Pete Buttigieg campaign truck in front of Iowa Democratic presidential debate
When it comes to the Democratic presidential nomination, our mainstream media are quick to make snap judgments and predictions without much reflection. Currently, the media are overemphasizing the results of the outlier Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primaries, to declarePete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, respectively, the front-runners, while simultaneously declaring Joe Biden‘s moderate candidacy dead in favor of either Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar or Mike Bloomberg. The media likely are wrong in these conclusions. At minimum, their declarations are premature and lacking in evidence. For perspective, let’s take a look at the 1992 and 2004 Democratic presidential nominations, since that’s the last two times the Democrats were running against an incumbent Republican president:
Just before Iowa’s first in the nation Democratic presidential caucus next Tuesday, Joe Biden‘s campaign has released its latest Iowa-targeted ad. Entitled “Imagine,” the ad has Biden himself on camera, asking viewers to “imagine all the progress we can make in the next four years,” including affordable healthcare, renewable energy to tackle climate change, and banning assault weapons to reduce gun violence in our schools. At the end of the ad comes the kicker from Biden:
But first, we need to beat Donald Trump. Then there will be no limit to what we can do.
Trump impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., speaks at trial of Donald Trump in U.S. Senate
Last May, when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was still reticent to impeach Donald Trump, she explained that Trump was “self-impeaching.” What Pelosi likely meant was that Trump was digging his own political grave, hurting his chances for reelection in 2020. Pelosi’s prediction seems to be coming true now, as the latest polls indicate that the top six Trump challengers for the general election — Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg — all beat Trump in head to head match-ups. This latest good news for Democrats comes as Trump has been impeached (“for life,” as Nancy Pelosi brilliantly said), and is now undergoing a trial for removal in the U.S. Senate.
Rally outside Democratic presidential debate, July 2019
When the first Democratic Party presidential debates had 20 or more participants last year, many viewers found the format unwieldy and unworkable. The candidates never had enough time to answer the questions, and constantly were cut off. While one candidate was giving an answer, one or more other candidates were raising or waving their hands to try to be called upon for a response. The moderators were too intrusive. It was all very distracting, and sometimes provided heat but very little light. Plenty of folks said, just wait until we have fewer candidates, then the problem will be solved.
Joe Biden has run essentially a general election campaign against Donald Trump from the day Biden joined the 2020 presidential race. For example, while the Democratic primaries don’t even begin until February 2020 and the candidates are slugging it out with each other, Biden aims most of his rhetoric, and his ads, directly at Trump or the general electorate itself. Biden’s first big ad showed world leaders laughing at, ridiculing, and even ignoring Trump on the world stage. Biden’s latest ad, released just yesterday, warns that, if America is to continue its progress towards justice for all, Donald Trump must not be reelected.
Biden’s general election campaign in the primaries may make good sense, given that Biden is the only Democratic candidate this year to have served eight years as Vice President (to beloved Democratic President Barack Obama), as well as having been a long-serving leader in the U.S. Senate, including being Chairman of the Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees. And such gamble apparently has paid off, as Biden has led the Democratic presidential primary polls, on the national level and in most states, virtually every day since joining the contest.
Therefore, Biden’s next ad should continue his general election theme, and attack Donald Trump on something on which Trump is extremely vulnerable: his physical and mental health, as evidenced by his speech slurring and other behavior.
Yesterday, U.S. Senator Kamala Harrisabandoned her efforts to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination for 2020. In an email to supporters, Harris wrote:
I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.
On paper at least, the highly accomplished Harris should have been one of the favorites to win the Democratic nomination, and, for a time, she was in the top tier, polling at 15 percent. So what went wrong?
Republicans defending Trump: melted butter, toast, or both?
Yesterday morning, the House Intelligence Committee held another Donald Trump impeachment inquiry hearing, this time with Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. To say the hearing did not go well for Trump and the Republicans is an understatement. For example, Sondland admitted that “everyone was in the loop” regarding Donald Trump’s demand that Ukraine‘s president provide “deliverables,” meaning helping Trump personally by investigating phony conspiracies about Joe Biden, Biden’s son Hunter, and the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential election efforts, in exchange for a meeting with Trump and crucial military aid for Ukraine that Congress had already approved.
The devastation that Republicans on the Committee must have been feeling was perfectly captured in this bit of video that is part of the tweet below, showing Republican Ranking Member Devin Nunes painfully turning to his side’s counsel after one segment of Sondland’s testimony:
As Sikhs, we are not supposed to be happy about the suffering of other human beings. Watching Republicans signalling with their eyes, “Fellas, we’re screwed” during testimony of Gordon Sondland, I have been a very, very bad Sikh today. #ImpeachmentHearingpic.twitter.com/4fbAqtz5O6
Mind you, Sondland is not some Democratic Party hack. On the contrary, he is a real estate businessman who in recent years has been a Republican Party donor and bundler of contributions to Republican candidates such as Willard Mitt Romney. Sondland, through his companies, donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, and then received his ambassadorship in return.
Watching Devin Nunes’ reaction to Sondland’s testimony, we can’t help but be reminded of a similar meltdown by a well-known TV character in similar circumstances:
Photo by Sterling College, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/xvdQhy
In the very first Messaging Matters post, nearly nine years ago, we wrote: “Republicans have placed a ‘matrix’ over this country” with the help of “news media [that] are largely controlled by giant corporations,” as well as an organized Republican “messaging machine.” Based on recent revelations, it turns out that Facebook is part of this Republican machine too. As a result, we’re unplugging from the Facebook matrix.
U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff
The U.S. House of Representatives has wasted no time after House Speaker Nancy Pelosiannounced a formal impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump on Tuesday. Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee held a public hearing featuring Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. The subject of the hearing, which was carried on virtually all of the cable TV news channels plus C-SPAN, was the just-released Whistleblower complaint against Trump, his attorney Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and possibly others.
The Whistleblower complaint alleges that Trump pressuredUkrainian President Volodymyr Zolensky to investigate activities of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, in return for U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and then sought to hide the record of Trump’s phone call, as well as Trump’s calls with other foreign leaders, on a separate, secret electronic server. The complaint contains other related allegations as well, and, for some members of Congress, was apparently the last straw that influenced them to support the House formal impeachment inquiry. Just this week, the slowly building stream of House members supporting the impeachment inquiry became a waterfall, jumping by some 75 to reach 218, the majority number needed to vote to impeach Trump or other federal officials.
Aspen Times article on Democratic presidential debate
Last night, the top 10 candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination debated each other for the first time at Texas Southern University, a historically black university in Houston, TX. The debate was hosted jointly by ABC and Univision television networks, and featured Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Julian Castro. In their two previous debates, up to 20 Democratic candidates were included, but that was over two separate nights for each debate, so that the top candidates according to the polls (especially Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren) had not faced each other directly. The debate also had a couple of very notable moments, not coincidentally from candidates who are quite far down in the polls: