Democrats are, if the political media is to be believed, in a soul-searching phase right now, deciding what exactly the party stands for and what they should run their next campaign on. They are deeply divided, the pundits tell us, between the "far left" and the pragmatists who don't want to win the primaries only to lose the general election. They can't even agree on which demographic will be the key one to delivering victory in 2020.

In reality, Democrats are actually a pretty united bunch right now, laser-focused on one overriding shared goal: defeating Donald Trump and his Trumpist Republicans. This singleminded dedication to defeating a sitting president is nothing new in American politics, of course, and goes back (at the very least) to the formation of the Whig Party in response to Andrew Jackson's perceived monarchical rule (the party's name was even a continuation of this theme, as the British Whigs were anti-royalist). Democratic politicians and rank-and-file voters all largely agree that the 2020 campaign should primarily be about booting Trump out of the Oval Office, and everything else is secondary to that larger goal. This was so apparent in the 2018 midterm elections that Democratic politicians barely even had to mention Trump, because it simply was not necessary -- Democratic voters were already fully on board with that goal to such an extent that it didn't even need to be said by the candidates, which freed them up to campaign on more concrete issues.

Party unity, however, doesn't sell newspapers. Which is why, throughout the 2018 campaign season, the mainstream media desperately tried to convince Democratic candidates that the real election issue they should be debating was whether to immediately impeach Trump or not. Thankfully, Democrats refused to take this bait and ran their campaigns on protecting Obamacare and people with pre-existing conditions. To great effect.

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The news media -- once again -- has been in a frenzy over the possibility that Robert Mueller will wrap up his investigation next week and issue his long-awaited report. They've gone down this road before, as have President Trump's legal advisors (who have been telling Trump the whole thing is going to be over very soon now for almost a solid year and a half). So you'll forgive us for not being all that convinced that this is indeed the time that Lucy won't pull the football away, and we'll finally get to kick it thumpingly down the field!

Perhaps we're being a wee bit too cynical? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. We'll see what next week brings.

Even if Mueller's report does drop next week, we also have to caution everyone that nobody outside of his investigation has any real idea what will be in it. And it may take awhile for the public to even learn what's in Mueller's report, even if he does hand it in next week and closes up shop. The attorney general has the discretion to either release all of the report, some of it, a summary of it, or none of it. If he chooses any path other than "release all of it" then House Democrats are going to immediately begin work to obtain their own copy, of course, so the likelihood that it'll stay forever buried is probably pretty darn low.

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The mainstream media -- right, left, and center -- are largely missing the point when reporting (and opining) on the recent revelation about Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein talking about the use of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Because in all the shocking hair-on-fire reaction, few bother to point out that neither man would have had anything to do with removing President Trump with the procedures laid out in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The president's cabinet would be initially involved, and then Congress might also have a direct say, but "secondary officials at the Justice Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation" are simply not on that list.

McCabe is, of course, currently out there on a book tour, hawking his tell-all of life as he saw it within the Trump administration. But the focus on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment story is kind of odd, because it was not actually news. It had been previously reported months ago, in fact (in September of last year), from Rosenstein's point of view. The only news was the additional point of view of McCabe, who was the person Rosenstein was speaking to about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

McCabe's book brought this story back up again, and the media started reporting on it as if it were some sort of scoop, even though the news wasn't exactly fresh or anything. But this time around, the story seems to have made a bigger splash.

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When looking ahead to the 2020 Democratic primaries, many pundits are suffering from a lack of imagination. Either that, or they just don't remember the 2016 Republican primary race, for some reason. Because unlike the last two close-fought Democratic primary seasons (in 2016 and 2008), this time around it will not be a binary process. There will not be a single frontrunner challenged by a single underdog. The field is already too big for that to happen. What this means in practical terms -- the thing that most haven't grappled with -- is that the winner of the early primaries and caucuses could win not with a majority of the votes but with a smallish plurality of the votes. Even winning 30 percent might be enough, with so many others in the race splitting the remaining votes among them.

How this will play out has yet to be determined. But my guess is that it could mirror the 2016 Republican primary season in a fundamental way. One frontrunner may emerge while the others fight for votes and dilute the anti-frontrunner total. This is how Donald Trump won the GOP nomination, after all.

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Will American voters "feel the Bern" in 2020? We're soon going to find out the answer to that question, since Senator Bernie Sanders just announced he'll be making a second run for the Democratic presidential nomination. To mix a few pyrotechnical metaphors, Bernie certainly caught fire once, but the question is whether lightning will strike twice for him again.

