Carolina Bound

Last month, as you will recall, I wrote a letter to former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley asking him to consider running for President in 2024 if President Biden does not.  After nearly a month, I still haven't gotten a reply.  But the political news from the past week has all but made that moot.  Because if there was any doubt about Biden's plans for 2024, that doubt was swiftly quashed with Biden's successful effort to get the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to change the order of the schedule of the presidential primaries and caucuses.

President Biden requested that South Carolina be the first state to hold a primary for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination on February 3, followed by the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucus three days later.  Georgia would hold its primary on February 13, and Michigan would go next on February 27.  All of these dates are Tuesdays except for South Carolina's date, which is on a Saturday; Saturday primaries have been the standard there.  The DNC voted on the change and passed it overwhelmingly. 

Oh, Joe's running, all right.

Biden argues that South Carolina is more demographically representative of the party, with its large black population, and of the country, and thus it makes sense that South Carolina Democrats set the pace with their choice.  (The South Carolina Democratic Party is majority-black.)  It's also no coincidence that Biden won the 2020 South Carolina primary after biting the big one in the previous three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.  I'm sure that South Carolina's Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn is pleased.  I'm sure that DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, another South Carolinian, is also pleased.

The change poses a great deal of problems, though.  Here's the first one.  No one is going to object to stopping Iowa from going first after it botched the reporting of the results of the 2020 caucus to the point where it hardly mattered that Pete Buttigieg won it.  But refusing to let New Hampshire go first runs afoul of a New Hampshire state law that demands that its presidential primary be first, with no ifs, ands or buts about it.  That could be a sticky wicket.  Second, South Carolina is such a strongly Republican state that it becomes meaningless for Democrats in the general election, as it hasn't voted Democratic for President since 1976.  Third, primaries are run by states, not parties, so South Carolina's Republican governor and Republican legislature would have to sign off on any change - and unless the GOP moves up the South Carolina primary to first-in-the-nation status to help former South Carolina Republican governor Nikki Haley, another possible 2024 presidential candidate, it won't do so (especially when Donald Trump wouldn't want competition from Haley, his former U.N ambassador).  Fourth, despite the fact  that New Hampshire's primary would take place three days after South Carolina's, so much focus would be on the Palmetto State, with its larger area and population and its bigger media market, that it would give the retail politics of New Hampshire, where presidential candidates can meet voters face to face and accumulate supporters one small living room or country inn at a time, short shrift.  The greater expanse of land and people in South Carolina prevents that sort of thing there.  That would mean a tougher time for dark-horse candidates like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton from breaking through.  Joe Biden himself was a dark horse in both his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns, but he never made it to New Hampshire in either try and came in fifth there on his third try in 2020, and, again, it's no coincidence that he doesn't want New Hampshire to go before South Carolina. 

The fifth problem is that Democratic presidential hopefuls who have the best interests of black voters at heart but don't necessarily connect well with black voters have no chance of getting momentum out of South Carolina.  After his difficulties with blacks in his hometown of Baltimore over policing when he was mayor, which crippled his 2016 presidential run, I doubt that Martin O'Malley could make a go of it in South Carolina even if he runs in 2028.  Pete Buttigieg would also have problems with black voters in South Carolina after his own policing issues from when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana.  Both O'Malley and Buttigieg also suffer from being the type of  presidential candidates who look like Presidents out of central casting and appeal to white yuppies, much like Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, or the horrible John Edwards, and black voters have historically resisted such candidates.   

The 2028 presidential hopeful who benefits most from this primary schedule change is Kamala Harris, simply by being black and having a good rapport with the black voters who form the Democratic Party's backbone.  Remember also that Jim Clyburn said she should be Biden's heir apparent.  Aside form the obvious fact that Democratic presidential heirs apparent (Walter Mondale, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton) never pan out, Kamala Harris is extremely unpopular and has never been tested in a presidential campaign.  (Her 2020 run imploded before anyone even cast a ballot or participated in a caucus head count.)  The Democratic Party doesn't just need a candidate who can play well among South Carolina Democrats in 2028; it needs a candidate who can pay well nationally.  Who knows - maybe the 2028 primary will actually produce someone like that.

