Millionaire Elizabeth Warren Claims She's 'Not One of Them' Wealthy Individuals...

At Weasel Zippers, "OWS-Founder Elizabeth Warren Says She’s Not In The 1% Despite Being Worth $14.5 Million…"

Progressives: liars, hypocrites, losers.

Scott Brown Hammers Elizabeth Warren on Native American Claims

At Legal Insurrection, "Warren-Brown Post-Debate Analysis":

In hindsight, focusing on releasing records was brilliant, because Warren has a major problem, she likely made or participated in causing Harvard to make false federal filings as to her Native American status using standard Harvard and EEOC definitions.

Lots more at the link.

And FWIW, at the Boston Globe, "In crucial first debate, Scott Brown challenges Warren’s Native American heritage claim."

Identity Politics Remains a Political Loser

It's Kim Strassel.

I love this lady!

At WSJ, "Stay Woke, Drop Out: In its wake, identity politics leaves a trail of failed Democratic candidates":

In its wake, identity politics leaves a trail of failed Democratic candidates, writes @KimStrassel https://t.co/auu0EMfEGU via @WSJ

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) January 17, 2020

To paraphrase Santayana, Democrats who refuse to acknowledge Hillary Clinton’s failures in the 2016 election were always doomed to repeat them. Why is their primary field littered with the failed bids of woke candidates? Why is #WarrenIsASnake trending on Twitter? Because identity politics remains a political loser.

That’s the takeaway from the rapidly narrowing Democratic field, and smart liberals warned of it after 2016. Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Times, faulted Mrs. Clinton for molding her campaign around “the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop.” Successful politics, he noted, is always rooted in visions of “shared destiny.”

Progressives heaped scorn on Mr. Lilla—one compared him to David Duke—and doubled down on identity politics. Nearly every flashpoint in this Democratic race has centered on racism, sexism or classism. Nearly every practitioner of that factionalist strategy has exited the race. Mr. Lilla is surely open to apologies.

Kamala Harris created the first big viral moment when she tore into Joe Biden, absolving him of being a “racist” even as she accused him of working with segregationists to oppose school busing. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand didn’t hold the race card but ran a campaign about “women’s equality,” attacking any Democrat who didn’t measure to her standards on abortion, child care and violence against women.

Sen. Cory Booker campaigned relentlessly on “systemic racism” and “social justice,” blasting Mr. Biden for his work on the 1994 crime bill and warning the nation of an “all-out assault” on black voting rights in 2020. Beto O’Rourke felt the need to make up for his own whiteness by going all in on reparations for slavery. Julián Castro built his run on complaints about “discriminatory housing policy,” injustices to transgender and indigenous women, and threats to marginalized communities.

Which bring us to Elizabeth Warren’s attempt to rescue her campaign with a Hail Mary appeal to “sexism.” Her campaign leaked in the run-up to Tuesday’s debate the claim that Mr. Sanders, in a private 2018 meeting, told her he didn’t believe a woman could win the presidency. Mr. Sanders denied it. When the inevitable CNN question came Tuesday night, Ms. Warren played the victim and rolled out a rehearsed statistic about the election failure rate of the men on stage. She praised the Democratic Party for having “stepped up” to elect a Catholic president in 1960 and a black one in 2008 and suggested it should do the same for a female candidate today. Sen. Amy Klobuchar cheered her on.

This is the politics of exclusion—and it explains why a field that began as the most diverse in Democratic history is now coming down to a competition between two old white men. Candidates who speak primarily to subsections of the country are by necessity excluding everybody else. All voters want to know what a candidate is going to do specifically for them, and for the country as a whole. And while many voters view issues in a moral context, few voters feel a moral imperative to vote for candidates solely because they are black, or female, or gay. It’s an unpersuasive argument.

Identity politics is also by necessity vote-losing, because it requires accusations. Ms. Warren is getting blowback now after implying that Mr. Sanders is a misogynist, and calling him a liar. Sanders supporters are lacing Ms. Warren on social media with snake emojis and declaring a #NeverWarren campaign. Even if she stages a comeback, she’s alienated a key base of support.

Precisely because Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders don’t have easy identity-politics cards to play, they’ve focused on broader themes. Yes, they give shout-outs to core liberal constituencies, but Mr. Biden’s consistent argument is that he is the only one qualified to beat Mr. Trump, while Mr. Sanders’s is that America needs to overhaul its economic system. Those are positions around which greater numbers of Democrats can unify...

More.

Tom Steyer Surges

Well, money buys political viability. Who knew?

At the Des Moines Register, "Is Tom Steyer surging? Businessman qualifies for Des Moines debate after polls show him in top 3 in Nevada, South Carolina":

Holy cow Steyer’s at 15 percent in South Carolina?!! #Dems #TomSteyer #BigMoney #BILLIONAIRE 💰🇺🇸🤓 https://t.co/wGNkFkCdxZ

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 10, 2020

I don't think these Steyer numbers are a mistake. Remember, we've had basically no polling out of NV and SC and for months now he's been spending a fortune in both while the other candidates focus on IA and NH. He's had the run of the place.

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) January 9, 2020

OK the links now work:

NV
Biden 23%
Sanders 17%
Steyer 12%
Warren 12%
Buttigieg 6%
Yang 4%
Booker 3%
Bloomberg 2%
Gabbard 2%
Klobuchard 2%

SC
Biden 36%
Steyer 15%
Warren 14%
Sanders 10%
Buttigieg 4%
Bloomberg 2%
Booker 2%
Yang 2% https://t.co/YJqNyYG9Qehttps://t.co/2LllHmMrJn

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) January 9, 2020

WASHINGTON – Political activist Tom Steyer will be on the Democratic primary debate stage Tuesday, barely making the cut after surging in a Nevada and a South Carolina poll were released Thursday evening.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is leading in Nevada at 23%, according to a Fox News poll. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont follows at 17%. Steyer and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are tied in third place at 12%.

Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana mayor, trailed those four candidates at 6%, followed by entrepreneur Andrew Yang at 4%.

The Nevada poll was conducted Jan. 5 to Jan. 8, with 1,505 Nevada voters interviewed on both landlines and cellphones. Interviews were offered in English or Spanish. Of those interviewed, 635 identified as potential participants in the Democratic caucus. There is a margin of error plus or minus 4 percentage points.

In a separate Fox News South Carolina poll, Biden again led the pack with 36% support. Steyer is in second place with 15%, followed by Sanders at 14% and Warren at 10%.

The South Carolina poll was conducted Jan...

Also at Memeorandum.

Turmoil in Middle East Upends Democrat Primaries

I think Dems are jockeying to see who's the most anti-American.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S.-Iran turmoil scrambles Democrats’ 2020 race, shifting focus to war and peace":

Actually it's not just "the economy, stupid." Voters always rank foreign policy low on their priorities. But it consistently rattles elections. @hookjan anchors our look at how Iran tensions scramble the primary. https://t.co/M1zScu6z6G

— Evan Halper (@evanhalper) January 8, 2020

WASHINGTON  —  President Trump’s order for the targeted killing of a top Iranian general and Iran’s quick retaliation have scrambled the 2020 campaign, thrusting issues of war and peace to the center of a contest that so far has been dominated by domestic issues.
Iran’s launch of more than a dozen ballistic missiles against a U.S. military base in Iraq on Tuesday night guarantees that the political fallout from the killing of Gen. Qassem Suleimani will not fade any time soon.

“What’s happening in Iraq and Iran today was predictable,” former Vice President Joe Biden said at an event in Philadelphia as news of the attack broke. “Not exactly what’s happening but the chaos that’s ensuing,” he said, faulting Trump for both his past action — abandoning an international nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 — and his more recent decision last week ordering Suleimani’s death by an armed drone in Baghdad.

“I just pray to God as he goes through what’s happening, as we speak, that he’s listening to his military commanders for the first time because so far that has not been the case.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, opening a rally in Brooklyn Tuesday night, said of the retaliatory attacks, “This is a reminder of why we need to deescalate tension in the Middle East. The American people do not want a war with Iran.”

