Who Is Most Likely To Knock Himself-- Or Herself-- Out Of Contention Tonight? Biden Or Gillibrand? Fingers Crossed: Both?

Passing The Torch by Nancy Ohanian

The media is trying to stoke what the Washington Post called explosive faceoffs tonight and tomorrow. I guess that's better than when Hearst sank the Maine to start a war with Spain in order to sell newspapers. The media today knows it isn't likely, but what they want most is a brawl between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie. More likely they'll get a brawl-- "a rematch"-- between Status Quo Joe and Kamala tomorrow. "This time," teases the AP, "Harris, the lone black woman in the field, will be joined by another top black candidate, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who also has been an outspoken critic of Biden. Booker had denounced Biden for his recollections of the “civility” of working in a Senate that included white supremacists and for his leadership on a 1994 crime bill that the New Jersey senator assailed as a mass incarceration agent in the black community."

Biden vs. Harris has quickly become the defining candidate-on-candidate juxtaposition in the early months of the contest.

Although of different sexes, races and generations, the two rivals share the same broad path to the nomination, particularly the broad coalition of white and black voters necessary to win the Southern primaries that dominate the early months of the nominating calendar.

...To be clear, Biden aides say Harris’ broadsides sparked a new aggressiveness and determination for the former vice president, and he’s gone on a policy offensive in recent weeks, most notably on health care.

A proponent of adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges, Biden almost certainly will try to pin down Harris on her support for Sanders’ “Medicare for All” proposal. Harris, though, has stopped short of Sanders’ explicit call for abolishing private insurance, and she insists that the plan can be paid for without any tax hikes on the middle class.

Biden and Harris will be joined on the stage July 31 by Booker; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; Colorado Gov. Michael Bennet; former Obama Cabinet member Julián Castro; New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand; Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard; Washington Gov. Jay Inslee; and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

Something tells me Tulsi has no intention of being someone who "was also there." And Gillibrand's desperate camp has already leaked that Gillibrand-- who is at 0.5% in the RealClearPolitics polling averages and has nothing to lose-- will attack Biden as a sexist tomorrow. Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan for Axios: "They don't want to talk about it, but the struggling Kirsten Gillibrand campaign appears to have spent a lot of time Googling Joe Biden as of late. The New York senator has publicly-- and cryptically-- alluded to unnamed Democratic candidates who "do not believe necessarily that it's a good idea that women work outside the home." The remark, which she's declined to clarify, has generated fervid speculation... [A]n account on the site newspapers.com that appears to be linked to her campaign has been gathering news articles about the former vice president's stance on the child tax credit in the '80s. (The newspaper.com account and related Twitter account appear to have been taken down after we approached the Gillibrand campaign for comment.) The account belongs to somebody called wilcox8405. Gillibrand employs a researcher named Alexandra Wilcox... Wilcox8405 clipped these Biden articles on July 11 and 12, indicating that Gillibrand's team has been preparing this attack on Biden for more than 2 weeks. When we asked Gillibrand's campaign about all of this, spokesperson Meredith Kelly said: 'Kirsten believes we need to have a broader and more intentional conversation about valuing women in this country and even this primary, and she intends to do so in the coming days. Stay tuned.'"

The big picture: Gillibrand appears to be adopting a Kill Biden strategy that's popular among Democrats preparing for the second round of debates in Detroit this week. Several campaigns and strategists told Axios they see an opportunity to damage Biden and boost their own fortunes as Harris did when she hit Biden on desegregation in the first debate.

Gillibrand turned herself into a generally hated figure after her ugly, self-serving attack on Al Franken. She hasn't figured that out yet and it's likely that her attack on Biden-- whether it hurts Biden, falls flat, or actually helps Biden-- will destroy whatever is left of her big waste-of-money campaign. She better hope she doesn't get a strong primary challenger next time her Senate seat is up.

The stakes are high for Status Quo Joe. If he does as bad tonight as he did last time, he'll glide down towards oblivion. If he does even worse than he did in the first debate, it could signal a quick end to a campaign that should have never begun. One Biden staffer said that they "know folks are going to want to take shots. He's fully prepared to talk about all of his record. He’s not going to let his record be mischaracterized." His problem, of course, is that no one is mischaracterizing his record. His record is even worse than anyone is saying. And in the age of Google search and fact-checking agencies, relying on what he's always relied on for his whole career-- lying-- isn't going to work as well as it used to.

Team Todd noted that "it’s unlikely he can afford another rough outing, which would only increase the chatter that he might not be up for the rigors of a general-election fight against President Trump. And if that happens, that could produce maybe the most destabilizing event so far in the 2020 Democratic race, creating openings for several other Dem contenders... [I]f you’re Joe Biden and a Democratic Party that’s anxious about its prospects versus Trump, you can’t have two [bad debate performances] in a row."

Politico was even more brutal is assessing what Biden is facing tonight. Most people don't think he's got what it takes to get out from under what was always inevitable. It's as though his well-paid campaign advisors and consultants are propping up a political corpse just so the pay checks keep flowing. It's really, really disgusting.

Not long after his anemic performance in the first presidential debate, as his poll numbers began to slide, Joe Biden had conversations with nervous donors and personally assured them his campaign was on track.

“People were raising serious questions about his ability to be very aggressive against Trump,” said one person who spoke with Biden.“He’s listening. He seems to be more sure of himself after that first fiasco. I think he realizes now that he screwed up.”

Many Democrats-- including his own donors and admirers-- continue to question whether he’s capable of recovering from a damaging first performance. They wonder whether he can exercise the discipline necessary to execute a debate plan on Wednesday, when several rivals will have an interest in taking him down.

Seldom has a candidate so well-equipped for a debate projected so much uncertainty.

“The big question he has to resolve is if he’s up to this thing, if he’s vigorous and if he’s engaged,” said David Axelrod, a former Obama advisor.

...Biden walked straight into Kamala Harris’ ambush, flailed awkwardly as he attempted to defend his record on busing and civil rights and looked anything but a front-runner.

It served as a vivid reminder of the former vice president’s headstrong ways and bad habits, acquired over decades in office. Sources who have worked to prepare him for debates in past years say he has a propensity for foregoing the advice of professionals and going off-script. It all creates an aura of uncertainty around Biden, a problem for a contender whose candidacy is built around the premise that he is the safe choice among a sprawling field of Democrats.

