#^d 2020-03-08 #^h Weekend Roundup
The Democratic presidential primary took a dramatic turn over the last ten days. The relevant event sequence:
I imagine someone will eventually emerge claiming to be the genius behind Biden's transformation, but it's possible there's no conspiracy here. It's not that I can't identify actors or linkages -- you can be pretty certain that when David Brooks wrote his "never Bernie" column or when James Carville crawled out from under his rock to declare that nominating Bernie would be insanity that there were people (and money) behind the scenes pushing them forward. To my mind, the most suspicious sign was Harry Reid's endorsement of Biden only after the Nevada caucus, where he might have had an effect similar to Jim Clyburn's in South Carolina. Sanders' big Nevada win both drove his enemies together and set up expectations that made Biden's South Carolina win look even more impressive.
One lesson from this is that Sanders' appeal is limited, mostly to people who understand his key issues -- a trait he shares with Warren, although until now, one could imagine him not being so limited by it. Also, that he is not immune from media attacks, which have accelerated to new heights recently, and that seems to have scared many people into looking for a safer choice. Why Biden should be that choice isn't very clear, other than that he's the only one unlikely to get shafted by the people who've run the Democratic Party into the ground since the 1970s. Even people who substantively agree with Sanders, and who respect and admire him, have non unreasonable fears that the money people behind the party will do anything to undermine him (a faction that Bloomberg gave an explicit face to), even if that results in Trump winning a second term.
There are a lot of Democrats who only have one real concern in 2020: who can beat Trump? Biden has never seemed like a very solid answer to that question, but if you can't have someone progressive, at least he seems less limited than Bloomberg, Buttigieg, or Klobuchar. He has a long record of going along with whatever the party wanted -- be it wars, free trade deals, favors to the big banks -- without ever picking up the scent of ideology. He represents continuity with the Clintons and Obama, but wasn't necessarily culpable for their failures. He can still feign an emotional attachment to the working class, even though in the end he always winds up siding with the moneyed interests. He comes off as a cipher you can project your hopes onto. He is, for instance, the favorite candidate both of blacks and of culturally conservative whites (the kind most likely to be racists). The South has a lot of both, and that's where he cleaned up on Super Tuesday.
The weak link in Biden's campaign is Biden himself. He's 77, looks fit for that age, but it's easy to find clips where his mind wanders and his mouth goes elsewhere. He failed miserably in the first two contests this year, where voters have a year or more to check the candidates out up close. On the other hand, he won several states on Super Tuesday where he never appeared, and didn't have much if any campaign presence. He has a long record with a lot of dubious votes and speeches, and he'll get a lot of flack over that record. It is far from certain that he can withstand the intense scrutiny that a presidential campaign will entail. Sanders is unlikely to go beyond Biden's political record, but expect the Republicans to be ruthless not just at picking apart Biden's weaknesses but on inventing things from whole cloth. His mental agility, such as it is, will be tested severely.
Sanders will continue to contest the nomination. As Yglesias points out (see below), next month's primaries present some rough challenges for Sanders, and he is playing catch up now, in a process which is biased (if not necessarily rigged) against him. He has gained one big thing from Super Tuesday: he now has a single opponent to define himself against. He needs to do three things viz. Biden: he needs to emphasize the moderation of his views and ingratiate himself with the main current of the Democratic Party (which, issue-wise, is now well to the left of Biden's record, although it's important to make those positions less threatening and more intuitively reasonable); he needs to expose Biden's dangerous incompetency, and the risks the Party is taking in entrusting him with the nomination; and he needs to convince voters that he can be much more effective than Biden at standing up to Trump.
That may be a tall order, but I for one am already convinced on all three counts. The challenge will be in making those points resonate with less informed voters, and in effectively dodging the flak that the media will hurl at him, based on prejudices that are already ingrained.
When I started thinking about what to say this week, I came up with three possible scenarios for Elizabeth Warren. She's since taken one of those off the table, so I won't belabor it, but simply note that had she stayed in the race, she would have needed to do two things. The most obvious one is to attack Biden's personal competency (while respecting, if not necessarily agreeing with, "moderate" positions). The other is that she would need to catapult herself to the front of Bernie's movement, usurping his positions but arguing that she would be more effective at implementing them. The hope would be that after the near-death experience of Super Tuesday, Bernie's supporters may be more open to her taking charge, especially if she proves herself the more effective opponent to Biden. She could even wind up making Bernie her VP. Of course, this would have been difficult to pull off, and she wouldn't have much time, especially for the period when she is dividing the progressive vote. But she was pretty effective at knocking Bloomberg off his chariot, and she could go after Biden more directly than 78-year-old Bernie.
