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 . . . 

Joe Biden's Last Hope

Imagine the headlines in the Sunday papers the day after the South Carolina primary on February 29:

BIDEN LEAPS BACK TO FRONT RUNNER STATUS  

LEAP DAY WIN HELPS BIDEN LIVE TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY 

AFTER 2/29 WIN IN SC, BIDEN LEAPS INTO MARCH LIKE A LION

Well, I'm sure that's what Biden would like to see.  And the former Vice President can still pull it off.  He still has the lead in the polls, and he's fighting like hell in South Carolina.  But even with that, it may not be enough.  Not only is Tom Steyer - who undistinguished himself in Iowa by winning a mere 0.3 percent, half of what Martin O'Malley got in 2016 - gaining in the South Carolina polls, so is Bernie Sanders.  One projection even has Sanders winning.

A solid performance in the Nevada caucuses on February 22 might help Biden gain traction in time for the South Carolina primary, but he faces two obstacles.  One is that Sanders is much better organized there despite opposition to his single-payer health care proposal due to the generous health benefits offered by the culinary worker's union, a big force in Nevada politics thanks to the hospitality business in Las Vegas and Reno.  Another is that the culinary union, whose support Biden was counting on to give him a boost in the Silver State, has decided not to endorse anyone.  Sort of reminds me of the "Muppet Show" episode parodying awards shows in which Miss Piggy is in both sketches up for Best Muppet Sketch and knows she can't lose . . . until the judges decide not to give out the award.  Biden must be fuming in private about losing his chance to grab a major endorsement and get some desperately needed positive media attention.

Biden doesn't seem to be doing enough to shore up his support in South Carolina, especially among black voters, and his palmetto firewall is showing cracks and splits.  He still has a chance to turn things around, but the feeble, lackadaisical nature of his campaign in recent weeks suggest that he's not up to the task.  He might have to withdraw as a candidate on March 1 . . . and the Democrats could leap into chaos in time for Super Tuesday.

The Elephants In the Room

What, the Republican presidential nomination contest still isn't over?

When it became apparent that Mitt Romney was going to have a good night on Super Tuesday, I pretty much expected the aura of inevitability to finally shine on him. But Rick Santorum came within a whisker of wining the Ohio primary, and he was also able to claim wins in North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee - highlighting Romney's problems in the South and the Plains states and revealing a remarkable acceptance these rednecks and yokels have for Italian-American Catholics like Santorum. Romney, going into upcoming contests in Mississippi and Alabama as well as Kansas, admitted he's going into "foreign territory." Conservative voters just aren't warming up to him - there'll be another Ice Age before they do.

That said, President Obama isn't out of the woods yet. He'll have to face negative ads from numerous right-wing super-PACs in the fall, plus a virulent Tea Party ready to turn out for the Republican presidential nominee even if it's a cow. Righties will gladly overlook the flaws of the eventual nominee (Romney) to get Obama out of office. The fact that Obama's poll numbers have improved is irrelevant, especially considering how marginal these improved ratings really are.

Meanwhile, the Republican power grab plot is in full force. A redistricting of U.S. House seats in Ohio, done by Republicans in Columbus with the blessing of Speaker John Boehner (who represents a suburban Cincinnati district) after Ohio lost one seat, forced liberal Democratic incumbent representatives Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur in a primary contest for the same seat, even though the distances between their respective home bases of Cleveland and Toledo are 120 miles apart. (Their new district snakes along the shore of Lake Erie.)  Kaptur won, ending Kucinich's political career - to the delight of Republicans who were sick and tired of his progressive policy initiatives and to the dismay of Republicans who will no longer have him to kick around anymore. But more Republicans are delighted than dismayed. Kucinich's forced retirement is the latest in a series of GOP efforts to establish a permanent majority in the House of Representatives by eliminating Democratic districts in states currently under Republican control that lost House seats as a result of the 2010 census even as Republican states in the Sun Belt are gaining seats.

Many of these states losing House seats have more Democrats than Republicans, so Democratic votes in Democratic states will be neutralized. In New Jersey, the Eleventh U.S. House District, where I live, was redrawn to include a good part of the liberal Essex County town of Montclair (which was divided between two Democratic districts), but the Eleventh District remains heavily centered in Republican Morris County. Starting in January, the Democratic voters in Montclair who now find themselves in Republican Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen's district can now look forward to a decade of having their positions and concerns underrepresented - or not represented at all.  

The era of Democratic dominance James Carville predicted back in 2008 ended before it even began, and the demise of the Democratic party can't be far behind. Even if Obama wins re-election, the Democrats can't possibly overcome in 2016 the built-in advantages Republicans are creating for themselves in terms of reapportionment and super-PAC money.

The Campaign Continues . . .

Oh, is the Republican presidential nomination campaign still on?

This protracted race is probably the best argument for replacing the constitutional system in America with a parliamentary system that guarantees shorter election campaigns - or at least overturning Citizens United. All eyes are on tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, especially Ohio, where Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are in a dead heat. Santorum was a huge favorite in Ohio until he said John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on separation of church and state made him want to throw up and suggested that a President who wanted people to go to college was a snob.

Yeah, about that latter issue . . .. Santorum apparently misunderstood President Obama's comments on education. Obama believes that anyone who may not be an appropriate fit for college ought to go to a trade school, which, ironically, was the same point Santorum was trying to make in his wrongly worded remarks. And that would be a reasonable argument, which Santorum could have made if he had spent time in his own undergraduate studies learning how to debate.

But - and here's another important point no one seems to be making - wouldn't it be a good idea if some trade school students went to college as well, if they have the intellectual capability for it, so they could enjoy high art and literature in addition to learning how to work in a specific vocation? And it would also be beneficial to require some intellectual rigor in the engineers who build our dams and bridges so they could have minds flexible enough to consider possible effects of their work and imagine the implications of it. If engineers are smart enough to ponder the long-term effect of infrastructural systems and how they could fail, for example, they can design infrastructure with such ramifications in mind. Then we could build bridges that don't collapse.

As someone who merely observes the debate over education in America and is not an expert on it, I don't know how we can get the best bang for a buck and produce, as former Vice President Dan Quayle advocated, "the best educated American people in the world." All I know is that the current system ain't working. Look at Dan Quayle.