Some People Are Already Saying "Anyone But Trump" And They Include Status Quo Joe

As Philip Bump pointed out yesterday in his Washington Post column, after Trump's latest anti-Fox Twitter-tirade, "Trump’s objection to Fox News polling is possibly largely due to the fact that they’re good polls. Fox’s on-air programming is often heavily weighted in Trump’s favor, but their polling isn’t." The poll shows Trump's overall disapproval 51-48% and even worse on the key issues he plans to fight the 2020 election on. Underwater on every issue but the economy:

• Border security- 44-52%
• Immigration- 41-54%
• Trade- 40-49%
• Race relations- 32-57%

Worse yet, the Fox poll shows him losing to Biden 49-39%, losing to Bernie 46-40% and within the margin of error in matchups with Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

Matt Taibbi is in Iowa and what he's seeing on the ground has him worried that the Democrats are going to blow this again.

The front-runner-- the front-runner!-- is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the Eighties and never finished higher than “candidacy withdrawn,” with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s “momentum” challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with “I don’t think you’re a racist . . . but . . .” on national TV.

A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her “I have a plan for that” argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis-- another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.

A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.

The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says “We’re out of ideas” quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.

...In a mid-June appearance in Iowa, Biden tipped off reporters that he’d be making remarks about Trump. Dressed in dark-wash dad jeans and blue shirt, he became the 10,000th Democrat this year to call the president an “existential threat.”

Trump wasted little time laying into Biden. “Joe’s a loser,” he quipped, adding Biden was a “dummy” who was “even slower than he used to be.” Saying he’d rather run against Biden than anybody, Trump said, “I think he’s the weakest mentally. . . . I like running against people that are weak mentally.” He then ripped Biden for keeping a light schedule, saying, “Once every two weeks . . . he mentions my name 74 times in one speech. . . . That reminds me of crooked Hillary. She did the same thing.”

Next thing you knew, we were right back in 2016, with reporters dutifully conveying Trump’s insults and even kinda-sorta suggesting they were true. “There’s been a lot of questions about your schedule, and that it’s been a little lighter than some of the other candidates,” a reporter asked Biden in Ottumwa, Iowa.

MSNBC gave Trump more than a minute of airtime for “Joe’s a loser,” while the Washington Post and the New York Times put the exchange on the front page. This is how things went in 2016. Trump would taunt an opponent, the opponent would face-plant the effort at return fire, ratings would go up, and the cycle would repeat.

The logic of the Biden candidacy is a facsimile of our last memory of normalcy, like if Barack Obama were on vacation, or sick, maybe. Biden’s labors to remind us he was the understudy of the last president are painful. His launch speech contained 35 uses of the word “folks.” This included a rare double-folks (“Folks, I know some of the really smart folks say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity. . . .”). He constantly references the “Obama/Biden administration” and chides audiences that “we don’t say often enough as a party or a nation” that Obama was awesome.

Biden on the trail will spit out the campaign equivalent of clip art, e.g., “America, folks, is an idea, an idea that’s stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean,” or, “America has always been at its best when America has acted as one America.” By the end of the campaign, Biden will be plunked behind podiums to mutter, “America America America America America . . .” And we’ll vote for him.

The problem is that he’s got almost a year of Democratic primary left, and has to keep saying actual things until he wins. He seems engaged almost daily in cleaning up verbal messes. When Harris oar-smacked him with her “that little girl was me” busing story (T-shirt now on sale for $29.99 at store.kamalaharris.org!), Biden’s response was the debate equivalent of “Check, please,” saying, “My time is up.”

His awesome vulnerabilities on the woke front have him saying things that sound like Trump quotes, like his response to Booker on working with segregationist senators: “There’s not a racist bone in my body.”

Biden’s early front-runner flubs are reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s $150 million failure to handle Trump tweets. There are many such parallels. Biden is Jeb. O’Rourke, running in what the Times calls the “younger face” lane, is Marco Rubio. Unseen Steve Bullock is unseen Jim Gilmore. Bill de Blasio is the same “Why is he running?” New Yorker George Pataki was. And this election’s version of John Kasich, the embittered realist barking, “What are we doing here?” from the literal edge of the debate stage, is former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.

Noon on a weekend, Room 103 of the Statehouse, Des Moines. John Delaney is addressing Iowa’s Asian and Latino Coalition. Stocky and bald, the co-founder of a health care lender is the umpteenth Democrat to address the influential group, which is full of local small-business owners. I will later hear this is one of the smallest turnouts of this group any Democrat candidate has yet attracted, a list that includes self-help author Marianne Williamson.

