What Do Mainstream Republican Careerists Think Of The #CocaineConvention So Far?

Before the #CocaineConvention began yesterday, I passed a TV and noticed that Trump was doing a press gaggle of some kind. Briefly interested in the way you might be attracted to a pile-up on the inter-state shown on TV, I was soon wondering why the TV network didn't just label it "And now an uninterrupted hour of lies from your president." And that was just a precursor of what was coming-- Apocalypse Now, 2020.

CNN, which was thanked by Señor T, for covering his shit-show, noted this morning that it "started off with a parade of dishonesty, in stark contrast with last week's Democratic convention. While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn't have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans' convention." CNN listed over a dozen of the most blatant and pre-approved lies that, in sum, are the substitute for a party platform.

Speaking of which, at The Atlantic this morning, David Frum ran down the unspoken GOP platform, which the party has decided not to publish. "This omission," he noted, "has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult. This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. He listed 13 ideas that "command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans. Once you read the list, I think you’ll agree that these are authentic ideas with meaningful policy consequences, and that they are broadly shared. The question is not why Republicans lack a coherent platform; it’s why they’re so reluctant to publish the one on which they’re running." I'll summarize, using Frum's words:

• Adjusting the burden of taxation down on society’s richest citizens.
• Coronavirus is a much-overhyped problem. It’s not that dangerous and will soon burn itself out. States should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible, and accept the ensuing casualties as a cost worth paying-- and certainly a better trade-off than saving every last life by shutting down state economies. Masking is useless and theatrical, if not outright counterproductive.
• Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about.
• China has become an economic and geopolitical adversary of the United States. Military spending should be invested with an eye to defeating China on the seas, in space, and in the cyber-realm.
• The trade and alliance structures built after World War II are outdated. America still needs partners of course, especially Israel and maybe Russia.
• Health care is a purchase like any other. Individuals should make their own best deals in the insurance market with minimal government supervision. Those who pay more should get more. Those who cannot pay must either rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.
• Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among African Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.
• Anti-black racism has ceased to be an important problem in American life. At this point, the people most likely to be targets of adverse discrimination are whites, Christians, and Asian university applicants.
• The courts should move gradually and carefully toward eliminating the mistake made in 1965 when women’s sexual privacy was elevated into a constitutional right.
• The post-Watergate ethics reforms overreached. We should welcome the trend toward unrestricted and secret campaign donations. Overly strict conflict-of-interest rules will only bar wealthy and successful businesspeople from public service.
• Trump’s border wall is the right policy to slow illegal immigration; the task of enforcing immigration rules should not fall on business operators.
• The country is currently gripped by a surge of crime and lawlessness as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticism of police.
• Civility and respect are cherished ideals. But in the face of the overwhelming and unfair onslaught against President Trump by the media and the Deep State, his occasional excesses on Twitter and at his rallies should be understood as pardonable reactions to much more severe misconduct by others.

"So, concluded Frum, "there’s the platform right there. Why not publish it? There are two answers to that question, one simple, one more complicated. The simple answer is that President Trump’s impulsive management style has cast his convention into chaos. The location, the speaking program, the arrangements-- all were decided at the last minute. Managing the rollout of a platform, as well, was just one task too many. The more complicated answer is that the platform I’ve just described, like so much of the Trump-Republican program, commands support only among a minority of the American people. The platform works (to the extent it does work) by exciting enthusiastic support among Trump supporters; but stated too explicitly, it invites a backlash among the American majority. This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country. And for those purposes, it will succeed most to the extent it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message. The challenge for Republicans in the week ahead is to hope that President Trump can remember, night after night, to speak only the things he’s supposed to speak-- not to blurt the things his party wants its supporters to absorb unspoken."

Frum just neglected to mention one big and rapidly growing part of the unwritten Republican Party Platform-- Q-Anon, the new Republican Party Religion, which is disrupting the GOP and the already crackpot religious right churches. "Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe," wrote Katelyn Beaty for ReligionNews. "With support from Trump and other elected officials, it has gained credibility both on the web and in the offline world: In Georgia, a candidate for Congress has praised Q as “a mythical hero,” and at least five other congressional hopefuls from Illinois to Oregon have voiced support. One scholar found a 71% increase in QAnon content on Twitter and a 651% increase on Facebook since March." 

Jon Thorngate is the pastor at LifeBridge, a nondenominational church of about 300 in a Milwaukee suburb. In recent months, he said, his members have shared “Plandemic,” a half-hour film that presents COVID-19 as a moneymaking scheme by government officials and others, on Facebook. Members have also passed around a now-banned Breitbart video that promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Thorngate, one of the few pastors who would go on the record among those who called QAnon a real problem in their churches, said that only five to 10 members are actually posting the videos online. But in conversations with other members, he’s realized many more are open to conspiracy theories than those who post.

  Thorngate attributes the phenomenon in part to the “death of expertise”-- a distrust of authority figures that leads some Americans to undervalue long-established measures of competency and wisdom. Among some church members, he said, the attitude is, “I’m going to use church for the things I like, ignore it for the things I don’t and find my own truth.