As for Martin O'Malley . . . I'd better get used to the idea that he will likely never be President, just as we'll likely never send humans to Mars or build a high-speed passenger rail network at home.  O'Malley once said that he believed the the U.S. was capable of doing both at a forum during his 2016 presidential campaign, but his Kennedyesque call to greatness obviously impressed no one in the audience.

Oh yeah, the forum where O'Malley spoke was in South Carolina.   

More Biden Cabinet Picks

Joe Biden nominated more people for his Cabinet, including former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm as Secretary of Energy and New Mexico congresswoman Deb Haaland (pronounced "Holland") for Secretary of the Interior.  I had been hoping that Biden would nominated Steve Bullock, the outgoing governor of Montana, for Interior Secretary, given that he lost his Senate bid and is leaving public office.  But Bullock carries the original double sin of being white and male, so he never had a chance.  And although it more than makes sense to nominate a Native American woman like Haaland (below) to head a department that manages federal land and resources and oversee affairs with the indigenous tribal nations, the big problem with the nomination is that she has to give up her House seat, which won't be filled by a special election for months.  According to my calculations, all Biden has to do is nominate two more Democratic U.S. Representatives to his Cabinet and Kevin McCarthy becomes House Speaker.  

Biden didn't poach the House for an Environmental Protection Agency administrator, at least.  He choice Michael Regan, North Carolina's Secretary of Environmental Quality, who would be the first black man to head the agency.  Don't look so much at his race as at his record; he's had to deal with coal ash pits and pig manure in North Carolina, so he knows how to handle two of the most polluting industries in the country - coal and pork production.  Both Haaland and Regan do, though, represent Biden's efforts to lessen the negative impacts of the environment on racial and ethnic minorities.

And with Jenifer Granholm prepared to oversee clean energy development and energy-efficient systems to aid in transit, that leads me to the choice of Pete Buttigieg (below) as Secretary of Transportation, which represents another underappreciated minority - Americans of Maltese origin. 😉  Mayor Pete is obsessed with cars and trains as much as Biden is, and I'm sure he grew up playing with toy cars like every other American boy (I had a figure-eight highway overpass for my Matchbox cars, one of the best toys I ever had!).  With his youth and his world view, Mayor Pete might very well be the guy who gives us what we transit-crazy Europhiles want - bullet trains for Amtrak and electric cars and minicars for suburban streets.  I'll take a Volkswagen ID.3, please! 

Biden can get his energy and transportation infrastructure passed through Congress with this team.  Unless, of course, he picks off more House members for his Cabinet.

As for a post for Martin O'Malley . . .yeah, that ain't going to happen.  Why do we need an Irish Catholic in the Cabinet when we'll have an Irish Catholic in the Oval Office?  O'Malley mostly sat on the sidelines during the 2020 presidential campaign, and therefore Biden doesn't owe him anything.  I have to be honest - O'Malley will likely never return to public life unless Biden makes him Ambassador to Ireland.  As someone who plays up his Irishness more than Biden does - which, ironically, has led some folks to call him a white Democrat as white as a Democrat can possibly be - O'Malley would be perfect for the post. 

At least a young Democrat O'Malley championed - Buttigieg - will be on Biden's team.  Which is more than I can say for another young Democrat he championed even more, Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke.  Seen him tapped for a Cabinet post lately?

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.  

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

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.

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.   

Mayor Pete?

As a former protégé of Gary Hart, Martin O'Malley has cultivated a few protégés of his own, and they're all running for President in 2020.  Beto O'Rourke, whom O'Malley is backing, jumped in first, and his sole supporter in the 2016 presidential campaign from the House Democratic caucus, Eric Swalwell, is also running. And then there's Pete Buttgieg.