Before we get to assessing Bernie's chances for success, though, we've got to examine how his announcement helps define the Democratic field, so far. Bernie becomes the tenth serious entry in the Democratic race, with a number of possible candidates still waiting on the sidelines. I should also mention before I begin that Senator Amy Klobuchar also announced her candidacy since the last time I reviewed the Democratic field. So how do they all stack up so far? For the time being, I'm going to separate the candidates into three tiers, based solely on name recognition (which is about all we've got to go on so far).

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First of all, happy Presidents' Day to everyone!

Well, of course, I should say "everyone in states such as Hawai'i, Massachusetts, and Texas" and all the others who officially apostrophize the plural. To those living in California, Alaska, and George's own namesake state of Washington, we would have to wish a happy President's Day to you. To occupants of Michigan and New Jersey, we bid you all a happy Presidents Day. And we'd have to individually wish all the other variations, but instead we'll just go with our favorite and wish everyone in Arkansas a happy "George Washington's Birthday and Daisy Gatson Bates Day!" We wrote at length upon this chaos a few years back, while also pointing out that George Washington wasn't actually born on George Washington's Birthday (just for fun).

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Emergency! Ahh! Everybody run!

Sigh. Well, here we are. Not only has Donald Trump become the first president to order the military to do essentially nothing just to make a political point (see: midterms 2018, border deployment), he has now become the first president to declare a national emergency because he made a political promise he just couldn't keep. He couldn't keep it because -- counter to his own self-portrayal as a dealmaking genius -- Donald Trump is such a terrible dealmaker that he couldn't even get a Republican Congress to give him what he wanted, for two whole years. And if that isn't a national emergency, then what is?

Let's just take a moment to quickly review how we got here. Donald Trump began his presidential campaign warning about the flood of evil brown people who were coming to rape and murder us all in our own beds. He boiled this down into one call-and-response phrase to use at his rallies:

"Build the wall!"

"Who is going to pay for it?"

"MEXICO!"

Once sworn into office, he immediately signed an executive order calling for his wall to be built. This was meaningless, of course, and the wall didn't get built. Trump also, in his first call to Mexico's leader, tried to strongarm him into giving him a bunch of money so he could claim he made good on his campaign promise to make Mexico pay for his wall. The Mexican president essentially laughed at Trump's suggestion. This was about when all talk of having Mexico foot the bill ended, for Trump, who conveniently threw that notion down the memory hole.

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Freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has unveiled her first legislative effort, the "Green New Deal" resolution. The rollout was a little rocky, with some rookie mistakes made. But putting all that aside, I thought it'd be worthwhile to take a look at the actual text of the resolution itself. It's already being demonized by Republicans in a way not seen since the "death panels" demonization of Obamacare, so it's important to see what is actually in it, rather than the caricature of it that its opponents are already creating.

The actual text of the resolution begins by laying out the problems in some detail. It explains why climate change should be a governmental priority, and offers up the solution that we need to act as decisively as we acted during World War II and the Great Depression. Here's just one representative excerpt to sum the introduction up:

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Do we need new labels to adequately describe the Democratic Party's ever-widening 2020 presidential field -- and, beyond, to more accurately describe the factions currently at play within the party at large? Because when most everyone agrees on the goals but differs mainly on the tactics that should be used to get there (or how fast we should try to get there), this doesn't really fit the old "leftist-versus-centrist" political scale at all anymore.

It's an interesting question to ask, but I hadn't given it much thought until now. I was recently directed by a reader to an interesting New York Times article written by Jamelle Bouie, which made the case for looking at the party through a new political lens. He makes the point that calling some Democrats "liberal" versus those who are "moderate" or "centrist" doesn't really capture the nuances of their very real differences about what direction the country should go in next. Or, to be even more accurate, the differences in how we should go about moving towards goals that most Democrats actually agree upon.

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Today I experienced one of those rare times when I had in mind what I wanted to write, and then I read somebody else's article and it made pretty much all the points I was going to make (with some of them made better than I could have). This kind of takes the wind out of one's sails, it should be noted. So what I'm left with is mere commentary around the edges of the issue.

The article I'm referring to was written by Bob Cesca and it appeared in Salon. It was titled "Scandal Double Standard: Democrats Pay The Price For Every Misdeed While The GOP Skates." I encourage everyone to read it in full, because it's worth your time. It covers more than the one "scandal" I was thinking about writing about today, but it does such a good job there that it's worth a long excerpt:

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