A Man Is Only As Good As His Word? So How Do Closet Cases, Like Lindsey Graham Survive In Electoral Politics?

 

I'm gay. When I realized it, I was living in Amsterdam. I went to a psychologist and told him. He looked at me oddly and said, basically, "So? You need me to give you the addresses of gay bars?" Then I flew to the U.S., for my first visit back home in 4 years, to tell my mother. Her response was to tell me I couldn't borrow her wigs. Years later my first corporate job was working for a gay man. My sexuality never held back my career and I rose to be president of the parent company. I'm glad I never went down the closet road. People in closets live a life reflexively and usually increasingly dishonest. They lie about who they are, what they are and, eventually, about everything and start living a life where serial dishonestly becomes the essence of being, more so than any semblance of honesty. It's the slipperiest of slopes to start down and so, so tragic for so many people.

It's the slope poor Lindsey Graham felt he had to go down if he was going to be a successful politician in South Carolina. And, his life has been one gigantic lie, both professionally and personally. "Everyone knows" and even colleagues and acquaintances who find him likable, simpatico and amusing, all tend to pity him. And now it may be catching up with him politically, as an unlikely Democratic opponent has him locked in a what should be an easy reelection campaign but is basically tied and too close to call.

On Saturday, Washington Post reporters Sean Sullivan and Seung Min Kim wrote that 4 and a half years ago Lindsey "sat across a conference table from his colleagues and issued them a dare. 'I want you to use my words against me,' said Graham, a South Carolina Republican with a flair for drama. Pointing with his index finger, Graham continued: 'If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.' On Saturday, Graham was singing a different tune, pledging support for President Trump in 'any effort to move forward regarding the recent vacancy created by the passing of Justice Ginsburg.' The stark turnabout from 2016 marked the latest chapter in Graham’s dramatic reinvention of himself during the Trump presidency, morphing from an old-school Senate institutionalist and bipartisan dealmaker into a stalwart soldier for the president’s agenda."

Democrats and other opponents of The Donald very much would like to take Graham up on his offer-- to hold his words against him. I don't know how effective this Lincoln Project ad will be with South Carolina voters, but I suspect someone will figure out exactly how to hold his words against him in a way that will cause him no end of political pain. After all, no one likes a liar... well, except for Republicans who apparently love liars:





"Graham," our Post duo reminded us, "is chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee charged with processing Supreme Court nominees, and he is in the midst of a competitive reelection campaign that could factor closely into the fight for control of the upper chamber. His comments Saturday, coming after less-decisive statements in the hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death Friday, amounted to the latest indication of how Republican leaders are rallying quickly around a strategy of seeking to fill her seat this year. That prospect has stoked widespread outrage among Senate Democrats, who are calling Republicans hypocrites for the move after blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 because they said the president chosen by voters that fall should make the pick.

“There’s no doubt everything will be sort of on the table if we’re thrown into a world where you can’t trust somebody’s word and precedents get changed at will to fit your priorities of the moment,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said in response to Graham’s decision to align behind Trump and go back on what he said in 2016.

During Saturday’s call, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) used similar language, saying that if Senate Republicans move forward with whoever Trump nominates, “nothing is off the table for next year” should Democrats win control of the chamber. That appeared to be a reference to structural changes to the court proposed by liberal activists such as expanding the number of justices-- a proposal that has sparked some disagreements among Democrats.

Republican leaders appeared determined to press ahead swiftly to fill the court vacancy with a conservative jurist. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised Trump during a Friday phone call that his nominee would get a vote in the Senate, according to people familiar with their conversation who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

Trump told McConnell he liked Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and Barbara Lagoa of the 11th Circuit, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

“We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices,” Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday. “We have this obligation, without delay!”

...Less clear is how rank-and-file Republican senators will respond, with many in tough reelection races in states where Trump is not popular. Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, meaning they can afford to lose no more than three members in a confirmation vote, should the entire Democratic caucus unite against Trump's nominee.

They have already lost one.

“I do not believe that the Senate should vote on the nominee prior to the election,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is in a tough reelection fight, said in a statement. “In fairness to the American people, who will either be re-electing the President or selecting a new one, the decision on a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court should be made by the President who is elected on November 3rd.”

Collins’s reservations contrasted sharply with the comments from Graham, who is seeking a fourth term in the Senate. The contest has been tougher than many expected in a ruby-red state Trump won easily in 2016, with recent polls showing Democrat Jaime Harrison in close competition with Graham.

Now Graham will be at the center of what will likely be one of the most contentious confirmation battles in history, affording him an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Trump. But some Democrats say his position could help amplify the arguments against his reelection.

“A lot of folks miss the Lindsey of old-- and that’s why this race is so competitive,” said Steve Benjamin, the Democratic mayor of Columbia, S.C. “When it comes time to do what’s right and maybe not popular,” Benjamin said, “it can be difficult for some.”

Harrison, one of his party's fast-rising African American stars, sounded similar notes. “My grandpa always said that a man is only as good as his word. Senator Graham, you have proven your word is worthless,” he wrote on Twitter.

Writing for The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere offered a glimpse into what Republican senators are saying in private and off the record. "Whispering Republicans," as he termed them, talk about how they hate The Donald and then back him in public-- to the media and, of course, with their votes. The GOP is absolutely one of the country's two spineless, jellyfish parties. "The secretly apostate Republican senators," wrote Dovere, "have two choices: They can support a president they think is a threat to American democracy while also violating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s invented 2016 rule about not confirming justices in an election year, or they can oppose Trump, enraging both him and their progressively cultish base while giving up what might be their last chance to secure a conservative majority for a generation."

