Peeling the Onion

As Nevada Democrats caucused (remember that, ancient history by now), Bernie Sanders declared neither the Republican or the Democratic Party establishments could stop him. Lately, as he focused his attack on his last rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, he makes it a point every time to say he is running against the political establishment.

Actually not Bernie, You are running to win the nomination of a major piece of the political establishment, the oldest established political party in the nation, the one with roots in the faction led by Thomas Jefferson that formalized itself as a political party during the time of Andrew Jackson – the Democratic Party.

In the now very unlikely event Sanders becomes the Democratic party nominee for president – in the more unlikely event of his election as president, how exactly does Bernie Sanders propose to govern and with whom?

How exactly does he propose to govern without the Democratic establishment? Because you see, what all this is about — this infernal two years of stupidity called the American presidential election campaign — is about governing.

Four years ago two New Hampshire Newspapers, the Concord Monitor and the Keane Sentinel published a piece I wrote in which I asked this question:

When you vote for president, how many people are you voting for? And then I answered the question with the observation that very much the most people would say they were voting for one person – and further observed that was entirely incorrect.

And that remains so today.

Why? Because when you vote for president you are not voting for one person. You are voting, by various sourced estimates, for 4,000 people the president will appoint across the executive branch of the federal government.

He will appoint them to staff the White House, his cabinet reaching down to the level of assistant secretary, and those he will name to run the entire A to Z gamut of federal agencies, boards, commissions and the like from the SEC and the FCC to the FDA and the CDC/Centers for Medicaid and Medicare — down to the most obscure government offices.

Of those 4,000 presidential appointees, sources say 1,250  or so will need to be confirmed by the United States Senate.

How do presidents find those people? They find them within the long-standing and ever sustaining, rejuvenating, experienced government and political cadres of their parties, the Democratic and Republican Parties because those are the only two parties that get to govern us.

Both major parties have cadres of candidates for those 4,000 positions. They are of course senators and House members, though no president should want to reach into the Senate because those seats are rare.  But the 4,000 are also from academia, business, capitol hill staffs, governors and former governors, statehouses across the nation, policy organizations and think tanks, and more.

Whether you liked George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan; whether you liked Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama, those men and their presidencies were able to draw on their respective parties’ trained, informed, educated, experienced cadres – their experts, their governments in waiting.

If you are a Democrat you didn’t like the people or their policies, programs, legislative agenda, foreign policy and management of government by Republican presidents and their choices to populate the executive branch or if you are a Republican you did not like some or all of them under Democratic presidents.

But – but at least you could understand that the people put into those positions by presidents of either party were, in the main, qualified, able and experienced, especially in the top 500 positions – the ones we read about day in and day out: The cabinet secretaries and their assistant and deputy secretaries, the CIA, the FBI, the NSC, the DNI, the prominent and not so prominent federal boards and commission. Current example? The CDC and its several parts.

Among the reasons the Trump administration is the worst thing to happen to the United States of America since Pearl Harbor is that by and large and for the most part — and really overwhelmingly the Republican cadres – that party’s human infrastructure of government-ready policymakers and managers — stayed out, estimating correctly the career-ending catastrophe this administration would be.

They knew what was coming. They wanted no part of it. They were right and so instead we have Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and their ilk.

The Republican Party’s personnel infrastructure did not know Donald Trump. He did not know them. He made it clear he didn’t care to know them.

He could, as he said, do it all alone or nearly so with his scrum of toadies, incompetents, screaming meemies like Steven Miller, other assorted henchmen, and lest we forget, his gangster family.

Shortly before Trump was elected Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey was tasked with managing the transition. He put together the top of a government in waiting and more that goes into a sensible transition. Hillary Clinton similarly had a detailed transition in progress.

Trump threw out Christie and his transition planning because his nasty son-in-law has it in for Christy because Christy prosecuted Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner,  for setting up his own brother, Jared’s uncle, to be blackmailed with a videotape of the uncle with a hooker that Charles had sent to his sister-in-law. Nasty people.

And so Jared’s pique killed what slim chance there was for a reasonable transition. Instead we got this misshapen, malformed administration populated by misanthropes, gangsters, hangers-on, lobbyists, and a general assortment of know-nothings. For very much the most part, the Republican government in waiting stayed out.

Fast forward now to Bernie Sanders. He is not a Democrat. He has never helped the Democratic Party. When he runs for the Senate he files as a Democrat, thereby assuring no one will challenge him in Vermont. He wins on the Democratic Party line and immediately after being elected he resigns from the party.