In the days before Iran’s strikes, the rising international tensions had abruptly sharpened Democrats’ disagreements about the U.S. role in the world, personified by the sparring between two front-runners for their party’s nomination — Biden, who’s had a hand in decades of U.S. foreign policy, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an anti-interventionist critic of those policies. Warren has echoed Sanders as she seeks to revive her flagging campaign.

The president’s strike order against Suleimani crystallized what Americans love or hate about Trump: It was the kind of impulsive show of force that fans embrace as tough-guy swagger, but critics fear as his dangerously erratic, even unhinged, behavior. “This brings together a lot of the critiques around Trump,” said Derek Chollet, a former Obama administration Pentagon official who is now executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund. “The weakening of our alliances, the haphazard process, the impulsive decision making, the almost fanatical desire to undo anything Barack Obama did, regardless of whether it is working or not.”

Trump’s decision, which surprised even his own military advisors, came just weeks before Democrats’ nominating contest begins with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, highlighting the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the top candidates.

Biden immediately embraced the opportunity to emphasize the value of his foreign policy experience in a world roiled by Trump’s “America first” policies, touching on his years in the Senate, including as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and as President Obama’s trusted wing man. He did so in Iowa on Saturday, but Tuesday he gave a more formal speech in New York.

Against a backdrop designed to exude presidential leadership — royal-blue draperies and a row of American flags — Biden promised relief from Trump-era chaos. “I understand better than anyone that the system will not hold unless we find ways to work together,” he said. To Democratic critics who dismiss his faith in his ability to work with Republicans, Biden said, “That’s not a naive or outdated way of thinking. That’s the genius and timelessness of our democratic system.”

Sanders has seized on the crisis to remind voters that he, unlike Biden, voted against the Iraq war and has long warned of the risks of U.S. interventions abroad.

“I have consistently opposed this dangerous path to war with Iran,” Sanders said at a recent Iowa stop. “We need to firmly commit to ending the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, in an orderly manner, not through a tweet.”

That message energizes his antiwar base but may be less appealing to party voters more broadly. A November CNN poll found that 48% of Democratic voters thought Biden was best equipped to handle foreign policy; 14% said Sanders was.

Warren has similarly expressed anti-interventionist sentiment, but Sanders’ supporters initially complained she wasn’t pointed enough in condemning Trump. That underscored the challenges she faces as she tries to appeal to Sanders supporters on the left while also appealing to more moderate voters.

Warren “wants to show contrast and pass the commander-in-chief test at the same time,” said Heather Hurlburt, a former Clinton administration foreign policy official at New America, a think tank.

For Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and an Afghanistan war veteran, the Middle East tumult is a double-edged sword, spotlighting his status as the only top-tier candidate who has served in the military, but also his political inexperience.

Whether the issue will continue to grab candidates’ and voters’ attention will hinge on the unpredictable fallout in coming days and weeks. Trump’s response to the Iranian attacks will be fraught with political risks, especially to the extent he is seen as having provoked the hostilities. Typically in campaign seasons, most polls find that foreign policy is not a high priority for voters more preoccupied with economic issues, but when American lives are at risk, the stakes rise.

In most national elections since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, issues of war and peace have been powerful factors. In 2002, Republicans benefited from the post-9/11 political environment under President George W. Bush, whose approval rating was over 60%, and the president’s party gained congressional seats in a midterm election for only the second time since 1934.

In 2004, Democrats’ growing opposition to the Iraq war helped propel Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, a Vietnam War veteran, to the presidential nomination. “I’m reporting for duty,” he said at the convention. But Republicans savagely misrepresented his military record, helping Bush to eke out a reelection victory.

Four years later, opposition to the war also helped vault first-term Sen. Barack Obama first to the party’s nomination over Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted in 2002 to authorize the war, and then to victory over the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a hawkish supporter of the war.

When Clinton ran again in 2016, her early support for the war again was attacked by her primary opponent, this time Sanders. During the general election campaign against her, Trump tapped into Americans’ rising weariness with what he called “endless wars” and promised to bring troops home and to reduce America’s military role in the world.

To date, Democrats’ 2020 campaign had focused mostly on domestic issues — healthcare, income inequality, gun control and climate change — and on Trump’s fitness for office.

The Nation Endorses 'Democratic Socialist' Bernie Sanders for President

It's Katrina vanden Heuvel's publication --- it's her baby, and the editors are going all in for Bernie Sanders.

It's a lengthy editorial, so as they say, RTWT.

See, "‘The Nation’ Endorses Bernie Sanders and His Movement":

We have an announcement! https://t.co/pteRV2hrEb pic.twitter.com/vSjlGcPKhN

— The Nation (@thenation) March 2, 2020

If Bernie Sanders had simply demonstrated that it is possible to wage a competitive campaign for the presidency without relying on wealthy donors, corporate funders, or secretive PAC money, he would have earned his place in history.

If all Sanders had to show for his two campaigns for the presidency was the greatest leftward shift in the political discourse since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term—putting not just Medicare for All but also the Green New Deal, free public higher education, fair taxation, cancellation of student debt, housing as a human right, universal free child care, and an unwavering critique of the billionaire class firmly onto the political agenda—we would owe him our gratitude.

If his contribution to the debate on foreign policy never went beyond refusing to endorse trade deals that harm workers, denouncing America’s endless wars, and reasserting Congress’s control over presidential adventurism—and had not also included defying AIPAC and the Israel lobby, reminding Americans that many of those crossing our borders are fleeing dictators sustained by Washington, and maintaining his long-standing rejection of authoritarianism at home or abroad—we would still recognize Sanders as a prophetic figure.

But he has accomplished much, much more. As of this morning, Bernie Sanders—a Jewish grandfather with an indelible Brooklyn accent—is the leading contender for the Democratic nomination. He got there by forging a movement campaign that expands our understanding of what can be achieved in the electoral arena and that invites us to imagine that government of, by, and for the people might actually be possible.

The movement Sanders has helped to build—a multiracial, multiethnic movement of working-class women and men, people of all ages, all faiths, gay, straight, and trans, veterans and pacifists, teachers, farmers, bus drivers, nurses, and postal workers coming together to demand justice and redeem the endlessly deferred promise of America—deserves our enthusiastic support. Most crucially at this point in the 2020 campaign, this movement and this candidate deserve our votes.

Bernie Sanders and the movements he supports (and that support him) have created a populist moment, a vibrant and growing alternative to the tired shibboleths of austerity and market fundamentalism. They are exposing and upending the white nationalist con that promises a blue-collar boom while cutting taxes for the rich and gutting health care, environmental protection and education for the rest of us.

Four years ago, when Sanders began his battle, we supported him, arguing that in his candidacy

movements for greater equality and justice have found an ally and a champion. In contrast to the right-wing demagogues who exploit [our national crisis] to foment division, the Vermont senator has reached into a proud democratic-socialist tradition to revive the simple but potent notion of solidarity. We must turn to each other, not on each other, Sanders says, and unite to change the corrupted politics that robs us all.

A great deal has changed since then. We now have a right-wing demagogue in the Oval Office, a man credibly accused of sexual assault on the Supreme Court, an administration staffed with sycophants and corporate lackeys. Meanwhile, we’ve watched with mounting dismay as congressional Democratic leaders have pursued a narrow—and futile—quest for impeachment while failing to prevent immigrant children from being torn from the arms of their parents and put in cages. We have witnessed the daily spectacle of an administration that fudges the facts and scorns science while the planet burns.

Yet when we look beyond the corridors of power, we cannot despair. Not while we’re also in the middle of a long season of revolt, from the millions of women (and allies) in their pink pussy hats protesting Donald Trump’s inauguration to successful teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Los Angeles, and Chicago, to demonstrations culminating in the removal of Puerto Rico’s corrupt, sexist governor—and that’s just in the United States. From Beirut to Baghdad and from Haiti to Hong Kong, people are rising up together to demand an end to corruption and the politics of divide and rule.