Notice The Donald's Chamber of Commerce retweet from Sunday morning, signally he's ready for war with Alaska senior Senator Lisa Murkowski, who is not up for reelection in November and is not up for giving Trump a third Supreme Court pick.

For McConnell, this is principle versus power, and the golden rule is “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.” And it’s happening as the next generation of ambitious Republicans looks to a future in which Trumpism remains a dominant force within the party no matter what happens in November.

Don’t expect many Republicans-- even those who want to stick it to Trump-- to be direct with their commitments. “If they try to shove something through, I think you’re going to see some of these Republicans who hate Trump fall on the horrible sword of ‘This country is dangerously divided right now; the hypocrisy is horrible; if we do something like this, it will tear the country apart,’” says Joe Walsh, the former Republican representative from Illinois, who briefly ran a primary campaign against Trump that went nowhere earlier this year. Based on conversations he’s had, Walsh estimates that, of the current Republican senators, “if you put a gun to their head privately, I would say more than 40 of the 53 would like to see him lose.”

Walsh insists that Republicans didn’t want this vacancy-- not now. “This is political death for the Republicans,” he told me.

This is not the time for Republicans to insist that they haven’t “seen the latest tweet.” This is where they either will or will not give Trump the boost that he needs weeks before the election. Now, more than ever, they are either with him or against him. “This,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, said on CNN last night, “is my colleagues’ moment of reckoning.”

...Senator Joni Ernst, in a tight reelection race in Iowa, said in July that she would support a nomination process if an opening occurred. But that puts her at odds with her fellow Iowa senator, Chuck Grassley, who said in August that he couldn’t support a confirmation in an election year if he was going to be consistent with the position he took in 2016. He stood then with McConnell’s adamant refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing after Antonin Scalia’s sudden death in 2016, though Garland was nominated nine months before Election Day. Of course, the question becomes whether Grassley will hold to his position now that the question is no longer theoretical.

...Late yesterday, I asked a former Republican House member what an anti-Trump Republican senator would do when facing a choice that sounds more out of a novel than anything Goethe might have come up with if he’d ever wandered around Capitol Hill.

“The Republican senator,” said the person, who requested anonymity to speak directly about old colleagues, “will do what they must in the name of self-preservation.”

“Guess what?” the former House member said of Graham. “He’s going to do it. You know he is. He’s up for reelection in South Carolina. He needs his base. He’ll flip on this.”

McConnell, in his Rube Goldberg–machine statement explaining why Trump’s nominee will get a vote on the floor of the Senate but Obama’s didn’t, left the door open to having a vote in a potential lame-duck session after the election.

Maybe it’ll all come down to Senator Mitt Romney, who is publicly offended by pretty much everything Trump stands for but whose spokesperson shot down rumors last night that he would oppose a confirmation before the election. Or maybe, if Mark Kelly wins his Senate race in Arizona, it will all hinge on a legal dispute over whether he would get to immediately be sworn into the seat because his opponent was appointed to it. Or maybe by then we’ll be in a country where the November 3 votes are taking weeks to count, rioters and militias are out on the streets, and, as in 2000, the election will head to the Supreme Court, which now is without a tiebreaker vote.

In 2016, from the minute he learned of Scalia’s death, Obama knew that Republicans would try to prevent him from appointing a justice and flipping the balance to a 5–4 liberal majority. He nominated Garland anyway and threw himself into the fight, daring the GOP senators to oppose a middle-of-the-road, accomplished judge whom so many had voted for in his confirmation to a lower court. Working the phones for a few senators he dreamed might buck McConnell, he pleaded with them: Don’t do this.

I remember speaking with one of the Republican senators struggling with breaking the process then. The senator, though torn, ultimately did not say anything publicly, and didn’t invite Garland in for a meeting.

Last night, Obama closed his statement mourning Ginsburg with, “As votes are already being cast in this election, Republican senators are now called to apply that standard.” Don’t hold a confirmation hearing, he said. Always an institutionalist with his eye toward history, Obama was admitting that the process breakers had won.

Now the question is, what else will Trump, the ultimate process breaker, win?

David Frum offered up 4 reasons to doubt McConnell’s power. He asked himself 4 questions:

• Does McConnell really command a Senate majority?

The polls do not favor Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, or Thom Tillis--senators from Maine, Colorado, and North Carolina up for reelection this cycle. Yet these competitors may not be ready to attend their own funerals. They may regard voting against McConnell's Court grab as a heaven-sent chance to prove their independence from an unpopular president-- and to thereby save their own seats... (Martha McSally of Arizona, however, is likely a safe vote for McConnell. The deadest of the Senate's dead ducks surely must be focused on retaining national Republican support for her post-Senate career. Mitt Romney of Utah is a more open question: His strong sense of fairness will push him against confirmation; his consistent support for conservative judges will pull him in favor.)

• Does McConnell really have a nominee to advance?

Any last-minute Trump nominee will face a gantlet of opposition in the Senate, a firestorm of opposition in the country, and probably a lifetime of suspicion from the majority of the country.

Can McConnell and Trump find an appointee willing to risk all that for the chance-- but not the guarantee-- of a Supreme Court seat? Specifically, can they find a woman willing to do it? The optics of replacing Ginsburg with a man may be too ugly even for the Trump administration. And if they can find a woman, can they find a woman sufficiently moderate-seeming to provide cover to anxious senators? The task may prove harder than immediately assumed.

• Will Trump balk?

