Who Can Win The Conservative Lane To Take On Bernie? None Of These Clowns?

The fight for the conservative lane is in full swing, and yesterday, Bloomberg's campaign manager dismissed Biden's strategy for beating out Bloomberg, Klobuchar and Mayo Pete. Biden's plan is to win big in South Carolina and get the corporate media to market him as the "come back kid." Yesterday, Kevin Sheekey, the Bloomers campaign manager, claimed "South Carolina is not going to matter" and that "Super Tuesday is going to be really definitional for this race."

The Real Clear Politics polling average for South Carolina has Biden way ahead again because of a just-released poll from Monmouth. The polling average has Biden at 34.3%, Bernie at 20.0%, Steyer at 14.0% and no one else in double-digits. Here's the Monmouth poll released yesterday (including changes since their October survey):

• Status Quo Joe- 36% (+3)
• Bernie- 16% (+4)
• Steyer- 15% (+11)
• Elizabeth- 8% (-8)
• Mayo- 6 (+3)
• Klobuchar- 1% (flat)
• undecided- 15% (flat)

Biden is going on Chris Wallace's Sunday show on Fox to declare that he's the comeback kid after the (expected) big win among elderly rural voters who think he's the second coming of Obama and are largely unaware that his political foundations are completely steeped in racism. (Trump will make sure they know if Biden makes it to November.) So will these folks change the Super Tuesday dynamic across the country? I doubt it. Bloomberg's folks agree with me that it won't and Bernie is doing his own thing and largely ignoring the increasingly vicious and desperate squabbling in the conservative lane. He knows he'll have to fight one of them in the end-- probably at a brokered convention-- and is just trying to pile up as many delegates as he can while they work at undercutting each other.

Mayo Pete (Twerp) is also keeping his nose to the grindstone, with a strategy of forgetting about winning any Super Tuesday states and instead targeting a few congressional districts where he thinks he can eke out a few delegates, like he did in Nevada.

Buttigieg’s campaign said in a memo that its objective on March 3 is to “minimize” Sanders’ margins and maximize “delegate accumulation by [congressional] district, not states.” Anticipating a drawn-out primary process, Buttigieg is looking to survive deeper into the calendar, making it to mid-March contests in the Midwest that might provide more opportunities for him.

Buttigieg is focusing on selected districts in smaller media markets throughout the country to rack up delegates, from Austin, Texas and its suburbs to San Diego, northern Maine, and other locales where Democrats flipped House seats in 2018. But it’s a risky strategy to maintain momentum, and that risk is born out of necessity.

...“Pick a place and try for a win. Otherwise, if you’re playing just to pick off delegates, then that’s what you say if you’re in trouble,” the strategist said, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “If it’s a math game, then you’re just doing it to be at the convention, and you’re not playing to win.”

In its memo, Buttigieg’s campaign pledged to “limit Sanders’ delegate lead to no more than 350 pledged delegates.” States on Super Tuesday account for about a third of the total delegates handed out in the Democratic presidential race.

“How many districts are each candidate hitting threshold and by what margin? To me, that’s the most important question on Super Tuesday,” said Michael Halle, an adviser to the Buttigieg campaign. “You gain the most efficiency by becoming viable.”

But even among his supporters, there’s a fear that Buttigieg’s best days in the presidential race already happened.

“We’re definitely worried about him not making it to Maryland,” which votes in late April, said Raina Chambers, a 49-year-old from Beltsville, Maryland, who saw Buttigieg speak in Arlington, Va., on Sunday.

Her husband, Michael Chambers, added, “but if Pete doesn’t make it, I’d be fine with Michael Bloomberg, too.”

No doubt. Most Mayo Pete supporters would be just fine with any status quo piece of shit, if not Bloomberg, then Biden or Klobuchar or Mark Warner of Chris Coons... anyone who doesn't champion the working class. Hey, what about John Delaney or Michael Bennett? Why is no one talking about digging up Frackenlooper?