Sanders has made this global outcry a part of his 2020 campaign. He has gathered his forces and moved against America’s oligarchy, and this time he’s had company—and competition. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy appealed to progressives who, though they shared many of the Sanders campaign’s goals, worried that his age, his fiery manner, or his avowal of democratic socialism would be handicaps in the battle to defeat Trump. She appealed, as well, to the millions of Americans who believe that it is long past the time when this country should elect a progressive woman as its president. Along with Sanders, Warren has widened the left lane of American politics. While Sanders has popularized the idea of a political revolution, Warren’s detailed plans have given depth and meaning to proposals for Medicare for All and a wealth tax. The pair have differed on details, but Warren and Sanders have been such a potent team—especially in last summer’s debates—that some here argued they ought to form a ticket.

That still seems like an idea worth considering...

As noted, don't miss the rest of this essay --- I have a feeling the editors are on to something: Don't blow off Bernie's chances. This "democratic socialist" could very well destroy the American republic.

Hat Tip: Memorandum.

Democrats Put Private Health Insurance Up for 'Debate'

Really, I hope Dems talk about obliterating private and employer-based health insurance right up to November 2020. It's going to be too easy, dang.

At LAT, "News Analysis: Democrats ask if Americans are ready to give up job-based health coverage":

Voters have repeatedly punished both Democrats and Republicans who've threatened to take away their health coverage, no matter how flawed it is. Are Dems ready to risk trying again? https://t.co/thjrXEdzsB

— Noam Levey (@NoamLevey) August 2, 2019

WASHINGTON —  Sharp disagreements among the presidential hopefuls at this week’s debates have crystallized a critical and explosive political question: Are Democrats willing to upend health coverage for tens of millions of their fellow Americans?
The party is closer than it’s been in decades to embracing a healthcare platform that would move all Americans out of their current insurance and into a single government-run plan.

Plans pushed by three of the four leading candidates — Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California — differ in their particulars but would all end the job-based system that provides coverage to more than 150 million people.

That’s a hugely risky strategy, as more-centrist rivals reminded the three senators during the two nights of heated, sometimes confusing, debates.

Sweeping healthcare plans have never fared well in American politics.

For decades, voters repeatedly have punished presidents and Congresses — Democratic and Republican alike — who have threatened to take away existing health plans, no matter how flawed.

Just last year, the GOP suffered historic losses in the House of Representatives after the party’s unsuccessful effort to roll back the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

But at a time when rising insurance deductibles and medical bills are crippling growing numbers of American families, many Democrats on the party’s left believe public discontent with the current system has changed that dynamic.

“It’s time that we separate employers from the kind of healthcare people get,” Harris said Wednesday night, acknowledging that her “Medicare for all” plan would, after a lengthy phase-in period, end job-based insurance.

Harris, Sanders and Warren have made Medicare for all a central plank of their campaigns, riding a wave of discontent over rising medical costs to call for a historic expansion of government insurance.

Their more-moderate rivals say the three have misjudged the public mood and that by overreaching, they would squander an opportunity to enact significant, if incremental, reforms.

A survey earlier this year by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that support for a single government plan fell from 56% to 37% when respondents were told that it might involve eliminating private insurance companies or requiring more taxes.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to take away insurance from half the people in this room,” warned Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who is among many Democratic presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who back more limited approaches.

The more-centrist Democrats would preserve the current employer-based system, as well as state Medicaid programs and the insurance marketplaces created by the 2010 healthcare law.

They would add an additional choice to allow Americans to buy into a Medicare-like government plan, often called a “public option.”

“Every single person in America would be able to buy into that option if they didn’t like their employer plan,” Biden said Wednesday.

Critics on the left say that approach would ultimately cost more and would preserve an outsized role for private insurance companies.

“We have tried this experiment with the insurance companies,” Warren said from the debate stage Tuesday. “And what they’ve done is they’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our healthcare system. And they force people to have to fight to try to get the healthcare coverage that their doctors and nurses say that they need.”

But threatening Americans’ current health coverage has proved disastrous for previous Democratic efforts to expand protections, including President Clinton’s doomed initiative in the early 1990s.

The 2010 healthcare law was almost sunk by labor unions angry about a new tax on the kind of generous health plans many of their members enjoy.

And even though the law was designed to have minimal impact on the existing insurance system, President Obama faced a firestorm when a few million people found their health plans canceled after new rules took effect requiring plans to offer more-comprehensive benefits.

“Traditionally, fear of losing benefits — however flawed they may be — trumps hope of getting something better,” said Chris Jennings, an influential Washington health policy advisor who worked for Clinton and Obama...

Still more.

D Is for Damaged, Dangerous and Delusional

From Dennis Prager, at American Greatness:

D Is for Damaged, Dangerous and Delusional https://t.co/fVKUdAmhqL pic.twitter.com/SgTSe8vocc

— American Greatness (@theamgreatness) July 3, 2019

If you watched either or both of the two Democratic Party presidential candidate debates, and if you are a liberal, a conservative or a centrist, you had to have been depressed. The intellectual shallowness, the demagoguery and the alienation from reality were probably unprecedented in American political history. Only a leftist, a socialist or a communist could have gone to bed a happy person on either night.

If you think this is a baseless generalization, here are a few of myriad examples from the first night:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.): “(The economy is not doing great) for the African Americans and Latinx whose families are torn apart, whose lives are destroyed and whose communities are ruined.”

Two things stand out: First is Warren’s morally reprehensible and false description of the economy. She never explains how the American economy is tearing families apart, destroying lives or ruining communities. Aside from being baseless, it is another left-wing libel against America.

She went on to explain economic inequality in America: “Corruption, pure and simple. We need to call it out.” It is difficult to overstate the contempt she and the rest of the left have for America.

Even more troubling was Warren’s use of the term “Latinx.” When leftist Orwellian newspeak makes its way into the United States Senate and into the vocabulary of a presidential candidate, the country is in trouble.

Here is how HuffPost explains the term (of which it approves):

“Latinx is the gender-neutral alternative to Latino, Latina and even Latin@. … Latinx is quickly gaining popularity among the general public. It’s part of a ‘linguistic revolution’ that aims to move beyond gender binaries and is inclusive of the intersecting identities of Latin American descendants. In addition to men and women from all racial backgrounds, Latinx also makes room for people who are trans, queer, agender, non-binary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.): “If billionaires can pay off their yachts, students should be able to pay off their student loans.”

My only response to this statement is to ask, Do most Democrats find that a compelling argument? Do they not realize what a non sequitur it is—and therefore how demagogic?

Billionaires, like non-billionaires, pay off their debts because they do not incur debts they cannot repay, not because they are billionaires. Senator Klobuchar apparently believes that non-billionaires need not pay off their debts. Every Democrat who addressed this issue said American society should repay student debts—which amount to $1.6 trillion. The party of “fairness” thinks it’s fair that every student who repaid his or college debts—and every young American who never went to college—must pay off that debt.

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro spoke in Spanish. Perhaps they—like all on the left—are unaware of the importance of all Americans speaking English in uniting the most ethnically disparate nation in human history. You cannot say “diversity is our strength” if you do not work to unite all the diverse cultures into Americans. And you cannot unite Americans without one language.

Their speaking Spanish was so transparently pandering to Latin, Latino, Latina, Latin@ and Latinx Americans that, for that reason alone, that group should decline to vote Democrat.

O’Rourke: “This economy has got to work for everyone. And right now, we know that it isn’t.”

This is just not true. Given some of the lowest unemployment rates in modern American history, this economy seems to be working quite well—certainly for all those willing to work.

Booker: “This is actually an economy that’s hurting small businesses and not allowing them to compete.”

The question I always want answered when someone on the left tells an outright lie is, Does he or she believe it? Someone should ask this of Booker. As the National Federation of Independent Businesses announced last month:

“Optimism among small business owners has surged back to historically high levels, thanks to strong hiring, investment, and sales,” said NFIB President and CEO Juanita D. Duggan. “The small business half of the economy is leading the way, taking advantage of lower taxes and fewer regulations, and reinvesting in their businesses, their employees, and the economy as a whole.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: “There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands. Democrats have to fix that.”

The notion that America’s money is “in the wrong hands, (and) Democrats have to fix that” should frighten every American who believes in private property and who opposes dictatorships and theft.

