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 . . . 

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.

New Hampshire Fallout

Remember when I said that before the New Hampshire primary that Joe Biden would make it through?

Well, everyone seems to think that he's through.

Biden's biggest accomplishment Tuesday night was not that he finished respectably in New Hampshire (he didn't), but that, unlike in 1988 and in 2008, he made it that far.  Alas, he only got 8 percent of the vote and came in fifth overall.  I don't want to say that he's finished, although Susan Page of USA Today - who anointed Hillary Clinton "the inevitable one" - does, and I'm sorry, Madame Page, you don't get to write Joe Biden off just yet.  Not until South Carolinians vote in their primary on Leap Day, at least.

As expected, neighboring senator Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, and his victory was written off by some pundits because he got only 26 percent of the vote.  Well, sure considering that he had ten opponents this time and not one.  (Now he has seven opponents; Andrew Yang, Michael Bennet and Deval Patrick withdrew, in that order.)  But what's noteworthy is that Sanders united the Democratic Party's liberal wing behind him and froze out neighboring senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been running a substance-filled, empathy-charged voter-friendly campaign.  She's Aunt Liz to Biden's Uncle Joe.   But she finished barely ahead of Uncle Joe, and she's as much in the wilderness as he is. 

The big story here is that Biden hoped to be helped by Sanders and Warren splitting the party's liberal wing, but instead, Biden, second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar split the so-called moderate vote, wining a majority of cotes in New Hampshire but denying the party's less radical wing the opportunity to coalesce around someone who can overcome Sanders and win a first-ballot nomination at the convention, which would ensure a united Democratic front against Trump.   Buttigieg, who split 18 of New Hampshire's 24 delegates evenly with Sanders, has the momentum to put up a fight in Nevada and beyond, while Klobuchar has the money coming in but not the organization. 

The wild card in all this is Michael Bloomberg, who is beginning to pick up black support from Biden but could find that momentum of support, thanks to newly leaked audio clip of his defense of the "stop and frisk" policy he pushed on young black men due to possibly flawed studies showing that their demographic is the most likely one to commit crimes, arrested.  Bloomberg is pushing everything he did as mayor of New York for black people as his argument for his candidacy, and he's gotten some leading black politicians, such as Brooklyn congressman Gregory Meeks and Columbia (South Carolina) mayor Steven Benjamin, in his corner.  But "stop and frisk" could still be a deal breaker for some - for white folks like Michael Moore, it already is. I'll have more on this topic later.

All of this means is that, despite the withdrawal of three presidential candidates and a winnowing of the field down to a reasonable eight, the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign seems as confused as ever at a time when it's never been more crucial for them to get more clarity.

We could be in serious trouble . . .. :-O

Democrats 2020: WTF?

I dismissed Cory Booker when he announced his presidential campaign in the middle of 2019, thinking he was all résumé and no record, but his presence is sorely missed now that Joe Biden is merely treading water and Pete Buttigieg, at the time I last checked, is still underwhelming the most loyal element of the Democratic base (read black voters) at a time when the two leading candidates of the party's liberal wing can't agree on the truth.  At least that's the impression from the last Democratic presidential debate held before the Iowa caucuses.

CNN's Abby Phillip, one of the moderators of the Des Moines debate this past week, asked Sanders if it was true that he told Warren that a woman can't win the White House - a woman can't win the White House, for the record, and I'll get to that in a moment - and he flatly denied saying it.  Phillip then asked Warren how she reacted when Sanders said what he . . . denied saying.  So much for impartiality.  After the debate, Warren accused Sanders of lying in response to Phillip's question, and Sanders refused to engage her.  Maybe because he was still steamed about Philip refusing to believe his response.  Somehow this dust-up got more attention than anything that was actually said at the debate about policy.  All Sanders and Warren did with their feud was detract attention from the need for Democrats to defeat Donald Trump - who was over in Milwaukee holding a rally that allowed him to speak about the issues voters cared about, such as the economy and well, the economy - and cause Iowa voters to shrug and wonder what the heck was going on.

