Tag Archives: Pete Buttigieg

2020 Democratic Primary

Democrats seek a nominee to take on Trump: thoughts on the state of the race

Bernie Sanders romped in Nevada. Some observations on the contest:

Bernie Sanders

I see no reason to reject the conventional wisdom that Bernie Sanders is the clear frontrunner, with ample resources to compete on Super Tuesday and no rivals well positioned at this stage to overtake him. Absent Biden (or another rival) achieving a lopsided takedown of Sanders in South Carolina, this is unlikely to change.

Sanders’ success, thus far, proves the adage that practice makes perfect. He did this in 2016. He has built an ardent following, a formidable campaign organization, an impressive online donor base, and – even with an intervening heart attack – he has hardly missed a beat in the 2020 race.

“I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”

This is a central theme, not always articulated so plainly, of the Sanders campaign. The theme rubs many grassroots voters (including this blogger) – who embrace the Democratic Party and have more faith in Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and other establishment Democrats (even James Carville), than we have in the junior senator from Vermont – the wrong way. But if Sanders wins the nomination, and if Democrats are prepared to rally ’round their nominee (as I am), this stance is likely to serve him well.

Joe Biden

He wasn’t impressive in his first two runs for the Democratic nomination. He clearly has lost more than a step or two at age 77. I didn’t buy the “Comeback Kid” shout on the night of the Nevada caucuses. Biden had better hope for an impressive performance in South Carolina or his political swan song will be that he smothered the prospects of several 2020 primary competitors positioned ideologically near him, who might have been stronger presences on the debate stage and the campaign trail than the former VP has been.

Pete Buttigieg

The former mayor of South Bend (along with numerous Republican candidates) has started running TV ads that go after Sanders by name. More emphasis on term limits and bashing (with Bernie!) the Washington establishment won’t win the day, so it’s time to go negative. Unless Buttigieg wins or finishes a strong second in South Carolina, it’s hard to envisage him with much chance of catching Sanders at this stage.

Mike Bloomberg

“He has now spent more than half a billion dollars since late November, propelling a rapid ascent in the polls.” Wow.

Mark Green relates his experience running against Bloomberg:

Three weeks before the New York mayoral election in November of 2001, I got a call from Mark Mellman, the pollster working on my race against Michael Bloomberg.

“Well, I have good and bad news. The good news is that I’ve never had a client 20 points ahead this late in a campaign who lost. The bad news is that Bloomberg is spending a million dollars a day — not a month but a day — and gaining a point a day.” I quickly did the math and shuddered.

Green lost 50% to 48%.

I’m skeptical that even with his billions, Bloomberg can secure the 2020 nomination from Democratic voters. But his immense stash is hard to contemplate. Will unlimited resources enable the mayor to block Sanders’ rise? Will ‘centrist’ establishment Democrats move to the billionaire’s corner and bring voters with them? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong.

Elizabeth Warren

With all her assets, my favorite candidate to take on Trump has been overtaken by others in the field. Amy Klobuchar has experienced a similar fate.

Not the year of the woman – at least not at the top of the ticket

Which brings me, as someone convinced that a woman could beat Trump in November, to a galling (albeit unprovable) conclusion. Democrats were snake bitten by Clinton’s crash in 2016. To the extent that Warren’s gender has harmed her in the primary, this can be laid at the feet of Democratic voters – spooked by Trump – fearful of misogyny, sexism, and intractable gendered traditionalism among the broader electorate – other voters – who might consider voting for a Democrat with a Y chromosome. If you’re convinced that the strongest candidate happens to be female, you must agree (as Jimmy Carter reminded us), life is not fair.

Democrats in disarray

Edward-Isaac Dovere, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that the Democratic establishment is desperate to stop Sanders, though he found few folks, apparently, saying so aloud. He quotes a vice president at Third Way, which opposes a Sanders nomination, and a lieutenant governor of California (who few Californians could name), who supports Buttigieg, plus someone at Emily’s List, which continues to support Warren and Klobuchar, the women still in the race. This is pretty weak tea. I guess most of the heavy hitters are in hiding.

Dovere writes, “This summer, party leaders may be forced to accept the nomination of a man who’s not officially a member of the party, who won’t have won a majority of primary voters, and whose agenda is popular with his progressive base but doesn’t have as much support with Democrats as a whole.” The link is to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey showing that 77% of Democrats support Sanders’ signature issue, Medicare for All. Yes, the public option is even more popular and support for Medicare for All diminishes when realistic details are added to the question, but – like Obamacare and the individual mandate – that’s the nature of public policy and public opinion.