“That part for us is concerning, that nothing feels authoritative right now.”

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon.

Elizabeth Warren Apparently Isn't Interested In Becoming Bernie's Vice President

Elizabeth Warren has let her dogs loose on Bernie. In the last week, the PCCC-- which has been respectful of Bernie while they valiantly supported their candidate... even as her campaign started sinking and laying off staff-- has gone into opposition mode against Bernie as though they were dealing with Bloomberg or Trump. I guess the results from the WBUR and UMass Amherst polls of Massachusetts primary voters, aren't going to calm them down at all. Both show Bernie leading in Warren's home state with her placing second, Bernie even beating Warren among women. That, along with expected losses everywhere else on Tuesday, would effectively end her campaign for president. She would have made such a great vice president, especially if she was VP and Secretary of something where she could kick bankster ass day in and day out.

WBUR:

UMass:

Bernie is also seen by the most voters as the most likely candidate to be able to beat Trump:

Bernie- 27%
Bloomberg- 19%
Status Quo Joe- 14%
Elizabeth- 12%
Mayo- 5%
Klobuchar- 4%
Steyer- 2%
Tulsi- 1%

In the one-on-one match-ups, they found Bernie with the most support against Trump as well. Obviously nearly all the Democrats would be eager to vote Trump out, although Republican oligarch Michael Bloomberg can't seem to garner the kind of support the actual Democrats do:

Bernie- 82%
Elizabeth- 81%
Status Quo Joe- 80%
Klobuchar- 80%
Mayo- 80%
Bloomberg- 73%

The also asked respondents to describe each candidate with one word. I guess socialism isn't scaring off Massachusetts Democrats!

Bernie:

Elizabeth:

Mayo:

Bloomberg:

Status Quo Joe:

Klobuchar:

Most Important 2020 Issue:

WBUR reported that "The new poll is evidence of a big challenge for the Warren campaign, following disappointing results in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. It appears that now the senator faces a tough fight at home. "The Warren campaign is working hard in Massachusetts, understanding full well that a loss at home would be devastating to a presidential bid trying to regain its footing. Earlier this week, volunteers launched a canvassing effort in Cambridge, led by Congressman Joe Kennedy III, a Warren backer, who says he is not worried about Warren's fight for Massachusetts."

The latest UMass polling shows incumbent Democrat Ed Markey beating Kennedy in the Senate race.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth got some more bad news from CNN polling in California and Texas as well. Bernie is way ahead of her-- and everyone else-- in the two states with the biggest share of delegates up for grabs Tuesday.

In Texas, Sanders holds 29% support among likely primary voters, former Vice President Joe Biden has 20%, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stands at 18% and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is at 15%. No other candidate reaches double-digits. Sanders (+14) and Bloomberg (+13) have posted the largest gains since a December CNN poll, while Biden has slipped 15 points. Warren has held roughly even.

The California results suggest the same four contenders hold the most support, though Sanders stands well ahead of the three contending for second place. Sanders holds 35% support, Warren is at 14%, Biden is at 13% and Bloomberg is at 12%. Sanders' support in the state has climbed 15 points since December, while Biden's has slid eight points. Bloomberg has gained seven.

Decisive wins for a single candidate in California and Texas-- states which will award more than 600 of the 1,991 delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination-- could change the tenor of a race that has at times seemed headed for a protracted fight.

TEXAS

CALIFORNIA

Obama Really, Really Wants To See Trump Defeated Next Year

When Glenn Thrush reported that Obama tried talking an increasingly less alert Biden out of jumping into the race for the Democratic nomination fearing his former VP could "damage his legacy," I wondered whose legacy that "his" referred to, Biden's or Obama's. "You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t," Obama told him. Thrush reported that Obama has asked Biden staffers to make sure the gaffe-prone Biden-- who also has trouble sticking to the truth when cornered-- does not "damage his legacy" or "embarrass himself" during the campaign. The staffers have failed miserably and Biden embarrasses himself every time he gets in front of a microphone. Obama has told confidants that he worries that Biden’s top aides are "too old and out of touch with the current political climate." which is also a good description of Biden himself.

In 2008 when Obama was looking for a running mate, he wanted to balance the ticket. "I want somebody with gray in his hair," Thrush reported he told an aide. An old person. Thrush doesn't go into the fact that he also wanted a conservative since Obama wanted to run as a pretend-progressive. And, unmentioned is that a black man might benefit with someone with a very unfriendly record towards minorities and a lot of red with racists. Biden was perfect. A stinking old conservative racist... what more could anyone want-- for VP?

There were two other finalists-- both white conservatives: Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and Indiana Senator Evan Bayh. Neither is as disgusting as Biden but Bayh is very very close.

“You are the pick of my heart, but Joe is the pick of my head,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Kaine after he made his choice, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.

Eleven years later, Mr. Obama’s cautions and calculations have come to roost.

Mr. Obama, standard-bearer of change but conscious of the racial dynamics of his candidacy, was wary of asking voters to digest too much at once. In Mr. Biden, he found a running mate who would conjure the comforting past and provide experience he did not possess, but would not maneuver for the presidency from the No. 2 slot.

