Category: Elizabeth Warren

The Endless Warren Butt-Hurt

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Did any presidential candidate ever deserve to lose more than Elizabeth Warren? This is a women who fabricated her own biography, falsely claiming to be Native American, in order to be the “first woman of color” on the faculty of Harvard Law. Say what you will about Barack Obama — whom Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan dubbed The Worst President in History — at least he actually was half-Kenyan, whereas Warren’s Cherokee fakery was so complete that the possibility of it being true involves the merest fraction of a single percentage point. If you’re going to play identity politics, you need to have a real identity.

We must credit Professor William Jacobson for his tenacity in calling attention to Warren’s fakery, and we should also credit the Democratic primary voters who rejected this bald-faced liar. The fact that Warren could do no better than third place in Massachusetts — the state she represents in the U.S. Senate — was an embarrassment she deserved.

Warren’s feminist supporters refuse to accept this verdict. Permit me to remind you of what Amanda Marcotte wrote last month:

Warren is a rock star. Crowds love her and she tends to get bigger cheers than anyone, even Sanders. She always takes her analysis to the next level, but manages to explain complex topics without dissembling. The ideas that sound radical in Bernie’s mouth (probably by design, to be fair) sound like common sense coming from Warren. She’s probably the single most popular candidate in the field, with people talking about her positively, even if they support someone else.
It’s clear, however, after months of cable news seeding the idea that the public is too sexist to elect a woman, that voters aren’t backing her. This created a weird dynamic in New Hampshire, where Warren drew big crowds, often due in large part to political tourists from other states who came to see the hottest act in town, not because she was actually rallying local voters here. So because of sexism, the most popular politician in the field will probably falter in the actual primary.

And this is what Jessica Valenti wrote last week:

I knew going into Super Tuesday that Elizabeth Warren was unlikely to win big. I had prepared myself for that. What did take me by surprise, though, was just how poorly she fared: Even in her home state of Massachusetts, she finished third. . . .
It’s enough to make me feel, well, despairing: that we had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her. . . .
Whoever the nominee is, their campaign is going to have to come to terms with the intense misogyny so many female voters have dealt with — and understand that it’s an issue we care deeply about. And their supporters are going to have to let us be sad — depressed, even — that once again we’re going to watch a race to leadership between old white men.

Feminist logic is a coin-toss: Heads, she wins. Tails, she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression. No amount of evidence can disprove this feminist belief. They believe in women’s victimhood as a matter of religious faith and, no matter how privileged or successful a woman actually is — e.g., Elizabeth Warren is a multimillionaire and a U.S. Senator — she’s still a victim if, for any reason, she is deprived of anything she might possible desire. Feminists believe that women are always entitled to everything they want, simply because they are women.

Of course, the butt-hurt over Warren’s failure is almost entirely a vestige of the Hillary Clinton butt-hurt. Democrats spent three years investigating non-existent Russian “collusion” in order to give some credence to Hillary’s paranoid belief that Donald Trump had cheated her out of the presidency. Thus, $120,000 in Facebook ads, some simple email “phishing” and a handful of Twitter bots were magnified into an vast international conspiracy to deprive Hillary of what was rightly hers. Mere sexism would not suffice; no, it took Russian military intelligence to defeat Hillary, who never even bothered to campaign in Wisconsin.

Having never recovered from the psychological trauma of Hillary’s defeat, feminists have gone completely bonkers over Warren’s defeat.

Here’s a paragraph from Megan Garber:

The campaigns of those who deviate from the traditional model of the American president — the campaign of anyone who is not white and Christian and male — will always carry more than their share of weight. But Warren had something about her, apparently: something that galled the pundits and the public in a way that led to assessments of her not just as “strident” and “shrill,” but also as “condescending.” The matter is not merely that the candidate is unlikable, these deployments of condescending imply. The matter is instead that her unlikability has a specific source, beyond bias and internalized misogyny. Warren knows a lot, and has accomplished a lot, and is extremely competent, condescending acknowledges, before twisting the knife: It is precisely because of those achievements that she represents a threat. Condescending attempts to rationalize an irrational prejudice. It suggests the lurchings of a zero-sum world — a physics in which the achievements of one person are insulting to everyone else. When I hear her talk, I want to slap her, even when I agree with her.

