2020 Presidential Campaign - It’s on

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I sincerely hope people don't start justifying Biden's mental decline or ignore it or say things like: "Everyone that age has "senior moments", that's all it is." We don't know if that's all it is. He may very well have actual dementia. Listen to our collective selves: In any other election, would we really even think of considering to vote for a candidate that could have dementia???

"Well, this isn't 'any other election'. Anyone would be better than Trump." Even someone who could have dementia? Really?

I thought of another reason other than the obvious one as to why after this second wave of primaries that people are going to push Bernie very hard to drop out and drop out fast: If Bernie drops out....no more democratic debates for Joe to contend with.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., appeared ready to call off the Democratic primary race Tuesday night and declare former Vice President Joe Biden the victor.

In a conversation with NPR as the results were coming in, Clyburn – who already has endorsed Biden – said that if Biden were to sweep the six contests, it would be best for the party to put an end to the primary race, debates and all.

"I think when the night is over, Joe Biden will be the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination, and quite frankly, if the night ends the way it has begun, I think it is time for us to shut this primary down, it is time for us to cancel the rest of these debates," Clyburn said, "because you don’t do anything but get yourself in trouble if you continue in this contest when it’s obvious that the numbers will not shake out for you."

Clyburn wasn't the only party elder ready to put an end to the primary brawl.

"This is all about November, these voters want to shut this thing down," famed Democratic strategist James Carville said Tuesday night on MSNBC. "Our mission as a party is to defeat Donald Trump."

But while Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has not tipped his hand as to his next move, he and his army of supporters have historically bristled at attempts by the party establishment to nudge him to the side. The upcoming debate this Sunday, presuming it goes forward, would mark perhaps his last chance to halt Biden's march to the nomination. With Biden continuing to stumble at times on the campaign trail – with gaffes and repeated clashes with voters, including a profanity-laced argument on primary day in Michigan – Sanders could hope to trip him up on Sunday.

“I believe the debates should go on, I think that Sen. Sanders and Vice President Biden should sit down, have a very civil conversation about some of the big issues facing our country,” Fox News contributor Donna Brazile, the former interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said Wednesday. “This is not the time to call for the end of the process. We have more than 700 delegates still at stake this month alone. Now at the end of the month, we should reassess. But right now, this is not the time to reassess.”

Clyburn's remarks, meanwhile, made waves overnight. By "trouble," Clyburn meant negative campaigning that could cause lasting damage to the eventual nominee in the general election. Clyburn specifically pointed to the 1988 Democratic primary race featuring Michael Dukakis and Al Gore that led to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush attacking Dukakis with the now-famous Willie Horton ad.

The ad focused on Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder but then raped a woman and stabbed a man while he had been let out on a weekend furlough program instituted by Dukakis. While the ad was racially charged given that Horton was black and the victims were white, it was viewed as effective at the time.

Clyburn is concerned that if Biden and Sanders continue to battle it out in primary contests scheduled through early June, it could benefit President Trump

People will say things,” Clyburn warned, “that you cannot overcome.”

Clyburn's comments may have been premature – at least for the time being – as Biden did not win every contest Tuesday.

The Associated Press has declared Sanders the victor in North Dakota with eight delegates, narrowly edging out Biden with six.

As recently as two weeks ago it looked like American politics had settled into a divisive new reality. The aggressive ideological wings so dominated the two political parties that they guaranteed that the general election contest would be between two most polarizing candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The battle would be fought between one of the more aggressive and cruel personalities in recent political history and the politician who seeks to remake the American economy more than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This is the future one feared after reading one most intriguing and insightful modern studies of the American voting public – the More in Common’s study of America’s “hidden tribes.” Rather than merely asking voters if they were Democratic, Republican, or Independent – or if they were conservative, liberal, or moderate – it dug deeper. It discerned a total of seven distinct political divisions (“tribes) in the United States. Our nation is comprised of progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, the politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.

