Biden on Foreign Policy (1 of 3): Nuclear arms proliferation and climate change

Joe Biden has an article on foreign policy published in the Mar/Apr Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), whose membership has long been largely been almost the definition of the US foreign policy establishment. The CFR has also been a stock bogeyman for far-right conspiracy theories, so the America First types that gravitate to Trump aren't particularly fond of them. (Fun fact: Foreign Affairs began publication in 1910 as The Journal of Race Development.)

It's a long-standing ritual for Presidential candidates to publish an article about foreign policy in this journal. Biden's is called Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump. It's a reminder of how a conservative Democratic Administration under Joe Bide can be expected to have a superior foreign policy to Trump's is pretty much all ways, or maybe literally in all. But it won't be the kind of transformative policy that is needed in many areas of US international affairs.

On the basics, we can reasonably assume that Biden would staff the State Department with competent professionals who would conduct normal diplomacy. That alone would be a significant improvement over the present. As we would expect from Biden, who is running on a Make American Boring Again program, the article is largely Democratic Party foreign policy boilerplate. But from his long career in politics and the Vice Presidency, he actually does know what the words mean. He wouldn't have to rely on FOX News blowhards for foreign policy advice.

Biden writes on nuclear arms control:

On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated. From Iran to North Korea, Russia to Saudi Arabia, Trump has made the prospect of nuclear proliferation, a new nuclear arms race, and even the use of nuclear weapons more likely. As president, I will renew our commitment to arms control for a new era. The historic Iran nuclear deal that the Obama-Biden administration negotiated blocked Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Yet Trump rashly cast the deal aside, prompting Iran to restart its nuclear program and become more provocative, raising the risk of another disastrous war in the region. I'm under no illusions about the Iranian regime, which has engaged in destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, brutally cracked down on protesters at home, and unjustly detained Americans. But there is a smart way to counter the threat that Iran poses to our interests and a self-defeating way - and Trump has chosen the latter. [my emphasis]

The danger of nuclear war is arguably the single most important issue the world faces. Climate change gets more public attention. But the damage done by climate change is more long-term. A nuclear war, even a "small" one like between India and Pakistan, would have catastrophic effects on the world: deaths directly related to the blasts, wide distribution of radiative fallout, and injecting massive dust clouds into the atmosphere. The latter could be seen as making nuclear war yet another climate change risk. The fact that the effect is known as a "nuclear winter" phenomenon shouldn't lead anyone to expect it would have a salutary impact in cooling off the planet. Such a change would be drastic and very sudden. I haven't seen a recent analysis of how a "nuclear winter" event would play out in the current state of climate change. But we can safely assume those implications would be very bad.

Biden does include this paragraph on climate change, which is okay so far as it goes, being safely reflective of the general approach of the Obama Administration:

The United States must lead the world to take on the existential threat we face-climate change. If we don't get this right, nothing else will matter. I will make massive, urgent investments at home that put the United States on track to have a clean energy economy with net-zero emissions by 2050. Equally important, because the United States creates only 15 percent of global emissions, I will leverage our economic and moral authority to push the world to determined action. I will rejoin the Paris climate agreement on day one of a Biden administration and then convene a summit of the world's major carbon emitters, rallying nations to raise their ambitions and push progress further and faster. We will lock in enforceable commitments that will reduce emissions in global shipping and aviation, and we will pursue strong measures to make sure other nations can't undercut the United States economically as we meet our own commitments. That includes insisting that China - the world's largest emitter of carbon - stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars' worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative. [my emphasis]

It's not entirely encouraging that he winds up there framing climate change as a issue on which we need to push China around. But he does include the ritual reference in the essay to how we should "seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security." (my emphasis)

But there is every reason to believe that on climate change that a Biden Administration will be significantly better than Trump's. Trump has been accelerating in the wrong direction on both issues. These are major problems that endanger the whole world. Just the fact that Biden would listen to experts and experienced diplomats that have a realistic understand of the relevant issues would be huge progress compared to Trump.

Status Quo Joe Biden, the new Eisenhower and ... the best we can do? (!?!)

So it looks like Status Quo Joe is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. We all have to hope he can pull it off with an at-least-I’m-not-as-bad-as-Trump campaign. Harold Meyerson writes of him:

Comes now Joe Biden, promising the restoration of White House calm and, more hopefully than realistically, an end to our civil strife. For the specter of nuclear war, substitute that of the coronavirus, which is more than a specter. In his talk last night, Biden projected the diligence and empathy Americans want in a president in times of trouble.

Otherwise, however, there’s no way the 2020s will resemble the 1950s. The consciousness of our huge levels of inequality already demands and will require major change, all against a background of demographic transformation. If a President Biden has the manner of Ike, he must have the substance of FDR or LBJ (well, the domestic-policy LBJ).