Until now, judicial-nomination fights have mobilized Republicans and conservatives more than Democrats and liberals. The fight McConnell proposes may upset that pattern. Trump's hopes for reelection depend on suppressing votes and discouraging participation. The last thing he needs is a highly dramatic battle that could mobilize Democrats in states including Arizona and North Carolina-- even Georgia and Texas.

The smart play for Trump is to postpone the nomination to reduce the risk of Democratic mobilization, and to warn Republicans of the risks should he lose. Trump’s people do not usually execute the smart play. They are often the victims of the hyper-ideological media they consume, which deceive them about what actually is the smart play. This time, though, they may just be desperate enough to break long-standing pattern and try something different.

• Will the conservative legal establishment play ball?

The judicial status quo enormously favors conservatives. Even should Democrats win big in November, it will take many years for them to catch up to the huge Republican lead in judicial appointments. By then, who knows, the GOP may have retaken the Senate, and of course it may well find a way to hold on in 2020.

But a last-minute overreach by McConnell could seem so illegitimate to Democrats as to justify radical countermoves should they win in November: increasing the number of appellate judges and Supreme Court justices; conceivably even opening impeachment hearings against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

McConnell may want the win badly enough to dismiss those risks. But many conservative-leaning lawyers in the country may be more cautious. And their voices will get a hearing in a contentious nomination fight-- not only by the national media, but by some of the less Trump-y Republican senators. This could be enough to slow down a process that has no time to spare.

Mitch McConnell has gotten his way so often that it’s hard to imagine he might ever lose. But the political balance of power is shifting this fall, and for once, McConnell may be on the wrong side of a power dynamic.

Kaddish Time For The Biden Campaign?

The caucus goers I saw interviewed on TV seemed like dull-witted zombies who were incapable of explaining their candidate preferences other than by parroting campaign talking points, usually word for word. But in his funeral oration for the Status quo Joe campaign in The Atlantic yesterday, Blaine Dodfrey found a sentient being at the Burlington caucus who he quoted. Noting that there wasn't a single person causing for Biden, Dodfrey asked Lonnie Herbert, a 50-year-old forklift driver, to explain. Donnie sounded smarter than most of the MSNBC correspondents. "Biden wants to go back to the way it was before Trump, but things weren’t working all that well then, either." He said the country needs a "hard shift" and that that was why he is supporting Bernie. Dodfrey says that was what he was hearing in working class caucuses not just in Burlington, but across Iowa, explaining why he came in 4th in the first state to look at the candidates and rate them.

Iowa has more counties that flipped from Barack Obama to Trump in the 2016 election than any other state. In these counties are small cities like this one, where I’m from-- hilly old towns dotting the Mississippi River that were once booming manufacturing hubs, union strongholds, and, for the most part, faithfully Democratic. The economies of these river cities in the state’s southeast have been slowly contracting for the past few decades. Younger residents tend to move to large metro areas for work, and many of the people who are left are older, whiter, and disaffected because of low incomes and limited opportunities, as Dave Swenson, an economics professor at Iowa State University, told me.

The Iowans I spoke with at caucus sites here in Burlington are people whom the former vice president has claimed he can win over. His message to working-class voters-- and Trump supporters-- has been one of warmth and solidarity, emphasizing his own middle-class upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and promising that he will not leave them behind in his quest to set the country back on the right track. “We don’t deserve a president who goes out of his way to make life in America harder, crueler, pettier,” Biden told a crowd in his hometown last fall. “[Trump] said he’s working for the Forgotten American. Well, he forgot about the Forgotten American.”

The senator from Vermont, in his campaign, has made a much different case to the same voters: Sanders is hoping to capture their frustration and anger, and channel it into revolutionary political change. “He’s the man with the plan!” said Darran Reverend, a 56-year-old union carpenter, who told me that he supports Sanders because of the senator’s push for Medicare for All. “He could’ve beat [Trump] in 2016 if they would’ve elected him.” (Reverend wasn’t able to caucus in the previous cycle, because of a felony conviction. In Iowa, ex-felons can’t vote in elections unless they apply directly to the governor to restore their rights, as Reverend did.)

People are “so tired of the way things are,” said Sara Mason, a 51-year-old full-time caretaker for her mother. Sanders is very far left, she added, but instead of scaring off voters in the general election, a Sanders nomination and his ambitious progressive proposals “might work the other way and get people fired up more.”

And although Buttigieg, with his Harvard education and his fancy fundraisers, may not appear to be the type of candidate who would attract a lot of blue-collar voters, the Iowans I spoke with seemed to see the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, as a fresh version of Biden. “He’s young and moderate,” said Lois Blythe, a Burlington librarian wearing a PETE button. “I think he can bring people together.” Blythe’s husband, Ike, seated next to her, told me that in November he’ll support “anybody that can beat that guy that’s in there now.” And his money, right now, is on (former) Mayor Pete.

Biden’s success was stymied by Sanders and Buttigieg across Iowa. As MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki has pointed out, Biden captured just one of Iowa’s 31 Obama-Trump counties. At Grimes Elementary, Sanders, Yang, and Buttigieg were the only candidates who had enough support to win a delegate to the county convention. At a small satellite caucus I’d visited earlier in the day in Keokuk, about 40 miles downriver from Burlington, Sanders and Buttigieg had both received enough support to be viable candidates; Biden had not. Statewide, Buttigieg and Sanders are effectively tied for first in the state delegate count; Senator Elizabeth Warren is in third place, with Biden trailing behind. This dismal showing for Biden suggests that his electability argument is much weaker than he-- and many other Democrats-- had hoped.

