Beto!

Well, well, well, well, only one day until I suggested that we might have to wait awhile for Beto O'Rourke to announce whether he's running for President, he decided to announce that he was going to . . . run for President!

Robert Francis O'Rourke is a walking set of contradictions.  He's seen by many as an exciting and progressive candidate for the Presidency and as a moderate who's the worst thing to happen to the nascent progressive movement since Obama gave us a watered-down, centrist administration.  O'Rourke has presented strong opinions on climate change and health care reform but has offered no concrete ideas or policies to deal with those issues.  He comes to the presidential campaign with the love and respect of Mexican-Americans in his hometown of El Paso and a commitment to racial justice and compassion for immigrants, yet he is seen as an egomaniacal honky who thinks he was "born" to stand for the Presidency in 2020.  He brings a record of accomplishment that is as thin as porridge - but so did Lincoln, we are told, yet we are also told that no woman or person of color with his record would be taken seriously.  On the other hand, he has more experience in government than what Donald Trump had in 2016 or what Howard Schultz has going into 2020.  He voted with the oil and banking interests.  He also supported Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all proposal.  He wants to work with Republicans just like Obama wanted to, but he wants to accomplish un-Republican things like abolish private prisons and legalize marijuana.

But what does Beto believe?  What one believes was a question neither Obama nor Bill Clinton - or Hillary Clinton, for that matter - could ever answer, and Beto hasn't answered it yet.  He's hit the ground running with his lofty rhetoric and his vague promises, but he needs to fill in the blanks.  Because his opponents are already doing so.  And I'm not talking about Trump or O'Rourke's Democratic opponents for the party's 2020 presidential nomination.  I'm talking about rank-and-file Democratic base voters who want to know how a guy who couldn't even defeat Ted Cruz for Senate could ever defeat Trump for the Presidency and call him a closet Republican masquerading as a progressive, a contemptible centrist jerk, a spoon-fed filthy-rich white boy benefiting from all the privilege that implies . . ..  but mostly a guy who's all style and no substance.  Perhaps the progressives in the Democratic Party have reason to be suspicious of Beto, but the nasty comments that have been hurled at him have been pretty silly.  He had his wife Amy by his side when he astutely released his announcement at 6 A.M. Eastern time,  just in time for the morning news cycle, and he got slammed because his wife was looking at him smiling without saying a word, with many people comparing her to a car show model or something like that. 

Thanks to his vagueness, however, Beto can expect more of that.  Obama ran a similar campaign of hope for the future in 2008, but his lack of substance as President led to an angry wave of right-wing populism that led to Trump.  Gary Hart waited too late to explain his "new ideas" when he ran against Walter Mondale for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.  He learned that lesson for 1988, only to be done in by his own arrogance when he thought he could invite a "ladyfriend" to his townhouse three days before giving a speech laying out his ideas to a press corps who couldn't care less about his policies when his sex scandal had already mangled his carefully honed image.  As a Texan, O'Rourke probably knows how to deal with right-wing populism better than Obama, and he most likely doesn't have the same dubious personal life as Hart, but if he's going to take himself seriously as a presidential candidate and allow others to take him seriously, he's going to have to explain what he would do as President and how he'd do it without sounding like he's parroting threadbare Democratic talking points.

I am very interested in Beto but remain unconvinced that he's the one; I'm still considering Jay Inslee or Julián Castro, among (many) others, in fact.  Irish identity politics and Martin O'Malley's endorsement of O'Rourke aren't going to be enough for me to back him, though; without a substantial record to show me, Beto's going to have to do more to convince me that he's Lincolnesque for reasons other than his 6'4" height. But I'm willing to listen.

Unlike some people (*cough cough*, Bernie Sanders supporters, *cough cough*) I could mention.

Marianne Faithfully

For those of of you who are disappointed that Oprah Winfrey isn't running for President in 2020, take heart: The Democratic presidential nomination process has a new Winfreyesque candidate to fill the void.

Marianne Williamson declared her candidacy for President not too long ago.  You might remember her as the self-help guru who ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from California in 2014.  Well, she's back and she's not just seeking a higher office; she wants to put America in touch with a higher reality.

An explanation: Marianne Williamson's entire shtick is based on a New Age theory of "spiritual regeneration" and the idea that physical reality is just an illusory dream.  This got her Winfrey's attention back in the early nineties, and she quickly became a "spiritual adviser" to Winfrey, who is a big advocate herself of creating one's own reality through magical thinking.  Williamson summed up her entire message of her presidential campaign with this statement on CNN:

"We need a moral and spiritual awakening in the country.  Nothing short of that is adequate to fundamentally change the patterns of our political dysfunction." 

Just gotta have a little faith, right?