Her other choices were to quite the race (as she's done) and pitch herself to be VP either under Bernie or Biden. She could conceivably be very effective in that role. The problem with going with Bernie is that it's an uphill fight. The question with the latter is whether Biden thinks he needs her that much (after all, many Biden backers hate her as much as they fear and loathe Sanders). The plus side is that it would end the primary process almost immediately, limiting the risk that Bernie might expose Biden's ineptitude. Besides, VPs are historically insignificant (but given Biden's age and problems and Warren's vigor, she could take advantage of the role).
Note that Bernie Sanders says he will drop out if Biden gets plurality coming into Dem convention. He's argued that Biden should do much the same thing if Sanders is leading going into the convention, but with his reserve of unelected second-round delegates, Biden hasn't agreed. This anticipates a graceful exit if his campaign can't rebound in the couple months remaining. I can't blame Bernie if Democrats prefer to go with Biden and his long record of indifference and failure. Greg Magarian commented in Facebook on the article:
Bernie Sanders promises to make the nomination of Joe Biden painless if the moderate is leading come July. He says Elizabeth Warren deserves time and space to decide her own path forward. He won't run on a unity ticket with Biden because two old white guys is at least one too many.
If you've been swallowing, or parroting, the tired narrative that Sanders is nothing but a crazy, misogynistic ideologue who constantly trashes the party and only cares about himself, I respectfully suggest that you listen to what the man says -- all of it, not just the pieces that fit your ingrained narrative. He's an exceptionally decent politician, with plenty of flaws, who's in this to help people.
Elsewhere in my Facebook feed are a bunch of diatribes against Sanders, some complaining about his "arrogance" (for running in the first place?), many more explicitly aimed at his supporters, accusing us of all sorts of vile behavior. I try not to take this personally, but after repeated slanders it's hard not to feel some solidarity with the victims. Sure, maybe some people say some things that are ill-advised. I'll even admit that I can say some disrespectful and even hurtful things about politicians I seriously disagree with, but I usually try to focus on issues and rarely project my critiques onto ordinary people who merely happen to favor someone I don't. The most famous recent case of a campaign generalizing about its opponent's followers was Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables," and that proved to be bad politics as well as a gross generalization. She was, of course, talking about Trump supporters, who by definition are at least willing to tolerate one of the most hateful, corrupt, and dishonest campaigns in US history, but even so, calling people names just turns them off and estranges them further. I'm sick and tired of being called names by partisans of Democratic candidates who themselves have little to offer and not enough self-consciousness to recognize their own past failures.
Of course, in addition to the name-calling every now and then you have to fend off some plain old faulty logic. For example:
If money is everything in politics, why is Biden, who has recently spent so little compared to other candidates, doing so well? Well, you can say it's all those "elites" and secret oligarchs, but I don't buy it (no pun intended).
Start with a faulty premise (money isn't everything in politics) and pile on other misleading and spurious claims. Biden started with name recognition, credibility, and long-standing political links -- things that even with incredible amounts of spending Bloomberg and Steyer were unable to buy in such a short time, things that even more legitimate politicians like Klobuchar and Buttigieg were unable to compete with. So when the election pivoted to becoming a race to stop Sanders, the choice who benefited most was the obvious one, Biden. On the other hand, do you really think that Biden, who can barely put together two coherent sentences in a row, was brilliant enough to pull this off? You don't have to be very conspiracy-oriented to suspect that there are "elites" and oligarchs lurking in the background, pulling on the various strings that orchestrated this turnaround. After all, we live in a world where these sorts of things happen all the time. And that doesn't necessarily mean they have Biden in their pocket, but he is the beneficiary of their machinations, and if he does get elected, he will very likely wind up paying for their favors.
The Super Tuesday breakdown by state (delegates in parens, vote if 5% or more):
Some scattered links this week:
James Arkin/Marianne Levine: Biden, Bullock boost Dems' Senate hopes. Bullock didn't have much to offer as a presidential candidate, but in states like Montana we'll take whatever we can get, and that state could do much worse. One might make a case that Sanders would be an asset to down-ballot races if he could dramatically boost turnout, but that isn't clearly established. On the other hand, I don't doubt that him heading the ticket would be a lightning rod for Democrats trying to run in red-ish districts, and don't have any real answer for that (other than that, in the longer term, Sanders' programs will do much more to solve serious problems, especially in red-ish districts).
