The Atlantic Is Worried About What''s Starting To Look Normal

The Atantic, which let's recall is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, #8 on Forbes's 2023 list of the world's richest women, is worried that Trump is starting to look normal:

[W]hat is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing. Donald Trump is filling his administration with “loyalists,” a prerogative that his opponents have grudgingly accepted as his due. Yet he is defining loyalist in maximal terms, including the belief that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election and was justified in his attempt to seize power. The winners are rewriting the history of the insurrection, and their version of history is about to acquire the force of law.

But isn't the election just past a vindication of the view that the 2020 election was "stolen"? Look at the efforts that began almost immediaately after 2020 to drive a stake through Trump's heart, the second impeachment of a lame duck, the January 6 prosecutions, the lawfare, including a specific federal indictment for fomenting the J6 "insurrection" -- all any of those did was keep public attention focused on Trump and eventually boost him in the polls.

Why did there need to be such an effort to establish and re-establish the legitimacy of that election, and why did it never quite accomplish that purpose? For instance, at this point, it isn't controversial to ask what insiders knew of Joe Biden 's cognitive decline and when they knew it. Nancy Pelosi, a leader of the J6 insurrection school of thought, neverthelesss herself blames Biden for waiting too long to drop out of the race.

So when would have been the opportune time for Biden to do this? In June 2024 instead of July? The primaries were already over, and the idea of suddenly holding new ones was never anythng but a chimera. In June 2023, which would have given candidates time to raise money and support for a full primary season? To raise any such question that Joe wasn't fit to serve would have been unthinkable at the time, and Pelosi would have been a chief enforcer.

Would it maybe have been better if someone other than Joe had run in 2020? Maybe, but the consensus was that Joe, "the last politician" able to keep the fraying Mew Deal coalition together one more time, was the only figure who could beat Trump -- but even in 2020, the insiders appear to have been aware that the only way to run Joe was with a basement campaign that kept him out of unscripted events. In other words, the seeds were already planted that something needed to be covered up.

In fact, one of the motly unmentioned subtexts of Trump's 2024 campaign was his ability to thrive in unscripted environments, from the failed Butler assassinaion attempt that produced paradigmatic visuals to hours-long, no-holds-barred podcast interviews. These were, whatever else they may have been, subliminal cues that something wasn't right in 2020. But this all seems to feed The Atlantic's distress:

On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Trump transition team is asking applicants for high-level positions in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies three questions: which candidate they supported in the past three elections, what they thought about January 6, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. Among the “wrong” answers, applicants say, are conceding that Trump lost the election or that his supporters should not have tried to overturn the result.

Well, at this point, it's more or less accepted that some of Trump's high-level appointments, including William Barr and Mike Pence, didn't serve him well. A remarkable feature of Trump's inner circle is that they learned things during the 2020 election that they put into practice in 2024, like having flying squads of lawyers in place to challenge election-day finagling. It looks like another lesson involved recognizing the need to establish loyalty at the policy level. The Atlantic thinks this is a bug, not a feature:

The purpose of these issue screens is not merely to ensure that Trump benefits from advisers who are committed to his success and wished for it all along. After all, plenty of Republicans voted for Trump multiple times without endorsing his attempted autogolpe. The purpose, rather, is to weed out anybody who dissents from Trump’s conviction that he is entitled to rule regardless of what the Constitution says. Trump believes, not without reason, that his first term was undermined by the insufficient devotion of his underlings, most famously Mike Pence (of “Hang Mike Pence!” fame).

Ezxcept that the US Supreme Court, in Trump v United States,

found that some specific alleged acts [in the January 6 indictmnt] were cleaarly immune from prosecution and others required an analysis of the facts. The majority ruled that Trump's alleged efforts to leverage the Department of Justice in producing alternate slates of electors could not be prosecuted, while remanding decisions on immunity related to Trump's alleged pressuring of the Vice President, state officials, and private individuals to the district court. The court also directed the district court to examine the scope of evidence that could be utilized in the charges against Trump, such as his public comments.

In other words, it was at worst an open legal question whether anything Trump did on January 6 was unconstitutional, but some things were definitely within the scope of his duties, while others required much more analysis. The special prosecutor eventually threw up his hands and requested the case be dismissed. There's nothing that says Trukmp feels he's "entitled to rule regardless of what the Constitution says". Instead, he asked the US Supreme Court to clarify just what the Constitution does say, and it generally supported his position.

The Atlantic is simply unhappy that the Overton Window has shifted.

