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Feb 6th 2020

IT WAS A devastating contrast. As the Iowa caucus turned into a fiasco (Democrats blamed the software), President Donald Trump hailed an American comeback in the state-of-the-union message and basked in his acquittal by the Senate over impeachment. With the economy roaring and his approval ratings ticking up, Mr Trump looks likelier than ever to triumph in November. Compare that with the Democrats after Iowa, in which no candidate won the backing of much more than a quarter of caucusers.

Democrats agree that ending Mr Trumps bombastic tenure is their priority. But their champions, now trudging round New Hampshire eking out votes before next weeks primary (see article), are starkly divided over what to offer Americans in his place. The left argues that America has stopped working for most people and thus needs fundamental restructuring. Moderates recommend running repairs. A lot rests on which side prevailsthe radicals or the repairers.

Any of the front-runners could yet end up as the nominee: the radicals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; or the repairers, Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden (despite his bad day in Iowa). So at a pinch could Michael Bloomberg, another repairer, who is spending gargantuan sums before Super Tuesday next month. But on every count the repairers have the better of the argument. They are more likely to beat Mr Trump, to achieve things and, most important, to do what America needs.

It is striking that all of the plausible nominees are campaigning to the left of President Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 (see Briefing). They all have ambitious plans on climate change; and, with the exception of Mr Bloomberg, are sceptical of free trade. Nevertheless, Mr Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, and Ms Warren, a capitalist, are distinctly more militant in both style and substance.

This is partly a matter of degree, as health policy shows. All Democrats want the number of Americans without health insurance, which has risen from 27m to 30m under Mr Trump, to be reduced, ideally to zero. The repairers would expand Obamacares market-based system until everyone was covered. Mr Sanders and Ms Warren, by contrast, would nationalise health insurance, revolutionising health care, a $3.8trn business accounting for 18% of GDP and which employs 16.6m people.

There is also a fundamental difference about the role of government. Take labour rights, for instance. All Democrats evoke a mythical golden age when people were rewarded fairly for a days work. The reformers would increase minimum wages to, say, $15 an hour and spend more on education and retraining. The radicals would force any largish firm to put workers on its boardMs Warren would give their representatives 40% of the seats, Mr Sanders 45%. Mr Sanders would require firms to transfer 20% of their equity to workers trusts. Both would create a system of federal charters to oblige firms to operate in the interests of all stakeholders, including workers, customers and the local community as well as shareholders. Such a government-mandated shift in corporate power has never occurred in the United States.

This radicalism is based on three misconceptions. The first is that Mr Trump showed in 2016 that you win elections through the fervour of your base rather than making a coalition. That is unlikely to work for Democrats in 2020. Presidential elections tend not to be kind to candidates who pitch their camp far from the political centre. Voters perceived Hillary Clinton as more extreme than Donald Trump in 2016, and it did not end well for her. In a 50:50 country, marginal handicaps matter.

Mr Trump would have fun with Mr Sanders, who wishes to double federal spending overnight and, perhaps more important to the president, honeymooned in the Soviet Union. It was no accident that in his state-of-the-union message Mr Trump pointed to Juan Guaid, the Venezuelan opposition leader who was his guest for the evening, and reminded Congress that socialism destroys nations. Few voters are hankering to own the means of production in suburban Philadelphia or Milwaukee, where the presidential election will probably be decided.

Another misconception is that a radical who did get into the Oval Office would accomplish much. Some Democrats say that the intransigence of the Republican Party means an approach built around compromise is worthless. The pursuit of incremental change, they reckon, is an admission of defeat at the outset. They are right that the two parties in Congress have forgotten how to work together. Todays Senate is likely to accomplish less than any other in the past half-century. Their idea is to take on Mr Trumps reality-TV populism with red-blooded economic populism. That might thrill activists and terrify Wall Street, but it would be both unproductive and self-defeating. Democrats believe in the role of government. They are condemned to try to make it work, not demonstrate that it cannot.

The last misconception, and the most important, concerns the substance of what the radicals would like to achieve. Ms Warren takes her faith in government to extremes. If she had her way, the state would break up, abolish or impose fresh regulations on about half of the firms owned by shareholders or private-equity groups. Mr Sanders would go even further. Both candidates treat private capital as if it operates with sinister intent, even as they embrace the state as if it were benign, capable and efficient. That is naive. Just as thriving businesses at their best invigorate and enrich, so government at its worst can be capable of heartless cruelty and indifference.

