Thoughtful notes like this keep me moving forward:
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A dear friend and fellow memo reader sends a correction: "minor correction Ahmed Zewail, one of my colleagues at Caltech, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. About a dozen of your physics guys were actually chemistry, noticed Daniel Kahnemenn missing from Economics. The meaning is unchanged but the list isn’t too accurate. I will say that IMO Kahnemenn and Nassim Taleb are the two smartest guys on the planet.
No big deal. C----"
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Someone else is disgusted with the way the FBI gum shoes arrested Stone.
If and when Hillary is ever brought to justice is this the way Mueller would have her arrested? (See 1 below.)
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One can only hope Democrats are seeking another version of Obama to run at the top their 2020 ticket. (See 2 below.)
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Moore does not believe Democrats are for real. (See 3 below.)
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As I noted in a previous memo, Trump lost the first round but is not out and Michael Goodwin believes as much. (See 4 below.)
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I am sure when Mueller's report is finally finished it will be conveniently and unexplainedly leaked. I am also convinced it will be skewed in the direction of smearing Trump but fall short of finding him guilty of Russian Collusion. Finally, I am sure it will have Sidney Weissmann's hand prints all over it.
I also believe Mueller's indictments, based on creating crimes, were done to create, in the minds of the public, guilt by association.
The mass media has treated Mueller with kit gloves whereas when it came to the special counsel investigating Clinton, he was vilified.
Going back to Mueller's report. As a prosecutor it is even questionable that he even write a report. Basically the job of a prosecutor is to refer the matter for or against prosecution. Comey exceeded his own authority when Atty. General Lynch demurred and he exonerated Hillary.
Mueller may not be engaged in a witch hunt but everything so far suggests that is exactly what has come to pass.
If Mueller's focus does not shift, at some point, to Hillary and those involved with her in seeking false warrants from FISA and then using them for the purposes of spying on Trump and his associates in order to disrupt his campaign, if not actually defeat him, then there should remain little doubt Mueller's investigation has no intention of seeking full justice. If Mueller can wander all over and beyond Russian Collusion and go after people for deeds done before they ever got involved in Trump's campaign then, surely, he can investigate those who were involved in The Steele Dossier etc.
And that means Comey and all the connected gumshoes. I continue to believe the stench reaches as high as Obama.
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Dick
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Much has been made of the pre-dawn arrest of Roger Stone in his home in Fort Lauderdale. To make this arrest, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, probably having delegated the task to his subordinate Andrew Weissmann (who is known for this tactic), assembled a full-scale FBI SWAT team of 29 members, replete with long weapons, body armor, and even a flash-bang grenade or two. The arrest took place at "zero dark thirty" or 5:30 A.M. Nevertheless, a CNN crew was on hand to film the whole thing.
Once upon a time, this level of force was considered necessary only to raid suspects able and inclined to shoot back, or who might destroy evidence. Think Symbionese Liberation Army or drug kingpin Frank Lucas of American Gangster fame. In such cases, in which the suspects really might shoot back, a television crew would never be allowed, on the grounds that they could be killed in the crossfire. The fact that a CNN crew was allowed to film Stone's arrest is evidence that nobody believed he was dangerous. Indeed, he was not: he is 66-year-old white-collar suspect with no prior history of violence, who didn't even have weapons in his house. Even the judge processing Stone's arraignment implicitly accepted that Stone was not dangerous; he allowed Stone to be released on a $250,000 surety bond.
The usual procedure in white-collar cases is not to assemble an unnecessary SWAT team. Instead, the Justice Department informs the suspect's attorney that the suspect has been indicted and needs to turn himself in to whatever courthouse for arraignment. The attorney informs the suspect and usually surrenders his client peacefully in the courthouse. No guns, no flash-bangs, no pre-dawn raids. Alan Dershowitz has said the only purpose of this level of force is to intimidate the mark into flipping on someone higher. In the case of Roger Stone, that can mean only President Trump.
Nor is Stone the only white-collar suspect to feel Mueller's wrath. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort got it much worse. Manafort not only was subjected to the same kind of pre-dawn raid as Stone, but also denied bail and held in solitary confinement – before his trial.
All suspects are, legally, presumed innocent until they have been duly convicted. The government has a positive duty to treat all suspects as decently as possible until their convictions. Tactics such as the ones employed on Stone and Manafort are an outrage and instances of government tyranny. Alan Dershowitz opined that the ACLU ought to be up in arms over this kind of arbitrary treatment of Manafort but that he wasn't holding his breath. (Dershowitz himself resigned from the ACLU a few years ago.)
Is there anything we, the citizenry, can do about this violation of our rights? Actually, there is: jury nullification. It is the public's final sanction against abusive, arbitrary, and tyrannical government power.