But wait - there's more!  Not only do we need an awakening, she says, we need to rediscover love.  This was of course the theme of her 2014 House campaign, and the idea of bringing love to Washington sounds as mushheaded now as it did then.  I may have once said that if we all have love, everything else will fall into place, but getting things done in Washington isn't based on love; it's based on compromise.

And what are her qualifications for the highest office in the land?  A 35-year year career of dealing with "the deeper levels of moral dysfunction" and "naming and transforming those dynamics."

Silly me, and I thought a good qualification for the Presidency was to serve two terms as governor of Maryland.

Anyway, Williamson's platform is mostly no different from other Democratic presidential candidates who have actual experience in governing.  She supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal proposal, universal background checks for gun owners, and tuition-free college.

But get this.  She also advocates a $100 billion budget for paying reparations to the descendants of slaves, to be paid out over ten years.

Not only does this have no chance of becoming reality (but then, Marianne Williamson is famous for being undeterred by reality!), she's going to have to deal with the argument, put forward by cultural critics such as James Howard Kunstler and Jamie Malanowski, that reparations have been paid for slavery  - 360,222 Union soldiers and their Commander-In-Chief, Abraham Lincoln, paid with their lives.     

Even if you favor reparations for the descendants of slaves, you have to admit that Marianne Williamson is completely unqualified to be President and that her candidacy is a joke. It's being taken seriously, though, if only because too many people took a joke candidacy like Donald Trump's seriously, and now we have a bad joke in the White House as a result.  But Trump's election only made it possible for anyone to run for President.  Even a flaky New Age guru like Williamson.   

So if I think we should not take her seriously, why am I writing about her?  Because it beats talking about Tulsi Gabbard.

I think Martin O'Malley made a huge mistake by deciding not to run for President in 2020.  He scoffed at the idea of inexperienced celebrities like Oprah running for the job, yet Williamson is a candidate and O'Malley isn't.  So far the choices for an opponent for Trump have ranged from unsatisfying to dismaying.  I don't see that changing any time soon.      

Down Around San Antone

Former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julián Castro announced his candidacy for President of the United States over the weekend.  Despite his celebrity status within the Democratic Party - and because of his lack of celebrity status outside the Democratic Party - Castro is considered a long shot. 

Castro, vying to become the nation's first Hispanic President, brings his expertise as an administrator over urban affairs and a strong liberal policy on immigration; his grandmother was an immigrant herself, from Mexico.  Alas, none of his executive experience comes from his position before HUD Secretary, that of mayor of San Antonio.  See, San Antonio has a council-manager form of municipal government, in which the mayor is a lot like the president of a European parliamentary republic, with very few executive powers, and the real chief executive is the city manager, who is the equivalent of a prime minister.  Perhaps Castro should have served as the city manager.       

Nevertheless, his background and his experience should still serve him well in the 2020 presidential campaign.  While it is true that former HUD secretaries have never become President - though former presidential candidates have become HUD secretaries, including the current one, the spectacularly insufferable Ben Carson - Castro is an attractive enough candidate to have a shot of making history by being first person to go from running housing policy to running the country as well as making history by being the first President of his ethnicity.

And if he ever makes it to the White House, seeing him and his twin brother Joaquin together in the same room should provide for some delightful confusion. :-D       

From Washington State to Washington, D.C.?

Washington State governor Jay Inslee  has all but made it clear that he's running for President.  He joins Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, Colorado senator Michael Bennet, and California senator Kamala Harris as likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidates vying to be the party's first presidential nominee from the West - a distinction Gary Hart came tantalizingly close to achieving.

Not only is Inslee the only governor in this select pack, he is planning to make the need to do something about climate change the centerpiece of his campaign, something that's sure to attract younger voters.  Unfortunately, there's nothing else in his record to suggest that he can attract those same voters, assuming they're inclined to even vote.  Inslee is a competent governor with a solid record on all of the issues Democrats care about, but his policy positions are mostly the sort that inspire traditional Democratic boiler-plate talking points.  That might be enough to win a general election, but it wouldn't necessarily help Inslee in the primaries and caucuses.       

In short, he's betting on enough people to care about climate change to give his campaign momentum.  Considering all of the extreme weather we've been having in this country lately, though, that might actually be sure thing. 

Taken For Granite

Martin O'Malley has been making the rounds in New Hampshire - ostensibly to rev up Democrats for the 2018 midterm elections and campaign for and support local Democratic candidates, but of course New Hampshire is the home of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.  O'Malley refuses to speculate on a possible 2020 presidential bid, saying he still has to think along and hard before he decides on that.  And possibly pray as well - he was educated by Jesuits, remember.