Delaney seems to sense this and looks peeved, not with the Asian-Latino coalition but with the Almighty. In a normal campaign year, he’d be the “crossover” candidate, praised for being a straight talker-- he’s already gotten accolades from both George Will and David Brooks, usually a sign of media love to come. Yet the love hasn’t arrived. Delaney, whether on TV or in person, throws off the same “I can’t believe I’m losing to this field” vibe Kasich often exuded.

Like Kasich, Delaney just wants the American people to get along, and if it’s not too much trouble, elect him president. But nobody is complying.

Flipping through Delaney’s book, The Right Answer, it’s clear he is genuinely saddened by the state of American politics. The epigram in the opening pages is from Kennedy, and begins, “Let us not despair...” About what is Delaney despairing? Mainly, it seems, that Bernie Sanders is pulling 15 percent on a promise to give everyone Medicare.

“Why do we have to go further than Germany and France and Sweden and the Netherlands, and throw out the entire U.S. health care system?” he pleads. “That doesn’t make sense to me. We should attack the problems, and fix those. And not mess with what’s working.”

He goes on to propose that from birth to age 65, all Americans be covered by “a federal health care policy, for free, as a right of citizenship.” This plan, he says, would allow America to avoid a fully government-run health care program. “Look, maybe in 20 years, people will like their government health care so much, they’ll drop their private insurance and we’ll get to the same place in the end,” he says. “But we have to live in the real world.”

At the end of his speech, a therapy dog in the crowd barks. Delaney flashes a look like he can’t catch a break. He did fine here, and may have won a convert or two from health care skeptics, but the “Why not me?” tone of his campaign captures something. It’s a familiar narrative: Republican state governments and a CEO-friendly administration are hacking away at policies dear to working people, while Democrats can’t seem to settle on an electoral formula to stop them.

They’re paralyzed by Delaney’s question: Do we really have to make radical changes? The centrists want the progressives to step aside for the sake of “unity,” while the progressives believe they’re the new mainstream and are the better bet in a world where traditional notions of electability are upside-down. While this argument rages, traditionally Democratic constituencies are taking losses all over the place.

Mark Rocha, a Communications Workers of America official, liked that Delaney grew up in a union household, but he seemed more focused on the idea that whoever the nominee was, that person needed to stop the bleeding quick.

Noting that Iowa’s Republican leadership has passed laws attacking the right of public-sector unions to organize, he says private-sector unions are dying too. His CWA once had 1,200 members statewide. Now it has 525, and the new members can’t pay much in dues.

“If they even come in the door, if I even get ’em to sign, they’re the lower-paid workers, they make $15 an hour,” he says. “We’re getting beat up.”

In the 2020 race, a succession of Democrats have already taken star turns as darlings-for-a-news-cycle, only to splat in polls right after. The pattern is incredible.

Harris is on her second run up the hill (her first was a “dazzling” debut in January). O’Rourke earned the death-knell “Kennedyesque” title, and raised a record $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, but cratered in polls even before his 8,800-word Vanity Fair springboard profile officially hit newsstands. “How About Pete?” asked New York magazine, atop a backlit cover photo that made the 37-year-old look like a Midwest Jesus; a South Bend police scandal later, Buttigieg was polling at zero percent with black voters. Then came Biden, who soared to 41 percent after launching to become what CNN called the “clear front-runner.” He’s lost a third of his support since then and is struggling to keep the lead.

Reporters show up at events with anxious smiles on their faces, like parents looking for a child at a department store. Maybe this one? How about her, or him? This is an extension of a phenomenon that began in the second half of the last GOP primary, when the press tried lavishing compliments on the “real” candidates they hoped would stop Trump. The internet remains littered with the wreckage of these efforts, in headlines like “Signs of ‘Marco-mentum’ for Rubio in New Hampshire.”

Then as now, in their zeal to find someone, anyone, to beat Trump, the press is once again too focused on the candidates themselves, ignoring warning signs that are almost always sitting right there in front of them, in the crowds.

Winterset, Iowa, a Monday afternoon in July. “Amy” “Amy” “Amy” read the alternating green and blue signs on cafe walls, as a packed house awaits Klobuchar. Gently spinning ceiling fans mark the passing time in this classic Iowa campaign stop. The Northside Cafe was founded in 1876, in the heart of Madison County-- yes, that Madison County, the one with the bridges-- and its comfort food, saloon walls covered in handmade quilts, and entranceway portraits of hometown hero John Wayne are familiar scenery for campaign journalists.

