Campaign 2020

[Okri]

I think what's terrifying right now is just clearly how much of this is his fault.

I had to look back and see when it was I made the statement you quoted. I see it's a week ago -- seeing this crisis is progressing in dog years, that might as well be another lifetime.

I will stick to my baseline observations -- that the virus is of course not Trump's fault, nor the cataclysmic economic effects it's going to produce. +

I know and it was fair. I just am still shook by how much bad he did here. Andy Slavitt suggested that there could be 1 million deaths, which assumes a 30% infection rate and a 1% mortality rate. Both are on the low-end of projections, though.

[Big Magilla]

I also wouldn't take that Axios article (posed a few days ago, so maybe forgotten) at all seriously. Axios was established by folks who thought Politico was too lefty; their based-on-anonymous-sources speculation on a Biden administration are of no value. The Democratic party has a liberal agenda -- evidenced by the bills passed in the House over the past 15 months. Give them a Dem Senate, they'll be sending plenty of liberal legislation to Pres. Biden, and I guarantee he won't veto any of it.

Good point. I was going to comment on the Axios crap when I first saw the quote but got distracted. This is the kind of nonsense that the press was coming up with on Clinton in 2016 to say "see - we're not just digging up dirt on Trump". I was a little surprised to see they were already dumping on Biden when they clearly prefer him to Sanders. Maybe they've already written him off.

[Mister Tee]

I think what's terrifying right now is just clearly how much of this is his fault.

I had to look back and see when it was I made the statement you quoted. I see it's a week ago -- seeing this crisis is progressing in dog years, that might as well be another lifetime.

I will stick to my baseline observations -- that the virus is of course not Trump's fault, nor the cataclysmic economic effects it's going to produce. But that statement was made when his management of it seemed merely staggeringly incompetent, not actively contributing to it. Everyone's heard how he dismantled the pandemic preparedness team, but not enough people know that medical people in Seattle who wanted to test people a month or more ago were actively forbidden from doing it by administration folk. Add to that the fact they still at least part of the time try to play down the severity of the situation -- and that they clearly don't want to test widely for fear of finding out how far things have been spread -- and it's clear they're the worst possible people to be in charge of something like this.

But events are hurtling forward despite all efforts to spin. It's incredible how quickly this has mushroomed. Six weeks ago, Rebel Wilson was making Coronavirus jokes at the BAFTAs. Two weeks ago, it was a concern, but a kind of distant one: like a hurricane still forming in the Gulf of Mexico. Hell, Wednesday afternoon, it came as a shock that March Madness was going to go forward without spectators; 24 hours later, after the NBA/Tom Hanks-Rita Wilson/Broadway, that seemed a drop in the bucket. I think this has now morphed into one of the signature, life-won't-be-the-same-after-this events -- in my lifetime, only the JFK assassination and the attack on the World Trade Center have rocked the foundations in the same way. (My parents, I presume, would add Pearl Harbor to the list.)

And we have the crushing bad luck to have a complete moral idiot at the helm. You can knock a whole lot of what Bush/Cheney did post-9/11 (i.e., the Iraq war), but in the immediate aftermath they held things together. What we're seeing now is as if Bush had handled 9/11 the way he did Katrina: complete incompetence making a horrible situation that much worse. Bush's reputation never recovered post-Katrina, and I don't see Trump having a prayer at this point, either -- especially since he, like Bush, has an economic meltdown ahead (already underway, in fact -- and the virtual cancellation of, minimally, the remainder of March will make it many times worse).