Was Obama The Architect Of The Democrats' 2024 Defeat?

A John Kass essay linked at Real Clear Politics yestesrday, To Move Forward, Democrats Must Oust Obama, tries to argue one point, but it actually proves another:

[H]ow did America get to the point where Republicans, once the country club white shoe party of the Bush family, could begin to wrestle with Democrats for the votes of the working class, minorities and women? How did the Republicans win so decisively?

It was Trump. What he did in remaking the Republican Party is simply astounding. But first he had to politically eviscerate the Bush family political dynasty that controlled the GOP. And so he relentlessly attacked Jeb!, then the standard bearer of the Bush clan for the disastrous war in Iraq, which slaughtered thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while wasting trillions of American dollars on this and other endless neo-con forever wars.

With that, the Bush GOP panicked and whined, but the Bush era was mercifully over. Eventually, working class whites, blacks, Latinos and young people turned their backs on the Democrat Party that had betrayed them.

On this, I agree completely, but he says it all before he even begins to talk about Obama, which he finally does about halfway down:

To win in the future, the Democrats must tear down Obama just as Trump tore down the Bushes. A new Democrat faith must emerge to launch a frontal assault on Obama’s keep in Martha’s Vineyard, sacking it and salting the earth. It must reject the cynical use of race to generate ugly tribalism.

Remember that Obama–who just the other day in a speech in Chicago talked about compromise and turning away from identity politics in order to save democracy–orchestrated two separate coup attempts against sitting American presidents. The first against Donald Trump damaged Trump from the outset and left his administration open to the depredations of the Obama Deep State including corrupt FBI and Intelligence officials, and later there was the Obama coup against Biden, which humiliated the senile old man and ended Biden’s presidency in all but name last summer.

Kass neglects the other figure I've been looking at here, Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi as Speaker was the one who controlled the impeachment valve, and before Obama was on the scene, she was the one who decided not to use it against Dubya:

In May 2006, with an eye on the upcoming midterm elections—which offered the possibility of Democrats taking back control of the House for the first time since 1994—Pelosi told colleagues that, while the Democrats would conduct vigorous oversight of Bush administration policy, an impeachment investigation was "off the table". A week earlier, she had told The Washington Post that although Democrats would not set out to impeach Bush, "you never know where" investigations might lead.

After becoming speaker in 2007, Pelosi held firm against impeachment, notwithstanding strong support for it among her constituents. In the 2008 election, she withstood a challenge for her seat by antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, who ran as an independent primarily because of Pelosi's refusal to pursue impeachment.

Whatever Obama may or may not have wanted to do, Pelosi, as Speaker, was the one who could bring it about. In 2007, she said no, but in 2019, with Obama retired, she said yes:

On September 29, 2019, Pelosi announced the launch of an impeachment inquiry against Trump. On December 5, 2019, after the inquiry had taken place, Pelosi authorized the Judiciary Committee to begin drafting articles of impeachment. After hearings were held, two articles of impeachment were announced on December 10. The House of Representatives approved both articles on December 18, thereby formally impeaching Trump.

This simply wouldn't have happened if Obama were simply urging it from the sidelines. If Pelosi had said no, as she did in 2007, it would have died. Or take Obama's effort to rally the sexist young African-American men of Pennsylvania to vote for Kamala. Kass says,

Remember just weeks ago when Obama was lecturing young black men who weren’t enthralled with the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Bitter and angry, he harangued them on what he could only understand as the sexism of the great unwashed.

. . . Yet those young men who he tried to shame didn’t live among the elites of Martha’s Vineyard or the Gold Coast of Chicago. And they weren’t insulated from the poor economy and pressure from the illegals. Instead, Obama was revealed by his own mouth to be be a complete and utter phony. You could almost hear regular people, those who had been Democrats, shouting “F You Barack” from every corner in every swing state.

So by Kass's own argument, Obama is past his sell-by date. Pelosi, while semi-retired as Speaker, seems still to be one of those in control of the Democrat party. Last July, whatever Obama may have wanted, Pelosi was the one who spoke to Biden:

Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him is, from one angle, the final political act of an octogenarian who realizes that his power is coming to an end and who is sagely passing the torch to a younger politician in a last-ditch effort to save his party and his country from authoritarian defeat. But from another vantage point, the real story is one of a different octogenarian—one who has wielded power more effectively than just about any politician in the past half-century—who used her decades of accrued experience and authority to do what no one else apparently could: get a dug-in presidential candidate to drop out and give his party a fighting chance.