Castro: “I don’t believe only in reproductive freedom; I believe in reproductive justice.”

Here’s an important rule: Whenever anyone adds an adjective to the word “justice,” know that the person is not speaking about justice but about something else entirely. “Social” justice is another such example.

Castro boldly proclaimed his view that unauthorized border crossing should be decriminalized and announced, “In my first 100 days with immigration reform (I) would put undocumented (i.e., illegal) immigrants, as long as they haven’t committed a serious crime, on a pathway to citizenship.”

Though not one Democrat candidate used the term, every single one believes in open borders...

Hillary Clinton Inherits a Far-Left Democrat Party in Philadelphia

Well, the Democrat National Convention is finally underway.

Things didn't start out as smoothly as folks would like, I'm sure. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been banished from the proceedings and a major anti-Hillary protest was raging earlier today outside the Wells Fargo Center in Philly.

Only the most dishonest partisan hacks would deny that the Democrats today are in fact a far left-wing party pushing an openly socialist, identity-based agenda. I think the only ones now just noting it are the establishment journalists in the mainstream press. And even then, reporters still insist on calling radical leftist ideologues "liberals." It's pretty maddening.

In any case, the Wall Street Journal provides a pretty decent overview on the front page of the paper today.

See, "Hillary Clinton to Take Command of a Changed Democratic Party":

When Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday, she will take command of a party that has little in common with the one she and her husband rode to the White House a quarter-century ago.

The party she will inherit is less white and more liberal. It is better educated and not as willing to compromise with Republicans. Many Democrats today aren’t convinced capitalism is the best economic model or that socialism is taboo.

Nor is the party entirely sold on its new leader. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this month showed 45% of registered Democrats and those who lean in that direction would have preferred a nominee not named Hillary Clinton.

“I’m in the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton camp,” said Jason Frerichs, a Democratic Party county chairman in southwestern Iowa.

Behind the party’s evolution are seismic shifts that have threatened to sweep aside the pro-business, centrist brand of politics the Clintons long embodied. Those same forces could make it tougher for Mrs. Clinton to govern from the center should she win in November.

Working-class white voters once loyal to the Democratic Party have gravitated to the Republicans over the past two decades, drawn by the GOP’s stance on guns, immigration and other social issues.

Amid the exodus, Democrats have moved left.

Only 30% of Democrats considered themselves liberal in 1994, the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That figure had nearly doubled by 2014, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

With minorities, 20-somethings and college-educated voters making up a bigger chunk of the party, some Democrats are questioning tenets that once seemed inviolate. Take capitalism. An Iowa poll early this year showed more than four-in-10 likely Democratic caucus-goers in a state with an outsize influence on the nomination battle described themselves as socialist.

Watching these trends, some Democrats are uneasy. They fear the party will continue to lose state and local contests unless it makes an ideological course correction. For all of President Barack Obama’s electoral success, the party lost more than 80 House and Senate seats under his watch.

“The party has moved steadily left because of the surge of liberal populism, and that has caused the party to be in complete free fall at the subpresidential level,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank, Third Way.

“The party is going to have to realize that to get and hold a sustained majority and enact solutions that are even remotely politically feasible, it’s going to have to move toward the center,” he said.

The draft party platform that Democrats approved at a two-day meeting in Orlando, Fla., highlights the sharp left turn the party has taken since Mr. Clinton held the White House 20 years ago.

The 1996 Democratic platform celebrated free-trade deals; the proposed new platform says they don’t “live up to the hype.” Bill Clinton’s platform embraced the death penalty; the new one would do away with it. The old platform boasted of building new prison cells; the 2016 version calls for “ending the era of mass incarceration.”

Eyeing the changes over the last generation, Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the Journal survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said: “These are two radically different parties.”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

She has signaled she isn’t about to govern in accordance with her party’s liberal faction. In naming a running mate, she passed over both Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the more moderate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Speaking to Charlie Rose of CBS News recently, she said: “We are the center-left party.”

Yet, pressed by Mr. Sanders during the presidential primaries, Mrs. Clinton reversed course and came out against a 12-nation Pacific trade deal she promoted back when she was secretary of state. Hoping to win over his young supporters, she recently rolled out new plans to wipe out public-college tuition for millions of families.

When Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday, she will take command of a party that has little in common with the one she and her husband rode to the White House a quarter-century ago.

The party she will inherit is less white and more liberal. It is better educated and not as willing to compromise with Republicans. Many Democrats today aren’t convinced capitalism is the best economic model or that socialism is taboo.

Nor is the party entirely sold on its new leader. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this month showed 45% of registered Democrats and those who lean in that direction would have preferred a nominee not named Hillary Clinton.

“I’m in the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton camp,” said Jason Frerichs, a Democratic Party county chairman in southwestern Iowa.

Behind the party’s evolution are seismic shifts that have threatened to sweep aside the pro-business, centrist brand of politics the Clintons long embodied. Those same forces could make it tougher for Mrs. Clinton to govern from the center should she win in November.

Working-class white voters once loyal to the Democratic Party have gravitated to the Republicans over the past two decades, drawn by the GOP’s stance on guns, immigration and other social issues.

Amid the exodus, Democrats have moved left.

Only 30% of Democrats considered themselves liberal in 1994, the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That figure had nearly doubled by 2014, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

With minorities, 20-somethings and college-educated voters making up a bigger chunk of the party, some Democrats are questioning tenets that once seemed inviolate. Take capitalism. An Iowa poll early this year showed more than four-in-10 likely Democratic caucus-goers in a state with an outsize influence on the nomination battle described themselves as socialist.

Watching these trends, some Democrats are uneasy. They fear the party will continue to lose state and local contests unless it makes an ideological course correction. For all of President Barack Obama’s electoral success, the party lost more than 80 House and Senate seats under his watch.

“The party has moved steadily left because of the surge of liberal populism, and that has caused the party to be in complete free fall at the subpresidential level,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank, Third Way.

“The party is going to have to realize that to get and hold a sustained majority and enact solutions that are even remotely politically feasible, it’s going to have to move toward the center,” he said.

The draft party platform that Democrats approved at a two-day meeting in Orlando, Fla., highlights the sharp left turn the party has taken since Mr. Clinton held the White House 20 years ago.

The 1996 Democratic platform celebrated free-trade deals; the proposed new platform says they don’t “live up to the hype.” Bill Clinton’s platform embraced the death penalty; the new one would do away with it. The old platform boasted of building new prison cells; the 2016 version calls for “ending the era of mass incarceration.”

Eyeing the changes over the last generation, Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the Journal survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said: “These are two radically different parties.”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

She has signaled she isn’t about to govern in accordance with her party’s liberal faction. In naming a running mate, she passed over both Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the more moderate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Speaking to Charlie Rose of CBS News recently, she said: “We are the center-left party.”

Yet, pressed by Mr. Sanders during the presidential primaries, Mrs. Clinton reversed course and came out against a 12-nation Pacific trade deal she promoted back when she was secretary of state. Hoping to win over his young supporters, she recently rolled out new plans to wipe out public-college tuition for millions of families...

Still more.

Inside the Fight Over the Democrat Party's Future

Well, this is interesting, at least.

At Time Magazine:

Rounding out our cover package on the Democrats: My piece on the party's divisions and what they mean for the future https://t.co/qlKjAyKnTA pic.twitter.com/QlC3oDdiEr

— Molly Ball (@mollyesque) July 25, 2019

They are both Democrats: Joe Biden, the 76-year-old former Vice President, and Ilhan Omar, the 36-year-old freshman Congresswoman. An old white man, with blind spots on race and gender and a penchant for bipartisanship; a young Somali-American Muslim who sees compromise as complicity. To Biden, Donald Trump is an aberration; to Omar, he is a symptom of a deeper rot. One argues for a return to normality, while the other insists: Your normal has always been my oppression.

How to fit those two visions into one party is the question tying the Democrats in knots. What policies will the party champion? Which voters will it court? How will it speak to an angry and divided nation? While intraparty tussles are perennial in politics, this one comes against a unique backdrop: an unpopular, mendacious, norm-trampling President. As Democrats grilled Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, on July 24, their sense of urgency was evident.

