick to death every flaw of Sanders' opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, and they go nuclear on anyone who doesn't like him.  Even Michael Jackson fans - the Islamic State of celebrity fandom - aren't as brutal to their idol's detractors.

The zealotry exuded by Bernie bros is getting pretty scary, but after what happened to Sanders in 2016, it's understandable. After all, he got screwed by Hillary Clinton supporters back then, but Hillbots screwed Martin O'Malley, too, and I'm doubly pissed off about that because Bernie bros disrespected and laughed off O'Malley as much as Hillbots did. We onetime O'Malley supporters, who did not in fact have meetings in a broom closet, are still smarting over that, and we have long memories and short fuses. We were angry at both camps, and we're not happy to see Bernie bros carrying on again like they did four years ago. It's worse than 2016.  I mean, how do you reason with guys who taunt Joe Biden by bringing a fake coffin to a Biden fundraiser?

Or those attacks on culinary workers in Nevada?

Okay, I'm going to conclude this blog entry from the perspective that it is unfair to paint Sanders supporters with a broad brush, and that not all Sanders supporters are jerks, and the Sanders supporters I know wouldn't do a thing like this.  So here it is:  Sanders currently leads Trump in head-to-head poll match-ups, he has momentum, and he's right on most of the issues.  And even though a comparison of his policies to Roosevelt's New Deal proposals in the 1932 presidential campaign is probably a nervous one at best, given that the economy in 2020 is far different than what it was in 1932, when one out of four people were unemployed but we still had a strong industrial base, I'll take at face value the idea that Bernie can defeat Trump in November as the Democratic presidential nominee, which is what my Sanders-supporter friends have been telling me.

Okay, my Sanders-supporter friends, I'll accept your arguments.  I'll accept the idea that Sanders, as the Democratic presidential nominees,  can defeat Trump.  But if he is the nominee, you'd better be right about this!      

Joe Biden's Last Hope

Imagine the headlines in the Sunday papers the day after the South Carolina primary on February 29:

BIDEN LEAPS BACK TO FRONT RUNNER STATUS  

LEAP DAY WIN HELPS BIDEN LIVE TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY 

AFTER 2/29 WIN IN SC, BIDEN LEAPS INTO MARCH LIKE A LION

Well, I'm sure that's what Biden would like to see.  And the former Vice President can still pull it off.  He still has the lead in the polls, and he's fighting like hell in South Carolina.  But even with that, it may not be enough.  Not only is Tom Steyer - who undistinguished himself in Iowa by winning a mere 0.3 percent, half of what Martin O'Malley got in 2016 - gaining in the South Carolina polls, so is Bernie Sanders.  One projection even has Sanders winning.

A solid performance in the Nevada caucuses on February 22 might help Biden gain traction in time for the South Carolina primary, but he faces two obstacles.  One is that Sanders is much better organized there despite opposition to his single-payer health care proposal due to the generous health benefits offered by the culinary worker's union, a big force in Nevada politics thanks to the hospitality business in Las Vegas and Reno.  Another is that the culinary union, whose support Biden was counting on to give him a boost in the Silver State, has decided not to endorse anyone.  Sort of reminds me of the "Muppet Show" episode parodying awards shows in which Miss Piggy is in both sketches up for Best Muppet Sketch and knows she can't lose . . . until the judges decide not to give out the award.  Biden must be fuming in private about losing his chance to grab a major endorsement and get some desperately needed positive media attention.

Biden doesn't seem to be doing enough to shore up his support in South Carolina, especially among black voters, and his palmetto firewall is showing cracks and splits.  He still has a chance to turn things around, but the feeble, lackadaisical nature of his campaign in recent weeks suggest that he's not up to the task.  He might have to withdraw as a candidate on March 1 . . . and the Democrats could leap into chaos in time for Super Tuesday.

Bloomberg's Chance

As Michael Bloomberg suddenly becomes a viable alternative to Joe Biden at a time when Biden is tanking and Bernie Sanders - who, as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, would be an American Jeremy Corbyn - is rising, questions about the former New York City mayor have surfaced, and he faces a triple whammy two weeks and change before Super Tuesday.  

Bloomberg still has to deal with the fallout from the "stop and frisk" policy toward young black men that he pursued as New York City mayor, his alleged defense of redlining, and newly released information about having made sexually suggestive comments about female employees before he became mayor of New York.  And since Bloomberg is quickly emerging as the one Democrat who could beat Donald Trump now that the Ukraine scandal has hurt Biden while leaving Trump unscathed, he has to go on a damage-control initiative that's less damage and more control.  Because when you have the opposite of that, you're Gary Hart.

Bloomberg has offered numerous explanations for policies he now says he regrets, saying that his "stop and frisk" policy followed demographic trends and insisting that what he meant when he said that the end of redlining caused the housing crisis was that predatory lenders lent money to people in low-income areas who couldn't possibly pay them back. As for these latest sexism charges, Bloomberg's supporters have pointed out that these charges are from the early nineties, and that he's changed his attitude toward women over time.  Fine.  So maybe Bloomberg ought to take part in the Democratic debates and offer an explanation and some damage control to establish himself for Super Tuesday.