I think Biden should adopt this Steve Earle song as his campaign theme. It even includes his position on no-Medicare-For-All-never-no-matter-what:

Look around
There's doctors down on Wall Street
Sharpenin' their scalpels and tryin' to cut a deal
Meanwhile, back at the hospital
We got accountants playin' God and passin' out the pills
Yeah, I know, that sucks that your HMO
Ain't doin' what you thought it would do
But everybody's gotta die sometime and we can't save everybody
It's the best that we can do

Meyerson's point on Biden and Eisenhower is about how SQJ tries to invoke a stereotypical, imagined, Father Knows Best, ideal version of the 1950s as seen by comfortable white people:

Comes now Joe Biden, promising the restoration of White House calm and, more hopefully than realistically, an end to our civil strife. For the specter of nuclear war [in the 1950s], substitute that of the coronavirus, which is more than a specter. In his talk last night, Biden projected the diligence and empathy Americans want in a president in times of trouble.

Otherwise, however, there’s no way the 2020s will resemble the 1950s. The consciousness of our huge levels of inequality already demands and will require major change, all against a background of demographic transformation. If a President Biden has the manner of Ike, he must have the substance of FDR or LBJ (well, the domestic-policy LBJ). [my emphasis]

Andrew Gawthorpe recently warned against assuming that the COVID-19 fiasco will crater Trump's popularity, such as it is (Be careful. Trump may exploit the coronavirus crisis for authoritarian ends Guardian 03/14/2020):

In short, nothing in Trump’s record – or that of his ardent base, whose political support is all he cares about – can lead us to believe that he will use his power to protect and serve all Americans equally in a time of unprecedented crisis. He might look like a deer in the headlights right now, but soon enough he will snap back to the unreality he lives in and deploy the only political trick he knows: rallying his base, abusing his power, trashing his foes. Many Americans will have to deal with the reality of a president who is not only incompetent to defend them but doesn’t even regard them as legitimate Americans worthy of protection. This epidemiological crisis is also a political one. We should prepare to defend against both.

Yet the diagnosis of polarization - true enough as far as it goes - obscures what makes that polarization so destructive. Elite discourse frequently implies that the two parties are mirror images of each other, as if both were moving at the same rate toward the political fringes, shedding norms and principles as they did so. But this is simply not what is happening. The core problem is not equal polarization but asymmetric polarization.

The Democratic Party has moved modestly leftward, mostly due to the decline in the party's presence in the South. But it still aspires to solve problems and so is relatively open to compromise. (For example, Obama's signature health-care law, now so reviled by Republicans, was built in considerable part from past Republican proposals.) By contrast, the Republican Party has moved dramatically rightward and now represents a radically disruptive force that the U.S. political system is ill equipped to contain. [my emphasis]

I was with him until the last paragraph, which could be read to mean that it's great that the Democrats are willing to compromise with hardcore rightwing Republicans for the sake of Compromise, and that the only problem is that the Republicans haven't adopted the same attitude.

No, the problem is that we have a Citizens United campaign-finance regime in the US which allows essentially unlimited campaign contributions by the wealthiest. That creates this "asymmetric polarization" situation in which the Republicans see maximum reason to be radical and intransigent on issues prioritized the One Percent. And for the Democrats to continually compromise/surrender to those positions. In the partisan political dynamic, the Republican Party is in a long and still continuing trend of self-radicalization and the Democrats refuse to take that radicalization as being as serious as it is and are still resisting developing targeted and effective strategies to counter it. It's not a question of manners.

Charlie Pierce tries to look on the bright side in Joe Biden Is a Party Man. Will He Go Along With the Party's New Progressive Direction? Esquire Politics Blog 03/16/2020:

Biden’s career has spanned the entire stretch of the Democratic Party’s nearly 50-year retrenchment. Already scared away from progressive policies by the destruction of George McGovern in 1972, the Democrats saw Jimmy Carter, hardly a progressive champion, lose to Ronald Reagan in large part because huge pieces of the old New Deal coalition fled to him. This scared Democrats for another three decades. The party committed itself to half-measures, and to a little discreet whoring after corporate cash. Only now, with the proof staring them in the face that the policies that began with old Dutch lead only to the abyss, have substantial parts of the Democratic Party returned to the party’s post-FDR roots. [my emphasis]

And we are seeing SQJ making verbal concessions to Elizabeth Warren's proposal to correct some of the harm that Biden was active in imposing on the country with things like his bankruptcy bill. But even in his Sunday debate with Sanders, he was taking his hardcore anti-Medicare-for-All position and indulging in cheap McCarthyist redbaiting against Sanders. Biden's a conservative. He can be counted on to fight for progressive policies on anything. Yes, if the Democratic base can bring enough pressure on him if he manages to get elected, he may have to concede. But it will be because he's forced into doing it like Nancy Pelosi was forced, reluctantly and belatedly, into proceeding with impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Digby Parton also warns that we don't see any real signs yet that the Trump Cult, aka, the Republican base, are losing faith in their Führer (Are the Trump voters getting nervous? Nah. Hullabaloo 03/16/2020):

According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday, Trump’s job approval stands at 46 percent, exactly the same as it was last month before the crisis really hit. His core fans truly do believe he’s doing a heckuva job. And because of that, they see this unfolding crisis differently than the rest of the country ...