Okay, I obviously caused a stir of my own by insisting that a woman can't win the Presidency.  My position is not based on any misogyny on my part.  It is based on misogyny on everyone else's part.  America is simply too entrenched in patriarchy, which has gotten a lot of bad press these days but is still respected and revered in parts of the country that are necessary to win in the general election.  In certain areas of the Midwest and in much of the South - and many parts of the West, I might add - the idea of a female President is unthinkable and as undesirable.  Too many Americans in what is disparagingly called "flyover country" are more comfortable with a man in the Oval Office - even, I'm sorry to say, the man in the Oval Office now - and many people who would never vote for Donald Trump would rather stay home in November than vote for a woman.  Sure, I'll vote for Warren if shes the nominee, but how many people in Michigan, Wisconsin, or even Pennsylvania (technically in the Northeast but really in the Midwest) would?  The number would likely disappoint you - and destroy Democrats if the nominee is Warren or even Amy Klobuchar, who has gained little traction in the polls.  And if she were a man named Andrew Klobuchar, she wouldn't get very far with that spell-checker-unfriendly Slovenian surname.      

And thanks to Warren and Sanders, I'm talking about this and not the con job Trump is pulling on the economy, showing those rosy stock-market numbers as proof that his economic policies are working when so many people are underemployed and one paycheck away from eviction. Thanks to Aunt Liz and Grandpa Bernie, I'm not talking about rising sea levels or lowering life expectancies.  And thanks to Aunt Liz and Grandpa Bernie, Donald, the bastard stepfather that married your mom, is laughing all the way to acquittal in the impeachment trial about to get underway!

Cousin Martin - Martin O'Malley, who turns 57 today - wouldn't have bothered with any of this trivia.  I'm still flabbergasted over his decision not to run again in 2020 and instead support . . . who's that kid from El Paso again?  Bingo or something . . ..  (Talk about trivialities . . ..)    

The Impeachment Trial: More Meh

Now that Her Holy Modal Majesty, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is releasing the articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate, people are praising her deft move to get pressure on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to have fair trial, with key Republican senators demanding a fair process in which to call witnesses and with new information about the Ukraine scandal - including former White House national security adviser John Bolton's willingness to testify on the matter - during the Speaker's imposed interregnum.   

Don't you believe it.  It's more daft than deft.

Pelosi (above) never had any leverage in holding back the articles if impeachment.  McConnell never wanted to receive them anyway, and he has no interest in holding a trial that would, if not remove Trump from the White House, still make him look bad.  There are four to six Republican senators who could join the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus in allowing witnesses to be called who could easily stick with McConnell when it comes to actually calling the witnesses during the trial.  (Except maybe Mitt Romney, who has said he'd like to hear what Bolton has to say.)  If there is a trial; McConnell is seriously considering a dismissal of the trial so he can get back to packing the courts with right-wing judges that will dominate the federal judiciary at least until my generation dies off.  In short, Pelosi's intransigence changed nothing, and it helped not a single Democrat.

Except maybe Joe Biden.  With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the presidential polls in New Hampshire and in both February caucus states (Iowa and Nevada), House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has opined that Pelosi delayed the submission of the articles of impeachment to ensure that Sanders is stuck in Washington as a juror in the impeachment trial to get him off the campaign trail in the crucial final weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire.  I don't agree entirely with McCarthy's assessment.  I think she did it to get Senator Elizabeth Warren off the presidential campaign trail as well.  Speaker Pelosi is officially neutral in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination process, but she's already made clear her disdain for Grandpa Bernie's and Aunt Liz's policy positions, such as their support for Medicare for all and the Green New Deal (which went down like an old brown shoe).  The last thing she wants is to have either one of them as the Democratic presidential nominee, and their absence from the campaign trail wild help Biden gain traction in the state primaries and caucuses preceding Super Tuesday and possibly prevent the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign from going all the way to New Jersey in June.

But Pelosi's gambit is not going to have a detrimental effect on Trump's standing or slow down or retard McConnell's progress in fighting progress.  It would only make sense that her moves are designed to affect the presidential trail more than the presidential trial.

Trail, trial . . . love those anagrams. ;-)           

New Leadership? PAH!

"New leadership."  That's what Martin O'Malley (below) promised in his 2016 presidential campaign.  It was his campaign slogan - simple, direct, and to the point.  It wasn't mealy-mouthed pablum like Hillary Clinton's "Stronger Together." 

Recently, though, it seems as if Democrats can't be bothered with new leadership.  Because they did, after all, nominate Bill Clinton's wife for President in hopes that it would stoke nineties nostalgia in the Democratic base.  Oh sure, she was a woman, and that was new, but her policies were not only the same policies her husband pursued, a lot of them were like the policies Obama pursued.  Well, what was so new about that?