Biden's political corpse, still supported by elderly rural black voters in the South, is still kicking while progressives are shoveling dirt into the grave. Mayo Pete and Mini-Mike are fighting over Biden's white supporters, while Bernie, Steyer and Mini-Mike are trying to appeal to Biden's now shaky black coalition. "But," wrote Dodfrey, "for the candidate whose entire campaign pitch has been his ability to win by appealing to a wide range of voters, the results from Iowa come as an especially significant blow. Even the voters at this working-class precinct just blocks from the Mississippi, the voters Biden considers his people, were rooting for somebody else."

One day earlier, also at The Atlantic Edward-Isaac Dovere penned the inevitable essay, How Biden Blew It, that went beyond the rejection by Iowa voters, despite the binders full of endorsements by conservative politicians. The Biden Dovere is writing about is out of gas-- the same way his chartered jet he was hoping would fly him to all the Super Tuesday states is. Out of gas and out of cash, having created a palpably joyless campaign. The feeling everywhere now is that no one wants to back a loser, which is how people see Biden again. He wrote that "Biden aides who were being honest with themselves knew for months that they were in trouble. Some didn’t want to believe it; some couldn’t. Others felt like they’d gotten into a taxi with a driver who was swerving all over the road, and they were just holding on and hoping they made it to the end."

Before this week, October was the low point, punctuated by the smack of the first Des Moines Register poll showing him tumbling and Warren in the lead. Biden was being out-organized, outworked, and, most of all, outspent. His late entrance in the race kept coming back to haunt him: He didn’t have a cushion of campaign cash; he hadn’t locked up top operatives anywhere. November 1 found Biden in Des Moines for the biggest primary event of the year: the Iowa Democratic Party’s Liberty & Justice Dinner, where all the candidates were speaking, and all their teams were organizing major shows of force to strut for the press and the local party bigwigs. Buttigieg went first, and he was smooth, claiming Barack Obama’s legacy as his own. But more important than anything he said was what he looked up at: sections of the arena packed with supporters wearing yellow T-shirts, their light-up wristbands flashing as they waved their signs.

Biden spoke second, right after Buttigieg. Some watching him closely from the audience swore they could see his attention drifting to the hundreds of empty spots in his reserved sections. They were right.

The next few weeks were a scramble. Just in time, money started coming in from big donors spooked by Warren’s strength and in response to the impeachment inquiry, which the Biden campaign moved aggressively to turn into proof that Democrats should see him as the strongest candidate against Trump. Headquarters rushed Biden’s ads back onto the air. The campaign started hiring again. Aides planned more trips to Iowa. A bus tour was a massive success. Big-name endorsements that had been kept in reserve for months, like Kerry’s, were rolled out.

But Sanders was creeping up in the polls, and Biden aides weren’t quite sure what to do about that. “I don’t respond to Bernie,” Biden told reporters after opening an office in Cedar Rapids at the beginning of January, although three weeks and a bunch of new polls later, Biden was suddenly on the attack, mockingly saying that Sanders’s position on Medicare for All was “I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but we have to do it.” The Thursday night before the caucuses, at the American Legion hall in Ottumwa, asked by a reporter about the Sanders campaign circulating a video in which Biden seems to be advocating for Social Security cuts, Biden reached into his jacket pocket and handed him a prewritten statement with the header “BERNIE FALSE ATTACK ON SOCIAL SECURITY.”

Grave by Will Boone

Biden's staffers said it worked. Iowa caucus goers said otherwise. And Friday night Biden indicated that he realizes it's not working for him in New Hampshire either, where he is, again, struggling for a 4th place finish. Biden's response to his disaster in Iowa was to take a long 3 day nap and then shake up the upper echelon of his campaign staff a tiny bit.

Beware: The Joe Biden Return To Normalcy

Biden has started-- and aborted-- four runs for president in the past. His brand of Republican-lite centrism is worshipped Inside the Beltway. Outside? Not so much. He never polled outside single digits-- low single digits. Early Monday, Atlantic columnist Edward-Isaac Dovere asserted that as Biden contemplates a 2020 run, he is focused on whether primary voters will support a centrist septuagenarian. He's riding very high in the polls right now-- but the overwhelming majority of people who back him don't know his sexist, racist corporate, pro-war record. And if he runs, they'll find out who the real Joe Biden is. Most of the low-info voters selecting him in polls, just see him as a stand-in for Obama-- and someone who can beat Trump.

Biden hasn't announced yet... but he's running. "Top positions for a campaign," wrote Dovere, "have been sketched out. Donor outreach has accelerated, with Biden himself telling staff at some events to write down the names of people who say they’re eager to help. A list of potential 'day-one endorsers' among elected officials has been prepared. Basic staff outreach is happening. Biden has even joked to people that he’s upped his daily workout to get in shape." Biden has told rich people he's sucking up to that "I’m 70 percent there, but I’m not all the way there."

That same 70 percent line has been circulating among Biden allies for weeks: This looks like it’s happening, but don’t write off the 30 percent chance that it doesn’t. In that time, people who’ve spoken to Biden and those around him say, he is still anguishing over both whether there’s a path to victory and whether running is the right thing to do for those closest to him, knowing that his record would be attacked and sensitive questions about his family would be aired in public.

...A Sanders candidacy would likely encourage Biden to run because he doesn’t agree with the Vermont senator’s policies and thinks they’re losing politics.

In a primary, Biden and his advisers believe, all those left-tilting candidates would divide support and leave him with a sizable number of more moderate voters.

“We’ve got a little bit of our own lane. We just need to go own it,” said a third person who’s been in touch with Biden’s top aides. “He’s well aware that this isn’t going to be easy, he’s going to have to fight for it, but I don’t think he’s viewing this thing through the lens of matching up against any one candidate.”