Garber concludes that Warren (“competence incarnate”) lost because her achievements and admirable qualities — “her intelligence, her experience, her compassion” — were “understood as threats.”

Or maybe because she lied about being a Cherokee?

No, the possibility that Warren lost because voters perceived her as fundamentally dishonest cannot be considered, because this might diminish the Feminist Victimhood Narrative in which Ivy League women like Megan Gerber (Princeton BA, Columbia MA) are so deeply invested.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

‘Cognitive Partitioning’: The Real Reason Elizabeth Warren Never Had a Chance

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The news broke this morning that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will quit the presidential campaign. I’m sure everybody is sad about this, and by “everybody,” of course I mean Jessica Valenti:

 

I knew going into Super Tuesday that Elizabeth Warren was unlikely to win big. I had prepared myself for that. What did take me by surprise, though, was just how poorly she fared: Even in her home state of Massachusetts, she finished third. . . .
It’s enough to make me feel, well, despairing: that we had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her. . . .
Whoever the nominee is, their campaign is going to have to come to terms with the intense misogyny so many female voters have dealt with — and understand that it’s an issue we care deeply about. And their supporters are going to have to let us be sad — depressed, even — that once again we’re going to watch a race to leadership between old white men.

Never bet against the patriarchy, sweetheart.

Notice that it’s not just men that Valenti singles out for contempt, but rather specifically old white men. One gets the impression that Valenti has been nursing hurt feelings ever since Hillary lost the 2008 nomination to Obama, but she couldn’t complain too loudly about that, because hating Obama would be racist. Conveniently, this time around, there were no black male political rising stars contending for the Democratic nomination — Corey Booker is a joke — and so Valenti invested completely in Warren as “the candidate of a lifetime,” ignoring her idol’s flaws that were so glaringly obvious to the rest of us.

Was it really “misogyny” that sank Warren’s campaign? Is it true that sexism among Democratic primary voters explains Warren’s defeat? Matthew Yglesias offers an alternative explanation:

Her supporters feel somewhat baffled: How did she evaporate from the top tier of contention, especially since so many of the people they know also like her? . . .
[I]f you, like many of my friends, find the situation puzzling, that is probably because you know a lot of people who are demographically similar to yourself. I’m a highly educated white person, and most of my friends and acquaintances are also highly educated white people. Elizabeth Warren is very popular with people like us.
The reality is that there aren’t that many people like us — and there’s a valuable lesson in that, not just about the Warren campaign specifically but about some of the larger dynamics in American politics. . . .
Even at a time when Warren had, in its estimate, fallen to fourth place in national polling, she was first with white college graduates and first with Democrats who have advanced degrees. . . .
The problem is that politics is a numbers game, and we are not in the majority. . . .
Validated data from the 2016 election, for example, suggests that only about one-third of 2016 voters had college degrees. The share among Hillary Clinton voters was higher, at 43 percent, but even among the more educated in the party, most people haven’t graduated college. And among college graduates, about 75 percent attend schools that accept more than half of applicants, rather than the kind of state university flagships or elite private universities whose graduates dominate the media. In my friend group, it’s not unusual for someone to be a lawyer or a doctor or to have a master’s degree in something or other. As a policy journalist, I speak to a lot of experts in academia or the think tank world who have advanced degrees.
But in the actual American population distribution, there are more high school dropouts than people with master’s degrees. The median American under the age of 30 has $0 in student loan debt, not because the median young person is superrich but because most people didn’t attend expensive higher education institutions in the first place. . . .
If you feel like Warren is very impressive and lots of people you know feel the same way, you’re not imagining it — lots of people just like you all across the country feel the same way.
It’s just that most Democrats aren’t all that much like you.

