Handicapping the Candidates

Here's my take on the front-runners so far:

President Trump: Various Republicans are planning to challenge him in the primaries. He will smash them just as he did the other Republicans in 2016.

Joe Biden: It's common for a Vice President to run for the presidency but it's rare for them to win. George H. W. Bush is the only one to have done so (plus Nixon on his second try running against Vice President Humphrey). Biden is following Hillary Clinton's lead and running as the presumptive candidate. Like her, he teased his candidacy for months then announced that he'd be announcing before finally announcing with a video. Biden is already looking past the primaries. His announcement video's message was "Orange man bad, vote for me". Hillary's 2016 campaign showed that you have to do more than attack Trump if you want to win the White House. Also, like Hillary, Biden carries a lot of baggage. He was first elected in 1972. He's always supported mainstream Democrat positions but the party has drifted so far to the left that votes for tougher sentencing and the Defense of Marriage Act in the 90s, both of which were overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party, are now negatives. Biden has a reputation as a gaffe machine and his campaign is following his lead. On his announcement day he received criticism for misrepresenting what President Trump actually said about Charlottesville, using Charlottesville as a campaign prop, his treatment of Anita Hill in 1991, and releasing a picture with a big "N" on President Obama. Biden has name recognition and some reflected glory from Obama but little else. Binden's going to have difficulty securing the nomination but he's the Democrats' best chance at winning back the White House.

Bernie Sanders: In 2016 Bernie was the fresh face of the Democrats (and the oldest person running). He brought a far-left agenda which excited a lot of younger Democrats. He originally ran in an effort to move the party to the left. He was so successful that his positions are now accepted by early all the other candidates. That's going to cause problems for Bernie. In 2016 he pledged to run a positive campaign but once he realized that he might have a shot at winning his natural crankiness came out. He's going to have a huge advantage in fund-raising but he's ancient and crotchety and probably too far to the left to beat Trump.

Elizabeth Warren: Her time came and went six year ago. She seceded her role as far-left spokesperson to Bernie. She got a start on her career by claiming Indian heritage. She tried to put that behind her last Summer with a DNA test that not only flopped but angered real Indians. She's struggled to get traction with her proposals. He proposal for college loan forgiveness was criticized on all sided. Her live-cast last Winter seemed forced and unnatural. Her campaign manager resigned over her decision to reject corporate donations. She's also struggled to break into the double digits in polls. With neither cash nor wide-spread appeal and no message that resonates her candidacy is doomed.

Beto O'Rourke: His main attraction is that he attracted a record amount of out-of-state donations in a losing Senate race. For a while the press loved him but they've moved on to Pete Buttigieg.

Pete Buttigieg: The mayor of South Bend Indiana came from nowhere to vault into the top contenders. He's already secured a spot in the debated based on the number of people who have contributed to his campaign. Buttigieg's main claim to fame is that he's openly gay. He uses this as a bludgeon, constantly insisting the Vice President Pence hates him for being gay. This is an outright lie. Pence has always been cordial to him. I suspect that Buttigeig's current popularity comes mainly from gays and he's already reached his ceiling. His record as mayor of a mid-sized city isn't that strong and doesn't really qualify him to be President.

Launching with a Lie

After months of speculation, Joe Biden finally launched his presidential campaign with a video. I was going to point out how well the multiple launches worked for Hillary Clinton (I'm going to release a video launching my campaign, I released a video, I'm going to hold an official launch event, I'm going on a listening tour, etc.) but after watching Biden's video I'm too mad at Biden.

The video starts out OK with a quote from the Declaration of Independence and an admission that Thomas Jefferson was flawed but still relevant. But then it switches tone to the neo-Nazi tiki torch parade that ended with a woman's death.

It was less than two years ago but people have already forgotten how that event happened. It began as a protest against removal of Confederate statues. Then a bunch of Nazi and Klan wannabies from all over the country decided to turn it into a white supremacist rally. They had their tiki torch parade with their anti-semitic chants about "Jews will not replace us". The next day they were supposed to have a second demonstration with a counter-demonstration across the square. But the police screwed up and herded both groups together then, when the inevitable violence broke out, they stood and watched because they were not in riot gear. A kid from Ohio panicked and drove his car into an empty car, driving it forward and killing the woman in front of it.