In late January, Biden’s aides made this case in talking points they circulated to allies who were being asked about his plans. “Joe Biden is someone who can reassert what our core values are. He can answer the big questions facing this country with real moral authority,” reads one section.

The campaign manager, if there is a campaign, would be Greg Schultz, Biden’s longtime political director and currently the head of his American Possibilities PAC. The communications director would be Kate Bedingfield, his last communications director at the White House. Steve Ricchetti, his chief of staff at the White House, who’s stayed with him over the past two years, will serve in a similar role for the campaign, assisted by the longtime political consultant Mike Donilon.

Ricchetti and Donilon have told people that they are now as close as they can get without having the final word from Biden. One major focus: how to quickly build a base of small-dollar donors, which is of particular concern because Biden has always struggled with fundraising and doesn’t have a large existing email list.

...[B]ig questions remain.

Among the biggest: How would he answer for his role in the Anita Hill hearings; for backing the 1994 Crime Bill, with harsh sentencing guidelines; and for supporting corporate-tilting financial legislation during his decades representing Delaware in the Senate? Still, Biden and his team look at the midterm results and think they’re proof that this may be more of a moment for him than people realize. More people won elections in November talking about protecting Obamacare, for example, than calling for Medicare for All.

Then there’s the Obama endorsement question. The two remain friends and speak on the phone. Even as the former president counseled other Democrats looking at presidential runs, he has generally avoided the topic of 2020 with Biden, and Biden hasn’t brought it up.

But if Biden runs, he’ll be running in part on the Obama-Biden record, which would raise the question of an endorsement. If Obama did endorse or even just strategically praised his former VP, he’d be putting his thumb on the scale in a way that backfired in 2016, when he did it for Clinton. Obama advisers stress that the former president thinks highly of Biden. But they deflected the question of whether this admiration would lead to an endorsement by saying they didn’t want to get ahead of the former vice president’s decision-making process.

Biden, meanwhile, is not assuming he’d get an endorsement, especially with Obama publicly and privately stressing that he does not feel like he should be the one deciding the future direction of the party.

Biden’s team has also been weighing how, if he runs, he’ll position himself within the field: as a statesman and party elder, but eager to avoid any of the inevitability that happened with Clinton. He would be attempting to run a first-among-equals campaign, which Biden allies think might be helped by all those in the Democratic chattering class who doubt he could pull it off in a changed party and political environment.

The people who believe in a Biden candidacy think it begins with his working- and middle-class white base. He also has African American support he earned from being part of Obama’s team, hero status within the LGBT community for jumping out front in support of gay marriage, and a connection to many young people nostalgic for the presidency they grew up with.

Warren G. Harding ran on many of the same premises that make a "compelling" case for Biden. Harding's 1920 campaign theme was "A Return to Normalcy," a reference to what life was like before the disruption of the Great War (World War I). Here's how Harding made his case: "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality." Biden can be expected to make a similar case after the disruption of Trump.

Harding was elected in 1920 and a series of scandals-- both political (Tea Pot Dome being the worst pre-Trump scandal) and personal (mistresses galore). He appointed pedatory bankster Andrew Mellon Treasury Secretary and Mellon immediately set out to cut taxes for the rich and for corporations. Like Trump, Harding was a moron who didn't understand policy and, also like Trump, had the attention span of a gnat. He explained to a friend that "I can't make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side, and they seem right, and then-- God!-- I talk to the other side, and they seem just as right." Eventually Harding appeared before the Senate himself and asked them to abolish the Excess Profits Tax in corporations while not giving a bonus to soldiers who fought in WWI. Congress passed the veterans bonus bill anyway but Harding vetoed it and his veto was narrowly sustained. His tariff bill was a feeding frenzy for corrupt lobbyists and equally corrupt politicians and eventually a disaster in international trade. At Mellon's insistence, Harding proposed bringing down the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 25%. And, also like Trump, Harding was an anti-union fanatic and pushed massive deregulation of business. His economic policies caused a quickie boost for the economy that eventually led to the Great Depression.

The 1922 midterms were a disaster for the GOP because of Harding's pro-business/pro-rich people policies. The Republicans lost a mind-boggling 82 seats in the House and 8 Senate seats. He died (age 57) a few months later. He is widely considered one of the 3 worst presidents in history. If Biden is elected I'll predict right now that he will be an even worse, though similar, president than Harding.

Democracy Is Comin'... To The U.S.A.

"The economy can only go down from here. The number of revelations from Robert Mueller can only go up," wrote Edward-Isaac Dovere in his Atlantic essay, 10 New Factors That Will Shape the 2020 Democratic Primary. And whether those two sentences excite you or depress you, he wants to warn you that they don't mean a Democratic candidate is a shoo-in for 2020. That's debatable but what isn't is that the primary race for the nomination "will be different from any that have come before" and that, as he put it so eloquently "the early polls being circulated will likely have as much relevance to the outcome of the race as learning Mandarin does to visiting Algeria." [That said, Sonatrach, Algeria's government-owned oil giant-- the largest company in Africa and 11th largest oil consortium in the world and employs 120,000 workers, producing 30% of Algeria's GNP jointly operates the Adrar refinery, near the village of Sbaa with the China National Petroleum Corporation. On top of that, China is playing an increasingly important and hands-on role in Algeria's economic development.]