Despite the fact that he'd been in Washington for a quarter century, Bernie Sanders (below) offered new leadership in 2016 in the form of policy proposals that hadn't been pursued since the mid-sixties - universal health care,  free college like they used to have in California - but you were still talking about a candidate who was hardly a new face, having toiled in the House and the Senate pushing legislation that had no chance of passage.

For 2020, the Democrats don't seem to be into new leadership so much - new faces, younger faces, a new generation.  The obvious exception is Pete Buttigieg, who is a millennial, a gay man and an American of Maltese origin - and his youth and vitality are generating excitement all over Iowa.  Too bad his patronizing attitude toward blacks is so old-school.  

He tried to identify with black voters by saying he too felt the sting of discrimination as a gay man, but he sort of forgot that white homosexuals, unlike black homosexuals, can avoid discrimination by staying in the closet, whereas blacks, straight or gay, come out as black the day they're born.  And then there's that long-ago comment Buttigieg made about black children doing poorly in school because of lack of role models.  Actually, black students have several role models.  They just don't hear about them much because of a form of structural racism that ignores black accomplishments in America . . . except during February. If this is new leadership, it's no wonder Democratic voters outside Iowa are sticking with the tried and tried again and true.   

O'Malley, by the way, found out how little Democrats are interested in new voices and new faces when he backed Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign - you know the story; I won't repeat it.  O'Malley clearly wanted to see another repetition, that of the Kennedy story, and so found in Beto the new generation of leadership America needs.  O'Malley is undecided now that Beto's gone, and with Tim Ryan having withdrawn from the presidential campaign, there simply aren't any Irish Catholics under 50 left for him to support. And though O'Malley supported Buttigieg for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship in 2017, I wouldn't expect him to be singing Mayor Pete's praises any time soon.

Especially when they're singing a quite different song about him in South Carolina.

Not too many of the younger Democratic candidates for President have offered much in the way of new ideas, so there's, say, little romance and excitement in Cory Booker possibly becoming our first Generation X President.  And then there's Elizabeth Warren, who at 70 may be the closest the Democrats come to new leadership - she's a woman, and she has detailed plans for her ambitious progressive agenda.

But she's a little shy in explaining how much they're going to cost.

But, when you think about it, Donald Trump has been an exemplar of new leadership in the past three years.  He's completely new when it comes to presidential governance.  He's new in that he'd never held political office or military rank (because of those nasty bone spurs! :-D ) before becoming President, and because he's doing things that quite frankly have never been done before.  Like breaking every international agreement the United States has ever committed itself to.  Or trying to get the Ukrainians to interfere in the next presidential election.  And letting Melania decorate the White House as something you might find in Stephen King novel for Christmas.  New leadership cuts both ways. 

In the end, Democratic voters might just forget about new leadership entirely and stick with Joe Biden, who feels as reassuring and as warm as a comfortable old shoe.  If only he would stop putting that shoe in his mouth.  But Biden (below), would bring a sense of newness to the White House in this respect; like Sanders, he'd be the first (and only, at this point) President from the Silent Generation, those Americans too old to have been at Woodstock (unless they were one of the performers) and too young to have been at Omaha Beach.  It is that same generation Gary Hart belongs to, and he famously said in his own 1984 presidential campaign that it was time for his generation to govern the country - a new generation of leadership with new ideas.  Yes - there it is!  Biden would bring the Silent Generation approach to governing (albeit, thanks to his gaffes, without the "Silent" part), something that the White House has never had. 

And he'd be bringing it to the White House 35 years and change late.

Heck, if Hart, who turned 83 on Thanksgiving, had run this year, we'd hear about his not-so-new ideas.  Whatever they are.

Meanwhile, Steve Bullock the Montana governor who campaigned for President on the promise of new leadership in all but name, withdrew as a presidential candidate, refusing to run for the Senate and possibly hoping he gets to be someone's Interior Secretary.  So did Joe Sestak, a forgotten two-term congressman who was neither new nor much of a leader. 

Maybe Americans - even Democrats - do want new leadership in the White House, however you define it.  But maybe they're wary of anyone who comes out and promises it.  From the 1972 failure of George McGovern, whose campaign manager, Gary Hart, was a mentor to Martin O'Malley, who backed Beto O'Rourke - born the same year that McGovern was running for President - to now, this promise of new leadership is getting pretty old.   

Sanders. Warren. No.

There will be no progressive revival in 2020.