Democratic activists are fuming over Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez's decision to change the campaign funding requirements and thus allow Bloomberg to take part in the February 19 Democratic presidential debate, assuming he meets the threshold in four nationwide polls.  Having qualified in three polls, Bloomberg should take the opportunity to participate in the debate if he qualifies in a fourth poll and make a sincere effort to put all of these controversies behind him.  It's all good and fine for him to go after Trump now, but he's not the nominee yet.

Democratic Disarray - 2020 Edition

I believe it was British prime minster Harold Macmillan, who served Her Majesty from 1957 to 1963, who said that a week in politics is a lifetime and a month in politics is an eternity.  So the Democrats probably hope that, with Iowa, Trump's Senate acquittal, and his relatively good poll numbers (actually, it's only one poll, but let that pass) having smitten them last week, they can get all that behind them and look ahead.

Not so fast.

The Democratic Party is broken, and it can't just be fixed in a week.  The damage from last week is too great and too obvious to paper over.  This time two weeks ago, Nancy Pelosi was deemed one of the most effective tacticians in the history of Congress.  This week, she's seen as a defensive old woman who was only too happy to give in to demands to impeach Trump despite knowing the eventual outcome and knowing that the Ukraine affair would be followed by Trump shaking down China, Turkey, the Czech Republic, or maybe even East Timor if he thought it would help him get dirt on Democratic candidates in the presidential election - and then have a paper-tearing tantrum when she realized she'd blown it.  Perhaps her biggest mistake was to work with Trump in getting a revised trade deal with Mexico and Canada to prove that the Democrats can still work to improve people's lives while still pursuing impeachment. Despite changes that helped workers and increased the required domestic content of U.S.-made automobiles, Trump ended up taking all of the credit for it and did not invite a single Democrat to the deal's signing ceremony.  Freshman House Democrats who won their seats in districts that Trump had carried in 2016, including my own congresswoman, find themselves, according to a couple of polls, now on the verge of being thrown out in November by Trumpers who are pissed off at them for supporting impeachment.  And the latest Senate forecasts now give a slight edge to the Republicans for keeping their majority and Mitch McConnell keeping his seat in particular.  It was McConnell himself who pointed that out.  Speaking of McConnell, the Democratic effort to brand him as an obstructionist for refusing to allow Senate votes for popular bills the Democratic House has passed has won no brownie points for Pelosi and her leadership team. 

The Democratic Party is on life support now.  Unless Democratic candidates for President and for state and local offices can focus on issues having nothing to do with impeachment, like health care and education, and unless they're willing to acknowledge the robust economy while still insisting that they can deliver more prosperity to more people - the people so far left out of the Trump economic juggernaut - they could lose everything in November.  Not just the Presidency, but the House of Representatives and a chance to retake the Senate.  And with Trump still in office in 2021, the Supreme Court could swing solidly to the right with the already rightward swing in the federal courts being further strengthened.  And it's a safe bet that if the Democrats fall from power nationally, their hold on state and local offices could collapse as well.  That will be it.  That will really . . . be . . . it.

Trump won't have to get a Republican Congress to abolish opposition parties with a national emergency as an excuse because the Democrats will have already disintegrated.  

If last week's events can be compared to a car getting stuck in the snow, then the present time is about getting that car out of the snow so the Democrats can resume their journey to their intended destination, which is the White House.  That effort begins today, ironically, in the snows of New Hampshire with the presidential primary.    

Biden His Time

No doubt about it; the Democrats had an apocalyptic week.  Following Trump's State of the Union address, which went off without a hitch (always possible, given his penchant for riffing), Trump's approval rating went up to 49 percent - meaning he has more support than he did the day was elected to the White House - his approval rating on the economy surged to an inexplicable 63 percent, and Democrats suddenly looked very churlish by talking the economy down.  Meanwhile, the Senate acquitted Trump in his impeachment trial (with Mitt Romney being the only Republican to vote for his conviction), he's fired Alexander Vindman from the his national security staff for testifying against him in the impeachment inquiry hearings and he sacked EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland for the same thing.  The Democrats may soon feel his full fury; Nancy Pelosi is still reeling from criticism of her act of tearing up a copy of Trump's last speech, the Trump base has been shored up against them in advance of the election, and the party still - still - doesn't have a presidential front runner.

And then there's Joe Biden.

Between Senate investigations of him and his son proceeding and his fourth-place showing in Iowa, Biden looks like a dead man walking, a man who began the campaign season as the next President of the United States but now looks to end it - prematurely - as a relic of the past who was too cocky and too self-assured to realize that his sell-by date was up and that he ought to go gently into the good night before either Bernie bros or Trumpers push him headfirst into it.