“It’s not like he’s willfully defiant of it. He just kind of is impulsive, in the moment. I think he thinks he’s grasped onto something glib or clever, and it turns out it’s not a good way to deliver,” said a Democratic consultant who has worked with Obama and Biden but would only speak on the condition of anonymity. “I think it’s grounded in an impulsiveness, it’s just kind of the way he is. He’s always had this issue, [today] it’s compounded by the combination of being just a little bit out of step with the contemporary theme and discussion.”

There was little evidence of the prep work that went into Biden’s first debate appearance-- preparation that drew on the talents of former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm; Anita Dunn, who helped prepare Barack Obama for debates; and Ron Klain, who served as a top debate preparation advisor to presidents Obama and Clinton and nominees Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton.

There was also little evidence of Sheehan’s fingerprints. The veteran debate coach is known for emphasizing the theatrical aspects of the event; how to use body language or hand gestures to project a message of strength, engagement or warmth-- areas within Biden’s comfort zone. Sheehan also focuses on how to avoid political kryptonite and return to safety.

The Democratic consultant, who saw Sheehan in action during sessions preparing Obama to debate Mitt Romney in 2012, said the top debate prepper helps provide a visual guide by drawing a triangle on a board and explaining that each of the corners represents a distinctive safety base of that person’s message. Those are the areas the candidate is to return to in times of doubt or duress.

But Biden didn’t seem to find many safe harbors during the debate. He even abruptly cut himself off at one point, saying: “My time is up.”

It is-- and he should have realized that before he decided to put himself and his ridiculously out-sized repulsive ego ahead of the national interest, not to mention the Democratic Party's. These are not times that call for a Warren G. Harding Back to Normalcy strategy-- not for a campaign and, more important, not for a post-Trump government.

Kamala is up tomorrow but Bernie wasn't thinking about debate stages when he lashed out yesterday at her brand new, Bidenesque, nightmarish, disqualifying excuse for a health plan. "Medicare for All," he wrote, "has the support of a majority of voters and huge parts of the Democratic Party. So it’s no surprise that other candidates for president want to say they also support Medicare for All. Sen. Kamala Harris released a plan today that her campaign calls 'Medicare for All'-- you can call it anything you want, but you can’t call that plan Medicare for All. Her plan is centered around privatizing Medicare, enriching insurance executives and introducing more corporate greed and profiteering into the Medicare system-- and even then, waiting for 10 years before any changes happen. Medicare for All means Medicare for All. Not more private insurance. Not more profits for denying care. And we cannot wait to fix our broken system... Our campaign is rejecting money from health insurance and drug company executives. We don’t want to have the support of people who profit off of our broken healthcare system. And anyone who wants to fix that system must do the same. The time is long overdue to guarantee healthcare to every man, woman and child as a right, not a privilege, under a true Medicare for All system."

At least there can no longer be any confusion about which wing of the Democratic Party Kamala is flapping for, or, at least, which wing she gets her consultants and her ideas from. Anyone who was wondering if she might be OK... now you know.

Gillibrand Is Better Off Polling Less Than 1%

Had someone asked me which presidential candidate has a political father who's in a crazy religionist cult, I would have said "Tulsi Gabbard," and I would have been correct... but not complete. Did you know that another candidate-- also who isn't going anywhere in this race-- has a father connected to a insane cult, an insane cult her step-mother is involved with too? Kirsten Gillibrand has mostly managed to avoid any public discussion of NXIVM (pronounced "nexium"). Unlike Tulsi, who was basically raised inside her father's crazy cult, Gillibrand seems to have succeeded in keeping away from her father's. Don't worry; neither is getting anywhere near the presidency or vice-presidency. Nationally, Tulsi is polling at 1.0% and Gillibrand is polling at 0.5%.

Presumably, if Gillibrand ever got beyond 1% the story of her father's cult-problem would make its way into the media. Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen wrote about the cult in terms of Gillibrand's anti-Franken rampage because... well, it's, among other things, a sex slave cult... and the sex slaves are all women.

Gillibrand is the daughter of longtime Albany lobbyist and political fixer Doug Rutnik... Rutnik, who divorced Gillibrand's mother, also served as the attorney for the NXIVM sex slave cult, which maintains its headquarters in Clifton Park, 20 miles north of Albany, and branded female sex slaves with cult leader [Keith] Raniere's initials. Raniere also required his female members to submit to photographs of their vaginas, "collateral" he would then make public in the event they failed to obey his orders.

For Gillibrand to have called for Franken's resignation over a few innocuous hand gestures and comments, which Gillibrand believed constituted serious sexual harassment unworthy of a senator, makes the junior senator from New York a paragon of hypocrisy.

Rutnik received $25,000 a month from NXIVM for his legal services... NXIVM also had Trump's close friend and adviser Roger Stone, a notorious Republican dirty tricks operative, on its payroll... It is not just Rutnik who has had a relationship with NXIVM. It turns out that his wife, Gwen Bellcourt, Gillibrand's stepmother, was deeply involved with NXIVM through its president, Nancy Salzman, a neuro-linguistic programming "nurse."

Big League Politics ran a piece about the scandal 3 months ago. (Since then, Raniere and Salzman were found guilty, about a month ago, on a wide array of charges, some horrific.)

Kirsten Gillibrand’s lobbyist father Doug Rutnik was employed by the NXIVM sex cult, according to court documents.

An eyewitness describes how Gillibrand sat at the NXIVM table at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser.

“The very first time I ever met Gillibrand she was at an event for Hillary Clinton in the Hall of Springs in the State Park. This was in 2006. I was at a table with a Russian friend and Mike Roohan and his wife. I was on the Democratic committee at the time and was given two comp tickets. Gillibrand came up to me introduced herself and said she was running against John Sweeney. This was before all the stories of his drunken behavior came out. He was still congressman kickass at that time. I promised my support and wished her well. i than commented to Mike that with her baby voice and demeanor that she was a lightweight. Boy was I wrong. But the kicker was when the mixing was over and Clinton went to speak. Gillibrand sat with one of the front tables. Yeah the three front VIP tables were all brought by NXIVM and she was sitting with Nancy Salzman. You can quote me on that,” said witness John Tighe.

Nancy Salzman has pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy while her daughter Lauren Salzman admitted to enslaving a woman, stating in court, “I knowingly and intentionally harbored Jane Doe 4, a woman whose identity is known to me, in a room in the home in the Northern District of New York” and “threatened to deport Jane Doe 4 back to Mexico if she did not complete labor requested by myself and others.”