The one thing Democrats agree on is that Trump needs to go, but even on the question of how to oust him, they are split. Ninety-five of the party’s 235 House Representatives recently voted to begin impeachment proceedings, a measure nearly a dozen of the major Democratic presidential candidates support. The party’s leadership continues to insist that defeating the President in 2020 is the better path. Half the party seems furious at Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not attacking Trump more forcefully, while the other is petrified they’re losing the American mainstream, validating Trump’s “witch hunt” accusations with investigations into Russian election interference that most voters see as irrelevant to their daily lives.

These divisions have come into focus in recent weeks. Two parallel conflicts–the fight among congressional Democrats, and debates among the 2020 candidates–have played out along similar lines, revealing deep fissures on policy, tactics and identity. A consistent majority of voters disapprove of the President’s performance, do not want him re-elected and dislike his policies and character. Even Trump’s allies admit his re-election hopes rest on his ability to make the alternative even more distasteful.

But for an opposition party, it’s never as simple as pointing out the failures of those in power. As desperate as Democrats are to defeat Trump, voters demand an alternative vision. “You will not win an election telling everybody how bad Donald Trump is,” former Senate majority leader Harry Reid tells TIME. “They have to run on what they’re going to do.”

The Democrats’ crossroads is also America’s. As Trump leans into themes of division, with racist appeals, detention camps for migrants and an exclusionary vision of national identity, the 2020 election is shaping up as a referendum on what the country’s citizens want it to become. This is not who we are as a nation, Trump’s opponents are fond of saying. But if not, what should we be instead?

“That little girl was me.” With this five-word statement at the Democrats’ June 27 debate in Miami, Senator Kamala Harris did not just strike a blow against Biden. She showed where the party’s most sensitive sore spots lie.

Harris explained that she had been bused to her Berkeley, Calif., public school as part of an integration plan; Biden, as a Delaware Senator, had worked to stop the federal government from forcing busing on school districts that resisted integration. On the campaign trail this year, Biden had boasted about being able to work with political opponents, citing his chumminess with Senators who were racists and segregationists. “It was hurtful,” Harris said, “to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States Senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.”

It was a powerful appeal, drawn from the personal experience of a woman of color whose life’s course was altered by the public-policy choices made in the halls of power. What was exposed wasn’t so much a real policy difference–after the debate, Harris took essentially the same position as Biden against mandatory busing in today’s still segregated schools–but a dispute about perspective. Biden, clearly ruffled, became defensive and eventually gave up, cutting himself off midsentence: “My time is up.” Biden remains the front runner, but the line had the ring of a campaign epitaph.

Presidential primaries are always the battleground for political parties’ competing factions, and some of the debates Democrats are enmeshed in now are ones they’ve been having for decades. Swing to the left, or tack to the middle? Galvanize the base, or cultivate the center? Tear down the system, or work to improve it? These familiar questions are now shadowed by the specter of Trump and his movement. If Americans are to reject Trumpist nationalism and white identity politics, what’s their alternative?

With two dozen presidential candidates and the race only just begun, the majority of Democratic voters say they are undecided. But a top tier of five candidates has emerged as the focus of voters’ attention: Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Harris and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. At the moment, it is Warren and Harris who appear on an upward trajectory, while the three male candidates trend downward.

Biden’s pitch to voters is moderation, electability and a callback to the halcyon days of the Obama Administration. Sanders seeks to expand the fiery leftist movement he built in 2016. Warren has staked her campaign on wonkishness and economic populism, while Harris paints herself as a crusader for justice. Buttigieg offers a combination of generational change and executive experience. To imagine each of them in the White House is to conjure five very different hypothetical presidencies come January 2021.

On Capitol Hill, the party has been spread along a similar axis of race, power, perspective and privilege. To address the humanitarian crisis on the southern border, Pelosi pushed a compromise bill this summer that sought to fund migrant detention while protecting the rights of asylum seekers. She was opposed by members of the so-called Squad–a quartet of outspoken freshman Representatives who have become champions of the party’s rising left wing: Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All women of color, all 45 or under, all adept with a Twitter zinger and prone to inflammatory statements, they seek to build a movement and shake up the party–a markedly different theory of change from Pelosi’s dogged insistence on vote counting and the art of the possible.

The ugly sight of a President luxuriating in “send her back” chants laid down a marker for 2020. As much as traditional Republicans might like the President to campaign on a healthy economy, a tax cut that put more money in the pocket of two-thirds of Americans and a slate of new conservative federal judges, Trump plans instead to plunge even further into fear and division. And as much as Democrats might like to talk about health care, climate change and the minimum wage, their candidate will inevitably be dragged into his sucking morass of conspiracy mongering and tribalism.

For a moment, the controversy unified the bickering House Democrats, who passed a resolution condemning Trump’s comments. But behind the scenes, Democrats’ reactions to the spectacle were a test for the electoral theories of their feuding factions. Progressives (and many Republicans) argued that Trump was only making himself more toxic to swing voters. But some in the Democratic establishment fretted that Trump’s repellent statements were a political masterstroke, elevating four fringe figures as the face of the party...

More.

Shades of Blue

From Thomas Chatterton Williams, a fellow I read from time to time at the Old Gray Lady, who hits the nail on the head here like Thor smashing some enemy antagonist to dust. 

At Harper's Magazine (surprisingly):

Late on election night, when the betting markets were just realizing that Trump’s path to victory had narrowed, and leading voices on the left were lamenting the failure of anything resembling a blue wave to swell up and wash the country clean, Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman from Arizona and an Iraq War veteran, tweeted a triumphant message to his supporters: “Az Latino vote delivered! This was a 10 year project.” Gallego had ample reason to rejoice. For the first time since 1996, a Democratic presidential candidate had won the state of Arizona, thanks in large part to strong Hispanic support. This development stood in sharp contrast to outcomes in Texas and Florida, where Latinos provided crucial votes for Trump, and in California, where they even helped to doom a pro–affirmative action ballot measure. In light of this fragmented result—and amid much hand-wringing in the media over whether Latinos still form a coherent category in our obsessively charted racial landscape—one user responded:

Ruben, honest question, how do we as a party improve our work with the LatinX community across the country as well as we’ve done in AZ? Its so frustrating to see so many republican LatinX voters, but I know its on people like me to help convince them dems are the place to be.

Gallego’s blunt reply went viral: “First start by not using the term Latinx,” he told him. The MSNBC host Joy Reid, who only hours earlier had referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as “Uncle Clarence,” popped into the thread dumbfounded, seeming surprisingly out of touch for a professional commentator. “Can you elaborate on this a bit more?” she asked Gallego, with what seemed like genuine incredulity. “I was under the impression that this was the preferred term, and as a Black person, I’m definitely sensitive to what people prefer to be called.”

In fact, not only is “Latinx” decidedly not the term most Latinos choose, but a significant number—about three fourths of the Latino population—have never even heard of it. A bilingual national survey conducted in December 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that a mere 3 percent of Latinos use the descriptor. And yet, the “new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative,” the report observes. It is what prominent progressives—from Elizabeth Warren to Ibram X. Kendi—insist on using to describe a community to which they do not themselves belong. During the Democratic primaries, Senator Warren tweeted, “When I become president, Latinx families will have a champion in the White House. #LatinxHeritageMonth.”

“When [Latinx] is used I feel someone is taking away some of my culture,” Gallego wrote in response to Reid’s question. “Instead of trying to understand my culture they decided to change it to fit their perspective.”

The disagreement over such progressive jargon may seem like inside baseball to those who aren’t extremely online, but it is worth considering seriously, emblematic as it is of deeper fissures in the always tenuous patchwork of identity groups and economic classes that constitutes the contemporary Democratic coalition. The lives of progressive, college-educated, predominantly white “coastal elites” have become far removed from those of white Republicans, but more significantly from those of the nonwhite voters their party depends on to remain electorally viable—and whose validation lends them an air of virtuousness. The battle over “Latinx” might be understood as an instance of what the conservative commentator Reihan Salam has called “intra-white status jockeying”—an opportunity for “those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites . . . to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites.” What Gallego knows, and can’t help but bristle at, is the fact that this semantic gatekeeping is ultimately not even about Latinos.