...[T]he choice of Mr. Biden as a hedge against change has left the demographically and ideologically evolving Democrats profoundly divided as they desperately seek to unseat President Trump. Even as Mr. Biden casts himself as the man to complete and cement the Obama legacy, that legacy has moved to the center of the Democrats’ fractious debate.

While paying homage to Mr. Obama, who remains popular among Democratic voters, many candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, are urging the party to move far beyond his administration’s positions on immigration, criminal justice, health care, the regulation of banks, the environment, income inequality and race, which they now view as timid, conservative or dated.

“You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not,” Mr. Booker said to Mr. Biden during the most recent Democratic debate.

The Obama-Biden origin story has been often told, and often sentimentalized. But a re-examination at this crystallizing moment of the primary campaign, based on more than two dozen interviews with Obama and Biden aides and others with knowledge of the relationship, reveals a more complicated dynamic between the two men, and one that is still evolving.

Mr. Biden and his advisers initially thought he might be a better fit as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, and he bridled at the Obama campaign’s attempt to control his every utterance and personnel move. He exploded when campaign researchers began asking questions about the private life of his family, especially his younger son, Hunter.

Mr. Obama, for his part, took a long time to warm to Mr. Biden, and kept him at arms’ length, and on a leash, in the early days. Up until earlier this year, he suggested Mr. Biden would be better off sticking with his vague promise, made during the audition for the vice presidency, that his short-lived 2008 presidential campaign would be his last.

...“It’s an incredible turn of events, when you think about it,” said Mr. Bayh, who retired from the Senate in 2011. “The question then was, ‘Do you happen to fit the moment?’ The question now is, ‘After all these years, can you turn yourself into an independent source of power, as opposed to being just a loyal and faithful wingman?’ Only time will tell.”

Mr. Biden ran for president in 2008 because he thought he could do a better job than anyone else, saw no real downside, and as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted to advance a cherished policy idea: a plan for partitioning Iraq into three ethnic enclaves.

“He felt a responsibility to do it,” recalled Ted Kaufman, one of Mr. Biden’s oldest friends and advisers. “He looked around at the potential people who would run, and he concluded, ‘It’s my time to run.’ It wasn’t a complex set of decisions. If he lost, he lost.”

Others in Mr. Biden’s orbit discerned a deeper motive: Here was his final chance to exorcise the humiliating memories of a promising 1988 campaign demolished by reports he had plagiarized speeches.

Mr. Biden drove his 2008 campaign from the lot directly into a pothole. On the eve of its rollout, in January 2007, he told a reporter for the New York Observer that Mr. Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Mr. Biden did not bother to tell any of his aides that the interview had gone catastrophically wrong.

...Biden managed just 4 percent of the vote in Iowa on the night of Jan. 3, 2008. His communications adviser, Larry Rasky, suggested he soldier on in New Hampshire, and the candidate wavered for a moment. But his sister, Valerie Owens Biden, shot it down, and he dropped out.

Mr. Biden slipped back to the Senate, and seemed at peace. Shortly after dropping out, he approached Mr. Bayh, who had briefly considered running for president, in the Senate gym. “You were a whole hell of a lot smarter than I was!” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Bayh. “I never had a goddamn chance!”

...It was around that time, in February or March, that Mr. Donilon raised the idea of the vice presidency. Mr. Biden, according to two people in his orbit, initially dismissed the idea, saying he had no interest in being anyone’s “second banana.”

“It wasn’t that easy for him to move on,” said Terrell McSweeny, a longtime Biden policy adviser. Still, “he was starting to ask himself, ‘What can I do that will make the biggest difference for my country?’”

Mr. Biden did not dissuade his people from exploring the opportunity.

By the summer, Mr. Obama’s two top strategists, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, had Mr. Biden at the top of their list. The choice was not just about politics and optics. Mr. Obama, confident to the point of cockiness about his political chops, was privately expressing anxiety about his ability to govern-- conceding that Mrs. Clinton, his chief rival for the nomination, had made valid points about his inexperience.

“He needed somebody in the Situation Room, and somebody who would deal with Mitch so he wouldn’t have to,” said Mr. Axelrod, referring to Mitch McConnell, the combative Senate Republican leader.

Mr. Biden’s relationship with Mr. McConnell would come with its own complications. In late 2012, Mr. Obama tapped his vice president to negotiate one-on-one with Mr. McConnell what was known as the “fiscal cliff,” a budget-cutting deal.

It produced one previously unreported incident that left White House and Senate staff scratching their heads: During a follow-up meeting in the Oval Office in early 2013, Mr. McConnell ruled out a big deal before the 2014 midterms, when he would be running for re-election in Kentucky. Mr. Biden responded by saying, “Mitch, we want to see you come back,” an off-the-cuff endorsement of one of their biggest adversaries.

“That was Joe Biden being Joe Biden,” said Harry Reid, then the Senate Democratic leader, who was in the room, adding that it was an attempt to put Mr. McConnell at ease.

One of the first decisions Mr. Obama’s search team made was to exclude Mrs. Clinton from consideration, despite a tepid public claim that she was in the running. The protracted primary fight had simply been too bitter, and the president would soon offer her the State Department, to put her near, but not so very near, the seat of power.