He hurt the Democratic Party in 2016. He is hurting it again. He has extorted if for position in the House and Senate for more than 30 years. He seeks the Democratic nomination for president while making it clear he is not a Democrat and disdains the Democratic Party.

He has a fervent following and yes, it is young. Its masses believe he will erase their college debt, give them a new system of free universal medical care and more and that he can, as Donald Trump said, do it alone. He can’t of course.

Reading back into the New Deal, looking at how FDR’s Brain Trust and cabinet members like Harold Ickes and Francis Perkins assembled the legislation that became the hallmarks of the New Deal, especially and above all the Social Security Act of 1935, to this very day — to this very day — the single, most far-reaching socio-economic program ever enacted by the United States of America, we understand that it takes more than rhetoric.

It takes more than good intentions, even best intentions, to achieve broad social and economic progress and fairness. It takes political know-how and an experienced political cadre to get it done. It takes a party and its human infrastructure.

FDR above all understood that and constructed even from his time as governor of New York State what has become the ongoing, renewable and renewing generational infrastructure of political and policy architects and makers of the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders has been the foe of that Democratic infrastructure virtually his entire adult and political life. He does not come from or have access to what he calls the Democratic Party establishment that is, in reality, the foundation on which the Democratic Party constructs national governments when it is chosen to lead them in the White House.

Would that Democratic core of experienced policy, political and administrative people work for Sanders any more than the Republican version was willing to work for Trump?

It seems unlikely they would and, without them, Sanders could not govern and certainly without them he would absolutely not have the trust of the House and Senate if both come into Democratic Party control next January.

Do Sanders voters understand this? Do they know the right answer to the question, how many people are you voting for when you vote for president? Or as Trump declared, do they believe that Bernie and Bernie alone can do it?

He can’t. No one can.

In the American republic, in the systems to govern our republic that evolved from when Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in their differences confirmed our division into what their boss, George Washington, called “factions”, we have seen presidencies incorporating the political parties come and go, rise and fall.

But always, until this presidency, presidents have looked to and been able to look to well-formed party infrastructures to populate their governments to carry out their policies and provide the polity of functional administrations.

Bernie Sanders makes it clear he is not a Democrat. Could he govern without the Democrats whose nomination he asks for but whose political party he disdains?

Not likely. Very unlikely. Highly unlikely.

With Super Tuesday’s count is in progress, its muddle slowly clarifying with hours before California begins to come in and days before all of it will be tallied because there are 2 million early votes in the Golden State to be unsealed and counted in the days ahead, what can we deduce?

First, enormous turnouts in most states, maybe all 14 of the Super Tuesday states that portend?

That portends if you are a Republican you better wake up and smell the roses or, more likely, reach for the smelling salts because you are headed to a catastrophe come election day in November alike to your party’s 1964 debacle, the year of Goldwater and the daisy ad. And you must know if you have any sense, why it is going to happen and that it will be entirely well deserved.

Nothing should more alarm Republicans than a galvanized, aroused, unified black vote combining with an alarmed, aroused united, new Democratic white suburban women’s vote. That may be a political oxymoron but whatever else it is, it is a hard left/right hook tattoo in politics.

What could that mean? Joe Biden in the White House; Democrats gaining 10 to 20 seats more in the House; and winning Senate seats in Colorado, Georgia (not one but two there),  and in Arizona, Maine, maybe Iowa and, crazy as it sounds, Texas and South Carolina, producing — net of the loss of Doug Jones’s seat in Alabama (got to be realistic) — a 52-46 Democratic Senate.

If no one in Washington would give you odds on that tonight (and they wouldn’t.) I would.

If it’s Sanders, the result likely is the reverse: Trump in the White House, McConnell remaining majority leader of the Senate and, worst of all, Democrats losing the House. That is not a possibility. In politics numbers are immutable. It is a likely certainty.

So the likelihood of a big Democratic year is one of two things emerging even early on Super Tuesday night.

The other is that we will all know March 18 whether Biden can win this outright on the first ballot or if it is going to a second ballot and perhaps beyond.

Why? Because even now this early as it is shaping up, the Democratic contest does not point to anyone getting to 1,991 delegates on the first ballot but very probably to a first-ballot leader topping out at about 1,700 if Bloomberg and Warren win delegates and stay in the contest.

