Taken For Granite

The New Hampshire primary is today, and it's do or die for Nikki Haley, who could pull a classic Granite State upset against Donald Trump and win or go down swinging like Sonny Liston as the polls (which, in New Hampshire, are never right) suggest.

Haley has hit her heights.  Alliterations aside (well, after that second one), Haley has finally been going after Trump on his increasing cognitive disorder, as he's been confusing her with Nancy Pelosi in talking about January 6 and making beep-beep noises talking about nuclear-missile launch boards.  But she started doing so late - maybe too late to win. But we will see tonight. 

As for the other Republican contenders . . . well, Vivek Ramaswamy's fifteen minutes of fame are pretty much over, though he might have won himself  the Secretary of Commerce position in a Trump 47 administration, but given Trump's racist insinuations against Ramaswamy's fellow Indian-American Haley (oh yeah, South Asians are actually members of the Caucasian race, making them, as George Carlin once called them, dark brown white people, so it's actually ethnicism, or perhaps xenophobia), that's not likely.  Asa Hutchinson, the only 2024 Republican presidential candidate not from New Jersey who called Trump on his crimes, also quit the campaign, much to the delight of the Democratic National Committee, which sent out a press release joking that they hadn't even noticed that he was still running.  Sort of like when I learned this month that Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton on "The Honeymooners," died at 99 and I said to someone that I hadn't even known she was still alive - except that I didn't say that as a joke!  Anyway, President Biden personally apologized to Hutchinson, realizing how mean-spirited that press release was, especially when Hutchinson was an anti-MAGA comrade in arms.  But that's the Democratic National Committee for you.  Heck, leading Democratic Party members ridiculed Martin O'Malley in 2016 when he exited the presidential campaign - and he's a fellow Democrat!

And then there's Ron DeSantis . . .

After a landslide re-election victory as governor of Florida that destroyed Florida's state Democratic Party like a hydrogen bomb, DeSantis was a colossus in the national Republican Party and seen as the logical heir apparent to Trump, and he looked like an attractive candidate, advocating Trumpist policies without Trump's toxic personality.  Unfortunately, DeSantis turned out to have a toxic personality of his own.  His inability to smile, for example, is clearly evident in the photo above, and he couldn't work up enough energy with voters to even display an affectation of warmth.

Democrats were hoping that DeSantis would be strong nationally as he's been in Florida and cause a knockout brawl with Trump that would mirror the Ford-Reagan battle of 1976.  Instead, the DeSantis campaign was destroyed like the Florida Democratic Party, and in both cases it was DeSantis who did the destroying.  He tried so hard to show his MAGA credentials that he came across as a vindictive, angry man who would do anything to further his political career - and not just as a presidential candidate. He had been going after gays and picking fights with Disney even before he declared his candidacy for President, as well as restricting abortion in his state even before Dobbs was handed down by the Supreme Court.       

DeSantis will still be governor of Florida for another three years, but his political career is all ready over.  By 2028, no one will want DeSantis to run for President.  His chances for a Trump 47 Cabinet position have already been blown to bits.   

He died with his high-heeled boots on.

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

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.

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.       

Solid As Granite

Mitt Romney's commanding victory in yesterday's New Hampshire primary - winning 39 percent of the vote - makes him the one to beat . . . for President Obama. It's become obvious that there really is no conservative alternative to a "moderate" Romney; Romney is the conservative alternative to the centrist incumbent President. Romney is opposed to an agenda that would impose a European-style social democratic system on America, but then, so is Obama.

With libertarian Ron Paul finishing a distant second in New Hampshire with 23 percent of the vote, mainstream arch-conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum hope instead to make inroads in South Carolina, where the unemployment rate and the intolerance for gays are both higher than in New Hampshire. Jon Huntsman's respectable third-place showing at 17 percent gives him reason to carry on. But Romney's ability to do better than expected in the Granite State- even after all of his recent gaffes marking him as a clueless CEO type - puts him on a clear path to the Republican presidential nomination and gives him more of an opportunity to hit the President south of the suspenders.

Romney can thank Florida for this victory, as Florida voted to have its primary on January 31, before the Iowa and New Hampshire contests scheduled for February - forcing both states to move their contests up to early January. Florida thus spared Romney of spending more time campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly seeing his numbers go down more over a longer period. Now he can spend more time than ever before focusing squarely on Obama and swat away the GOP also-rans like so many mosquitoes.

My advice to the Obama team: Start working on your Romney counterpunch.