There are moments when the United States has required something like a revolutionbefore the civil war, say, or in the years running up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. This is not one of them. Unemployment is as low as it has been since the mid-1960s. Nominal wages in the lowest quartile of the income scale are growing by 4.6%. Americans are more optimistic about their own finances than they have been since 1999.

Instead America needs repairinglowering the cost of housing and health care; moving to a low-carbon economy; finding a voting system that rewards consensus, not partisanship. For that, national politics needs to become boring again, not to be an exhausting, outrage-spewing fight between Mr Trump and the most extreme candidate the Democratic Party can muster.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "The Democratic primaries will be a contest between radicals and repairers"

Read the rest here:
The Democratic primaries will be a contest between radicals and repairers - The Economist

About a half-hour before Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbards town hall here on Thursday, a guest at the Fireside Inn & Suites in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, ducked into the conference room to inquire about all the signs. When a volunteer filled him in, he sounded skeptical. Shes running forpresident?

Yes, and to hear some of the folks here tell it, she might even win.

Gabbards long-shot campaign has yet to take off nationally, and there are a lot of reasons for thattheres her strange familycult?; her public feud with Hillary Clinton; her failure to qualify for the last three debates; and the obvious fact that Bernie Sanders, who she backed in 2016, is still here and now may be the frontrunner. But Gabbard is holding down about 5 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, according to the Suffolk University tracking poll. Thats potential spoiler territory, with the first-in-the-nation primary just days away.

So wheres all that support coming from? If the crowd at the hotel was any indication, its a whole lot of Republicans and independents who supported President Donald Trump four years ago.

She has a lot of class, but shes sort of the Democratic Trump, said Anthony Stevens of Vermont, who was there with his fiancee, a Democrat who was still undecided. Stevens meant it as a good thingafter all, hed voted for the president four years ago. This time around he was looking for someone different (Trump does not have a lot of class). He liked Gabbards anti-war stance and was drawn, again, to a candidate who had clashed with her own party.

Shes got to feel like Rudolphthey wont let her play in the games, Stevens said, alluding to her exclusion from the most recent debates. (Gabbard has failed to meet the qualifying threshold for Fridays debate at the University of New Hampshire.)

A few seats over sat Bob Gill, a former Marine who is now a horse farmer in New Hampshire. He had also voted for Trump. Gill was still undecided, but liked Gabbard because he thought she might be the kind of voice who could maybe bring people back together. Plus, I like that shes looking to save some money on the wars and everything, he said. But he had no patience for the rest of the field, particularly the septuagenarians topping the polls in some of the Super Tuesday states. Id put them out to pasture, he said.

Sitting in the back, Lisa Buck-Rogers, an Air Force veteran and New Hampshire voter, told me she also supported Trump, but would most likely vote against him this fall. Gabbards criticism of American military actions struck a chord with her. I like how she feels about respecting our veterans and making sure their lives are spent accordingly. She likes some of what Sanders says, too, particularly on health care, but shes Gabby as long as I can.

Ask a voter what they like about, say, Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren, and you might get a range of answers. But the responses I got about Gabbard were unusually consistentwhat Scott Decker, a supporter from Burlington, Vermont summed up as anti-imperialism. Other candidates oppose foreign intervention to varying degrees, but it dominates Gabbards message, so much so that to these supporters, it supersedes the kinds of policies (like single-payer health care) they might consider a deal-breaker in the eyes of someone else.

Ken Rafferty, an independent from Lebanon, New Hampshire, voted for former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in the Republican primary in 2016, but he didnt vote in the general election that year. Im glad I didnt, because I never would have voted for either one of those guys, he said, referring to Trump and Clinton, though, in retrospect, Im kind of concerned about Trump. Rafferty disagreed with much of what Gabbard was pushing, particularly when it came to health care. But because of her criticism of American military action in the Middle East, and of her own party, Gabbard was the only Democrat hed even consider supporting.

Independents can vote in whichever primary they choose in New Hampshire, and Gabbard is leaning into her support from unaffiliated voters. At the town hall on Thursday, she asked, as she often does, for a show of hands from the Democrats in the room. There were maybe six of them, in a crowd of about 40. Another half dozen were Republicans, the rest independents. (Though unfortunately for Gabbard, many of these independents were from neighboring Vermont.) A few people in the audience applauded at the results.

For these Republicans and independents, it helps that Gabbard sometimes seems to have as much of a beef with the Democratic Party establishment as they do.

Anybody who is banned from the mainstream media and who gets shit from Hillary Clinton is my kind of person, said Decker, a Burlington, Vermont, resident who said who would also support Sanders in the general election if he gets there.