Understand too that next Tuesday, one week from now, six more states, among them Michigan and Missouri, hold primaries and that just two weeks from now, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, four more hold primaries including Illinois, Ohio and Florida – Florida the third-largest state with 25 million people.

By the close of voting March 17, 60% of the Democratic 1st ballot delegate vote will have taken place and 60% of 1st ballot pledged delegates will be chosen — chosen by voters not by some mythical establishment out to thwart Sanders.

One thing for certain is that a black voter in South Carolina is not a member of any establishment. She is most likely a church-going, hard-working socially moderate, economically disadvantaged woman and to accuse her of being part of an “establishment” plot to deny Sanders the nomination is disqualifying foul.

Then if by March 18 no candidate is within reach of closing out to 1,991 delegates, assuming four candidates continue, then it will be all but mathematically impossible for someone to win on the 1st ballot given the 15% proportionality in district, at large and PLEO delegate slatings under Democratic Party rules – rules Bernie Sanders pressed for after 2016.

So the bottom line, the takeaway, whatever cliche you want to use is that what is shaping up tonight, albeit with California yet to come and Texas still taking shape, is this: If four candidates have delegates and stay in the contest, it will go to the convention where, in the end, Bernie Sanders will not be nominated and Joe Biden will be (providing they stay alive at their respective ages of 78 and 77).

Have you noticed, the political press/media/punditry is suddenly awake to the real chance there will be a multi-ballot contested Democratic National Convention?

They have begun to look at the math, the delegate math as the question is asked if a candidate who arrives at the convention with a plurality but not a majority of delegates should he be afforded presumption and pushed over to a majority that gains the Democratic presidential nomination?

Bernie Sanders says yes, all the other candidates say no. No wonder in that, as he is likely to have the highest delegate count when they all get to Milwaukee in July.

Continue reading “Delegate Math = Majority, not Plurality”

Approaching the New Hampshire primary or as Bernie Sanders would say, the New Ham-Sha primary, the pundits tell us that it is critical to make a strong showing to be able to raise money to go on running for president.

Wrong. Why wrong? Because it is already Feb. 10 and there are not but two realist outcomes left in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Either someone will emerge to be the overwhelmingly likely nominee by April 2  — only seven weeks from now — or no one will, pointing the contest toward negotiation and perhaps some candidate withdrawals in mid-to-late June as the decision could head toward the first multi-ballot convention in either major party since 1952.

Ah but all the pundits keep harping on the likelihood that candidates will be forced to withdraw because their money will run dry long before then.

Have they been right yet? Nope. And aren’t you beginning to hear the first noises from them about this being a long, drawn-out battle?

First, money is a lesser factor in a contest in which one man is spending three times what all other candidates are combined. As of the Iowas caucuses —  whose failure is one of one state Democratic committee, not of an entire party — Michael Bloomberg had spent $300 million in two months since entering the race.

The day after Iowa, Bloomberg announced he would double down and spend $300 million more to gain the nomination and would double his staff of 1,000 campaign workers nationwide to 2,000 workers.

Against the onslaught of his money, the amount any other candidate can raise and spend is relative —  as in relatively meaningless. That is especially so knowing that at his present pace, by the time the convention rolls around it is likely Bloomberg will be in for $1 billion. His convention operation will cost millions more than anyone else’s simply because it can.

Second, and equally relevant as to why money is less the measure it has been up to now is the calendar.

As noted, it is Feb. 10. New Hampshire votes Feb. 11 (tomorrow as this is being written). Late polls point to at least five candidates obtaining 10% of the vote statewide. At least three and possibly four are within reach of the 15% needed to get a share of the state’s pledged delegates, of which for all the commotion there are but 24 — 8 each in the state’s two congressional districts, 3 PLEO delegates (if my readers by now do not know what PLEO means I am not explaining it again) and 5 statewide at-large delegates.

As Bugs Bunny would say, “Duh, that’s all folks”.

Yes, that’s all folks because for all the rapture on MSNBC and CNN, 24 delegates is a spit in the delegate ocean. Oh, Iowa? That was 42 delegates where 5 candidates came away with at least a few and the highest number was 14 for Pete Buttigieg.

Get the point? February is deciding pretty much nothing.

And that will signal what? Nothing actually, absolutely nothing except that the race goes on. Why? Because Democrats so far fail to perceive a president among their choices, allowing that yes, so far, Bloomberg is not one of the choices they have had and he won’t be until March 3.