Jury nullification is the refusal of a jury to convict a defendant, no matter how irrefutable the evidence against the defendant is. Law professor John Joseph Duane calls it the "Top Secret Constitutional Right." It's "top secret" because no judge or prosecutor ever likes to admit that any jury can always tell him to go take a hike. Professor Duane says the absolute right of a jury to implement jury nullification is enshrined in the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment, and also in the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a right to a jury trial whose verdicts no judge has the power to overturn.
Jury nullification has a long history in the United States. Colonial juries used it to refuse to convict in "maritime cases" (presumably, that means smuggling). Before the Civil War, juries composed of abolitionists used it to refuse to convict defendants accused of violating the Fugitive Slave Act, much to the rage of the South. During Prohibition, juries used it to refuse to convict in cases of violations of the Volstead Act. One estimate has it that juries nullified as many as 60% of all Prohibition cases. And, shamefully, all-white juries in the South used it to refuse to convict white men accused of murdering blacks. The Emmett Till case is the most notorious instance of this abuse.
Jury nullification can also be used to rebuke abuses of power committed by unaccountable, out-of-control special counsels like Robert "Gestapo" Mueller. How much egg would end up on Mueller's face if, after all of his efforts, Roger Stone's jury refused to convict?
Naturally, the last thing Mueller will ever do is publicize the fact that the public can actually tell him to go stuff it.
The author is an Iowa truck driver known to some AT readers as Kzintosh.
Image: James Ledbetter via Flickr.
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2) The Foolish Quest To Be The Next Barack Obama
Reassembling his coalition probably isn't the path to the presidency this time
By Bill Scher
Kamala Harris was dubbed the “Female Obama” even before she announced she was going to “pull off an Obama-sized feat in 2020,” as McClatchy put it when the California senator formally entered the Democratic presidential primary this week. Now, her campaign envisions replicating the coalition that backed Barack Obama’s 2008 primary upset: “Asians, Latinos and other voters of color, as well as educated white liberals” and young voters.
Julián Castro has the same idea. After the 44-year old grandson of Mexican immigrants announced his candidacy, his brother Joaquín predicted that he would have “strong support” among Obama voters because “his message resonates” with them.
Julián Castro’s fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke was also touted as Obama’s natural political successor. “He’s Barack Obama, but white,” said one anonymous donor to POLITICO, marveling at O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and his online fundraising haul.
Other candidates, still waiting in the wings, can be expected to eye the Obama coalition for themselves. If Cory Booker or former Attorney General Eric Holder enter the race, surely more Obama comparisons will be made. Nobody would confuse Joe Biden for Barack Obama, but he does have the unique credential of having been Obama’s vice president and would hope to impress his voters. Bernie Sanders, who won over young white progressives but not older African-Americans in 2016, has been spending more time in front of black audiences ever since.
The demographic path Obama charted in the 2008 Democratic primary is a tantalizing one: Put together African-Americans with young voters and white liberals who live near Whole Foods, and you can send every other Democrat packing. But there’s a big problem with trying to recreate Obama’s 2008 success in 2020. In a field with so many choices and so much diversity, African-American voters are far less likely to function as a monolithic bloc.
The black vote became decisive in 2008 once the field winnowed down to Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s early polling lead was buoyed by African-Americans. But after Obama captured the hearts of liberal white Iowans, African-Americans recognized he had a shot at making history, and thereafter were nearly unanimous in rallying to his side.
Where that made the biggest difference was in the Southern states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, where African-Americans accounted for about half of the Democratic electorate. Obama edged Clinton in the entire race by only 29 pledged delegates, and those five states netted Obama 65 more delegates than Clinton won—more than doubling his eventual margin of victory.
Eight years later, African-American primary voters held no grudges and gave Clinton their overwhelming support. In turn, Clinton racked up a 153-delegate lead over Sanders in those five crucial Southern states. She netted another 122 delegates over Sanders in Tennessee, Texas and Virginia—three Super Tuesday states where black voters were between one-fifth and one-third of Democratic primary voters. (In Texas, Clinton also beat Sanders handily among Latinos, who made up one-third of the vote.) Those eight states helped Clinton by early March build a lead that was essentially mathematically impossible for Sanders to overcome, and accounted for most of Clinton’s final pledged-delegate margin of victory of 359.
Clinton’s 2016 coalition diverged from Obama’s in one key respect: The white part of her coalition was mainly composed of more moderate, less educated senior citizens instead of younger progressives likely to hold college degrees. But the clear constant in the two victories was bedrock black support.