Let me repeat that - there will be no progressive revival in 2020!

Which means that neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren will be President.

Deal with it.

And why do I say all of this? Because now is not the time for a progressive revival.  As someone who in 2016 did in fact support a Democratic presidential candidate who ran to the left of the eventual Democratic nominee (though Martin O'Malley was not liberal enough to satisfy Bernie bros), I don't like to admit this, but the simple fact is this. In 2016, after eight years of Barack Obama's accomplishments, we were in a moment to move forward and go farther under a more liberal Chief Executive, but that moment has long since passed.  Because in 2016, Democrats played it safe with a centrist nominee in Hillary Clinton, and Trump, who promised sweeping change - ironically, a selling point for Sanders' own 2016 campaign - won the Presidency.  Since then, Trump has not only erased Obama's accomplishments, he's violated all of the norms that existed in Washington long before Obama came along.  In short, Trump has taken the country too far back from where we were in 2016 for us to simply pick up where we left off then.

Even if we were in a position to go far left at this time, we're too exhausted by Trump's governance to move ahead.  Now more than ever, we need moderation.  Universal medical insurance and taxing the rich will have to wait, as well several other progressive pipedreams - even modernizing Amtrak, a pet policy of Joe Biden (and myself).  We need to get back to where we were in 2016 before we can move on to the bigger, better and greater things Sanders and Warren talk about, and it will take at least four years for us to get back to where we were.  And it won't be easy.  

The Presidency, you might recall, changed parties in 1920, from Democrat Woodrow Wilson to Republican Warren Harding, after a tumultuous period that left Americans exhausted (which included a world war).  "Back to normalcy" was the winning slogan in 1920, and it's going to be the winning slogan in 2020.  

As for Bernie and Liz, well, they'll at least still have their Senate seats.

Billion Dollar Babies

Tom Steyer has a billion dollars to spend on making this country a better place to live, but when his  anti-Trump impeachment campaign wasn't going anywhere, he decided to run for President after having ruled it out.

And then the impeachment inquiry happened anyway.

I won't dwell on Steyer's platform - the same Democratic talking points on education, the environment and tax fairness, plus a campaign to get big money out of politics (which he's spending big money on), because has has no chance of winning the White House.  But he did score a major victory by being instrumental in the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, and so, with the inquiry under way and promising certain impeachment, his usefulness has passed.  Go home, Tom - you've won.     

And as Steyer - now facing an embarrassing kerfuffle over a supporter of his who actually tried to buy endorsements for the candidate - Michael Bloomberg, who said he wasn't interested in running for President, is exploring a presidential run after all.

The former New York City mayor, unimpressed by the remaining Democratic presidential candidates and probably fearing a Warren nomination, is reportedly planning to run now, beginning with a filing in the presidential primary in . . . Alabama.  Leave it to a New Yorker to say, "If I can make it here, I can make it in Mobile!" But then, he may be on to something, because Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders can't make it in the nation's midsection, but now, neither can Joe Biden (relax, I'll get to him), if the polls are to be believed  - they're not, because Biden is entrenched in a statistical four-way with the other two and with Mayor Pete.  But believe this: Biden has given interviews to the press to turn things around for his campaign, but his efforts haven't satisfied anyone and he's still headed in the wrong direction.

Can you say "brokered convention," boys and girls?

Bloomberg has some solid policies on climate change, education and reproductive rights, but his billions leave him open to charges that he's trying to buy the White House.  Bernie bros will not be amused 

God knows how this is going to turn out.  Actually, God used to know, but even the Almighty Himself doesn't have a clue anymore.   

The Week That Is (So Far)

Too much to keep up with, so I'll be brief . . .

The Democratic presidential debate two days ago (October 15) showed that, even if she's not really the front runner for the party's presidential nomination, Elizabeth Warren has surged to the point where she's being taken seriously.  All of the candidates - even Joe Biden - grilled her on her policies, specifically on how she'd pay for Medicare health coverage for anyone, and she ducked and weaved without ever answering the question.  Bernie Sanders - refreshed and ready to move on after his heart attack - as honest about it, saying that taxes would have to go up.  The fact that few if any candidates went after Biden suggests that he's through.  Not so.  Biden is still leading in a few polls and he's well ahead in South Carolina, and he projected strength and resolve in light of Donald Trump's attack on him and his son Hunter in a press conference the day after the debate in Ohio.  Hunter Biden himself was impressive in his interview with ABC's Amy Robach.  Both Bidens have gone a long way toward addressing the involvement or lack thereof in Ukrainian business dealings, but of course there are too many second-guessing skeptics who will say that they're not satisfied.

