Fetterman Does The Oz

John Fetterman bombed completely in his one and only debate with Dr. Mehmet Oz in the U.S. Senate election campaign in Pennsylvania.  Or so you might think after reading headlines like this one from the Associated Press:

Fetterman struggles in Senate debate against Oz after stroke

Or how about this one from the New York Times?

Fetterman’s Debate Showing Raises Democratic Anxieties in Senate Battle 

Here's one from Politico! 

Fetterman’s debate performance prompts Democratic handwringing 

And from NBC News . . .

Fetterman's debate performance has Democrats on edge in crucial Pennsylvania Senate race 

Really!

Listen, people . . . Democrats are worry-warts by nature.  You'd be, too, if your party kept losing one or both houses of Congress two years into the administration of a President of your party.  You'd certainly be nervous if the opposition party nominated a telegenic celebrity to run against your guy.  And you'd certainly wring your hands knowing your best issues are the issues voters care about the least.   

To play up Fetterman's struggles in Tuesday night is to suggest that no one knew that Fetterman was recovering from a stroke.  He made it clear that no one should expect him to do as well as Dr. Oz because of what he called "the elephant in the room" - not Oz's wife but the issue of his health, which Fetterman's doctor - unlike Oz, a practicing doctor - says is good and improving every day.   So they poor guy flubbed a bit on the fracking issues.  Big deal.

As for Oz, who owns nearly a dozen homes and none of them in Pennsylvania (a few of them are in Turkey), he showed about as much intelligence about abortion as he does toward diet supplements. He proposed that abortion rights should not be decided on by the federal government by "women, their doctors, and local political leaders" . . . as if local political leaders had anything resembling the medical expertise Oz allegedly has.

Oh yeah, if Fetterman is finished, why did he rake in half a million bucks after the debate?

Chill out, Dems, you should do just fine in Pennsylvania.

It's states like Nevada and Georgia, where Democrats actually hold those seats up for election as opposed to the open GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania, that you should worry about!

(P.S. I was only kidding about Oz's wife Lisa, I'm sure she's a lovely person.)

A Gracious and Polite Man Versus an Angry and Defiant Man

Joe Biden won most of the states selecting delegates to the Democratic National Convention this past Tuesday, including the biggest state, Michigan.  Speaking in Philadelphia, Biden, with his wife Jill beside him, said that he wanted to extend a hand to the newer, more diverse generations coming up in the Democratic Party.  He complimented Bernie Sanders for his own presidential campaign and said he wanted to join Sanders supporters in the common goal of defeating Donald Trump. 

And I can count the number of Sanders supporters who were satisfied by Biden's gracious comments on zero fingers.

Yesterday, Sanders emerged to announce his plans for the short term.  Acknowledging his losses in Tuesday's primaries and caucuses, he sounded like he was prefacing a withdrawal announcement with a final show of resistance, in the style of Gary Hart ("I'm not a beaten man, but I am an angry and defiant man").  Well, Sanders let out his anger and defiance, stressing the need to defeat Trump in November and vowing to do what he could to defeat him, but he did not end his presidential candidacy.  Instead he declared that, while he was losing most of the primary elections and caucuses, he was winning the ideological campaign, as the increasing majority of Americans under 50 agreed with his positions on health care, the environment, and economic justice.  And he demanded that Biden answer the question as to what he, as a moderate who sees no reason to fundamentally change the structure of American democracy, what he was going to do about all that.

Sanders might as well have given Biden his briefing book for Sunday's debate - which Sanders says he looks forward to - for all of the advance questions he threw at him.

Well, then, good.  The debate between Biden and Sanders should be the best Democratic debate of the 2020 election cycle.  Not only will it be the first one-on-one debate between the two men, it will be held only with a moderator and possibly a panel, with no audience and no spin room for reporters because of the coronavirus.  That's a good thing.  It will be a classic debate like the old Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, which also took place without an audience.  It will be a serious discussion between the center-left candidate and the progressive candidate as to where America should go into the 203rd decade of Christendom.  Mano a mano.  Biden versus Sanders.

Sorry, Tulsi.    

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 . . ..)    