Sabin references that week of the '08 meltdown, and I remember many of us thinking, Can't Obama take over now, because it's clear the current team is hopeless? That was only two months before the election, and still it seemed agony to wait. Here it's more than 7 months, with untold damage to come between now and then. So, I had the same feeling watching Biden the other day: yearning for his normal, sensible words to replace the ever-cascading idiocy Trump and gang offer on a daily basis. Who'd have thought he could top that session at the CDC last Friday, when he called Gov. Inslee a snake, and said he didn't want people to get off the cruise ship because "I like the numbers where they are"? But then we got his hostage-video of a speech on Wednesday (legendary for the graph of Dow futures plummeting with every word), and today's "let me pump up pharma stocks to rescue the market" event, where it became clear everyone's first assignment was to suck up to Trump, and where he uttered the quote Sabin references -- a quote that, I guarantee, will be run in ads so often this Fall it'll remind you of "Show me the money".

A lot of people around the web are scoffing at the Wehner article Sabin linked, saying "I thought it was over after Access Hollywood/firing Comey" etc. First of all, Trump DID suffer for all those things -- losing the popular vote, then seeing his party get his ass kicked in the midterms. But more to the point: nothing kills an incumbent president's chances at re-election like a recession...and this one's going to be a doozy. Biden was already running significantly ahead of Trump in polling; this is going to make Joe a prohibitive favorite.

And, though maybe people aren't as concerned about this as they were a few days ago, I just need to say: there's NO evidence Biden is "suffering cognitive decline". That's a Trump/Russian bot whisper campaign, and no one hear should treat it credulously. Biden has ALWAYS been a rambling speaker if not corralled; age has maybe exaggerated that a tad, but it's nothing to do with mental decline. His speech Tuesday night (was that really just this week?), delivered without teleprompter, showed he's in complete possession of his faculties. Which is way more than can be said of his GOP opponent.

I also wouldn't take that Axios article (posed a few days ago, so maybe forgotten) at all seriously. Axios was established by folks who thought Politico was too lefty; their based-on-anonymous-sources speculation on a Biden administration are of no value. The Democratic party has a liberal agenda -- evidenced by the bills passed in the House over the past 15 months. Give them a Dem Senate, they'll be sending plenty of liberal legislation to Pres. Biden, and I guarantee he won't veto any of it.

[Sabin]

Truman: "The buck stops here."

Trump: "I didn't do it."

Can you imagine if Barack Obama said "I didn't do it?" Can you imagine?

[mlrg]

I have a hunch that his presidency might be over, but not this year, for the simple reason that there will be no elections. It will be postponed. I have already read that some primaries might be postponed

[Sabin]

I'm writing this from home. I was told this past week that going to the WeWorks is the easiest way I could contract COVID. All of Los Angeles is on high-alert. All the stores are empty. All the pilots have been cancelled. Obviously, the fate of the entertainment industry isn't terribly consequential but my city is a ghost town.

Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic in an article titled: "The Trump Presidency is Over."

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

I'm certainly prone to hyperbole. I've gone back and fort on this election with wild mood swings over the months and years. But it really feels like The Trump Presidency is over. If the virus itself isn't Trump's fault, his handling of it has been a disaster: disorganized, willfully ignorant, and above all self-absorbed. We're a very lucky people to be bubbled off and sheltered like we are but this is a crisis that many of us are feeling personally in our day-to-day lives, and I feel like that's a death sentence for any President. Joe Biden's response speech might not have been great but it means something that so much attention was paid to what Joe Biden was saying. It meant something when viewers wanted to know more about what Obama thought than McCain during the economic recession. It sadly meant something when Trump got the attention he did throughout 2016. It means something now.

I know we've got months and months to go but my biggest concern about Joe Biden has been lack of support from Bernie Sanders supporters and the youth. I'm no longer concerned. Enough of both camps will rush out to flush this guy out. Whatever divisive progressive groundswell consumed the nation for years already feels like a memory. This weekend, Sanders will try to frame this crisis as a need for single-payer healthcare but it's over. This is a crisis of competency.

My bigger concern about Trump is that he's only going to get more desperate and we have no idea what that is going to look like.

NOTE: this is either the end of the Trump Presidency or shit is about to get *REALLY* weird.