What Yglesias is describing here is a phenomenon that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein described in their book The Bell Curve as “cognitive partitioning.” One tragic consequence of the controversy over the alleged racism of The Bell Curve is that it obscured what was, to me, the most valuable part of Murray and Herrnstein’s book. “The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite” (pp. 25-125) describes how, since World War II, the prevalence of standardized testing and the expansion of access to higher education has operated as a vast sorting machine. Brainy young people are identified at early ages, put onto an academic fast-track (“gifted” programs in elementary school, “honors” classes in high school) that leads them toward prestigious “selective” universities.

Once you carefully consider what Murray and Herrnstein demonstrate in that 100-page section of their book, a lot of things about our society that might otherwise be mysterious suddenly make perfect sense. Once upon a time — in my father’s youth — college education was almost exclusively for the children of the rich. There were no federally guaranteed student loans and no Pell Grants, and so if your parents couldn’t afford to send you to college, you might be able to work your way through, or maybe get a scholarship, but in general, college education was a status marker of the upper classes. However, beginning with the G.I. Bill (which sent my dad to the University of Alabama), college education became more widely available, and the postwar expansion of the middle class — the widespread prosperity of the Eisenhower/JFK era — made it possible for a much larger segment of young people to aspire to a college education. Thus the SAT and ACT gained greater importance as tools to separate the academic wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Yglesias takes note of the important distinction between merely “college educated” people — your Southwest/Northeast State University diploma — and those who attended “the kind of state university flagships or elite private universities whose graduates dominate the media.”

This distinction is not entirely about test scores. The average graduate of Georgia State or Georgia Southern has a lower SAT than the average graduate of Emory (or Yale or Stanford), but the real distinction is still largely one of socio-economic class. Yglesias attended an expensive private prep school and then went to Harvard ($69,607 a year, including room and board), and if your parents can’t afford to spend that kind of money (U.S. median household income is $61,937) you shouldn’t even bother applying to Harvard. Better you should go to your nearest state university, and graduate as close to debt-free as possible, than to mortgage your future for the experience of hanging around a bunch of “elite” snobs at Harvard for four years.

I was shocked the other day to learn that one of the Chapo Trap House podcasters, who goes by the pseudonym “Virgil Texas,” went $100,000 in debt to attend Cornell University. Dude, how stupid can an allegedly “smart” person be? You don’t even need a college degree to become podcaster, much less an Ivy League degree and, having visited Ithaca, N.Y., I can’t understand why anyone would borrow money to go to school there. If a young man with good SAT scores just wanted to spend a lot of money to go to college, what about surfing your way through Pepperdine or partying your way through Tulane? Like, you could actually live for four years — palm trees and sunshine and girls wearing short-shorts — instead of enduring those grim winters in upstate New York.

What the hell gets into the minds of these kids who borrow ridiculous sums of money to attend expensive private liberal arts colleges? Why don’t parents stop their kids from making these foolish decisions? Have we, as a society, become so over-awed by educational “prestige” that we are willing to sell our souls to obtain it? Why does it seem common sense has become so rare? But I digress . . .

While I almost never agree with Matthew Yglesias about anything, I think his analysis of the Elizabeth Warren phenomenon is correct. A Harvard professor ran a campaign that appealed to the kind of people who are impressed by Harvard professors. Such people are very numerous among the media elite, but not so much among the rank-and-file Democratic primary voters. So now Elizabeth Warren is packing it in, and the presidential campaign becomes a choice between old white guys.

Cosmic equilibrium has been restored. The patriarchy wins again.




 

Clown Car Campaign Nears Its Sad End

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Early last year, Lawrence Person dubbed the Democratic presidential campaign a “clown car,” and by summer 2019, there were so many candidates it was difficult for the DNC to narrow the TV debate field down to 20. Does anyone remember anything Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper or John Delaney said during their brief sojourns on the campaign trail? At least my favorite candidate, Marianne Williamson, had a memorable message. Crazy? Perhaps, but memorable.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and when Michael Bloomberg dropped out Wednesday morning, endorsing Joe Biden, the prospects of a “brokered convention” (which pundits had been jabbering about for the past month) dwindled to nearly zero. Jim Treacher mourns:

Bloomberg spent all that money to upend the establishment, more dough than most of us would ever see in a hundred lifetimes, and now he ends up standing on his tippy-toes to kiss the establishment’s butt. It really is terrific to watch. . . .
Mike Bloomberg provided a lot of high-paying jobs to soulless, unprincipled campaign hacks. So that’s not nothing. Unscrupulous drones need to put food on the table too.