Even as impeachment is gaining support in light of Trump's mismanagement of a misguided effort to knock Biden out of the 2020 presidential campaign to make Warren the Democratic presidential nominee and give her the full McGovern next November, Trump  has mangled the carefully crafted U.S. Middle East policy to the point where the Turks have turned the Kurdish enclave in Syria into the greatest pocket of misery west of Bangladesh, and the Islamic State terrorist prisoners held there are escaping.  It took House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, during a White House meeting on Syria, to stand up - literally! -  to Trump over the matter in full fury while her male counterparts in the room bowed their heads for the shame if being there (stop pussy-whipping yourselves, guys), after which Pelosi - whom Trump called a third-rate politician - and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer stormed out.  And yet Trump may survive all this despite bipartisan fury over his Syria policy simply because he supporters think a Kurd is something that cows chew.

Meanwhile, House Oversight Committee chairman Elijah Cummings just died.  RIP. :-(  This could be a blow for House Democrats trying to make a case against impeachment that can persuade at least a few Senate Republicans to vote for conviction in a Senate trial.  Yes, yes, the House Oversight Committee will have a new chairman - I don't know who that would be - but, at this juncture, saying that the House Oversight Committee could get another chairman seems like saying that Led Zeppelin could get another drummer after John Bonham died. :-( 

Crossroads

With the Turkish invasion of Syria, Donald Trump, by withdrawing U.S. Special Forces protecting and working with Kurds, out of the region, has created a foreign-policy disaster even as his impeachable abuse of power and obstruction of justice are causing the constitutional equivalent of peritonitis.  But hey,. the stock market rebounded yesterday on good news about improved prospects for U.S.-China trade talks   through they prospects are never more than just that - and, as it stands now, Trump, with a good economy, could be facing as the Democratic presidential nominee in November 2020 Elizabeth Warren, who's blessed with an avauntular demeanor but is cursed with policy positions that make her unelectable.  (As I noted here before, she wants to get rid of private medical insurance and probably make us eat muesli - German for "leaves and twigs" - for breakfast.)

But Joe Biden - whom I still haven't evaluated completely on this blog, believe it or else - can't be counted out.

Recent polls show that, despite Warren's revived campaign and her threat to Biden's poll numbers, Biden's own support has not eroded.  His numbers are still the same.  And, having taken a berating over his son's dubious business dealings as a board member of a Ukrainian gas company and his own efforts to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired for being corrupt - even though there's no evidence that the  Bidens did anything wrong - he's fighting back.  He's going after the New York Times - the New York Times! - for publishing an op-ed piece attacking the Bidens from a Breitbart-affiliated conservative columnist.  He's also protested Facebook's decision - still in force - to run a misleading anti-Biden commercials from the Trump campaign.  He's beginning to do everything that Democrats have wanted him to do since Trump has gotten him mixed up in the Ukraine scandal.  And - this is crucial - he's come out in favor of impeachment and accused Trump of violating the Constitution, and he's vowed to fight back and fight back hard henceforth.

Trump, of course, tried the stick the knife in Biden's hide even deeper, tweeting, "So pathetic to see Sleepy Joe Biden, who with his son, Hunter, and to the detriment of the American [t]axpayer, has ripped off at least two countries for millions of dollars, calling for my impeachment - and I did nothing wrong, and that the struggles of Biden's campaign "gave him no other choice!"

Biden's response?  "Thanks for watching. Stop stonewalling the Congress. Honor your oath. Respect the Constitution. And speaking of taxpayers, I’ve released 21 years of my tax returns. You?"

Ha ha, good one!

Biden is at a crossroads now.  He's still a strong candidate because he's showing signs of a fighting spirit - the sort of fighting spirit you always see anyone at the nadir of a struggle.  Warren may be surging too early, and many Democrats fear that it may not be the right time for her liberal agenda, as many Americans would rather not try any new bold experiments just now.  Also, the new war in Syria reminds people of Biden's national-security expertise; given the ridicule Hillary Clinton's opponents for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination (one of whom was Bernie Sanders - more of whom in a moment) got for having insufficient or non-existent foreign-policy credentials, Biden can use his as a strength - not just against Trump but against Warren.