After New Hampshire, the contest moves on to Nevada (where more orderly caucuses will occur Saturday, Feb. 22 ) and then to the South Carolina primary on Saturday, Feb. 29 (it’s a leap year).

South Carolina has rightfully been advertised as the first test of how black Democrats will vote except that proposition too is subject to dissection. Yes, African Americans comprise well more than half the Democratic electorate in the Palmetto State.

But their outlook, political experience, and expectations in small-city, rural South Carolina are very different from African Americans in, for example, the largest black city in the United States – Brooklyn, N.Y., where more than half the 2.7 million population are black people.

All that being said and said and said by the media and when it concludes with the South Carolina vote, February results in the election of just 154 pledged delegates among the 3,981 pledged delegates who will be elected to cast votes on the 1st convention ballot. On that first ballot, 1,991 delegates will comprise the majority necessary to win the nomination. So, after Iowa, Mayor Pete for example still needs 1,977 delegates to be nominated.

Three days later, on March 3 is Super Tuesday: 14 states including California (415 pledged delegates) and Texas (268 pledged delegates), American Samoa and Delegates Abroad will vote.

On Super Tuesday, a further 1,551 delegates will be chosen and the total elected to that moment will be 40%. By March 17 the total rises to 60% and by April 2 to 70%.

If Super Tuesday produces at least four — and with Bloomberg and his fortune in the mix from that day forward — quite possibly five still viable candidates, then money to finish the heart of the primary season to April 2 will be less consequential because only 30% of pledged delegates will still be available and because Bloomberg’s money will continue its deluge.

This is not to dismiss money as a factor but if by April 2 at least four of the candidates who rely on fundraising rather than a $55 billion fortune have accumulated sufficient delegates to continue, they will be able to ride increased public awareness in the media, on-line, and among actual remaining primary voters of the fact that a historic convention battle could loom.

If no candidate reaches or gets really close to the magic first ballot number of 1,991 delegates, candidates who can amass even a couple of hundred delegates would be foolish to drop out. Lightning doesn’t come in a bottle but at a contested convention a few hundred delegates can be tinder for a wildfire to sweep the convention floor.

It may be an oxymoronic posit, but one doubt has become clear as crystal. If Bernie Sanders is not the candidate, and this writer bets heavily he won’t be, will he and his angry legion — who like their candidate reflect limited knowledge and narrow perception —  abandon the Democratic Party and its nominee?

This threat more than anything else —  and it looms and will loom larger as the competition becomes sharper — could thwart the election of a Democrat to the White House in November.

Iowa Democratic Party caucus-goers vote Feb. 3  for a presidential nominee. The three cable networks will have wall to wall coverage with panels of their cognoscenti declaring so and so and such and such about who is winning what share of Iowa’s 41 elected delegates as the cable wizards try to pick the winner of the whole shebang – the nomination.

They will be missing the point.

Continue reading “And the Candidate Is: Part XII”

At this point, the dog’s tail has wagged so hard it has fallen off.

He’ll get another dog soon enough.

December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor Day, will be a milestone in the contest for the Democratic nomination for president. It’s the primary filing deadline for the California primary.

The California primary will be March 3 as will the Texas primary, for which the filing deadline is Dec. 9, along with primaries to elect delegates from 13 other states, American Samoa and Democrats Abroad. March 3 is the so-called Super Tuesday.

State of the Race

Every week now brings and will bring primary filing deadlines, deadlines for minor party filings and for independent candidacies for the November election.

But the seeming important primary dates right now, the ones the media keep harping on,  Feb. 3, Iowa caucuses, Feb. 11, New Hampshire primary, Feb. 22, South Carolina primary and Feb. 29,  Nevada primary — will be subsumed on Super Tuesday when 14 states, American Samoa and Delegates Abroad elect delegates.

A total of 168 delegates will be chosen in the four February contests, less than 0.5% of all delegates. Just a few days later, when all Super Tuesday votes are counted, Democrats will have chosen 40% of all elected, first-ballot delegates.

At that point, if there remain three to five viable candidates, if no one breaks through to capture at least 35% of all delegates elected, it begins to become mathematically difficult to achieve a first-ballot nomination.

By April 1, primaries and caucuses will have been held in 29 states and three more overseas U.S. jurisdictions bringing total elected delegates up to 66%. If no one is on a very clear path to a first-ballot nomination by then it could be nearly impossible and signal a multi-ballot convention.

The national political press still seems to believe or wants to believe a clear winner will emerge by March notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary.