Currently the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg - his spell-checker-unfriendly name is Maltese, as his father was an immigrant from Malta - is a veteran ofthe war in Afghanistan and a dynamic leader who has worked to revitalize his hometown and is known to be a thoughtful, philosophical politician.  He should be, as he was a Rhodes scholar.  That, his age (he's 37), his fluency in seven languages, and his sexual orientation - not only is he gay, he's shown affection to his husband in public have made him the hot Democratic presidential candidate as I type this.

Buttigieg has been upfront about his sexual orientation, explaining how he has found inner peace in both his marriage and his Episcopalian faith.  He is sincerely interested in how work defines a person's life and he sympathizes with the plight of the Midwestern worker who senses a lack of self-identity and self-worth after having lost a job.  Buttigieg hopes to define the dignity of work and the identity of the working class by urging such people to place their faith in a future where we work to restore the American dream and work together to move the country forward.  He cleverly announced his candidacy in the former Studebaker plant in South Bend, which I thought was a masterstroke.  I once opined on social media that you shouldn't automatically assume that white men who pine for the 1950s are racist, misogynistic jerks who want to go back to a time when women and people of color were not so dominant . . . because maybe they just miss Studebakers.  By announcing his candidacy in a former factory that hasn't produced a car since Studebaker went out of business in 1966, Buttgieg reminded us that we can't go back to these days and we can't re-create the elements of the past that we want to bring back.  Yes . . . we don't want to bring back institutionalized racism, but we can't bring back Studebaker cars or the economic aberration that allowed so many Americans working in factories like the Sutdebaker plant to prosper - that aberration being the industrial competition that was temporarily eliminated in other countries by the Second World War.  We need to start something new.

Buttigieg is counting on his own new-ness - new leadership, new generation, etc. - to get him the Democratic presidential nomination, and I'm so impressed by him that I wonder if O'Malley supported the wrong protégé by backing O'Rourke, who seems to have been forgotten.  There's just one thing - like O'Rourke, Buttigieg hasn't advanced any detailed policy proposals.  And as with O'Rourke, many party activists who want to see policy papers from every candidate are skeptical of Buttigieg.

Buttigieg has masterfully gone on the offensive with his sexual orientation, reconciling it with his faith in God and making his fellow Hoosier Mike Pence look like the homophobic twit he is, but as the trolling hecklers staging evangelical morality plays at Buttigieg rallies demonstrate, Mayor Pete still has his work cut out for him.  Meanwhile, some gays are actually saying he isn't gay enough . . . apparently because he presents himself as too clean-cut and too all-American (he's from Indiana, for crying out loud - what do you expect?)  Or maybe it's because he doesn't like Streisand.

None of this, however, makes me doubt his chances of winning the White House.  This does.  South Bend is a town of 101,166 people . . . more than Burlington, Vermont, where Bernie Sanders was mayor in the 1980s, but fewer than Newark, New Jersey, where Cory Booker was mayor from 2006 to 2013.  The idea of a guy who's practically a kid going from the mayoralty of South Bend to the Presidency is like the idea of a mail room foreman at a Fortune 500 company becoming chairman of the board.

Once again, Unn D. Sided is my pre-election Democratic favorite for the Presidency in 2020.  And if you think I'm going to settle on a candidate soon, I have a brand new Studebaker to sell you.   

There Is No Democratic Front Runner For President In 2020

There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020.  

Let me repeat: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!

I'll say it again: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!!

I re-iterate: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!!     

Okay, Bernie Sanders has a healthy lead among the declared Democratic presidential candidates, and his socialistic ideas are becoming widely popular among Democratic primary voters.  And, Joe Biden leads Sanders when you include him, even though he is undeclared as of now, and he represents the meat-and-potatoes Democrats who can't be bothered with Sanders' "revolution." But neither Biden nor Sanders are close to a majority.  Meanwhile, Beto O'Rourke is slowly rising by and competitive against Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg is even more competitive, placing third in some polls; he's like an Energizer bunny that doesn't slow down.  And the candidates in the single digits still have a chance to break out in Iowa or New Hampshire, as the voting is a long way away.  Everyone running so far comes to the table with different ideas and different perspectives, and Democratic primary voters have plenty of time to sort them out.  Don't believe anyone who says that Bernie Sanders is definitely going to win the nomination.