The power of the black vote was evident in the 2018 Democratic primaries, too. African-American Stacey Abrams romped over her white opponent in Georgia’s gubernatorial primary. In Florida, Andrew Gillum, the lone African-American in a seven-person field, eked out a victory with a little more than one-third of vote after running up the score in four populous counties with large black constituencies. Abrams and Gillum ran to the left in their primaries, hewing closely to the Obama ’08 model by bringing white progressives into their winning coalitions.
This trend is why the South Carolina presidential primary—the first majority-black primary in 2020—is garnering increased attention at the expense of the lily-white affairs in Iowa and New Hampshire. And appropriately so. Black voters are a major component of the Democratic Party and should play a sizable role in picking the nominee.
But their role may be more complex this time around. The primaries of 2008 and 2016 quickly came down to binary choices. In 2008, North Carolina’s John Edwards limped into the South Carolina primary, came in third, and called it quits, making it a two-person race for the rest of the South and beyond. And 2016 was always a contest between Clinton and Sanders (Jim Webb’s plea for time notwithstanding). With the white vote divided, once black voters forcefully swung behind Clinton, the race was over.
This white male pundit has no special insight into the mindset of today’s African-American voters. But early polling suggests they are not rushing unanimously toward any one bandwagon. This week’s POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows Biden leading among African-Americans with 26 percent, followed by Sanders with 14 percent. Harris comes in third with 7 percent (most of the poll was conducted just before she announced her candidacy) while Booker (2 percent) and Holder (1 percent) are near the bottom of the pack.
It is often noted that Obama trailed Clinton in early 2007 polling, and that was among black voters as well. But even back in January of that year, the same stage of the primary season as today, Obama was scoring double digits and held a solid second place, ahead of more established figures like Edwards, John Kerry and Al Gore. None of the current and probable candidates of color begin the race in the strong position Obama held.
Early polling is not always predictive because many voters aren’t yet paying close attention. But according to South Carolina’s leading African-American politician, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the black voters who are paying attention are still shopping, albeit from an initial short list. “From African-Americans, I’ve only heard three names being discussed: that’s Booker, Harris and Biden” he told the New York Times. He even went as far as to predict Biden, who has long vacationed in South Carolina and maintained political ties to local leaders, would win the state and “everybody else would be running for second place.”
If that proves true, or if no one candidate wins South Carolina by a large margin, it sets up a dynamic different than the recent past. In 2008 and 2016, the landslide winner of South Carolina went on to the sweep the rest of the critical Black Belt states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. This time, South Carolina may be more of a winnower, culling the field but not catapulting one candidate into the lead. Different Southern states may go different ways. No one would reap a decisive delegate haul.
An argument that has gained prominence is that the best way to win a Democratic primary is to be an African-American candidate who runs left. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar observed after the 2018 gubernatorial primaries: “African-American candidates were able to build an energized Democratic coalition of black voters, white liberals, and younger voters to swamp more-established candidates in primaries. But white liberal candidates struggled to expand their support beyond the most predictable precincts, unable to build racially diverse coalitions for their progressive messages.”
As Theodore R. Johnson further explained in POLITICO Magazine last October, white Democrats have moved left since 2000, but “the notoriously pragmatic black electorate” has not. Fifty-five percent of white Democrats now self-identify as liberals, double the share of black Democrats. Successful progressive black candidates have cannily black voters’ desire “to elect people who understand the experience of being black in America” while also “running to the left of their competition to have a shot at winning white liberals.”
In Slate, Jamelle Bouie speculated along similar lines that a black candidate could have the edge this primary cycle. White candidates, he suggested, either can’t adequately convey “social solidarity” with black voters, or in trying too hard to convey it, spark backlash among white voters. Black candidates, Bouie argues, “can stay somewhat silent on race, embodying the opposition to the president’s racism rather than vocalizing it and allowing them space to focus on economic messaging without triggering the cycle of polarization that [Hillary] Clinton experienced.”
But if black voters are not a political monolith in 2020, that would greatly expand the plausible permutations for assembling a winning coalition in the Democratic primaries. In 2016, Sanders and his democratic socialist “revolution” failed to impress most “notoriously pragmatic” African-Americans. But he did narrowly win among black voters under 30, who are presumably more idealistic. If he held on to that niche and most of his earlier base of young white voters, in a fractured field, that might be enough.
On the other end of the ideological spectrum, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a possible dark horse entry, has been purposefully antagonizing the left by deriding en vogue ideas like free college for all and a federal job guarantee as “unrealistic ideological promises.” Political suicide in today’s Democratic Party? Maybe. But McAuliffe might be able to convey “solidarity” and win some share of the black vote by selling his biggest gubernatorial accomplishment, restoring the voting rights of approximately 173,000 ex-felons almost single-handedly. Then, with the help of older, moderate white voters, he might rebuild a version of the Hillary ’16 coalition. Weirder things have happened! Though Biden, if he really does have the inside track in South Carolina, would be better positioned to pull off a multiracial coalition of pragmatists.