[Okri]

There's, to start, the stumblebum performance the administration is putting on in combating the virus -- hobbled at every turn by an ignorant president who insists on a fantasy version of the situation. He's making it clear the only concern he has about he virus is how good or bad it makes him look. He's ready to contradict his experts, misrepresent numbers -- anything to pretend it's going well and he can't be blamed for it. None of this will help if the virus spreads at the level experts fear (except, of course, with his base, who would gladly go to their deaths pretending they were fine as long as it made him look good). This is clearly hurting him with any voters who are on the fence.

But the economic results are going to be worse. It's not just the stock markets; the worldwide economy is, by most observation, about to come to a screeching halt. Recessions can be supply- or demand-driven; the coronavirus seems ready to deliver both. Goods from China and Italy are already essentially eliminated --as my father asked last night, won't Apple stores essentially have to shut down at some point, if they can't get resupply from China? And areas in the US like Washington state are now suffering the same fate -- unable to ship goods past quarantine -- with who knows how many other spots to follow? That's the supply side. But the demand side could be worse, with travel and leisure industries already taking sharp hits (friends of mine were planning to visit NY from the Midwest, but their doctor recommended against inessential travel), and street traffic in major cities showing noticeable slacking off. People will of course buy essentials, but the kind of luxury and impulse buying that has been propping up the economy will take a dive if people are hesitant about going out in public. This could be a very serious recession.

Frankly, none of this is Trump's fault (though the government's limited number of options to offset things is the fault of the GOP running up the deficit and lowering interest rates at a time the economy didn't need it). But of course he's been taking undeserved credit for the continuation of Obama's boom, so this is sort of karmic justice.

Bottom line: even a regular, decent president would have trouble getting re-elected with the worldwide economy in turmoil (ask Jimmy Carter about that). Putting that on top of a presidency that's already alienated the majority of the citizenry leaves almost no path for re-election.

I think what's terrifying right now is just clearly how much of this is his fault.

[OscarGuy]

Let's put it this way. Trump can use whatever attacks he wants against Biden, but he's got his own share of cognitive decline arguments against him, so it's really just a wash. Which would you prefer, the bigot with cognitive decline or the pro-labor guy.

[taki15]

The fact that Jill Stein is the one promoting the "Biden has dementia" trope tells you all that you need to know.

[Sabin]

OscarGuy wrote
Can we please get off the cognitive decline angle for everyone. Unless you're a psychologist and you've sat for an in-person interview, you have zero clue what you're talking about. These are Russian troll-style talking points. I see Sanders supporters latching onto every minor foible or mistake as some proof that Biden is in cognitive decline. He's always been gaffe prone. We know this. We've known it for decades. He's a gaffe machine. That doesn't mean he's suffering from dementia.

No, I won’t.

I won’t be posting about it on social media. But here? Yes, I’ll be saying what I think. I’m a conscientious voter who votes for my principles in the primary and always enthusiastically for the Democratic in the general. I’m nobody’s enemy.

Also, I don’t think there’s any phrase that’s been toxically driven into the ground more during this cycle more than dismissing something as a “talking point.” I’m all for calling out the framing of questions, but I don’t support ignoring something that will he used against us later. This is a primary for everyone. If not cognitive decline, I’m concerned that Biden has lost a step. I don’t know why but it’s happened. I’ve been concerned about it since the first debate. Nothing has changed my mind.

And I’m very upset that after a primary with thirty people we’ve ended up with Biden and Sanders, soon to be just Biden.

Big Magilla wrote
This is a man in full control. Don't fall for those snippets of him at his worst. Everyone has those moments. What voters see is that Biden will bring decency and honor back to the White House, restore America's standing in the world and bring hope to the masses. Sanders and his supporters have had an impact on popular culture that will influence the party platform but Sanders and Trump are the "old men" here. Both shows signs of dementia far greater than Biden.

Well, Sanders appears substantially more lucid and eloquent than Biden but...