. . . “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” one Democrat anonymously told Politico. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

Pelosi is still in the House and has filed papers to run for re-election in 2026. And it's worth pointing out that, although retired as Speaker, she was the one figure who could prevail on Biden to drop out of the race, for whatever that was worth -- it's beginning to look like Harris never had any realistic chance of turning things around.

Both Pelosi and Obama are out of touch -- Pelosi was doing little more than flailing in a last-ditch effort to turn the election around -- but Pelosi is the one who's still in some sort of position to do damage.

SomeDemocrats are standing up to Pelosi,but she's the one that still needs to be taken down:

Several Democratic lawmakers complained anonymously to Axios about the former speaker.

'She needs to take a seat,' said one senior Democrat.

. . . Some lawmakers think the 84-year-old is having trouble letting go of her previous power. She elected to stay in Congress as a regular lawmaker instead of fully retiring.

'I understand that this is a difficult transition for her, not being the leader, but she is not,' the member of the Congressional Black Caucus told Axios.

'She needs to understand what her new role is.'

But it's basically Trump who's going to do this, not any Democrat.

If AI Is So Great, Why Do I Get So Much Spanish- And Chinese-Language Spam?

Generations ago, IBM was the dominant player in tech. It was said that you couldn't be fired if you went with IBM, but within a few years of when I started, people definitely began to be fired for going with IBM, and I was never much of a fan. But when I started thinking about this post, I found this piece at IBM's website that tries to give an overview of artificial intelligence, or AI. It's as good a start as any.

I decided I needed to update my own understanding of AI, because the tech billionaires who've lined up with Trump want to influence AI policy. It seems to me that there are two main fields within AI, massive database search and machine learning. Massive database search involves things like searching huge numbers of phone calls or e-mails for keywords or other associations to identify targets. Machine learning involves teaching computers to underatand, translate, and generate natural language, produce original text or works of art, or self-drive automobiles.

Massive database search really isn't new. One of my first tech jobs in the 1970s was with a company that produced a newspaper publishing system. One of its features was keyword search of the AP feed. You could put in a word like "food", and you'd get every incoming AP story that mentioned food, which would make the food editor's work that much easier. But at the time, the company had a hush-hush contract with one of the three-letter agencies to do a much more comprehensive search, maybe of all phone calls all over the world, that mentioned two or more particular keywords in the same message.

(At one point, I believe my sister, a highly capable linguist, had a contract to review the output of such a system, but I know little beyond that.) But this was all being done in the 1970s, it's nothing new. But let's keep in mind that for generations, the three-letter agencies, as well as their Russian, Israeli, and other counterparts, have been running these searches. Find all the phone calls that have the words "infidel", "martyr", "bomb", and "airplane" in any of eight languages. Find all the e-mails that have "Trump", "schedule", "AR-15", and "scope". Sort by relevance and pass it on to the appropriate agency.

And hey, they were doing that in the 1970s, right? Think how good they must have gotten with it by now! Think of Moore's Law, the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years with minimal rise in cost. Computer power has long since gone through the roof! With these sorts of tools, we no longer are caught by surprise with sudden invasions, terrorist attacks. or assassination attempts! They're all a thing of the past!

As far as I can see, the main concerns the tech billionaires like Musk, Mark Andreesen, or David Sacks have with AI are related to this sort of massive database search. Keep in mind that in the 1970s, the three-letter agencies were already able to do mass searches of phone calls, and that was before text messages or e-mails. Computer power has grown to keep up with that, as well as bank and credit card tranactions. If you buy a gun, the agencies know it, and they can put you on a watch list at will.

They can track your movements by phone and GPS. They know when you check in and out of your hotel, and when you go in and out of your room. AI just makes these searches faater and easier. The frontiers at this point are facial recognition and DNA. At least theoretically, it's just a matter of time before we have the DNA profiles of everyone, we'll be able not just to track, but to predict, their facial features, and if you say the wrong thing in a phone call, they'll know who you are and where to round you up.

This is part of what concerns Musk and the others, although they're more worried that the government will decide who gets the contracts to do all this and who's frozen out of the market. There are also legitimate concerns about privacy, but I'm just not sure if these aren't overrated.

For instance, let's take the case of the so-far unidentified perp who assassinated United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan: New York police use facial recognition as they work to identify suspect in killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO. How's that working out? They've got a cell phone, bullet shells, a backpack -- maybe he fled on an electric bike (which proably has a GPS tracker). Maybe he's in Atlanta. Maybe a camera caught him in a taxi. So far, he's still on the lam. Maybe they know his name, maybe not.