The extended list of hopefuls included Ohio’s governor, Ted Strickland; a moderate Texas congressman, Chet Edwards; and Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia who was running for Senate that year. Kathleen Sebelius, the progressive governor of Kansas, was added later to compensate for the gender imbalance. In the end, however, it came down to Mr. Biden and two men who would have represented generational change: Mr. Bayh, then 52, and Mr. Kaine, 50.

It was indicative of Mr. Obama’s unsentimental approach that his personal favorite, Mr. Kaine, finished third. The nominee viewed him as too young and too unschooled in foreign affairs to help him in the campaign or White House. Mr. Obama was also deeply worried about a backlash against a black man at the top of the ticket, and believed that an older white running mate would ease fears in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana that he had lost in the primaries.

“Barack Hussein Obama is change enough for most people,” Mr. Obama said of passing over Mr. Kaine, according to Mr. Axelrod.

In late July, Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Axelrod embarked on a one-day trip from the campaign’s Chicago headquarters to audition all three, starting with Mr. Biden in Delaware.

“Basically I said, ‘Forgive me for being so blunt, but how do we know you know how to shut up?’” Mr. Axelrod recalled asking. “An hour later, he finished answering. So I asked him another question.”

[Joe Biden has a long history of verbal flubs and gaffes. And he knows it.]

Mr. Biden was candid about his struggle to maintain verbal discipline, and he repeatedly interrupted himself to ask, “Am I making sense?” But the quantity of his advice was offset by its quality. Mr. Obama’s political magi were especially impressed with his insights into the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.

...Obama agreed that Mr. Biden would be the final person he spoke to before making a big decision, and the two men would have weekly lunches. Mr. Biden also made a loyalty pledge that would become the basis of their deeper personal bond. “You make a decision, and I will follow it to my death,” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Kaufman.

At some point, Mr. Biden also told Obama aides that “Barack would never have to worry” about him positioning himself for another presidential run. He was too old, he told them, and he viewed his new job as a capstone, not a catapult. But while both sides assumed that vow covered the duration of Mr. Obama’s presidency, what might happen after that was never explicitly stated.

Mr. Biden was the only one of the finalists to make such a promise. “That was helpful,” Mr. Plouffe said.

Before parting, Mr. Obama popped a surprise, intended to test Mr. Biden’s commitment to being a wingman: “Would you prefer being secretary of state to vice president?” he asked.

Mr. Biden chose the latter. Mr. Obama formally offered him the job after he flew back to Washington. Neither man has ever spoken publicly about exactly what was said, but one Biden aide who was watching the little red switchboard light for the senator’s private line said it stayed on too long for it to have simply been a perfunctory call of congratulations.

...Biden’s simmering ambition was a source of unease for both men. Mr. Plouffe shut down an early move made by Mr. Biden as vice president to assemble a presidential team-in-waiting, blocking Mr. Biden’s attempts to court the party’s West Coast fund-raising elite and rejecting an attempt to hire Kevin Sheekey, a veteran Democratic operative.

In 2016, Mr. Obama quietly pressured Mr. Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Mrs. Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda, and partly because he thought Mr. Biden was in no shape emotionally following the illness and death of his son Beau in May 2015.

By now, the line between heart and head, between the personal and political, so clear a decade ago, has blurred completely.

The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.

“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Mr. Biden-- who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago-- responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump.

Mr. Obama has said he will not make an endorsement in the primary, and has offered every candidate his counsel. But he has taken an active interest in the inner workings of his friend’s campaign, to an extent beyond anything offered to other candidates.

In his interactions with Mr. Biden-- the pair had a quiet lunch in Washington last month-- Mr. Obama has hammered away at the need for his campaign to expand his aging inner circle.

He has communicated his frustration that Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate-- urging him to include more younger aides, according to three Democrats with direct knowledge of the discussion.

In March, Mr. Obama took the unusual step of summoning Mr. Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Mr. Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.

When they were done, Mr. Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments:

Win or lose, they needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.

Obama will be an enthusiastic campaigner against Trump and for whichever Democrat wins the nomination-- even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie, even if Obama is generally from the neoliberal wing of the party and Bernie certainly not. I want to recommend people read Matt Taibbi's new Rolling Stone essay, Media Companies Run By The Country’s Richest People Can’t Help But Project The Mindset Of Their Owners. "The news media is now loathed in the same way banks, tobacco companies, and health insurance companies are, and it refuses to understand this. Mistakes like WMDs are a problem, but the media’s biggest issue is exactly its bubble-ness, and clubby inability to respond to criticism in any way except to denounce it as misinformation and error. Equating all criticism of media with Trumpism is pouring gasoline on the fire. The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup."

This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:

Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving… You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV. 

...Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn’t create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward “elites” to his side. The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters. The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last.

Is Getting Rid Of Trump Enough? How About Fundamental Change AND Getting Rid Of Trump?