As recently as Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren was saying she was still “in this fight,” but by Wednesday afternoon she was reportedly under pressure to drop out and support Bernie Sanders. Warren “had a plan for everything — except winning,” and even Ilhan Omar stuck the knife in her back:

Moral of the story? Never turn your back on Ilhan Omar.

Now that Creepy Uncle Joe appears to have the nomination within his grasp, we have passed a crucial phase of the election campaign:

After a month-long panic driven by fears of an unstoppable Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party establishment breathed a sigh of relief last night. Joe Biden scored wins in nine of the 15 contests on Super Tuesday, capping a crucial four-day turnaround in which victory in his “firewall” state of South Carolina was quickly followed by withdrawals by three of his rivals, two of whom immediately endorsed his presidential bid. With the news Wednesday morning that billionaire Mike Bloomberg will quit the race and endorse Biden, it now appears that the man President Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” has a clear path to the Democratic nomination.
Biden’s rapid revival seems to have ended what I described, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as “The Great Liberal Freakout.” Anyone who watched CNN or MSNBC after the February 3 Iowa caucus could see that Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State had inspired abject despair among the liberal pundits. The prospect that Sanders might win the Democratic nomination on a socialist platform was an omen of doom — guaranteed defeat in November — a scenario that longtime Clinton adviser James Carville called “the end of days.” . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Sanders Wins California, Biden Wins Texas, Brokered Convention Looms

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As of 8 a.m., Maine remains “too close to call” — Joe Biden leads by about 2,200 votes with 83% of precincts reporting — but what matters more is the delegate count, and it will take another day or two before we have a complete total from Super Tuesday. Biden won 9 of 15 contests, including two states (Minnesota and Massachusetts) that had been considered a lock for Bernie Sanders, so you could say the “Joementum” is real:

Get ready for a long and grueling road ahead as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in a race that could possibly result in the country’s first contested major-party nominating convention in well over a half-century.
The former vice president, surging to victory in the five southern Super Tuesday states and beyond, crowed to supporters at a primary celebration speech in Los Angeles after most of the results were in.
“I’m here to report that we are very much alive,” Biden told a cheering crowd. “This campaign is taking off.”
Hours later, the Associated Press projected Biden the winner in Texas – which had the second-largest cache of delegates on Super Tuesday.
But Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont who’s making his second straight White House run, won California — the biggest prize on a day when one-third of all Democratic presidential convention delegates were up for grabs.
“Tonight I tell you with absolute confidence we’re going to win the Democratic nomination,” Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist lawmaker, predicted as he spoke to supporters in his home state of Vermont. . . .
Biden . . . was wounded after a lackluster fourth-place finish in Iowa’s caucuses and a disappointing fifth-place showing in New Hampshire’s primary. But a slight rebound in Nevada’s caucuses — where he came in a distant second to Sanders — was followed this past weekend with a landslide victory in South Carolina’s primary. . . .
Fox News contributor and former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile termed Biden’s comeback “the most impressive 72 hours I’ve ever seen in U.S. politics.”
That comeback was fuled by a tidal wave of establishment consolidation behind Biden over the past three days, which included rival moderate candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropping out of the race and endorsing the former vice president.

On MSNBC last night, James Carville credited Rep. James Clyburn — the black South Carolina Democrat who gave an emotional endorsement to Biden last week — with saving the Democratic Party. This salvation is purely for the party establishment, and anyone who’s seen Biden’s public appearances lately knows that the doddering old fool is unlikely to be a formidable opponent to Trump in November.

