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Has Paul Ryan become so disaffected with Donald Trump that he quietly changed political parties, when no one was looking? The Washington Post, in an unrelated story, ran a photo of Orrin Hatch standing next to Ryan with the caption (emphasis added):
Is Senator Elizabeth Warren actively auditioning for the role of Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick? At this point, it's rather hard to come to any other conclusion, since Warren has been so outspoken of late on the subject of how horrible Donald Trump would be as president.
I should mention right up front that I'm essentially punting on today's article. I had planned on doing this anyway, but then an appointment I had got cancelled at the last minute, so I at least now have the time to jot down a few things -- a news update and then some great news for the site. The first is just me patting myself on the back (again, I'm admitting this up front, in case there are cat videos or something else on the web which would be a better use of your time than reading this), but the second is a bit of personal news that I think regular readers will be almost as excited about as I am. But before we get to dessert, we've got to eat our vegetables.
This column was written from bottom to top today. The reason we started with the end and worked our way back up is that we were inspired to go off on a rant (rather than our usual talking points for Democrats). This was due to unusually high levels of panic in the media this week (actually it's not that rare that mainstream media panic causes us to go off on a rant, just in general). But because we started with this extended rant, we're going to have to summarize the week in lightning fashion here in this intro, because we are way behind schedule now. So without much extraneous commentary, here are the stories we noticed during the week.
To tell you the truth, I never thought I'd have to write this article. I fully expected someone else to dig this stuff out, if the calls for Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race (or "say nice things about Hillary Clinton") began. Now that they have, I still haven't seen any detailed reminders of how the 2008 Democratic primary race ended yet. So I went ahead and dug them out on my own.
I wrote the following exactly eleven months ago, when Bernie Sanders announced his run for the presidency. I'm running it again today, for two reasons. The first is that I am otherwise occupied, with putting together my applications for press passes for both national conventions (wish me luck). So I was going over a lot of old columns, looking for ones I could cite. The second reason is why this particular article leapt out at me is that it is pretty prophetic in seeing clearly the concept of a how a Bernie Sanders campaign effort would be run. The biggest thing I missed was the fact that Bernie would be the first Jewish president, instead of just "another old white guy." But while not every word in it came true, I think I did a fairly good job of predicting the overall dynamics of the race as it has played out. So again, apologies for the re-run, but here's what I had to say about Sanders, from the very beginning.
Originally published April 29, 2015
We've had a President Jimmy and a President Ronnie, so why not a President Bernie?
Bernie Sanders just had a very good week. Six states voted in the past week, and Bernie won five of them. Overwhelmingly. Bernie got over 70 percent of the vote in four states, and over 80 percent in Alaska. All in all, a pretty good week. His delegate count has now hit four digits, with superdelegates added in. That's all pretty impressive, but rather than focusing on his chances for actually winning the Democratic presidential nomination this time around (which are still pretty low, even with that impressive string of victories), instead what intrigues me is how the movement of Democratic populism seems to be growing. If Sanders falls short this time around, the next time a populist runs they may actually succeed. Bernie has already gone a long way towards transforming the Democratic Party away from its embrace of economic centrism (the Bill Clinton and Democratic Leadership Council era) towards a much more people-centered party.
No matter what the next primary election results show tomorrow night, one thing seems to be certain: we are in for a long slog of delegate-counting before either party's nominee is crowned. On the Republican side, this is leading to more and more desperation from the party's bigwigs, as they clutch at the thin straw of somehow yanking the nomination away from Donald Trump at their convention. All of this is going to take time to play out, but we're just going to leapfrog over it all for now and assume for the purpose of this conversation that Trump does emerge victorious as the Republican Party presidential nominee. Whether a third-party conservative challenge emerges or not, this means the next big question has to be who Trump is going to pick as his running mate. So buckle your seatbelts, because this is likely going to be just as bumpy a ride as the rest of the GOP nomination process has so far been.
It's been a wild and crazy week -- so much so, in fact, that we're going to start with a quote we never thought would become appropriate to use in a column about politics. It's from the movie Taken, where Liam Neeson's character utters the classic line: "Now's not the time for dick-measuring."
That title, of course, refers to the most recent Republican debate, where in a fit of frustration the caption writers at CNN just gave up and ran "Unintelligible yelling" as the caption. Yep, that about sums it up, doesn't it?