To be nominated on the first ballot a candidate must win 50% plus 1 of 3,768 elected delegates — 1,885 delegates. To be nominated on a second or any subsequent ballot, when super-delegates can vote,  would require 50% plus 1 of 4,532 delegates or 2,267 delegates. No candidate – no candidate — is yet on a first-ballot path.

The pundits continue to preach prevailing wisdom that Iowa will crystalize the contest, New Hampshire could be a knockout win if the Iowa winner wins again; and that if the candidate who does that is not Joe Biden then he has a black-voter firewall in South Carolina.

They can see the trees, one tree at a time. What the pundits so far cannot see is the forest of delegates to be selected from Feb. 3 to late June in 57 separate primaries and caucuses amid a tangle of rules that ensnare the nomination in a crowded field without a front runner in this oh so fraught Time of Trump to which we can add the ever more divisive morass of impeachment.

The contest lately lost two candidates who understood they were going nowhere but it also gained two prominent public men. Who dropped out? Wayne Messam, mayor of Mirama, Fla. who almost no one heard about unless perhaps they read this blog a year ago, and, storied Beto O’Rourke, who started with a flash but ended in the pan.

Dropping into the contest in November were former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who decided not to run at the start of the year then changed his mind at the end of it; and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a man reportedly worth $55 billion, ready to spend $1 billion to purchase the presidency. As if to prove that, in just 10 days Bloomberg made a nationwide $30 million TV buy,  more than all the other candidates together spent the entire year on TV advertising.

Bloomberg, reputedly the third or fourth richest man in the United States, says he will not take contributions (other than from himself) and would not take the presidential salary if elected – decisions that spit in the face of democracy.

No matter how rich a president is, he should take the salary we pay if only to remind himself every day he works for the citizenry, they don’t work for him.

The Matter of Race in the Race

Why would? Why did Patrick and Bloomberg enter the race late? It has to be because they saw no one else commanding it or likely to. Their’s look like bets not to win the nomination outright but to earn a place to contend at a multi-ballot convention.

In Patrick’s case, in particular, the hinge for his decision may be a calculation based on the pivot on which the contest will turn and on which the November outcome will depend in large measure — the black vote, widely calculated now to favor Biden.

Just before Thanksgiving a Quinnipiac Poll, one of the reliable surveys, showed Biden with 43% support from black voters, nearly twice his overall 24% share in the survey with Sanders at 11% among black voters and no one else in double digits. That spells trouble for Democrats.

In 2016, 129 million voters cast ballots for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Black voters cast 12% of all votes. Clinton won 92% of their votes. The catch for Clinton was the black vote dropped 1.1% from 2012, a difference of 1.3 million votes. Among several, this is a very glaring reason why she lost.

Take Wisconsin: Trump won the state by 23,000 votes in 2016 as statewide voter turnout dropped 3% from 2012. But in Milwaukee County, the seat of the largest black population in Wisconsin, turnout slid 10%.

If the black voter falloff in Milwaukee had mirrored the statewide drop, Clinton would have won Wisconsin as Obama did; ditto Pennsylvania, ditto Michigan. But here’s the rub, from the convention to the end of the campaign Clinton did not campaign once in Wisconsin. Not once.

Whether a Democrat can be nominated without being first or even second choice of black Democrats, it is absolutely certain a Democrat cannot win the White House without a seismic vote from black Americans.

Similarly, Hillary Clinton won an estimated 66% of the Latino/Latina vote in 2016. Given Trump’s record on immigration, DACA, and incitement of race and ethnic prejudice that percentage is ripe to increase for the 2020 Democratic candidate.

But first and foremost, the key Democratic constituency in presidential elections is black voters, 23% of the Democratic presidential selectorate, and therein lies the rub for the present field.

Biden, clearly, is favored by the black constituency now at least as that is demonstrated by polling in South Carolina, where over 60 percent of Democratic voters are black. Nationally he captures over 40% of black voters in polls but no better than 20% of white Democratic voters in polls.

Buttigieg, as has been apparent from the start, has no purchase with black Democrats significant problems gaining their support and yes, there is a bias involved. Black Americans are perceived as liberal because they vote for Democrats who emphasize and support their concern for civil and economic rights. But historically and in polling, they take a more conservative view than white Democrats on social issues like being gay, gay marriage and abortion.