Former NXIVM employee Frank Parlato provided Big League Politics with copies of the court documents in NXIM’s suit against Rutnik, which prove Rutnik’s employment by the group... “Her father Doug Rutnik came to work as a consultant for NXIVM…he was fired, they sued him, and he had to pay them $100,000,” Parlato said, referring Gillibrand’s father.

Parlato is the NXIVM whistleblower who blew the lid off the case, including the revelation that NXIVM leader Keith Raniere’s cult was branding women with his initials.

“Her father’s wife, her stepmother, was also a member of NXIVM... Doug got her into the cult, Gillibrand’s father got Gillibrand’s future stepmother into the cult. Doug left the cult because he was sued. Clare Bronfman after her father was sued donated money to Gillibrand. Gillibrand accepted it.”

“One is inclined to call her a liar,” Parlato says of Gillibrand.

Why Is Gillibrand Such A Colossal Flop?

Kirsten Gillibrand already re-started her campaign launch-- twice. It didn't do a bit of good either time. No does the whining about how everyone is ignoring her because she's a woman... as Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and even Amy Klobuchar leave her in the dust. Her polling averages are putrid and it's a joke she's even being allowed into the first debate. The latest RealClearPolitics national average of polls shows her at 0.8%, trying to catch up to Andrew Yang. Her average in Iowa is worse-- 0.6%-- and it's really awful in New Hampshire... just 0.3%, even worse than Frackenlooper! And she's not even doing as well as that in Massachusetts, a super Tuesday state where she's unlikely to pick up a single delegate. And in her own state, New York... oy. Bad polling, few small donors and almost no endorsements from her colleagues.

Cory Booker won the endorsement of all 11 New Jersey members of Congress and the other U.S. Senator + the governor, lieutenant governor, Senate president and General Assembly speaker. Contrast that with Gillibrand, who managed to wrangle an endorsement from Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who has her own primary troubles because of her coziness with Wall Street banksters. Although she hasn't made a formal endorsement, the furthest right on any statewide official in New York, the state's putrid lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, gave Gillibrand a maxed out donation.

Her campaign's latest incredibly lame excuse for its failure to win any endorsements: "the campaign does not expect Gillibrand to be an establishment candidate and its strategy reflects that." Newsday reported that a national party official from New York speaking on the condition of anonymity said Gillibrand hasn't generated much good will among fellow politicos in the state. Another official, also speaking anonymously, noted that Gillibrand rose to her post more as an individual than as a team player. Small donors have stayed away and she stopped taking money from Wall Street and corporate PACs when she was severely criticized for doing so but... she transferred $10 million in that kind of sewer money from her Senate account to her current presidential campaign.

And that brings us to Edward-Isaac Dovere's weekend piece in The Atlantic, This Isn’t Going According to Plan for Kirsten Gillibrand. He finally said aloud what no journalists allow themselves to write: everyone hates her. "This isn’t going well for Gillibrand," he wrote. "She has failed at some basics. For someone who’s always been a voracious fundraiser, she raised just $3 million in the first quarter of the year, less than half of what South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg raised. And she was weeks behind the self-help author Marianne Williamson and the automation alarmist Andrew Yang in getting the 65,000 donors needed to guarantee her a spot on the Democratic debate stage later this month. (Her campaign announced she finally passed that mark last weekend.) Gillibrand is a United States senator from New York, and this is the best she can do. A mess, maybe. But it’s no more of a mess than at least a dozen other candidates who are underperforming just as much, or worse. If all the candidates who, like Gillibrand, haven’t broken 2 percent in the polls were subject to as much coverage about how terribly they were doing, there wouldn’t be room for coverage of anything else."

This is the story Gillibrand tells about herself, and she tells it consistently: “I have always been underestimated-- not only by potential opponents, but by the media,” she said in a 2010 interview, right after she’d dispatched what seemed likely to be a serious primary challenge from a former representative. “It will be the tale of the tortoise versus the hare, and I am the tortoise. Every campaign I’ve ever had, it’s always been part of my story, and I was not helped by many people who should have helped me,” she told me when we sat down briefly in April at a Friendly’s outside Concord, New Hampshire. “I am an underdog, and I’ve always been in every race I’ve ever had, and I win people over based on the merits,” she told me last week in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The potential reasons for why her campaign hasn’t caught on are seemingly endless. People working with her campaign acknowledge that she clearly underestimated how much her being out front in calling for Al Franken to resign from the Senate was going to haunt her-- even though that was a year and a half ago, and despite the fact that all the other senators in the race called for him to go too. Among primary voters and partisan media outlets that put a premium on purity, no one is letting go of her past pro-gun or anti-immigrant positions. The media spotlight she gets in New York and Washington only makes it more shocking when insiders in those cities realize she’s largely unknown to almost everyone else.

Gillibrand claims to be not surprised that big donors haven’t been as supportive as she would have wanted. She claims to be not surprised that she’s been slow to gain a following. She claims to be not surprised that she seems stuck in a time loop, with almost every event and interview including questions about Franken and how she’s changed her position on gun control since running in her first House race. “They don’t know me,” she reasons, so they’re going for the easy attacks on her, but “once I get the chance to speak about who I am, what I’ve done, and what I intend to do, I believe the questions will change, and what people know about me will change.”

...What many had expected was for Gillibrand to blast into the race as the candidate of women’s empowerment, seizing on the #MeToo movement and the greater moment of female activism that has been driving Democratic victories. That’s tough in a race with six female candidates, including three other prominent female senators, but it’s also a theme that Gillibrand has largely left alone until now, deciding that because people are so concerned with electability, she’d focus instead on how she’s been able to win in tough districts and get bills passed.

...I’d asked people who have worked for and around Gillibrand what it is that makes people not like her. The answers all included some mention of how much of a striver she is and how clear her ambition is—a complaint laced with notes of sexism that critics have had about her for years, though particularly weird in a presidential race, in which over-the-top ambition and ego are prerequisites.

She's still being called to answer for her Franken crap and still immediately gets out the shovel and starts digging herself in deeper. Watch her on Fox, where she came across angry and mean. She didn't win any converts, even if some people applauded a bit.

I've Thought About It A Lot And I've Concluded Gillibrand Would Be A Better President Than Trump. Will Fox Viewers Agree Tonight?