Not so fast.  What we learned from Iowa and what we may yet learn from New Hampshire is that their first-in-the-nation status in the primary an caucus system is so antiquated that the "gut punch" Biden got in Iowa and may yet get in New Hampshire may not matter much.  Biden is on the edge of the cliff, but he's fighting his way back from it, as his aggressive stance in New Hampshire and in the ABC debate this past Friday would suggest, and he's counting on respectable finishes there and in Nevada before going on to South Carolina.  

Oh, I've seen and heard the snark against Biden from various pundits, but this all seems to be from the perspective of overpaid media personalities taking cheap shots against whoever happens to be down, and this time it's Biden.  Snark is just something every politician has has to deal with since Gary Hart made a fool of himself at a newspaper publisher's convention in the 1988 campaign and opened the floodgates for death by punditry. (The snark Beto O'Rourke ultimately got was a classic example of the media tearing down a figure they'd built up once they realized they should never have built him up in the first place.  If I may refer you to a critique of Beto from just before he quit the presidential campaign . . . ) 

Biden may be a lousy candidate, but he would make a better President than he is a candidate, and he knows that.  That's what keeps him going and makes him keep trying.  By his own admission, he isn't going to win in New Hampshire, but if he finishes a solid second or even third, he'll live to fight another day.  Two other days - Nevada on February 22 and South Carolina on Leap Day, February 29.    

Again, I'm not endorsing or supporting Biden and I will only vote for him if he is the Democratic presidential nominee.  And truth be told, it's looking less likely that that will happen.  Especially after Bernie Sanders and the now-ascendant Pete Buttigieg finished strongly in Iowa and look to capitalize on that momentum in New Hampshire.  But they'd better start worrying because pretty soon the campaign moves toward states where support for them is not is not as strong.  If Joe Biden can capitalize on that circumstance, he'll be in better shape.  If he can't, well, that's why Michael Bloomberg is waiting in the wings.

I'll look at Bloomberg later.

O'Malley Feels the Bern Again

Now that John Delaney has quit his presidential campaign (much to my relief), Martin O'Malley is set to regain his position as the most disrespected Democrat from Maryland.  He recently told the Guardian that he is fearful of Bernie Sanders' rapid rise in the campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and sees him as a threat to efforts to unseat Trump because he's too far to the left and is not even a member of the Democratic Party.  Further, he says, Sanders' record has some serious flaws that would make him an awkward Democratic standard bearer -like his past support of the National Rifle Association, for example.

"Bernie’s still being given a bit of a free pass by the national media," he said.  "I do not believe that he would be a strong candidate for our party in the fall. And, except for three months out of every four years, he’s not even of our party . . .  He's a man who never has accomplished anything in public office, who has, I believe, demonstrated his inability to forge a governing consensus, let alone hold a governing consensus. And I think he’d be an awful choice as our party’s nominee."

Needless to say, O'Malley's comments drew ire from Bernie bros, many of them going to Twitter to ridicule his failed 2016 presidential campaign and telling him in no uncertain terms what he could do with himself.  (Some of them even made fun of his name, saying it sounded like that of a cartoon character.)   Since I was in a bad mood at the time I noticed this, I responded to the O'Malley-haters with a few choice words of my own, and let me tell you, I was in an extremely bad mood, so I really unloaded on them!

And I don't blame O'Malley for picking this fight.  After all, the 2016 Sanders campaign showed as much disrespect for him as the Hillary Clinton campaign did - maybe even more disrespect - and Sanders' mere presence in the 2016 presidential nomination discombobulated him and destroyed whatever chance he had of challenging Hillary directly.  When Hillary attacked Sanders earlier this year, it was the churlish reaction of a bad loser.  When O'Malley does the same thing, it's righteous indignation born out of  of having had to run for the Presidency with  the deck stacked against him not only by the Democratic National Committee but by an independent who shouldn't have run for the party's nomination in the first place.

O'Malley proved as governor of Maryland that you don't have to destroy the system in order to deliver progressive results, but he never got a chance to make his case for working within the system.  And recent events have proven many in the Sanders camp to be intolerant, self-righteous, and smug.  I actually agree with a lot of Sanders is saying, but he's not going to win.  I once said that O'Malley's and Sanders' positions were mostly similar with only a difference in temperament, but it turns out that difference in temperament is far more significant than a difference of opinion.  As governor of Maryland, O'Malley probably found it easier to deal with Republicans in Annapolis than with someone of Sanders' ilk. 

O'Malley's doing fine, now, thank you, teaching, consulting, and promoting his book - more on online media than on mainstream TV news, which clearly wants nothing to do with him - but the activity could theoretically lead to bigger and better things. If either Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or Michael Bloomberg is elected President  in 2020, any one of whom will likely serve only one term due to age, O'Malley could run for President again in 2024, though it would be a stretch for him to try to regain elective office a decade after last holding it (unless he gets a Cabinet post in a post-Trump Democratic administration).  The possibility of a 2024 presidential election with the incumbent retiring, however, does provide an opportunity.  Sadly, with the way things are going, that incumbent could be Donald Trump.