Inside Information

I can't keep up with all of this coronavirus news.  I want to write about everything else going on the world, but there's nothing else going on in the world.

I'm a little late in commenting on this, and I can't add much to it, but here it is: As you already know, U.S. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, privately warned attended of a luncheon in North Carolina about a month ago that the coronavirus outbreak was going to hit America and hit it hard, calling it "probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic," and then proceeded to sell stocks before the market tanked.  Where did he get this information and why didn't he tell anyone else?

Because Burr (above) shared information in private rather than keep it to himself, he doesn't believe that he violated any insider-trading laws, but just to make sure he didn't, he's asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate him.  Wow, what integrity.  No one is buying this.  Consider this reaction from a leading pundit: "He [Burr] must resign from the Senate and face prosecution for insider trading . . ..  He had inside information about what could happen to our country, which is now happening, but he didn't warn the public . . ..  Instead, what did he do? He dumped his shares in hotel stocks so he wouldn’t lose money."  The pundit's name? Tucker Carlson.

You know you screw up badly when you are a Republican and you tick off Tucker Carlson.

Equally appalling is the situation of appointed Republican U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, who also sold stocks before COVID-19 eighty-sixed the Dow and who is - MAXIMUM BIG SURPRISE! - married to Jeffrey Srpecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange! Burr sold only (only?) $628,000 to $1.72 million in stocks, but  Loeffler sold between $1,275,000 and $3,100,000 in stock.  Forbes magazine's Jack Brewster (who, by the way, wrote a very good opinion piece about Joe Biden's stutter for Newsweek) reported that both Burr and Loeffler were downplaying the coronavirus crisis even as they were unloading their portfolios. 

While Burr and Loeffler sold their stocks directly, two other senators had their stock sold by third parties before the market tanked, one Democrat, Dianne Feinstein of California and one Republican, James Inhofe of Oklahoma.  I'm willing to give both of them the benefit of the doubt because of their different situation - even the insufferable Inhofe, who was one of the eight senators who voted against an earlier coronavirus relief bill.  But Burr ought to take Tucker Carlson's advice, and Loeffler, running in a special election to complete the remainder of former Senator Johnny Isakson's term, should not be given the opportunity to do so.  

The Gloves Come Off

Donald Trump is going after Joe Biden big time.  Fearful that Biden would be a formidable opponent to his re-election bid in 2020 should he be the Democratic presidential nominee, Trump sent Rudolph Giuliani to Ukraine to try to get the government there to open an investigation into his interference reading an investigation into some potential funny business including his son Hunter's service on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.  Giuliani reversed course after a public outcry over his efforts, as he is not a government official acting on Trump's behalf but merely Trump's lawyer, but the damage may have been done.  Even though a recent Bloomberg story debunked the story about any wrongdoing on the Bidens' part, this story helps sow the seeds of doubt among Democrats who might end up nominating someone Trump can take out more easily.  Like Bernie Sanders.

This comes just after Trump's son Donald Jr. was subpoenaed by the Senate Intelligence Committee for its investigation of possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, which sounds like payback against Biden.  In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee's chairman, who issued the subpeona, is Senator Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, and he is less interested in backing up Trump than he is in getting to the bottom of what exactly the Russians did in the 2016 election.  This has nothing to do with Biden's son except for the fact that it's Trump's son who's being subpoenaed.  It's a weird case of tit-for-tat with Trump getting revenge against Biden for trying to have Biden's son investigated because of a subpoena against Donald Trump, Jr. that Biden didn't initiate!  And now Trump may ask Attorney General William Barr to look in to the Biden "case" himself.

Even if Biden is the best choice to go against Trump, he has his work cut out for him.  Trump will stop at nothing to win another term, and he's willing to destroy anyone to make it happen.  But he's so hell-bent on destruction that the person he may end up destroying most is himself.

The Female Barack Obama?

I'm not going to comment on Attorney General Jeff Sessions' answers to questions about the Russians at his Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, or his recollections of meetings with Russian officials.  Because he offered neither.  I'm instead going to comment on the star of the hearings,  U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California.