Last February, whites on the left expressed shock and disappointment when Joe Biden beat the surging Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina primary, due in large part to moderate and conservative black primary voters who chose to reject the socialism they’d been told was in their best interest. Why should this have been surprising? Again, according to widely publicized research conducted by Pew, black Americans’ self-reported ideology has remained relatively stable throughout the twenty-first century. In 2019, about 40 percent of black Democratic voters considered themselves “moderate,” while an additional 25 percent identified as conservative. Just 29 percent of black Democrats described their views as “liberal.”

Yet these glimpses into the heterogeneity of black and Latino—to say nothing of Asian—political preferences did not prepare influential progressives for the far less welcome November revelation that Donald Trump—whose behavior and associations have earned him the reputation of a kleptocratic xenophobe, if not an outright fascist—had gained traction with every major demographic (including Muslim voters, despite his travel ban). In a year of inescapable talk of racial identity and white supremacy, mass protests against systemic and interpersonal racism, and a fifteen-thousand-person rally in Brooklyn for black trans lives during the height of the pandemic, the extraordinary irony was that one of the very few groups whose support for Trump declined even modestly was white males.

“This is so personally devastating to me,” began an emotional thread of tweets from the New York Times columnist Charles Blow the morning after the election. “The black male vote for Trump INCREASED from 13% in 2016 to 18% this year. The black female vote for Trump doubled from 4% in 2016 to 8% this year.” Analyzing the exit polls (which are admittedly imperfect), he also picked out white women and LGBTQ voters for opprobrium—“the percentage of LGBT voting for Trump doubled from 2016. DOUBLED!!!”—before landing on an insight that should spur an enormous amount of introspection on the left:

The percentage of Latinos and Asians voting for Trump INCREASED from 2016, according to exit polls. Yet more evidence that we can’t depend on the “browning of America” to dismantle white supremacy and erase anti-blackness.

Not only did Latinos, Asians, and, it must be reiterated, black voters join whites in delivering Trump more votes than the record 69.5 million Barack Obama got in 2008—more votes, that is, than any candidate in the history of the United States except Biden—they also upended assumptions down-ballot as well. In California, Proposition 16, the lavishly funded proposal to once again allow race and gender to be considered in government hiring and contracting and in public-university admissions, was roundly defeated, despite the state’s shifting demographics in the twenty-four years since the ban on affirmative action was imposed (white people now make up 36 percent of the population, second to Latinos at 39 percent).

The measure commanded strong support in just five counties in the Bay Area as well as the city of Los Angeles, Alexei Koseff noted in the San Francisco Chronicle: The “yes” campaign “vastly outspent opponents and drew high-profile endorsements from across the political spectrum,” yet the supposed progressive landslide didn’t come.

Fashionable narratives about the Democratic coalition and its members’ goals and ambitions can efface what many minorities think is in their best interest. Such misreadings are not just insensitive but dangerous. They can lead Democrats to pursue ill-conceived, poorly articulated policies that backfire to the benefit of conservatives, or worse, inflict harm on vulnerable communities. The recent push to defund the police is one of the most extravagant examples of what is, at best, high-minded intellectual recklessness. Those calling to do so “have shown a complete disregard for the voices and perspectives of many members of the African American community,” Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil-rights lawyer who formerly led the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, told the Star Tribune in July, after the city council moved to defund the MPD in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. “We have not been consulted as the city makes its decisions, even though our community is the one most heavily impacted by both police violence and community violence.”

The tragic reality is that homicides in Minneapolis increased by 50 percent in 2020. More than 500 people had been shot by December, the most in a decade and a half. Meanwhile, the city’s mayor noted a “historic” rate of attrition among Minneapolis police, with twice as many leaving the force as in a typical year. Though 2020 was exceptionally frustrating for many reasons, most notably the substantial loss of life and of economic security wrought by COVID-19, it’s hard to imagine that a stark drop in officer morale didn’t contribute to the mayhem.

Like the niche semantic preference for “Latinx,” but with far more direct and dire consequences, viral slogans such as “abolish the police”—created by people of color, but powerfully amplified by whites situated at a considerable remove—have been foisted on black communities that have a far more equivocal relationship with policing than is often acknowledged.

Online, some very audible voices argue for the abolition of prisons and police departments. Offline, countless black Americans are forced to confront the harsh inadequacy of stark rhetorical binaries. They are overpoliced and underpoliced at the same time. Outside the brutal videotaped killings by police that fill our news feeds, or the numbing grind of quotidian degradations like stop-and-frisk, it is underpolicing that causes the most harm. Jill Leovy’s masterly 2015 book, Ghettoside, presents a thorough, unsentimental account of the social dynamics plaguing American cities and the senseless killings that routinely occur in them—often perpetrated, as we are so frequently reminded, by other black people. Leovy quotes the Harvard legal scholar Randall Kennedy: “The principal injury suffered by African-Americans in relation to criminal matters is not overenforcement but underenforcement of the laws.” The late Tupac Shakur put it most vividly in making a case for black self-defense in a 1994 BET interview: “We next door to the killer,” he practically screamed. “We next door to ’em, you know, ’cause we up in the projects, where there’s eighty n——s in the building. All them killers that they letting out, they right there in that building. But it’s better just ’cause we black, we get along with the killers or something? We get along with the rapists ’cause we black and we from the same hood? What is that? We need protection, too!” Anyone who speaks with black people outside of academic or activist circles knows that this is hardly a fringe view...

Still more.

 

'CBS This Morning' Gushes Over Elizabeth Warren, Presses Her to Run for President

At NewsBusters.

It's okay to be cordial with your guests, but you've also got to truly interview them. You've got to get down to the controversies, otherwise you're simply giving them free airtime.

Warren's literally a proven liar, and the CBS crew --- whom I admire --- didn't see fit to call her on it.

Far-Left 'Niche' Issues Define the Democrat 2020 Presidential Field

They're really not "niche" issues, but rather core issues designed to rig the system so Democrats win elections. Trump hatred has turned Democrats into the party of desperation and deceit. The front-page of the Los Angeles Times defined this as turn toward previously unmentioned specialty items for the party. Not anymore, sheesh.

From Mark Barabak, "It’s the electoral college, stupid. And the Supreme Court. And the filibuster ...":

How do you stand out in a crowd of nearly 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls? Talk about something different.https://t.co/ynCAtYsybh

— Mark Z. Barabak (@markzbarabak) April 15, 2019

In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House focused on a message so elegantly simple the slogan became campaign legend: It’s the economy, stupid.

In this presidential race, it’s a lot of things.

Abolishing the electoral college. Ending the Senate filibuster. Refashioning the Supreme Court. Paying reparations for slavery.

A whole raft of issues that were little noted, if not wholly overlooked, in previous presidential campaigns have assumed a significant role in this early phase of the Democratic nominating contest, reflecting the party’s leftward shift, the power of social media and, perhaps above all, a field of contenders the size of a small platoon.

“The pressure on all the candidates to figure out how to differentiate themselves from the other candidates is intense,” said Anna Greenberg, a pollster working for former Colorado governor and presidential hopeful John Hickenlooper, one of more than 20 Democrats running or deciding whether to do so.

Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., launched his upstart campaign with a push to eliminate the electoral college and was one of the first to propose expanding the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices. He suggests five members appointed by a Democratic president, five by a Republican president and the remainder coming from the appellate bench, subject to unanimous consent from the 10 other justices.

Other Democratic hopefuls, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, have said they are open to both ideas.

“Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is … get rid of the electoral college,” Warren said, amplifying the issue by pitching it during a recent CNN town hall.

Harris and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have discussed the issue of reparations, which has largely been consigned to academic and theoretical debate, in the context of their broader proposals to help the poor. Several rival candidates, including Buttigieg, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, have said they too support ways of compensating victims of systemic racism.

“It doesn’t have to be a direct pay for each person, but what we can do is invest in those communities, acknowledge what’s happened,” Klobuchar said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

To a great extent, the Democratic candidates are moving in the direction of left-leaning voters and activists, who have the power on social media to organize around issues and elevate concerns, rather than what has typically been the other way around.

