Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,085]

The Three Barriers to Biden’s Re-Election

Price increases, a broader economic frustration built over decades, and an inability to articulate what’s being done about any of it

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

 

Democratic anxiety has ratcheted up to the point of neurosis. The presidential election today is within the margin of error, with a difference of a point or two. By way of comparison, at this moment in 2000 George W. Bush was up by seven points, and by August of that year, by 16 points. At no point was Al Gore publicly admonished to step aside, nor was any conspiracy to somehow throw him out at the convention openly discussed. Gore came out, kissed his wife, gave a speech about the people vs. the powerful, and the race was tied in a blink.

Such patience is not in evidence today. The default mode for Democrats is panic, and for Republicans, bravado. It pervades the way politics feels, regardless of results, and tilts the turf on which the election is waged in a conservative direction. It hobbles clear thinking about the dynamics of elections, and in some ways perpetuates the outcome; after all, people love a bandwagon.

What Democrats need to know right now is why they’re losing in the presidential race, so they can be confident in adopting the right strategies to change course. Some pundits are attempting to reason out theories, sometimes seven theories at a time. I have a few of my own, which separately point to the fact that policy matters, though you can’t expect people to intuit that policy themselves.

More from David Dayen

The first thing to say here is just that inflation is bad, and this first sustained round in 40 years has been poison for heads of state, regardless of their political ideology. Biden’s situation is positively sunny compared to Justin Trudeau or Rishi Sunak; indeed, just about every incumbent in a highly industrialized nation who presided over inflation is in rather terrible shape, from Japan to France to South Korea to Germany.

That should put the cottage industry of “what Biden is doing wrong” takes in their proper context; he’s in better shape than his colleagues, in part because his economy is faring better than other nations. But price hikes have a strong downward pull, and contra Ezra Klein, they are borne by heads of state, not governors or senators.

It’s true that inflation in the U.S. has been generally stable for a year, at a level barely above the norm, and wages have increased more rapidly in the aggregate, bringing Americans more purchasing power. But I think economist J.W. Mason is right to say that the time period by which we chart inflation statistics, over one or 12 months, is not necessarily the most obviously correct one. “The change in prices over the past several years is just as much an economic fact as the change over the past year,” Mason posted on Twitter. (That change in prices appears to be worse in areas less favorable to Democrats.) People have not reconfigured their mental beliefs of what things should cost, and assuming their view of this is simply wrong is the equivalent of the satirical Bertolt Brecht decree that the government should “dissolve the people and elect another.”

During the 2020 election, candidate Biden made a promise to not be a totalizing force in people’s lives as president.

I think there’s another driver here. Cory Doctorow has blessed us with the term “enshittification,” though for purposes of historical accuracy I must note that the blogger Yves Smith came up with the concept more than a decade ago, under the sobriquet “crapification.” For at least this long, consumers have been abused, as their role as the primary group companies must please has been supplanted by Wall Street. As surplus value pools in the hands of investors and executives, product quality suffers and customer service drifts into the territory of nightmares. Yet market power locks people into enduring these burdens. This has been happening for a while, but inflation punctuated it and made it more visible. When you’re paying more for the same stuff, you might ruminate on how the stuff was better back when you were paying less.

Biden is therefore being punished for a buildup of degradations that corporate America has inflicted upon its customers for decades. The demoralizing nature of crapification combines with the demoralizing nature of price rises, and people cast about for someone to blame.

That they have put it on the president is natural, even though the policy side of this administration, more than any other in recent memory, is actually working to punish companies for these practices. Nobody in decades has attempted to take on private equity bust-outs, junk fees, and the lock-in effects of corporate concentration like the high-profile officials in the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Antitrust Division of the Justice Department.

Yet Biden gets almost no credit for these or other achievements, and this is what really frustrates partisans, who cannot believe the polling they’re seeing, where Americans think the economy is in recession and unemployment is at a 50-year high rather than a 50-year low. (In this case, we should probably choose not to believe the polling that found this result, given that it was conducted by the perfectly self-interested Mark Penn.)

What I think is not understood enough is that the Biden presidency was in many ways predicated on not taking credit for achievements.

DURING THE 2020 ELECTION, CANDIDATE BIDEN made a promise to not be a totalizing force in people’s lives as president. He would not generate drama or instigate day-to-day hysteria; he would end rage-tweeting and fight-picking and endless boasting. He would be a different kind of president, concerned with quiet progress over self-aggrandizement. He would bring things back to normal.