We may not have seen the last plot twist in this story. What happened so far? Until Feb. 3, the campaign was about fundraising, TV debates and polls. Then you had the disastrous clusterfark of the Iowa caucus and eight days later, Biden placed fifth in New Hampshire. So by Feb. 12, everything that the pundits had been telling America during the debates-and-polls phase of the campaign was wiped out by the actual results. A three-week scramble ensued — “The Great Liberal Freakout” — during which there were two more debates, Feb. 19 in Las Vegas and Feb. 26 in Charleston, the first of which saw Mike Bloomberg get destroyed as an establishment alternative, and the second of which was a gang beatdown of Sanders. The next debate is March 15 in Phoenix, but by then we will have had another round of primaries (Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Washington State, and the North Dakota caucus) on March 10.

The next big prizes are Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Arizona on March 17, with a total of 577 delegates at stake. The questions are whether Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren will stay in the race. Bloomberg’s team said they would “reassess” after Tuesday, when the billionaire’s big spending netted him 46 delegates. As long as a brokered convention scenario is possible, Bloomberg will probably decide to stay in it, but what about Warren? So far she’s done no better than third place in any state, and how much money does she have left? There’s no way she can compete statewide in big states like Florida or Ohio, so her only real incentive for continuing her campaign is the prospect that she could struggle on, gather a comparative handful of delegates (maybe 200 total by June) and have some influence in a brokered convention.

UPDATE: Feminists are butt-hurt:

(Hat-tip: Boris Badenoff on Twitter.)




 

SUPER TUESDAY: Joe Biden Sweeps the South, Bernie Sanders Wins VT, CO, UT

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UPDATE 11:45 p.m. ET: OK, so far in California — about 15% of precincts reporting — it’s Sanders at 27%, Bloomberg 20%, Biden 18%, Buttigieg 12% and Warren 11%. You might say, “But I thought Buttigieg dropped out?” Yes, but early voting (an idea I’ve always opposed) means that many thousands of ballots were already cast before Buttigieg quit. Both Texas and Maine are still too close to call, but the “win” doesn’t really matter. What matters is the delegate count, and “too close to call” means that Biden and Bernie will more or less evenly split a majority of the delegates in those states. If Bernie manages to hang on for a win California, that will offset his losses elsewhere, and so the total delegate count should be nearly a dead-heat.

Still, tonight will be counted as a comeback victory for Joe Biden, whose campaign was written off for dead before he won South Carolina, and now he’s got momentum in a field that has swiftly shrunk from seven candidates to four. Warren has vowed to remain in the race, and Bloomberg’s campaign staff says they will “reassess” their situation tomorrow. My guess is that both of them hang around at least for the next debate on March 15, but that’s just a guess.

It was pointed out on MSNBC tonight that Biden won states where he never campaigned, ran no ads, and didn’t even have any staff or offices in the state. So a lot of inconceivable things have already happened, and I’m going to bed. We’ll sort it all out in the morning.

UPDATE 11:20 p.m. ET: Sanders wins Utah and leads by about 4 points in Texas, but it’s still too close to call there. Biden wins Massachusetts, where Warren placed third in her home state.

UPDATE 10:40 p.m. ET: Biden has won Minnesota and Arkansas, while Texas and Maine remain too close to call. Polls close in California at 11 p.m. ET.

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: Tennessee has just been called for Joe Biden, adding to Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma for the former vice president, while Bernie Sanders has added a win in Colorado to his previously announced victory in his home state of Vermont.

* * * PREVIOUSLY * * *

It’s 7 p.m. ET, and polls just closed in Virginia — which has already been called for Joe Biden — and in Vermont, where I’d say Bernie Sanders is the heavy favorite. A week ago, it looked like Biden was doomed, but he won big Saturday in South Carolina, forcing Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to quit the campaign. Buttigieg and Klobuchar both endorsed Biden, and so that leaves Biden, Sanders, Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren as the only real candidates left. My hunch is that Bloomberg is going to get completely wrecked tonight. He’s spent something around $500 million in a huge bet on Super Tuesday, and I doubt he’ll clear 10% in any of the 14 states voting today. We shall see.

UPDATE 7:15 p.m. ET: Yeah, this was an easy call:

What really counts, of course, is not who “wins” each state, but rather the total delegate haul for each candidate. Keep an eye on that.

UPDATE 7:35 p.m. ET: Fox News just called North Carolina for Biden.