Dovere lays out 10 factors he says will define the Democratic primary to choose a final combatant to take on Trump. First off will be Trump's role as an annoying ring-side commentator. He'll try to do as much damage to each candidate as he has already likely done to Elizabeth Warren. "The most predictable part of Trump’s reaction to the primary campaign: He’ll be tweeting about all the big candidates as they get in. He’ll throw out nicknames. He’ll insinuate. He’ll let loose rumors from the oppo files, forcing reporters to chase them down... Usually, an incumbent lets the other party’s primary finish before getting engaged in the race, but Trump isn’t the usual incumbent. The 2020 Democratic candidates will be introduced to the broader American public not just by the media and their own campaigns, but also by the man they’re hoping to run against."

And then there's the cost, especially now that "the primary calendar now puts California and Texas so early in the process, any campaign looking to survive will need to run simultaneously in both of those large states, along with the traditional early states and a handful of other big primaries. The candidates will need to run organizing operations on the ground across the country, and they’ll need to run commercials on the air." That's great news for Beto in Texas (and theoretically for Kamala Harris in California, although many California Democrats barely know who she is and she certainly isn't as popular a figure in California as Beto is in Texas). It also gives a huge advantage to candidates with the most name recognition: Bernie, Biden, Elizabeth Warren... and whomever Rachel Maddow decides to plaster all over MSNBC over and over, whether Amy Klobuchar, Eric Swalwell or... well, let's just remember how lucky we all are that Maddow's self-admitted choice for president, failed Missouri conservative Claire McCaskill, is off to the glue factory. "According to Democratic operatives who are planning campaigns," wrote Dovere, "to get to the first week of March, when Super Tuesday is held, it’ll take a minimum of roughly $40 million. On the high end, it could soar past $60 million. And they’ll need many millions more to take them through the rest of the campaign season." That gives an advantage to plutocrats Mike Bloomberg and John Delaney, as well as to the progressive billionaire "in" the race, Tom Steyer.

Monday night Lawrence O'Donnell had a panel on his show discussing the portnetial candidates. Joy Reid ventured that Kamala "ticks off all the boxes," but, alas, none-- not one-- of the boxes she listed have anything to do with being a good president. It was wall-to-wall identity politics: her gender, the unending list of races in her pedigree... all the kinds of things that excite political journalists for whom issues are just too damn complicated to talk about. Dovere wrote that "There’s never been a presidential-primary race with more than one female candidate. There’s never been a presidential-primary race with more than one black candidate." (At least he adds that "There’s never been a presidential-primary race with more than one candidate running from the left of the base.")

All those patterns will be broken in 2020. And that means the traditional calculus about who gets which voter groups is out the window.

Some of these changes could directly affect candidates’ thinking about the primary map. The heavily African-American Democratic electorate in South Carolina, for example, tends to favor black candidates and those with strong ties to the black community. But this time around, there will likely be at least two black candidates, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and others with a long history of support from black voters.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, the conventional wisdom is that local New England candidates have the edge. But this cycle, there could be several who come from neighboring states, such as Elizabeth Warren, who launched an exploratory committee on Monday, and Bernie Sanders.

And at the same time California is moving up in the primary calendar, this race could have four Californians-- Harris, Steyer, Eric Garcetti, and Eric Swalwell-- and others with strong support in the state, such as Sanders and Joe Biden. If no one can count on locking down any particular group or place, it could mean just about everything is up for grabs.

And then there's the undeniable fact that voters will want "to know where the 2020 candidates stand on impeachment questions, and there likely won’t be much room for anything but absolutism. Revelations from Mueller’s Russia investigation are likely to keep coming-- including indictments, pleas, and sentencing deals-- and the new House Democratic majority is planning multiple new lines of inquiry. If the past two years are a guide, the Democratic candidates’ responses to the latest Trump scandals will get much more attention than any policy rollouts they might prepare." Every campaign will have to come up with some kind of canned response that doesn't sound canned. "And," as Dovere reminds us, "any House members who are running for president would be in a position to vote on sending impeachment articles to the Senate, and any senators running would be in a position to vote on whether to keep their Republican opponent in office." Awkward.

And this seems really important: besides Biden, obviously, how many candidates are just going to be campaigning on a kind of status quo ante? "As they look ahead, will Democrats want a restoration of the last president’s policies, or a restart?" By now, we should all know where Bernie stands, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren too. Anyone else? Most are just the kinds of politicians who know how to pull their fingers out of their asses, put them in their mouths to wet them and hold them up to the wind. "For all the Democrats still gushing about Obama, many also see his presidency as full of missed opportunities: What if, for example, he’d included a public-insurance option in Obamacare? What if he had been harder on Wall Street after the crash?"

Then there's something special for the candidates like Bloomberg and others from-- at best-- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party:

The Republican electorate doesn’t tend toward soul-searching or taking out its leaders—at least not usually. This time around may prove a little different, as the remaining Never Trumpers reach out to Had-Enough Trumpers and There’s Got to Be Something Other Than Trumpers—who, along with the rest of the traditional Republican Party, have been left dizzy and confused by the president. Operatives are working hard to come up with a consensus choice to run against Trump. But so far, they have not come close to a consensus, let alone a choice.

For the Democratic candidates hoping to make it to the general election by picking up wayward Republican votes, that could mean engaging in the debate going on within the other party. They’ll have to answer several tactical questions: Do you agree with the Republicans attacking Trump? How do you do that without seeming sympathetic to the Republican arguments and leaving yourself vulnerable to the absolutism of some Democratic voters? How do you embrace the turmoil within the other party while also making the wider aspirational embrace that campaigns are going to be aiming for?

Will evil outside forces play a role... via hacking? Russia? China? The Saudis? Israel? Organized Crime? The Mercer family?