There was a comfort in this, and because we’re dealing with Democrats, anxiety about that comfort, fueling worries that a mass of resistance leaders “going back to brunch” would dissipate the energy around changes that needed to be made. By and large, the administration has gotten done what it wanted to do anyway, without a rank-and-file army pushing from below. But this determination to disconnect the presidency from Americans, after four years of a presidency delivered directly to the national bloodstream, has not worked out well in building a record.

Over the Trump years, Americans became accustomed to substituting noise for action. If Donald Trump was yelling about something or other, at least it meant there was a debate going in Washington. There was a sense of motion about the Trump presidency that was at odds with the generally torpid output.

In the Biden administration, this dynamic is flipped. His legislative record was decent for the first two years, and his administrative record decent throughout; but because politics has now become more of a rap battle than the gradual establishment of foundations for progress, nobody gets the sense that anything is happening.

Some of this is the failings of the storyteller and his age. Biden’s not a great messenger. But the bigger problem is he hasn’t wanted to carry any message. Matt Stoller’s readout of how Biden’s press secretaries, whose job is to explain the White House agenda, consistently demur at saying anything about what that agenda is, is indicative of a political decision to stay out of people’s feeds and recede into the background. There are theories about how speaking softly lowers the temperature for legislative dealmaking, but it’s the worst way to maintain standing among voters, especially coming off a presidential term where talk stood in for action.

The fact that Biden took on advisers from the Sanders and Warren wing of the party, far from being a concession to left-wing ascendancy, was a concession to the reality that Biden had practically no policy apparatus as a candidate. He had a choice to reimpose the Clinton/Obama retreads that put the country on the path to electing Donald Trump, or the only other idea factory in the party. This worked out for the business of policy, but the pillars of this strategy—industrial policy, trustbusting, strengthening labor, and generally providing the counterweights to crapification—were so novel that they required a politics that educates the public on their rationale. That stands in direct contrast to the hands-off approach signaled by Biden before his inauguration.

Former White House adviser Tim Wu’s frank discussion of both the history and current practice of presidents in antitrust policy lends some support to this view. On the policy side, Biden’s team is attempting to reconnect antitrust with politics; on the political side, there remains “a significant distance from involvement in or even mentioning individual cases.” (This is starting to change, as Karine Jean-Pierre did decide to comment on the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Ticketmaster.)

Part of this is overcautiousness from White House lawyers concerned with being seen as influencing legal actions. But part of it is a conscious choice. It’s a bad choice, because the public was taught through nonstop coverage of Trump and a Great Man depiction of history going back centuries that the president is the center of the political story. If you decide to move out of that spotlight, you must not be doing anything worth a damn.

Though I haven’t mentioned Gaza up to now, I should say that this disinterest in vocalizing policy is playing a huge role here. The feebleness of having Benjamin Netanyahu viciously ignore every back-channel entreaty to restraint is palpable, and it sums up people’s attitude about the president.

The election shines a spotlight even on the reluctant, and maybe this will bounce in Democrats’ direction. Consumer resistance to price levels is spurring some discounting, border crossings are falling precipitously, crime rates have come down, clean-energy investment is soaring, and entire industries are being reshored. Those realities will be aired in public, though whether the voters who matter most will see or feel them is still an open question.

But at least some of the discontent and belief in government futility is locked in, not just because inflation is poisonous to political fortunes but because Biden wanted to keep his achievements locked away. That obviously has to change.

Running a populist campaign has been the Democratic antidote to voter apathy or anger for the entirety of their run in winning the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. Bill Clinton said that Americans who worked hard and played by the rules should get a fair shot. Gore pitted the people vs. the powerful. Barack Obama, who had populism surgically removed from his person at birth, reacted to an economy in a far worse state than today by running ruthlessly in his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, who was depicted as the private equity ghoul who literally just fired you.

Donald Trump, who is seeking bribes from oil companies and wants to give corporations more tax breaks as a reward for their elevated profits, is if anything easier to target in this manner. Biden flirted with it in 2020 and even this year, using a “Scranton vs. Park Avenue” formulation. It may be boring to see this old-time religion from Democrats every four years, and in the past maybe tiresome in its hypocrisy. But for Biden, or at least for the significant faction of his administration trying to change the rules of the economy, it would have the added benefit of being correct.

