The Status Quo Joe Return To "Normalcy"-- A Disaster Waiting In The Wings

Does a "return to normalcy" sound like a good idea after 4 years of Trumpism? It may sound vaguely tempting but it's anything but a good idea. The kind of "normalcy" Biden's campaign is based on is precisely the "normalcy" that plowed the field for the insidious growth of Trumpism. We spent a lot of time writing about that in 2019 and yesterday so did Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico: Joe Biden's secret governing plan. Team Biden is already putting a potential cabinet together. "Biden advisers," they wrote, "describe a Return to Normal plan-- a reversal of President Trump's unorthodox, improvisational style. Biden wants known, trusted people around him-- many from the Obama years." Although there are a couple of exceptions, most of the names are at the root cause of Trumpism. Here's the Politico list:

• John Kerry would love to take a new Cabinet position devoted to climate change, or might even accept a curtain call to return as secretary of state.
• Susan Rice, formerly President Obama's national security adviser, is another option for State.
• Mike Bloomberg, who swiftly endorsed Biden after the former mayor's campaign collapsed, would be a top possibility to head the World Bank.
• Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general under Obama who stood up to Trump and was fired, would be a leading contender for attorney general.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren as Treasury secretary could help unite the party.
• Jamie Dimon-- chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and mentioned over the years as a potential presidential candidate-- would also be considered for Treasury.
• Anne Finucane, vice chairman of Bank of America, is another possibility for Treasury.

Who would be more like Harding Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon? Not Elizabeth Warren, that's for sure.

They also will toss something over to Mayo Pete, "perhaps as ambassador to the UN, or as U.S. trade representative," either helping to "credential Buttigieg for a future national campaign."

And in the mix for VP, according to VandeHei and Allen, are Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris (if not Attorney General), Cory Booker, Deval Patrick, Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, Tammy Duckworth, Val Demings... "One adviser told us when we asked who the V.P. pick would be: 'Whoever Jim Clyburn wants it to be.'"

They also note that the chief of staff "would likely be Ron Klain, who held that job for him when he was veep." And Michèle Flournoy, an Obama undersecretary of defense, would be the favorite to run Biden's Pentagon.

Biden, a throw-back institutionalist, relishes an emphasis on governing, norms and restoring alliances. That includes respect for experts, and for the art and science of governing. This evolving plan is all in Biden's comfort zone-- all meant to send a public signal of stability.

Remember, Harding, who ran on a platform that could be boiled down to "A Return To Normalcy," won in a landslide and was once extremely popular. Today his short stint in the White House-- he won in 1920 and died in 1923-- is routinely considered one of the 3 worst presidencies in history.

What Biden's campaign represents is the status quo ante-- the normalcy of the time before Trump... when Obama (and Biden, more or less) were inadvertently laying the ground for Trump with their centrist agenda. Biden wants to re-embrace that agenda today. He seems to have persuaded himself that his "great relationships" with Senate Republicans will make the country a better place and that it will all be one great big Grand Bargain of he's in the White House. Was he not milking those relationships while the Senate was screwing over the Obama-Biden administration? He seems to have forgotten that Merrick Garland was another of many, many, many examples of the Obama administration moving right to compromise with the Republicans, who would then just move the goal posts further and further right. Garland was more like a mainstream Republican nominee than a Democratic nominee. Obama, offered him as a compromise to replace Scalia. And now Biden is saying he'd nominate him again if he had the chance-- the ultimate in an utterly clueless status quo ante vision.

And with sizable majorities of Americans favoring raising taxes on the wealthy so that they start paying their fair share, where does Biden go? Back to the already way too low rates under Obama. Forget AOC's proposal for a top marginal rate of 70%... Biden told Chris Cuomo on CNN that he'd like to raise the top rate to 39.5% and take the corporate rate from 21% to 28%.

Whatever the question or the topic, State Quo Joe wants to take it back to the way it was under Obama. Medicare-For-All makes no sense to him-- just tweaking an entirely inadequate Obamacare system that was always just a weak incremental first step towards universal healthcare anyway.