President Trump condemned the Nazis basement-dwellers and the Klansmen wannabies but he also said that their were good people on both sides. He was referring to the people who were simply protesting against the removal of the statues. They had held peaceful protests before and they were not protesting in favor of white supremacy.

At least twice President Trump explicitly condemned the white supremacists. Not that you'd know if from the news.

BIden says that he's running because of that incident. It sure took him long enough to react. There are early two dozen announced candidates ahead of him.

He also claims that that rally was unlike anything that's happened in his lifetime. He was born in 1943, during the Japanese interment program. He was a teenager before segregation ended in the South.

Biden is also ignoring the antisemitism that's gnawing away at his own party. The Republicans have condemned racist and antisemitic groups but the Democrats turn a blind eye.

I believe that Biden is serious when he says that Charlottesville upset him but he's guilty of the same thing until he condemns Farakan and Al Sharpton for saying things just as bad as the tiki marchers. If you're going to base your campaign on Trump being too friendly to racists then you have to call it out on your own side or you are a hypocrite.

This is not BIden's only example of hypocrisy. After the release of the Access Hollywood tape of Trump talking about liking to touch women Biden talked about taking Trump out back and beating him up. But Biden has his own issues with women. There are dozens of pictures and videos of women looking uncomfortable as he touches them and plays or sniffs their hair. He was also known for making female Secret Service agents uncomfortable by swimming naked.

Instead of telling us what he'll do for America, Biden launched with an attack ad. Suddenly Bernie doesn't look so bad.

Annotating the Future Green New Deal

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a video looking back from sometime in the future at the Green New Deal. You can see it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9uTH0iprVQ&feature=youtu.be

There's a lot here and she glosses over a lot pretty quickly. It's in the form of water colored paintings so I'll take each painting.

It opens with AOC on a the bullet train from DC to New York. She's on that, because air travel has been eliminated or drastically curtailed. The time scheme is unclear but she's older with some white streaks in her hair. I guess hair dye isn't carbon-neutral.

She reflects back on being a freshman in the "most diverse Congress ever". This begins an interesting theme - the video is supposed to represent "diversity" but it does so in a very un-diverse way. Nearly every face represented is brown. There are some blacks represented but virtually no whites or Asians.

She moves on to the Green New Deal, assuring us that we already have all the technology needed to implement it (we don't).

In 1977 a scientist made a presentation about CO2 causing warming. She seems surprised that the world didn't immediately jump of and take notice but this was one of dozens of doomsday predictions that had been going on for a decade. And yes, there were predictions of a new ice age at the same time.

She then claims that Exon-Mobile was doing research to confirm this within two years. Exon is represented by the first white man we've seen - a fat guy with an evil look on his face. Plus there's another white guy representing politicians who "knew all along and did nothing". This launches into a long-standing conspiracy theory on the left: that the oil companies knew that global warming was real and suppressed the information

Onto James Hansen's presentation to Congress in 1988. She tells us that Hansen was a top NASA scientist but fails to mention that he spent decades saying "we only have 4-5 years to save the planet". Hansen is the only white guy who doesn't look evil in the video. She tells us that Hansen was 99% certain that global warming was already happening. That's a meaningless figure since it just tells us that Hansen was certain, not that he was right.

Back to Exon and how terrible they are. She doubles down on the conspiracy theory that Exon is behind any doubt about global warming.

She talks about the time lost because of the evil Exon and the animals that have gone extinct. The graphic shows a pair of rhinos. This is an outright lie. Rhinos aren't threatened because of global warming. They are threatened because of poachers who kill them for their horns.

She talks about the hurricane that hit "the place where her family is from, Puerto Rico". She calls the hurricane a "climate bomb" and compares it to 9/11. Technically, her family isn't exactly from Puerto Rico. She's decided from Spanish who colonized the island before moving to New York. The damage the hurricane caused was because the country's electrical system was already failing because of governmental corruption. The estimated death toll used highly questionable methodology.

And she threw out the "12 years to cut emissions in half" warning. That's just the latest in three decades of "act now or else" predictions. They are not based on science, they are propaganda. If these predictions were based on science then we'd have been past the tipping point years ago. But, AOC is young and hasn't learned to be skeptical. Instead she's calling on us to change EVERYTHING.