One of the reasons Kirsten Gillibrand almost never gets beyond 1% in any national or early-state polling is because Democratic primary voters know her mostly as an opportunist who stabbed Al Franken in the bank to advance her own mediocre career. That factor isn't likely to matter much to TV viewers tonight who tune in to see her Dubuque Iowa town fall on Fox. Fox viewers were never Franken fans. And, in fact, many years ago-- when she was still a right-wing anti-immigrant/pro-NRA congresswoman from upstate New York-- Gillibrand was a frequent and popular Fox News guest, always willing to be the Democrat going on air to oppose Democratic initiatives and back conservative ones. But then she did a 180 in return for a Senate appointment she would never have won, and is now far more likely to be on with Rachel Maddow than with Sean Hannity. Chris Wallace hosts her town hall tonight. Will theFox fans like her-- or be turned off by her views on abortion? Unlike any of the other women in the race, she tends to come off as a bitter man hater. Even progressive men pick up on it and get turned off to her. Imagine if Fox viewers detect that in her tonight!

"I think it's a great opportunity for me," the me-me-me-me-me candidate told Fox. "I want to talk to voters where they are. I want to be able to go into every living room and make sure voters know who I am, why I feel the call to run, and why I believe I'm the best candidate to run this country and to bring this country back together again." It drives her crazy to see McKensey Pete, Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang-- let alone a gaggle of mere congressmen-- pull ahead of her in the polls. On Friday, Tim Alberta did a Politico Magazine cover story on her: Kirsten Gillibrand's Failure To Launch. Insiders all thought she would have been a top tier candidate and are scratching their heads today about why she hasn't made any headway among Democratic primary voters. Many people Fox News viewers will like her more. Alberta reported that she raised less money than any of the 6 senators running for the comination-- even less than a conservative nothing-burger like Michael Bennet. "Given her anemic polling since entering the race," he wrote, "Gillibrand’s feeble fundraising performance fanned skepticism about her viability to earn a nomination that Democrats believe will require close to $100 million in hard money raised. But at this point, Gillibrand isn’t focused on winning the primary. She’s worried about surviving the next few months." She's near the bottom of the national averages. There are only half a dozen candidates who are averaging less than half a percent according to Real Clear Politics:

• Gillibrand- 0.3%
• Bill de Blasio- 0.3%
• Frackenlooper- 0.3%
• Seth Moulton- 0.2%
• Steve Bullock- 0.2%
• Mike Bennet- 0.2%

Everyone else running is polling better than Gillibrand, including John Delaney, Andrew Yang, Julián Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, Tim Ryan and Tulsi Gabbard. In the newest Monmouth poll of New Hampshire primary voters, she's polling less than 1%. She's spent more time in New Hampshire than in New York-- and she's wasted millions of dollars on TV advertising in the state. "Gillibrand," wrote Alberta, has failed to achieve liftoff as a presidential prospect. She has not broken 2 percent in a single national poll since officially declaring her candidacy in mid-March, and her 0.4 percent average in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of surveys places her behind the likes of Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard and even geeky long shot Andrew Yang."

In a conversation for Politico’s Off Message podcast, the New York senator vacillated between insinuating that she is being treated differently because of her gender and arguing that Americans are ready for a female president.

“Hillary won the election. She won the popular vote by 3 million votes, and you have to remember, she was definitely the most qualified candidate we’d ever had running for president,” Gillibrand says. “And, but for Russia, but for Comey, but for misogyny, but for a lot of things, she would have won. So, I believe that of course this country is ready to elect a woman president, but they need to know what we’re running on and what we’re for, and why we’re running and why we think we’re the best candidate.”

Yet Gillibrand has struggled to communicate this to voters. Things have gotten so grim for her that recently, a high-ranking campaign aide to Cory Booker-- Gillibrand’s opponent for the Democratic nomination-- tweeted that she had donated to the New York senator’s campaign and encouraged others to follow suit. This was done, the aide noted, to ensure that Gillibrand’s “important perspective is on the debate stage.” To other Democrats, this looked less like an act of short-term benevolence than one of long-term strategy: The historically large field will soon begin to be winnowed, and when it does, some of the surprising early exits will make for valuable endorsements. No name has surfaced in those conversations of late more frequently than Gillibrand.

How did it come to this? How did one of America’s best-financed senators come to rely on charity and presidential pan-handling, begging for a dollar at a time just to stay alive? How did one of Washington’s most recognizable women find herself buried in the polls beneath a number of less prominent men? And how does she breathe life into her campaign before it’s too late?

...Gillibrand claims, like all candidates do, that she’s having the time of her life campaigning for the highest office in the land. And yet her cheerful demeanor cannot mask the annoyance she is feeling-- with the media, with the gender dynamics central to the race, and with the Democratic Party itself.

Gillibrand clearly doesn’t think much of the DNC’s rules governing the debates. Even before the national party announced the stricter criteria candidates would need to meet to qualify for the third and fourth debates this fall-- effectively putting an expiration date on more than half of the Democratic candidacies-- Gillibrand took issue with the emphasis on early polling to shape a process that has commenced far earlier that it once did.

“The last couple of presidential candidates who were Democrats who won, or even are nominees, you had to look at where they were at this early stage. I think somebody looked up where Bill Clinton was at this stage. He had 1 percent in the polls and had 30 percent name recognition in Iowa. So, like, it takes time,” Gillibrand said. “And with 20 candidates, it might actually take longer … because for each one of us to have a chance to be heard it’s going to take time. I mean, even the debates alone, if we get more than five minutes each on that stage, that’ll be surprising. So, you’re really even not even going to have more than a few minutes to talk about what you’re for and why you’re running and what your views are for the country.”

Gillibrand argues that both of the debate thresholds, polling and unique contributions, “are related to name recognition.” But she certainly is better known than the likes of Yang, or Williamson, or Gabbard, or Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, the latest 2020 candidate to “double qualify” by reaching both qualification milestones. Working the referees this early isn’t a sign of strategic savvy; it’s a sign of desperation.

Asked about the pressure she’s feeling, Gillibrand said it’s “created because of the DNC’s framework that they’ve put the candidates under,” which she suggests isn’t the “natural” or “normal” role for a national party. Asked whether she disagrees with the DNC’s rules, she replied, “I’m not sure. I don’t know that they’re serving the public well.”

Meanwhile, compounding Gillibrand’s frustration is her fraught relationship with the political issue that has defined her ascent: gender.

When I asked whether it was problematic to have so many white men-- Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg-- soaking up the media spotlight, she replied, “Yeah, I think it’s problematic. …. We have amazing women candidates, amazing candidates of color, and hopefully through this process we will lift our voices up and be heard.”