But if there were so many different shades of gray, why does America feel so polarized? Because the three “wings” – progressive activists, devoted conservatives, and traditional conservatives – tend to dominate political discourse. Together they comprise 33 percent of the electorate, with the two extremes (progressive activists at 8 percent and traditional conservatives at 6 percent) more than twice as likely to view politics as a hobby than the rest of America. Politically, they punch well above their numerical weight.

What about the rest of America? It was the “exhausted majority” – those Americans who are “fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and society.” Moreover, that exhausted majority was concentrated on the center and center left – the 26 percent of Americans who were traditional or passive liberals, and the 15 percent of moderates. Thus, if the exhausted majority was going to show itself, it would first show itself in the Democratic primary. The question was whether the key word in that description was “exhausted” or “majority.”

If the center-left majority was too exhausted, then the energized wings would dominate both parties. There is in the Trump era no distinct or potent center-right. And if the progressive minority turned out in sufficient numbers (and the moderates stayed home), then America would face an election featuring its most divisive political personalities.

With the sudden and decisive rise of Joe Biden – a man who is putting a fight for the “soul of America” front and center in his campaign and has frequently touted his desire (and ability) to reach across the aisle – has answered the question, at least for Democrats. The majority is less exhausted than it might appear. The energy of the progressive activists simply can’t overcome the sheer numbers of the suburban and African-American voters who are demonstrably more moderate than the disproportionately white progressive base.

Despite his lopsided defeats, Bernie Sanders is fighting on, but barring truly unexpected developments, the race is over. That leaves 2020 as one of the more fascinating races since World War II. Trump will wrap his arms around his base with the same intensity that he hugs the flag at CPAC. Biden will aggressively court the same suburban moderates who gave the House to the Democrats in 2018.

If Trump wins again, the activist conventional wisdom will harden. Moves to the center are foolish. Courting moderates is the path to defeat. To paraphrase Meghan Trainor, it’s all about that base. Democratic activists will scorn their defeated candidates with much the same intensity that Trumpist Republicans loathe John McCain and Mitt Romney. They’ll be deemed relics of a naïve past that wrongly believed that there existed a persuadable middle. The path to polarization will be complete.

A Biden victory, on the other hand, would likely send shock waves through a Republican Party that now views appeals to the center as evidence of weakness. It has interpreted the 2016 election – fought against one of the most disliked politicians in American history – not as an aberration, but rather as the new model for political engagement.

Republicans now believe that you can bury your political opponents in an avalanche of insults, and many are now rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of watching Trump attempt to humiliate and bully Joe Biden on live television in three presidential debates.

It’s a bit much to cast the 2020 election as a fight for the “soul” of America. A national soul is not fully revealed in its politics. But 2020 will determine – at least for a time – the nature and strategy of American political engagement. Trump has confidence that his wing is energized enough to give him four more years. Biden is betting that his majority isn’t too weary to win.

I sincerely hope people don't start justifying Biden's mental decline or ignore it or say things like: "Everyone that age has "senior moments", that's all it is." We don't know if that's all it is. He may very well have actual dementia. Listen to our collective selves: In any other election, would we really even think of considering to vote for a candidate that could have dementia???

"Well, this isn't 'any other election'. Anyone would be better than Trump." Even someone who could have dementia? Really?

Democrats showed us a surprising amount of cohesion and coordination, when, collectively, they took action to turn Joe Biden’s strong finish in South Carolina into a romp through Super Tuesday. But they may regret this decision sooner than they think — and we may come to despise them for it.

Already there is an effort underway to protect Biden from any possible damage that Bernie Sanders could do to him in the remainder of the Democratic primaries. Leading Democrats such as James Clyburn have argued that it would be useless to hold more debates, because the party already has a strong front-runner, a prohibitive favorite if polls hold up.

Really? The whole point of elections is to see if polls hold up. Biden currently has 867 delegates. Sanders has 711. It takes 1991 delegates to win the nomination. The last televised debate was before the South Carolina primary, and it included Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, Biden, and Sanders. We haven’t seen Biden take on someone one on one, though he does threaten random people who question him at his rallies. Shouldn’t he have to close the deal with voters?