Healthcare, education and the economy are still matters of great interest and routinely come up wherever White House contestants appear. But underlying those issues is a broader frustration — particularly among those on the left — with the political system and its institutions, which, in their view, have thwarted the political will of most Americans.

The Democratic nominee has won the popular vote in all but one of the last seven presidential elections, yet twice in the last two decades it was a Republican — George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 — who claimed the White House by receiving the most electoral college votes.

In the Senate, Republicans refused to even consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, waiting out the 2016 election in hopes of filling a vacant seat, and have wielded the filibuster in such a way it now requires a super-majority to pass any significant legislation.

The Supreme Court, meantime, has moved decidedly rightward under President Trump, who benefited from the Senate’s delaying tactics and filled two vacancies...

Obama Gets Pass on Kenya from Democrat-Media-Complex

I wasn't planning on blogging this, since I'm not really into the birth certificate controversy. But this is much more. The Obamas have long played up Barack's Kenyan heritage, and obviously there's more to the literary press release than the Democrat-Media-Complex is letting on. I turns out that press agents Dystel & Goderich had clients submit their own biographies. It's not a "typo" as the f-king dishonest Democrats are trying to pawn off. See: "Media Works to Suppress Obama 'Born in Kenya' Bio."

And even if we forget about where Obama was born, the question is why was it so important for Barack to play up the Kenyan connection?

See Mark Steyn on that, "Eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography":

It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905: "Geography is about maps. But Biography is about chaps."

But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?

Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don't go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president's own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author:

"Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."

So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn't meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama's official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? "This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me," says Obama's literary agent, Miriam Goderich, a "fact" that went so un-"checked" that it stayed up on her agency's website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007:

"He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister."

And then in April 2007, someone belatedly decided to "check" the 16-year-old "fact" and revised the biography, a few weeks into the now non-Kenyan's campaign for the presidency. Fancy that!

When it comes to conspiracies, I'm an Occam's Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he's spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.

After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title "Journeys In Black And White," being born in Hawaii doesn't really help. It's entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else. Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man's rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.

And where's the harm in it? Everybody does it – at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was "the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review," there's no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, "Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995." There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats' Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She's the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she "self-identified" as Cherokee, so that makes her a "woman of color." Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the "Pow Wow Chow" cookbook, a "compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families."

Continue reading.

At the video above, Michelle Obama lauds Barack as a "Kenyan" at a campaign event in 2007. Skip to the 2:00 minute mark.

And see Blazing Cat Fur, "The Mystery of the Kenyan Birth" (with a Glenn Beck video at that link).

Also, at Melissa Clouthier's, "Barack Obama, Birther — UPDATED."

More, from Roger Simon, at PJ Media, "The Mystery of the Kenyan Birth."

Why the Obama Campaign is Suddenly So Worried

"Four Little Words," according to Kimberly Strassel:

What's the difference between a calm and cool Barack Obama, and a rattled and worried Barack Obama? Four words, it turns out.

"You didn't build that" is swelling to such heights that it has the president somewhere unprecedented: on defense. Mr. Obama has felt compelled—for the first time in this campaign—to cut an ad in which he directly responds to the criticisms of his now-infamous speech, complaining his opponents took his words "out of context."

That ad follows two separate ones from his campaign attempting damage control. His campaign appearances are now about backpedaling and proclaiming his love for small business. And the Democratic National Committee produced its own panicked memo, which vowed to "turn the page" on Mr. Romney's "out of context . . . BS"—thereby acknowledging that Chicago has lost control of the message.

The Obama campaign has elevated poll-testing and focus-grouping to near-clinical heights, and the results drive the president's every action: his policies, his campaign venues, his targeted demographics, his messaging. That Mr. Obama felt required—teeth-gritted—to address the "you didn't build that" meme means his vaunted focus groups are sounding alarms.

The obsession with tested messages is precisely why the president's rare moments of candor—on free enterprise, on those who "cling to their guns and religion," on the need to "spread the wealth around"—are so revealing. They are a look at the real man. It turns out Mr. Obama's dismissive words toward free enterprise closely mirror a speech that liberal Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren gave last August.

Ms. Warren's argument—that government is the real source of all business success—went viral and made a profound impression among the liberal elite, who have been pushing for its wider adoption. Mr. Obama chose to road-test it on the national stage, presumably thinking it would underline his argument for why the wealthy should pay more. It was a big political misstep, and now has the Obama team seriously worried...

Continue reading.

Donald Trump’s Electoral Map to Victory

Hey, don't get cocky kid (as Instapundit loves to say).

 At U.S. News and World Report, "Trump’s Electoral Map to Victory, Yes He is Going to Win":

Donald Trump’s path to the White House has gained growing plausibility with a flurry of poll numbers showing the Republican nominee on the ascent over Hillary Clinton in some of the most crucial battleground states.

Trump’s new momentum is the product of a hazardous period for Clinton, in which she earned fervent backlash for deriding half of his supporters as belonging in a “basket of deplorables” and then nearly collapsed in public while fighting a previously undisclosed bout with pneumonia that renewed lingering questions about her health and took her off the campaign trail for most of this week.

Three polls showing Trump inching ahead in Ohio, survey results placing him in the lead in Florida and still another poll giving him a slim advantage in Nevada have jolted hardened perceptions about the race 11 days before the first debate in Hempstead, New York. Additionally, a CBS News/New York Times survey of the contest released Thursday found the candidates statistically even nationally, knotted at 42 percent apiece.

Many political observers who concluded the race was slipping out of Trump’s reach after his disastrous August are now recalibrating their opinions and wondering how Clinton will stop her own September slide – a stark indication of how volatile the campaign remains with more than seven weeks until Election Day.

"Hillary's just not a very good candidate. She doesn't have campaign skills, comes off as shrill, and has a cloud hanging over her," says Scott Reed, the senior political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Trump has "shown a new level of message discipline. That's why this election has tightened up."

Polling out of Ohio – where surveys are now tracking Trump ahead by 3 to 5 percentage points – set off alarm bells within the Clinton campaign, which suddenly announced it was dispatching Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Clinton's former rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, to the Buckeye State this weekend to pitch the former secretary of state to young voters uninspired by her candidacy. Warren and Sanders will promote Clinton's plan to make college debt-free across five cities on Saturday.

"We always expected the race to tighten up," Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said on a conference call Thursday. "They call these 'battleground states' for a reason. They are going to be hard-fought."

A Bloomberg survey of Ohio found that a higher proportion of men and older voters are indicating their likelihood to cast ballots – a glaring sign that Clinton needs to rally younger voters and minorities in order to offset that surge benefiting Trump, whose victory is predicated on garnering an unprecedented portion of the white vote.

Liberal advocates also are openly expressing worry that millennials ages 18 to 34 – 45 percent of which are minorities – don't recall or care that the last sustained era of economic prosperity occurred under President Bill Clinton.

"My concern is that they're not turned on to participate," Maria Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, said at a Brookings Institution event in Washington on Wednesday.

Facing little room for error, Trump's climb remains uphill, but Republican strategists are beginning to see an emerging electoral map that would allow him to squeak out a victory.

Trump must hold all 24 states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012 and add Ohio and Florida to the tally. A loss in Florida, Ohio or in increasingly competitive North Carolina – which Romney carried by just 2.2 percentage points over President Barack Obama – would hand Clinton the presidency.

Virginia, the fourth-most competitive state in 2012, has drifted into Clinton's column, analysts believe...

I'm not getting too excited about this.

Now, like I said before, if Pennsylvania looks likely to flip to Trump on election day, I might get a little more emotional. I suspect the Keystone State would perform a bellwether service in that case, with perhaps even a couple more surprises to come as well.

Still, Trump must run the table, so to speak. He's got no margin for error. His election frankly will need to look like a tsunami. That's not the case for Hillary, although they're shitting bricks either way.

More.

Elizabeth Warren Wears Feather Boa to Celebrate Homosexual Marriage Ruling in Massachusetts

Well, it's a "boa" at the tweet, but c'mon. Is there any other kind?

