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Good time Amy prepared for the fight. again.
- 01. Introduction (& how NPPs can vote in primaries)
- 02. Theories of Victory — the Moderates
- 03. Theories of Victory — the Democratic Left
With the January 2020 Democratic Debate starting in a few minutes, here are the projected lowlights of the evening:
- While Elizabeth Warren will not attack Bernie Sanders unprompted over his allegedly telling her in 2018 that a woman would have trouble beating Trump in 2020 (which he denies saying), Amy Klobuchar will attack Sanders for being a repulsive sexist and attack Warren for covering him and not mounting this attack on him before now.
- Amy Klobuchar will continue to maintain that winning a several elections in Minnesota is proof that she would win an election for President, despite her losing this primary badly so far.
- Amy Klobuchar will continue attacking other candidates on the basis that their ideas are not the only good ideas while continuing to attack other candidates for adopting her own proposals.
- Amy Klobuchar will continue to suggest that her having co-sponsored bills on various issues is proof that she is best equipped to deal with them.
- The pundits will conclude that this is the debate where Amy Klobuchar came through and won. (Which is fine with me because she won’t have won and will just take votes away from Biden.)
- Elizabeth Warren will not announce that she plans to pick Julian Castro as her Vice President … until just before the Nevada primary, when the white states are safely out of the way. But she will adopt his “Adios, Trump!” line, which will not end well.
- Joe Biden will be asked the “Groping, Stroking, Sniffing, Hugging, Licking” question again and will be indignant, honestly clueless as to what anyone will be upset at this. He will maintain his standing among women over, oh, 70.
- Pete Buttigieg will continue to claim that being elected mayor of a liberal college town in the 2010s while being gay is some sort of amazing feat, when the real amazing feat is having the gall to run for everything he possibly can when he’s just the Mayor of a city that is not just smaller than Costa Mesa, but smaller than Ek Cajon, and he can’t even win most of the demographics (young gay religious veteran) that he proudly represents.
- Tom Steyer will continue to demonstrate the truth of Ronald Reagan’s dictum that anyone who wants to be a politician should spend time studying acting by showing what happens when an amateur takes the stage.
- Bernie Sanders will do too much quoting material he has said in previous debates and too little time on the witty little zingers that will have been the highlight of the debate.
The Day After’s Reckoning
- To my shock — and I wasn’t alone in that — Warren did go off on Bernie after a prompt (for which she or her team were responsible for eliciting), so we’ll never know whether Any Klobucher would have gone after Sanders and Warren because there was no need to do it.
- Klobucher asserts that her winning Minnesota proved that she could win the Presidency. True. Unexpected was Warren apparently agreeing, but that’s part of her taking on the Hillary mantle.
- I think that she might have done this once.
- I think that she might have done this too, but I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that chloroform would not keep her from speaking for at least 20-30 seconds past her limit.
- There was the usual amount of Klobuchar love from the cable networks, but more excitement at the Warren-Sanders fight.
- She didn’t announce it, but this was a gimme.
- It’s amazing that this didn’t happen, but that’s “fairness” for you.
- Quite to the contrary of my expectations, Buttigieg did not mention his being gay in the one place where we would have expected it. He mentioned that when he debated Trump on foreign policy he’d be able to reply on his military record, and that when Trump invoked religion in a debate he’s be able to rely on his knowledge of scripture. But neither of those statuses, nor his being young, is any sort of a historic first for a Presidential candidate. The big first is that he is an out and proud (and married) gay man — something that Trump will surely use against him cynically and horrifically. That’s the important match-up, both his strength and his vulnerability — so why didn’t he talk about it in that answer?
- Tom, please — look at me. OK, now don’t look at me (and everyone else) when you’re answering questions. Look at the questioner like everyone else does. Learn from others.
- Bernie was a little better in not simply repeating catch-phrases for bold policies that we’ve already heard. But what people are going to remember is his denying that he made a sexist statement to his “friend” Sen. Warren. He gave a good answer to that — that he’d have to be crazy to say that a woman couldn’t win the Presidency when Hillary Clinton almost did — but how well can one do with a “he-said/she-said” situation? It’s not going to be what people remember.
So far, as of 6:40, five of the six candidates have been making decent impressions – the exception being Steyer, who someone told to look directly into the camera. (Why, Tom, why?) I want Steyer to stay in the race so that he can snipe at Bloomberg, but he’s really not equipped to debate.