People keep saying that this is Trump’s Katrina, referring to President George W. Bush’s bungling of one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. But it pays to remember that Bush’s approval rating also didn’t fall much in the immediate aftermath of that storm. He was right where Trump is at the time, mired in the low 40s. That rating briefly dipped in the two months after the disaster hit and then bounced back up to 43%. It wasn’t until the next year that he drifted down into the 30s.

Maybe it took a while to sink in for Republican voters that their hero was failing them, and perhaps the same thing will happen with Trump. If this epidemic hits their own communities - and it will hit everybody’s - you’d think the Trump bubble might finally pop. I wouldn’t count on it. Their devotion runs deep and I’m not sure anything can break it, not even a disaster of unprecedented scale like this one. He could let their grandmother die of COVID-19 on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. [my emphasis]

Digby reads polls. This is a very useful thing for political commentators to do.

The Presidential race after Super Tuesday

Republicans: Democrats are socialists and communists and they want to give everything to blacks and Mexicans and wimmin!

Establishment Democrats: Sanders is a socialist and a communist and he doesn't want to give anything to blacks or Latinos or women.

Status Quo Joe Biden: We can't let Sanders or Trump win because I'm Obama's, Obam-, I'm was his guy. And we have to protect the Supreme, the top one, the court - you know the thing! And Medicare for All, we can't - it won't - it's a lyin' dog face pony-soldier program."

That's pretty much the state of the race as we head for another big Tuesday.

David Dayen points out the importance of Michael Bloomberg's very expensive crash-and-burn Presidential campaign (Mike Bloomberg’s Belly Flop Was a Great Moment for Democracy American Prospect 03/04/2020):

There’s a perception (inaccurate though it may be) that elections go to the highest bidder, and Bloomberg’s bid was astronomical. He was trying something fundamentally new in political history, and for a while it was working. ...

He spent more to win the presidential election than any general election candidate in American history, and he reached that lofty perch nine months before Election Day. That doesn’t even include what he spent to buy political support, from candidates he previously showered with campaign contributions and mayors whose initiatives he funded through his philanthropy. ...

Even before [the Democratic debate in the week prior to Super Tuesday], progressive messaging on Bloomberg took hold. Yes, he was successfully labeled as the avatar of stop and frisk. But others, including the Prospect, expressed the great danger a plutocratic presidency would present. A Bloomberg coronation was likely to lead to austerity cuts, union busting, and authoritarian violence against protesters, as it did in New York City. But more than that, it would mean our elections could be bought, that our institutions had no use other than as a plaything for an egomaniac with money.

And then Bloomberg’s first debate, in Las Vegas, confirmed the smallness of this man, his lack of virtue. A silent billfold behind the podium would have done better. Yes, Elizabeth Warren did the heavy lifting on Bloomberg, particularly over the sexual misconduct cases at his company and the nondisclosure agreements he forced women to sign. But the stage was set in the week leading up to that debate, with a sustained argument from the left that handing Bloomberg the keys to the Democratic Party would represent the formal end of the Democratic Party in America. Bloomberg’s only response was a grumble. [my emphasis in bold]

Strong Super Tuesday for Make America Boring Again

Bernie Sanders win in California Tuesday is a real win. But the other states' results mean that the day didn't come close to being the blowout his supporters would have liked to see. Biden's streak of wins, including in Massachusetts and (apparently at this writing) Texas is impressive. We won't know for a while yet what the delegate counts will be in California. There is a 15% threshold statewide to win any delegates and how the vote sorted out by Congressional district also affects the delegate count. But it looks like only Sanders and Biden and maybe Michael Bloomberg are likely to surpass the minimal hurdle to win delegates. Depending on how the final count shakes out, Sanders could win a majority of the California delegates if Bloomberg doesn't make the hurdle.

A few things seem pretty obvious immediately afterward. Maybe the most impressive is how well Biden did in large states like California and Texas while having a minimal field operation and his own campaign not having much money to spend on media buys compared to Sanders. His high name recognition and the weekend consolidation of the centrist wing of the party after Biden's South Carolina win came through for him. It's definitely now a Sanders vs. Biden race, with Bloomberg apparently on the verge of backing out.