[Vesper 30,085]

My Political Depression Problem—and Ours

Granular study of the ever-more-authoritarian right didn’t demoralize the author as much as reaction from the left.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

 

I don’t want to make this about me, because it really isn’t about me. I don’t want make it about them, because it really isn’t about them.

I’m talking about an anguish I felt this past week, a weight heaving down somewhere around my sternum, grinding away at my ability to proceed through daily life. Such feelings are not unfamiliar to me; just ask my pharmacist. But I’ve never had them before over politics.

So, yes, OK: Maybe this is a little bit about me.

I’ve spent half my life now, starting in 1997 when I was 27, trying to make sense of the right. It was a fortunate career choice. With each passing year, the right became more and more the star of the American political show. More and more, people began telling me, with aching earnestness, that what I did was profoundly valuable to them. I helped them understand their childhoods; I helped them fear the future less, because they saw what we had overcome before. They still feared the future, but they were grateful, because I inspired them to launch their own careers as activists or politicians to fight for it.

This has been a fortunate thing for my soul. Writing that last sentence, in fact, I misted up a little bit—which is a good thing, because for the last several days, I’ve felt so dead inside that I’ve hardly had any emotions at all.

What does my work on American conservatism come down to? One of my readers once put it best: “There’s always more, and it’s always worse. But it’s never new.”

The most important part of that formulation is the “always worse” part. Right now, that means three things. First, there is no going back to some more innocent conservatism of the past. Second, if Donald Trump wins the majority of electoral votes and accedes again to the White House, this will obviously be very bad. But third, if he does not win the majority of electoral votes—well, it might be worse. I’ve heard that the secret to politics is repetition. Can you stand for me to repeat it one more time? The question is not just how many votes Donald Trump gets, but how many are willing to take up arms for him if he loses.

More from Rick Perlstein

Always worse. In the book I’m working on now, I’ve developed a theory to explain why that is, and how it works. I call it the “authoritarian ratchet.” Its axioms are that the basic thing conservatism promises to its adherents, a return of society to a prelapsarian state, is impossible; but that this impossible thing, in the logic of conservatism, is also imperative to achieve, lest civilization collapse, and good people suffer a kind of living death.

To understand the “imperative” part, note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization.

“The demand is for the abolition of all distinctions … It attacks the integrity of the family; it attacks the eternal decrees of God Almighty; it denies and repudiates the obligations of motherhood.” (That was a delegate to the California constitutional convention of 1879, speaking on a motion to give women the vote.)

“Never in the history of the world has any measure [been] so insidiously designed … to enslave workers … The lash of the dictator will be felt … [It will] pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” (That was Republican congressmen in the debate over Social Security in 1935.)

“You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” (That was Ronald Reagan in 1961, talking about what would happen if Congress enacted Medicare.)

“We won’t have a country anymore.” (Donald Trump, 2015–present, usually about “open borders,” but more recently, about what will happen if he loses in November.)

When conservatives lose fights like these, and civilizations stand nonetheless, conservatives just move on to the next existential threat: people using the “wrong” bathrooms, lab-grown meat, or whatever else is invented by some clever ideological entrepreneur.

Which is strange. Imagine living, as your basic orientation toward the world, under the imperative/impossible dyad. No wonder conservatives, as a basic psychological proposition, tend to feel so angry and unhinged.

What is even stranger is when conservatives win. When this, that, or the other liberal horror they’ve been working decades to repeal is finally repealed (think, most recently, of the right to abortion). When after decades of struggle, they take command of a marquee institution like the Supreme Court. When they control the White House, House, and Senate, like they did between 2017 and 2019. And yet that never makes them less agitated. The promised return to a prelapsarian peace doesn’t feel any closer—because retuning to that fictional state is impossible.

Note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization.

Of course, a conservative could respond by moderating their expectations of what politics could achieve—but then other conservatives say they are no longer conservatives. They are “squishes,” “RINOs,” or “cucks.” No wonder there are fewer moderate Republicans to point to all the time.

A conservative could also respond by questioning the original premise. But if they do that, they are no longer “conservative” either.