The false narrative Biden lackeys-- like former Delaware governor Jack Markell, a shady conservative very much like Biden-- are working ceasely to create is that Democratic voters "know him. And they don't know just his name. If it were just name recognition, these polls may look different." That's false; as voters get to know Biden better, they flee to other candidates. Polling has shown that the more closely people have followed the primary, the more likely they are to move away from Biden. He began his campaign in early May with an average polling number of 41.4%. The most recent poll, by YouGov last week for The Economist shows him at 22%. As voters see how feeble he is, how conservative he is, how racist he is, what a liar he is... they start looking for other candidates. "Biden's campaign," reported Julie Pace and Bill Barrow of the Associated Press, "is eager to focus more on his eight years as vice president than the decades that preceded his time in the White House. Advisers believe his years serving as No. 2 to the nation's first black president resonate particularly well with African American voters, one of the most powerful segments of the Democratic electorate."

Yesterday New York Magazine columnist Ed Kilgore asked the pertinent question of primary season: Is Beating Trump The Best Democrats Can Hope To Achieve In 2020? "One of the fundamentals of the 2020 presidential nominating contest is that rank-and-file Democrats really want to beat Donald Trump and are willing to sacrifice other goals if necessary to send the 45th president to the dustbin of history," he wrote. Polling bears out the assertion.

Conservative campaigns, particularly of right-of-center Biden surrogates John Delaney, Frackenlooper, Steve Bullock and-- don't flip your lid; I know her far better than you do-- Tulsi Gabbard are threatening "that progressive policy proposals will feed Republican claims that Democrats are a wild band of socialist baby-killing America-haters who want to open the borders and register criminal aliens to vote while they are signing up for their free health-care coverage."





Kilgore admits that there’s a counterargument from the left, that nonvoters and even some 2016 Trump voters crave single-payer health care and free college and other progressive proposals and have only voted Republican or not voted at all in the past because corrupt conservative Democrats like Biden and Delaney, et al don’t offer them anything to improve their lives or any kind of real change or-- as Biden himself put it-- "fundamental" change.

But what Kilgore's column in about is The "what Democrats can realistically hope to accomplish after beating Trump... Is ejecting this terrible anomaly from the White House enough?" When combined, the two serious progressive contenders in the race, Bernie and Elizabeth, consistently out-poll Biden. They are offering Americans a realistic roadmap to fundamental change. Bidenis basically offering nothing but his decrepit stench-ridden political corpse and his ugly, vile over-sized ego.

Limiting Trump to one term (assuming, as is prudent, that there is zero chance he will be removed from office by the Republican-controlled Senate before that term ends) would remove his stubby fingers from the nuclear trigger, and thrill most of our allies. It would calm financial markets constantly roiled by this unstable man’s gyrations in economic policy and his taste for trade wars. It would stop the Federalist Society’s shockingly successful campaign to stuff the federal courts with conservative ideologues, which a second Trump term could bring to a crucial and almost irreversible tipping point. And it would halt the more radical policies that Trump has implemented by executive order and that Republicans have tried to enact via legislation. Perhaps most important, beating Trump would reduce the likelihood that one of the nation’s two major political parties would become wedded for the foreseeable future to a radical right-wing populism that depends on racist appeals and efforts to subvert democracy for survival.

But anyone who thinks, for example, that addressing climate change is a generational, or perhaps even biological, challenge that can no longer be delayed cannot be satisfied with just avoiding a 2021 hellscape. And Democrats really do need to internalize the fact that they haven’t been in a position to advance their policies in a serious way since 2010.

To be very specific about it, Democrats entered 2009 having won two straight landslides, with a supermajority in the Senate, a big majority in the House, and a popular and charismatic president claiming a mandate for “hope and change.” Yes, those managing the Democratic “trifecta” in Washington had to deal with the aftermath of the financial meltdown and the advent of the Great Recession. But in theory, at least, they had the power to get big things done-- until a handful of moderates in their ranks objected to elements of the original Affordable Care Act that in retrospect were essential to Obamacare’s success. And then the whole dream collapsed when Republican Scott Brown destroyed the Senate supermajority in a shocking special election in deep-blue Massachusetts.

In retrospect, Democratic prospects for anything like fundamental change went steadily down from that point, creating a lost decade of dashed hopes and gridlock interrupted only by those two years when Trump and a GOP trifecta won its own half-measures.

Yes, in 2020 Democrats could end the threat of a permanent conservative counterrevolution-- a job they started by retaking the House in 2018. But if all they do is to beat Trump, they will be at the very best where they were when it all started going bad in Massachusetts.

Can they aim higher than that? Yes. They can begin, of course, by defending their control of the House and retaking the Senate along with the White House. The latter will not be easy, given the landscape, even if they win the presidency. Without the Senate, though, the new president will be helpless to put together the administration it wants or to begin to reshape the judiciary in a more progressive direction. Big legislative “reaches” like major new health-care reform measures or climate change actions or steps to address income inequality would be dead on arrival. And even with Senate control, the filibuster will make legislative action all but impossible.