Dan Balz: Sanders faces a challenging 30 days in his quest to defeat Biden.
Zack Beauchamp:
Elizabeth Warren's exit interview is a warning for the dirtbag left. I'm really getting tired of being called names by politicians trying to distance themselves from the left. Isn't "dirtbag" just a nastier, more direct way of saying "deplorable"? And what exactly is it that makes us on the left so deplorable? Wanting health care, education, affordable housing and food secured as a right? Wanting clean air and water, and a stable environment? Wanting an end to war and violence? Wanting an end to racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination? Wanting the political process to be free of distortions caused by privileging money? Of course, it's possible that some of the people who habitually attack leftists think they want some of those things, too, but what chance do they have of succeeding when they spend so much effort attacking people they should be allying with? [PS: The term "dirtbag left" seems to be a self-description from the podcast Chapo Trap House, something I've never heard and know next to nothing about. They did an interview with Sanders, which Beauchamp and/or Warren seem to think is enough to implicate them in every bit of crude humor they allegedly indulge in.]
Netanyahu wins big in Israel's elections -- but not enough to secure full control. One section here is called "The big policy stakes of the Israeli election," but it's hard for me to find any. The one sticking point of contention is whether Netanyahu should be protected from going to jail for his corruption.
Kim Bellware: Matt Gaetz made light of coronavirus by wearing a gas mask. Now one of his constituents has died.
David Dayen: Mike Bloomberg's belly flop was a great moment for democracy.
As a Super Tuesday state resident, I ask you to trust me on this: you could not escape Bloomberg's presence on air, online, and in your mailbox. He spent more to win the presidential election than any general election candidate in American history, and he reached that lofty perch nine months before Election Day. That doesn't even include what he spent to buy political support, from candidates he previously showered with campaign contributions and mayors whose initiatives he funded through his philanthropy.
Thomas B Edsall:
Why is it so hard for democracy to deal with inequality? He cites Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, on how center-left parties have shifted their focus and membership to educated professionals, and as such have lost focus on the working class and inequality. Paul Krugman has a less useful review of Piketti: Thomas Piketty turns Marx on his head.
Does anyone have a clue about how to fight back against Trump's racism? "Moderates and progressives have a lot to lose by ignoring each other on this crucial question."
The audacity of hate: "Trump has a knack for turning anger and fear into political power. And for turning the volume up to 11."
Adam Eichen: We're the closest we've ever been to campaign finance reform: Talk about understatements: "But the fight is far from over." The thing that I remember is that after the 2008 election, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency yet didn't lift a finger to limit the role of private money and the influence of big donors. Maybe that was because Obama significantly outraised McCain? And that he recognized that as the incumbent president, he'd be able to do that again in 2012?
David A Farenthold/Joshua Partlow/Jonathan O'Connell/Carol D Leonnig: Newly obtained documents show $157,000 in additional payments by the Secret Service to Trump properties.
Josh Gerstein: Judge slams Barr, orders review of Mueller report deletions.
Ryan Grim: Elizabeth Warren should endorse Bernie Sanders -- not for him, but for herself and her mission: "Warren stayed out of the 2016 Democratic primary, and it hurt her badly."
John F Harris: 2020 becomes the dementia campaign: "Biden and Trump partisans trade charges of senility in an era of aging candidates."
Kerry Howley: The enthralling brutality of Elizabeth Warren: "What it felt like watching her go in for the kill." Part of what makes her so attractive as a vice-presidential nominee.
Sean Illing:
"The party needed an intervention and the voters staged it": Interview with James Carville, who just crawled out of his obscurity to lead the scaremongering against Bernie Sanders.
What we get wrong about misogyny: Interview with Kate Manne, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.
Fred Kaplan: The US-Taliban agreement is not a peace deal: "It's not even a cease-fire."
Kate Kelly: Wall Street, encouraged by Biden's wins, breaks out its checkbooks: "Fearful of the more progressive candidates, some finance executives had sidelined themselves from the elections until Mr. Biden surged."