You say “he’ll bring back decency and honor.” This is an Axios article about Joe Biden’s secret plan to govern.

https://www.axios.com/joe-biden-cabinet ... cda57.html

- “Biden advisers describe a Return to Normal plan.”

- Bloomberg is a contender for World Bank.

- Somehow both Warren and Jamie Dimon (!) are contenders for Sec Treasury. I can’t imagine someone supporting both.

Look, I’m not an economist. I don’t know what I’m talking about. These sound like extremely bad ideas. This looks like the kind of governing plan of somehow who wants to reward teamwork, who still believes we can work with Republicans, and that “the foundations of our economy are strong” to quote McCain. Beyond this, when has “Return to Normal” ever worked?

[OscarGuy]

Can we please get off the cognitive decline angle for everyone. Unless you're a psychologist and you've sat for an in-person interview, you have zero clue what you're talking about. These are Russian troll-style talking points. I see Sanders supporters latching onto every minor foible or mistake as some proof that Biden is in cognitive decline. He's always been gaffe prone. We know this. We've known it for decades. He's a gaffe machine. That doesn't mean he's suffering from dementia.

[Big Magilla]

Did you watch his speech last night?

This is a man in full control. Don't fall for those snippets of him at his worst. Everyone has those moments. What voters see is that Biden will bring decency and honor back to the White House, restore America's standing in the world and bring hope to the masses. Sanders and his supporters have had an impact on popular culture that will influence the party platform but Sanders and Trump are the "old men" here. Both shows signs of dementia far greater than Biden.

[Sabin]

Okri wrote
But I legitimately wonder if the DNC would rather lose with Biden than win with Sanders.

I used to doubt this. I don’t anymore. I don’t mean this with any sinister undertones. At the very least, they know how to fundraise with Trump.

Okri wins
I don’t see how Biden wins. I see how Trump loses. But I don’t see a Biden presidency as a good thing for the big problems. I see those big problems getting worse. And I see Trump II being a hell of a lot worse. So yeah, Trump’s undeniably worse. Biden’s better. But coming from the deepest Democratic bench in a while, it’s disheartening.

I felt relieved last week when the Dems united around Biden. I don’t anymore. The videos I see of Joe Biden talking to voters are disconcerting. He’s old and defensive. He yells at them. I’ve never seen a major political candidate seem so frail and ornery.

Biden loses every second of his debate with Trump. All Trump has to do is ask him about the Iraq War vote and NAFTA. He is astonishingly incapable of admitting mistakes. But maybe voters can ignore it.

Biden wins through team effort. And what a team! He’ll have a united party. They won’t ignore the Midwest. They’ll galvanize the 2018 midterm vote. And if his running mate isn’t a turnoff, maybe he can eek it out. It cannot be overstated how much had to go wrong for Clinton to lose. Swing 80,000 votes and she wins by three million votes. Not bad for a Democrat with the second highest unfavorables in modern history! Wonder what a dude with a penis could do...

The above scenario is possible. And somewhat likely.

Biden’s ability to lose? Health and some WikiLeaks style leak. That’s about it.

The man’s not well. He’s been in cognitive decline for months. He seems like Bruce Dern from Nebraska. He can’t hide in a bubble forever. He’s defensive and jerkish to crowds. The media won’t bubble him off forever. It will become a story and it’ll be a race to break it. I have no doubt. Or Maybe curiously timed right before the DNC that he’s a sex vampire or he went to Epstein’s island. Idk. Biden is a gross politician. True or not, there are things that could weigh him down.

Throw in NAFTA ads and Iraq War ads to hurt him.

If he picks Stacey Abrams, that could do it too, perhaps. Or maybe Kamala Harris given the racism. And sexism.

But it took SO much to go wrong for Trump to win in the first place. Biden’s blunders don’t seem to anger most Americans. You may not see him as likable. But Americans don’t hate him like Hillary. They just think “Oh, that’s Joe.”

