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The saga of the transmission continues, which once again ate up my whole day. I will try to get to answering some comments later (something I've been lax at this past week), but my apologies once again as there will be no new column today.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
When political wonks look at factors which influence presidential elections, one of the most obvious correlations is with how the economy's doing. Economic indicators are a good indication of the mood of the voters, or at least they have been in the past. Of course, as with any attempt to identify causality in the nebulous field of politics, this isn't a hard-and-fast rule or anything, but tracking the economy is a better indicator than most as to whether the voters are in the mood for a change at the top or not.
A more important measure is harder to take, because it's not so much how the large economic indicators (such as unemployment and gross domestic product) are performing that matters to voters as it is their own personal perception of how the economy's doing that matters most. A low national unemployment rate may be a good thing, but if you happen to be unemployed and living in an area with not many jobs (or not many good jobs), then you may not have as rosy an outlook as the numbers might at first suggest. This leads to a large political risk for any candidate, most importantly an incumbent. If you base your campaign on how wonderful the economy is doing, then you run the risk of people deciding you are simply out of touch with their own lives and situations.
[Program Note: Due to dealing with ongoing automotive problems, I was not able to do a full Friday Talking Points column today, so my apologies for the lack. Instead, I did have time to write the following extensive overview of what Joe Biden's entry has already meant for the Democratic presidential nomination race. It's not a full wrapup of the week, I realize, but it'll have to do for today. By next Friday, hopefully we'll be back up and running (both figuratively and literally, for the car) for our usual Friday Talking Points column.]
Former Vice President Joe Biden entered the 2020 Democratic presidential field as the clear frontrunner, which is a new experience for him. In his previous two runs for president, he never got to where he is now: comfortably leading the entire pack. Biden is polling ahead of the previous frontrunner Bernie Sanders by anywhere from a few points to a healthy margin of 10 or more, and both men are far out in front of all the other contenders, who are all struggling to even manage to break into double digits in the polls.
Add to that today's breaking news, that Biden outraised everyone else in his first 24 hours, and Biden has -- for now, at least -- cemented his frontrunner status. Biden raised an impressive $6.3 million in his first day, topping the other two highest candidates in this metric as well (Beto O'Rourke raised $6.1 million and Bernie Sanders raised $5.9 million on their first day on the campaign trail).
But even though he's never had the experience of leading the pack before, Biden is already acting like a frontrunner. His introductory video was a marked departure from the other candidates running, because Biden did not focus on any one political issue or lay out his plans for America's future or make the case why he's the best Democrat to win the nomination. Instead, Biden focused almost exclusively on what the entire election is about for many (if not most) Democratic voters: beating Donald Trump. Biden made the case that for America to remain true to its ideals, President Trump must not have a second term in office.
My apologies, but there will be no new column today. I am dealing with automotive (transmission) problems, and had to spend all day running around, leaving no time to write. Hopefully, I'll still be able to get a column out tomorrow for the weekly Friday Talking Points roundup. For now, my apologies again for the lack of column today.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
Monday night, Bernie Sanders appeared on a CNN town hall, and was asked a rather unusual question. An audience member asked whether Bernie supported enfranchising prisoners such as the Boston Marathon bomber or people convicted of sexual assault. Bernie's answer was surprising to many, because he spoke not only in favor of incarcerated prisoners voting, but cut to the heart of the matter: to Bernie, it's a question of basic rights.
Here was Bernie's answer to the question:
I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy. Yes, even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, "That guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote. Well, that person did that, not going to let that person vote," you're running down a slippery slope. So, I believe that people who commit crimes, they pay the price. When they get out of jail, I believe they certainly should have the right the vote, but I do believe that even if they are in jail, they're paying their price to society, but that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.
Bernie's answer made a splash in the news, but most of the stories failed to mention that his home state of Vermont already allows prisoners to vote. It is one of two states which do so (Maine is the other). So while Bernie's answer may sound radical to many, it's not actually all that radical a position for a senator from Vermont to take.
The use of the word "begins" in that headline might be a bit puzzling, since President Donald Trump has pushed back on any number of things during the course of his presidency, most often on Twitter. But today we're not talking about exchanging schoolyard insults with his political opponents, but actual legal pushback from the executive department. Which is somewhat new, and can be expected to grow over the coming months.
While Trump did attempt not just to push back against the investigation Robert Mueller conducted but to actually kill the whole investigation altogether, there wasn't much in the way of legal pushback in the form of refusing to turn over possible evidence or refusing to make people available for interviews. There were no claims of executive privilege, which is pretty unusual for a presidential investigation of this scope. Trump did successfully avoid an in-person interview under oath with Mueller's team by pushing back against the idea, but that was really about it in terms of defying requests from Mueller.