Let’s acknowledge: democratic socialism and revolution aren’t popular Democratic campaign themes. But Sanders – in contrast to Hillary Clinton in 2016 – has a compelling economic message that resonates with many voters, especially younger voters who have reason to believe that the system hasn’t worked well for them.

The Democratic Party didn’t have to allow Sanders to enter the Democratic primary in 2016. The man is a free agent with virtually no loyalty to the party. But it did so. I welcomed Sanders’ challenge at the time (though I never entertained the idea of voting for him) because I thought he would make Clinton a stronger candidate and, in particular, to prompt her to sharpen her economic message to middle- and working-class Americans.

In retrospect, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I don’t think her campaign learned a thing from Sanders’ challenge. And, I suspect that a comfortable life with Bill Clinton, who has cashed in as a past president and advanced into the ranks of the one-percent, made it tough for Hillary to recognize the measure of economic angst and anger directed toward the one-percenters who crashed the economy, escaped justice, and continue to thrive.

Sanders – although he is a millionaire with three houses – is speaking to those voters.

Can Democrats unify to beat Trump?

Defeating a president presiding over a continuing economic expansion won’t be easy. Sanders continues to poll well against Trump, but it’s early. I’m convinced that Sanders wouldn’t be the strongest possible contender this fall. But in a base election, I believe any Democratic nominee stands a fighting chance. The country is split down the middle. Democrats are highly motivated to end Trump’s reign.

Will Sanders at the top of the ticket harm the prospects of Democrats taking back the Senate? Probably. He will almost certainly make life more difficult for many down-ballot Democrats. So it is up to the party and the candidate to do their best to overcome this disadvantage.

Sanders has been – as Matt Yglesias has argued – an effective legislator, “dramatically more pragmatic than his record,” not a kook. One hopes, if he wins the nomination, he runs a savvy, pragmatic general election campaign. With Sanders at the top of the ticket, the Democrats will have a strong case to make for creating an economy that works for everyone, not just the millionaires and billionaires.

Meanwhile, Democratic Senate and House candidates can run away from Sanders (as many ran away from Nancy Pelosi in 2018) if they must. They can embrace the strongest elements of his agenda, a Democratic agenda, while promising that they’ll never vote to take away employer-based health care. And note that the leadership of the Culinary Workers Union, which brought its members a superb health care plan – offering 24-hour clinics with no deductibles and modest co-pays, coverage for dental care, eye care, and prescription drugs, while pushing out middlemen and profit centers – opposed Sanders in Nevada. Much of the membership disagreed.

Sanders put together a diverse winning coalition in Nevada. If he can keep this up, he will be the Democrat nominee.

(Image of Sunday, February 23, 2020 Los Angeles Times with Mike Bloomberg front-page wraparound ad.)

2020 Democratic Primary

Irony watch: Has ‘Mary Poppins’ morphed into another … unlikable Democratic woman?

My last post included this quotation on Elizabeth Warren’s attempt to distinguish herself from the last Democratic woman to seek the presidency: ‘Instead of the aloof insider-technocrat, she is promoting herself as a kind of “Mary Poppins” figure — the cheerful, exuberant, uber-competent woman who simply gets things done and makes everyone feel included and proud.’

It turns out that a couple of the men — Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — seeking the Democratic nomination have discovered that Senator Warren, like Hillary Clinton before her, lacks the proper presidential demeanor:

Buttigieg laid the groundwork by criticizing Warren’s “my way or the highway approach” and suggesting recently that she is “so absorbed in the fighting that it is as though fighting were the purpose.” Biden, launching a range of new attacks on Warren, said this week that she reflects “an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics.”

This tact is depressingly effective in contemporary politics:

“Labeling a woman angry, or emotional or shrill, is a well-worn strategy when it comes to attacking women’s qualification to serve an office,” said Amanda Hunter, a spokeswoman for the Barbara Lee Foundation, which conducts research on women seeking elected office.

Those attacks, she said, can be effective because they sow doubt in the person and make them less likable.

“Voters will not support a woman they do not like even if they believe she’s qualified,” she said, citing extensive research. “But they will vote for a man they do not like.”

Anyone who has watched Warren on the campaign trail can see how ill-fitting this critique of her is: “Warren bounds onto the stage…. The affect is upbeat, barely contained energy.” But, in my view, Biden’s recurring promise to restore comity in Washington is even more off the mark.

“With Donald Trump out of the way, you’re going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany. Mark my words. Mark my words.”

Barack Obama offered this exact critique circa 2012: “I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

Didn’t happen. And Biden should know better, since he experienced the absolute Republican intransigence from the beginning:

Vice President Biden told me that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ ” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was, ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden said. The Vice President said he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along those lines.