The good news is that people aren't making fun of O'Malley anymore.  His recent engagements up in the Granite State actually got some good notices, and two New Hampshire talk-radio hosts complimented him for his articulate, direct speaking style.  (Note: The quality of your speaking style is inverslye proportional to your ability to win votes.)   The bad news is that many people still regard O'Malley as an afterthought, largely because he was only able to compete in one state (Iowa) in 2016 as a presidential candidate and the voters there wasted no time in telling him to get the hell off the stage. Pundits and late-night comedians go out of their way not to mention him in talking about 2020.  They'll say the next Democratic presidential candidate should be another black guy, like Eric Holder or Cory Booker, or perhaps a woman, preferably Kamala Harris, who being a half-black, half-South Asian woman married to a white man, is Jesse Jackson's entire Rainbow Coalition, her own balanced ticket.  Or they look to the Kennedys - look, Bobby's grandson Joe is a rising star!  Or Kirsten Gillibrand, who holds the Senate seat once held by Bobby Kennedy and Hillary Clinton (though the Kirsten for President craze has cooled somewhat).  Or maybe Hillary again!  They're even encouraging 76-year-old Bernie Sanders to run again because, well, he's the most popular politician in the country and because aging Baby Boomers who suddenly won't trust anyone under 60 are just as suddenly saying that age doesn't matter.  Bill Maher has been hoping for another Sanders run, insisting that older people have a lot to contribute.  The 62-year-old Maher has said that if Sanders doesn't run, there'll be no one else, unless Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown's likely successor as governor of California, should decide to run for President after only two years as governor.  And that other geezer, Joe Biden, is being taken seriously at the age of 75.                

And if all else fails . . . there's always Oprah.

O'Malley has been ignored in large part because of what pundits seem to perceive as a nerdy, pollyanna-ish approach to public service on his part that's more out of 1960 than 2020.  (In New Hampshire last week, O'Malley even got upstaged by Ohio governor John Kasich, seen as a possible GOP primary challenger to Trump in 2020.)  Also, there's O'Malley's insistence that the Republicans are the Democrats' opponents rather than their enemies (hardly the best way to win over bloodthirsty Democratic partisans, especially Hillary partisans already offended by O'Malley's mere existence), and also his low popularity among blacks, a linchpin of the Democratic base.  And yet it's Michael Steele, the nation's most prominent black Republican, who has been among the first to suggest that O'Malley might be a major presidential contender for 2020.  When he suggested this to Chuck Todd on MSNBC, Todd, known for cavalierly dismissing people, suggested that Steele, who is from Maryland, was biased toward a fellow Marylander.  But Steele quickly schooled Todd on how O'Malley has been making a lot of "interesting noise" in politics (I assume he meant O'Malley's Win Back Your State PAC) and reminded Chuckles the Clown that O'Malley is very good at retail politics and with hand-to-hand campaigning.

Todd found that he couldn't argue with that.

I maintain that O'Malley will run, and once he throws his hat in to the ring, there will be some difficult days for him as he moves forward, given all of the people who still expect little if anything from him.  But if and when he gains traction out of first Iowa and then New Hampshire, you can expect more people to take Martin Joseph O'Malley very seriously.

And then we break out the Pop-Tarts.

O'Malley made a speech at a New Hampshire event last week, and it's online.  I'll comment on that once I get the chance to actually watch it.       

Pop-Mart

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had born as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." - Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" 

Martin O'Malley has had to endure more injury and insult than any presidential candidate in recent history.  When he announced his candidacy, the press took it less seriously than Donald Trump's.  Commentators trained themselves to laugh at the mention of O'Malley's name.  As noted on this blog, he was the only 2016 presidential candidate that every other candidate in both parties joined Trump in ridiculing.  I think even Lawrence Lessig made fun of him.      

So . . . after all the ridicule, after all the put-downs, after all the snark . . . what does a guy like Marty have to do to get a little respect?  How about get vengeance?

Yes! O'Malley should remember every member of the Democratic establishment who ever pulled strokes against him (i.e., most of them) and every person in the media who did the same (i.e., all of them) and get even with the whole lot of them.  He ought to get back at every snarker, doubter, and detractor and get back hard.  And here's how he ought to do it:

• Win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 (if the party still exists by then). 


• Win the 2020 presidential election.

Revenge will be his.

But that's not all I have to say here.  I would also like to take this opportunity to propose an official food for the 2020 O'Malley presidential campaign . . .

. . . the Pop-Tart.

Yes, the humble Pop-Tart, that overprocessed but delicious toaster pastry from Kellogg's - in multiple flavors - that tastes best out of the box rather than heated up.  Do I propose this idea because it would be a good way for O'Malley to connect with the white working class?  Because it would generate political contributions from the Kellogg Company - and give Marty a leg up in the company's home state of Michigan?  Because Marty can't afford anything better to feed his campaign staffers?  No, not for any of these reasons.  I think that the Pop-Tart should be the official food of the Martin O'Malley campaign for this reason . . .

Pop-Tarts are a lot like revenge.  They're sweet, and they're best when served cold. ;-)