Gabbard knew right away that the DNC was fixed, Buck-Rogers said, referring to Gabbards decision to step down from her post as Democratic National Committee vice-chair in 2016.

Still, while Gabbard is happy to go on Fox News, engage Trump voters, and feud with her party, theres still one line she wont cross. During the Q&A that followed her stump speech, she took a question from a man in a Tulsi T-shirt, named Paul Woodman, who was sitting next to a man wearing a Fuck Trump pin. I voted against Hillary, which means I voted for Trump, Woodman told her. He just might do it again, if Democrats dont nominate the congresswoman standing in front of him. Gabbard was the only Democrat he could stomach, and he was convinced she wasnt going to get a fair shake from the DNC, even if she ended up with enough delegates to compete for the nomination. Have you ever consideredchanging parties or re-affiliating?, he asked.

She smiled, thanked him for the question, and tried to dispel, once more, the idea that theres no longer a place for her in the party. First of all: no

Excerpt from:
Trump Voters Have Found a Democrat They Can Get Behind in New Hampshire - Mother Jones

A Republican Party rift that is poised to put Georgia in play for Democrats, from the top of the ticket on down, is being fueled by Rep. Doug Collinss bid to oust appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a November special election that coincides with Election Day.

In Washington, Senate Republicans closed ranks around Loeffler as they ordered K Street to halt financial support for Collins and warned the congressman, an ally of President Trump, that challenging their colleague would extinguish his promising political career. But, in Atlanta, top Republicans are proposing to change Georgia law to move up the special election primary by six months to boost Collins, who is more well known than Loeffler.

The divide is disrupting GOP strategy to court suburban swing voters and bolster support for Trump and Sen. David Perdue, who is up for reelection, heading into the fall. Some Republicans worry that a heated Collins-Loeffler primary could facilitate a repeat of the midterm elections, when a Democratic surge flipped a historically GOP suburban House seat and the Democratic candidate came within 1.4 percentage points of the governors mansion.

All [Collins] has done is put two Senate seats, multiple House seats, and Georgias 16 electoral votes in play, said Kevin McLaughlin, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a statement.

But at least one wealthy Republican donor, a regular contributor to Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the NRSC, and various Republican senators, said he is backing Collins. This is Mitch McConnells worst nightmare, said Dan Eberhart, an energy executive from Arizona, who added that the congressman has a MAGA following that would be tough for Loeffler to overcome.

Collins in an interview Wednesday said his critics' concerns are overblown.

Theres never a problem with people having a choice on conservative values," he said. Loeffler, personally wealthy and expected to self-finance at least a portion of her campaign, declined to comment.

Gov. Brian Kemp appointed Loeffler to succeed Johnny Isakson, who resigned last month amid health issues. Trump preferred Collins, 53, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the White House impeachment defense team. But, determined to stop the erosion of support for Republicans in the suburbs, especially among women, and to protect Georgias status as a red state, Kemp selected the 49-year-old Loeffler.

Collinss allies in the Georgia state House struck back with legislation to change the rules for special Senate elections.

The Georgia House of Representatives is expected to pass a bill converting the first round of the special election to a closed Republican primary and set it for May. But, even if the bill clears the state Senate, Kemp, who is committed to Loeffler, would veto it. A senior Republican official in Georgia told the Washington Examiner the battle has sparked bitter recriminations that extend from the partys power brokers down to the grassroots.

Ive seen it in my Facebook feed, this official said. Absolutely, people are split.

Trump, a wild card who might influence the outcome of the special election, has not yet commented on Collins's candidacy.

Read more from the original source:
Doug Collins Senate bid threatens to hand Georgia to the Democrats - Washington Examiner

At a recent town hall, pro-life Democrat Kristen Day asked presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg if he and his party would be more inclusive of pro-life Democrats. Do you want the support of ... pro-life Democratic voters? she asked. There are about 21 million of us. And if so, would you support more moderate platform language in the Democratic party to ensure that the party of diversity, of inclusion, really does include everybody?

Buttigieg shot that idea right down in the kind of backhanded way a presidential candidate will do. After being pressed by moderator Chris Wallace and again by Day with a second attempt at an answer, Buttigieg made it clear there's no place in his party for pro-life voters.

Some were outraged that Buttigieg took such a hard line. But why shouldnt he? His position is clear: Democrats are pro-choice, and those who don't agree aren't welcome. I see nothing wrong with Buttigieg's response he was simply telling the awful truth.