The candidates who are people of color may have the best grasp on how to win a sufficient amount of narrower slices of the Democratic base. For example, Harris, who has Jamaican and Indian ancestry, is leveraging her membership in the 300,000-member Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which may help her consolidate college-educated black women. The website Jamaica Global recently praised Harris for emphasizing her Jamaican heritage at a 2018 campaign appearance in South Florida, which has a significant Jamaican-American population. And media outlets in India have taken note of how Harris regularly extols her Indian mother. But despite Harris’ potential for stitching together a broad, racially diverse coalition, if Castro proves successful in consolidating the Latino vote, he could give Harris a scare in her delegate-rich home state of California.
Beyond how well they perform in their own racial and ethnic communities, candidates of color will have to decide which white subgroups to pursue. Johnson’s analysis, written before the November 2018 midterms, raised a red flag. Referring to African-American progressives like Abrams and Gillum, he warned, “If these nominees are unsuccessful, it would suggest, rightly or wrongly, that black progressive candidates may still be a bridge too far for too many Americans, just as Jesse Jackson was in 1984. And it may very well disrupt the white liberal-black voter coalition within the Democratic Party ... ”
Abrams and Gillum did lose their general elections in 2018. Therefore, as potent as a progressive black-white coalition can be in the primary, nonwhite Democratic candidates will have to examine whether an overly aggressive pursuit of white progressives would harm their ultimate chances of becoming president. Then again, self-described liberals compose a majority of white Democrats, and you can’t win the general if you don’t win the primary. Harris and Castro, as well as Booker and Holder if they run, probably should still lean left, but they need not feel obligated to chase Sanders to the furthest left pole on everything.
One thing is certain: Even if the black vote doesn’t repeat its Democratic primary role as a monolithic gatekeeper, black voters—plural—are still of the utmost importance. And that means issues affecting the black community are of the utmost importance as well. But candidates and their campaign strategists will need to tailor their messages based on factors like age, education level, region, gender and ideology, just as campaigns often do when wooing white voters. In the process of doing so, they may learn differences in issue priorities and positions among African-American subgroups.
In 2008, the campaign that convinced the most Democrats that it was poised to make history was the campaign that fused the winning coalition. In 2020, the campaign that grasps the complexity of the Democratic Party, and crafts a platform and message to navigate that complexity, will most likely be the campaign that successfully builds its own distinctive, and dominant, coalition.
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3) Democrats For Border Security? It's A Hoax
By Stephen Moore
There's one sure indication that Trump's strategy during the government shutdown of constantly pounding Democrats for being soft on illegal immigration is working. Suddenly many of even the most liberal Democrats are screaming from the rafters that they are for border security. Nearly every Democrat has been coached to start by talking about the need for protecting our border.
That's a 180 degree flip. At the start of the shutdown, the Pelosi crowd was saying "there is no border crisis," and "a wall is immoral." Now their polls must be telling them otherwise because they are starting to sound like Pat Buchanan on the need to keep illegal immigrants out. Even Pelosi recently said Democrats want "funding for smart, effective border security solutions."
The problem for Democrats is that their new rhetoric is the transparent utter lack of sincerity. Democrats have done everything possible during the last several years to openly encourage illegal immigration.
Jury nullification has a long history in the United States. Colonial juries used it to refuse to convict in "maritime cases" (presumably, that means smuggling). Before the Civil War, juries composed of abolitionists used it to refuse to convict defendants accused of violating the Fugitive Slave Act, much to the rage of the South. During Prohibition, juries used it to refuse to convict in cases of violations of the Volstead Act. One estimate has it that juries nullified as many as 60% of all Prohibition cases. And, shamefully, all-white juries in the South used it to refuse to convict white men accused of murdering blacks. The Emmett Till case is the most notorious instance of this abuse.
Jury nullification can also be used to rebuke abuses of power committed by unaccountable, out-of-control special counsels like Robert "Gestapo" Mueller. How much egg would end up on Mueller's face if, after all of his efforts, Roger Stone's jury refused to convict?
Naturally, the last thing Mueller will ever do is publicize the fact that the public can actually tell him to go stuff it.
The author is an Iowa truck driver known to some AT readers as Kzintosh.
Image: James Ledbetter via Flickr.
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2) The Foolish Quest To Be The Next Barack Obama
Reassembling his coalition probably isn't the path to the presidency this time
By Bill Scher
Kamala Harris was dubbed the “Female Obama” even before she announced she was going to “pull off an Obama-sized feat in 2020,” as McClatchy put it when the California senator formally entered the Democratic presidential primary this week. Now, her campaign envisions replicating the coalition that backed Barack Obama’s 2008 primary upset: “Asians, Latinos and other voters of color, as well as educated white liberals” and young voters.