Catherine Kim:
Sen. Kamala Harris joins the growing list of lawmakers endorsing Joe Biden. Article includes a list of lesser figures who also endorsed Biden (about half with "former" in their titles). Also mentions one person who recently endorsed Bernie Sanders: Jesse Jackson. Also note: with Warren out of the way, The Nation finally endorsed Sanders.
Trump announces Mark Meadows as his new chief of staff: Replacing Mick Mulvaney, who is being promoted to "United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland." I didn't realize that was even a thing, and would have resisted the temptation to appoint someone named Mick to it (but, obviously, Trump didn't).
Ezra Klein: Sanders can't lead the Democrats if his campaign treats them like the enemy. That seems like a fair point, but then consider the subhed: "What Bernie needs to learn from Biden." Biden is the favorite of the professional party elite because he's perfectly in tune with their cater to business interests while only occasionally giving lip service to the party's rank-and-file voters. Those same elites see Sanders not just as an outsider but as the leader of a revolt against their rule.
Natasha Korecki: Biden's 'Bernie brothers' remark lights up social media.
Natasha Lennard: Trump is a disaster for abortion rights -- but Joe Biden can't be trusted to fight for choice. E.g., see Lisa Lerer: When Joe Biden voted to let states overturn Roe v. Wade.
Eric Levitz: Bernie's revolution failed. But his movement can still win.
German Lopez:
Joe Biden's new plan to end the opioid epidemic is the most ambitious in the field.
Mike Bloomberg spent $500 million to win nothing but American Samoa. Living in Kansas, and using the DVR or streaming services for most of what I do watch, I got through the period without watching any Bloomberg commercials, so I can't say for sure, but Bloomberg got into the race because Biden was faltering, only to find that hardly anyone liked him. If Bloomberg's ads broadly supported "moderate" candidates, they likely helped Biden as much or more than they garnered votes for Bloomberg -- who may be just as happy to have salvaged Biden's flagging candidacy as he would have been had he wound up being the "moderate" standard bearer. Had he won the nomination, I'm convinced that Bloomberg would be a total disaster against Trump. Still, it's a testimony to Sanders that Bloomberg feared and hated him enough to spend $500 million just to run interference for Biden.
Mark Mazzetti/Adam Goldman: Erik Prince recruits ex-spies to help infiltrate liberal groups.
Laura McGann: Chris Matthews's misogyny shaped political journalism for a generation. Matthews "retired" last week, after a string of faux pas -- most notoriously his comparison of Sanders' win in Nevada to the Nazi invasion of France (an analogy that would have been more apt or at least more amusing had he saved it for Biden's Super Tuesday avalanche). My only lament is that I figure it's likely that he'll unretire to Fox, where his being a lout and an asshole will be deemed an asset, and left unchecked.
Ella Nilsen:
Why early polls for Super Tuesday missed Biden's sweep. Something like 30 percent of voters decided who to vote for in the last few days, and 47 percent of them picked Biden, over 18 percent for Sanders (who led Biden 33% to 29% among voters who had decided earlier).
/Li Zhou: Why women are feeling so defeated after Elizabeth Warren's loss.
Ashley Parker/Yasmeen Abutaleb/Lena H Sun: Squandered time: How the Trump administration lost control of the coronavirus crisis.
Cameron Peters: The next Democratic debate will feature a much smaller stage: Just Sanders and Biden.
Andrew Prokop: The delegate math for Biden and Sanders after Super Tuesday, explained. After Super Tuesday, Biden is ahead 184-106. That margin is quite a bit less than Hillary Clinton's lead over Sanders at this time in 2016 (but California voted much later back then).
Robert Reich: Five ways William Barr is turning America into a dictatorship.
Nathan J Robinson: Democrats, you really do not want to nominate Joe Biden. Also wrote Time to fight harder than we've ever fought before, and What the stakes are.
Aaron Rupar:
Trump: "We'll be cutting" entitlement programs. White House: He didn't realy mean that. But you can tell he wants to cut programs, because he's using the word "entitlement." Even "safety net" implies somewhat optional, although taking it away would hurt the people who most need it. I'd rather think of those programs as basic rights. Cutting them takes rights away from people.
Trump used his Fox News town hall to again mislead Americans about coronavirus.
Facebook's top news stories are like a window into an alternate dimension: "It's Super Tuesday and the coronavirus is spreading, but Facebook is talking about Hillary Clinton's emails."