The quandary for Day and others like her is that she's Catholic, which puts her in the unfortunate position of having to choose between what she believes is the lesser of two evils. In a 2015 interview, Day was asked how pro-life Democrats "fit into" a party that supports abortion. This was her answer: "Yes, the Democratic Party fails on this most important protection to the dignity of the unborn, but their policies to address income inequality and support for new mothers ... could result in a lower abortion rate because families will have the means to provide housing, nutrition, and a safe environment to raise the child."

Day is not alone in her worldview. Roughly half of all Catholics vote Democrat.

The question is why. It's been decades since opposition to abortion became the litmus test for Democratic support. Democrats prefer to call abortion "reproductive rights" to make the tragedy sound more palatable, but a pig dressed as a princess is still a pig. Catholicism's entire platform, meanwhile, is built on the sanctity of life. What gives?

For the record, I'm not Catholic. However, I've been steeped in Catholicism my entire life. My mother's family is Catholic. My husband and his (mother's side of the) family are Catholic, and our kids are Catholic. I even went to Catholic school, as did my husband, our kids, and pretty much all of our friends. We all vote Republican, but Catholics are evenly split between the two major parties, so there are plenty of Catholic Democrats in our neck of the woods.

But to be Catholic and vote Democrat in 2020 is both disingenuous and naive. Day's justification is that she believes Democratic policies will make poor people less poor, and therein lies the rub. You see, Catholics' other signature issue is poverty, and half of Catholics believe Democrats are the party that cares about the poor. That means this group is stuck between a rock (supporting people who support killing babies) and a hard place (the desire to end poverty). In the end, they sacrifice their principles on the sanctity of life for the sake of the poor.

In the end, Catholics get neither of their interests met. Far from lifting up the poor and downtrodden, Democratic policies hurt those they claim to help. Moreover, Arthur Brooks demonstrated conclusively in his book Who Really Cares that conservatives are far more compassionate than liberals. Strong families, church attendance, earned income (as opposed to state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not governments, offer the best solution to social ills are all factors that determine how likely one is to give.

"Numerous studies have demonstrated that a dollar in government spending on nonprofit activities displaces up to 50 cents in private giving, writes Brooks. The highest level of crowding out occurs in assistance to the poor and other kinds of social welfare services. And guess who in the private sector does the most for the poor? Catholics. So one could argue that voting Democrat in fact undermines their work.

I'm also convinced Catholics don't realize what a dominant force feminism is the Democratic Party. No single group in this country is less devoted to, or even interested in, marriage and motherhood than feminists. Yet Mary, mother of God, is another significant force in the Catholic church. A good Catholic recognizes the invaluable role mothers play in our society, and Democrats pull out all the stops to get mothers out of the home and into the workforce. Why would you get behind that if you're Catholic?

The question worth asking isn't whether or not Buttigieg's party will welcome pro-life voters who think like Day. A better question is, "Why is any Catholic still voting for Democrats?"

Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, columnist, and radio host. Her newest book, WOMEN WHO WIN at Love: How to Build a Relationship That Lasts, was published in October 2019. Suzannes website is http://www.suzannevenker.com.

See the original post:
To be Catholic and vote for Democrats in 2020 is just wrong - Washington Examiner

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks in Columbia, S.C., January 20, 2020. (Sam Wolfe/Reuters)

On the menu today: Establishment Democrats suddenly realize Bernie Sanders might win the nomination; a lot of ominous signs for Sanders in a general-election matchup; some other observations from the winter meeting of the Stand Together groups allied with Charles Koch; and some little-known sterling organizations making a difference.

The Sudden Democratic Panic about Bernie Sanders

One week before the Iowa caucuses, with Bernie Sanders leading most polls in that state and in New Hampshire, the rest of the Democratic party is suddenly realizing that the Vermont senator could well win the nomination. At NBC News, Politico, and ABC News, the big story this morning is that the Democratic establishment has been caught asleep at the wheel for a second straight cycle.

I know not everyone in the NR audience has such a warm-and-fuzzy perspective about our old friend and colleague David Frum. But Frum is a guy who at least spent some time in the conservative movement and GOP politics, and periodically he reminds the mostly left-of-center audience of The Atlantic of how the world actually works, and when he does, it can turn out to be hilarious. Its like watching a parent try to explain to kids that the coins in their piggy bank cannot, in fact, cover the costs of a trip to Disney World:

Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate. He has never fought a race in which he had to face serious personal scrutiny. None of his Democratic rivals is subjecting him to such scrutiny in 2020. Hillary Clinton refrained from scrutinizing Sanders in 2016. It did not happen, either, in his many races in Vermont. APoliticoprofile in 2015 by Michael Krusearguedthat Sanders had benefited from an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters, and local reporters who have steered clear of writing about Sanderss personal history rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.