Julián Castro has the same idea. After the 44-year old grandson of Mexican immigrants announced his candidacy, his brother Joaquín predicted that he would have “strong support” among Obama voters because “his message resonates” with them.
Julián Castro’s fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke was also touted as Obama’s natural political successor. “He’s Barack Obama, but white,” said one anonymous donor to POLITICO, marveling at O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and his online fundraising haul.
Other candidates, still waiting in the wings, can be expected to eye the Obama coalition for themselves. If Cory Booker or former Attorney General Eric Holder enter the race, surely more Obama comparisons will be made. Nobody would confuse Joe Biden for Barack Obama, but he does have the unique credential of having been Obama’s vice president and would hope to impress his voters. Bernie Sanders, who won over young white progressives but not older African-Americans in 2016, has been spending more time in front of black audiences ever since.
The demographic path Obama charted in the 2008 Democratic primary is a tantalizing one: Put together African-Americans with young voters and white liberals who live near Whole Foods, and you can send every other Democrat packing. But there’s a big problem with trying to recreate Obama’s 2008 success in 2020. In a field with so many choices and so much diversity, African-American voters are far less likely to function as a monolithic bloc.
The black vote became decisive in 2008 once the field winnowed down to Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s early polling lead was buoyed by African-Americans. But after Obama captured the hearts of liberal white Iowans, African-Americans recognized he had a shot at making history, and thereafter were nearly unanimous in rallying to his side.
Where that made the biggest difference was in the Southern states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, where African-Americans accounted for about half of the Democratic electorate. Obama edged Clinton in the entire race by only 29 pledged delegates, and those five states netted Obama 65 more delegates than Clinton won—more than doubling his eventual margin of victory.
Eight years later, African-American primary voters held no grudges and gave Clinton their overwhelming support. In turn, Clinton racked up a 153-delegate lead over Sanders in those five crucial Southern states. She netted another 122 delegates over Sanders in Tennessee, Texas and Virginia—three Super Tuesday states where black voters were between one-fifth and one-third of Democratic primary voters. (In Texas, Clinton also beat Sanders handily among Latinos, who made up one-third of the vote.) Those eight states helped Clinton by early March build a lead that was essentially mathematically impossible for Sanders to overcome, and accounted for most of Clinton’s final pledged-delegate margin of victory of 359.
Clinton’s 2016 coalition diverged from Obama’s in one key respect: The white part of her coalition was mainly composed of more moderate, less educated senior citizens instead of younger progressives likely to hold college degrees. But the clear constant in the two victories was bedrock black support.
The power of the black vote was evident in the 2018 Democratic primaries, too. African-American Stacey Abrams romped over her white opponent in Georgia’s gubernatorial primary. In Florida, Andrew Gillum, the lone African-American in a seven-person field, eked out a victory with a little more than one-third of vote after running up the score in four populous counties with large black constituencies. Abrams and Gillum ran to the left in their primaries, hewing closely to the Obama ’08 model by bringing white progressives into their winning coalitions.
This trend is why the South Carolina presidential primary—the first majority-black primary in 2020—is garnering increased attention at the expense of the lily-white affairs in Iowa and New Hampshire. And appropriately so. Black voters are a major component of the Democratic Party and should play a sizable role in picking the nominee.
But their role may be more complex this time around. The primaries of 2008 and 2016 quickly came down to binary choices. In 2008, North Carolina’s John Edwards limped into the South Carolina primary, came in third, and called it quits, making it a two-person race for the rest of the South and beyond. And 2016 was always a contest between Clinton and Sanders (Jim Webb’s plea for time notwithstanding). With the white vote divided, once black voters forcefully swung behind Clinton, the race was over.
This white male pundit has no special insight into the mindset of today’s African-American voters. But early polling suggests they are not rushing unanimously toward any one bandwagon. This week’s POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows Biden leading among African-Americans with 26 percent, followed by Sanders with 14 percent. Harris comes in third with 7 percent (most of the poll was conducted just before she announced her candidacy) while Booker (2 percent) and Holder (1 percent) are near the bottom of the pack.
It is often noted that Obama trailed Clinton in early 2007 polling, and that was among black voters as well. But even back in January of that year, the same stage of the primary season as today, Obama was scoring double digits and held a solid second place, ahead of more established figures like Edwards, John Kerry and Al Gore. None of the current and probable candidates of color begin the race in the strong position Obama held.