Now we hit the meat of the video. Socialism. The economy's broken, too much money goes to the people at the top. The Great Depression! World War Two (with Rosie the Riveter as a black woman).

Then she moves on to her future history with the Democrats taking the Senate and the White House in 2020 and launching the "Decade of the Green New Deal" which includes Medicare for All and nationalization of wages.  Look, even if the Democrats gain complete control of Congress and the White House, the rest just isn't going to happen.

According to AOC, the biggest problem at the beginning was that there was a labor shortage. This is a nod to illegal immigration. We need to import all the workers we can get to rebuild everything.

Then she personalizes it with a girl from AOC's old neighborhood, Iliana (I may have gotten the spelling wrong). Iliana's first job after graduating from college (at government expense?) is to restore wetlands in Louisiana. They are shown planting mangroves and removing pipelines BY HAND. No polluting earth movers here. This answers why there's a labor shortage.It takes a lot of people to replace machines. By the way, they had to get "generational knowledge" from native Americans on how to plant mangroves and remove pipelines.

Ileana soon realizes that digging by hand in Louisiana is hellish work and moves on to being a solar plant engineer before getting a job at a child care center. Since everyone seems to get the same wages no matter what the work, there was probably a waiting list years long to get one of those easy child care jobs. We never do get a hint of what Ileana's degree is in.

But not everything is perfect and Hurricane Sheldon put parts of Miami underwater "for the last time". That's not how hurricanes work. They cause a storm surge which recedes.

There were still hurricanes and droughts and other problems but making universal health care and government jobs a human right made everything just swell.

Eventually Ileana runs for Congress and wins AOC's seat in a publicly funded election. I'm not sure how digging in the swamps or minding kids qualifies you for Congress but if they let a waitress in, I guess they'll let anyone in.

AOC closes by thinking back to riding the old school Amtrak train in 2019. This is another lie. It implies that she used the train to travel between DC and NYC but she always takes the plane.

So that's AOC's vision for the future - a socialist paradise where everyone has brown skin, college graduates go on to dig in the swamps, and everyone seems to work for the government. It's framed as a kids story so all of the hard stuff is glossed over and everyone lives happily everafter.

What Really Happened

The Meuller Report is due out in a few hours. In advance of it, here's what really happened that led up to it.

Let's start with Putin. He misses the old USSR and has been trying to reassert Russian as a dominant world power since the Bush administration. But Putin was afraid of Hillary Clinton. It was no secret that she was the hawk in the Obama administration. She was the one who talked Obama into carrying out the raid that killed bin Ladin and into overthrowing Libya. Putin worried that without Obama to restrain her, he'd be the next one she toppled. So, when Bernie Sanders emerged as Hillary's chief rival, he took some actions to help Bernie. Specifically, he had the DNC's mail server and Clinton's campaign chief's email account hacked.

Julian Assage, founder of Wikileaks has been praised as a truth-teller and a journalist. Actually he's nothing but an anti-American crank who delights in publishing anything that will embarrass the US, regardless of who gets hurt. He wasn't working for the Russians but he was all too happy to publish any dirt they could dig up. Most of it was published early in the campaign and did more to help Bernie than anything else.

But the game was rigged from the beginning. The Clintons owned the DNC. In exchange for bailing them out from potential bankruptcy, the Clintons got control of the party. Poor Bernie never had a chance.

Enter Donald Trump. He was one of a gaggle of candidates. When Putin said something complimentary about him, Trump refused to disown it. And Trump had done some business before in Russia. Since Russia is corrupt, you can't do any business there without working with people who have ties to the Kremlin. Plus, Trump wasn't expected to win so he continued to pursue business deals including some already in progress in Russia (which fell through in part because they didn't have any direct ties to the Kremlin).

That was enough for the Clinton campaign. They started floating rumors about Trump and Russia. Then they used a shell company to hire Fusion GPS to find some Russian connections. They subcontracted an ex-British spy named Steele who subcontracted the work to some contacts in Russia. They collected a bunch of salacious stories which became the Steele Dossier. This was shopped around to members of Congress including Sen. John McCain who passed it on to the FBI and to several newsrooms. The Justice Department already had a copy of the Dossier because a top Fusion officer was married to a top DOJ official and she passed it to him.