They vote for Democrats for many reasons but first and always because of civil and economic rights, with which Democrats have identified and been identified since FDR and the New Deal. Republicans, historically the party of black Americans from the time of Abraham Lincoln to the 1932 election, have become the anti-party for black Americans with a revealed, concerted program to restrict and reduce voting rights so hard-won by blacks and white liberal allies from both parties 50 and more years ago.

Race prejudice is the reason every state in the defeated Confederacy has changed from solidly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican since the 1964 Civil Rights and the 1965 Voting Rights laws were enacted.

Bloomberg made his first moves by filing for the Alabama and Arkansas primaries. Next November Trump will crush the Democratic presidential candidate in those states. But in July Democrats from both will be at the convention with votes that count in the nominating contest with large black contingents in their delegations.

Another key social issue is how the law is enforced in the United States. It is enforced as it always has been, with a heavy dose of racial discrimination and determination.

If the south has its history of lynchings, the north has stop and frisk. The foremost proponent of that noxious practice was Michael Bloomberg. New York’s former mayor started his run for the White House with an apology for his repugnant, unconstitutional stop and frisk policy because he knows it was anathema to Democrats. It still is. It always will be.

No apology is good enough, none can be to black men and Latinos stopped and frisked literally hundreds of thousands of times in New York City during his time in city hall because of who they are and the color of their skin, not for anything they had done.

Therefore, Bloomberg could be the very worst choice for the Democratic Party — the one candidate who could keep black Democrats home in November 2020.

Can $500 million in TV advertising overcome his stop-and-frisk history?

Anyone who thinks so, staring with Bloomberg, is whistling Dixie.

Kamala Harris and Corey Booker are black Americans who continue to paddle at the bottom of the presidential puddle. Some recent reporting in the mainstream media finds black voters looking for more than identity. An element in their failure to ignite among black voters could be that given the privilege in which Harris and Booker were raised and have moved through life, black voters don’t find identity with them.

Amy Klobuchar is one of several white candidates from states where blacks constitute a minuscule part of the population, less than 5% in her Minnesota. She too, though lately gaining some traction as a moderate alternative to Biden, has yet to make a connection with black Democrats.

The same applies to Bernie Sanders from Vermont, 5% black, and Elizabeth Warren, Massachusettes, less than 10% black; while the entry of Patrick, Massachusett’s, first black governor, could diminish further her similar lack of appeal so far among black voters in her own state and beyond.

Unlike Bloomberg, Patrick is a well-off man but not a wealthy man able to pour his own money into the campaign. Entering late without Bloomberg’s resources to hire lots of expensive staff immediately, he jumped in with no money, no campaign structure or staff and no particular message.  He is a good friend of President Obama but in no way the inspirational figure Obama is. Like others, he is betting on a Biden bust.

Then, does the fact that so far except for a 77-year old white man whose candidacy is flailing and failing, black voters are not attaching to any of the candidates signify something that bodes ill for the Democratic Party’s candidate in 2020?

Oh Yes, definitely. In plainest terms, it suggests no matter who the candidate is he or she has to make sure the vice-presidential candidate will energize and galvanize black voters near to the level President Obama did.

Is there someone who can do that?

If there is, her name is Stacy Abrams.

State of the Race

What’s the state of the race? It’s looking for the next frontrunner.

Biden is back at the top in all the polls as the calendar turns to December. Buttigieg surged in the Fall but lately is back in single digits in 4th place as the focus on him exposed his problems with black and Latino/Latina voters and it began to dawn on folks that although he’s glib — very glib — Mayor Pete has hardly done a thing except be the now largely absent mayor of a small city in a state Democrats will lose to Trump.

Warren’s summer surge has been undone by a focus on her thicket of plans, notably by the fact that she had no explanation of how to finance “Medicare for All”. She came up with one but it doesn’t wash. Sanders, the oldest candidate, has moved back up past Warren again in the latest polls and the rest of the field continues to lag in place.

As the contest advances, Biden, Sanders, Warren and now Bloomberg are not getting any younger, bringing into sharper focus whether the nation’s answer is another 70-plus-year-old in the White House – especially someone who would be past 80 years seeking reelection in 2024 if he doesn’t up and die first, which 80-year-olds do every day. The only word for that prospect is stupid. If it will be stupid in 2024, then it is just as stupid now to set it in motion.

The polls in Iowa and New Hampshire on which the media fixates, show this one day and that the next. Given that four candidates, Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg are in or around double-digits it is well to remember there is a 15% proportionality rule in delegate awards from voting.