Early polling is not always predictive because many voters aren’t yet paying close attention. But according to South Carolina’s leading African-American politician, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the black voters who are paying attention are still shopping, albeit from an initial short list. “From African-Americans, I’ve only heard three names being discussed: that’s Booker, Harris and Biden” he told the New York Times. He even went as far as to predict Biden, who has long vacationed in South Carolina and maintained political ties to local leaders, would win the state and “everybody else would be running for second place.”
If that proves true, or if no one candidate wins South Carolina by a large margin, it sets up a dynamic different than the recent past. In 2008 and 2016, the landslide winner of South Carolina went on to the sweep the rest of the critical Black Belt states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. This time, South Carolina may be more of a winnower, culling the field but not catapulting one candidate into the lead. Different Southern states may go different ways. No one would reap a decisive delegate haul.
An argument that has gained prominence is that the best way to win a Democratic primary is to be an African-American candidate who runs left. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar observed after the 2018 gubernatorial primaries: “African-American candidates were able to build an energized Democratic coalition of black voters, white liberals, and younger voters to swamp more-established candidates in primaries. But white liberal candidates struggled to expand their support beyond the most predictable precincts, unable to build racially diverse coalitions for their progressive messages.”
As Theodore R. Johnson further explained in POLITICO Magazine last October, white Democrats have moved left since 2000, but “the notoriously pragmatic black electorate” has not. Fifty-five percent of white Democrats now self-identify as liberals, double the share of black Democrats. Successful progressive black candidates have cannily black voters’ desire “to elect people who understand the experience of being black in America” while also “running to the left of their competition to have a shot at winning white liberals.”
In Slate, Jamelle Bouie speculated along similar lines that a black candidate could have the edge this primary cycle. White candidates, he suggested, either can’t adequately convey “social solidarity” with black voters, or in trying too hard to convey it, spark backlash among white voters. Black candidates, Bouie argues, “can stay somewhat silent on race, embodying the opposition to the president’s racism rather than vocalizing it and allowing them space to focus on economic messaging without triggering the cycle of polarization that [Hillary] Clinton experienced.”
But if black voters are not a political monolith in 2020, that would greatly expand the plausible permutations for assembling a winning coalition in the Democratic primaries. In 2016, Sanders and his democratic socialist “revolution” failed to impress most “notoriously pragmatic” African-Americans. But he did narrowly win among black voters under 30, who are presumably more idealistic. If he held on to that niche and most of his earlier base of young white voters, in a fractured field, that might be enough.
On the other end of the ideological spectrum, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a possible dark horse entry, has been purposefully antagonizing the left by deriding en vogue ideas like free college for all and a federal job guarantee as “unrealistic ideological promises.” Political suicide in today’s Democratic Party? Maybe. But McAuliffe might be able to convey “solidarity” and win some share of the black vote by selling his biggest gubernatorial accomplishment, restoring the voting rights of approximately 173,000 ex-felons almost single-handedly. Then, with the help of older, moderate white voters, he might rebuild a version of the Hillary ’16 coalition. Weirder things have happened! Though Biden, if he really does have the inside track in South Carolina, would be better positioned to pull off a multiracial coalition of pragmatists.
The candidates who are people of color may have the best grasp on how to win a sufficient amount of narrower slices of the Democratic base. For example, Harris, who has Jamaican and Indian ancestry, is leveraging her membership in the 300,000-member Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which may help her consolidate college-educated black women. The website Jamaica Global recently praised Harris for emphasizing her Jamaican heritage at a 2018 campaign appearance in South Florida, which has a significant Jamaican-American population. And media outlets in India have taken note of how Harris regularly extols her Indian mother. But despite Harris’ potential for stitching together a broad, racially diverse coalition, if Castro proves successful in consolidating the Latino vote, he could give Harris a scare in her delegate-rich home state of California.
Beyond how well they perform in their own racial and ethnic communities, candidates of color will have to decide which white subgroups to pursue. Johnson’s analysis, written before the November 2018 midterms, raised a red flag. Referring to African-American progressives like Abrams and Gillum, he warned, “If these nominees are unsuccessful, it would suggest, rightly or wrongly, that black progressive candidates may still be a bridge too far for too many Americans, just as Jesse Jackson was in 1984. And it may very well disrupt the white liberal-black voter coalition within the Democratic Party ... ”
Abrams and Gillum did lose their general elections in 2018. Therefore, as potent as a progressive black-white coalition can be in the primary, nonwhite Democratic candidates will have to examine whether an overly aggressive pursuit of white progressives would harm their ultimate chances of becoming president. Then again, self-described liberals compose a majority of white Democrats, and you can’t win the general if you don’t win the primary. Harris and Castro, as well as Booker and Holder if they run, probably should still lean left, but they need not feel obligated to chase Sanders to the furthest left pole on everything.