From Jacklyn Friedman:

Don’t know if you can see her here, but Senator Warren is wearing a boa at the State House right now. pic.twitter.com/uFClUBBoRk

— Jaclyn Friedman (@jaclynf) June 26, 2015

Fifty-Seven Percent of Americans Want Presidential Candidate Who'll 'Change Obama's Policies...'

Oh God yes.

At CNN, "Election 2016: The perfect candidate":

A new CNN/ORC poll finds most Americans say they would like a candidate who's a seasoned political leader, someone with an executive background, and someone who's willing to change Barack Obama's policies.

Rather than assessing the traits of individual candidates, the poll asked respondents to think about their perfect candidate and choose between two statements relating to several different traits often found in presidential candidates.

Would the perfect successor to Obama be someone with ideological purity or someone who had a great chance at winning? Someone who has had economic success or someone who's never been wealthy? Someone who relies on their religious views to guide policy or someone who believes religion should have no place in government?

Three statements generated wide-reaching support. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they'd like a candidate who has been in the public eye as a political leader for many years over one who's new to the political scene. Further, 59% say they prefer a candidate with executive experience over one who's worked as a legislator, and 57% say their perfect Obama successor would change most of the policies enacted by Obama's administration.

A long history in the political limelight is appealing to a broad swath of Americans, with majorities across age, race and education lines saying they prefer someone who's been in the public eye as a political leader for many years.

There is a partisan tinge to the results of this question, however, with Democrats -- who will choose from a field whose leading contender has decades in the public eye -- more apt to prefer a seasoned leader (77%) than Republicans (51%). On the GOP side, 46% say they would rather see someone who is new to the political scene take the White House in 2016, and their party's field includes several contenders who fit that bill.

Overall, 57% say their perfect Obama successor would change most of the policies of the Obama administration, while 41% prefer that the next president continue most of his policies. Republicans are near unanimous in their search for a change in most of Obama's policies: 94% want that. Among Democrats, 22% are looking for changes while 77% would prefer Obama's policies to remain in place...

More.

That 22 percent of Democrats who want changes to Obama's policies are looking for an even more "fundamental transformation" than we've been seeing this last six years, hence the groundswell of support for an anti-capitalist Liz Warren candidacy. See, for example, Legal Insurrection, "Game Changer: Boston Globe urges Elizabeth Warren to challenge Hillary."

Donald Trump Seals His Election in the Electoral College (VIDEO)

The biggest drama surrounding this whole thing is how the far-left has sought to destroy and delegitimize the process. It's never been disrupted like this.

But Trump's sealed his election with the vote today around the nation.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Trump officially gets 270th electoral vote, sealing his election as president."



And at the Wall Street Journal, "Donald Trump Wins Enough Electoral Votes to Become President."

And this is actually hilarious:

Monday’s Electoral College proceedings drew a record number of votes for candidates other than Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. That reflected the lingering deep divisions within the country that played out during an election season in which Mr. Trump won more electoral votes, but trailed Mrs. Clinton in the popular vote. At least seven electors defied the will of the voters in their states—a number not seen in roughly a century and a half.

Two Texas Republican electors cast ballots for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul. On the Democratic side, four Washington state electors refused to cast ballots for Mrs. Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine. Three voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, while one cast a ballot for Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle. In Hawaii, one Democratic elector also cast a ballot for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In the vice-presidential vote, the Washington vote was even more unusual, with electors casting votes for a trio of female U.S. senators: Democrats Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Maria Cantwell of Washington, as well as Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine. Another elector cast a ballot for Winona LaDuke, an environmental activist. One Texas Republican voted for former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina on the vice-presidential ballot. Another Hawaii elector also voted for Ms. Warren.

Several other attempts by electors to cast ballots for alternative candidates were unsuccessful. Democratic electors in Colorado and Maine tried to cast votes for Mr. Sanders. In Maine, the elector was ordered to vote again, while in Colorado the elector was replaced with an alternate...

Still more.

WaPo/ABC News Poll: Hillary Clinton Has Big Democratic Lead for 2016 Nomination

At the Washington Post, "For 2016, Hillary Clinton has commanding lead over Democrats, GOP race wide open":

Hillary Rodham Clinton holds a commanding 6 to 1 lead over other Democrats heading into the 2016 presidential campaign, while the Republican field is deeply divided with no clear front-runner, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Clinton trounces her potential primary rivals with 73 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, reinforcing a narrative of inevitability around her nomination if she runs. Vice President Biden is second with 12 percent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) is third with 8 percent.

Although Clinton’s favorability rating has fallen since she stepped down as secretary of state a year ago, she has broad Democratic support across ideological, gender, ethnic and class lines. Her lead is the largest recorded in an early primary matchup in at least 30 years of Post-ABC polling.

The race for the Republican nomination, in contrast, is wide open, with six prospective candidates registering 10 percent to 20 percent support. No candidate has broad backing from both tea party activists and mainline Republicans, signaling potential fissures when the GOP picks a standard-bearer in 2016.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was at or near the top of the Republican field in many public opinion surveys last year, appears to have suffered politically from the bridge-traffic scandal engulfing his administration.

The new survey puts Christie in third place — with the support of 13 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — behind Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) with 20 percent and former Florida governor Jeb Bush at 18 percent. The rest of the scattered pack includes Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), who are at 12, 11 and 10 percent, respectively.

Among strong backers of the tea party — who make up about one-fifth of the Republicans polled — Cruz has a big lead, with 28 percent, followed by Ryan, at 18 percent. But Cruz, an iconoclastic freshman senator who rose to prominence during last fall’s partial government shutdown, registers just 4 percent among those who oppose or have no opinion of the tea party.

Christie is weakest among the strong tea party set, winning 6 percent of that group, but he has the backing of 15 percent of other Republicans. Bush’s base of support comes from self-identified Republicans, while Ryan’s strength comes from white evangelical Protestants, young voters and less conservative wings of the party. Rubio does particularly well among Republicans with college degrees.

Christie has benefited from the perception that he has unique appeal among independents and some Democrats, a reputation the governor burnished with his 2013 reelection in his strongly Democratic state.

But that image has been tarnished, the survey finds. More Democrats now view Christie unfavorably than favorably, with independents divided. Republicans, meanwhile, have a lukewarm opinion, with 43 percent viewing him favorably and 33 percent unfavorably. Overall, 35 percent of Americans see him favorably and 40 percent unfavorably.

The 2016 presidential campaign is not likely to start taking shape until the end of this year, when candidates are expected to begin declaring their intentions. Among the Republicans, Ryan and Bush appear to be the most ambivalent about a campaign. Other Republicans not named in the poll, such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, could gain steam as potential candidates.

On the Democratic side, Warren has said she will not run, although she has a loyal following among some liberal groups hoping to draft an alternative to Clinton.

Polling this far out in the cycle is poor at forecasting winners of party nomination battles, but it offers important clues about current voter attitudes. Major fundraisers and party activists in particular look to such polls as indications of potential candidates’ strengths and weaknesses on the national stage as they begin to pick their horses.

In a theoretical head-to-head general-election matchup, Clinton leads Christie among registered voters, 53 percent to 41 percent. This is a far larger deficit than Republicans had in the popular vote in the past two presidential elections. In 2012, President Obama beat Mitt Romney by 51 percent to 47 percent, and he beat John McCain by 53 percent to 46 percent in 2008.

Christie is hurt by weak support among independents — trailing Clinton by 48 percent to 43 percent — as well as by a less consolidated party base. Although 90 percent of Democrats say they would back Clinton, only 79 percent of Republicans say they would support Christie. By contrast, Romney beat Obama among independents by five percentage points, and he won 93 percent of Republican votes.

Clinton, who would become the first female president if elected, shows enormous strength among women in the new poll. She leads Christie among female voters by 59 percent to 34 percent — more than double the 11-point margin Obama held over Romney.

Not a lot of suspense there. Clinton will not only run, she'll run away with the nomination. And the GOP? It remains to be seen.

IMAGE CREDIT: iOWNTHEWORLD.