It sounds from the early results that the Sanders' campaign's goal of activating new primary voters wasn't achieved in most places. And his vote skews young, while older voters are more likely to participate.

Sanders is definitely the anti-establishment candidate and that's how he consistently has positioned himself. Now he'll have to make that work in a head-to-head contest with Biden. Elizabeth Warren is still a minor factor. But based on the polling of her supporters, it's hard to tell at this point whether her presence in the race benefits either Sanders or Biden more.

The punditocracy processes primary results especially through as though voters make their choices along a consistent left-to-right ideological scale. And no amount of contrary evidence seems to be able to shake them off that approach. At this point, Biden undoubtedly benefits from a comfort factor, i.e., Make America Boring Again. No doubt a worthy goal in comparison to the Malicious Orange Clown Show that we've experienced for the last three years.

It may be near-impossible for pollsters to measure. But I wonder to what extent Trump's bumbling, irresponsible handling of the coronavirus crisis may have boosted the return-to-normalcy mood among Democratic voters on Tuesday.

Biden's victory speech focused around familiar and optimistic Democratic platitudes (quoted by Karoli Kuns, Biden Celebrates Big Super Tuesday Victory: 'We Are Better Than This President' Crooks and Liars 03/03/20):

This is about the future. It's not about the past. It's about our children and grandchildren about leading in this country and leading the world once again. We have to remember who we are. This is the United States of America. It is time for America to get back up. And once again, fight for the proposition that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal, endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights.
We saw it often in school but don't realize how profound it is. We never lived up to these words, but until this president we never walked away from it. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe with every fiber of my being that's who we are. Let's get back up. We are a decent brave, resilient people. We can believe again but we are better than this moment. We are better than this president.

Charlie Pierce evoked the memory of Warren G. Harding to remark on the appeal of a comfort vote (It Looks Like Democratic Primary Voters Want a President They Can Ignore 4 or 5 Days a Week Esquire Politics 03/04/2020):

It’s plain now that, for the moment, anyway, a large part of the Democratic primary electorate is hungering for a president that it can ignore for four or five days a week. ...

I will grant you that the Harding precedent doesn’t bode well for a possible Biden presidency. However, what he’s been pitching ever since South Carolina is essentially the same appeal, with Sanders (and, to a lesser extent, Warren) in the roles of revolution, agitation, surgery, and so forth. It was the theme of all three endorsement speeches presented at the big hootenanny in Dallas; of course, it was Pete Buttigieg’s raison d’etre for his own campaign, so that wasn’t a stretch at all. The comfy shoes are triumphing.

The coronavirus crisis is a dramatic instance where boring and competent is dramatically better than bad know-nothing melodrama.

The New York Times and the "Democratic establishment": stenography or trolling?

Don't miss this classic piece of stenography journalism in the New York Times: By Lisa Lerer and Reid Egstein, Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders 02/27/2020.

They write, “Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders's candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance.”

Wait, what about The Resistance? You know, Party Unity against the unique menace to democracy represented by Donald Trump and all that?

But at least the New York Times recognizes that the "Democratic Establishment" is really A Thing.

This is especially entertaining: “A number of superdelegates dream of a savior candidate who is not now in the race, perhaps [Ohio Sen. Sherrod] Brown, or maybe someone who already dropped out the race, like Senator Kamala Harris of California.”

I'm trying to imagine if their sources actually managed to tell them with straight faces: So, Sanders gets to ‎Milwaukee with 45% of the delegates, and the convention votes to nominate Kamala the Cop instead. It's brilliant, man!

Yeah, that’s gonna happen ...

That fantasy also may be circumstantial evidence that use of hallucinatory chemical substances may be common among this “Democratic establishment.”

A lot of the article consists of various angles arguing against Sanders' position that the candidate that comes into the convention with a plurality of delegates should get the nomination. Of course, everyone tries to frame it in terms of high principle. But it's actually a tactical issue. If one of the other candidates besides Sanders was the most likely to get a plurality on the first ballot, they would be taking the position he's taking now and Sanders himself would be arguing that the convention needs to make its own decision despite the plurality.

Lerer and Egstein define their version of the "Democratic establishment": “The Times has interviewed 93 party officials - all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention.” along with, of course, various party big names that for shorthand we could call Bloomberg supporters.

Also, I was happy to see this mention of a group of which I'm part, "“Superdelegates from Democrats Abroad count as half a vote each.” Democrats Abroad counts as a state party so it also has DNC members. And WE ALL SUPPORT BERNIE SANDERS. Well, mostly, probably. At the 2016 convention, Democrats Abroad sent nine delegates for Sanders and four for Clinton.

This also provides some comic relief:

Others are urging former President Barack Obama to get involved to broker a truce - either among the four moderate candidates or between the Sanders and establishment wings, according to three people familiar with those conversations.