Kamala Harris became a rising star in the falling Democratic Party the second she was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2016.  A tough prosecutor of South Asian and Jamaican descent, she served as District Attorney of San Francisco and then as Attorney General of California and was known for her tenacity and her lack of moderation in the pursuit of justice (such moderation, as Barry Goldwater once told us, is no virtue).  She's brought that no-nonsense attitude to the Senate, grilling witnesses in the Trump investigations such as Jeff Sessions to get to the heart of the matter.  But she's had a hard time getting her questions out; Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) keeps cutting her off.

Now why is that?  Because she's a woman?  Because she's a person of color?  Or is it because Republicans are afraid of her aspiring to a federal elective office higher than the Senate?

I'll come right out and say it - Kamala Harris is being talked about for the Presidency in 2020.  And Burr and other Republicans may be trying to silence her because they see her as a threat down the road.  

She's a dream candidate for many Democrats, someone who could forge a new coalition of women, people of color, and white male liberals, and maybe drawing in the same Trump voters in the Rust Belt who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.  Indeed, she is seen as a female Obama - biracial, educated abroad (she lived in the Canadian province of Quebec as a teenager), liberal on social issues, a seasoned lawyer, and a first-term U.S. Senator.  She's also married to a lawyer, California attorney Douglas Emhoff.  As a presidential candidate, she'd be unstoppable.

But as President?  Well, that's the problem.  She'd come into office with the same drawbacks as Obama. While she has more state and local government experience than Obama had before he entered the Senate, she will by 2020 have only been in the Senate for four years, like Obama, and she'd likely enter the Presidency as unfamiliar with Washington as Obama proved to be.  How could she get things done?  And how effective would she be at building up the Democratic Party?  These questions about Harris need to be answered.  I would expect her to be more effective than Obama as a President and as a party leader, if her relentless grilling of Sessions is any indication.  But is this another play by the Democrats at identity politics, which Obama eschewed, preferring to be the candidate who happened to be black, not the black candidate -  but which Hillary Clinton, as a woman, so shamelessly exploited to the detriment of the party and her own career?  If the answer is yes, then Harris would be wise not to take the bait and not to run as "the non-white female candidate."  Because playing with identity politics is the same as playing with fire, and when Hillary played the "gender card," she, the Democrats, and the whole country were burned.

But don't count out Kamala Harris in 2020.  She could be a formidable presidential candidate then and scare the Republicans silly.  Guys like Burr understand that.

Forgetting Elaine Marshall

At the beginning of the year, political pundits suggested that while 2010 would be a tough year for Democrats in which they were expected to lose seats in Congress due to the economy and the fact that the party not holding the White House does better in midterm elections, all incumbents regardless of party affiliation would have a tough time this year. Now these same pundits are suggesting that Republican incumbents are in much better shape because of all the momentum on their side. No one has come out and said so, but the punditocracy seems to expect a year like 1994, in which the Republicans not only took over the House but took over the Senate with every incumbent Republican senator being re-elected and every open seat going Republican, with two incumbent Democrats going down to defeat.

And so, it must seem silly to cover Senate races with incumbent Republicans this year. Maybe that's why you haven't heard much of this year's U.S. Senate campaign in North Carolina - except here on this blog, of course.

You remember North Carolina, a state with an incumbent Republican senator - Richard Burr - so well favored that Chuck Todd at MSNBC couldn't be bothered to talk a lot about it? You probably haven't heard all that much about the Democratic challenger, Elaine Marshall. She is North Carolina's Secretary of State, and has a distinguished record of accomplishment including the recovery of $340 million from Wall Street banks. Well, I don't mean to laugh at Chuck Todd - HA HA HA HA HA HA HA - but despite national disinterest in this race, she's moved up to two points behind Burr in one poll and moved ahead, also by two points, in a poll taken by WWAY-TV in Wilimington.

Burr is so unpopular in the Tar Heel State and is so connected with politics as usual in Washington he could lose his election running unopposed. Fortunately for him, though, he has a Democratic opponent whom he can define as too radical and too out of the mainstream for this very conservative state. Not if Elaine Marshall defines herself first. She doesn't have as much money, but she has a spirited group of progressive backers who are willing to contribute to and work for her campaign. Marshall also has free media at her disposal, and if she does enough interviews and hits the right notes, she can overcome Burr's financial advantage very easily. Most importantly, she, as a progressive, gives voters reasons to vote for her, not merely against Burr. This is how she defeated a White House-backed candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination, and this is why she is in a better position to win in North Carolina than Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, who's down by twenty points in her race.