One thing is certain: Even if the black vote doesn’t repeat its Democratic primary role as a monolithic gatekeeper, black voters—plural—are still of the utmost importance. And that means issues affecting the black community are of the utmost importance as well. But candidates and their campaign strategists will need to tailor their messages based on factors like age, education level, region, gender and ideology, just as campaigns often do when wooing white voters. In the process of doing so, they may learn differences in issue priorities and positions among African-American subgroups.
In 2008, the campaign that convinced the most Democrats that it was poised to make history was the campaign that fused the winning coalition. In 2020, the campaign that grasps the complexity of the Democratic Party, and crafts a platform and message to navigate that complexity, will most likely be the campaign that successfully builds its own distinctive, and dominant, coalition.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) Democrats For Border Security? It's A Hoax
By Stephen Moore
There's one sure indication that Trump's strategy during the government shutdown of constantly pounding Democrats for being soft on illegal immigration is working. Suddenly many of even the most liberal Democrats are screaming from the rafters that they are for border security. Nearly every Democrat has been coached to start by talking about the need for protecting our border.
That's a 180 degree flip. At the start of the shutdown, the Pelosi crowd was saying "there is no border crisis," and "a wall is immoral." Now their polls must be telling them otherwise because they are starting to sound like Pat Buchanan on the need to keep illegal immigrants out. Even Pelosi recently said Democrats want "funding for smart, effective border security solutions."
Why is this tiger suddenly changing its stripes. Because their open borders stance is way outside the mainstream of America and is hurting them in the polls.
Democratic pollsters concede that Trump's tough on illegal immigration stance was one of the biggest issues that resounded with working class Democratic voters who live in states behind the blue wall. That's the wall Trump crashed through in 2016.
The problem for Democrats is that their new rhetoric is the transparent utter lack of sincerity. Democrats have done everything possible during the last several years to openly encourage illegal immigration.
Dems' Border Deceit
Let's just consider what positions Democrats have taken on border security and controlling illegal immigration over the years — and up through about 10 days ago. During the 2018 midterm campaigns the rallying cry of many Democrats running for Congress was "abolish ICE," the federal border patrol agency. This wasn't a position way outside the mainstream of Democratic thinking, but was embraced by the new darling of the party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the latest Democrat presidential aspirant, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator from New York.
So the party that doesn't want a wall and doesn't want border agents is trying to convince Americans that they really want border security. Right.
One of the Democrats' objection to the wall, and it is a legitimate point, is that about half of the illegals come in legally and simply overstay their visas. A wall won't stop those illegals from coming. To stop them requires "internal enforcement" of the immigration laws. Democrats say they favor those measures.
Where? when? how?
Most Democrats have long been supportive of the policy of "catch and release." This means illegals are basically released back on the streets after apprehension.
Deportation? No Thanks
Democrats and left wing supporters have opposed the deportation of illegal entrants and continually trash the border agents for mistreatment of illegal migrants. There are certainly abuses and those should never be tolerated. But it's a tough and dangerous job working on the border, and why is it that the left always takes the side of the illegal immigrants and not the people enforcing the laws?
Meanwhile, Democrats routinely resist all attempts to deny illegal immigrants welfare benefits, including food stamps, unemployment benefits, the earned income tax credit, public housing and Medicaid. They also almost universally support subsidized college tuition to illegal immigrants.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office has just reported that in 2017, there were about $140 billion of " improper" or "fraudulent" payments in that year alone. Many of these payments went to illegal immigrant households. The Census Bureau reports that more than half of illegal households are collecting welfare benefits. Yet the left opposes doing anything about these abuses when welfare reform is debated.
Beacon For Illegals
Let us just say that all of these policies send a welcoming message to all the aspiring illegal immigrants from around the world.
Perhaps worst of all is the sanctuary city policy of 200 cities across America, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and New York. This basically announces like a blaring billboard to illegal immigrants, if you can get your way to L.A. or Chicago, you've got a permanent home here. The fad is growing each year. The local police aren't allowed to turn over illegals to the feds or cooperate with ICE agents. I have not heard a single prominent national Democrat attack this pro-illegal immigration maneuver.
What is clear is this: you can be for sanctuary cities or you can be for combating illegal immigration. But sorry, you can't be for both. When I have brought this up on CNN, liberals protest indignantly that "sanctuary cities are a red herring." But not one city that I know of has stopped providing safe harbor for illegal immigrants.
In other words, Democrats may be changing their rhetoric, but not their positions on immigration control. They have shown no interest in border enforcement. They have shown no interest in internal immigration enforcement. Trump is right that the Democrats are the pro-illegal immigration party. The border wall showdown is a 24-7 reminder to voters of this sad reality.