For that matter, think how AI can track my computer use. It must certainly know I'm white, over 65, my income, my health status, my address, my e-mail, my interests (railroads, history, politics), I speak German pretty well, because I have German correspondents and Facebook friends, as well as small Latin and less Greek. In fact, my German Facebook friends are mostly AfD. The agencies know all about me, and I'm sure about them as well, as does the BND, as does Google, as does Meta

So why do I get so much Spanish- and Chinese-language spam, but no German? That's my puzzle. Why can't they locate the guy who shot the healthcare CEO? Why couldn't they predict the nut jobs who tried to shoot Trump?

Almost from the day I started working in tech, I thought the whole thing smelled of boondoggle. IBM struck me as a yuge boondoggle at the time. AI, at this point, strikes me as the same thing.

What Does This Say About Their Judgment?

In yesterday's post, we saw how accounts suggest that Kamala Harris had the inside track for nomination as Joe's running mate in 2020, as well as a lock on designation to replace Joe as the Democrat nominee once he withdrew from the race last July. While some accounts attribute this influence to James Clyburn, I think the evidence points much more strongly to Nancy Pelosi, and to a slighly lesser extent, Barack Obama.

Numerous accounts have reported that Joe is angry at both Pelosi and Obama for forcing him out of the race, for instance:

Pelosi and Biden have not spoken since he stepped away. And the president’s anger flashed to the surface during a televised interview that aired this weekend when he namechecked the former speaker as he explained why he quit the race.

“And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic,” Biden told CBS. “You’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and — and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”

Biden also harbors some resentment that Obama — his friend and former boss — did not call him directly to voice his concerns about the campaign in the aftermath of the disastrous Atlanta debate in late June.

While Obama tweeted in support of Biden immediately after the debate, he then went publicly quiet. The former president did not try to stir up a movement to dislodge Biden from the top of the ticket, but he also didn’t quell one, much to the dismay of some of those closest to Biden, according to the three people.

This glosses over whether they also worked to install Kamala as Joe's replacement, but the references I've used for the past several days indicate that the near-immediate consensus in favor of Kamala wouldn't have taken place without their consent. But we still have the problem of Kamala's track record as a candidate in the 2020 primaries and what it said about her likelihood of success in 2024. Yesterday, Real Clear Politics linked to thois story from Roll Call, Kamala Harris lost, but how weak of a candidate was she?

Harris underperformed across the country, according to the Vote Above Replacement, or VAR, standard. And the dynamic wasn’t limited to critical battleground states but spread over Democratic and Republican territory alike.

Harris finished ahead of a typical Democratic candidate in just 13 states, ran even in Connecticut and underperformed the average Democrat in 36 states.

. . . The VAR metric measures the strength of political candidates relative to a typical candidate from their party within the same state.

. . . Harris’ performance mattered most in the key states that effectively decided the presidential election, and she didn’t do well.

The vice president underperformed a typical statewide Democrat in six of the seven preelection battlegrounds, including Michigan (-2.7 VAR), Arizona (-2.4), Nevada (-1.2), Pennsylvania (-1.2), North Carolina (-0.9) and Wisconsin (-0.9). The only battleground state where she overperformed was Georgia, where the new Democratic Baseline is 47.6 percent and Harris received 48.5 percent of the vote.

The Democrat establishment, presumably led by Obama and Pelosi, already had Harris's track record in plain sight in front of them -- yes, she was potentially an attractive candidate, but faced with bad poll numbers that made donors hesitate, she was forced to end her 2020 primary campaign in Decemvber of 2019, even before the Iowa caucuses. What was her appeal to the kingmakers, who despite her record as a campaigner, wired her in as the 2020 vice presidential pick and then the 2024 presidential candidate?

Let's recall, as I outlined yesterday, that the Democrat establishment promoted Harris despite her electoral record, first as a vice presidential candidate, but then they made her the presidential candidate in 2024 after discouraging any serious primary contests that spring. I think the only explanation is that they were aware of how far left she was, not just as a 2019 campaigner but as a US senator, and they thought it wasn't a bug, it was a feature:

Vice President Kamala Harris served in the Senate between 2017 and 2021, providing a legislative record that allows her to be located along the left-right continuum that dominates legislative behavior in the Congress. Based on her roll call voting record, Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.

