Two weeks ago – which of course is like a year in Trump physics – the New York Times took the unusual step of endorsing not only one but two women for president, presenting Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as the choice for “progressive” Democrats and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar as the choice for moderates. And the issue I had with that comes down to two famous cliches: you can’t have it both ways, and you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Again, damn near ANY Democratic candidate (with possible exceptions, which I’ll review) would be better for the country than Donald Trump, representing the great state of Vladimir Putin’s Wallet. Anybody who doesn’t get the nomination would be a great running mate or (in some cases) Senator. Only ONE of them is going to get the nomination. And since we now know that the stakes for the future are, one, Trump can commit any crime he wants, and two, Republicans are never going to stop him from doing so, it is imperative that in the binary-logic duopoly that is our political system that the designated NotRepublican party not only win the presidency but do so with enough political momentum to flush out Trump’s enablers in the downballot Senate races. And that means you need the right candidate, and splitting the difference like the Times did is splitting your focus, which the NotRepublicans can’t afford to do.
At the start of the year, there were still twelve Democrats running for president, but as of last Friday, John Delaney made the shocking announcement that he was leaving the race, which led to the even more shocking discovery that he’d been running for months in the first place. So that leaves eleven. And at this point just before the Iowa caucus, I think I should review the people who are left. Because some of those who quit the race – like Harris and Booker – are on paper more serious candidates and better choices than some who are left. To eliminate the people who really don’t need to be there: You’ve got Michael Bennett, another person who no one has heard of on the national level, and fairly recent entry Deval Patrick of New Jersey, who is at least known there but doesn’t seem to have much reason to run other than he wants to, not because he has a chance of getting more attention than he has.
Tulsi Gabbard gets a lot of attention, but not necessarily for good reasons. As with some of the centrists here, she reveals the real problem with the “two” party system in practice: It used to be that socially conservative people could be in the Democratic Party and fiscally conservative, socially libertarian people could be in the Republican Party, but polarization is not equal. As the Republicans continue to purge any non-wacko, non-Trumpnik influence, the standard for “conservative” is theoretically broad but increasingly narrow: All you have to do is agree with everything Trump says, even if it contradicts what he said two hours ago. And if you can’t keep up with a conductor who throws out the sheet music, the duopoly obliges you to put your trust in the designated NotRepublican party, even if the Democrats would really prefer to be the “progressive” party. Gabbard agrees with the liberals on a lot of spending proposals, but as a Hindu she is culturally conservative in many ways, and even if she has made overtures to the queer community, they have reason not to trust her. She’s also vocally anti-war and anti-Beltway complex, and that does impress leftists, but they already have Bernie. It also impresses contrarian conservatives and libertarians, but they already have Trump, who talks a lot about not wanting to start a war, and that seems to be good enough for them.
Then you have the men who could be grouped as The Billionaire Boys Club. The first being Andrew Yang. I like Yang. The universal basic income (UBI) concept is one of the few things that socialists and libertarians can agree on, and it reveals a long-term aspect of the economy that few politicians focus on: As more jobs become automated, larger sections of the population will be literally surplus labor. But for all Yang’s ideas, and recently increased public profile, he’s still not getting that far in the polls.
But whereas Donald Trump, who’s essentially been raising 2020 money since 2017, has raised more than $300 million this year for his campaign, Tom Steyer has raised $157 million, and Mike Bloomberg, who only entered in November 2019, has already raised over $200 million dollars, mostly his own resources.
And the thing is, it’s gotten Steyer to the debate stage, and while polls in Iowa are still sketchy, Bloomberg is doing as well as most of the second-tier candidates without even being in a debate. I agree with a leftist friend on Facebook who said that if we have to have one of these billionaires in charge, he would prefer Steyer or Yang, because they at least seem to care about the public, whereas Bloomberg is just trying to preserve the plutocracy in his own way. And he’s especially not good from a libertarian standpoint. He is a great advocate for what we call the “nanny state”, pushing large soda bans as Mayor of New York, along with the “stop and frisk” policy that concentrated on non-white neighborhoods. I might still have to vote for him if he ends up being the nominee, but he’s easily my least favorite choice. But I think Bloomberg is looking at Trump’s example and he’s concluded that if you already have a national profile, and you already have enough money (or razzle-dazzle) to expand that profile, you might as well run, and apparently some sections of the country like a pushy New York elitist in charge, but after almost four years they don’t like everything he does. Really, this ought to be Mike’s approach to campaign ads. “BLOOMBERG 2020: A Billionaire Asshole Who’s Not Trump.” Or: “BLOOMBERG 2020: A Pushy New York Billionaire Who’s Not A Putin Bitch.”