Warren G. Harding ran on many of the same premises that make, at least to pundits and other status quo Democrats, a "compelling" case for Biden. In the 1920 campaign, "A Return to Normalcy," was a reference to what life was like before the disruption of the Great War (World War I). Here's how Harding made his case: "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality." As expected, Biden is making a similar case based post-Trumpist disruption to the status quo.

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

As Chris Hedges noted yesterday, "There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously become the Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces with the Republicans to crush him. Trump would, if Sanders was the nominee, instantly be shorn by the Democratic Party elites of his demons and his propensity for tyranny. Sanders would be red-baited-- as he was viciously Friday in the New York Times’ 'As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity'-- and turned into a figure of derision and ridicule. The oligarchs preach the sermon of the least-worst to us when they attempt to ram a Hillary Clinton or a Biden down our throats but ignore it for themselves. They prefer Biden over Trump, but they can live with either. Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate. It is the primacy of corporate power-- which has extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class in misery-- and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth."

The Democrats will once again offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate totalitarianism. What the public wants and deserves will again be ignored for what the corporate lobbyists demand. If we do not respond soon to the social and economic catastrophe that has been visited on most of the population, we will be unable to thwart the rise of corporate tyranny and a Christian fascism.

We need to reintegrate those who have been pushed aside back into the society, to heal the ruptured social bonds, to give workers dignity, empowerment and protection. We need a universal health care system, especially as we barrel toward a global pandemic. We need programs that provide employment with sustainable wages, job protection and pensions. We need quality public education for all Americans. We need to rebuild our infrastructure and end the squandering of our resources on war. We need to halt corporate pillage and regulate Wall Street and corporations. We need to respond with radical and immediate measures to curb carbon emissions and save ourselves from ecocide and extinction. We don’t need a “Punch and Judy” show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house down.

Biden, 2020's Warren G Harding

Status Quo Joe by Nancy Ohanian

Before Biden officially announced, I was developing a theory about how he would be the Warren G. Harding of the election cycle. Harding-- once extremely popular, is routinely considered one of the 3 worst presidents in history by presidential scholars-- ran on a platform that could be boiled down to "A Return To Normalcy." And, sure enough, Status Quo Joe, is living up to the theory.

What his campaign represents is the status quo ante-- the normalcy of the time before Trump... when Obama (and Biden, more or less) were inadvertently laying the ground for Trump with their centrist agenda. Biden wants to embrace that agenda. Just Thursday, Biden did an interview for Iowa Starting Line, an interview his handlers probably wish he had never sat for. Biden-- who PolitiFact has shown to be a congenital liar nearly as untethered to truthfulness as Trump-- started off by whining about the campaign and insisting it should be about his actual researchable record but about his say-whatever-you-think-the-audience-wants-to-hear promises. "We’re supposed to be talking about and competing about what we’re going to do about the future. Anybody can go back and pitch something about somebody’s past, out of context. Like, who in God’s name knows anything about busing from your generation?... My decision was made that I’m not going to go back and argue with people about the past. What do you want to do now? I hope we move that way and continue to talk about the future."

Then he went on to try to persuade... himself? someone else? that his great relationships with Senate Republicans will make the country a better place. Was he not milking those relationships while the Senate was screwing over the Obama-Biden administration? No one asked. He seems to have forgotten that Merrick Garland was another of many, many, many exampled of the Obama administration moving right to compromise with the Republicans, who would then just move the goal posts further and further right. Garland was more like a mainstream Republican nominee than a Democratic nominee. Obama, offered him as a compromise to replace Scalia-- a conservative judge Republicans liked a lot, even more than Democrats did. But now Biden is saying he'd nominate him again if he had the chance-- the ultimate in an utterly clueless status quo ante vision.

And with sizable majorities of Americans favoring raising taxes on the wealthy so that they start paying their fair share, where does Biden go? Back to the already way too low rates under Obama. Forget AOC's proposal for a top marginal rate of 70%... Biden told Chris Cuomo on CNN that he'd like to raise the top rate to 39.5% and take the corporate rate from 21% to 28%.

Whatever the question or the topic, State Quo Joe wants to take it back to the way it was under Obama. Medicare-For-All makes no sense to him-- just tweaking an entirely inadequate Obamacare system that was always just a weak incremental first step towards universal healthcare anyway.