As for that convention... the NY Times went into fantasyland yesterday. Don Beyer (New Dem-VA) is a multimillionaire, a status quo politician who would never feel comfortable around a President Bernie. "At some point you could imagine saying, 'Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,' he said, while preparing to introduce the former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend., Ind., at a campaign event near his home on Sunday. 'Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.'" Drunk? Insane? Fatally conservative? All of the above?

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials-- all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention-- and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.

“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”

While there is no widespread public effort underway to undercut Mr. Sanders, arresting his rise has emerged as the dominant topic in many Democratic circles. Some are trying to act well before the convention: Since Mr. Sanders won Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, four donors have approached former Representative Steve Israel of New York to ask if he can suggest someone to run a super PAC aimed at blocking Mr. Sanders. He declined their offer.

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

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

People close to Mr. Obama say he has no intention of getting involved in the primary contest, seeing his role as less of a kingmaker than as a unifying figure to help heal party divisions once Democrats settle on a nominee. He also believed that the Democratic Party shouldn’t engage in smoke-filled-room politics, arguing that those kinds of deals would have prevented him from capturing the nomination when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008.

“If Bernie gets a plurality and nobody else is even close and the superdelegates weigh in and say, ‘We know better than the voters,’ I think that will be a big problem,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, a Sanders supporter who is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Others in the party view Mr. Sanders as such an existential threat that they see stopping him from winning the nomination as less risky than a public convention fight. Many feared that putting Mr. Sanders on the top of the ticket could cost Democrats the political gains of the Trump era, a period when the party won control of the House, took governor’s mansions in deep red states and flipped statehouses across the country.

Aside from Mark Warner, one of the richest politicians in America and a conservative, Chris Coons, the Delaware conservaDem who is a Bidenesque character but not senile, and Pelosi, the second most hated politician in America after Mitch McConnell, other fantasies brought forward by The Times include Sherrod Brown and Kamala Harris.

Jack Holmes, politics editor at Esquire on that Times rubbish: "For all the worried talk of Sanders as another George McGovern, a chaotic convention where the delegate leader is jettisoned for someone chosen by The Folks Behind the Curtain could shake the public's faith in the Democratic ticket nearly as much as McGovern's display of catastrophic judgment in the Eagleton Affair. More to the point, these Wise Men of the Democratic Party are not, at least as they appear in The Times, particularly wise. A number of them seem to think they can randomly choose a person who is not running to be the nominee... There seems to be an overwhelming sense among delegates to the Democratic National Convention that the election can only be won by sticking to the old ways, by returning to the Before Times. What no one seems willing to contemplate is that we are never going back. There is no normal to go back to. Just as NeverTrump Republicans have mostly convinced themselves he's an aberration within their party, it seems the Democratic Establishment has convinced itself he is not the symptom of any deeper, structural problems in how we run our shop. There was something so fundamentally broken in this country that we elected a racist game-show host over a former Secretary of State the last time, and now a man who calls himself a democratic socialist-- whose actual policies are more New Deal Democrat-- is winning the primary race. Maybe it's because he's promising to transform the way we do things in a country where the actual voting public doesn't seem to like how things are done."

Remember a few paragraphs up you read "William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind?" Maybe The Times should have introduced him by explaining that Owens is a Republican donor and healthcare lobbyist. You know... just for a little context. The Intercept's Lee Fang reported that Owen runs a lobbying firm-- Asset & Equity Corporations-- which helped finance right-wing Republican senators Mike Rounds (SD), Dan Sullivan (AK) and Mitch McConnell (KY) last year. Confronted by Fang, Owen said "I am a committed Democrat but as a lobbyist, there are times when I need to have access to both sides and the way to get access quite often is to make campaign contributions. I’m a registered lobbyist and I represent clients and they have interest in front of Congress and I attend the Senator’s Classic, which is a Republican event, each year." Why should Owen be a DNC member, a super-delegate or someone with any power whatsoever in determining who the nominee is?

Sunday: Bernie appears at the L.A. Convention Center with Public Enemy, Sarah Silverman and Dick Van Dyke. 5pm, although doors open at 3pm. I bet they'll be registering voters.