The look on her face when I mentioned O’Rourke’s appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair was beyond description. “Unusual,” she finally mustered, biting her lip and her tongue at once, a litany of curse words no doubt suppressed underneath her smirk. “Never seen it before.”

And when I asked Gillibrand to name the worst part of running for president, she replied, “I don’t want to tell you.” She added that “it’s not an appropriate thing for me to say,” then promised to tell me later, off the record.

After hearing the off-the-record answer, I pressed for a sanitized version, which she offered in the most measured of tones. “The one thing that’s annoying to me is how many times reporters ask you about our male colleagues. Who cares? I’m running for president. I want to tell you what my vision is, why I’m running, and why I’m going to win,” she said. “I think reporters like yourself, who are super smart and super careful, will always ask me what I think about the male colleagues. Are you asking the male colleagues what they think about us? Probably not.”

This is the hang-up of Gillibrand’s campaign. Never has the Democratic electorate been more exercised by issues of identity, and never has gender been more central to the national conversation-- politically, culturally, socioeconomically and otherwise. And yet Gillibrand, despite having very little to lose at this point, remains cautious in interviews and on the stump-- aiming for broad appeal instead of a niche brand, trying to draw in support from every cell of the party rather than cultivating a base and building out.

At every stop in New Hampshire, the senator was careful to modulate her answers and her tone in ways that would render her universally acceptable. She talks of how she dominated the blue boroughs of New York City-- but also how she carried the state’s red, rural counties. She believes Trump is a “coward”-- but she wants to calm the vitriolic nature of our politics. Gillibrand didn’t shy away from a single proposal-- whether it was expanding the Supreme Court, increasing funding for indigenous groups or signing a breast cancer-related pledge-- that voters asked her about.

Yet when it came to addressing the gender bias she believes is inherent to politics-- a belief shared by many younger progressive women, a sizable chunk of the Democratic coalition-- Gillibrand held back. Had her off-the-record answer been published, it would have gone viral overnight, racking up hundreds of thousands of clicks and instantly erasing any concerns about her small-donor disparity. But Gillibrand chose to be careful. Having won in a red district, having persuaded older, whiter, Republican audiences to support her in the past, she believes she can do so again.

The problem for Gillibrand is, the polls and the fundraising numbers show that this cautious approach isn't getting her anywhere. The over-50 male demographic in Iowa and New Hampshire is likely to lean toward candidates such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or perhaps even Elizabeth Warren, whose paeans to economic populism resonate with the dwindling remnant of blue-collar Democrats. The market Gillibrand was poised to corner-- after becoming Washington’s leading voice on women’s rights issues and embracing the risk of calling for Al Franken’s resignation from the Senate-- was that of the young, female voters who have mobilized the backlash to Donald Trump’s presidency.

Instead, in an overflowing field with more than 20 candidates slicing and dicing the electorate every which way, Gillibrand seems to believe that she can’t afford to alienate any one bloc of voters.

If the recent controversies surrounding new state-based abortion laws are any indication, it’s a tactical misreading of the race. Gillibrand’s forceful denunciations, on social media and cable news programs, earned her more free media coverage than anything else since the launch of her campaign. It was a reminder that she is more comfortable than any of the other Democrats in speaking to women’s issues, having not only mastered the messaging but worked extensively on the policies regarding everything from pay equality to workplace discrimination.

In that instance, Gillibrand seized the opportunity to gain headlines and eyeballs-- and most likely, campaign donations-- by owning an issue of visceral importance to what should be her core base of supporters.

Still, she seems conscious of doing so infrequently, wary of being typecast as a single-issue candidate. In a vacuum, for a generic Democratic woman candidate hoping to defeat Trump in a November election, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to downplay the talk of glass ceilings. And yet, for a female Democratic candidate like Gillibrand, whose image is heavily colored by her fights for gender equality, winning the party’s nomination—and the right to challenge Trump-- might require a greater reliance on her identity.

This is the paradox of Gillibrand’s candidacy. She believes, as do many of her Democratic rivals, that voters want “electability” in a nominee-- someone who above all else will defeat Trump in 2020. And she does have a case to make in that regard: As a former upstate congresswoman, she does have a feel for the nonideological challenges facing rural and poor America. And at her core, layers beneath the questions about her political evolution, she is inherently relatable, someone who quotes Scripture as easily as she sips a beer or rocks a baby.

But Gillibrand’s emphasis on long-term electability may be coming at the expense of her short-term viability. She has chosen not to pursue with reckless abandon the demographic that should be her core constituency in the primary-- women-- believing it would limit her appeal to other portions of the electorate. And she has ignored suggestions that she change course and act with more urgency in this regard, telling me, “I need to be patient, and know that it’s going to take time and hard work… Your poll numbers are irrelevant today. What matters is where you are a year from now.”

The problem facing Gillibrand is, poll numbers at this stage of a presidential primary have never been more relevant to the outcome-- and if she doesn’t do something drastic to improve hers, she won’t be around a year from now.

It's tough on a Uriah Heep-type personality like Gillibrand to be so resoundingly rejected when she isn't really offering anything except herself. It isn't her ideas that are being rejected-- she has none-- it's Kirsten Gillibrand herself that is being rejected-- her record, her integrity, her vibe, her essence... She should drop out and spent the time she's spending in New Hampshire and Iowa seeing a top psychoanalyst. Other than Trump, there's never been a politician who needed one more.

Which Democrat Will Drop Out First? Kirsten Gillibrand Says Don't Look At Her

I've written a lot about why I don't think Kirsten Gillibrand would make a good president and there's no need to reiterate all of that again here. But one thing I never doubted was her skill as a politician. I've seen it first hand for over a decade. So why is her campaign failing so abysmally? Why are people saying she should drop out before she further embarrasses herself? Yesterday Shane Goldmacher tried to get to the bottom of that for NY Times readers.

First of all, for all the corporate and Wall Street cash she's rolling in, grassroots donors have abandoned her. She may not even qualify to make it to the debate stage! Goldmacher explained that "In the two years leading up to her 2020 run, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand spent millions of dollars building up a network of online and grass-roots donors who could power her coming presidential campaign... but her expensively laid plans unraveled as those potential contributors all but vanished. [She] raised less money from small contributors in her first quarter as a presidential candidate than she had in six of the eight previous quarters when she wasn’t running for president, according to federal campaign records. The poor showing has left the New York senator short on one of the Democratic National Committee’s key criteria-- having at least 65,000 donors-- to qualify for the party’s official debates that begin next month. And she has seen herself lapped in the small-donor chase by lesser-known names, including two Democratic neophytes, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur with the tagline “humanity first” advocating a universal basic income, and Marianne Williamson, an author and spiritual guru."

