In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Tryng to make sense of the current crisis, I've looked at two 20th century constitutional crises, the 1936 UK crisis that led to Edward VIII's abdication, and the 1944 crisis of FDR's perilous state of health leading into the November election and his death the following year only months after his inauguration. Both were resolved largely behind the scenes. But I think a closer and more recent parallel is the problem that was posed by Thomas Eagleton, who was the 1972 Democrat vice presidential nominee who was forced to withdraw his candicacy when information surfaced about his medical history. George McGovern's nomination for president at the 1972 Democrat convention wasn't assured, and his chances against Nixon in November were never bright. Thomas Eagleton, a US senator from Missouri, wasn't on McGovern's short list for vice president, but after Ted Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff both turned him down, he had to find a willing substitute quickly. He fell ...

Let's delve a little farther into the 25th Amendment, or at least the part that's most applicable to the current crisis, Section 4: Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law p...

Back on June 7, I posted about the unspoken constitutional crisis during FDR's third term in which the White House, according to Dr Steven Lomazow, concealed the president's metastasized cancer and severe cardiopulmonary disease that made his death inevitable early in his fourth term. Enough insiders anticipated this that they forced him to drop Henry Wallace and choose Harry Truman as his running mate for the 1944 election. I said in that post, [I]t was a de facto constitutional crisis that under the circumstances could only be resolved by Roosevelt's death, which insiders fully understood to be imminent in any case. It's hard to avoid thinking we're heading for an equivalent crisis before the next election, but the additional complication is Vice President Harris. . . . Biden is bad enough, but it's less and less likely he can last another four years, and we'd get Harris sooner than anyone expects. By at least his final year in office, accor...

I was originally going to post on Nate Silver's Substack yesterday, The presidential election isn't a toss-up , and I'll have a few things to say farther down, but I actually think it's been overtaken by events, namely this morning's Qunnipiac and New York Times/Siena polls . The Quinnipiac has Trump up 6 points over Biden in a 5-way matchup, while the Times/Siena poll has Trump up 3. Between them, they put Trump up 2.6 points in the Real Clear Politics 5-way aggregate, 1.5 points in the head-to-head aggregate, when only last week, the head-to-head had him up by only 0.5 points. Although as I've been saying all along, the national polls are meaningless, because the popular vote doesn't elect the president, I think the movement in those polls over June does mean something. Quinnipiac minimizes it : As President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump prepare to face off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, Trump has a s...

More than a week ago, I wondered why Real Clear Politics doesn't swap out at least a couple of the states in their list of "battleground" poll aggregates, when it seems like there's really not much of a battle taking place in several of those states: I briefly thought of suggesting to RCP that, for instance, they revise the list of "battlegrounds" and take at minimum, say, North Carolina and Nevada off the list, since Trump is ahead by over 5 points in both, start running aggregates for Minnesota and Virginia, and place them on the "battleground" list instead. That would give a list that would show the real tipping-point states. Might not that provide more of a horse race? The problem I saw, though, was that this would effectively put at least two more states in the solid-Trump column while acknowledging that two solid-Biden states are now in play, which changes the whole "close race" paradigm RCP and all the right people have been...

Another piece of the conventional wisdom that's been puzzling me ever since Trump came on the political scene is the view even among Republicans that he's a narcissist, an immature mental 12-year-old who can't control himself. His own attorney general William Barr said last year , I'm not his lawyer, generally I think it's a bad idea to go on the stand. And I think it's a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control, and it would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion. Republicans of that ilk, let alone Democrats, continued to wring their hands and furrow their brows over whether he'd take the stand right up to the last days of the New York trial, when in fact he didn't take the stand -- and likely never intended to. Let's face it, Trump is a a shrewd guy. He had one successful career as a real estate developer, another successful career in entertainment, and now a career in politics...

As I mentioned yesterday, I''ve been gnawing for days over the question why, among other things, the Biden campaign came up with the ides of a June debate. In fact, let's remember, this was one of several non-negotiable terms Trump had to accept if he wanted to debate at all, incluiding muted microphones when the other guy was talking. Trump accepted all those terms right away, even though it's generally thought they put him at a disadvantage. Why? I might be the only person besides Chrlamagne tha God who's asking why the Biden campaign ever thought this up . I think the answer is that the Biden people had a plan, and they're sticking to it. According to their plan, the debate is going to be the final blow that puts the election out of Trump's reach. In fact, they selected the June debate not to give the Democrats time to find a replacement if Joe performs badly, but to give the Republicans time to replace Trump at their own convention when he falls...