For good measure, Fusion had some Russians offer information to the Trump campaign.

During his presidency, Obama had staffed the DOJ, the FBI and the CIA with people who were personally loyal to him. They didn't care much for Hillary Clinton but they recognized her as Obama's chosen successor so they moved against the Trump campaign. They chose a low-level staffer and used the Steele Dossier to get a FISA warrant to spy electronically eavesdrop on the Trump campaign.

None of this was used because Trump was expected to lose the election. A few rumors were floated but no serious charges were made.

At the same time they conducted a show-investigation of Hillary's use of a private email server. This was difficult because they found several actual felonies. In order to keep from discrediting the Clinton campaign they were generous in granting immunity in exchange for testimony. They also had to rewrite the laws concerning handling confidential information to include intent. And they had a last-minute problem when an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner for  child-porn discovered that Clinton and her assistant had been forwarding emails to Weiner to print. After putting off the field agents for weeks, James Comey, the head of the FBI, made a show of reopening the investigation. It was all a show and Comey lied about the results, hiding the fact that Hillary had forwarded confidential emails to someone who didn't even work for the government so he could print them off at home.

Besides their involvement with Wikileaks, the Russians bought some targeted ads through social media. They spent less than $1 million. More than half the ads were anti-Clinton but they also ran anti-Trump ads, too. The purpose was not to swing the election. It was to create divisiveness. If you will remember, Putin hated Hillary, and she was projected to win anyway so they ran more anti-Hillary ads than anti-Trump ones but they an both. This is what the Russians do - they run ads to try to disrupt elections and weaken their rivals.

Unexpectedly Trump won. The Clintons couldn't just let it go that she lost a race that was hers to lose. So the day after the election they invented an excuse - it wasn't her fault, it was Comey and the Russians. You heard Hillary say variations of that again and again.

The Russians continued to push divisiveness. The weekend after the election they were pushing pro and anti Trump rallies.

This left FBI Director Comey with a dilemma.He now worked for a man he hated. So he started undermining Trump. He knew that all the major newsrooms had the Steele dossier but that it was too unsubstantial to print without a hook. So he had a private briefing with the president-elect and informed him that the Russians claimed to have a tape of him hiring prostitutes to pee in a bed that Obama had slept in. Then he told the press that he had informed Trump that the Russians had possible blackmail material on him. This would have totally undercut Trump's presidency except Buzzfeed got carried away and printed the entire Steele Dossier. Once it became public, it was easily disproved.

Regardless, the FBI went after Trump's security advisor, Ret. General Flynn and engaged in possible entrapment. Trump made a comment to Comey about hoping that they went easy on Flynn. Comey later claimed that this was obstruction of justice..

Comey was playing a double game. The FBI revived their investigation into Russia and began investigating Trump personally. They leaked that to the press while repeatedly telling the White House that Trump was not being investigated. Eventually Trump got fed up and fired Comey.

But Comey had one last shot. He took some confidential memos with him and leaked them to a friend who in turn leaked them to the press. The goal of all of this was to get a special prosecutor appointed. Comey must have known that there was no Russian collusion but once a special prosecutor starts, he seldom wraps up his investigation without finding something.

And yes, Meuller did find some things. None of them were related to the Trump campaign but he did get some people indicted.

Which brings us to the upcoming release of the Meuller report.

Ilhan Omar and 9/11

US Representative Ilhan Omar addressed a meeting of CAIR in March. During her 20-minute speech she included this:

"Here's the truth. For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I'm tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,"

Lots of people have picked up on her reducing the worst terrorist attack on American soil to "some people did something". This was outrageous but it has been remarked on elsewhere by people far more prominent than I am. I'm going to comment on the total ignorance shown in the rest of that passage.

According to Wikipedia, CAIR was founded in 1994 after Arabs were portrayed as terrorists in the movie True Lies. It only took me a minute to look that up but Omar got it wrong while addressing over 500 members of that organization. She's old enough to remember the event. She was already living in America at the time. She should remember that CAIR immediately jumped in and predicted that a wave of Islamophobia was about to blanket the country. Which didn't happen because Americans can tell the difference between Muslims living peacefully here and extremists living in caves in Afghanistan.