Kilgore then goes off the rails entirely-- into an anti-Bernie/anti-Warren rant-- drawing the perfect example of why so few progressives bother reading his persistently narrow-minded, elitist, right-of-center negativity. He wants Biden to win and doesn't understand that that is likely to equate to 4 more years of exactly what he doesn't want: Trump. Kilgore would have counseled against provoking the British by starting the Revolution. He would have have said to ask the plantation owners to feed the slaves better. Kilgore would have opposed public education, labor rights, civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection. Big things take a lot of work. That's Bernie; that's Elizabeth Warren. That's certainly not Biden, Delaney, Frackenlooper, Gabbard, Bullock, Mayo Pete or Kilgore. And, by the way... this is Texas, not Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Michigan or even Ohio; TEXAS:

A new national poll of registered voters from SurveyUSA shows Bernie and Biden each beating Trumpanzee 50-42% and Elizabeth Warren beating him 46-44%. But the most important finding is among independent voters where Bernie trounces Trump by ten points. Biden also beats him but just by 6 points. Elizabeth Warren and Trump are even among independents. Among profoundly ignorant and extraordinarily stupid people who aren't equipped to deal with the 21st Century, Trump rules and beats every Democrat. In that demo, Trump beats Mayo Pete and Kamala by 30 points each, beats Bernie and Status Quo Joe by 21 each and beats Elizabeth by 18 points. In households with at least one family member who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, Sanders leads by 50 points, Biden leads by 46 points, Harris leads by 45 points, Warren leads by 44, Mayo Pete leads by 38.

Click on the image and it will blow up so that you can read it and understand why Bernie's the way to beat Señor Trumpanzee

A Closet Mentality Is All About Deceit-- And Can Be Very Problematic To Break Free Of-- The Case Of McKinsey Pete

On Friday we took a little look at McKinsey Pete's gay identity politics. Several people have asked me to explain why living in the closet is such a terrible thing. To live a double life, a person has to start learning how to lie and deceive and eventually that deceitfulness takes over someone's whole being and they stop understanding when they're lying and when they're telling the truth, not just about their sexuality, but about everything. This is something I've studied carefully when it comes to politicians. I read and then re-read Maryland top-dog GOP outed congressman Bob Bauman's fantastic book, The Gentleman From Maryland. Bauman, founder of the American Conservative Union and Young Americans For Freedom, wrote poignantly about how his secret double life was so stressful that it led to alcoholism. I had dinner with Mark Foley after he was caught bonking young congressional pages and we began an honest years-long correspondence. And here in California when far right-wing ultra-homophobic state Senator Roy Ashburn was caught, drunk, with a young male prostitute, I studied his fascinating public epiphany. I respect him for it. He now talks about how a tawdry and fearful existence in the closet ruined his life (below) and forced him into an existence predicated on hypocrisy and deceit. Ashburn, when asked if he's been a hypocrite, said, flatly, YES! "I was in hiding."





From an L.A. Times interview Patt Morrison did with Roy Ashburn in 2010 soon after he was busted:

For decades you worked so hard to keep your sexual orientation under wraps. This must have been a torment, but in another sense, was there an element of relief?

I'm sensing relief now. I had not consciously decided to come out, but there's no doubt looking back that I had become increasingly bold about attending gay events, like pride festivals, and going to dance clubs and bars. Last year I attended Las Vegas Pride and San Diego Pride.

Were you looking over your shoulder?

A little more in San Diego than Las Vegas.

...At some point, you must have realized a public career was incompatible with being open about your sexual preferences.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind-- the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press-- at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

You worked for members of Congress, then were elected to public office yourself from Kern County. Were your sexual preferences in the back of your mind, or did you just go about your business?

The answer is both yes and no. I was married and had children. And I had a career and a passion. I also had a huge secret. But given my circumstances and my responsibilities, it wasn't an overwhelming issue for me. The desires were always there, but my focus was primarily on-- well, pretty selfishly-- on me and my career and my family.

Barry Goldwater had a gay grandson and didn't think government had any business in anybody's bedroom. But the recent brand of Republicanism has championed anti-gay issues.

I truly believe the conservative philosophy as embraced by Goldwater: that the government has no role in the private lives of the citizens. In the 1980s, there was a coming together of the religious right and the Goldwater right, sort of a marriage of convenience. It propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Reagan never repudiated that but-- this is just my view-- I don't think he really embraced it either. In no way do I want to put down people of strong religious convictions; I happen to have very strong religious beliefs myself. But it was a merger of those two, and the religious [right's issues] were about same-sex rules, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun rights, these sort of core, litmus-test issues.

Did you feel uneasy with that combination? You did help to organize and speak at a rally in 2005 against a legislative bill sanctioning same-sex marriage.

How I ever got into that is beyond me. I was very uncomfortable with that, and I told one of my confidantes, "I'm never doing that again." It was not what I wanted to do, it wasn't me, but I helped to organize and lent my name.

A lot of people, gay or straight, are probably wondering why you voted even against issues like insurance coverage for same-sex partners.

The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

"Roy [Cohn] was not gay," Republican operative and Trump crony Roger Stone remarked about Trump's mentor, to CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin. "He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around." Political closet cases live in darkness, fear and self deception. Their lives are a lie and lying becomes the norm. All Republican closet cases are, at heart, Roy Cohn. A lifelong homosexual-- and a swell guy-- Mark Foley, long before he was caught, drunk, sneaking into a boys dormitory looking for sex, was a critic of President Clinton. "It's more sad," he told the media, "than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."