In yesterday's post I found myself scratching my head about key decisions Joe's handlers have made leading up to Thursday's debate. The biggest puzzle was why they made Trump the take-it-or-leave-it offer for the historically early first debate in June, when debates have normally taken place much later in the campaign. This will have the effect of tiring Joe out months earlier than would normally happen, but they also scheduled the debate for just two weeks after exhausting trips to Europe for the D-Day commemoration and G7, items they were fully aware of before offering the June 27 date. But I also noted that the handlers seem deliberately to have set up Thursday's video scene of Joe shuffling from Air Force One to Marine One en route to his debate prep at Camp David, when two months before, they'd made the decision to have White House staff escort Joe on those same walks to Marine One and surround him to shield the view of precisely his same shuffling gait. I...

Something bothered me about the most recent video of Joe, the one where he shuffles from Air Force One to Marine One at the Hagerstown airport en route to his derbate prep at Camp David. As Jesse Watters puts it, Joe Biden is seen shuffling at the speed of an elderly man with a poor memory as he gingerly makes his way across the tarmac to Camp David. There is a longer version of the same video, which Fox has edited for this segment. In the longer version, Joe is descending the stairs from Air Force One actually displaying basic physical competence, and as he reaches the tarmac, he returns the salutes of the marines there. But in the segment on the Fox show, he tires visibly as he crosses the 50 yards or so to the helicopter, and by the time he reaches the steps, he's clearly too tired to return the salutes of those marines. This is visible in the Fox edit. (I checked the protocols for presidents returning military salutes -- civilians in general do not salute, includin...

The feature of this year's presidential campaign that I've found most remarkable is how early key events have been taking place vis-a-vis campaigns in the past that I think are similar. Nobody saw Reagan's landslide over Carter coming in 1980 -- at least nobody in legacy media. George H W Bush's come-from-behind victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988 came only after he called Dukakis a "liberal" at the Republican convention, and it was cemented only by mid-October when Dukakis rode on a tank. Dubya's more predictable victory over John Kerry in 2004 nevertheless wasn't tacitly acknowledged in legacy media until the Bush campaign's windsurfing ad in late September, after which anonymous Democrats began leaking their complaints about the Kerry campaign. As I've been noting here, though, prominent Democrats have been complaining about the Biden campaign, both anonymously and for attribution, since late last year, and if anything, there have been ...

As of two weeks ago, and even up until this morning, plans for Joe's debate prep leadingup to the June 27 debate were vague. Here's a June 10 story from AP : After back-to-back trips to Europe, President Joe Biden plans to head to Camp David next week to prepare for his first 2024 debate with former President Donald Trump, hunkering down at the woodsy Maryland hideaway that has hosted many similar cram sessions in the past. .. . A person with knowledge of the president’s plans, who insisted on anonymity to more freely discuss them, suggested Biden could spend the better part of a week at Camp David getting ready for the first debate. But others involved in the planning said Monday that details were still being worked out, including how many days Biden would devote to prep. They said exactly where he’d be doing it, at Camp David or elsewhere, had not been finalized. But now we know! As of this morning, according to ABC News , With a week to go until the fir...

Ever since the G7 "cheap fake" vignettes, outlets across the board have been spitballing new strategies to replace Joe on the November ballot. Via the UK Daily Mail , [I]t seems no matter how much cold water the Biden campaign or Democratic Party throw on this raging fire of speculation, Americans will not be put off the Great Joe Biden Replacement Theory. It's the idea that somehow, some way the President will be swapped out as the Democratic Party's candidate ahead of the 2024 election. But the obstacle is always Kamala, who is the other horn of the dilemma. The Daily Mail points this out: [The substitute] would not be Vice President Kamala Harris, according to sources, who observed that Harris has already had to fend off a push to replace her on the ticket. 'It doesn't just become Kamala. Kamala only becomes the nominee if Biden dies,' one blunt consultant said. Another Democratic political insider believes that Harris has failed so badl...

YIKES: Watch Joe Biden incoherently babble at his Hollywood fundraiser as Obama looks on in SHOCK. This is so bad… pic.twitter.com/W7WsF74zvM — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 17, 2024 The conventional wisdom, even before the 2024 presidential debate dates were set, has been that Joe's handlers will be able to prep him well enough for the first debate, now a little over a week away, that he'll surpass a low-bar standard and "win" the debate against Trump simply by avoiding major embarrassments. For instance, Biden’s performance at his State of the Union address — which went over largely well and led to many public reconsiderations of whether he was too diminished to run for a second term — is very much on the minds of some Trump aides. They expect that Biden’s team will get him into similar shape ahead of the debate. As of now, even though I'm a contrarian in any case, I have serious doubts about this. The CNN story at the link was written l...