The obstacle, at least to conventional minds, was that she'd eventually have to get elected, but she'd lasted as far as she had as a national candidate by avoiding elections with the help of Obama and Pelosi. In August of 2023, I noted,

the Democrats can't dump Biden, because as an old white guy who isn't Bernie Sanders, he's the last vestige of the New Deal coalition, and any successor will inevitably be just an unelectable front for one or another leftist splinter faction of the old party.

I brought this up in the context of the "Götterdämmerung strategy", that if yuou know the world is going to end on a date certain, for instance the giant asteroid is going to hit the planet, you run up your credit cards in the weeks and months before in the knowledge you'll never have to pay them off. They were going to put a leftist in, no matter what, and the results were actually predictable. They probably knew the likely outcome themselves.

If you look at Kamala this way, she was the Götterdämmerung candidate, certainly Mrs Pelosi's last hurrah. But Götterdämmerung isn't a governing strategy.

So, Again, Why Did Joe Pick Kamala For VP In 2020?

We saw yesterday that, although the conventional wisdom says Joe made a deal with Rep James Clyburn to choose an African-American woman in return for Clyburn's endorsement in the South Carolina primary, Clyburn's version of events was that before the primary, his only ask was that he commit to nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court. CBS News gave another Clyburn account in August 2020, after Joe announced Kamala as his pick:

"I was part of the vetting. Then they were doing polling and I said to him, when all of that's over, you let your head and your heart take a look and you go with that" Clyburn told CBSN anchor Anne-Marie Green. "I spoke to him the day before he reached his conclusion and he said to me at the time, 'I am having a little war between my head and my heart. When that is reconciled, I will give you a call and let you know what my decision is.'"

Clyburn, a close ally of one of Biden's VP candidates Representative Karen Bass, said he supported all 12 women on the short list, including the four African-American women who were "seriously considered."

Again, there's no reference to any specific tit-for-tat here. On March 17, 2020, Politico reported on the early selection process:

Joe Biden’s confirmation of the biggest open secret in politics — that he would pick a woman as his running mate — was just the start of a thorny selection process that touches not only on gender but race, geography, experience and personal chemistry.

The array of choices in play, according to Biden advisers and allies, reflects the competing forces bearing down on Biden as he looks to the general election. Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren are top names. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto are also in the mix.

There’s a powerful current of thought in Democratic circles that Biden needs to choose a black woman after African American electorate indisputably revived his campaign in South Carolina and the South. But it’s by no means a certainty.

“I think it’s necessary for it to be a woman and I prefer an African-American woman. That’s my preference,” Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told POLITICO in an interview. Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden before South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary was a transformative moment for the Biden campaign.

But it's hard to avoid thinking the list of all those potential candidates was mostly for public consumption. After Joe annouinced Kamala as his choice in August, CNN had this analysis:

Harris, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, had been the front-runner to be Biden’s pick for months because, well, she simply made sense.

It goes on with a list of blah-blah reasons, she's experienced, she's from California, she has national exposure, young, historic, blah blah blah. But it continued,

See, if you are Joe Biden, making your third run for president and ahead in virtually every swing state and nationally over President Donald Trump, every day between now and November 3 you want to do nothing that threatens to change the underlying dynamics of the race.

. . . What Biden did is make the pick that maximized his chances of continuing to make the race a straight referendum on Trump while also selecting someone, in Harris, whose resume suggests will be ready to step in if and when Biden decides to step aside.

Reports from that time, though, all suggest Kamala had been the front runner all along. The references to Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, or Gretchen Whitmer were never anything but polite. I also think that in his interviews later in the selection process, Clyburn is probably giving himself more credit than he deserves for influencing Joe's decision -- what we know about Joe at this point is that he's not very smart, and with what intelligence he has, he's not an independent thinker.

In particular, according to Forbes, Kamala had a 20-year alliance with Barack Obama:

Harris endorsed Obama in his primary against Hillary Clinton and volunteered for his campaign, including knocking on doors for him in Iowa, according to multiple outlets.

Days before Obama’s inauguration, comparisons between Harris and Obama gained national attention when journalist Gwen Ifill appeared on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” and said Harris “has a bright future and they call her the ‘female Barack Obama.’”

. . . Harris is floated as a potential replacement for Holder after he announces he’s stepping down; though she publicly said in 2014 she wasn’t interested in the job, Holder told the Post Obama discussed her in 2015 as a possible successor, and the then-attorney general called Harris to “gauge her interest” in the role.