UPDATE 7:50 p.m. ET: Damn those Samoans! I just lost a bet!

That’s six more delegates than I thought he’d get. I’m shocked to learn that if you throw around a few million bucks in Samoa, you get results.

UPDATE 8:05 p.m. ET: The Biden juggernaut rolls on:




 

Warren Plans to Win Brokered Convention

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Delusional? Yes. Perfect from a GOP perspective? Absolutely:

Elizabeth Warren can win debates, but not states: There’s a chance she will walk away from Super Tuesday having not carried any of the first 18 contests, including her home state of Massachusetts.
Yet she, her campaign and their close allies say she’s in the race all the way to the convention, despite her latest drubbing in South Carolina on Saturday. They insist she still has a path to the nomination, narrow as it is. . . .
Warren advisers believe she can remain in the hunt by collecting a significant number of delegates on Super Tuesday and then again on March 10 — they are optimistic about California, Colorado, Texas, Michigan and Washington — even if they don’t win any states outright. Campaign manager Roger Lau said earlier this month that Warren was “poised” to finish second in eight Super Tuesday contests and in the top three in all 14.
The team is also more openly discussing what it has been talking about internally for weeks. Warren’s path to victory is likely at a contested convention and not by outright winning a majority of pledged delegates, which they believe no other candidate will achieve, either.
“[A]s the dust settles after March 3, the reality of this race will be clear: no candidate will likely have a path to the majority of delegates needed to win an outright claim to the Democratic nomination,” Lau predicted in a memo released Sunday. “In the road to the nomination, the Wisconsin primary is halftime, and the convention in Milwaukee is the final play.”

My only question is, what can I do to encourage Warren and her advisers to double-down on this far-fetched scenario? This is every Trump supporter’s wet dream, and please forgive me for using the phrase “wet dream” in a post about Elizabeth Warren. Anything that prevents the Democratic primary campaign from becoming a head-to-head contest between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is good, in terms of helping re-elect Trump. Mike Bloomberg wasting millions of dollars to run a three-minute nationwide commercial on Sunday night? Perfect.

If Bloomberg’s campaign has any positive impact, it will be to help convince us that billionaire oligarchs like him should not exist. It’s bad enough that an oligarch can buy up airtime; to do so in order to exploit a pandemic for your presidential campaign is disgraceful.

What percentage of the Super Tuesday vote will Bloomberg get? Hopefully, enough to prevent Biden from winning several states, and thus moving Democrats closer to the brokered-convention scenario that the Warren campaign is fantasizing about. Of course, a comeback victory for Biden can’t be ruled out, but nobody on the Republican side should worry about that, either, as it has become apparent that Biden is completely senile. The best-case scenario, in terms of Trump’s re-election, is for Sanders to get this close (holding thumb and forefinger half-an-inch apart) to the nomination, only to be cheated out of it by a backroom deal at the convention. Whatever happens to the Democrats, however, the most likely scenario in November is that Trump wins:

About half an hour into his speech Saturday afternoon at the 48th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), President Trump spotted a familiar face in the crowd. “My friend over there — you are the greatest,” the president said, and urged the man to stand. “Look at him … Does everybody know Jeffrey? Jeffrey Lord” (38:10).
The conservative audience responded with applause for The American Spectator’s longtime contributing editor. “What a great guy,” Trump continued. “He used to defend me on CNN, and then he defended me just a little bit too much. And they said, ‘Jeffrey, get the hell out.’ And thank goodness you’re on Fox now.… Thank you for being here, too, Jeffrey.”
Trump was in a relaxed and cheerful mood when he took the stage of the Potomac Ballroom at the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor. Just before helicoptering over to CPAC on Marine One, the president had joined Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci at a White House press conference on the coronavirus. As with everything else in the Trump Age, this turned into a confrontation with the “fake news” media. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Democrats Engage in Angry Shouting Match in Charleston, South Carolina

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The worst debate in the history of American politics:

The CBS News moderators came under fire on social media Tuesday as the Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina grew heated, with crosstalk often drowning them out.
Meghan McCain compared the debate’s atmosphere to the contentious discussions she faces on “The View,” saying, “these moderators need to get this under control.” . . .
Former Vice President Joe Biden in particular spoke over moderators attempting to cut him off on several occasions, insisting, “I am not out of time. You spoke over time, and I’m going to talk” and later asking, “Can we just speak up when we want to? Is that the idea?”
Later, as Biden attempted to break in again, moderator Gayle King quipped, “I promise, Mr. Vice President, we are going to get to you,” with Biden responding, “You keep promising me that, but you never get to me.”