Pence and Azar's coronavirus media tour revealed that their main concern is protecting Trump.
Dylan Scott:
Polls show Biden and Sanders are probably going to split Warren's voters.
Why support for Medicare-for-all didn't translate into a bigger Super Tuesday for Bernie Sanders: Exit polls show strong support for Medicare-for-all, yet Biden got 25% of the votes from those who favored it over Biden's opposing plan. Jedediah Briton-Purdy tweeted:
Among other things, the share of voters saying they support Bernie's program but voting for more conservative candidates is a measure of the distance between our success in naming a better world and our failure to foster political faith in its nearby possibility.
Or the trashing of political faith by Democrats who have run to the left then settled into near-nothing reforms, inaction, and/or worse once elected.
Nate Silver: After Super Tuesday, Joe Biden is a clear favorite to win the nomination: latest odds have Biden 8 in 9, no majority 1 in 12, Sander 1 in 50. But Micah Cohen hedges a bit: Confidence interval: Sanders still hasa shot.
Jeff Spross:
Could Democrats win the battle against Trump but lose the war against Trumpism?
The Republicans, determined to maintain a plutocracy-friendly policy regime when it comes to taxes, regulation, and public investment (not to mention voting rights and access to democracy) have had no choice but to pitch reactionary white chauvinism to white voters in a bid to stay viable. Trump's triumph in their 2016 primary simply transformed the subtext into text. Democrats, hobbled by the interests of the donor class that Hillary Clinton and now Biden represent, have limped along by promising to be somewhat less poisonous compared to the alternative. . . .
The platforms of Elizabeth Warren and especially Sanders -- taxes to smash America's concentrations of wealth, a national job guarantee, Medicare-for-all, an end to the student debt crisis, a Green New Deal, a resuscitated labor movement -- demonstrate an ambition and urgency that at least come close to matching the severity of the challenge. Should Democrats best Trump, they will have two years (four, if they're lucky) to pass such changes.
If, however, Democrats don't meaningfully address these problems -- dying jobs and dying communities and dying hope for the future -- it will only further empower and embolden Republican arguments pitting working Americans against each other, that government isn't the answer, and that immigrants and minorities are to blame, while leaving voters wondering what the point of the Democratic Party is. That's one way we end up with an even more extreme version of Trump next time around.
Jack Welch's legacy looks very different than it did 20 years ago. Related: Stephen Meyer: Jack Welch is dead. Neoliberalism lives on.
Paul Starr: How fear of Bernie Sanders has driven the great consolidation in the Democratic race: "Voters didn't suddenly discover a passion for Biden."
Emily Stewart: Mike Bloomberg is proof that you can't buy a presidency. On the other hand, Donald Trump is proof that you can, if you can overcome the insularity of your class and locale -- something the much richer Bloomberg couldn't do).
Matt Taibbi: To rebound and win, Bernie Sanders needs to leave his comfort zone: "Current and former staffers say Sanders has run a great campaign -- except when it comes to taking on Democrats like Joe Biden by name. Can he fix that?" I doubt he can, and I doubt he wants to, not only because he is an exceptionally decent person but because he realizes that backlash against exposing Biden's faults will hurt his campaign against Trump, and won't help his long-term goal of winning through ideas.
Matthew Yglesias:
The political map ahead is bad for Bernie Sanders. Still, much depends on Michigan, where Bernie won an upset in 2016. On the other hand, Biden's peculiar appeal to both blacks and white racists seems tailor made for a state that has previously voted for George Wallace and Jesse Jackson. Four years ago Bernie barely lost Illinois and Missouri, but both have lots of similar white voters who voted against Clinton but could go for Biden. Then there is Florida, where Bernie is presumably toast because he didn't regurgitate the usual anti-Cuban jingoism.
An expert explains how America got stuck playing catch-up on coronavirus.
Bernieworld's reaction to Super Tuesday's defeat, explained.
Why Elizabeth Warren is losing even as white professionals love her. Written before Super Tuesday, this struck me as a sober assessment of her dwindling chances. It's been clear to me for a long time that the thing that most limited her was her inability to broaden her base beyond highly-educated elite liberals.
Li Zhou: The Alabama Republican Senate runoff is bad news for Jeff Sessions: He came in second with 31.65%, trailing Tommy Tuberville, setting up a runoff. Roy Moore came in fourth this time, with 7.15%.