Wow, Warren has totally decided to stake her claim on being a woman, arguing that women candidates have recently been doing better than men.
Uh, that doesn’t prove much of anything — and Warren knows it. The race for the Presidency is not like other offices; it is not determined based on heuristics that lead many people (myself included) to vote for a female or LGBT or minority religion or person of color if I don’t have a way to distinguish them on policy merit. At the Presidential level, voters know the candidates well, and don’t have to decide who to vote for or whether or not to vote. They will also go through a public torture-test that you simply don’t see on a local level. I absolutely believe that Warren can win, but any of the candidates will get a huge turnout from those women who aren’t devoted to Trump. The question is how one can boost voter turnout over all. Warren hasn’t built the infrastructure to turn voters out; if nominated, she’ll end up having to borrow those ground troops from Bernie.
This whole ‘tiff’ with Bernie got both of them tens of millions of dollars in coverage, didn’t hurt Bernie in the slightest (no Bernie diehard would ever believe it), and most of all, starved Pete, Joe, Tom, and Amy of media attention.
With the Women’s Marches this weekend the last major event before primaries, they’ll both strengthen their presence with the activists who ‘do stuff/show up.’ It’s no accident this happened this week, and quite likely, both Bernie and Elizabeth knew exactly what they were doing.
I highly doubt that their tiff (or rift) was coordinated, and that post-debate encounter where she apparently told him off and then didn’t shake his extended hand is pretty good evidence for that.
My opinion of Warren dropped deeply after this. (At this moment I’d prefer Steyer, but I hope to get over that.) The basic problem is that if she had a real live grenade there — why wait to launch it until now?
If Bernie (weirdly) told her that a woman CAN’T beat Trump — rather than perhaps that a woman will (or might?) have special difficulties winning against him because Trump is antagonistic and dismissive of women in a way that taps and atrociously and effectively into pervasive misogyny in a ways that he couldn’t do successfully against a male candidate — shouldn’t she have already brought it up by now?
Was it right to ambush him on the eve of the last debate before Iowa, when it would do her the most political good, without previously talking to him about what he said (which may have been bad, may have been offhand, may have been misinterpreted or poorly stated, and which he may not even remember, though perhaps he would if she refreshed his mind)?
No — it was nasty politics. And it will hurt her badly against Trump.
It’s no coincidence that the question I raise above — “why now?”, “why by ambush?” — are the same ones raised by defenders of Brett Kavanaugh over the accusations against him. (That’s why I hate raising them at all — though they are completely pertinent.) It seems to me that the emotional power of what Warren has said is that she is painting him as a kind of Brett Kavanaugh, who will issue a denial of wrongdoing and question her veracity.
Of course, there’s no similarity between what Kavanaugh and Sanders are accused of doing — which is why it’s OK to ask those questions. Warren would not have been so deeply traumatized by Sanders’s alleged actions that she would have suppressed it or feared significant reprisal. We now have to review her entire history, as a “friend” to Sanders since 2018, keeping in mind that by her own account she had this knowledge in her mind, apparently never tried to clarify it, and saved it to blow Bernie’s campaign out of the water at the most advantageous time.
If we were talking about a rape or sexual assault, it would be understandable.
But we’re not: we’re talking about something that is a worst a foolish political opinion. Saving this “he said, she said” for an ambush is treacherous.
Trump will have a great time with this, using it to amplify the questions about her credibility that already underlie his Pocahontas attacks. Unless Bernie agrees that he did this thing, he can portray her as a kind of Blasey Ford — who, if I remember the polling, did not go over well with swing voters. Except that any deficiency on Blasey Ford’s part was excusable and this was not.
If she tries walks it back — that Sanders said that a woman might have problems winning against Trump because of his aggressive machismo, or something else that she perhaps misinterpreted — then she gets tarred for having it go too far in the first place. (And that going to far would have been entirely her fault, along with the person who leaked it.) Both she and Bernie have now become suspect — and the refusal of his handshake was a stupid political move that just magnifies it. It was incredibly klutzy, at best.
My fear about Warren has long been that while she was brilliant and engaging she was also too much of a goofy academic — as in lacking political common sense. While she demonstrates a killer instinct here, she also shows a real lack of political dexterity. Trump has more of both.