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

Harding was elected in 1920 and a series of scandals-- both political (Tea Pot Dome being the worst pre-Trump scandal of the 20th Century) and personal (mistresses galore). He appointed pedatory bankster Andrew Mellon Treasury Secretary and Mellon immediately set out to cut taxes for the rich and for corporations. Like Trump, Harding was a moron who didn't understand policy and, also like Trump, had the attention span of a gnat. He explained to a friend that "I can't make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side, and they seem right, and then-- God!-- I talk to the other side, and they seem just as right." Eventually Harding appeared before the Senate himself and asked them to abolish the Excess Profits Tax in corporations while not giving a bonus to soldiers who fought in WWI. Congress passed the veterans bonus bill anyway but Harding vetoed it and his veto was narrowly sustained. His tariff bill was a feeding frenzy for corrupt lobbyists and equally corrupt politicians and eventually a disaster in international trade. At Mellon's insistence, Harding proposed bringing down the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 25%. And, also like Trump, Harding was an anti-union fanatic and pushed massive deregulation of business. His economic policies caused a quickie boost for the economy that eventually led to the Great Depression.

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

Beware: The Joe Biden Return To Normalcy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...[B]ig questions remain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Trump, America Needs Something Better Than Another Back To Normalcy President

It would be a tragic mistake for Democrats to pick a 2020 nominee based solely on ousting Trump. Electability is always an important consideration but it should never-- not even now-- be the only consideration. Almost any reasonably decent candidate should be able to beat Trump. It's not about them; it's not even about Trump. It's about us. Is there a candidate offering us something we want from our government? Chances are, whomever can get it together to win the primary is going to beat Trump.

Right now wikipedia is keeping a running list of potential Democratic nominees. 6 have declared: ridiculous New Dem multimillionaire ex-Congressman John Delaney, Richard Ojeda, Michael Arth, Ken Nwadike (the Free Hugs Guy), Robby Wells and Andrew Yang. Washington Governor Jay Inslee and spiritual teacher and author Marianne Williamson have exploratory committees. And then there are two dozen who have "expressed interest," from Bernie and Biden to Oscar De La Hoya, Michael Bloomberg and Tracy Flick.

On CNN Sunday, the Democrats' great GOP ally Rick Santorum warned Jake Tapper that Democrats have to pick someone unexpected to win-- he'd probably like Beto or Alexandria, or maybe Richard Ojeda, Pete Buttigieg, or Julian Castro to be the nominee-- and not someone "expected." He said "When the Democrats win, they pick someone unexpected. Or someone that is not the favorite-- Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter-- when they pick John Kerry or Al Gore or Hillary Clinton, they lose. So I'm hoping for Bernie [Sanders] or Elizabeth [Warren] or somebody like that. Some tired, old-- Joe Biden, put them out there and we'll win. If they pick someone new then I think they have a chance." Another Tapper guest, Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger, said it couldn't be anyone "far left" and then went on to define Nancy Pelosi and anyone who isn't from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party as being far left. He's sad that it's taking too long for the Democrats to transform themselves into the Eisenhower Republican Party while the GOP has moved so rapidly and decisively transforming themselves into a Hitlerite fascist party. Kinzinger was pumping for a nice safe corporate whore, Joe Biden and said he could beat Trump. "He can attract the kind of people voting for Donald Trump, the middle class, the blue-collar workers. I think he's the one that can take that away. If you put somebody like Bernie Sanders up, it's just out of the stream of what people want." Luckily Nina Turner was on the panel as well and she corrected both GOP doofuses: "Let me tell you something, wanting people to have a $15 an hour minimum wage, wanting to make sure that people have Medicare for all... there is no far-left, so don't paint Sanders and other people like that." Sure they do. Turner wants Democrats to win; Kinzinger and Santorium want Republicans to win. Is that so complicated?

2020 isn't just an opportunity to get rid of Trump. It's also an opportunity to replace him with someone as good as he is horrible-- with the great president America hasn't seen in over 7 decades! It's a chance to pick a candidate based on a vision for moving America forward. In 1920-- exactly a century ago-- the country went for a schlemiel who had a campaign theme everyone get behind: a return to normalcy (after the Great War). They wound up with a catastrophe: Warren G. Harding, the beginning of a downward spiral that led directly to the Great Depression and World War II. The Return to Normalcy candidate for the centenary is of course Joe Biden, the ultimate status quo or status quo ante candidate with nothing to offer except "not Trump."