. . . Harris met with Obama twice during her first presidential run in the 2020 primaries and spoke with him by phone, according to CNN, though Obama never formally endorsed a candidate in the race until now-President Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee.

The alliance between Nancy Pelosi and Kamala isn't as clear, but according to USA Today, they both came up through the California Democrat machine:

San Francisco, like many cities, has core political families that shape the political landscape. Harris and Pelosi would both come through what locals call the “Burton-Brown machine.”

Former Democratic Rep. Phil Burton organized a coalition made up of labor, civil rights leaders, and gay and Asian voters to win control of the city from Republicans in the 1950s.

. . . When Burton died of heart failure in 1983, his wife, Sala Burton, succeeded him. Four years later, on her own deathbed, Sala Burton made it clear who she wanted to replace her: Nancy Pelosi.

. . . A few years later, Harris would begin making a name for herself in political circles. A prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney's office, she formed friendships and developed allies within the local political world. Those friendships led to a position in the San Francisco district attorney’s office and a short-lived romantic relationship with Brown, along with several state board positions and involvement in local campaigns.

Harris was elected California attorney general in 2010. Six years later, when Democrat Barbara Boxer retired from the U.S. Senate, Harris ran for that seat and won, placing her in the same office where she interned under Sen. Alan Cranston of California during college.

None of these steps would have taken place without Pelosi's approval as head of the California machine. It's hard for me to avoid thinking Kamala was both Obama's and Pelosi's choice for Biden's running mate in 2020, and this was transmitted to Joe, well before any public announcement.

As we've been seeing, Kamala was regarded by insiders as the front-runner to be vice president nominee in 2020, and she was the front-runner to replace Joe when Joe was forced out last July. Kamala was wired iin as Joe's replacement, as far as I can see, at least from the start of the 2020 primary season. But this raises its own question: Kamala was a disastrous candidate in that same priomary season. She withdrew from the race in December 2019.

Why was she so well-regarded by Pelosi and Obama that they'd wire her in as Joe's presumptive successor from the start?

I Haven't Seen Anyone Asking About The 2024 Democrat Primaries

I keep coming up with questions nobody else is asking -- for instance, although we hear leaks now and then about how insiders were getting worried about Joe's cognitive decline at least by early this year, why were the national and state Democrats working so hard to discourage serious primary campaigns for other candidates? For instance, Bobby Kennedy Jr originally planned to run as a Democrat in the primaries. Via PBS in October 2023,

Longtime environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday he will run for president as an independent and drop his Democratic primary bid, adding a wrinkle to a 2024 race heading toward a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

. . . Kennedy has spent weeks accusing the DNC of “rigging” the party’s primary against him and threatening that he might need to consider alternatives.

In campaign emails and videos, he blasted the DNC’s decision not to host debates between Biden and other candidates and railed against the committee’s plan to give South Carolina rather than Iowa or New Hampshire the leadoff spot on the primary calendar this election cycle.

Dean Phillips was only slightly more successful with a primary campaign, suspending it on March 6 of this year following Super Tuesday. According to Wikipedia,

Phillips has objected to being left off the primary ballots of several states by their respective Democratic parties, including in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

. . . On November 9, 2023, asserting that his campaign was hampered by ballot access policies and a lack of candidate debates, Phillips issued an apology to Bernie Sanders, regretting his previous disbelief towards Sanders's 2016 campaign's complaints of biased rules by the DNC governing the presidential primary. When asked for comment, Sanders responded, "He's changed his views now that he's a candidate? I'm not getting involved in this."

Phillips accused representatives of the Biden campaign of pressuring liberal media outlets to not platform him. Phillips also accused the Democratic National Committee of actively obstructing Democrats and Independents from ballot access — “bleeding campaigns dry” by handing out lawsuits against non-incumbent candidates and "absurd signature requirements["].

Phillips announced his candidacy in October 2023, only a short time after Kennedy decided to run as an independent. Here is ABC News's assessment at the time:

The congressman's campaign is motivated by concerns over Biden's electability given Democrats' apprehensions about the president's advanced age (he'll be 81 in November), poor approval rating (40 percent in 538's national average) and early general election polls that may foreshadow a difficult race against Trump.

Clearly some Democrats were looking at Biden's chances realistically, but thery were a small minority. ABC contniues,

Phillips has laid out one chief campaign goal: Ensuring Democrats defeat Trump in 2024. However, the two paths he's set out for how to do that don't seem especially viable — and are also somewhat incongruous. One route involves him actually winning the nomination and offering a stronger (and notably younger) opponent to Trump. But Phillips's path to defeating Biden in the Democratic primary looks vanishingly small. . . . Moreover, to have any shot at success, he probably should have launched his campaign much earlier in the election cycle.