The Trump campaign will not steer clear. It will hit him with everything its got. It will depict him as a Communist in the grip oftwisted sexual fantasies, a useless career politician who oversaw a culture ofsexual harassmentin his 2016 campaign. Through 2019, Donald Trump and his proxies hailed Sanders as a true voice of the people, thwarted by the evil machinations of the Hillary Clinton machine. They will not pause for a minute before pivoting in 2020 to attack him as a seething stew of toxic masculinity whose vicious online followers martyred the Democratic Partys first female presidential nominee

Trump will terrorize the suburban moderates with the threat that Sanders will confiscate their health insurance and stock holdings, if not their homes. Trump accused Democrats of pro-ayatollah sympathies for noticing that his story about the killing of Qassem Soleimani was full of holes. In 1980, Sanders joined a left-wing party whose presidential candidate condemned anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, suggesting that many of them are simply spies or people assigned to protect the spies, as Ronald RadoshreportedinThe Daily Beast.Imagine what Trump and his team will do withthat.

A lot of stuff that was either no big deal or dismissed as just Bernie being Bernie in Vermont will look really bad in GOP attack ads in all of those swing states. I still cant believe we havent seen a single commercial that even mentions Sanderss otherworldly op-ed about womens rape fantasies. The Sanders campaign will insist it was the foolish ramblings from a confused young man, written many decades ago. The Trump campaign will point out, accurately, that Sanders was 30 years old when he wrote it.

The whistling-past-the-graveyard assessment of Sanders for Democrats is that his particular quirks wont much effect on the overall contours of the race; in a matchup between any Democrat and Trump, any Democrat just has to keep the blue states and flip the big three in the Upper Midwest Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to win the presidency. But . . . a new poll released Monday measured head to head matchups in Delaware, and . . . Bernie Sanders is ahead of Donald Trump only by a point. Maybe not all those blue states look so secure if Sanders is the nominee.

And did I say flip Pennsylvania? Maybe thats not such a safe bet!

John Fetterman, Pennsylvanias lieutenant governor, and Bill Peduto, Pittsburghs mayor, both Democrats, agree on one thing: a pledge to ban all hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, could jeopardize any presidential candidates chances of winning this most critical of battleground states and thus the presidency itself. So as Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren woo young environmental voters with a national fracking ban, these two Democrats are uneasy.

In Pennsylvania, youre talking hundreds of thousands of related jobs that would be they would be unemployed overnight, said Mr. Fetterman, who endorsed Mr. Sanders in 2016 before Donald J. Trump won his state, pop. 12.8 million, by just over 44,000 votes. Pennsylvania is a margin play, he added. And an outright ban on fracking isnt a margin play.

Ramesh lays out an argument that the Trump campaign, or Trump supporters, will use to sway Trump-skeptical or Trump-weary conservatives if Sanders is the Democratic nominee. Even a minimally competent President Sanders would still make America significantly more open to socialist policies in the long run. The limits of whats politically possible will shift left as the political world adjusts to the new reality. Politicians, strategists, journalists, activists and voters who thought that certain ideas were too far left to make it in America would revise their sense of the country, and of what counts as extreme or as realistic within it. The ground on which future races for president, governor and Congress are contested would move left. That doesnt mean the U.S. would be Venezuela, or even Denmark, by the start of 2022. But it is reasonable to expect that government policy 10 or 20 years from now would be considerably more socialistic than it would be if Trump were re-elected or if Biden were elected.

Signs of Hope for America, Well beyond the Beltway

Various news and notes from this years Koch/Stand Together winter meeting . . .

The Koch winter meeting loves to spotlight charitable and nonprofit groups with new and different approaches to tacking social problems.

As mentioned yesterday, this country is full of good people who want to make a difference. And sometimes these corners of America with good people making a difference feel like theyre light years away from whats going on in Washington.

ADDENDUM: Look, my fellow air travelers. I hate delayed flights and the risk of missed connections as much as the next guy. But the weather is the weather, and if you fly through, say, San Francisco, theres always going to be the chance of fog delaying things. The poor woman behind the counter at the gate cannot control the weather and, in most circumstances, is doing the best she can. It does not matter to the weather if you have a lot of frequent-flyer miles, and the gate agents manager isnt going to be able to change the weather, either.

See original here:
Bernie Is Frightening the Democrats - National Review