William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind.

"She's the only person I can think of who can unify the party and help us win," he said. "This election is about saving the American experiment as a republic. It's also about saving the world. This is not an ordinary election." [my emphasis]

So the way to save the American Republic and the entire world is ... nominate Michelle Obama as Vice President?

They're just trolling us now.

Will any Democrats use Russian propaganda lines tonight?

In the previous post, I quoted Julia Ioffe's article that has the misleading title, Why Exactly Does Putin Love Bernie? GQ 02/23/2020.

She cites a comment by Andranik Migranyan, "who used to run a Russian government-funded think tank attached to the Russian mission to the U.N." She quotes him saying, "The things Sanders says even Russian communists would be too scared to say. He is a real communist."

I wonder if any Democratic candidate in the debate tonight will use a Russian talking point like this against Bernie Sanders. I mean, Democrats are supposed to reject Russian propaganda claims and Russian interference in our elections, right?

So obviously anyone using them will completely disqualify themselves for the Presidency in all Democrats' eyes! Right?

Tio Bernie after Nevada

I do enjoy seeing headlines like this, from Politico:

The article is by Natasha Korecki and David Siders, Sanders sends Democratic establishment into panic mode 02/23/2020.

The primary race is just beginning, although I certainly hope Sanders wins big on Super Tuesday next week.

It's telling that the first concerned anti-Sanders Democrat the Politico article quotes is this one:

“In 30-plus years of politics, I’ve never seen this level of doom. I’ve never had a day with so many people texting, emailing, calling me with so much doom and gloom,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way after Sanders' win in Nevada.

Bennett said moderates firmly believe a Sanders primary win would seal Donald Trump’s reelection. “It’s this incredible sense that we’re hurtling to the abyss. I also think we could lose the House. And if we do, there would be absolutely no way to stop [Trump]. Today is the most depressed I’ve ever been in politics.”

"Hurtling to the abyss"? Dude, have a glass of wine. Smoke a joint. Chill out.

If you've never heard of Third Way don't feel bad. Beltway Village reporters are basically the only ones who have heard of it. It's a hardline centrist group whose only purpose seems to be trolling any Democrat to the left of Joe Lieberman. If the Sanders movement is so progressive it depresses the three or four people who care what Third Way says, that's a good thing.

John King reports for CNN that actual Democratic voters don't seem share the establishment's panic at the moment. John King breaks down Bernie Sanders' effect on polls after Nevada 02/23/2020:

BTW, I notice that pundits like King have been referring to Nevada as "a liberal state".

Politico also quotes another professional centrist, Simon Rosenberg, hoping for a win for Status Quo Joe Biden. And they make this observation about Tio Bernie's win in the Nevada caucuses, "It was not just Sanders’ victory, but the lopsidedness of the outcome that struck fear into moderate Democrats. In one day, Sanders proved that he could broaden his coalition beyond the narrow base that many assumed would limit his appeal."

And, sad to say, there is Chris Matthews (Daniel Politi, Chris Matthews Slammed for Comparing Sanders’ Victory to Nazi Invasion of France Slate 02/23/2020).

Harold Meyerson has some important observations on the significant of Latino support for Tio Bernie (Bernie Blowout Highlights Latino Liberalism American Prospect 02/22/2020):

First, as in all communities throughout American history with a disproportionate share of immigrants, it’s the young - most born and schooled here, often more fluent in English than their elders - who not only are the most active politically but who also guide their elders through the labyrinth of American politics. As Bernie and Bernie’s policies speak more compellingly to the young than do any of his rivals and their policies, it’s no surprise that Latinos have tilted so sharply Berniewards in these caucuses.

Second, and even more fundamentally, the level of backing among Latinos for governmental support for economic equity and advancement has long exceeded that of any other demographic group in the electorate. One look at the exit polls on California ballot measures over the past quarter-century shows that, when voters have been asked to approve funds for schools or parks, and to decide on minimum-wage levels and the rights of unions, Latinos have been the most liberal voting bloc there is - more so, even, than African Americans. On one 1998 California ballot measure that would have greatly curtailed unions’ ability to involve themselves in elections (fortunately, it lost big), Latinos voted no at a higher rate than union members.

There’s an old conventional wisdom that says that because Latinos are supposedly more conservative on issues like choice or preserving the traditional family, they’re not all that liberal. It’s wrong. First, younger Latino voters aren’t conservative on those issues. Second, and more important, election after election has shown that when it comes to their choice of candidates, Latinos consider the candidate’s position on economic questions to be far more decisive than that on any cultural issue. [my emphasis]

Why is the Democratic establishment shocked at Bernie Sanders' status in the primary contest?

In a few days, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary will have given us a better picture of the Presidential field.