I think he’ll run a snoozer of a campaign to slight victory.

As a President though... I don't know.

[Okri]

So, when the Democratic field was unveiled, I was seriously impressed. There were people who I wanted to see in the American federal government (Warren, Harris). And there were others who I grew to admire throughout their time in the race (Gillibrand, Castro, Inslee). And there were others still who I was glad were present even if I had a hard time with them in the race in particular (O’Rourke, Buttigieg, Yang). So it doesn’t surprise me that a presidential candidate could look at the field and actually think “hey, I want these people on my side.”

That the race is boiling down to Biden vs Sanders is a bit of a disappointment.

Sabin earlier described Biden as Clinton without the sexist baggage. I would add a few more caveats to that. He’s far more gaff prone, with a voting record that is mixed to say the least. He’s a weak debater (but maybe that doesn’t matter – does Trump debate anyone at this point)? I’m told that he’s likeable and I… don’t get it as much as I’d like to. Democrats were crucified under Obama – losing something like 1000 seats to Republicans, so this idea that he’d be a saviour down-ballot is not born out. Biden has stated repeatedly he feels he can work with Republicans, which speaks to an era that I don’t think exists anymore. You look at what the GOP in Oregon is doing; or what the former governor of Kentucky did…Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s the harvest Republicans have planted for 30 years. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I want it him to be able to work with these Republicans. He’s a “centrist” so I don’t see him enacting the changes America needs (inasmuch as I understand the nation) and certainly not the changes the world needs of America (though you have no idea how much I wish we didn’t need the nation on “our” side). Meanwhile, you look at just how staunchly the DNC wants him (Jim Clyburn suggesting the DNC intervene and cease debates….. awful idea)

Sanders, on the other hand, strikes me as a great figurehead. His vision for a more perfect union is perhaps the most truly expansive and needed one of our era. But in terms of someone who understands the politics is the process by which people with competing interests and goals accomplish things… he’s lacking, to say the least. That he hasn’t produced that turnout groundswell amongst youth that he needs to (a whole ‘nother topic, but yee-Gods, that’s depressing) is a huge flaw he doesn’t know how to (or cannot) overcome. But I legitimately wonder if the DNC would rather lose with Biden than win with Sanders.

I don’t see how Biden wins. I see how Trump loses. But I don’t see a Biden presidency as a good thing for the big problems. I see those big problems getting worse. And I see Trump II being a hell of a lot worse. So yeah, Trump’s undeniably worse. Biden’s better. But coming from the deepest Democratic bench in a while, it’s disheartening.

[Sabin]

Mateo wrote
I recognize Kamala Harris (the other name I hear thrown around most) is more accomplished politically and has her fan base but could she generate the same type of excitement as Stacey? That might seem like a no-brainer but Stacey is younger (could help with Joe's lower favorability with Gen Z), has less baggage (i.e. Kamala's Attorney General background), and has gained both airtime and respect for her recent work on voting rights.

Last point: Harris and Abrams bring two different kind of enthusiasms.

I think Abrams would possibly do more to bridge the gap between the Biden and Sanders camps bc she suffered such ridiculous voter suppression in Georgia. They’d be more reluctant to attack her (ugh, I miss life before Twitter). And she would potentially bring in more youth voters. The reason why I would be more excited about a Harris ticket is everything I said below about the problems with Abrams as a running mate (she’s not ready) is choosing Harris would heal some of the wounds from this bruising race. By choosing Harris, Biden announces himself as someone who is willing to learn from his critics. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know but it can be good optics for a nation that might want to move on.

I think she would bring a faction Warren voters in because like Warren, Harris ran and had an incredibly rough go of it. She may not galvanize the youth crowd but honestly who cares at this point? She wouldn’t unify the party (nobody can) but she would consolidate the party. Also, I favor tickets that double down on strength and comparability vs. bridge gaps. Biden and Harris both come from the Senate. They look like they’re part of the same team.