Well-meaning Republicans-- not just sneaking partisans like Santorum-- will also be urging Democrats to nominate Biden or one of the other blind establishment centrists (say a Hickenlooper or, worse stir, a Bloomberg). Sunday night, at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, 2 "good" Republicans-- James Comey and Nicolle Wallace-- begged Democrats for a back to normalcy candidate. They hate Trump, although perhaps for somewhat different reasons than normal people hate Trump. They think he stole their putrid conservative party. They just want to bring back more putrid conservatism. That isn't what we want though, is it.

When CNN reports that "former FBI Director James Comey asked American voters Sunday night to end Donald Trump's presidency with a 'landslide' victory for his opponent in 2020," it sounds sweet to us. "All of us should use every breath we have to make sure the lies stop on January 20, 2021," said Comey, who "all but begged Democrats to set aside their ideological differences and nominate the person best suited to defeating Trump in an election. 'I understand the Democrats have important debates now over who their candidate should be,' Comey told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, 'but they have to win. They have to win.'" We know that but what comes after we win is important to us too.

Over the course of more than an hour, Comey repeatedly derided Trump's character, again likening the atmosphere around the President to what he saw in prosecuting mafia figures and suggested that Trump's tweets could eventually amount to witness tampering. Asked if Trump might be an unindicted co-conspirator in some of the crimes recently described by special counsel Robert Mueller, Comey said he didn't know, "but if he's not there, he's certainly close."

Still, Comey said he hoped that Trump would be swept out of office without being impeached. Framing the rise of Trumpism as a political ill the country needed to exorcise at the ballot, he expressed a hope that Americans would "in a landslide rid ourselves of this attack on our values."

"Removal by impeachment would muddy that," he said, and potentially leave a third of the country feeling like their chosen leader had been removed in a "coup."

Trump's decision to fire Comey in May 2017 was a key factor in the appointment of Mueller, who was handed the job by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the aftermath of Comey's dismissal and the subsequent leak of a memo in which he recounted Trump asking that he end an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. In a book and in public statements, Comey has become a leading critic of Trump-- and Trump has berated him in turn, relentlessly and usually on Twitter.

Hours earlier, Trump attacked Comey in a pair of testy morning tweets, claiming without evidence that the former FBI chief had lied on Friday in his testimony to the House Judiciary and Oversight committees.

Comey laughed at the idea Trump had even looked over the actual testimony, joking to Wallace before she could read the tweets, "He's finished reading the 253 pages?"

After hearing the words out loud, he turned serious.

"My reaction to it is actually disturbing to me, which is kind of, 'Eh, there he goes again.' I thought I was 'Lyin' James Comey' now I'm 'Leakin' James Comey'. But I kind of shrug and sometimes smile and laugh about it and then I have a secondary reaction, which is to be horrified at my own numb reaction," Comey said. "We have to remind ourselves the President of the United States of America is publicly announcing that people are committing crimes, that they should be in jail."

Asked if Trump's tweets could be viewed as witness tampering, Comey answered carefully-- insisting he had no insight into Mueller's thinking.

"I'm not prepared to judge it," Comey said, "but again, if I were prosecuting a case in the Southern District of New York and a prominent person started attacking my witnesses, I'd want to know so what's going on there and does that cross the line from free speech, which we have to keep protected, into something else?"

Speaking about the period before the 2016 election, Comey was unsparing of Republican congressional leaders who he said opposed making public intelligence community concerns over Russian interference.

"To their everlasting shame, the leaders-- (Senate Majority Leader Mitch) McConnell, (House Speaker Paul) Ryan-- refused," Comey said. "I think they're going to have a hard time explaining that to history."

He had kinder words for former President Barack Obama, describing the Democrat as a foil to Trump in almost every way.

"I was struck that Barack Obama is the best listener as a leader I had ever seen and Donald Trump is the worst I've ever seen," Comey said. "Obama had the confidence to be quiet and try and get that. Donald Trump is a deeply, deeply insecure person, so I don't see any prospect that he would be able to be quiet for long enough to hear the truth."

Speaker... 2020?

Hillary surrogates used to whisper that if were was elected president he wouldn't be able to get anything through Congress because he hand allies there (other than Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison, Tulsi Gabbard, Ro Khanna and Alan Grayson). Now there are way more than that behind Bernie and his programs and in 2020 there should enough to swing Congress towards the widely popular ideas he's running on, from Medicare-for-All and Job Guarantee to Free state universities and the Green New Deal. In 2020, we need to elect Bernie and and House ready for his programs. No more New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

Two silly-as-whoopie-cushions updates (a little early morning humor): Third Way wants Beto-- imagine a BETO/Lieberman ticket!!-- and, even more hilarious, Biden has been hiring DCCC staffers... which should be enough to guarantee him a sad, sad DOA campaign.

President Watch: So that son of a bitch Warren G. Harding really did it!

"Come 'n' get it, baby"? Don't believe your judgmental eyes. NYT reporter Peter Baker assures us that Warren G. Harding, who apparently had the ladies throwing themselves at him, "was seen by women of the time as attractive." Okay, noted. (Maybe when he was younger?)

by Ken

Our Noah just seems to find these things. Or maybe they find him, I don't know. Either way, among his pass-alongs this week was this:

DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life

By PETER BAKER | Aug. 12, 2015

WASHINGTON — She was denounced as a “degenerate” and a “pervert,” accused of lying for money and shamed for waging a “diabolical” campaign of falsehoods against the president’s family that tore away at his legacy.

Long before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby or Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, who scandalized a nation with stories of carnal adventures in a White House coat closet and endured a ferocious backlash for publicly claiming that she bore the love child of President Warren G. Harding.

Now nearly a century later, according to genealogists, new genetic tests confirm for the first time that Ms. Britton’s daughter, Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, was indeed Harding’s biological child. The tests have solved one of the enduring mysteries of presidential history and offer new insights into the secret life of America’s 29th president. At the least, they demonstrate how the march of technology is increasingly rewriting the nation’s history books. . . .

Noah has some observations to share, but we'll come to those later. Meanwhile, here I've been, blithely unaware that there's been all this controversy raging. Didn't everyone else also assume that ol' Warren G. done it? It seems not.

The revelation has also roiled two families that have circled each other warily for 90 years, struggling with issues of rumor, truth and fidelity. Even now, members of the president’s family remain divided over the matter, with some still skeptical after a lifetime of denial and unhappy about cousins who chose to pursue the question. Some descendants of Ms. Britton remain resentful that it has taken this long for evidence to come out and for her credibility to be validated.

“It’s sort of Shakespearean and operatic,” said Dr. Peter Harding, a grandnephew of the president and one of those who instigated the DNA testing that confirmed the relationship to Ms. Britton’s offspring. “This story hangs over the whole presidential history because it was an unsolved mystery.”

"The Nan Britton affair," Peter Baker explains, "was the sensation of its age, a product of the jazz-playing, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties and a pivotal moment in the evolution of the modern White House."

It was not the first time a president was accused of an extracurricular love life, but never before had a self-proclaimed presidential mistress gone public with a popular tell-all book. The ensuing furor played out in newspapers, courtrooms and living rooms across the country.

While some historians dismissed Ms. Britton’s account, it remained part of popular lore. Pundits raised it as an analog after revelations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Ms. Lewinsky. HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” made it a subplot a few years ago. The Library of Congress effectively recalled it last year when it released Harding’s love letters with another mistress, Carrie Phillips.

Ms. Britton, who was 31 years younger than Harding, had a harder time proving her relationship when she revealed it after his death because she had destroyed her own letters with him at his request and because his family insisted he was sterile.

WGH grand-nephew Peter Harding, 72, a physician in Big Sur, California, says he grew up buying the family's version. (“My father said this couldn’t have happened because President Harding had mumps as a kid and was infertile and the family really vilified Nan Britton.") But when he found a copy of The President’s Daughter, the book Nan Britton wrote (more about it later), among his father’s stuff and read it, belongings, "he concluded that the man described in it resembled the writer of the letters to Ms. Phillips, an expressive romantic who doted on women."

He enlisted his cousin Abigail Harding, a retired high school biology teacher in Worthington, Ohio, and they enlisted James Blaesing, whose mother was the disputed Harding offspring. And they turned to AncestryDNA ("a division of Ancestry.com, the genealogical website"), and its testing "found that Mr. Blaesing was a second cousin to Peter and Abigail Harding, meaning that Elizabeth Ann Blaesing had to be President Harding’s daughter."

Not subject to dispute, apparently, is that Nan Britton, who was from Marion, Ohio, where WGH was a newspaper publisher, had a 6½-year affair with him

She was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive. Ms. Britton hung pictures of Harding on her bedroom wall and sought his help finding a job. Harding agreed to meet her in New York. In July 1917, at age 20, she “became Mr. Harding’s bride,” as she put it, during a New York hotel room assignation.

For six and a half years they maintained their affair, meeting wherever possible, including in Harding’s Senate office, where Ms. Britton wrote that they conceived Elizabeth Ann, born in October 1919. Harding never met his daughter but provided financial support. He and Ms. Britton continued their relationship after he became president, repairing to “a small closet in the anteroom” in the West Wing where, she wrote, they “made love.”

Ms. Britton was devastated when he died in office in 1923 at the age of 57 and more so when she discovered there was no provision to support their daughter. In need of money and shut out by Harding’s family, she wrote “The President’s Daughter” in 1927, inciting a fierce backlash from his supporters.

Which left Nan Britton and her family in a pretty horrible darkness that still enshrouds them. Grandson James Blaesing says that her relationship with Harding "was a love story and her family always believed her."

“She loved him until the day she died,” he said. “When she talked about him, she would get the biggest smile on her face. She just loved this guy. He was everything.”

Mr. Blaesing said the family lived with scorn for decades. They were followed, their house was broken into and items were stolen to try to prove the relationship was a lie. “I went through this growing up in school,” said Mr. Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Ore. “They belittled him and her.”

The tests, he said, finally vindicate his grandmother. “I wanted to prove who she was and prove everyone wrong,” he said.

NOAH WAS ALSO STRUCK BY THIS BUSINESS OF WGH
BEING "SEEN BY WOMEN OF THE TIME AS ATTRACTIVE"

"Judging from the photo of 'The Hard One,' " he says,

I guess women of the day ate a lot of strange mushrooms. Rudolph Valentino he wasn't!

Maybe it was just the fact that many women are attracted by power and status, all wrapped up in a nice suit. We've always heard about what goes on in the Senate cloak room, but all Harding had was a coat closet.

"Not to cheapen [Nan's} love for the man," Noah says, "but she may have really just been an obsessed groupie. Clearly, she had stalker attributes. She was 20. He was 50. What's a guy to do? The job has a lot of stress." Noah points out that Warren G. "was a republican the first time republicans went crazy."

Planting the seeds of economic disaster and nurturing them isn't easy. Cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy of the day was a fight. So was fighting to reduce veterans' benefits (Sound familiar?).

"Who knows?" says Noah. "Harding may have even had some sort of sense that his time on Earth would be short."

Spiritualism was all the rage in his time. Maybe he'd received a message from beyond and decided to go for the gusto. We've always heard about what goes on in the Senate cloak room, but all Harding had was a coat closet, so, let's have a little sympathy for the man!

"I give him credit, though," Noah says. "He was no Bill Cosby!" He also can't help flashing ahead in time to a more recent president's misadventures with a young woman.

I'm struck by the fact that Harding's mistress had no absolute proof and paid dearly for it, as did the love child. Fast-forward 75 years or so and wonder how Monica Lewinsky's life could have been made even worse than she made it by those who would have destroyed her credibility had she not kept that dress.

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Guinea-- And What The Coup There Can Tell Us About Our Own Government

Moussa Dadis Camara, Guinea's new president

I doubt anyone serious has contemplated the possibility of a military coup in the United States since the dark mutterings of alcoholic rogue politician Richard Nixon hinted at a potential constitutional crisis. Last week, though, while I was in Mali and as Bush and the right-wing coterie around him were preparing to give up their hold on political power, the country next door, Guinea, had a military coup d'etat. The constitution was abolished and a junta of young military officers took over the government.