Connecticut Smackdown

Connecticut's U.S. Senate race got down and dirty when noted drug-pushing violence peddler Linda McMahon released an ad that delivered on a promise she made - it exploits Richard Blumenthal's misstatements about his Vietnam-era service record. With Blumenthal holding a lead of only three percentage points in one poll, the McMahon campaign has clearly decided to deliver the coup de grace to Blumie by reminding voters of the controversy from May. And she brought it up in advance of the Senate candidates' debate on WTIC-TV in Hartford last night, aired on C-Span.

Before I go any further, let me comment on the styles and personas of the two candidates. Blumenthal had always seemed to me like an Eliot Spitzer manque, at least before the sex scandal that brought Spitzer down; indeed, many is the time I confused the two. Blumenthal is less personable than Spitzer, though, and he talks with a reedy, almost nerdy voice. But he commands himself very well, given is erect physical structure and self-confidence. While it may have shocked C-Span viewers outside Connecticut that Mrs. McMahon talked like a Southerner, that's because she happens to be from North Carolina, originally, and she very much comes across as a girl from a trailer park who came into a lot of money. Her lime-green pantsuit was hideous. She's not only an outsider in Connecticut politics, she's an outsider in Connecticut preppie culture.

Now, some substance. Blumenthal addressed the Vietnam issue head-on, saying that there was no excuse for his misstatements, apologizing for them, admitting his mistake, and expressing pride for his service. This is what Chris Matthews said he should do and this is also what Blumenthal and others thought he did back in the spring. Matthews will likely have complained that Blumenthal didn't seem genuinely contrite enough by the time you read this, but I don't know what else Blumenthal can do to please his critics in the media. McMahon, for her part, had to defend comments she made that the minimum wage ought to be reviewed. She insisted that she never meant to suggest repealing it. Even though she has no idea how much it is.

On other issues, Blumenthal supported government initiatives to sell American-made goods, such as rules for government contractors to but American products, and he cited the many cases in which he represented workers in Connecticut whose jobs were threatened with outsourcing, and supported middle-class tax cuts and letting upper-income tax cuts expire. McMahon, who wanted to extend all of the Bush tax cuts, recited the old canard how a government official like Blumenthal had no experience in creating jobs, while she contributed to the economy with her business ventures. Unfortunately for her, that business - promoting a rigged, theatrically violent and intellectually impoverished "sport," gave Blumenthal the opportunity to question the value of her business, and he responded accordingly.

Also in the debate was a discussion of the Steven Hayes case in Connecticut; Hayes was just convicted of killing a woman and her two children in a home invasion in 2007; the woman's husband manage to escape. When asked if the death penalty was warranted, both Blumenthal and McMahon came out in favor of it. Some liberal voters might not be so inclined to vote for Blumenthal on the basis of his answer, given the opposition to capital punishment on the left. They might just stay home.

Ironically, it was the legal distinction of another criminal case that may have helped Blumenthal close the sale with Connecticut voters. Linda McMahon noted a case against World Wrestling Entertainment - in which workers have been classified as independent contractors to trim costs - was opened in Connecticut on the day Blumenthal, the state attorney general, announced his Senate candidacy, an occurrence she found more than coincidental.

Except for one thing. The investigation is a criminal case being pursued by the Department of Labor, which is under the control of Jodi Rell, the outgoing Republican governor. Blumenthal pointed out his office has no jurisdiction in such a case; he only prosecutes civil cases.

Asked to respond, McMahon replied, to some audience laughter, "No comment." It was the only time she was at a loss for words.

This issue has surfaced before in the campaign, but never with the the kind of devastating effect on a candidate only possible in a free media format like a debate. If Blumenthal - ahead in a newly released poll by about seven points - manages to win, this will be remembered as the moment he got his groove back.

McMahon is one of three female business executives trying to buy elective office this year. The other two - Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the "California Girls" - are failing in the Golden State, what with Whitman losing steam in her bid for the California governorship over having employed an illegal immigrant housekeeper for several years and with incumbent senator Barbara Boxer pulling ahead of Fiorina in that state's U.S. Senate race. If McMahon similarly goes down in flames on November 2, it will be a good night for Democrats no matter how many contests Republicans win.