This blunder reminds me that while she won reelection against a nobody, she only won that election against an appointed incumbent — in a deeply Democratic state — by only 7.5%, even with a major nationwide push behind her. Maybe she’s just not really that politically adept. If not, is it safe to nominate her against Trump? I’m still up in the air about that. I’d feel better if, demonstrating a desire to reach a common understanding of what happened, she had had the presence of mind to just shake Bernie’s hand and set a time for them to meet later.
“I highly doubt that their tiff (or rift) was coordinated,”
Both are shrewd enough to improvise/harmonize; coordination would be unlikely, but is also unnecessary. The minute eyeballs moved from Pete, Joe, Amy, Tom, Mike, and most of all, Donald to the Warren/Sanders ‘spat,’ they realized how to exploit that, build coverage for the both of them, gain millions of equivalent air time – at almost no cost.
Warren attacked Bernie with a nerf ball, not a hand grenade, knowing the media was ready to interpret it as a grenade (what were they going to do? Iran had sidelined the whole candidate pool, and they hadn’t gotten ink out). They’ve tested this dozens of times before (and indeed, at least 3 times this weekend).
That said, if you do wish to reconsider the ‘friendship’ between Warren and Sanders, you might also wish to reconsider what ‘not me, us’ actually means: is it really, “me, and if you disagree with me, you’re not part of us”? If so, then a mere he-said/she-said debacle can indeed derail a friendship (and a movement). But if ‘not me, us’ is actually a pledge for how a group operates, then it requires accepting that other parts of ‘us’ may see things differently, and have to work past that without assuming ‘enemies.’ Either ‘Warren’ is part of Sanders’ ‘us’ – or Sanders is alone, destined to remain alone…and that makes governance difficult (and revolutions perilous).
I can’t believe that I forgot to include Klobuchar claiming to be “The Only One Who …” yada yada and absolutely refusing to quiet down at the end of the end of her time limit. (Worst, it gave Biden his best line of the second segment of the debate.)
Being interviewed soon after the end of the debate is a benefit that the network controls. First out: Buttigieg. Then, after a Bloomberg commercial, Klobuchar gets a long, long, and fawning segment to use as a forum. Then an ad series including a bullshit anti-health care (of any kind — so much for fine distinctions), followed by … pundits. Then Joe Biden’s closing speech — kudos to whoever wrote it — and a lot of discussion about him. At midnight eastern time … Tom Steyer, who is very different and much better in informal conversation. An hour after the debate ended — no Bernie, no Warren (except to focus on their seemingly antagonistic interchange at the end). At 9:15 PT, I give up.
Having the advantage of NOT watching the debate and only seeing Michael Bloomberg introduced on one of the late night shows last night….we can say with impunity: Biden/Harris take it in a walk. Mayor Pete will be a great Cabinet Member. Amy too! Bernie and Liz need to stay in the Senate and run things. Tom Styer could be Ambassador to Uganda or Urguay maybe. Michael Bloomberg to the Court of St. James, of course!
Didn’t Nelson Rockefeller do that job? We forget.
Amy’s weirdly arched right eyebrow was the standout feature of the debate. I watched part of it with some Thorburn workers and the organizer said Amy’s eyebrows might be some metaphor for bipartisanship, and I clarified “When they go low we go HIGH.”
Gawd, what a bunch of losers. What this really means is that there are likely even more miscreants in the party willing to take another four years of the Rotting Yam to seek their Main Chance.
I guess I’ll be voting for a ged-u-wine billionaire.
Bloomberg? Mayor “Stop and Frisk”? How nice for you.
*Somehow, Democrats have learned to fail….almost every time. Amy doesn’t like “Skinny People”? Really? Let’s get back to basics…how many Democratic Candidates for President do we need? 100? Maybe 1000? The election is less than a year away and the Democrats are busy eating their own young? Very depressing. Letting the Trumpster win by default is totally ridiculous. We don’t need a process that pits one billionaire against three other billionaires. Too bad Ross the Boss passed away….he would have been the best of the bunch. Maybe Jamie Diamond will get picked as the Trumpster’s replacement for Mike Pence. His whole team is ready for the dumpster and he has no qualms about throwing them in there. The Democrats need to choose their candidate and his running mate immediately, if not sooner! Biden/Harris and then we can go to work. The current Halley’s Comet Strategy, by both sides is bloody awful and very depressing. Where is Harry Brown, Ralph Nader, Bo Greitz, Ross Perot and Monty Hall….now that we need them?