Well, he might.  It's worth noting that Sanders supporters - the Islamic State of Democratic primary voters - have so far expressed zero tolerance for an alternative, and they hope to get revenge against what the Democratic establishment did to him in 2016 by getting him the nomination.  I haven't seen any sign that he could win against Trump, though, and his supporters steadfastly refuse to consider an alternative because other candidates aren't "progressive" enough.  They wouldn't accept Martin O'Malley as an alternative in 2016 because they found his very liberal record as governor of Maryland - you know about Matthew Yglesias' article, I won't link to it again - insufficient.  Barack Obama made a note of this at a town hall in Berlin where he expressed fear that the Democrats could help Trump by fighting each other over a purity test instigated by the Bernie bros. 

You know, if Sanders supporters had been more open to O'Malley and recognized that he had a better chance to win, Hillary Clinton would have never been the nominee and O'Malley most likely would have defeated Trump,  and the rest of the 2010s would have been different.  But that was not to be, largely because Bernie bros (and their sisses) are an obnoxious, elitist bunch - more so than the Hillbots of 216.  So, again, don't believe that Sanders - or Biden, or that matter, assuming he actually runs - has the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in the bag.  In fact, I predict a brokered convention in 2020, given the vast quantity of candidates.  So, again: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!!    

I had wanted to support Martin O'Malley for President in 2020 to get revenge against those who stopped him.  I thought it was just the Hillbots who laughed him out of contention, but it's since become obvious that the Bernie bros undermined him too.  As O'Malley is not running this time, I am seriously considering with Beto, Mayor Pete or maybe California congressman Eric Swalwell - they are all O'Malley protégés, and he's a good judge of character.  Thus, I could still get my revenge against the O'Malley-haters from 2016.  But because there are so many candidates to choose from, Unn D. Sided remains my choice for now (though you can tell I've ruled Bernie out).

And if I do back an O'Malley protégé, I won't be eating Pop-Tarts in symbolic support - they're too carcinogenic. :-O

The New Democratic National Committee Chairman

It's Tom Perez.

Although Keith Ellison and several other candidates for the post of Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman fought the good fight, the 447 members of the committee, who voted yesterday (the vote was not scheduled for today, as I had stated earlier), chose a party insider who has been loyal to the establishment and is seen to be friendlier to wealthy donors and to the Clintons than to the millions of people who backed Bernie Sanders and the dozen or so of us who were for Martin O'Malley.  (O'Malley, who made Perez his Secretary of Labor, Licensing and Regulation when he became governor of Maryland, wouldn't back Perez for the DNC chairmanship.  That should tell you something.)

The Democrats could have gotten someone new and fresh  - alas, South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg withdrew at the last minute - but chose instead a political hack who is seen, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald, as "a reliable functionary and trustworthy loyalist by those who have controlled the party and run it into the ground."  Indeed - he blindly supported Hillary Clinton (that's the only way you could do it - blindly) in the 2016 presidential primaries (and O'Malley was clearly getting even by supporting Buttigieg, not that it mattered), and he's pretty much at Bill and Hillary's beck and call.  In fact, he advised Hillary Clinton during her 2016 primary campaign, and he suggested that she paint Sanders as the "white candidate" to build and shore up her support among minorities.  And isn't it weird that Hillary Clinton herself would put out a video message of resistance to Donald Trump on the eve of the DNC chairmanship vote to convince us that she's still relevant?  (She wants to run for President again.) 

Oh yeah, on a separate vote, a resolution that would have banned "registered, federal corporate lobbyists" from serving as at-large DNC members was rejected.  Money talks, and the people walk.

Although Perez made Ellison his deputy chairman to quell angry progressives and promised to go after the working-class and rural and exurban voters who backed Trump in 2016, most liberals realize that the Democratic Party no longer represents their interests (and hasn't since the Vietnam War ended) and are ready to bolt the party.  There have already been calls for a convention to found a new party . . . similar to the calls for meetings in Michigan and Wisconsin in 1854 that led to the Republican Party, which quickly supplanted the Whigs and recruited ex-Whigs Abraham Lincoln and William Seward, as well as the Frelinghuysen political dynasty in New Jersey, among others.  And the Huffington Post has been circulating a petition to make it happen.