And then we get to Klobuchar. I’ve seen a lot of attempts to push her profile in recent weeks, including of course the NYT endorsement, but there have also been other efforts, like the New York magazine profile “Does Amy Klobuchar Have A Shot?” from January 10.
Liberal Media: Stop trying to make Amy Klobuchar a thing. It’s NOT going to happen.
If you’re fixated on diversity and distressed that the departure of Senators Booker and Harris means that Patrick, Gabbard and Yang are the only people of color left in the race – meaning, for all purposes, it’s an all-white race – you’re really going to be distressed by the gender politics going in. Both Klobuchar and Warren have the advantage that Hillary Clinton had going into 2016, of being the first potential woman president, and either would have the support of all the people who wanted that to happen in 2016 and are mad that it didn’t. Unfortunately, they would both have to deal with the same gender politics as Clinton, and while I think Warren has the personality and disposition to compensate for that, Klobuchar will handle that bias about as well as Clinton did, which means not at all.
Indeed, while the Times article presented Klobuchar as the best champion for centrism, Klobuchar is really a great example of why that’s not necessarily the best approach. I believe that it WOULD be the best approach in a country where the other member of the duopoly was not batshit insane and rationalizing everything on bad-faith arguments, but that’s where we are now, and if there was a legitimate reason that Trump won, it’s that the establishment approach to things is not working out for most people, and Klobuchar is nothing if not an establishment Democrat. The same New York magazine had another article just this Thursday showing how as a county attorney general, she put a teenager away for killing a child, but new reports suggest he wasn’t the guy who did it and there’s little direct evidence to suggest that he was. “It’s worth nothing that in her eight years as county attorney, cops and county sheriffs killed 29 civilians. Klobuchar’s office did not criminally charge any of the officers involved.” Now, while the Democrats can’t go too far to accommodate the woke “progressives,” they also shouldn’t try to alienate them by rationalizing this approach to government, especially since a lot of moderates and even conservatives are rethinking this approach to the law.
And ultimately, it just comes down to the same thing I have with Patrick and Bennett and to some extent Bloomberg: Why is Klobuchar here? What makes her approach better than everyone else, and why does she think her resume and profile are such that she could even get the nomination, much less beat Trump? Because again: Beating Trump is what we’ve got to be concerned with.
And so at this point I move away from the kids’ table to deal with the four people who’ve actually got a serious shot at winning the first set of races. Two are basically centrists and two are self-proclaimed progressives. I’ve already gone over my impressions of Biden and Buttigieg. I am a centrist, and Buttigieg is probably my favorite, since he reminds me of the common-sense approach of Obama, without Obama’s naive assertion that you can negotiate with Republicans on conventional terms of courtesy and compromise. And yet all the haters say he isn’t going to get anywhere once he reaches the Southern primaries with their huge black constituencies. (Klobuchar has Buttigieg’s same homefield advantage in the Midwest, but doesn’t seem to have any greater strength in South Carolina, and the media doesn’t make an issue of that.) I can’t deny that that is a factor, though. And I have to ask, if Buttigieg’s gayness is not an issue with most of the white public, how much of an issue is it for black voters who may be liberal on a lot of things but socially conservative? It’s not something one wants to acknowledge, but a lot of people didn’t want to acknowledge that Trump could win black, Hispanic and white female voters either.
Still, if Buttigieg’s youth and lack of national experience are a disadvantage in running for president, those factors in addition to his assets would make him an excellent running mate. Which means the Vice-Presidential debate with Mike Pence would be glorious.