The rear of the cafe buzzes. Reporters love Klobuchar. She cracks jokes, gives good quotes, and reminds everyone of a relative. Maybe her? “She’s great,” someone whispers from the nest of tripods. “And funny too!” Some are repeating their favorite Klobuchar lines, like her bit about Trump being “all foam and no beer.” This is the Minnesota version of “all hat and no cattle,” a standby that holds the record for being told the most times by the most politicians without earning a genuine laugh.

Klobuchar plunges into her speech. It’s border crisis, climate crisis, and jokes about Trump. “All foam and no beer” takes a turn as a metaphor for Trump’s tax plan: “All the beer went to the wealthiest people.”

...Papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe ran stories suggesting Warren’s campaign might be fatally “wounded” before it even began in January, because of her too-liberal politics and her infamous claim to Native American heritage. But she persisted and suddenly looks like one of the favorites. Numerous stories about the Iowa race point out that she has the largest paid organization in the state, with 50 staffers here.

Her policy prescriptions are detailed and bold, including a two percent overall “ultramillionaires tax” that measures by net worth instead of income (theoretically closing a giant loophole), along with the cancellation of student debt and the breakup of Silicon Valley monopolies.

In late spring, the same media outlets that pummeled her in winter began swooning over a Warren “surge,” in a lovefest that frankly was just as phony as the previous reports of momentum for Harris, O’Rourke, Mayor Pete, and Biden. But at least the pundit predictions of her campaign dying before birth were wrong.

The problem for Warren is “I’ve got a plan for that!” is a dubious strategy in an era in which the campaign promise itself is a declining currency. On paper, she’s done just about everything right. But if she advances, voters will soon be introduced to the fact that plans and promises similar to the ones Warren is making have been made many times before. It’s not a referendum on her but on how much belief is left out there.

Her “economic patriotism” plan, which envisions the government using levers like the Fed and the Treasury to protect jobs, has earned praise from left and right (Tucker Carlson gave it an “attaboy” on Fox). But the catchphrase was used not only by Obama, but also by two other Massachusetts Dems Warren resembles: 1992 presidential contender Paul Tsongas, and Dukakis. The Duke’s 1988 message of “new economic patriotism” included proposals for universal health coverage, a higher minimum wage, scholarships for students committed to teaching careers, etc.

Politicians often sound great. They may sound like they understand issues up and down. They may even have passed laws that ostensibly address problems. But for a lot of Americans, speeches never catch up with reality. Legislation designed to prevent pollution, contractor corruption, sexual assault, predatory lending, and countless other abuses may earn approving headlines-- but create few results on the ground. This gap between reality and political proclamation is what opened the door for Trump in 2016.

“I work at Walmart, along with 1.5 million other people,” Morgan Baethke says. “Those employees are used to the idea that if the Walton family says X will happen, X happens. If a businessman says X will happen, X will happen.” He pauses. “But if a senator says it, who knows?”

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a Sunday morning, just after services at the Unity Center, an alternative church that preaches a “practical approach to Christianity.” It’s a place you might expect to buy healing salts or take hypnotism lessons. The crowd is younger and more female than at most campaign stops.

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author made famous by Oprah Winfrey, is speaking to about 50 people. “When we get bad news, when we learn that something really terrible is going on, so many superficial concerns drop away. And we become very intelligent,” she says, glaring and pausing for emphasis.

Williamson is a small, almost ethereal figure with silver-streaked hair and intense eyes that 19th-century authors would have described as being “like coals.” Her superficial eccentricities and occasional incautious statements (she once said “there’s a skepticism which is actually healthy” on the issue of vaccines) have caused reporters to chortle at her run.

But her speech is not a lifeless collection of policy positions. It’s an interesting, tightly written diagnosis of the American problem. Precisely because socioeconomic stresses have pushed them into heightened awareness, she says, the American public sees what she calls “a transition from democracy to aristocracy,” and the corporate sector’s “insatiable appetite” for money that dominates American life.

Williamson is not a traditional orator, with a voice that fills the room. You can barely hear her without a microphone. But she grabs crowds. Nobody is checking sports scores or Twitter. They’re in.

Williamson goes on to say that most Americans are aware that their government is now little more than a handmaiden to sociopathic forces. She describes a two-party system that, at its worst, operates in perfect harmony with the darkest impulses of corporate capitalism, and at best-- presumably she refers more to Democrats here-- sounds like institutionalized beggary.

“ ‘Pretty please, can I maybe have a hundred-thousand-dollar grant here?’ ” she says. “ ‘Pretty please, can we maybe have a million dollars in the budget for all this?’”

Heads are nodding all over the place.

“They say, ‘I can get you a cookie.’”