If anything is striking in the polls it is that between them Andrew Yang, the $1000-a- month-in-every- pot man and Tulsi Gabbard, the woman Hillary hates, are polling up to  10% between them in New Hampshire. The best one can say about what that says about American voters is no wonder Trump is in the White House.

Lest we forget, two prominent Democrats have not made a debate stage since the summer, Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana and Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado. Democrats should be asking why foolish people like Gabard and Yang are in the debates and these two men, who have won statewide in red and purple states and who have a lot to say have not been allowed onto the stage.

Speaking of debates. The first one in June drew 24 million viewers. The November debate had 7 million. The next one is in December for which so far six candidates have qualified. But then these are not really debates, especially the recent one in November when the panel of questioners cut off almost every interchange between candidates. They are mass interviews that seem to make less and less of an impression.

There will be another in late January, just before voting starts. If nowhere else, it should get big audiences in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Meantime Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Holiday to all the candidates. They’ll need to enjoy them because it won’t be much fun for them once they end.

On October 5, 1938, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and said,

“We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat … you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but can be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude … we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road … we have passed an awful milestone in our history when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting”. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Churchill’s remarks addressed the Munich Agreement, signed in the early hours of Sept. 30, 1938, by Edouard Daladier, premier of France, Benito Mussolini, Duce of the Italians, Adolph Hitler, chancellor/Fuhrer of Germany, and Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of England.

Continue reading “The Paris Peace Conference: Endless Damage”

Gabbard: Weird, peculiar, confused, suspect (could/should lose House seat in primary).

Beto: Inch deep silly platitude-man, knows next to nothing.

Castro: Benign, served in cabinet, could again, about it.

Booker: Oh, goodness – little bit of this, little bit of that, little bit of nothing.

Yang: Sorry, where’s the Ying? Well-meaning jerk but — but  a jerk.

Steyer: Entitled jerk = fool.

Harris: Clever, shrewd, tricky, unready, phony, programmed, mostly uninformed.

Biden:  Disaster, confused, unsure, hesitant, inarticulate, irrelevant — loyal father

Sanders: Lev Bronshtein redux, knows he’s right because everyone else wrong (see impatient face).

Warren: Exposed, artless dodger, converted Republican, has can’t be paid plans, predictable, snarky, smug.

Buttigieg: Sensible, articulate, facile, perfect but…

Klobuchar: Smart, focused, pointed, centrist, capable, knows stuff, WINNER.

Well, here we are on the near eve of the 4th show in the series titled “Debate” with a field of 12 entered (CNN Tuesday, Oct. 15, 5 p.m., two CNN talking heads and a NY Times editor are the panel).

Next time, November, the qualifications again move up – to 165,000 small contributors and a 3%  polling threshold, which will likely allow Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer to gain the stage while again barring two of the most interesting intelligent able candidates. And this word just in as they say. Yang is a yes. Well, he is promising free money.

Either Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado or Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, would crush Donald Trump and could put this county on a path of informed liberal government. But they cannot get traction so they are not on the stage. “Politics,” it has been said, “ain’t beanbag” and neither Bennet or Bullock raised enough beans for their bags to qualify for this debate.

Of course, the Democratic National Committee pulled a fast one with the debate Tuesday at first promising to break it into two sensible nights of 6 candidates each. But it reneged, maybe to save some production money, and so we will watch a 12-way food fight.

As the 12 candidates (Biden, Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris, Booker, Klobuchar, Yang, Steyer, Gabbard, Castro, and O’Rourke) prepared to attack, slash and burn – which is what the chattering commentariat grade them on — how does this race look? How does it look, given Bernie’s heart attack, Ukraine, Ukraine/Biden, impending impeachment, impending crushing of the Kurds, and lots and lot of new polls?

It starts to look serious because once this debate is done we move on to November and then fast come Thanksgiving and the holidays and then, BOOM, the voting starts.

What were 16 months away when the first part of this ongoing series began is now just a little more than 3 months away.

Then what about:

•Bernie’s heart attack: This Underscores what has been said here over and over and over again. No one who will be 79 on Inauguration Day and 83 at the end of a first-term has any business running for president (or as in the case of Joe Biden, 78 years of age and then 82 at the end of the term. And pretty nearly the same for Warren, 70 years and 74 years.)

Older people are fragile. Any of us who are of these ages can be fine today, gone tomorrow or incapacitated for a lot of tomorrows.