But for today, I want to mention the analysis by David Dayen and Alexander Sammon (They Forgot About Bern The American Prospect 01/28/2020) of how the Democratic political establishment more-or-less pretended that Bernie Sanders' campaign didn't exist until around the first of this year:

Sanders has been in the race since last February [of ], which means he’s spent some 350 days shattering donation records, building a committed fan base of millions, and never exiting the top three in polling, while spending the majority of the race in second place. Meanwhile, he’s run up a long list of high-profile endorsements from prominent politicians and celebrities. This is not someone who snuck up on the field.

Of course, Sanders was a close runner-up during the last presidential cycle, who never really stopped running once Donald Trump was elected. His years of building political infrastructure and track record of appealing to young voters was evident four years ago. He came close to taking out Hillary Clinton, an overwhelming favorite with massive institutional advantages that no 2020 candidate matches. It’s somewhat unfair to say that the political powers that be should’ve seen Sanders coming from a year off; they’ve had the entire latter half of the decade to apprehend his candidacy. [my emphasis]

Dayen and Sammon basically mock the Democratic establishment for being so negligent, even from the standpoint of their own sectarian, inner-party interests. "These are the strategic geniuses we should trust, not only with a general-election campaign against Donald Trump, but with running the country? The people who couldn’t see a Jupiter-sized asteroid headed straight for them?"

I'm a little more fascinated by the mystery of why they took this approach. Some of it was probably plain miscalculation and wishful thinking, i.e., if we ignore him and his annoying supporters, they will go away.

The laziness and groupthink among the major media probably had a lot to do with it, too. They didn't take Sanders seriously as a candidate because none of the people they talk to on a daily basis took him seriously. He and his proposals may be popular. But to cable TV stars earning hundreds of thousands or even millions a year, he just sounds like a crank.

For hardcore Hillary loyalists, it's likely that some of them are still irritated that he challenged her in 2016. Even calculating politicians and political activists can let resentment get the best of them.

And I do think that mainstream Democratic rhetoric about the Trump win contributes to fuzzy thinking about the current race. The self-styled Democratic "resistance" hasn't been able to focus on who to blame for 2016 outcome: Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, James Comey, Bernie Sanders, and so on. Depending on who you're listening to at any one moment, any one of those is clearly to blame. Fuzzy thinking about the 2016 campaign that bounces freely from one scapegoat to the other is not necessarily conducive to thinking clearly about the current race.

As Dayen and Sammon put it, "The blind rage towards Sanders, evinced by the corporate wing of the party, seems to have manifested itself as literal blindness toward an enduring front-runner who could only charitably be described as hiding in plain sight."

The Democratic Presidential field is winnowing out rapidly

The Iowa caucuses are two weeks from this coming Monday. New Hampshire's primary is eight days later. So the Democratic primaries are likely to sort out to three or even two leading candidates in a few weeks.

It would be seriously awesome if it came down to a Sanders-Warren race with Warren as the conservative candidate.

Real Clear Politics shows this set of match-ups with Trump as of this past Wednesday (Latest 2020 General Election Polls):

The Hill has a convenient listing of important dates, 2020 Presidential Election Calendar 10/10/2019.

According to this Reuters/Ipsos post reported Thursday (Chris Kahn, Looking for a winner, Democrats keep Biden and Sanders on top: Reuters/Ipsos poll 01/10/2020), the national rankings have Biden, Sanders, and Warren as the top three possibilities in the Democratic race.

Mayor Winecave is down to 7% according to this poll. But it's a national poll and he has previously been showing up well in Iowa polls, although he's slipped more recently. Buttigieg's campaign is assuming they need a really strong showing in Iowa to stay viable.

Bloomberg's candidacy so far is mainly a reminder of how ridiculously dependent American elections are on big donors and pseudo-"independent" expenditures, the candidate himself being the big donor here. The only way I can think of that the oligarchical financing could get worse would be for Congress and/or the Supreme Court to prohibit individual donations of less than the current limit of limit of $2,500.

The Trump cult is going after Biden like crazy, of course. And they've started taking Sanders more seriously. Sanders probably benefitted from the national media and Big Pundits assuming he was meaningless until basically a couple of weeks ago, in that the Republicans largely held off on the oppo against him. The Project Veritas video this past week is a hint of how the Republicans will work the anti-Semitic propaganda against him.

That was the Jew-Bolshevik version. We'll also get a lot of the rich-Jews-controlling-the-world version complete with Puppet-Master George Soros and the like. Susan Collins at some point will say she's "very disappointed" that Republicans would use such tactics.

