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Joe Biden drew a huge target on himself this week, with his comments on getting along with stone-cold racists in the United States Senate. Conservative commenter Ana Navarro perhaps best summed up Biden's error, criticizing him for "dragging up these dead racists instead of talking about the live racists."
Joe Biden is having a bad week, at the precise time when all the other Democrats running for president really needed him to stumble. With the first debates now less than a week away, Biden has handed his opponents a number of openings for them to directly attack him -- which, no doubt, some of them will exploit on stage next week. And Biden has no one to blame for this state of affairs but himself.
President Donald Trump apparently thinks he can easily beat the 2020 Democratic nominee -- if Democrats would only nominate Hillary Clinton again, that is. The fact that she's not actually running seems to have completely escaped him. Granted, with 24 candidates in the Democratic race, it is rather hard to keep track of them all -- but even so, it's pretty hard to miss the fact that there simply are no Clintons whatsoever in the race this time around. But Trump's never been one to let facts get in the way of a good chant at one of his political rallies.
The first authentic polling trend of the 2020 Democratic nominating contest may now be happening. By "authentic," what I mean is a polling trend that is not merely an "announcement bump." Every candidate (well... every viable candidate) has seen some sort of boost in their polling immediately after making their official announcement, but most of these have since subsided. Now that the field is full, there will be no more such announcements to skew the polling, and any trends must thus be due to actual campaign successes or failures by the candidates. And we're seeing at least the beginnings of the first of these trends: Senator Elizabeth Warren seems to be enjoying a surge.
It's June, which means that it is Supreme Court season once again. The high court's session wraps up at the end of June each year, and they usually hold back the most contentious cases until the very end. This year, there are two such big cases that could change American politics for at least the next decade or so. But in the meantime, the court has announced a few other decisions worth examining for their political impact as well.
We have to begin by first ignoring all the rampant criminality spewing forth from the White House -- just for the moment, mind you -- to concentrate instead on looking forward, not back. Because we're less than two weeks away from the first round of Democratic 2020 presidential primary debates, and the Democratic National Committee just announced the lineup for the two nights.
President Donald Trump just made news by admitting what everyone already knew or suspected -- that he'd be just fine with Russia feeding him dirt on a political opponent during a presidential election campaign. He wouldn't see any necessity to inform the F.B.I. if a foreign government offered up negative information, and he furthermore insisted that any other American politician would do exactly the same thing. He's trying to normalize his own amorality, in other words.
What do you do when reality doesn't match up with how you'd like things to be? For most of us, we either pursue some form of escapism (binge-watch television, drink to excess, book tickets to the International Space Station, etc.), or we just knuckle down and admit that reality can be a real bummer at times. Hey, that's life, right? But for Donald Trump, the easiest response is to just go right ahead and attempt to redefine reality into what he'd like it to be. After all, if millions of his followers can be hoodwinked into believing something that is patently false just on his say-so, then that gives it a sort of reality all on its own, doesn't it?
Donald Trump has one go-to tactic in what passes for his political toolbox: personally create a crisis, rail loudly about it and make threats, and then "solve" the crisis and claim it was the biggest victory of all time. He's used this tactic over and over again, and he really doesn't care who pays the price for his political flim-flam job -- Dreamers, farmers, manufacturers, consumers, or anyone else. But an interesting thing just happened with his most recent deployment of flim-flammery: absolutely nobody bought it this time around. The media didn't fall for it and the public certainly didn't fall for it. Maybe this boy has cried "Wolf!" once too many? Because it certainly feels like something has changed.
The field has been set, the cattle calls have begun, and the first debate round is looming on the horizon. In other words, the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest has moved into a new phase. If the polls can be believed, the people of Iowa are once again taking their "first in the nation" status seriously, and have begun examining the candidates much more closely than voters in other states. That should come as no surprise, since almost all the candidates are now investing heavily in doing well out in corn country. At least, the ones who have raised enough money to invest heavily in any state, that is.