I predict that Perez's elevation to the DNC chairmanship is going to accelerate a mass exodus from the Democratic Party and cause the first major change of the nation's two-party system in 160 years.  Any Democrat currently eyeing a White House run in 2020 will have to make a decision whether to stay with the old party or join the new one.  All Democrats now have to understand that they should either lead, follow, or get out of the way.  

We all know what the DNC chose to do. :-(

(Some good news: Stephanie Hansen won the state Senate special election in Delaware.)

How To Rebuild a Party - The O'Malley Way

Martin O'Malley not only wants to run for President again in 2020, he wants to save the Democratic Party from itself.

The former Maryland governor and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate is wasting no time in helping to put Democrats - now on the verge of extinction - back on the road to recovery by putting his money where his mouth is.  You might recall that O'Malley had pleaded with Democratic leaders to pay more attention to state and local races and was ignored, and the results of that inattention can no longer be dismissed.  (The party itself is being dismissed.)  So that's what he's doing - addressing the problem.  He was in Delaware this past Saturday campaigning for Stephanie Hansen, the Democratic nominee for the special election for the Delaware state Senate seat  in the Tenth Senatorial District, which Democrat Bethany Hall-Long recently vacated to become the state's lieutenant governor.  The outcome of this election decides party control of the state Senate.  The election is scheduled for February 25.

Hansen (below) is the sort of Democrat that O'Malley wants to see at all levels of government.  She is for preserving open space and balancing development with open space preservation, improving public schools, and preserving property tax credits for elderly constituents on a fixed income.  In other words, she, like O'Malley, is a progressive but not a nut about it. 

O'Malley has already campaigned for Democrats in state legislative races, most notably for Jim Lykam in a special state Senate election in Iowa, which Lykam won.   O'Malley knows that, if the Democrats have any chance of coming back for 2018 and 2020 and avoid the fate of the Whigs in the 1850s, they have to win at the local level and work their way up. They need state legislative seats, school board seats, municipal council seats, mayoralties, and county executive positions - then they need to regain governorships and U.S. congressional seats.  And they need to engage voters on the local level and find out what's on their minds, not just read opinion polls.  That's why O'Malley is supporting this man for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship. 

He is Pete Buttigieg, the current mayor of South Bend, Indiana. An openly gay man who served in the Navy Reserves during the Afghanistan War (and while he was mayor, at that), he has made redevelopment of South Bend a top priority in his administration, and he's made a point in getting things done and showing how municipal government can work.  More to the point, though, he's young, he's experienced, he's smart (he was a Rhodes Scholar) and he's a Midwestern Democrat who knows how to talk to people in a region of the country that went solidly for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.  Which is why he's perfect for the job . . . well, not entirely perfect.  He's still an incumbent officeholder, and that may impede him should he be elected chairman.  But Buttigieg, a millennial, represents the future of the country far better than Tom Perez or Keith Ellison; he's mostly been  unsullied by inside Washington politics.  (Buttigieg did work for an international-policy consulting firm in Washington for a year.)  

Alas, I have a feeling that Buttigieg won't get the nod to run the DNC.  Why?  Because he's a logical, sensible choice - can't have anything like that in the Democratic Party!  But maybe Democrats, who choose their national committee chairman on February 26, should heed Buttigieg's words ("We have to have the humility to figure out where the party fits in the broader movement, not the other way around," he told a DNC forum in Baltimore) and those of his chief backer.  Because guys like Buttigieg and O'Malley know what the Democratic establishment apparently doesn't - the party has to get back to its roots and reconnect with working people, else it will disintegrate the same way the Whig Party did after the Whigs found out too late that nominating another old war hero for President (Winfield Scott) wasn't enough to endear themselves to the electorate.  Similarly, nominating another Clinton for President wasn't enough for the Democrats to endear themselves to the voters either.