In January, however, Democrats took back control of the House of Representatives, which means they also took control of all the oversight committees. Multiple investigations into Trump and his minions soon ensued, as was to be expected. This is what Trump is now pushing back against, in a big way. He probably feels he's got the political wind at his back after the Mueller Report didn't end with indictments, and he has unleashed his legal team to do everything possible to obstruct the will of Congress as it pertains to all the investigations. At best (for him), Trump will be able to ignore the investigations completely, and even at the worst he'll be able to slow them down to a glacial pace by contesting everything in court.
Another day goes by, another Democrat jumps in the presidential race. You'll forgive me if that sounds somewhat cynical (or even a bit loopy), but that's what the first few months of 2019 have seemed like, at times. But hopefully we're getting to the end of this opening phase in the 2020 presidential race, and hopefully within the next few weeks or so we'll have a full Democratic field and nobody else will jump into the race. That's our fervent hope, at any rate. It's hard enough keeping up with the names of everyone running already!
Campaign News
Another sitting House member has decided that he should be the one to take on Donald Trump. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts officially threw his hat in the ring today. So far, this makes five current House members running (the others are John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Tim Ryan, and Eric Swalwell). Now, winning the presidency from a Senate seat is a lot rarer than people think, but winning the presidency from a House seat is almost unprecedented, so all of these campaigns should be seen as the longest of longshots.
Yesterday, Robert Mueller's investigative report on Donald Trump was made (mostly) public. Today, Trump and his cheerleaders are insisting that he has been totally vindicated and exonerated, while some Democratic candidates for president are demanding that impeachment proceedings be launched in the House of Representatives. That's a pretty wide gulf in perception, but at this point it was to be expected.
Just as has already been revealed in multiple behind-the-scenes tell-all books written about the Trump White House, at the heart of the Mueller Report's findings on obstruction of justice is a bit of incredible irony: what saved Trump from the more blatant forms of obstructing justice was nothing short of his own incompetence. He'd order an advisor to do something that was clearly illegal or highly unethical, and the advisor would either refuse outright or just do nothing in the hopes that Trump would forget about the whole thing. The fact that high-ranking aides would repeatedly just fail to act on Trump's outrageous demands in the hopes he'd soon forget about them obviously means that such a tactic was often effective. The picture this paints is not a flattering one, of Trump blowing up and screaming at someone to do something but then being so easily distracted that he'd forget all about it and often never mention it again. Again, this is the same picture painted by multiple tell-all books as well as a variety of other sources, so it is probably pretty accurate. Trump was saved from a whole lot of lawbreaking because he'd immediately forget that he had demanded such a thing. Hell of a way to run a country, isn't it?
The Mueller Report is finally out. Portions of it have been redacted, and congressional Democrats will doubtlessly continue their push to get an unredacted version to read, but even if that happens the public may never get to see the full text. So for now, we've only got what was released today to examine. And the emerging consensus seems to be that there was no one glaring thing to point to which will lead to Donald Trump's downfall. As usual, there is plenty of fishy and questionable and possibly illegal conduct by both Trump and his minions, but none of it is likely to spur immediate impeachment hearings.
The tragic fire at the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral could have been a lot worse, especially at level of the ground floor. But to a large extent this further catastrophe was avoided. Images from within the cathedral show a surprising amount of the floor to be relatively unburnt, including standing pews made of wood. The thanks for this miracle, though, belong not to God but to some unnamed Medieval stonemasons -- those who did the design and construction of the building's vaulted ceilings. Because their vaulting held fast, widespread damage at ground-level was averted.
When you examine the architecture of a cathedral, one thing quickly becomes apparent: there's really not that much to actually burn. Almost the entire building is made of stone, metal, and glass -- none of which burn very easily. The only extensive use of wood is in the construction of what might be called the "attic" and the roof itself. This is where all the flames were coming from in the videos we all saw from France while Notre-Dame de Paris burned.
Anyone at all interested in the subject of cathedral architecture would be well advised to go down to their local library and see if they have a copy of Cathedral, by David Macaulay (1973). It is an illustrated children's book which details in pen-and-ink drawings how a cathedral is built, from the ground up. It is fascinating and well worth a read, as the architectural drawings are so good that even adults will enjoy learning how cathedrals are laid out and actually constructed. Or, if you're more inclined to read a thick, multigenerational saga, you could always check out The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett, which begins with an intentionally-set fire in a cathedral attic and follows one family of stonemasons through the construction of an English cathedral in the Middle Ages.