So how is that possible? What about her or her campaign has turned off the party's grassroots. She claims it's discrimination against women, although Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are doing extremely well and most of the other women running have surpassed her in terms of grassroots donors. Is it all because people are angry about how she treated Al Franken? I doubt people remember her earlier flip-flops, her days as a Blue Dog, her campaign against immigrants, her status as a spokesperson for the NRA or her dishonest advocacy for tobacco giants. This is a person unable to look inward, always blaming someone or something else for problems of her own making.

Goldmacher wrote that she's "reorganizing her online operations and trying to turn around her political and financial fortunes with her high-profile criticism of the new laws in Georgia, Alabama and other states that drastically restrict abortions. As she sounds the alarm, and raises money off her fight, she is trying to attract new supporters to a campaign in great need of them."

All told, 12 candidates have said they acquired at least 65,000 donors ahead of Ms. Gillibrand-- former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced doing it in less than 12 hours-- despite her decade-long standing as a senator for one of the most donor-rich Democratic states in the nation.

Missing the donor mark is just one aspect of a campaign that has struggled for traction from the outset. What little national attention Ms. Gillibrand did receive early on was often soaked up by old questions, from voters and the media, about her past, especially her switched positions on guns and immigration a decade ago, as well as her push in 2017 for Al Franken to resign from the Senate following accusations of sexual misconduct.

Mired near the bottom of most polls at 1 percent or less, she has drawn thinner crowds on the trail than the top contenders, and her televised CNN town hall event drew the worst ratings of any weekday town hall that the network has hosted. She has struggled to secure home-state support and also faced a complaint about her own office’s handing of a sexual harassment complaint that eventually resulted in the departure of the aide in question.

All the while, she spent 80 percent of every dollar she raised through March, among the field’s fastest spending rates.

“It is surprising to me she hasn’t resonated with the electorate,” said Patti Solis Doyle, a Democratic strategist and campaign manager for Hillary Clinton in 2008. “She’s had the resources, she’s had the time, she’s also had a national profile, particularly on issues that truly resonated at least in the 2018 midterms: a strong advocate on sexual harassment and women’s issue’s writ large.”

She has also run into some bad luck. Any would-be momentum from a small but splashy launch rally in March outside a Trump property in Manhattan was smothered when, hours later, the first summary of the special counsel’s report on Russian election interference was released. And her proposal for “democracy dollars”-- giving voters money to donate to campaigns-- came as news broke that the special counsel objected to that initial summary.

Ms. Gillibrand’s argument that she is the advocate in chief for women has been clouded by the fact that a historic number of women are running, including three Senate colleagues: Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

...Her campaign says she is connecting one voter at a time in coffee shops and living rooms. But in a celebrity-fueled climate dominated by mass media and viral moments online, it is not clear such a pathway exists in 2020. Ms. Gillibrand has taken to calling the primary a “marathon and not a sprint,” a tacit admission she has fallen behind.

...On the trail, Ms. Gillibrand has tried to put on a happy face. She has played beer pong in New Hampshire. She swapped dresses with a drag queen in Des Moines. She arm-wrestled with a college student in Ames, Iowa.

Still, the sting of failing to hit financial goals has been the source of particular consternation inside the campaign, people familiar with the operation said.

Ms. Gillibrand herself has long used her fund-raising as a measure of success. She wrote in her memoir, Off the Sidelines, that after she was appointed to the Senate to replace Mrs. Clinton in 2009, she changed her computer password to “3M1stQ” to serve as a constant reminder of her financial target: $3 million in the first quarter of the year.

A decade later, that is all she raised when running for president.

Her $3 million quarterly haul was about half of what some rivals raised in their first 24 hours.

Now, Ms. Gillibrand is making some changes. Her campaign is winding down the role for one of her longest-serving political and digital firms, Anne Lewis Strategies, where she spent $5.6 million in 2017 and 2018. That was nearly 60 cents of every dollar she spent, much of it to buy Facebook ads. Ms. Lewis’s firm received another $826,000 in Ms. Gillibrand’s first two-plus months as a presidential candidate-- by far her single largest expenditure.

...Gillibrand, who has run on the tagline “Brave wins,” has said she has suffered for calling for Mr. Franken to resign. “Democratic megadonors are blacklisting me because I refused to stay silent,” read online ads asking for $1 to ensure she makes the debates.

That didn't help her. It reminded voters that they love Franken and were pissed off that her never-ending opportunism drove him out of the Senate where he was needed far more than she is. Her Facebook ads were a waste of nearly a million dollars. She could have handed out $10 bills at her events instead and wound up with higher poll numbers. Her approach to 2020 campaigning is a decade out of date. Anne Lewis? Why? Is Gillibrand on autopilot? Neal Kwatra, a New York-based Democratic strategist, told Goldmacher that Gillibrand is "in a precarious place in a modern presidential campaign where we have elite consensus emerging about who the top-tier candidates are." No one thinks she is any longer. Can she turn that around?

Gillibrand has billed herself as an electable Democrat who won a conservative upstate New York House district in 2006. But that focus has highlighted how her stances then-- she had an A-rating from the National Rifle Association and spoke against illegal immigration-- contrast with her record now as a progressive senator who voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Trump’s nominees... [She] charged in a recent CNN interview that there was some “gender bias” among those who underestimate her. Jennifer Palmieri, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s communications director in 2016, agreed that there had been some biases at play.

“I think that the women candidates have a harder time of breaking through early,” Ms. Palmieri said. “Even though some of the men are fresh faces, we recognize them in a familiar role.”

Ms. Gillibrand is plowing ahead. After fund-raising in New York and Connecticut this weekend, she will campaign in Iowa each of the following three weeks.

“I have faith in the process,” she told reporters in New Hampshire recently, “and the American people.”

Those are the sounds of a sinking campaign. I'm not ready to bet money she'll be the first to drop out-- but she's definitely in contention. She's lucky that the Republican Party in New York is essentially dead and can't mount a credible statewide campaign any longer. Her next step will undoubtably be to cast herself as the victim/hero of the Republican jihad against women's Choice.