Leaving aside those procedural questions, already there is another effort underway to impose a taboo against saying the following: Joe Biden is clearly not well. The comeback front-runner for the Democratic nomination hasn’t lost a step; he’s lost the plot. You’re not supposed to diagnose or psychoanalyze people from afar, I know. It is rude. Having any conversation about the frailty of an elderly public figure always feels rude. Such conversations are difficult to have even about elderly family members, behind closed doors.

But this subject needs to be broached right now. Accusations that Hillary Clinton was unwell were treated as a conspiracy theory up until the moment she seemed to collapse at a 9/11 memorial and was pushed into the side of a van like a sack of meat. Though that viral clip surely hurt Clinton, it was a one-day story and she performed reasonably well on the campaign trail afterward. Biden is amassing a series of viral clips that are much worse. He’ll forget the name of former president Barack Obama, or the state he’s in, or stock phrases of American oratory: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women created by . . . you know . . . you know the thing.” He’ll announce to a baffled crowd that “I’m Joe Biden’s husband and I work for Cedric Richmond” (Richmond is a congressman, in case you were wondering.)

Yes, we need to make room for verbal slip-ups among people who are tirelessly barnstorming around the country and giving public speeches. But any look at a video of Biden in a previous campaign for president shows that the former vice president has diminished. If he has one of these moments in a debate with President Trump, it could be fatal for his campaign. In that sense, he should be anxious to debate Bernie Sanders this weekend and prove that he has what it takes.

None of this should be construed as a pass to ignore the deficiencies of Trump’s character and state of mind, or questions about Bernie Sanders’s age and health.

I sincerely hope people don't start justifying Biden's mental decline or ignore it or say things like: "Everyone that age has "senior moments", that's all it is." We don't know if that's all it is. He may very well have actual dementia. Listen to our collective selves: In any other election, would we really even think of considering to vote for a candidate that could have dementia???

"Well, this isn't 'any other election'. Anyone would be better than Trump." Even someone who could have dementia? Really?

I thought of another reason other than the obvious one as to why after this second wave of primaries that people are going to push Bernie very hard to drop out and drop out fast: If Bernie drops out....no more democratic debates for Joe to contend with.

This was distasteful when it was about Trump, it was distasteful when it was about Clinton, and it is still distasteful now.

Donald Trump has claimed to have invented the word fake, that the moon is part of the planet Mars, that Barack Obama was the founder of ISIS, and that he wants to date his daughter. He’s obsessed with cable news and nuclear bombs. Yes, even if Joe Biden is in the early stages of dementia (and again I find it pretty distasteful to speculate) then he is still clearly more competent than Donald Trump.

Looks like he'd have to do something REALLY bad, like eat a puppy on live TV, before he would be disqualified from office.

Is Biden all but assured of the Dem nomination at this point?

Looks like he'd have to do something REALLY bad, like eat a puppy on live TV, before he would be disqualified from office.

Not even the teleprompter could prevent the latest Joe Biden gaffe.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee apparently lost his train of thought Monday while delivering a speech on what he believed President Trump should do to combat the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

”I’m glad the president has finally activated the National Guard. Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies and logistics,” the former veep said, reading from a teleprompter in a 30-second video clip posted to his campaign YouTube channel and picked up on by Mediaite.

“We need to activate the reserve corp of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with this crush of cases. And, uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that, we are,” he started to add before stumbling over his next words and making a circular motion with his right hand, apparently asking staffers to roll back the prompter, before changing course.

“Well, let me go to the second thing. The president must use the Defense Production Act,” he said before the clip finished, referring to the Korean War-era law that allows the feds to order private businesses to make badly needed emergency supplies such as protective masks and ventilators.

Trump cited the act last week but has sent mixed signals about whether it has been invoked, saying he had not used the powers allowed by the act before asserting that he had.

In the speech, Biden called on Trump to put the act into place immediately.

“The president must use the Defense Production Act to radically increase the supply of critical goods needed to treat patients and protect our health care workers and first responders, including protective gear like face masks, and critical equipment like ventilators so desperately needed in our hospitals,” he said, according to a transcript provided by his campaign.