Those who do affect this apostasy are often the most clear-eyed explicators of what happens next, as the imperative/impossible dyad continues to fail to deliver. Constituents demand, and conservative politicians offer, even more radical panaceas, the problem always being that the previous ones were not conservative enough. Ever-more-elaborate conspiracy theories as the only explanation for the disappointment. Ever-more-fierce hunts for quislings to purge. Ever-more-metastasizing scapegoating. Anger at the designated Others who must have made it happen—for conservatism itself can never be the problem. Conservatism, as I once wrote, never fails. It is only failed.

This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.

Just listen to any recent Donald Trump speech: The redemptive promises he makes are more insanely fantastical with each passing day. Imagine the disappointment their serial failures will bring in their wake, which can never redound on him. (Conservatism never fails …) They must instead be blamed on the Enemy.

Which is us.

That is why another Trump term—or the potential insurgency after a Trump defeat—may be traumatic beyond our poor powers to imagine it. People seem to think there’s some modern American exception to the ease with which human beings can turn to violence on a mass scale, and the pleasure they will take in it, once they receive sanction from on high to do so. It can happen here. It might.

But believe it or not, contemplating that is not what is making me so depressed.

LOOK AT THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF THIS ESSAY: its reference to “them.” I’m not talking about right-wingers.

There have always been right-wingers. They’ve always harbored the potential to do the most terrible things imaginable. After all my years dwelling intellectually among them, I’ve devised ways to retain equanimity while staring down that particular abyss, and become adept at taking in their harshest assaults. I’m talking about the kind of person who tracks down your email to let you know they hope someday to flay all the skin off your body (I got that one for calling the Vietnam POW/MIA flag “racist”); or the kind of Fox News host who spits out “that Perlstein,” as a picture of me with my nose photoshopped to be 15 percent more Jew-y flashes on the screen; or a top-drawer right-wing publicist, one of the people at the vanguard in driving Bill Clinton’s impeachment, trying to smear my career out of existence for writing a book critical of Ronald Reagan.

No, the injury grinding me down is built of much smaller differences. It comes from encounters with colleagues and comrades on the left. What we disagree on, as you might have guessed, is endorsing a Democratic president who shares responsibility for the massacre of tens of thousands of innocents, in a criminal war that another country’s quite fascist leader seems to be pursuing, not merely out of fanatical bloodlust and racism but in order to stay in power and perhaps to avoid prison.

It’s happening, no surprise, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where I’ve been drafted as an apologist for “Genocide Joe” for arguing why the alternative is so much worse.

People who read me here won’t be particularly surprised to learn that I agree with these interlocutors that the best word the English language gives us to describe what the IDF is doing to the population trapped within Gaza is, indeed, “genocide.” And while I think the version of the argument that holds that Joe Biden himself is committing genocide is a grievous violation of reason, I still believe that, considering the tools at his disposal to stop it, Biden’s moral culpability for the slaughter is only a few notches below that.

So, saying you should vote for him anyway is a hard argument to make. Maybe I should be gentler on myself that I’ve not managed to persuade the literally thousands of people on the left raining abuse down upon me for making it. All the same, my failure is gutting me worse than anything that has happened to me before in my career.

What it comes down to, I guess, is this. If I of all people can’t convince people on the left to fight right-wing authoritarians who consider them veritable Untermenschen, then what the hell have I been wasting half my life on this work for?

FORMERLY-KNOWN-AS-TWITTER IS NOT REAL LIFE, they say, and you can dismiss a lot of the nastiness, especially when it’s attached to a pseudonym, as the product of minds not mature enough to know better.

But it has also come from grown-ups with considerable cultural capital, including people I deeply admire. When I reposted a picture of an IDF soldier proudly sitting and reading in the library of Gaza City’s Aqsa University, in front of a set of shelves he and his unit had set on fire, a response shredded my insides more than anything I had ever fielded about my writing (including the guy who wanted to flay me alive). It came from someone who is a major intellectual influence on me. It amounted to: Rick Perlstein thinks you should vote for Biden, because under Trump, the books will burn faster.

Not bad, by Algonquin Round Table standards: That’s genuine wit. You’ll have a hard time finding the post, though, if you care to search, because by the time this essay is posted I plan to have closed down my formerly-known-as-Twitter account, at least until people can be counted on to have moved on. It’s hardly an original insight to point out that the incentives on social media are set up to award the hit-and-run over respectful mutual engagement. So I’ll take a break—not least because I am very guilty of that sin, too.