*Plans, lot of plans and proposals: Well this is the hallmark of the Warren candidacy, though Bernie has lots of his own and almost everyone else has responded with this, that and the other.

The fact is, and you can read history or ask anyone who has spent much time around government, a governor, a president get to do one or two really big things in the first year’s glow after their elections and, if they win a second term, maybe the same again the first year of the new term. The rest? High stakes domestic maintenance and world diplomacy.

Otherwise, no — no more than that unless it’s 1933 and the whole world is crumbling. But even FDR by 1935 when he signed Social Security into law in the third year of his first term, had pretty much spent his first mandate and then by beginning his second term with a plan to pack the Supreme Court nearly blew up his second mandate.

True, LBJ got an enormous civil and socio-economic rights program through Congress but that was pretty much done in 1964 when he had the sympathy of the nation and in 1965 his election after-glow year when he had not yet been diverted by Vietnam and had the largest majorities in the House and Senate since the New Deal.

Warren can propose as much as she likes. Little of it will be passed, not in its current form. As someone observed pertinently when the last Democratic debate focused again on health coverage (it is a misnomer to call the political subject health care, the debate is about how to cover, to pay for health care),  the candidates all know that while they can propose all they want on health, they will be glad to sign whatever a Democratic congress can agree to send them as the next progressive step.

•Trump/impeachment/Ukraine/Rudy/Syria-Kurds: If anyone thinks they can sort out the impact all of this is having and will have on the contest for the Democratic nomination good for him or her. It is a reasonable guess that it is having big impacts. But what? As Trump says, we’ll see.

One likely observation though is that all these things portend even greater craziness than we have witnessed, a more unhinged Trump in a last-ditch end of the world campaign to which the best antidote the Democratic Party can nominate would be a sensible centrist of a sensible age.

Whatever else the majority of Americans are hungry for right now they are starving for a normal, traditional, sensible presidency. That cannot come from the far left any more than it can from the far-right albeit the far left would make the world better while the far-right seeks always to make to take it back to worse and worser times.

•Polls: The polls are all over the place. During August and September, they showed a steady climb by Warren, some even showing her passing Biden and taking over the lead.

Since Ukraine began to dominate the news and Trump launched the vicious attack on Biden, the former vice president has steadied with at least four major polls showing the race returning to the balance it had before Warren’s ascent when Biden’s candidacy foundered.

More or less on the eve of the debate the polls again show Biden at about 30%, Warren in second in the high teens or low 20% range, Sanders holding third between 15% and 20%, Buttigieg with modest recovery to about 8% from his decline to 5% and Harris in about the same position with everyone else scoring 1% to 3% variously in various polls.

One thing of note. There have been at least three national polls since Sanders’ heart attack and his support remains steady. That, in turn, suggests that his supporters are not going anywhere, are not moving to and not going to move toward Warren anytime soon, if ever.

It still means that 70% of Democrats do not want Biden and that if their support could be joined, and there are no signs it could be, Warren/Sanders together remains short of a majority and that the contest remains fluid as the voting nears.

The take away right now? That in a scant five weeks we have seen Ukraine and all it means, the clear move toward impeachment, the Rudy Tutti Giuliani implosion, the Sanders heart attack, Biden’s confused response to Ukraine/Trump, the reduction of American policy in the Mideast to the whims of Trump. That’s a lot, an awful lot. What else will happen before Iowa Democrats caucus?

Let’s hope the panel in this next debate does not ask a single question about health coverage policy, or this policy or that policy or this plan or that plan or the next plan.

No, ask them, the candidates, how a man or woman should be president? What a president does, what a president should do?

Ask them what they understand to be the limits of presidential power and authority?

Ask them how they would repair the presidency?

Ask them if they believe it is possible to repair the reputation and standing of the United States after this historic disaster. And what they would do to bring that about?

Ask them the first three things they would do immediately to begin to repair the presidency and the United States?

Ask them if they truly understand what being president is about?

Ask them why they dare to imagine themselves as president?

But please, don’t ask again about health policy.

Events outpace the ability to keep up with them. Even at this moment as this is written, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced a formal multi-committee impeachment inquiry; President Trump says he will release the full transcript of  his July 25 “perfect call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the House Intelligence Committee says it has heard from the whistleblower’s attorney to arrange his testimony.

While all of this will likely change hour by hour and day by day with much more to come over many months just 13 months from the 2020 election, there are some fundamentals worth observing.

Continue reading “Blow, Blow, Blow A Presidency Away”