Democratic Voters Don't See Kirsten Gillibrand As A Potential President-- And She Can't Understand Why

Remember Kirsten Gillibrand? She was picked by the Democratic establishment for the Hillary Clinton Senate seat when Hillary went to work for Obama as Secretary of State, in preparation for a presidential bid. Gillibrand was an attractive, albeit unaccomplished, woman from the right-of-center Blue Dog coalition, an upstater for a seat that had to go to someone not from the City. Recently, when I started the Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President series, she was #2-- and she's the only one that got an official Worst Democraps-Update.

Over the weekend she was in New Hampshire to show voters there why she's a worst Democrap. Poor thing rarely breaks the 1% mark in the polls. The new Monmouth poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters shows her at less than 1%. Three of her female colleagues in the Senate are doing better than she is. Elizabeth Warren is at 8%, Kamala Harris at 6% and Amy Klobuchar is at 2%. Elizabeth Warren is also voters too choice for second place and Kamala Harris is the second highest scoring in that category. Gillibrand? Not so much-- just 1% of voters say she's be their #2 choice.

In Iowa she's at 1%. Voters don't like her int South Carolina either; nor in Nevada. The most recent national poll has her at 1%. Most of the other women in the race are doing better than she is. And yet... she told CNN while she was campaigning in New Hampshire that she thinks her inability to get any traction is because of "gender bias. I think people are generally biased against women. I think also biased against young women. There's just bias and it's real and it exists, but you have to overcome it."

She also seems upset that she's virtually the only candidate who can't reach the 65,000 donor mark that would qualify her for the debates. Calling the rule "random and inaccurate," she said it's "an odd measurable. Like, why do you make that your measurable as opposed to have you won elections before and have you ever run statewide before and how many votes have you gotten before and have you passed legislation and are you effective in your job?"

Maybe Latinos don't like her because they remember how she treated them

She's getting a little bitter about how she's being received. People don't see her as a potential leader. Many Democrats are repulsed by her record, her flip-flops, her opportunism... and, of course, by the way she treated Al Franken. But it's much easier to blame her gender than than to look inward and face the unpleasant truth about herself.

Cory Booker isn't doing too well and he isn't going to win the nomination either. Will he say it's because he's African-American. Will Pete Buttigieg blame it on homophobia? Will Beto say people are prejudiced against Irishmen? Skateboarders? Texans? Skateboarding Irish Texans? There are unevolved souls you have a bias against women, against people of different races, religions, ethnicities... you name it. But plenty of voters are looking at the candidates and picking Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, who are both A-list contenders. Gillibrand isn't. Many voters say they want a woman on the ticket-- just not Kirsten Gillibrand. Her whining about being a woman is part of who she is and part of why voters don't like her. If New Yorkers were smart they would have dumped her long ago.

Inauthentic and creepy

Put Bernie Sanders' Face on those Joe Biden Photos, Then Imagine What Party Leaders Would Be Saying

Jon Stewart as Biden: "Hey girl, you seem tense. Is it the stress of me groping you for 28 straight seconds?"

by Thomas Neuburger

An interesting thing is happening around Joe Biden's #MeToo moment. Even though Al Franken was almost immediately rousted from the Senate by now-presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and others for unwanted touching and kissing, handsy kissy Joe Biden is being held to a very different standard. Why?

The Democratic Party Reaction to Joe Biden

Let's start with Kirsten Gillibrand's reaction. Recently I asked, "Does Kirsten Gillibrand Consider Joe Biden's Behavior 'Disqualifying'?" We now have an answer. Here's Gillibrand on Hardball speaking with Chris Matthews (link; skip to 4:38 to listen to the entire Biden conversation). When Matthews asks "What should he do?" Gillibrand responds (my emphasis):

Gillibrand: Well you know, Chris, [sexual assault] is something I've taken very seriously over the last seven or eight years, fighting against sexual assault in the military, sexual assault on college campuses, and actually changing the rules in the House and Senate on harassment, so I think with these allegations specifically, I think it's something if Vice President Biden intends to run, he's just going to have to address directly with the American people.

And there you have it: Even though I've made it my brand to care about sexual assault, Biden can stay in the presidential race, so long as he explains himself. She continues with this: 

Matthews: What should he say?

Gillibrand: There's a conversation about do we value women. And when you allow the space for women to tell their truth and what they experienced, you have to not only receive and believe them, you have to investigate. 

Think back to Franken, who was forced out "without any real vetting of the allegations facing him," as Politico put it. Apparently, the "you have to investigate" rule applies only to Biden. Quite the inconsistency.

So Matthews asks about Gillibrand's position on Al Franken relative to her position on Biden. Gillibrand says the cases were very different because "there were eight credible allegations corroborated in real time" against Franken (whatever "real time" means). Then she repeats what she's said many times, that she needed to not "stay silent" about the Franken accusations because she had a duty to make sure her sons knew that "it's not OK to grope a woman anywhere on her body without her consent" (emphasis added).

This is a good time to watch the clip above. Not the Sam Bee part; the uncomfortable-to-watch Biden-groping-women part. Clearly some of those people do not consent.

Matthews then closes:

Matthews: Should he quit?

Gillibrand: It's something he's going to have to talk about and understand what's happening....

Matthews: Do you call on him to leave the race?

Gillibrand: No, I do not, and what I’m saying now is that it’s something he’s going to have to address. And the truth is, we as a country have to decide if we value women at all.

Read the two sentences immediately above. This is beyond shameful, and way beyond stupid. Does she think no one has ears?

Gillibrand is not the only Democrat to come to Biden's rescue. Nancy Pelosi: "I don't think it's disqualifying." Sen. Tammy Baldwin: "There’s a failure to understand how one’s actions impact others." Sen. Jeanne Shaheen: "I was surprised by the allegation.... All of us, including the vice president, need to continue to work on changing our culture."

From all of this, the path to forgiveness for Biden is clear: Say you "understand" and move on. The voters may not forgive him for his misdeeds, but the leaders of the Democratic Party already have.

Why Is Biden Defended? Explanation 1, It's Generational

Which leads us to ask, why is Biden so well defended by Party leaders and insiders? The reason most often offered is "it's generational." Let's call this Explanation 1.

Here's how EJ Dickson put it in Rolling Stone:

To an extent, this line of debate ["I don't think it's disqualifying"] is to be expected from old-school, establishment Dems like Feinstein and Pelosi, who have clear-cut reasons for standing behind a peer like Biden. But their refusal to outright condemn his alleged behavior is also representative of a generational gap in the #MeToo movement, between those who take quote-unquote “less egregious” violations seriously, and those who do not. Although the allegations against Biden are not of a criminal or even overtly sexual nature, they still involve the issue of consent, and whether or not a man invading a woman’s personal space qualifies as a career-ending transgression.

