Last year I described the Moderate lane of the Democrat Party as being:
… the part that’s not Woke, not into Identity Politics, and not that keen on vast, new government schemes beyond what already exist in the form of the troubled Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid programs. The lane that includes the large majority of those white male voters forming Trump’s base, which the Democrats are desperate to “cut deep into”.
The reason for the quote marks in the title is that this lane is now only moderate in comparison to the nutters in the other lanes of the Democrat Party. Everyone in this lane has come out for some form of Medicare-For-All, banning fracking, and so forth.
So let’s look the main candidates still standing in this lane: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobucher and Bloomberg.
Joe Biden (DOH!, Washington D.C.)
I think I’ve covered this guy enough here and here early in 2019 and here during the New Hampshire primary.
Biden always looked like a loser. As I said last May, he only led in polls because of being the Big Dog in the “moderate” lane.
Even as early as Iowa – and despite the best efforts of the MSM to gaslight for him that there was nothing to see about the dealings of he and his son Hunter in the Ukraine – it was obvious that Democrat voters had some tough questions about the whole business, and Biden’s response was simply “denial and anger“.
The surprising thing is that nobody has been able to grab the moderate mantle as Biden has fallen. It remains split between Biden, Buttigieg and Klobacher, with Bloomberg possibly rising. But at some stage even the moderates are going to give up and throw in with whoever wins the Socialist and/or Woke lanes in a desperate show of unity.
Pete Buttigieg (McKinsey, Earth)
The first truth is that Buttigieg is just not going to crack the Black vote in any state. The second truth is that’s because of the traditionally strong anti-gay bigotry of African Americans, which Democrats and commentators tip-toe around with phrases like “demographic fit” or focusing on protests against Police actions in the Indiana town of which he was mayor.
He’s good on his feet in debates and comes across as the most natural of the candidates, almost never making a gaffe. But I think Buttigieg’s problem is that he’s too smooth. He’s the American Tony Blair in an age where such globalist managers have become a curse word to all too many middle and working class people.
He’s the living, breathing example of the rise and dominance of managerial capitalism that hit the gas pedal in the 1980’s. He’s both a product and participant of the managerial system that now runs society.
He’s also symbolic of his generation and his class. At 38, he is the classic millennial, having turned 18 years old around the time of the great Y2K nervousness, and has followed the career path of such people.
He is not a man who actually does or builds things in the world. Instead he participates in them and gets the credentials for that, which is then leveraged into the next stage of his career. Son of a college professor. Valedictorian of his high school. Won “first prize in the John F. Kennedy Presidential essay contest.” Then Harvard. Then Oxford for a Rhodes scholarship in Philosophy.
And after he piled up all those academic credentials he went off to work entry-level jobs in politics and the media, steadily building his resume and network of contacts. When I found out he’d worked at McKinsey & Company I burst out laughing: in the US of the 1990’s they were seen as one of the major targets for such people and I’m sure it’s not changed. Listen to what he says: almost all of it is a pitch-perfect McKinsey word salad:
“We had the belief that in the face of exhaustion and cynicism and division, in spite of every trampled norm and every poisonous Tweet, that a rising majority of Americans was hungry for action and ready for new answers.”
It’s so bad that its led to the Mayor Pete Platitude Generator. Sure, all politicians have platitudes but Buttigieg’s are gold-plated Powerpoint slides from the 2000’s. Whenever he unloads one of these I always think of this:
We must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”
Amy Klobuchar (Nice, Minnesota)
From the start of Trump’s presidency I’ve thought the best way to defeat him would be to cuddle up to him. Trump loves a fight: waking up to massive amounts of abuse, insults, MSM hate-fest, court cases and accusations of criminal behaviour is, for Trump, a day ending in “Y”. His Queens persona loves it, thrives on it.
So don’t give it to him! The Democrats should have just supplied the praise he constantly craves – while also presenting him with Medicare-like health plans and trillion-dollar infrastructure plans. It’s not like he gives a shit about massive government spending or deficits. Sure, it would require a degree of swallowing their own vomit but that’s politics.
And along with that approach, perhaps select a candidate in 2020 who is the non-Trump.
Like Amy Klobucher.
Always calm, perhaps even bland. Someone who can just roll with Trump’s attacks, smile, tell him that she expected a better nickname than whatever he’s tagged her with, and then keep on pushing policy – all while presenting US voters with the question: “Do I really want four more years of this daily drama?“, rather than “Which candidate do I like better?“. To be fair, the latter might work for Klobucher too. Basically present as someone who will just run the damned country without you having to think about it every day because of yet another Trump vs. “X” shitstorm in the MSM and Social Media.