And then there what Dovere dubs "The X factor. Recession? War? Natural disaster? Presidential meltdown? Trump spent the holidays showing just how wild he can make things on his own. The months ahead could present any number of world- and history-turning events, and any number of reactions from the president will shape what follows them. More than just reacting, the people auditioning to replace Trump as commander in chief will have to come up with their own proposed solutions amid the flames of whatever is burning-- and will likely have to do so more than once."

The DCCC Has Another Terrible Idea-- Copying The 2006 Midterms, A Recipe For Catastrophe

When Politico needed a writer do do a story on the false narrative of how successful Rahm Emanuel was in 2006 and how it's the model for 2018, ultimate DC establishment shill Edward-Issac Dovere, the most superficial reporter in Washington, was the obvious choice. Mr. Superficial: "An unpopular president, the scent of corruption in Washington, a riled-up liberal base-- to House Democrats, 2018 is already looking like 2006 on overdrive. Now Democrats see the same ugly storm forming for Republicans that delivered them the majority 11 years ago, and they’re digging out the blueprint. The party is vastly expanding the number of districts it plans to contest, recruiting veterans and business owners to compete in conservative terrain as it did back then. Three senior House Democrats are soon heading to Chicago to seek advice from Rahm Emanuel, the party’s 2006 master strategist."

Before we look at the statistics of what actually happened, one apocryphal story. First a little from CNN: Rahm knew Foley was molesting underage pages a full year before he finally blew the whistle on the very day it would be too late for the Republicans to be able to replace Foley on the ballot. Blue America was working with a progressive union candidate at the time, Dave Lutrin, in the very red district. Suddenly, long before anyone had any inkling that Foley was about to be exposed, Rahm and Hoyer started pressuring Lutrin to drop out of the race. That was confusing; why would they care about this district? But they had recruited a wealthy Republican, Tim Mahoney, talked him into switching his registration to "D" and promised to clear the field so he wouldn't have a primary. Long story short: Lutrin dropped out, Rahm leaked the Foley story, Mahoney won, Mahoney joined the Blue Dogs and spent his miserable one term in Congress voting with the Republicans and chasing women, Mahoney got caught up in a sex scandal, Mahoney was defeated in 2008. Dovere forgot to mention that one-- or any of the stories that challenge the establishment narrative he is helping his beloved crooked conservaDems to push.

One more thing before the statistics: primary season, 2006. Rahm was on the warpath against progressive and grassroots candidates coast to coast. And when the progressive candidates defeated his pathetic corporate and Wall Street shills, he abandoned their districts to the Republicans with a vengeance. But from Carol Shea-Porter (NH) and John Hall (NY) in the northeast to Jerry McNerney in California's Central Valley, the candidates Rahm worked so hard to sabotage, beat his candidates and then went on to beat Republican incumbents without his help. That's not part of Dovere's narrative either.

There were 30 seats that flipped from Republican to Democrat that year:

• Arizona Blue Dog Harry Mitchell replaced GOP arch-villain JD Hayworth. Mitchell was defeated in 2010
• Arizona Blue Dog Gabby Gifford won an open Tucson seat and was shot, replaced by Blue Dog Ron Barber, who was defeated in 2014 after one Republican-lite term
• Grassroots Dem Jerry McNerney defeated powerful GOP chairman and is still serving his California district in Congress
• Colorado New Dem won an open seat in Denver's suburbs and is still serving
• Connecticut New Dem Joe Courtney defeated GOP incumbent Rob Simmons and is still serving
• Connecticut New Dem Chris Murphy defeated GOP incumbent Nancy Johnson and was later elected to the Senate
• Florida New Dem Ron Klein beat GOP incumbent Clay Shaw and lost his seat in 2010
• Florida "ex"-Republican won Foley's open seat and was immediately defeated in 2008
• Indiana Blue Dog Joe Donnelly defeated GOP incumbent Chris Chocola and would have been defeated in 2012 but tried a hail Mary pass, running for the US Senate against a far right lunatic who lost
• Indiana Blue Dog Brad Ellsworth defeated GOP incumbent John Hostettler and was defeated in 2010
• Indiana Blue Dog Baron Hill defeated GOP incumbent Mike Sodrel and was defeated in 2010
• Iowa populist Bruce Braley won an open seat and was defeated for the US Senate in 2014
• Iowa populist Dave Loebsack defeated GOP incumbent Jim Leach and is still serving
• Kansas conservaDem (rejected by the Blue Dogs when she tried to join) Nancy Boyda beat far right incumbent Jim Ryun and was defeated in 2008
• Kentucky progressive Democrat John Yarmuth-- not a Rahm candidate-- defeated GOP incumbent Anne Northup and is still serving
• Minnesota Democrat Tim Walz defeated GOP incumbent Gil Gutknecht and is still serving
• Despite DCCC sabotage, New Hampshire grassroots progressive Carol Shea-Porter defeated GOP incumbent Jeb Bradley and was re-elected last year despite Trump winning her district
• New Hampshire New Dem Anne Kuster defeated GOP incumbent Charlie Bass and is still serving
• New York grassroots progressive John Hall defeated GOP incumbent Sue Kelly and was beaten in 2010
• New York Blue Dog Kirsten Gillibrand beat GOP incumbent John Sweeney and was appointed dot the Senate to replace Hillary Clinton in 2009
• NY Blue Dog Mike Arcuri won an open seat and was beaten in 2010
• Anti-immigrant North Carolina Blue Dog Heath Shuler beat scandal-ridden (like Trump, heavily involved with shady Russian banks) GOP incumbent Charlie Taylor and avoided defeat in 2012 by retiring
• Ohio Blue Dog Zack Space defeated scandal-plagued GOP incumbent Bob Ney. Hey went to prison and Space was defeated in 2010
• Pennsylvania Blue Dog Jason Altmire defeated GOP incumbent Melissa Hart and was defeated for reelection in 2012
• Non-Rahm candidate Joe Sestak defeated GOP incumbent Curt Weldon and left the seat in 2010 to run for the Senate
• Pennsylvania New Dem Patrick Murphy defeated GOP incumbent Mike Fitzpatrick and was defeated for reelection in 2010
•Pennsylvania Blue Dog Chris Carney defeated GOP incumbent Don Sherwood and was defeated for reelection in 2010
• Texas Blue Dog Nick Lampson won the open Tom DeLay seat and was defeated for reelection in 2008
• Ciro Rodriguez defeated GOP incumbent Henry Bonilla in a run-off but was defeated in 2010
• Wisconsin Democrat Steve Kagan won the Green Bay/Appleton open seat and was defeated in 2010.