The state of the Democratic presidential nomination process is still unclear, though.  Bernie Sanders just had a heart attack, and though he's vowed to continue his campaign, he may not be able to do so much longer.  His presence in the campaign keeps Biden and Warren evenly divided in the polls; if Sanders drops out, most of his supporters will undoubtedly go to Warren, possibly giving her the nomination and giving Trump the opponent he wants, though a third of Democratic primary voters are behind any one of the other sixteen presidential candidates, all of them pretty much also-rans - who knows where they'll eventually go if and when their candidates drop out? . But Biden's climb back up appears to have already begun.  I still have no idea who will win the nomination, but it's likely going to be either Uncle Joe or Aunt Liz.

I still miss Cousin Martin, though. 

Biden Time and Warren Warning

Donald Trump keeps producing more evidence that he used his office to collude with the Ukrainian government to have Joe Biden and his son investigated.  Former special Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker just gave Congress a whole record of White House electronic correspondence on the need to get the Ukrainians to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine in exchange for weapons.  Given the younger Biden's business dealings in China, Trump has publicly called for the Chinese to investigate him as well.  This means Trump is asking two foreign governments to intervene in the 2020 presidential election.  Trump is in deep trouble.

So why do I think he's going to get re-elected in 2020?

Two reasons - Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.  Biden was reluctant for too long to address the question of his son's business ventures - none of which have proven to be crooked - and when he finally did,  he didn't satisfy a single pundit or primary voter despite his forcefulness.  Biden was the strongest candidate the Democrats had to go against Trump, but Trump's needling of Hunter Biden's business deals in Ukraine and his conflation of that with the former Vice President's efforts to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired - because of corruption charges against the prosecutor! - have rendered Biden damaged goods.  Trump could then whip him after getting acquitted by the Republican Senate following his impeachment.  The needling . . . and the damage done.

Elizabeth Warren, who now leads in the Democratic primary polls, has no chance of getting elected President because . . . she's a woman.  There, I said it.  But there's another reason she can't get elected - she's a liberal.  You see, a lot of people who would ordinarily not vote for Trump will gladly do so if Warren is his opponent because of her European-style social democratic politics.  She wants Medicare for all!  She wants to tax hedge fund managers!  She wants free college for poor kids!  She may even want  to . . . impose fuel economy standards that will force Americans to give up their F-150s and drive small hatchbacks!  (And make us eat muesli for breakfast.)   You know - she wants us to be like the French.

Trump has neutralized Biden and will encourage the Democrats to nominate Warren the same way Nixon's henchmen neutralized Edmund Muskie in 1972 and got the Democrats to nominate George McGovern, who only carried one state - Massachusetts - in the general election.  A Warren nomination would probably lead to the same result - the Democrats would only carry Massachusetts.  And being liberal is more toxic than being a woman.  If Warren, whose original last name is Herring, were a man named Warren Herring . . . with the same progressive politics . . . and were the 2020 Democratic nominee for President, she/he would still lose. A liberal Democrat named Warren Herring would lose the White House in 2020 as sure as a conservative Republican named Warren Harding won it in 1920.

Did I happen to mention that Warren is from Massachusetts? 

Panic In Detroit

Mitch McConnell boasts about having spent his Senate career ensuring that America won't become like Europe (right, good schools, gun control, public support for the arts, a humane criminal justice system, universal health care, high-speed rail, who wants any of that?), and recent polling shows that Democratic voters, while ready for a change from Trump, aren't prepared to go all the way down the European social democratic path anyway.  They may want universal health care, but not Medicare for all.  They may want Amtrak and even local public transit, but the don't want to give up their Explorers and F-150s for Yarises.  They may want immigration reform, but that don't want to decriminalize non-sanctioned border crossings.  They do want a moderate presidential candidate, but they don't want Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.  Though progressives would blame the centrist media for suggesting all that and telling you want to think.  But I, as someone who voted for Jill Stein in 2016, have come to the conclusion that Democrats cannot have a progressive presidential candidate for 2020.  A progressive agenda would have been possible for 2016, but Donald Trump has taken us so far backwards that we have to get back to where we were when Barack Obama left the White House before we can start dreaming big again about emulating European social democracies.

So the two-part debate in Detroit this past week satisfied no one. In the first night, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders stood in solidarity for their progressive goals, but the so-called moderates (any Democrat not liberal enough for the Sanders/Warren crowd is called one) had the upper hand as a group.  But no one centrist candidate dominated the field like Sanders and Warren did, exposing the weak standings of these lower-tier candidates as they wait to take the mantle of the leading centrist or center-left candidate should Joe Biden fumble in the long run.