McKinsey Pete is a Democrat, so at least politically, he is very different from Bauman, Foley, Cohn and Ashburn (not to mention Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, neither of whom has been publicly outed yet). Sunday, the NY Times published a sure-to-be-controversial piece by Jeremy Peters, Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet-- And why it took him until he was 33 to come out.

The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out-- all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too.

Chris Pappas, who was two years ahead of Mr. Buttigieg at Harvard and is now a Democratic congressman from New Hampshire, said he arrived at college “pretty much convinced that I couldn’t have a career or pursue politics as an L.G.B.T. individual.” Jonathan Darman, who was one class ahead of Mr. Buttigieg, remembered how people often reacted to a politician’s coming out then: “It wasn’t a story of love but of acknowledging illicit desire.” And Amit Paley, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class, recalled that “it was still a time where vocalizing anti-gay sentiments was not only common, but I think pretty accepted.”

The thought that 15 years later someone they might have shared a dorm or sat in a lecture hall with would become the first serious openly gay candidate for president of the United States never crossed their minds. But no one would have found the possibility more implausible than the young man everyone on campus knew as Peter.

Mr. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was “a career death sentence,” as he put it in his memoir.

Many in his generation and in his college class decided to come out as young adults, whether they were confident they would be accepted or not, and had their 20s to navigate being open about their identity-- a process that helped make Americans more aware and accepting of their gay friends, family members and co-workers. Instead, Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

“Because I was wrestling with this, I’m not sure I fully processed the idea that it related to me,” he said in an interview.

More than most people his age-- even more than most of the ambitious young men and women he competed against at Harvard-- he possessed a remarkably strong drive for perfection. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, work on a presidential campaign, join the military and be elected mayor all before he turned 30. After being deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan in 2014, he said he realized he could die having never been in love, and he resolved to change that. He finally came out in 2015, when he was 33.

He took a longer journey than his peers did, he has said, because of the inner turmoil he experienced over whether in fact he wanted to be known as the “gay” politician.

His record of accomplishment during those years in the closet is impossible to separate from the isolation and anxiety he felt as he weighed the cost of telling his family, friends and constituents who he really was. Pursuing so many goals had two outcomes, intentionally or not: It distracted his busy brain from a reality he wasn’t ready to face, and provided him the armor of a life experience that would make his sexual orientation just one of a litany of attributes.

“Peter struck me very early on, at 18 or 19, as someone who would run for president regardless,” said Randall Winston, a close friend of Mr. Buttigieg’s from college. Over beers and Chinese food, Mr. Winston said, they spent late nights on campus talking about the right and wrong reasons for getting into politics. “If you want to be a political leader, why?” he recalled. “Is it about yourself? Is it really about the good of the nation? I think he was asking himself those questions from the jump.”

Mr. Buttigieg said in the interview that if he had been interested in a career other than politics, he would have found the decision to come out much easier. “The arts is one where you could have jumped in there in the 2000s, and it would have been sort of incidental,” he said. “Whereas something like finance, it was getting there. And in politics it would have been completely defining.”

Few experiences in his young adulthood were as formative in shaping his identity as the hypercompetitive environment he encountered at Harvard. Even liberal Cambridge, where meeting a gay student or professor would have been fairly unremarkable, did not always nurture the sense of confidence that he and many of his gay classmates felt they needed to be themselves. At times their surroundings seemed to do just the opposite.

In interviews with a dozen of Mr. Buttigieg’s friends and classmates, people described a culture in which a mix of abundant ambition and youthful insecurity made students carefully attuned to the way they presented themselves to others.

Mr. Winston recalled the dual pressures of having high expectations for yourself while also being aware-- sometimes realistically, sometimes not-- that your classmates and professors had their own ideas about who you were too.

“I don’t want to say it’s all artifice-- a lot of this is just common to growing up,” he said. But the culture at Harvard, he added, caused a lot of students to think, “‘O.K., I’m going to maintain this aura, this impression I’m giving to others.’”

Describing the insecurities he felt as a young man, Mr. Buttigieg has said he sometimes marvels at how differently the world treats him today compared with what he expected when he was too afraid to come out. On the day he kicked off his presidential campaign, he said he had imagined what he would say to his teenage self. “To tell him that on that day he announces his campaign for president, he’ll do it with his husband looking on,” he said with a note of disbelief in his voice. “Would he believe me?”

Mr. Buttigieg took a long and fraught path from life as an undergraduate who once had a girlfriend to a presidential candidate who travels the country with his husband in tow. While he was still in the closet, the country became a different place very quickly. And to understand Mr. Buttigieg’s journey is to understand the microgeneration in which he came of age.

When members of the Harvard class of 2004 were juniors in high school, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man from Wyoming, was bludgeoned, tied to a fence post and left to die in a murder that shocked the nation’s conscience. By the time they shipped off to Cambridge, few would have any gay friends — at least ones who were open about it. And the idea of a man marrying another man, or a woman marrying another woman, seemed almost absurd. The closest thing gay men and lesbians had to marriage was a civil union, which in 2000 was legal in exactly one state: Vermont.