Some commentators declared that Joe Biden had his strongest debate performance to date, but what I noticed was he kept shouting at the top of his lungs, as if being loud was whole point — aerobic shouting. Meanwhile, almost everyone directed their fire at Bernie Sanders, except Elizabeth Warren, who spent much of the night attacking Mike Bloomberg, who isn’t even on the ballot in South Carolina. Jim Geraghty might have explained that strategy best:

 

In general, the debate was a colossal waste of time, and time is the valuable commodity that Democrats can’t afford to waste now:

Time is running out for the Democratic Party and, by this time next week, it will probably be too late for them to turn back. More than a third of the delegates to their national convention will be chosen next Tuesday, when 14 states including California and Texas hold their primaries. One the one hand, this means that the party’s agonizing struggle over its 2020 presidential nomination may soon be effectively over. On the other hand, if Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders claims a decisive victory next Tuesday — which now seems likely — the “Anybody But Bernie” faction of the party will be pushed to increasingly desperate measures in their efforts to deny him the nomination. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Zombie Candidate Elizabeth Warren Attacks Billionaire Bloomberg

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Let’s hope she inflicts maximum damage:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hit fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg on Thursday, taking aim specifically at his recently resurfaced comments he made in 2008 about the controversial practice known as redlining.
“Now this has been some presidential primary already. We’ve been going about this for about a year,” Warren said during a packed town hall in the Washington, D.C., suburb.
“Some people got in a little later than others. Michael Bloomberg got in on the billionaire plan,” she said to widespread boos from the audience.
She then went on to address 2008 comments resurfaced by The Associated Press, in which Bloomberg said that the end of redlining contributed to the financial crisis.
The practice involves banks discriminating against racial minorities looking to take out loans in an effort to afford homes. Those specific communities were identified by redlines on maps.
“Michael Bloomberg is saying, in effect, that the 2008 financial crash was caused because the banks weren’t permitted to discriminate against black and brown people,” Warren said.
“I want to be clear,” she continued. “That crisis would not have been averted if the banks had been able to be bigger racists, and anyone who thinks that should not be the leader of our party.”

Of course, what Bloomberg said about “redlining” and the financial crisis, like his defense of “stop and frisk,” was just the facts. Banks were under pressure to demonstrate that they were not discriminating against minorities, and this resulted in a lowering of lending standards. Bloomberg was not advocating racial discrimination, he was merely explaining how the history of discrimination and the efforts of finanical institutions to compensate for past wrongs were a crucial factor in what went wrong during the housing “bubble.” But facts don’t matter in a Democratic primary campaign. What does matter is (a) Warren’s campaign is doomed, and (b) on her way to oblivion, she’s taking a shot at the guy who many Democrats see as their best hope to beat Trump:

Establishment Democrats who had hoped that Michael Bloomberg could ride to their rescue might need to start looking for another plan. The former New York mayor got kneecapped this week when recordings surfaced of his previous remarks about race, crime, and economics that make Bloomberg look guilty of the kind of “hate” that Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of perpetrating. Desperate to stop socialist Bernie Sanders from winning the party’s presidential nomination, Democrats are now reckoning with the consequences of their habitual rhetoric of racial blame.
Having endorsed the anti-police agenda of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, Democrats won’t find it easy to defend Bloomberg’s record as mayor. Even if the billionaire’s lavish spending could buy him the party’s nomination — an untested proposition — Bloomberg’s record on racial issues would make it difficult for him to play the race card against President Trump in the general election campaign. Does anyone really think Democrats can win without the race card? . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.