She it probably referring to the Patriot Act when she talked about losing access to civil liberties but that had nothing to do with Muslims, either. So she described a attack my radical Muslims as "some people" then implied that American Muslims started losing their civil rights.

When challenged on this, she responded with a quote from President G. W. Bush who promised to get the people who caused the destruction and claimed it was comparable. Again, she's old enough to remember the circumstances of Bush's quote. He was standing in front of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. It was just a few days after the attack and the CIA was still determining who the attackers were. Bush wasn't trying to minimize the attack, he was promising vengeance for it.

The common thread here is that Rep. Omar keeps misrepresenting history. The big question is if she is doing this deliberately or if she is oblivious to her own ignorance. Either way it's scary coming from a member of Congress.

How the Democrats are Going to Lose in 2020

I've written before about the advantages President Trump has going into the 2020 election. Now I'll talk about what the Democrats are doing wrong.

First a note on strategy. There are three things a campaign can do. It can try to turn out the base, depress the other side's base, and convince swing voters to vote for their candidate. Most campaigns use two of these and some use all three. Hillary Clinton entered the race so well-known that it was difficult for her to appeal to swing voters so she concentrated on appealing to the Obama coalition and to trying to depress the rump vote. In fact, 90% of her ads were meant to depress Trump voters. They were direct attacks on Trump without bothering to offer herself as an alternative. Trump's campaign went after swing voters including many blue-collar workers who had been considered safely Democrat. Obviously Trump's strategy worked and Clinton's didn't. She got fewer votes than Obama and only did well in states that were safely blue.

So, onto 2020.

Right off the bat, the Democrats have a problem. In fact they have a dozen problems and growing. There are too many candidates. There are 18 or 19 with more expected including Joe Biden. That will get winnowed down pretty fast when the primaries start but it's going to cause enormous problems in the meantime. A related problem is that the candidates are all so similar. The party has a list of litmus tests that each candidate must pass to even be considered. With so many candidates running on nearly the same platform it's difficult for any one of them to stand out. There are multiple women and multiple blacks. There's only one openly gay candidate so far and he's managed to push into the upper tier, probably because of support from gays, but he's the major of a medium-sized city. That's not much to run on.

It takes a lot of money to run a presidential campaign. I order to have any chance of getting the nomination you have to have campaign headquarters in multiple states, preferably all of them plus a few territories. Clinton didn't do that in 2008 and it cost her the nomination. But there's only so much money to go around and with so many candidates, each running on nearly the same platform, it will be difficult for any of them to set up a national primary challenge. On the right side, this will make it easier for one or two to break free of the pack early on. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the two most likely to break free of the pack are Biden and Saunders. Both have significant name recognition and they consistently lead in the polls. I say unfortunate because they are both too old for the job. Trump set a record for the oldest candidate but these two are just shy of 80 and look it. Biden already floated the idea of running for a single term with a black female running mate who would take over from him in 2024 (She turned it down and is considering her own run).

Biden and Sanders have other problems. Biden is unexciting and has a problematic history. He was always a solid Democrat but the party has moved so far to the left that mainstream Deocratic positions he supported in the 1990s are now anathema to a candidate. He may be able to attract swing voters back but the base will not turn out for him. Sanders has the opposite problem. He's not even a Democrat, he's a Democratic-Socialist. He excites the base but union workers with good healthcare aren't going to swing back to vote for him.

The rest of the field has to contend with a party that is very different than it seems on social media. According to the New York Times, the Democrats engaged in social media are far whiter and further left than the majority of the party. The entire slate except for Biden is playing for the social media crowd. That will fire up the base but won't attract swing voters. There is little they can do to depress the Trump vote, either. Clinton already played that card.

So the party is caught between three choices. Biden is a safe choice but, between his age, his past positions and being an old, white man who's been around forever, he's not going to fire up the base. Saunders is old and radical and Trump would probably come out way ahead in debates. No one else has the stature to defeat a sitting president. They might excite the base but they are all too radical to attract swing voters.