Susan Collins is Very Disappointed American Bridge 21st Century 07/24/2019:

Centrist ideologues ready to bombard the progressive Democratic candidates

Jonathan Chait seems to be carved out a 2020 niche for himself as a reliable bellwether of corporate centrism. His piece Tulsi Gabbard and the Return of the Anti-Anti-Trump Left (New York 12/23/2019) is a good example:

Left-wing anti-anti-Trumpism played an important role in the bizarre 2016 outcome. Die-hard Bernie activists, fired up with anger at the release of DNC emails stolen by Russians that purportedly showed the party had rigged the primary, demonstrated against the party outside its convention hall and tried to drown out the speakers inside with boos. Stein attacked Hillary Clinton from the left, then audaciously staged a grift-y fundraising scheme supposedly to hold recounts in the states she had labored to flip to Trump. Trump’s election appeared to deliver the same shock of reality that had vaporized Ralph Nader’s 2000 support.

But Gabbard’s emergence is another indication that the disaffection that drove these events has not disappeared. Anti-anti-Trumpism has maintained a small but durable intellectual infrastructure. The sentiments that first registered as dissent from the Russia investigation transferred to impeachment, and a chorus of left-wing voices is attacking the effort to remove Trump from office as at best a misguided diversion and at worst a deep-state coup.

This is mainly a tacky attempt to stigmatize any Democrat to the left of Biden or Buttigieg as not very desirable people to be associated with. This year is going to be filled with many flights of fancy and propaganda like that one. Trying to refute columns like this point by point would be mainly a waste of time, because their persuasiveness is how well they resonate within Democratic faction fights and the chronically lazy habits of the corporate press.

But keeping a grip on reality is also a good thing.

Tulsi Gabbard has always been hard to place. She endorsed Sanders in 2016 and for the next several years tried to portray herself as a progressive in the Sanders-Warren "lane". In the course of 2019, she moved far enough to the right that she voted "present" on Trump's impeachment. But she's always been disturbingly well-disposed toward Hindu nationalism and has supported the kind of Islamophobia connected with it and with a lot of far-right politics generally. She has always taken a simplistically hawkish position on the War on Terror. That "present" vote along with not contesting her Congressional seat may be signs she's setting up for some kind of third party gig.

I know that Chait's handwringing about third parties is part of a narrative that is deeply embedded in Democratic Party rhetoric. It's not entirely wrong. For instance, if Joe Biden has a majority at the Democratic convention but then has all his delegates instead vote to draft Mitt Romney as the Democratic Presidential candidate, the handful of Republican NeverTrumpers will be having verbal orgasms about it for the rest of their lives. But that would produce a big third party candidacy with candidates able to pull enough votes to have a real shot at the White House. So it's possible.

The point, of course, is not that Biden will actually do exactly that. But he did say he might consider a hypothetical Republican as his Vice Presidential running mate. Ticket-balancing used to me picking a politician from one's own party as the VP candidate who would bring additional strength geographically or from a competing party faction. Ticket-balancing by picking a member of the opposing party as the VP nominee would be a new approach!

So Biden and the corporate Dems should have to worry about how reckless acts of pathological centrism might drives voters away from the Democratic Party.

There will always be some minor third party entries, and some tiny percentage of the vote will go to one or two of them. In practice, it's almost impossible to measure the effect of most of those, because a large portion of the tiny number who vote third party are none-of-the-above voters. Who they might have voted for otherwise basically has to be estimated from exit polling. In 2016, it's by no means clear how the absence of the candidacies of Jill Stein and Gary Johnson would have affected the Presidential election outcome in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. (But please don't anyone tell Neera Tanden; the poor woman might have a stroke.)

It's been hard for Americans to walk and talk at the same time when it comes to Russia since well before the First World War. So that's nothing new. But there are a group of people who think of themselves as left who desperately want to believe that somehow Trump is pursuing a peace policy toward Russia, when he's actually just stumbling alone from one dirty deal to another. But Trump's total indifference to nuclear proliferation - except when he's using it as an excuse to threaten war with Iran - is the opposite of a peace policy.

Chait uses Glenn Greenwald as an example of a sinister leftie. Greenwald usually comes down on the left side of the issues with which he publicly engages. And in Brazil, where he lives, he's been very much an advocate for the center-left leader Lula de Silva, and good on him for that. But Greenwald has always been kind of a doctrinaire libertarian, so he opposes campaign finance spending limitations, for instance. Dave Neiwert has been pointing out his occassionally disturbing libertarian position for years. This recent post of his sums up some of it. Michael Moore on Trump, 2020 & Why “the Old, Angry White Guy” Doesn’t Represent the Working Class 12/30/2019:

Michael Moore was on Democracy Now! the other day and said that in Michigan in 2016, there were districts that went heavily for Democrats in which 90 thousand ballots were cast with no vote for President. I've never dug into those partiular results, and it might be hard to make a reasonable guess of the impact of those, either. But it's a way bigger number than what Jill Stein pulled in Michigan.

The corporate press and the Democratic Presidential debates

John Stoehr has some useful thoughts on the press' "disarray" narrative about the Democratic Presidential contest.