- Moore, an economic consultant with Freedom Works, served as a senior economic advisor to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
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- 4) President Trump is down, but not out
- By Michael Goodwin
- Battered, bruised and beaten, Donald Trump faces a grim reality. Halfway through his term, his presidency is at low tide.The polls have cratered and his necessary retreatover using a shutdown to get wall funding had some erstwhile supporters spitting venom at him.His usual tormentors, meanwhile, are riding high. Nancy Pelosi drew her first blood as speaker, Chuck Schumer kept Senate Dems in line and the anti-Trump media are celebrating the president’s pain.If that weren’t trouble enough, special counsel Robert Mueller is still scalp-hunting. His indictment of Roger Stone, while not dinging Trump directly, keeps the Russia, Russia, Russia pot boiling and gives House Dems more grist for their pile-on probes.It doesn’t help that, ethics-wise, Stone now joins Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen in giving Trump’s former circle a resemblance to the freakish bar scene in “Star Wars.”Still, Trump is not the first president to put himself behind the eight ball. Sooner or later, they all do.The challenge now is a clear-eyed acceptance of reality and laser-like focus on the key question: What is my presidency for?It’s not a metaphysical quiz. The goal is to separate fact from fantasy and see what remains possible in light of the national mood and the 2020 calendar.What Trump cares about most, and what he should devote the rest of his presidency to, is obvious: fixing the immigration crisis, with border security the essential first step.
- In large measure, it is why he ran and why he was elected. It is the heart of America First.
- That’s not to say he should jettison the hunt for better trade deals and the end of North Korean nukes, although foreign governments, knowing Trump’s predicament, will raise the price on any agreements.But he, like all presidents, will rise or fall on domestic issues, and legislative victories at home are now impossible. Pelosi and Schumer are afraid of their party’s radicals, so the safest path for them always will be “no.”While that leaves Trump little room to maneuver, it paradoxically points the only way forward. Because there is nothing he can do to please the half of the country that hates him, he must do everything he can to win back those who were with him until the shutdown dragged on.The longest in history, it cost him about 10 points in the polls. I believe most of those people can be won back if he stays the course on border security while expanding the focus beyond the wall and violent crime.Especially during the three-week window for negotiations, Trump must get out of Washington and explain to the public the long-term cultural and financial stakes of porous borders.He made a start in the Rose Garden Friday, saying barriers not only keep drugs and criminals out, they also “save good people from attempting a very dangerous journey from other countries — thousands of miles — because they think they have a glimmer of hope of coming through.”He talked of better technology and “desperately needed humanitarian assistance for those being exploited and abused by coyotes, smugglers, and the dangerous journey north.”And he made sense by noting that the numbers are so vast — 60,000 apprehended in each of the last three months, he said — that “the tremendous economic and financial burdens of illegal immigration fall on the shoulders of low-income Americans.”All true, and there is much more to say about the corrosive effect illegal immigration has on American life, especially the promise that we are a nation of laws. Sadly, that claim is becoming null and void.Large numbers are crossing illegally each day, with patrol agents in Arizona saying that one group that tunneled under a fence included 376 people, nearly 200 of them under age 18.All 376 applied for asylum, and after being processed, were scattered across America.ABC News interviewed several in the group from Guatemala, including a man who said he paid $5,000 to coyotes and that it took him and his 12-year-old daughter eight days to get to the border. They had a plane ticket for San Diego.Nearby, a mother and two daughters were going to Cincinnati. They also said they spent eight days traveling, mostly on buses.
- They will join the 800,000 already waiting for asylum hearings, a backlog that grows by the day. Most will never show up for hearings, and few who skip will ever be arrested unless they commit a federal felony. They arrived in America illegally, and will join millions living in the shadows.Yet for most, that life will be far better than life in the hellhole nations they fled, especially now as Democrats aim to erase distinctions between legal and illegal immigrants.Sanctuary cities offer free health care and reduced college tuitions and many blue states give all comers the right to driver’s licenses. There are also efforts to allow illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.Pelosi and Schumer, who in the past voted for the walls they now denounce, deny they support open borders, but their refusal to support barriers is nearly the same thing. With the border nearly 2,000 miles long, barriers are essential at many points.Trump can say all this day after day in city after city, and it might change nothing. So be it. He still has, as he said again Saturday, the avenue of declaring an emergency and using other funds.He also could work with private groups trying to raise money through contributions. Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, is advising one group, “We Build the Wall,’’ and he told The New York Times the president gave the project his blessing.No one can know what, if anything, will gain Trump a second term. But sometimes the key to winning is behaving as if there is something worse than losing. In Trump’s case, that would be giving up on securing the border and failing to put America first.
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