Most pundits made note of Bill Halter's loss to Lincoln in the Arkansas Senate primary runoff and decided that it's not such a good idea for progressives to cast their lots with and spend their time and money on candidates not backed by the Democratic establishment. The likeliest reason they ignored Marshall's Senate primary runoff victory in North Carolina is because, while she defeated White House-supported candidate Cal Cunningham, Cunningham wasn't an incumbent senator like Blanche Lincoln is, and Marshall still has to defeat Burr. (And they act as if Joe Sestak's Senate primary victory in Pennsylvania, where he took out incumbent Democratic senator Arlen Specter, never happened.) But the passion is clearly on Marshall's side in North Carolina. She's surging in the polls, and it looks like a possible pickup that could offset Democratic losses elsewhere (like Arkansas). If I were Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey - who currently chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - this year, I'd be getting ready to pout more money into this race. It looks competitive now.

Only solid support from Menendez's committee and grass-roots Democrats and progressives can help Elaine Marshall. If she wins, no one will forget about her then.

Burr In the Saddle

The race in Massachusetts to fill the unexpired U.S. Senate term of Ted Kennedy is almost over. Thank God for that. But there are still the regular midterm Senate elections and other special races ahead. Despite their diminished standing in the polls, Democrats think they have a realistic shot of winning one or more of the open Senate seats being vacated by Republicans, namely in New Hampshire, Ohio, Florida and possibly Kentucky (yeah, right). They're even eyeing the seat of Republican Richard Burr in North Carolina, who is not retiring but whose poll numbers are weak - in Harry Reid territory - and has kept a low profile.

But Burr is also in jeopardy due to what I like to call Sam Ervin's curse. The curse goes like this: No incumbent senator has won re-election to this seat since Sam Ervin, the folksy Democrat who chaired the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair, was re-elected to the seat in . . . 1968. To give you some perspective, that was the year Ervin's fellow North Carolinian Andy Griffith's namesake sitcom aired its last episode. And "Matlock" has come and gone since then.

A history of elections to the seat since then goes like this:

Ervin chose not to run for re-election in 1974, the year President Nixon resigned over Watergate. North Carolina's state attorney general, Robert Burren Morgan, was elected to the Senate that year with 63 percent of the vote. In the Senate, Morgan established himself as moderate-conservative in the Jimmy Carter mold. But dissatisfaction with Carter in North Carolina in 1980 allowed Ronald Reagan to carry the state in that year's presidential election and allowed Republican John East to narrowly defeat Morgan in his bid for a second term. East exploited Morgan's involvement in the Panama Canal Treaty that eventually gave control of the canal to the Panamanian government.

East, a rabid social conservative like his colleague Jesse Helms, chose not to run for a second term in 1986, citing his failing health; he was a paraplegic from polio and had hypothyroidism. In June 1986, he committed suicide, and the Republican governor named Republican Representative James Broyhill, a scion of a North Carolina furniture manufacturing family, as an interim senator. Broyhill ran for the remaining two months of East's term and for a full term in his own right but was defeated by Democrat Terry Sanford in both elections, both held on November 4, 1986.

Sanford, a former governor and president of Duke University, served a full term in the Senate, where he had a record for supporting policies for economic development for Central America. In 1992 he lost his bid for a second full term to the ridiculously named Republican Lauch Faircloth, an ex-Democrat and a former highway commissioner in Sanford's gubernatorial administration and onetime Sanford "friend." Sanford himself was so dissatisfied with the Senate, he almost retired voluntarily.

Faircloth, another Helms manqué like John East, lost his bid for re-election in 1998 to John Edwards, who became a superstar for his star quality and his aw-shucks Mayberry style. Edwards didn't run for re-election in 2004, choosing instead to run for President that year; some say he would have lost that year, citing his falling standing in North Carolina polls. As it turned out, the seat changed parties once again, with Republican Richard Burr defeating former Clinton White House Chief of Staff (and current University of North Carolina system) Erskine Bowles in that November's election.

Fast forward to 2010. Richard Burr is a Republican incumbent in an election year that favors Republicans but not incumbents. And Burr is currently seen more as the latter than the former.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter Sam Ervin's Senate seat.

Forget Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania or Harry Reid in Nevada. Richard Burr's bid for re-election to the Senate from North Carolina is the race I want to watch.