“Gay marriage was not this obvious liberal no-brainer,” said Mr. Darman, a journalist and historian who came out in his senior year of college, 12 years before Mr. Buttigieg would. While Harvard was certainly a liberal bubble, it was still in many ways very socially conventional in the early 2000s, he said. “In a lot of social settings at Harvard in that period, the default assumption was that you were straight. And that would not have been true even five years later.”

Friends and classmates remembered Mr. Buttigieg as thoughtful and clearly on a trajectory that would bring him success of some kind, even if it dawned on few of them that might mean the White House.

One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

“His sexuality didn’t present as a really big thing in his life,” said Joe Flood, a classmate. “I think he always thought about himself politically,” he added, noting that Mr. Buttigieg would become active in the university’s Institute of Politics, an organization at the Kennedy School of Government that hosted big-name politicians like Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Howard Dean during their time in school. “You don’t end up there accidentally,” Mr. Flood said... There was a small, close-knit social circle of L.G.B.T.Q. students. But they existed a world apart from Mr. Buttigieg’s Harvard.

Peter at Harvard

...But when Mr. Buttigieg and his peers left college and started embarking on their professional lives, the country was changing in significant ways, jolting their sense of what it could mean to be openly gay and have a high-profile career.

One of the biggest developments was right in Harvard’s backyard. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state where same-sex couples could marry. Students flocked to Cambridge City Hall in the early-morning hours on May 17 to watch the first couples wed at 12:01 a.m.-- the earliest moment possible under the new law. Mr. Buttigieg remembers the occasion but was not there. “I don’t remember feeling that connected to it actually,” he said.

Soon states from Iowa to Maine would start allowing same-sex couples to marry. Then Congress would repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on serving openly as gay or lesbian. And the Supreme Court would declare the rights of gay men and lesbians to have their relationships recognized by the state, first in 2013 when it struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, and then again in the 2015 decision that guaranteed same-sex marriage as a right protected by the Constitution in Obergefell v. Hodges.

In 2004, when Mr. Buttigieg’s class graduated, public opinion polls showed that roughly one-third of Americans favored allowing same-sex couples to marry. A decade later it was more than half the country and rising.

Many closeted people found their plight more difficult during the early years of social and legal change, as they wrestled with whether to finally open up after years of trying to maintain an impression of themselves that was false.

Mr. Paley, who was Mr. Buttigieg’s college classmate, remembers sitting in his dorm room in 2003 as a closeted junior and crying as he read Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down bans on intimacy between homosexuals on grounds that such laws were an affront to their dignity. “That helped me realize I can’t live my life this way,” he said of hiding his sexual orientation. It took Mr. Paley until the end of his senior year to fully come out, and he now serves as chief executive of the Trevor Project, an organization that works to advance the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Mr. Pappas, the congressman from New Hampshire, ran his first race for state legislature in 2002 as an openly gay candidate and won. “It’s an important facet of who I am,” he said. “And I think over time I realized how powerful it was that I share that with more and more people.”

He said he ran as an out candidate in that first race because he saw no point in turning back after he came out in college. And after hearing from people who told him how encouraging it was to see him as an openly gay man in politics, Mr. Pappas realized he had made the right choice regardless of the political implications. “I don’t think I fully appreciated that at first,” he said.

After he graduated, Mr. Buttigieg went to work for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in Arizona and quickly immersed himself in the job. Mara Lee, who worked with him at the time and remains a friend, remembered meeting her co-worker for the first time: “Here’s this guy who’s doing a million things at once. He has seven or eight TVs on to monitor the local and national news. He’s introducing himself to me-- being genuine-- and having a conversation while typing.” She remembers two computer screens on his desk.

Once he came out, she said that being gay was never the first thing he wanted people to see when they met him-- a veteran, Rhodes scholar, polyglot who was first elected mayor of South Bend when he was 29. “While it’s an important part of who he is, it’s not the only part,” she said.

When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

His employees and constituents saw an eligible bachelor in their young mayor and wanted to set him up with their daughters. Some on his staff even joked about his old light green Ford Taurus as a “chick magnet.” He did not bother to correct them.

When he did come out in the summer of 2015, the forum he chose was an op-ed for the South Bend Tribune. “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am,” he wrote.

He may have waited far longer than most young gay men today. But ever the overachiever, he made record time in setting a new bar. In less than four years he went from being single and closeted to being married and out as a gay candidate for president.

Peters, who is a member of the LGBTQ community and not closeted, didn't bother to mention that he's gay for this story. He probably should have. But something more important that he should have done is spend some time looking into Pete's time as a consultant for McKinsey, a firm that inculcates its employees with an ability to lie smoothly and effectively. Pete's life in the closet prepared him for that perfectly-- for that and for the life of a politician. He may not lie as much as Trump and Biden... but he's still young and tends not to tell the truth about anything that can be seen as controversial.

Bernie also beat Hillary in South Bend