The second option, according to Phillips, is that his challenge will push Biden with a tough primary campaign that better prepares Biden for the rigors of facing Trump. But despite his intentions, the little-known congressman may risk damaging Biden ahead of the general election by indirectly calling attention to the president's weaknesses.

But he was an obscure figure who started late and attracted little money, while the Democrat establishment's strategy of discouraging serious primary challenges to Biden proved successful. We must assume this strategy had the assent of other powerful Democrats, including Obama and Pelosi. But after effectively eliminating challenges to Joe during the regular primnary season, Pelosi had this to say once Joe was pushed aside for Kamala in July:

Former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted on Wednesday that her party's presidential nominating process after President Biden dropped out was "open," and Vice President Kamala Harris "won it," despite the absence of any such contest.

Prior to Biden stepping down as the Democratic Party's nominee in mid-July, Pelosi reportedly said she favored a competitive open primary process to replace him if needed. On Wednesday, Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked Pelosi if she had changed her mind after seeing all the "excitement" Harris generated when she was tapped to replace Biden.

"No, I didn't change my mind. We had an open primary and [Kamala Harris] won it. Nobody else got in the race," Pelosi said. "Yes people could have jumped in – there were some people who were sort of preparing, but she just took off with it, and actually it was a blessing because there was not that much time between then and the election and it sort of saved time."

So Pelosi's idea of primaries 2.0 wasn't much different from her idea of primaries 1.0, namely, no primaries. It's intriguing that Harris withdrew from the 2020 primary race in late 2019, before even the Iowa caucuses, yet Biden chose her as his running mate despite her lack of national stature. This brings us to another question nobody is asking: why, really, did Biden choose Harris as his running mate in 2020? Beyond that, why was she chosen, unopposed, to replace Biden as the nominee in 2024, having bypassed any primary process?

Here is the conventional wisdom behind the choices:

South Carolina’s most influential Democrat endorsed Biden just three days before the Palmetto State’s 2020 primary and changed the course of the election. It propelled Biden to victory after a dismal fourth-place finish in Iowa, a dreadful fifth-place finish in New Hampshire and a distant second-place finish in Nevada. Here’s the story behind it.

The day before Clyburn endorsed Biden was the day of a candidate debate. And the day before that, Clyburn made what the 2021 book “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency” by NBC’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes called a political “ask” — “the favor a politician requests in return when he is granting one” — of Biden.

“Find a way to say that you were a part of picking the first Latina woman member of the United States Supreme Court and you’re looking forward to making the first African American woman a member of the United States Supreme Court,” Clyburn told Biden the day before the debate.

Yet a full hour and 45 minutes into the debate at a Charleston concert hall, Biden had not promised to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Clyburn rushed backstage in a commercial break, found Biden and cautioned him privately, “I’m telling you, don’t you leave the stage tonight without making it known that you will do that.”

The rest is history.

But the rest isn't history. Even in this version, all Clyburn demanded was an African-American woman nominee to the Supreme Court, not a vice presidential running mate. And in this version, a promise to do the Supreme Court nomination was what got Joe Clyburn's must-have support in the primary the next day. The African-American woman running mate, at least in this apparently authoritative version, wasn't even part of the 2020 deal between Joe and Clyburn.

So this doesn't really explain how Kamala got the vice presidential nod, and that means it's even more puzzling that, as Pelosi put it, "nobody else got in the race" when Joe stepped down. Over the months before Joe dropped out, the front-runner for his replacement, Gavin Newsom, first failed to become a primary opponent and then slowly withdrew from the public eye, pledging his support for Joe all the way. I strongly suspect Nancy Pelosi was behind this -- I think she had been clearing the way for Harris long before Joe's health became a top issue.

I actuaally think the Clyburn story itself is a smoke screen, the Harris choice probably came from others in the Democrat establishment, primarily Obama amd Pelosi. That she was a poor candidate in 2019-20 didn't matter, they were going to byhpass elections fom the start, as they effectively did in 2020.

And Joe's health was never a decisive issue. Joe would be bullied out under the threat of the 25th Amendment at some point, just preferably after the election, but Kamala was always going to be in the plan. That was a big reason they didn't want primaries in 2024.

I suspect something like this will eventually come out.