13. The campaign press does something else. It gives the impression that power creates order—that the party in power is more organized than the party out of party, otherwise it wouldn’t be in power. Not so.

— John Stoehr's Editorial Board (@johnastoehr) August 2, 2019

The corporate media have long since normalized Trump. And the ”normal“ (and lazy) assumption is that the incumbent President will be re-elected. The coverage on the Democratic race has so far been sad.

David Dayen also has some good observations in CNN's Debate Fail The American Prospect 07/31/2019:

Entertainment industry morons only understand how to stage television through the lens of forcing conflict. The questions weren’t really prompts as much as they were invitations to fight. The network had two progressive Democratic front-runners in Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and they saw their role as taking them down a peg. Tomato cans like John Delaney and John Hickenlooper tried to oblige (while failing miserably) because this is the last time more than 10 Americans will ever hear them speak ever again. So they took their shot. [my emphasis]

Never Trumpers - and a Mark Shields stuck firmly in 1990

On Friday's PBS Newshour's Political Wrap, David "Bobo" Brooks dn and Mark Shields grumped about how it was obvious that what the Democrats really need is to be more like Republicans. Shields and Brooks on Democratic debates, Supreme Court rulings 06/29/2019 (transcript here);

Shields, if anything, was even worse. Shields has always been anti-abortion and only mildly supportive of women's rights on the issue, if at all. Here, he sounds like he actually thinks the Republicans have more-or-less surrendered to the Democrats on abortion!

Just think of the 80 yards of the field that Republicans have surrendered to them on the abortion issue. [R]epublicans have been running away from what Republicans did in Alabama and Georgia and in Missouri, in Ohio. And the president has been distancing himself even.

And what do Democrats do? I mean, they basically just endorse abortion and throw in — well, how about trans people, covering abortion?

I just — I mean, to me, they just — wasn't thinking in terms strategically. I mean, they owned the majority position in the country, safe, legal, rare. And so, to me, I just don't understand the strategy.

Abortion rights are under siege across the country. And Shields thinks the problem is - that Democrats are fighting back.

He also repeats what he must know is a propagandistic polemic against national health insurance, aka, Medicare for All, that doesn't really make any sense (to put it generously):

And at great political cost, the Democrats, without any help from the Republicans, with total objection and resistance, passed it in 2010, under a Democratic president, Barack Obama. And ever since then, five consecutive elections, Republicans have run on, we're going to repeal it, going to repeal it.

As a consequence, Democrats — public by 2-1 thinks the Democrats are better on health care. So what do the Democrats suggest? We're going to get rid of it. We're going to get rid of it, going to get rid of — you like private health insurance that you have and guaranteed for preexisting conditions covered under the Affordable Care Act, we're going to get rid of private insurance.

Bobo's fellow Never Trumper Bret Stephens also thinks - surprise! surprise! - that Democrats aren't being Republican enought (): "None of this means that Democrats can’t win in 2020. The economy could take a bad turn. Or Trump could outdo himself in loathsomeness. But the Democratic Party we saw this week did even less to appeal beyond its base than the president. And at least his message is that he’s on their — make that our — side."

Stephens seens to be preparing for a "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me" moment. Even though, he isn't even a Democrat. I never trusted the Never Trumpers. This is why.

Digby is slightly more generous in Hey, NeverTrumpers: Please quit lecturing actual Democrats about how to win Salon 06/26/2019. But she has their number (italics in original):

I'm not a NeverTrumper-basher. ...

So I hope the NeverTrump troops don't take this the wrong way. But they really need to zip it when it comes to haranguing Democrats about their primary. They particularly need to stop speaking to the Democratic base as if they were a bunch of fools who need remedial lessons in politics from Republicans, the people who couldn't stop Donald Trump from snagging the nomination right out from under them. They should know better than anyone that running against him is like running against an alien from outer space. There is only one race that Democrats and NeverTrumpers can look to for clues about how to defeat him — and neither of them were successful, so nobody gets to claim the high ground here. ...

More importantly, NeverTrumpers telling Democrats what they shouldn't do is even worse. It's not just insulting, it's also strangely naive. In a way, it explains why some of these folks were so surprised that a demagogic con man took out that venerable list of GOP all-stars back in 2016, with none other than the odious Sen. Ted Cruz being the last man standing. These are not normal times, and simply assuming that the way for Democrats to win is to be more like pre-Trump Republicans is going to fall on deaf ears, and for good reason[.] ...

But if there are Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who are appalled by Trump's assault on the system and the Republican Party's descent into madness, these NeverTrumpers could make their best contribution e by helping those folks realize that stopping Trump means we can all live to fight each other another day on the issues where we may strongly disagree. There's no guarantee of that if Trump wins again.