This generational gap is not specific to the political realm; indeed, there is substantial data to suggest that a chasm exists between the views of older and younger women across the board. A BuzzFeed survey in partnership with Ipsos, for instance, found that while 42% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 said that the #MeToo movement changed the way they thought about consent, only 29% of people over the age of 55 agreed. Similarly, while 64% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 said that women who accuse men of sexual assault and harassment should always be believed, 38% of people over the age of 55 said the same. An NPR poll found a significant gap between older and younger respondents who agreed with the statement that the #MeToo movement had gone too far, while nearly half of older Americans said they didn’t understand what crossed the line in terms of sexual harassment.

While these survey results didn’t differentiate between older and younger women specifically, anecdotally, many younger women report a stark contrast between their own views and the views their mothers and grandmothers share on the movement. In a Time piece on the so-called #MeToo generational divide, a 25-year-old woman says that “the women in my generation have been drawing a much harsher line for anything they consider even slightly inappropriate,” while her mother is quoted as saying that she believes Gen Y and Gen Z feminists like her daughter “are losing the high ground and allies through their absolutism.” Similarly, when discussing the allegations against Biden with her mother, a friend told me that her mother had responded “exactly the way I thought she would”: by saying, “’I think men of that age just do that and don’t mean it to be weird or sexual'” (essentially, the Feinstein/Pelosi school of thought toward inappropriate workplace conduct).

Shorter Rolling Stone: "The rules have changed for younger women." (Note the element of criticism of this view in the article: "Gen Y and Gen Z feminists like her daughter 'are losing the high ground and allies through their absolutism.'" In other words, holding men to this standard is a mistake.)

Explanation 2, He's Our Only Hope

The "it's generational" may explain some voters' responses to Biden, but I don't think it explains the defense of Biden we're reading about. Note that most of his defenders inhabit the same corner of the world — they are people with power and influence in the Democratic Party plus their strongest supporters within the media.

Reaction from those who are less Party-aligned has been more mixed. The Atlantic: "Don't Defend Him as a Flirt." Gawker: "Joe Biden, We Need to Talk About the Way You Touch Women." Even the New York Times: "He is a product of his time, but that time is up."

So why the defense coming from Party officials? The Gawker piece linked above provides a hint: "Try this," Sam Biddle writes, "look at all of those photos and imagine, say, Paul Ryan's face instead of Biden's."

Or Bernie Sanders' face.

So let's be plain. We're coming into the 2020 election season and on the Democratic side there's a lot at stake — in effect, control of the Democratic Party itself from its very top.

As he did in 2016, Bernie Sanders is threatening a palace coup, a takeover of the Party that bypasses all the layers below the presidency — the Speaker's chair, Senate caucus leadership, chair of the DNC, all of it. As the Party's presidential candidate, he will have nominal control of the levers of Party power. As president he will have as much control of the country as he wishes to exercise, even if the leaders of both parties try to block him.

In the past, progressives — and by that I mean real reformers in the Bernie Sanders mold — have been remarkably ineffective in their own #resistance to Party leadership. At every turn, in every local election through 2016 and into 2018, every contest that threatened to put an actual progressive in power was fought bitterly by Party leadership via their control of the donor network, the DCCC, the DSCC, and their allies in other institutions of mainstream Party power, including the media. Some of these resistance candidates succeeded, a great many did not.

The single strongest breakthrough occurred in 2018, when a small group of aggressive progressives, reformers like Occasio-Cortez and others, defeated Party-approved candidates then showed themselves capable as a group of challenging its leaders on their own turf — from inside the halls of power.

Thanks to those victories and their continued opposition to leaders, progressive office-holders have gained some momentum, but not nearly enough. The Green New Deal is now a "thing" being discussed by voters, as is Medicare For All. But the pushback by Nancy Pelosi and other entrenched Party leaders has been fierce, corrupt and underhanded. Even Barack Obama is getting into the act. So even with a Democratic Senate, neither of these proposals is likely to be enacted soon.

The message in all this to progressives is simple: Don't threaten the status quo. The reason: The status quo enriches and empowers us. We're inside and you're not. We mean to stay in charge. Go away.

Seen this way, a Sanders or Warren presidency threatens forty years of entrenched, neoliberal, insider-led and inbred Party power, the very power a great many voters want freedom from, if only they could manage it.

So where is Joe Biden in all this? If you examine all of the viable Democratic presidential candidates (including Biden himself, who hasn't declared yet), they fall neatly into two groups — those opposed to the Obama-era status quo, rebels or "change" candidates; and those whose future depends on returning to that status quo, "faux-change" or "no-change" candidates. If you're a "change" voter this time around, none of the non-rebels is even close to a choice, at least in the primary.

Beto O'Rourke? He wanted to cut Social Security. Kamala Harris? She sent poor mothers to prison because their kids skipped school. Pete Buttigieg? He's an "all lives matter" kind of guy. Also this. Joe Biden? There's too much wrong with him to begin to list.

It's a very neat grouping — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the one hand, all the rest on the other — and the 2020 Democratic primary will be, as it already is, an epic battle between the forces behind these two groups. The forces behind the change candidates are mainly outside the Party — voters and a handful of rebellious elected officials. The forces behind all the others are inside the Party and close to its center — mainstream Democratic leaders and those who keep them in power.

It should therefore be obvious that mainstream Party forces badly need a "Sanders (or Warren) stopper" — or, to borrow their own language, a kind of "Sanders killer": As Axios writes, "One prominent [Biden] backer thinks Biden will run, and 'is ready to kill Bernie.'"

If you accept all this, now consider the polling:

Results of a March 5, 2019 Morning Consult poll (source)

One can almost hear their cries: "Who will save us from these meddlesome candidates?" The choices, at least so far, aren't promising. To date the only person positioned to knock off Sanders, or Warren should she surge, is Joe Biden. Kamala Harris, the nearest to either, is polling a quarter of what Sanders is polling, with the rest of the field well behind her.

Joe Biden, it would seem, is their strongest hope, perhaps their only one.

Are mainstream Democrats protecting him for that reason? From their lockstep defense of him, and the genuinely existential threat they face in the next election, I'd bet on it.

If you doubt me, put Bernie Sanders' face on those Biden photos — and imagine what Nancy Pelosi would be saying then.