Elizabeth Warren deserves special mention. Had she run in 2016 then she'd be in the top tier instead of Saunders. She was widely quoted and respected 8 years ago but she chose not to run in 2016. She probably calculated that Clinton was unstoppable and has a reputation of being unforgiving. The prospect of being senator under a hostile President Hillary was too daunting. When she decided not to run, her supporters moved over to Saunders and enthusiasm for Warren cooled. Then she released her DNA results and tried being relatable by live-streaming getting a beer. All of this pushed her from a contender to the middle of the pack.

Finally, on top of everything else, Trump is on the right side of the issues. A solid majority thinks that illegal immigration is a problem and a super majority is against open borders. Most people are satisfied with their insurance (which is why Obamacare only affected people who did not have insurance through their employer) and most people are skeptical of the Green New Deal. The issues that excite the Democratic base turn off the general electorate and are not even overwhelmingly popular among the greater Democratic Party.

So, baring an economic collapse or a miraculous U-turn on issues by the Democrats, Trump is likely to be reelected.

Saving the Electoral College

A ballot measure has been approved in Ohio to direct that the state's electors from the presidential election will vote for the winner of the popular vote rather than the winner in Ohio. This is part of a national movement to circumvent the Electoral College through state initiatives. So far, although it has passed in several states, it has been limited to states that Hillary Clinton carried. The proposed Ohio amendment is an effort to change the way a large swing state is counted. This is a very bad idea.

The Electoral Collage is part of the Constitution. There is a well-known mechanism for amending the Constitution but it requires super-majorities of Congress to pass followed by ratification by a super-majority of state legislatures. The supporters of this know that their chances of passing these hurdles are small and the chance of doing this before the election is non-existent so they have chosen to make an end-run around the Constitution at the state level. The Constitution explicitly forbids agreements between states without the consent of Congress so even if this succeeds it is likely to be overturned in the courts.

There is a twisted irony that supporters want to amend the Ohio Constitution as an end run around the Ohio Legislature in order to circumvent the US Constitution.

While supporters of the measure talk about making every vote count, the initiative is really aimed at helping Democrats in the wake of the 2000 and 2016 elections where the victor of the Electoral College did not win the popular vote. It's worth remembering that Democrats were supportive of the Electoral College when a swing of less than 2% in Ohio would have given John Kerry an Electoral College win. The Electoral was a big factor in Hillary Clinton's "blue wall" that was supposed to deny Donald Trump a path to victory.

Of course the United States is not a direct republic where every vote counts. It is a federation of states and was designed to assure that states with smaller populations have a louder voice so as not to be dominated by a handful of large states. This is even more true today when the population is polarized between the cities and the rest of the country. A map of election results by state is misleading. It's only when you look at it by county or precinct that you see how support for Democrats is limited to high-density areas.

So, a vote is a vote, right? So should it shouldn't matter where the voters are, right? Not exactly. According to the book, Shattered, during the 2016 campaign Bill Clinton wanted to campaign in the suburbs and rural areas but was overridden by Hillary's campaign staff which felt that it wasn't cost-effective. They had calculated that there were enough voters in the cities to give Hillary the win so there was no reason to court rural voters. Even when Hillary did leave the cities, she was still playing for them. At one point she told a group in South-Eastern Ohio that she was going to put a lot of coal miners out of work. She went on to talk about training them for new jobs but everyone listening knew that when the major employer in a small community is eliminated then there are jobs regardless of your training. They knew this, Hillary knew this and they knew that Hillary knew it. She was sending a message to the cities that she was serious about global warming and uttering platitudes about caring for displaced workers so the city people wouldn't feel guilty. Because of this, neighboring West Virginia voted for Trump by a wide margin.

Consider Columbus, Ohio. The population inside the city limits is larger than the three least populated states. The population of the Columbus Metro area (which includes Delaware and Zanesville) is larger than the 15 least populated states and larger than the three smallest states combined. And Columbus is the 32nd largest metro district out of 383. It costs significantly more to campaign in those smaller states than in Columbus so why would any candidate bother? President Trump confirmed this in a tweet talking about the difference between an Electoral campaign and a popular vote one. When all that counts is the popular vote then mostly-rural states will never see a presidential candidate and will have no one representing them.

And let's not even think about the nightmare of a national recount in case of a lose election.