It also means the GOP can’t demonise her: a “Flight 93” election strategy where you have to convince voters that the fate of humanity depends upon defeating Amy Klobuchar is not going work.
And it’s not like she’s not a good little Democrat. One way she’s fooled Minnesota voters has been to act loud on being a “moderate” in campaigns, everyday events, and getting her name on stacks of very minor legislation that garners approving headlines in her home state – all the while voting with her party 90% of the time and 100% on all the big, controversial stuff but not fronting it and avoiding interviews on it. No fights for Minnesota Nice.
But there’s been no Third Way, Clinton-triangulating bullshit here. She’s quite hardline Left in legislation where it matters, although she has flip-flopped a bit on Illegal Immigration. But then so have most Democrats – even Bernie Sanders – as the Far Left Woke winds have blown stronger through the Party.
But while all this works well for her as a Mid-Western Senator it’s a problem turning it into running for President. Sooner or later the phoniness is exposed. As the nominee she would have to defend those extremist Democrat policies around healthcare, immigration, the military and so forth from which she has hidden for so long. She is not a moderate. She is not funny. She is not an accomplished legislator. She is a boring speaker.
She’s also not actually nice and we finally saw that the other day when she snapped at Pete Buttigieg after he broke out his Spanish on the debate stage: “You know, I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete.” I had to chuckle at that as it’s likely what most other candidates think too. But it was also the moment “Minnesota Nice” went passive-aggressive, which is her normal state, and then openly aggressive, which doesn’t suit her at all. Her treatment of staff in Washington D.C. is legendarily terrible. It got so bad that in 2015, then-Senate minority leader Harry Reid had to take her aside, telling her to change her behavior.
Some former Klobuchar staffers, all of whom spoke to HuffPost on condition of anonymity, describe Klobuchar as habitually demeaning and prone to bursts of cruelty that make it difficult to work in her office for long.
It all speaks to a Hillary-like Empress quality regarding the plebs and sooner or later voters see that.
Her other main problem in getting the nomination has been the simple numbers game of having so many others in the same lane, starting with Biden, but even as he has faded, seeing the rise of Buttigieg (which she clearly resents, another character “tell” to voters) and now Mr Super-Spender, Bloomberg. The longer she’s hung on as others have dropped out, the better her numbers have been, both in primaries and nationally.
But given the refusal to date of the other three “moderates” to drop out, it makes her path tough going, especially in terms of money, which she needs to compete in Super Tuesday on March 3rd. That will include her home state and she has to win that at least. But even if Biden quits before then – after being humiliated in South Carolina, which looks possible – the other two “B’s” won’t. If Biden and Buttigieg had already dropped I’d give her a better-than-even chance of being the nominee when stacked up against Bernie and Warren. But that hasn’t happened – and she’d still be facing Bloomberg’s billions.
Mike Bloomberg (Rich, Manhattan)
In his last run for mayor of New York City, Bloomberg reportedly spent $170 per vote. By that count he could get 65 million Americans to vote for him while blowing less than 1/5 of his fortune.
I hope he does. Political consultants and advisors have to eat, being human after all – or so I’ve been told.
Aside from spending huge amounts of his own money, Bloomberg’s strategy has been rather like Rudi Guliani’s in 2008, where he ignored the small early states to go for the bigger prizes later on. Rudi did not have the money to pull it off: Bloomberg does.
The amounts he is spending are fantastic even by recent standards, with tons of TV adverts in California. He’s probably approaching $500 million and is buying up so many campaign people that others are having trouble getting staff. Perhaps that’s another aspect of his war of attrition.
But I don’t think it is going to work, or ever was going to work.
His main claims to be the nominee seem to be that, like the rest of the Moderates, he’s not Bernie Sanders and that he would be a non-ideological, calm and competent manager of the USA.
The trouble with that claim is that as NYC Mayor he was not only anything but moderate, he was extreme in all the small shit that simply annoys the hell out of ordinary people but really does fuck all to improve society. As a result most New Yorkers merely remember him for his bans and attacks on Big Gulp drinks, salt, transfats, smoking and so forth. Sure, there was also gun control, but NYC was already so hard-line on legal gun ownership that Bloomberg had little to do locally.