“So I promise you — and the President agreed with me — I never thought we were going to get Republican support,” Biden said.

The Veep has apparently forgotten what the country experienced during eight years of the Obama presidency. And if he wants to preserve his self-christened “middle class Joe” credentials — though that has become more of a stretch — he may wish to embrace a more unyielding approach.

It’s going to take a fight to undo decades that created the chasm between the middle class and the super rich. Republicans (who have fought tenaciously to create this dichotomy) won’t be helping just because likeable Joe Biden wins an election.

(Image: Senator Warren’s official portrait.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Disconcerting, dispiriting, and scary quotations and headlines of the day

▪ “The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.” — Peter Nicholas, “The Unraveling of Donald Trump: As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse.”

▪ We’re in an astonishing situation. Mr. Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the middle east.

You know, at the end of the day, he green-lighted the Turkish invasion. The five-day pause is probably a good thing. Maybe it will reduce the number of people murdered by Arab militias that are following the Turkish army. Give the Kurds time to run for their lives. Where they’re supposed to go is beyond me. 

But, you know, the instant take on this is: You allow Assad to reenter the Kurdish areas. You allow Iranian dominance in the region. And you let the Russian military occupy abandoned, hastily abandoned U.S. military outposts. It’s an astonishing outcome. What did Mr. Trump think he was getting out of all this? — General Barry McCaffrey, retired — “Gen. Barry McCaffrey blasts Trump’s ‘inexplicable’ policy in Syria.”

▪ Trump has publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence in dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and suggested this year it would be “appropriate” for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven richest countries — reversing the 2014 expulsion after Russia invaded Ukraine.

No Trump foreign policy move, however, has redounded so directly to Russia’s benefit as the Syrian pullout, with the Kurdish forces striking a deal with Russia. — Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim, “‘All roads lead to Putin’: Pelosi questions Trump’s loyalty in White House clash.”

▪ At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.

“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”

He buttoned his suit coat, pursed his lips, squared his shoulders and dropped his arms rigidly at his sides. “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas,” he then droned in a sleep-inducing staccato monotone the way he imagined most of the other 44 presidents had done. “It is a great honor to be with you this evening.”

The crowd loved it, roaring with laughter. Transforming back into the unpresidential president America has come to know, Mr. Trump added, “And everybody would be out of here so fast! You wouldn’t come in in the first place!” Being presidential, he was saying, is so boring. Who wants that? — Peter Baker, “On Day 1001, Trump Made It Clear: Being ‘Presidential’ is Boring.”

▪ “This is unquestionably the most outstanding nomination that I’ve ever recommended to Presidents to serve on the bench in Kentucky,” Mitch McConnell tweeted in July, when Walker’s name first came up. However, the Senate Majority Leader made his endorsement to the detriment of the nonpartisan American Bar Association, which gave Walker a rare “not qualified rating.” The ABA suggests that “a nominee to the federal bench ordinarily should have at least 12 years’ experience in the practice of law” — not zero cases in court under their belt. In addition, Paul T. Moxley, chair of the ABA committee on the federal judiciary, issued the closest thing to an I Don’t Know Her that a lawyer can physically emit: “Based on review of his biographical information and conversations with Mr. Walker, it was challenging to determine how much of his ten years since graduation from law school has been spent in the practice of law. — Matt Steib, “As Trump Fumes, GOP Advances Real Party Goal of Making the Federal Judiciary Great Again.”

▪ “I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party. Because there’s no wing that’s very large that is aligned with me.” — Senator Mitt Romney, “Mitt Romney Marches Alone: ‘I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party.’“

▪ And, yes, among the unsettling items in today’s news, is one about the Democrats:

Democrats aren’t comfortable with the brutal language of unvarnished national interest. They aren’t comfortable acknowledging tragic tradeoffs between the welfare of ordinary Americans and the welfare of vulnerable people overseas. Donald Trump is. He genuinely doesn’t care what happens to the Kurds or the Afghans—or any other group of people who can’t offer him votes or money or project his image onto the side of a luxury hotel. Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden do care, which is why they found it so easy to offer ferocious moral denunciations of Trump’s Syria policy at this week’s debate. They just don’t care enough to ask Americans to sacrifice to reduce the chances that Syria’s horrors repeat themselves in Afghanistan. — Peter Beinart, “Democrats are Hypocrites for Condemning Trump Over Syria: Presidential hopefuls blasted Trump for abandoning the Kurds — but want the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan under similar conditions.“