Seriously, what the fuck? MSDNC fired its handsy, Irish Catholic gaffe machine this week, why couldn’t the actual Democratic Party?
We know the story by now: Joe Biden was left for dead. He put all his chips on South Carolina. But (largely thanks to veteran congressman Jim Clyburn) the state came out for him in a big way, and everyone else’s vote take was underwhelming. So Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden. And then Amy Klobuchar, because Amy will not be one-upped by Pete on anything. And then Monday, Biden was at a Texas rally and got a surprise endorsement from Beto O’Rourke, complete with gratuitous Spanglish.
And Biden went on to win not only the states he was expected to win, but Texas, where Bernie Sanders was polling strong, and Minnesota, where Klobuchar’s endorsement helped break Sanders’ previous lead. (Don’t say I never gave Amy Klobuchar credit for anything.)
After Nevada, Bernie Sanders was the candidate to beat, but Biden performed so much better than expected this week that he actually overtook Sanders’ delegate lead. Now a veteran Democratic pollster says, “It’s done unless Joe makes some horrible mistake.”
Pfft. What are the odds of that?
Biden: Can at least have credit for staying power. His strategy all this time (conscious or not) is that that lots of Americans like the idea of Donald Trump – the straight-talking, politically incorrect populist – but unlike his cultists, realize he’s a Russian gimp who makes Biden look like Bill Nye the Science Guy. And he conveys himself in a positive way that neither Trump nor Sanders do. A point I kept hearing over the weekend after South Carolina is that Biden is a kind man, a decent man. Well, yes. He would certainly be a welcome change of pace after four years of Andrew “Dice” Trump.
(Seriously, I thought Trump was going to start his last State of the Union speech with ‘I got my tongue up Nancy Pelosi’s ass, see?’)
Biden also has the same thing that Hillary Clinton had in 2016 that sank Sanders the last time: party backing. It matters tremendously that everyone came out to endorse Biden, and to do so when they did. Exit polls indicated that a lot of Super Tuesday voters made their decision for Biden after his South Carolina victory and party endorsements.
I would have no problem voting for Joe Biden. But he’s still vulnerable. Banana Republicans are still trying to hang Hunter Biden over him. The same people who pretend Trump has no mental problems will pick on every mistake Biden makes (and it’s a matter of WHEN and how MUCH, not if). And his main problem remains his attitude that we can just wind back the clock four years and the Republicans will be a normal party again, which they haven’t been for quite some time. But as I’d said, the broader picture is that if the Democratic Party is settling in behind Joe, he at least has a very strong back bench to help him, including people who are not only more on the ball but more willing to accept that the political reality of our “two” party system has irrevocably changed, and will act accordingly. People like Pete Buttigieg. I very much got the impression that in the last few days of campaign appearances, Joe was letting Pete try out for the role of Vice President, which would make him a good auxiliary brain. Of course I’m sure that would make “progressives” hate him and Biden all the more.
Warren: The fact that Elizabeth Warren has not done as well as a lot of people, including me, thought she would has itself been the source of some media discussion. The best comment on it being from Reason Magazine: “Indeed, the media stumped for Warren so hard that Vox‘s Matt Yglesias recently had to write a post explaining to people why she was losing “even if all your friends love her.” By your friends, he meant friends of people like you, a reader of Vox.“
So – you’re convinced that your candidate is the objectively best choice for president and you just have to get around the trivial matter that the entire rest of the country doesn’t agree?
Hi. Welcome to the Libertarian Party.
There have been several pre-post-mortems of Warren’s campaign in the media, and they usually come to the common point that by emphasizing “progressive” politics while at the same time going back on some pledges – like not taking PAC money – Warren has alienated both progressives and mainstream Democrats rather than being a point of common agreement between the two camps. This means that any hope of her riding in as a compromise candidate to a brokered convention is probably futile, since that would require her to have a base that would take her as a second choice – when she didn’t even place second in her home state of Massachusetts.
I like Elizabeth Warren. I think Warren is a perfectly good politician and would make a fine president. I just don’t see anybody voting for her.
Sanders: Sanders is hardly beaten. But he’s in trouble. David Faris had a pretty good summary in The Week Wednesday. He started, as many analyses do, pointing out Bernie’s colossal mistake in praising Cuba’s education program, however qualified that praise may be.
Look, praising the Soviet legacy is not an unforgivable sin in America. Just look at Jane Fonda. Or Donald Trump. But Trump notwithstanding, that’s not a guarantee of political success. Socialists are being too cute by half if they think they can create a distinction between “good” socialism in Canada and Europe and “bad” socialism in communist countries, and then collapse that distinction by defending communist Cuba and socialist Venezuela. For one thing, what you have with Left parties in Canada and Europe is simply a more distributionist model of capitalism, because you cannot have the benefits of “socialism” without a capitalist system. And that is because you cannot redistribute income if there is no income to redistribute. That requires profit motive, that requires surplus value, that requires capitalism. And as I’ve said already, if you can point to other countries (including Costa Rica) that have welfare systems and social programs without putting priests and gays in prison, why do you not point to those countries as examples of success instead of Cuba? It makes the rest of us think that the one-party tyranny is not a means to an end but the end in itself.
It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes mainstream liberal hysteria over Bernie seem justified. The fact that Bernie is still a better choice than the Putin-Trump ticket says less for Bernie and more against what used to be the Republican Party.
But Faris also points out Sanders’ several other strategic mistakes, notably the fact that he has failed to reach out to potential fellow-travelers as well as Biden has. It’s one reason Warren is still in the race. It all comes down to the idea that there are two very strong constituencies in the Democratic Party – the (temperamentally) conservative mainstream liberals and the “progressive” leftists, and they both have enough force to make things difficult for the winning nominee going into the general election. But some of that potential force that Bernistas bring to bear was undercut by the results of Super Tuesday. Nevada and California disproved the liberal canard that Bernie can’t win non-white votes. But however much he has gained with Hispanic voters, he still hasn’t appreciably improved among black voters, at least those above their 20s. And that leads to another issue. As Esquire put it, “The Bernie Sanders Youth Revolution Was Nowhere To Be Found On Super Tuesday.” Voter turnout did increase over previous primaries, but mostly with the old white and black people who favored Biden. For example, Bernie’s percentage of the youth vote in Virginia went from 69 percent in 2016 to 57 percent this week. And this calls the best bluff that the Sanders wing has. It was thought that if Sanders was strong enough at the Democratic National Convention and party insiders pulled tricks to get a white-horse candidate to replace him, that huge voter base would just stay home and hand the election to Trump. Now if Bernistas say that they’re not going to vote in November, mainstream Democrats can just say, “Well, it’s not like you’re voting now.”
Bloomberg: As a lot of people predicted, Bloomberg dropped out after Tuesday. Not only that, he did endorse Biden, which on paper gives him a lot more campaign money. This is another strategic mistake of Sanders, who said he wouldn’t take Bloomberg’s support if he wins the nomination. But on the whole, Bloomberg’s campaign makes socialism look better than capitalism, because he proved you don’t need to be a government bureaucrat to spend hundreds of millions on a political vanity project that won’t do anything good for anybody.
Ironically, it also disproved Sanders’ central thesis that big money is the central focus of politics, since not only did his small-donor base make him competitive this year and 2016, both he and Bloomberg dwarfed Biden’s campaign spending and Biden still won most of the Tuesday states.
But really, the night was best summed up by anchor-in-exile Brian Williams on MSNBC, who made an off-hand remark to Rachel Maddow: “Perhaps if voting were central to our democracy, we’d be good at it.”