Biden did not fumble in the second night, despite a mass onslaught from opponents like New Jersey senator Cory Booker, and he did better than in Miami, but he didn't do great either.  This led many to wonder if he can take on Trump in a general election debate.  But what was really eye-opening were the other candidates on the second night going after the President's record.  Not Trump - Obama.  They picked on Obama's various failings as President as if they were running against him.  And Biden, Obama's Vice President, staunchly defended Obama, which makes him look good in the longer run.  The piling on top of Obama's record proved to be too much for many rank-and-file Democrats to stomach, especially when Trump exploited it in a rally in Cincinnati the following day.

The only reason Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez isn't pulling his hair out is because he's bald.    

The primary/caucus debates get harder to qualify for after this, but the field is hardly going to winnow any time soon, because there are likely enough Democratic presidential candidates who can get enough support from the polls and individual donors to keep on going and make the next couple of debates a two-night affair like Miami and Detroit were.  And they'll debate about the same old things - immigration, Medicare expansion - and not talk so much about the economy and the everyday struggles of ordinary Americans.  Good grief, a GM transmission factory in the Detroit suburb of Warren just closed, and even that couldn't spark a discussion among the candidates in the Detroit debate on what they could do for average voters who don't want to hear about exotic or revolutionary programs when all they want to know is how they're going to make it.  The factory closing was a tailor-made subject for someone like Tim Ryan, yet he was unable to get the opportunity to break out of the pack. As for Biden, he wants to talk about meat-and-potatoes issues, but he's constrained by what many of the other candidates want to talk about, and, say, rebuilding our infrastructure isn't one of them.  So don't expect him to stand up for Amtrak - a pet issue of his - any time soon in one of these debates.

And you know the Democrats are in trouble when pundits are actually finding Marianne Williamson impressive.

I'm not supporting anyone for President in the Democratic nomination process because I'm an independent.  Instead, I've been continuing my quixotic efforts to get Volkswagen to keep the standard Golf in its North American lineup when the eighth-generation model debuts.  Between that and supporting a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, I'd rather continue to fight to keep the standard Golf in this market.  At least I know I have a better chance of success there.     

Distant Early Warren

It's New Year's Day, and already one major Democratic presidential prospect is taking a step toward running for the White House.  Progressive darling Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, has formed an exploratory committee to see if she should throw her hat in the ring.  Exploratory committee members usually don't say no to the prospective candidates, so she's likely going to run.  In fact, you can bank on it.  (Get it?)

Okay, let me come right out and say it: If she's the nominee, I will be more than happy to vote for her, just as I was ready to vote for her for President in 2016 until she decided not to challenge Hillary Clinton.  But I really wonder if Warren can make it to the nomination, given the baggage she's carrying.  Not her staunchly liberal political positions; I'm talking about her personal baggage.

As we all remember, Donald Trump taunted Elizabeth Warren for having claimed Native American ancestry and using it to get preferences in affirmative-action program.  He famously called her "Pocahontas," and he promised to donate to her favorite charity if she took a DNA test to prove her indigenous heritage.  She did.  It turns out that she is 1/1024th Cherokee.  And although she never claimed Indian heritage to get an edge in affirmative-action programs and never profited in any way by her claim, the fact that she tried to beat Trump at his own game - a game Trump is always going to win - and ended up with such minuscule proof of her claim was a disaster.  Trump refused to take the DNA test seriously, and not only has he refused to donate money to her charity, he still calls her Pocahontas.  Meanwhile, Warren's supporters are chastening her for letting Trump play her for a sucker.  In short, her DNA test satisfied no one.

And then there's the issue of sex and politics.  Warren, by endorsing Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016, made it clear that her sex is more important than her politics.  (Note: "Gender" is a literary reference, people!)  Although Sanders was far more in tune with Warren's progressive agenda than Hillary was, she chose political correctness over political integrity by, as a woman, endorsing another woman - a woman whose centrism and opportunism nauseated Sanders supporters who had championed Warren.  Liberals have long memories and short tolerance levels. 

Nevertheless, her celebrity and her feistiness still make her a formidable candidate.  The joke is that she has a 1/1024 percent chance of winning, but then that's better than Martin O'Malley's chances.