"It'll Be Fine. . . "

The public dialogue has been all about Trump's cabinet nominees, but the question that still won't go away for me, and nobody's talking about, is why the Democrat leadership never came up with a Plan B over Biden before the time to reoplace him was long past. The suggestions we had last summer were that at least by the start of the year, insiders were shocked at Joe's cognitive decline, but as far as I can tell, nobody did anything about it.

Isn't that where the history of the 2024 campaign should start? But that means we should go back to 2020. From February of that year:

Former Vice President Joe Biden's poor showing in the New Hampshire and Iowa primaries this week — and Bernie Sanders' strong performance in both — are terrifying the Democratic party's top managers and fundraisers.

We got to taste that fear when Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry was overheard on a phone call in a hotel lobby in Des Moines, Iowa, telling someone that voters "now have the reality of Bernie" and it would lead to "the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole."

At that point, the Democrat establishment focused on Joe as the best alternative to Sanders. By March,

The Democratic empire is quickly aligning its forces to strike back at Bernie Sanders.

First, billionaire Tom Steyer dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination after former Vice President Joe Biden romped to victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., exited in quick succession Sunday and Monday and were expected to endorse Biden at a rally in Texas on the eve of the Super Tuesday contests that will pick roughly one-third of the delegates to the Democratic convention. Amid the candidate dominoes, a legion of current and former party officials threw their weight behind Biden, who had all but been left for dead by party elites a couple of weeks ago.

"It reflects the urgency of what we’re going into on Super Tuesday," said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton's bids for the presidency. "That's a big show of force that the left-of-center wing of the Democratic Party is consolidating around Joe because they understand what’s at stake, they understand the urgency, and they don’t want this to be handed to Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday."

This narrative suggests that Democrat insiders were fully aware of Joe's weaknesses, but the alternative was Sanders. The problem wasn't that Sanders was a red diaper baby -- they were all for that -- the problem was that the voters knew it, and Sanders couldn't win in November. In fact, it would be a repeat of 1972 or 1988; it could put the party's future in jeopardy.

So they decided to dress Joe up as a centrist and use Covid as an excuse to run a basement campaign. while also using the health scare to curtail Trump's ability to hold rallies. This covered up Joe's weaknesses as a campaigner while limiting Trump's strengths. Meanwhile, the deep state was used to discount issues like Hunter's laptop while planting the idea Trump was a Russian agent.

Finally, the Democrats could rely on big-city machines to manipulate the vote counts in key districts. This put Joe over the top, barely, that November. Once he was in, the people who really ran things could implement a program that was little different from anything Sanders could have imagined.

What puzzles me is that the Democrats on one hand were fully aware of both the weaknesses of their platform and the weaknesses of Joe as a candidate, but they never seem to have seen the need to adjust their strategy from the 2020 model, especially to find a replacement for Joe.

By 2024, Covid was no longer an excuse either to run a basement campaign or to claim Trump's rallies were a health risk. The Republicans had also learned a major lesson from 2020 and had teams of lawyers ready to challenge any attempts to delay counting, which paid off in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona, which had had those problems in 2020.

But the biggest question is still why Biden was allowed to run for a second term. It appears that behind the scenes, to make himself more attractive as the 2020 candidate, he was unofficially making it known that he would be a one-termer. According to The Hill, which was asking about this just this past June,

[T]he report most cited by those who believe a one-term promise was in place was from Politico in December 2019. “Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term,” reported Ryan Lizza. “While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.”

Lizza would go on to quote “four people who regularly talk to Biden” who said “it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024.” One “prominent adviser to the campaign” said explicitly, “he won’t be running for reelection.” That same advisor said that by signaling this one-term run, it would make the candidate a “good transition figure.”

That “transition” line is important, because it’s one Biden himself used publicly and on the record. “I view myself as a transition candidate,” Biden said at an online fundraiser in April 2020. In March of that year, at a rally where his eventual VP pick Kamala Harris was by his side, he used similar language: “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

As we now know, that turned into a bridge to nowhere. By March 2021, Biden was saying something entirely different. “My plan is to run for reelection. That’s my expectation,” he said shortly after he was inaugurated.

Well, this is the Joe Biden we've come to know, manifested most recently in his pledge not to pardon Hunter. But the question is still why powerful figures like Obama snd Pelosi allowed this to happen. After all, if Obama, Pelosi, and Harris could show Joe the door last June, they could just as well have done it a year earlier. They could have organized a donor strike in 2023 as easily as in 2024, for instance.

Barring other developments, I'll speculate about this tomorrow.