Of course the other thing that New Yorkers – and a certain very important part of the Democrat Party – also remember about Bloomberg was his vocal support for the Police policy of Stop and Frisk:
…the Supreme Court granted limited approval in 1968 to frisks conducted by officers lacking probable cause for an arrest in order to search for weapons if the officer believes the subject to be dangerous. The Court’s decision made suspicion of danger to an officer grounds for a “reasonable search.”
Having inherited a low-crime-low-murder-rate city from Rudy Guliani, Bloomberg was determined to take it to the next level – but without Guliani’s legal nous. Guliani had pushed the Broken Windows theory of policing and the results were hard to argue with as murders fell from 2605 in 1990 to 900 in 2001, along with other violent crime. But Broken Windows was a plan of long-term police-citizen involvement and arresting people for minor crimes instead of ignoring them was a key component. Stop and frisks were not the same thing, since more than 80% never resulted in a conviction.
But Bloomberg’s anti-gun mania took hold and he saw his chance: stops exploded from some 90,000 in 2001 to over 600,000 in 2011. The problem for Bloomberg now is that since the NYPD were already focused on high-crime areas, which were mainly Black and Hispanic, those groups were the ones that got hit. Some 90% of the 2010’s stops were of minorities. There was no evidence that they did anything to reduce crime in general or violent crime and eventually the Civil Liberties groups counter-attacked as Bloomberg left office. Stops are now down to about 10,000 per year.
The one thing everybody does say Bloomberg did well was leaving NYC’s financial books in good shape, largely thanks to his re-zoning that allowed a lot of commerical and private construction to happen. He also pushed for education reforms and charter schools. Unfortunately the USA is not as easy to run financially, or in any other way, as even a giant city like New York or a company like Bloomberg L.P.
And more importantly for the primary races, it turns out that 2020 Democrat voters don’t much care about any of this, while they do care very much about racism, misogny and rich pricks – as he found out big time when he finally stepped onto the debate stage a few nights ago. He got pummelled by everybody and came off looking bad with clumsy answers. His sole counter-attack – on Bernie Sanders for supporting communism in the past – was met with groans from the audience and his opponents. Bloomberg was a Democrat before 2001 when he registered as a Republican and then as an Independent before returning to Team Donkey – but he clearly does not understand where the Party is at today.
As an aside, it would normally be pertinent to point out such party hopping as an example of ambition over principles: he had to become a Republican in order to be endorsed for mayor by Guliani, whose popularity had soared because of his actions during and after the 9/11 attacks. When things turned dark for the GOP in 2007 he switched to “Independent” for his final NYC mayorality runs, and then back to Democrat in 2018 in preparation for this run. But given Trump’s success, as well as Bernie Sanders – who held himself aloof from the Democrats for decades as well as regularly cursing them as no different from the GOP – clearly party-hopping no longer matters as much as it once did.
It was no surprise that Bloomberg’s rising polls stopped in their tracks and began to fall after the debate. His history is turning out to be a rich goldmine for opposition research and attack advertising, and his outreach to Flyover Country will be limited as well if he ever became the nominee:
“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”
Offense accepted! And there goes his electability argument. It’s always interesting when very smart people reveal themselves to be very ignorant, and very stupid, about things outside their expertise and experience.
There has been some talk of him going Independent like Ross Perot in ’92 and ’96 but after all this commitment to the Democrats I think that unlikely. Perot and others started as Independents.
But Bloomberg is not going to quit in the face of all this. Falling polls to him simply mean spending more money (every YouTube access I make hits me with one of his adverts), and the question is what will happen when he eventually switches that money from pushing himself to attacking Bernie.
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Overall
It’s hard to see any of these four quitting any time soon. Biden might after South Carolina this coming Saturday, unless he does really well. Even then he’ll likely quit after Super Tuesday. Klobucher and Buttigieg will hang on through Super Tuesday and I’d bet on Klobucher being the first to go after that.
But the arguments as to who is best placed to beat Bernie will not stop and all four might risk going to the convention. It may be that the DNC and donors step in to try and make a selection by persuading people to stand down but since we’re talking politics I’d bet they’d go for the politician, Buttigieg, rather than the businessman, Bloomberg.
And by then it will likely be too late to stop Bernie anyway, a perfect repeat of the GOP mainstream candidates in 2016 who dismissed Trump and fought with eachother right to the bitter end when they suddenly realised they’d all lost.
No Minister 