When O'Malley (above) began his campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, doubting Thomases asked him how he could appeal to liberals who were pining for Elizabeth Warren.  "Elizabeth Warren isn't running for President," he replied.  "I am."  Thanks to Bernie Sanders, O'Malley's admittedly cocky observation ended up being irrelevant.  But not as irrelevant as O'Malley himself might be in 2020 if he waits too long to decide whether or not he's running.  Warren is already stealing headlines O'Malley never had a chance of getting anyway, but if he intends to run, he'd better declare his candidacy, and soon.  I would argue that he has a chance of getting the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in a large pool of candidates without a clear front runner and without a shrew like Debbie Wasserman Schultz running the show. But he has to get into the race mucho pronto.

Though . . . if it was difficult for O'Malley to run for President without Elizabeth Warren as an opponent for the nomination, how difficult do you think it will be for him to run for President with Warren as an opponent?  

A Consumer's Report

The good news is that we have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bad news is it may never do the job it's intended to do. See, Republicans have a few issues with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They're very much for it, except for the consumer financial protection part.

Be that as it may, they've made it clear that they would never submit to the appointment of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard financial expert who got the goshdarn agency up and running, to serve as its first chairperson. It seems she sides with ordinary folks too much. So Ms. Warren, whom they don't trust enough not to do the job, won't be getting it. President Obama has appointed someone else.

If you're a fan of making big banks and financiers behave, you're not going to like David Corn's article for Mother Jones magazine, in which Corn explains that Ms. Warren was too controversial for Obama to nominate. He couldn't even nominate her for a recess appointment; Republicans have conspired to keep Congress in session, a trick Democrats dared not try to block George Walker Bush's nomination of noted xenophobe John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. (Rumor has it that United Nations delegates still spit on the ground at the mention of Bolton's name. I started the rumor just now. :-D) So Obama nominated Richard Cordray, a former Ohio state attorney general, to head the agency. The good news is, he shares Elizabeth Warren's views. The bad news is, he shares Elizabeth Warren's views.

But that's not all. Republicans are concerned with the agency's separate budget and perceived lack of congressional oversight that would give the eventual chairperson way too much of a free reign in, well, regulating Wall Street. They've also complained about the CFPB being one more burdensome bureaucracy (because it would hinder shady Wall Street dealings) and it wouldn't be accountable to Congress . . . only to the people. Forty-four Senate Republicans have singed a letter vowing not to let any CPFB chairperson nominees be voted in the Senate unless Obama agrees to changes in the CFPB that would have more congressional oversight . . . and thus more congressional meddling to weaken and emasculate the agency. So, even Cordray's appointment is likely dead on arrival.

Obama may have had strategically good reasons not to appoint Ms. Warren, but this allows her to possibly run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts against Republican incumbent Scott Brown next year. Bay State Democrats lost this seat - Ted Kennedy's in a special election by nominating a horrible candidate, and the possibilities for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 2012 are even worse. Brown is the favorite in this Democratic state. Elizabeth Warren, with her feistiness and her populism, would make a great candidate as well as a great senator, and she's indicated that she might run. I hope she does. Because none of the other nine Republican U.S. Senate seats up for re-election in 2012 - did I mention the Democrats have 23 U.S. seats up for re-election next year? - are likely to flip.

If you can find a Democrat to unseat Mississippi's Senator Roger Wicker, more power to you. But Democratic hopes of stemming Senate seat losses in 2012 and possibly preserving their majority center on a vigorous Elizabeth Warren candidacy in Massachusetts.

So what will happen to the CFPB? Republicans will stonewall any nominee for the post until they finally win back all the power they had under Bush and abolish it.

Sorry.

Elizabeth The First

Elizabeth Warren got the appointment many have hoped she would get, the job of starting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her record in protecting the little guy from unscrupulous lenders and credit card companies has been seen as being essential to establishing a sense of integrity to the new bureau, as well as putting real teeth into it and giving it the momentum it needs to get up and running and enforce the new provisions of the financial reform law.

President Obama appointed her on an advisory basis to avoid a Senate confirmation, in which Republicans - who mostly opposed the law on the grounds of government overreach - would have surely blocked her. Warren has eighteen months - plenty of time - to get things moving. The move delighted liberals, who have been wanting in things to cheer about, but this appointment alone won't get the Democratic party base to the polls to offset Republican gains. Obama has shown signs that he's only beginning to fight, but time is of the essence. Nevertheless, Warren's appointment to this job is a big morale boost.