This elicits a few yeahs from the crowd.

Christ, I think. This woman is going to win the nomination.

Trump, she says, can’t be beaten by conventional thinking. “[He is] not just a politician,” she says. “This man is a phenomenon. . . . The only way we are going to defeat a phenomenon at the polls in 2020 is by creating a phenomenon.”

She stumbles a bit in Q&A, especially when a woman asks what she would do about the credit-score system. Williamson frowns, seeming genuinely perplexed. She clearly doesn’t know what having bad credit is like, and promises to look into it, in the tone of voice of a person who promises gamely to try a jellied-eel appetizer.

Still, she gets a rousing ovation at the end of her speech. After, she takes a few minutes to talk.

“The political establishment has the veneer of a deep conversation,” she says. “They think their political dialogue is so sophisticated. But it’s not sophisticated. It’s very unsophisticated.”

That lack of sophistication, she says, is what made Trump possible. Young people, in particular, have no more patience for the phoniness. “I see it especially in people who were born this century,” she says. “They’re tired of the nonsense.”

Williamson belongs to a category of candidate you might call the Ignored. They’re candidates blown off by national political wizards who don’t believe, or don’t want to believe, they can win. How anyone can think this way after 2016 is mind-boggling.

The list includes Williamson, entrepreneur and Universal Basic Income proponent Andrew Yang, Hawaii congresswoman and regime-change opponent Tulsi Gabbard, and, most conspicuously, Bernie Sanders.

It’s unseemly, the degree to which the press is rooting for Sanders to get his socialist tuchis out of the race. This is an actual headline from Politico after the first set of debates: “Harris, Warren Tie for Third in New Poll, But Biden Still Leads.”

The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Biden dropping to 25 percent nationally, with Harris and Warren jousting for third at nine percent. Where’s Waldo? The missing data point is that Sanders doubled both Harris and Warren in said poll at 18 percent. He also has the highest number of unique donors, and is the leading fundraiser overall in the race.

That doesn’t mean Sanders is going to win. He’s the only candidate with a more or less insoluble base of voters, but unlike Warren, who seems really to want this, Bernie has sometimes seemed dispirited. Still, the undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’”

There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”

Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.

Ames, Iowa, a house party. Reporters love this tradition, standing in the home of a real-life actual ordinary person.

House parties for me bat about .250. A major danger is ending up sardined in a room with insufficient air conditioning and no during-speech egress. This is the case at the gathering for Robert “Beto” O’Rourke.

After his dicey debate performance, O’Rourke was called to the carpet by his biggest donors, including Louis Susman, the former investment banker and Obama bundler. Susman reportedly ordered O’Rourke to unfuck himself before the next debates.

It’s bad enough when the money people are bossing around the candidates. It’s worse when one of those backers actually tells the story to the media; Susman went so far as to be quoted saying of O’Rourke, “The needed improvements are purely stylistic.”

After O’Rourke became a social media meme for his gringo Spanish, and got walloped in the debate on his pet issue, immigration, the campaign’s solution was to send him to Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande, for an emergency session of Looking as Concerned as Julián Castro. Now the poor guy is back in Iowa reporting on his adventures and delivering a speech entirely about the crisis. He describes the border scene in horrific, Boschian detail, down to the “little kiddos” who are “pooping in their pants” and on the floor where they will sleep and eat.

Most are listening intently, but there’s some wincing in the heat. There’s no way to avoid wondering how this would play in a general-election setting. One can already hear what Trump would say about his emergency Juárez trip: If it was Susman’s idea, why isn’t Susman running?

Four years ago, the rank inadequacy of the Lindsey Grahams and Scott Walkers and Jeb Bushes who tumbled into the pastures of Iowa made great sport for snickering campaign journalists, myself included. We dubbed the field of governors, senators, and congressgoons who couldn’t beat a game-show host the “Clown Car,” and laughed at what many of us thought was the long-overdue collapse of the Republican Party. The joke turned out to be on us.

The GOP error was epic in scale. The Republicans sent twice the usual number of suspects into the buzz saw of a Throw the Bums Out movement they never understood, creating the comic pretext for the Clown Car: twice the canned quips, twice the empty promises, double the rage, frustration, and eye rolls.

Nobody will want to hear this, but Democrats are repeating the error. The sense of déjà vu is palpable. It might and should still work out, according to the polls. But a double catastrophe seems a lot less impossible than it did even a year ago. Lose to Donald Trump once, shame on the voters. Lose to him twice? It’s glue-factory time for the Democratic Party, and another black eye for America, which is fast turning its electoral system into a slapstick reality show.