Month: October 2015

Gabriel Sherman at the Daily Intelligencer says we are already months into the Biden campaign:

Joe Biden is running for president — a fact that has been obvious, and true, for weeks. He spent the week continuing to phone key Democrats in early voting states and huddle with his kitchen cabinet, which includes his chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti; message man Mike Donilon; longtime adviser Ted Kaufman; and sister Valerie Biden Owens. He spoke with Harold Schaitberger, the general president of the powerful firefighters union, and won his endorsement, should he declare. According to a source, he told Schaitberger that “all the political pieces are in place.” In effect, Biden has been running since Maureen Dowd published a Times column reporting how Biden’s 46-year-old son Beau implored his father to challenge Clinton for the nomination shortly before Beau died of brain cancer. The campaign picked up steam the following day when Alcorn, who had been a top strategist for Beau’s gubernatorial run in Delaware, joined the super-PAC. His arrival transformed what had been the fledgling brainchild of a 27-year-old former Obama volunteer into a serious campaign-in-waiting. Alcorn says they are “well on their way” to raising $3 million and have grown to 20 paid staffers that include veteran field operatives in Iowa, South Carolina, and Florida and a digital-data team. In September, it hired Mark Putnam, a veteran of Obama’s 2012 media team, to produce television ads. Of course, what the Draft Biden PAC hasn’t had is Biden himself, and many Democrats believe that the vice-president has missed his window — that the debate went so well for Clinton she has effectively boxed him out. But this analysis assumes that Biden has been deciding whether he should enter. In reality, Biden is choosing what kind of campaign to run: an active one, in which he positions himself as a Clinton alternative, or a passive one that presents him as an alternative to Bernie Sanders or any of the other three non-­candidates who were onstage in Las Vegas.

Jeb Bush is about to walk into a haymaker. Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump stated the fact that that George W. Bush was the President when we were attacked by Islamic extremists.

“He was President,” Trump said. “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.” “I think I’m much more competent than all of them,” Trump said. “Say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump told Bloomberg.

Jeb Bush's responded with the threadbare lie that his brother “kept us safe.” I don't see how this isn't terrible news for the faltering Bush campaign. The more Trump reminds the GOP base of Bush;s incompetence, and the more Jed tries to respond to those attacks by sticking his fingers in his ear holes and chanting "He kept us safe" the more Bush looks like a complete buffoon.

Joan Walsh says Progressives won the Democratic Debate, hands down:

Courtesy of a Democratic Party that’s shifted left thanks to its base, for the first time in American history a national television audience was exposed to a serious discussion about capitalism vs. socialism, expanding Social Security, providing debt-free college, protecting reproductive rights, and jailing bankers. Early reporting tells us it was the most watched Democratic debate in history. What happened in Las Vegas Tuesday night surely won’t stay in Las Vegas. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley all had good nights, with debate performances strong enough to let each candidate’s supporters legitimately spin the night as a “win,” as they did. Progressives had a good night, too. The differences between Clinton and Sanders were made clearer, but not bitter. [Hillary] defended her shift left on many issues as coming to terms with reality. When CNN’s Anderson Cooper confronted her with a statement she made recently about being a “moderate,” Clinton retorted: “I’m a progressive, but a progressive who likes to gets things done.” That sums up Clinton’s pitch.

And there you go. It is a divide that I have spoken about for years. The Purists vs. the Pragmatists. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are no doubt pragmatists. For that, they are denounced as evil corporatist whores by some in the purist camp, which leads to the tonnage of disrespect and loathing the pragmatists feel for the purists. All of this is over tactics and incremental progress. Both sides pretty much agree on policy and the issues. It is the when and how that sets these two camps apart. Bernie Sanders is very much in the purist camp, and has been for years. He is so pure he cannot even be a Democrat. Hillary is very much in the pragmatist camp. And there is your primary.

Someone not named a variant of Brian to make it a three way.

Rep. John Carney’s decision last month to run for governor has opened up his at-large seat to Delaware Democrats hoping to make it to Washington. The day after the three-term member made his announcement, state Sen. Bryan Townsend, a corporate lawyer in Wilmington, got into the race. A week later, state Rep. Bryon Short, a small business owner and former aide to Sen. Thomas R. Carper, followed suit. Now a third Democrat is expected to get into the race. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who served as Delaware’s first African-American female secretary of Labor, is likely to announce her campaign in the coming weeks, a source who is familiar with her thinking told CQ Roll Call Thursday. In a safe Democratic district that President Barack Obama carried twice, the winner of the primary will almost surely win the seat. EMILY’s List has met with Rochester, and is encouraging her to run. “Lisa Blunt Rochester has been a fierce advocate for Delaware families,” EMILY’s List Communications Director Marcy Stech told CQ Roll Call. “We are excited to see that she’s taking a serious look at this race — she would be a strong leader in Washington who knows how to create opportunity for all.”

Via Roll Call

William Greider on the coming breakup of the GOP:

Fresh chatter among Washington insiders is not about whether the Republican Party will win in 2016 but whether it will survive. Donald Trump—the fear that he might actually become the GOP nominee—is the ultimate nightmare. Some gleeful Democrats are rooting (sotto voce) for the Donald, though many expect he will self-destruct. Nevertheless, Republicans face a larger problem. The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968—welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln—is now devouring itself in ugly, spiteful recriminations. The abrupt resignation of House Speaker John Boehner was his capitulation to this new reality. His downfall was loudly cheered by many of his own troops—the angry right-wingers in the House who have turned upon the party establishment. Chaos followed. The discontented accuse party leaders of weakness and betraying their promises to the loyal rank and file. At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. Americans are rapidly shifting toward more tolerant understandings of personal behavior and social values, but the Republican Party sticks with retrograde social taboos and hard-edged prejudices about race, gender, sexual freedom, immigration, and religion. Plus, it wants to do away with big government (or so it claims).

No it doesn't, as Hillary says. The GOP wants Theocracy, forcing one national religion upon all. It will take a big government to do that, to police the sexual habits of 350 million, to monitor millions of pregnancies every day to make sure none are aborted, to build and monitor a wall that keeps all in and out. The libertarian and business wings are repulsed by the racists and the theocrats, but only with them can they be a national party. Only with them can they have a chance to win national elections. But perhaps we have reached the point of not caring anymore. Boehner did.

Another Republican had a bout of honesty today and admitted the truth that the Benghazi Commission is nothing but a made up partisan witch hunt to crucify Hillary Clinton despite any wrongdoing on her part.

Currently, the 2010 Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Delaware is being sued by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for allegedly using at least $20,000 in campaign contributions to pay personal bills, such as her rent at her Greenville townhouse. Well, it seems that beyond whatever retainer he secured before taking the case, her attorney is not being paid.