I suspect most Americans didn't hear much about it. For one thing, American mass media doesn't follow international affairs unless it directly involves the U.S. (and Israel) and almost never mentions any non-genocidal news from Africa. For another, Guinea has no oil.

Still, Condoleeza Rice squawked loudest and longest about how horrible the coup was and how destructive it was to constitutional order. The E.U., UN and some African states were on the same page. One would hardly guess that the people of Guinea weren't. In fact, there seems to be universal support for the coup in Guinea, where the rotting, decaying corpse of an old regime was despised for its tyranny and unimaginable corruption. Keep in mind that Transparency International found Guinea to be the most corrupt country in Africa-- and believe me, that is saying a lot-- and the second most corrupt country on earth, Haiti being top dog. People were relieved when junior Army officers, led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, overthrew the hated government when long ailing dictator, Lansana Conté died at age 74 three days before Christmas, 24 years after Conté led a similar coup and took over.

The public is ecstatic, sensing that Camara and his colleagues are patriots dedicated to serving the public interest, rather than their own. Conté's corrupt family, which has stashed away many millions of dollars in Swiss banks, immediately fled the country, a relief to most Guineans, although many would like to see Conté's son stand trial for turning the country into a narcotics transit spot for Colombian gangsters. Just days after taking office the coup leaders declared that there would be zero tolerance for corruption, especially the kind that has drained Guinea's mineral wealth away for a few families and foreign-owned companies.

The coup was bloodless, genteel and polite and there is virtually no opposition to Camara's declaration of a two year interim government while he tries to root out the corruption that has rotted civil society and hamstrung economic development. He's already named an untainted civilian prime minister to help Guinea prepare for a real post-Conté democracy. Except for opposition from conservative foreign governments, the natural resources extraction industries that set their policies towards countries like Guinea, and the IMF, which has had Conté firmly in its predatory grip, the coup is viewed by everyone paying attention as a real step forward for Guinea.

But if the coup has been completely bloodless, Camara is threatening to execute anyone who embezzles state funds.

On a concrete stage inside the barracks from where he launched his rebellion Tuesday, Camara jabbed his finger at the sky as he swore to do away with the corruption that has drained the mineral-rich state's coffers.

"For the person who embezzles money, there won't be a trial. They'll be killed," he said as the crowd went wild. "I was born in a hut. I walked to school. ... Money means nothing to me."

...He said the country's ruling clique "spit on the faces of the poor," enriching themselves at the population's expense.

One of the remedies he proposed was reviewing the country's mining contracts and renegotiating them if the terms are unfavorable.

(Wouldn't it be great if Obama was as straight-forward and hardline about his own anti-corruption standards?)

Flying to Paris from Bamako yesterday I met a geologist who runs an iron ore exploration camp in Guinea. She told me she sometimes comes to Mali to escape the filth and pollution of Conakry. To understand what a shocking statement that was for me, consider what I had just written at the AroundTheWorldBlog a day or two earlier in regard to Bamako's filth and pollution. But she told me that comparison leaves Guinea looking far worse, with most people lacking the most basic amenities like clean water and electricity. She lays the blame for Guinea's problems right at the feet of Conté, his family and cronies. So do most Guineans.

So why can't the Bush Regime put two and two together and just cut Camara and his colleagues some slack? I just happen to be reading Thomas Frank's startling new book, The Wrecking Crew, How Conservatives Rule and, although he never mentions Guinea, he certainly explains a Republican mindset that would automatically condemn and seek to undermine Camara. In demonstrating how right-wing parties extol selfishness as a virtue, Frank claims that GOP leaders "laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense."

[T]hey caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing; they have wrecked federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job... Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exists to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

On the surface, Guinea-- and most of the Third World-- is far more corrupt than the United States. In reality, the systemic corruption that pervades American society-- think Enron, Abramoff, Bernie Madoff, Duke Cunningham-- makes Third World corruption seem like mere child's play. Warren Harding spoke for the Republican Party in 1921-- and his words still speak for today's GOP (as well as Blue Dogs and other corrupt right-wing Democrats)-- when he said that what we need is "less government in business and more business in government." That has been one of the hallmarks of Bushism-- and it has brought our country-- and most of the world-- to the brink of Depression, as well as to the widest gaps between the masses and the ownership class since... Warren Harding's days.