In other words, the vast majority of Rahm's much-touted-- to this day, at least by a numbskull like Devore-- recruits were so terrible that when their constituents realized they had been tricked into electing Republican-lite candidates, they didn't show up at the polls for them and they were defeated. And that's exactly what the DCCC is literally planning on doing in 2018-- electing bunch of rich self-funders, "ex"-Republicans, Blue Dogs, New Dems, identity politics garbage candidates... most of whom will lose in the 2022 midterms. They never learn-- not the corrupt, dumb establishment hack politicians and certainly not their imbecile stenographers at the political trade press.

Yesterday the DCCC announced that they had added 20 new "target" districts, most of which they will never actually fight in-- but it looks good for donors. These are the 20 new ones:

• AZ-06- David Schweikert
• CA-22- Devin Nunes
• CA-50- Duncan Hunter
• FL-06- Ron DeSantis
• FL-16- Vern Buchanan
• GA-07- Rob Woodall
• IL-12- Mike Bost
• IN-02- Jackie Walorski
• MI-01- Jack Bergman
• MI-06- Fred Upton
• MO-02- Ann Wagner
• NC-02- George Holding
• NM-02- Steve Pearce
• NY-21- Elise Stefanik
• NY-23- Tom Reed
• OH-10- Mike Turner
• OH-14- Dave Joyce
• VA-05- Tom Garrett
• VA-07- Dave Brat
• WV-03- open

I just asked a top DC consultant what he thinks of the list and he laughed and predicted they won't win a single one of these seats. "I wonder if they plan to campaign on transgender youth in Snowshoe and Beckley in that West Virginia district," he said unkindly.

This is their whole list of original districts they announced on January 30, which includes many districts they will never contest:

·         AL-02- Martha Roby
·         AR-02- French Hill
·         AZ-02- Martha McSally
·         CA-10- Jeff Denham
·         CA-21- David Valadao
·         CA-25- Steve Knight
·         CA-39- Ed Royce
·         CA-45- Mimi Walters
·         CA-48- Dana Rohrabacher
·         CA-49- Darrell Issa
·         CO-03- Scott Tipton
·         CO-06- Mike Coffman
·         FL-18- Brian Mast
·         FL-25- Mario Diaz-Balart
·         FL-26- Carlos Curbelo
·         FL-27- open
·         GA-06- open
·         IA-01- Rod Blum
·         IA-03- David Young
·         IL-06- Peter Roskam
·         IL-13- Rodney Davis
·         IL-14- Randy Hultgren
·         KS-02- open
·         KS-03- Kevin Yoder
·         KY-06- Andy Barr
·         ME-02- Bruce Poliquin
·         MI-07- Tim Walberg
·         MI-08- Mike Bishop
·         MI-11- Dave Trott
·         MN-02- Jason Lewis
·         MN-03- Erik Paulsen
·         NC-08- Richard Hudson
·         NC-09- Robert Pittenger
·         NC-13- Ted Budd
·         NE-02- Don Bacon
·         NJ-02- Frank LoBiondo
·         NJ-03- Tom MacArthur
·         NJ-07- Leonard Lance
·         NJ-11- Rodney Frelinghuysen
·         NY-01- Lee Zeldin
·         NY-11- Dan Donovan
·         NY-19- John Faso
·         NY-22- Claudia Tenney
·         NY-24- John Katko
·         NY-27- Chris Collins
·         OH-01- Steve Chabot
·         OH-07- Bob Gibbs
·         PA-06- Ryan Costello
·         PA-07- Pat Meehan
·         PA-08- Brian Fitzpatrick
·         PA-16- Lloyd Smucker
·         TX-07- John Culberson
·         TX-23- Will Hurd
·         TX-32- Pete Sessions
·         VA-02- Scott Taylor
·         VA-10- Barbara Comstock
·         WA-03- Jaime Herrera Beutler
·         WA-08- David Reichert
·         WV-02- Alex Mooney

Please notice... no Wisconsin seats; no Paul Ryan, no Glenn Gothman, no Sean Duffy... Blue America will have to take care of some of that for them. Get to know Randy Bryce, the iron worker and union activist putting together a campaign to take down Speaker Ryan, no matter what the DCCC decides to do to protect Ryan's purple swing-district seat again.

And if you want to help real progressives win, please check out the candidates at the ActBlue thermometer on the right, some in districts the DCCC is targeting and some in districts the DCCC is ignoring, none, though, who are the kinds of corporate shills the DCCC prefers to back.