And I like Joe Biden. But not as much as I did. I still think that there’s enough sympathy with the IDEA of what Donald Trump could be, contrasted with the ugly reality, that Biden could get support as the garrulous, politically incorrect guy who just wants to do the right thing. But even if Trump has done so much to lower the bar, I’m not sure that Democrats are going to endorse Joe the One-Man Gaffe Machine. Remember, in 2016, Republicans already thought they were in the Apocalypse. They were willing to endorse any candidate, no matter how scummy or unqualified, who had a real chance to beat Hillary Clinton and get Democrats out of power. By contrast, 2020 Democrats are still handicapped by a residual attachment to standards. This also means that they have to consider that the Ukraine smear campaign, fair or not, may work. Biden could still turn it to his advantage and point out that Trump’s Ukrainegate stunt demonstrates the depths that he and his party will go, and that they go to these depths because they’re more afraid of him than anyone else. And he does seem to be trying this, but I question how well it will work, or how flexible Biden will be in dodging the slime that he should know will be coming. The upside to sticking with Biden is the knowledge that if he isn’t chosen in the primary, Trump will pull some other skullduggery on whomever the nominee is. The bright side of that will be that Trump has already sunk so much of his attention to killing Biden that if he does, Trump’s going to have to switch it up late in the game, and it will be fairly awkward when he does. What, is he going to pressure Narendra Modi to investigate Elizabeth Warren because she’s an Indian?
Speaking of which: Now we get to the progressives. Again, I think that if you’re going to focus on Klobuchar and Warren, even though I am a centrist, that’s not necessarily the best approach, nor is the personality of Klobuchar better suited for the fight than that of Warren. To reiterate, Warren is going to be subject to much of the same snottery, bitch-calling, and other concealed and open sexism as Hillary Clinton. I also think she’ll deal with it better. The real difference between the Warren and Clinton, or Warren and Klobuchar, is personality. Warren seems nice. She seems sincere. And as they say, if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. Hillary Clinton couldn’t pull off sincerity even on the issues you know she cared about. And that’s partially because she was lacking in spontaneity and partially because everyone knew she was only in it for Her. Warren lacks both of those flaws. She has genuine rapport with voters she meets, and as she says, she has a plan for each of the issues she targets, including a plan to require candidates to disclose their tax returns and place their assets in a blind trust. That in itself would be good reason to support her, since as with Buttigieg, she realizes you can’t just reset the system back to “normal” once the Democrats are back in charge, because normal under Democrats was the system that got us to where we are now.
As for Bernie Sanders: Bernie Sanders is to politics what the Ramones are to rock music: He’s only got one song, but everybody loves it. Actually since 2016, he’s branched out: In addition to dealing with “the billionaire class”, he’s gotten fixated on climate change. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, or even most things that Sanders and Warren want- in fact, Sanders signature success in 2016 and this campaign was making himself a major contender with no corporate or billionaire money, simply by bottom-up contributions and word-of-mouth. While many would claim this is socialism in theory, in practice socialism (in both ‘democratic’ and Leninist forms) has always been centralized. But by demonstrating the power of large groups of individuals, Sanders has demonstrated an alternative to both corporate and government influence even as he claims that corporate influence is insurmountable and that a larger government is needed to oppose it. Indeed, it’s largely because of government influence that corporate influence exists. Business wouldn’t spend so much money on influencing government if it were a wasted investment. I actually did support Sanders in 2016 and even changed from Libertarian to Democrat temporarily as a last-ditch shot to have someone other than Hillary against Trump. With the number of choices in the system now, I haven’t decided if I’ll do the same thing this year. Only a couple (Klobuchar and Bloomberg) are busybody statists that I really don’t like. (The other one, Kamala Harris, dropped out.) Any of the others, including Biden, would be acceptable. I would prefer Buttigieg at this point. But Sanders has the profile and the populist bona fides to fight Trump on the turf where he won.
After all this DAMN time, watching the Trumpublicans make this country more and more corrupt, watching Democrats continue to play circular firing squad, we have to pick who it is that is going to oppose Putin’s viceroy in November. And that process starts this week. A process of elimination.
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls…
Dyin’ time’s here.