My worst offense was an over-the-top claim that we can expect second-term Trump to urge Israel to use nuclear weapons, that they just might, and that this would lead to World War III and global Armageddon—and, well, isn’t that worse than what is happening now?

The thing is, I don’t really believe it. Still, I convinced myself I did, doubling down, patronizing people by claiming they just didn’t know the literature, etc. My temptation to histrionic speculation was born of the logic of fka Twitter: to score points. It helped nothing. It opened me up to a mocking that was probably deserved.

I’ve certainly made arguments there that I stand behind, ones that don’t demand speculation about what Trump would do, but point to what he has done. Trump doesn’t care about causing mass death when those dying are red-blooded Americans. In my column on sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book on COVID, I cited a study demonstrating that if the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, 900,000 more people would be alive today. This is largely Trump’s fault, for refusing to do things Australia did like establish federal task forces, publicly subsidize necessary equipment, establish uniform lockdown policies and contact-tracing protocols, respect and empower the relevant public-health experts, etc. The reason he did not was his infantile magic thinking that if he pretended there was not a crisis, there would not be one, and he would not be blamed. Imagine how much less he’d care about corpses in a “shithole” like Gaza.

Another argument I stand by is a hoary cliché of the “lesser evil” sweepstakes: quoting Frederick Douglass’s famous advice to recently enfranchised Black voters that “the Republican Party is the ship, all else the sea.” I pointed out that, in 1872, white Republicans’ willingness to sell out multiracial democracy in the South was already in evidence, and the sharecropping system that forced Blacks into conditions almost as bad as slavery already in formation. So was Frederick Douglass pro-sharecropping? No, he was just saying that the leaky, rusting pile they were stuck with beat the hell out of drowning. It was a 19th-century version of imploring people once to hold their noses and support another oft-pathetic political party, our own benighted Democrats.

The authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it.

Be that as it may. For making arguments like these, I learned I was “a genocidal racist and it defines your politics, your character, and your scholarship.” And maybe I’ll keep pushing arguments like these, somewhere. But not chez Elon Musk.

I don’t trust my own infantile temptation to answer back snark for snark, to dream up cleverer cheap shots, to fantasize about spurring my own troops to a pile-on. So no more. De-escalation, or nothing.

Blame Joe Biden for this present mess, sure—this guy without the character to grasp how vulnerable any campaign would be for a second term that ends at age 86. This guy without the wisdom or foresight to conspicuously groom a successor. This guy who, in some unreachable recess of his brain, seems to have convinced himself he’s somehow saving another six million Jews from death by letting Benjamin Netanyahu indiscriminately massacre Palestinians.

Or, hell, blame Adolf Hitler, for making what was once the ideology of only a tiny minority of Jews—state-based Zionism—seem suddenly the only viable solution to the worst refugee crisis the world had ever seen.

Blame whoever you want, because either way, no one’s getting anywhere on fka Twitter.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot instead: calling the guys (the debaters seem to be all male, for what it’s worth) who’ve been slamming me. On the telephone, like in the olden days. Ask where they are coming from. Establish a common ground of understanding. Then, maybe, have the arguments.

Because what happens on fka Twitter, and I hope my interlocutors there don’t find this too patronizing, aren’t even actually arguments. They can be, certainly. But according to a koan issued by a long-forgotten social critic named Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the message. How a conduit for information structures that information determines how that information comes across. In Elon’s house, collecting endorphin hits from piling up points—follows, retweets, pile-ons, etc.—is just too easy. And in the world we live in, in 2024, all of us need some kind of narcotic just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s a symptom. A symptom of a time when oceans are rising and fires are burning and trust is evaporating and guns are proliferating, when AI is embraced headlong even as proof piles up that it just makes everything worse. A symptom of what happens when one broken society, the United States, smashes up against another broken society, Israel. A symptom of institutionalized stupidity, like Jews getting regularly called antisemites for not holding the same opinions as the most powerful people in society. People gulp the available pixel-pills to keep from feeling too much pain—which only makes us all more insane, and thus adds to the diseases causing the pain.

We need the drug. He’s got the drug. That makes this particular opium den, whatever the stakes of the arguments, just one more manifestation of an entire society in unceasing fight-or-flight mode, looking for an enemy to blame or a bunker to hide in. Our highbrow version of the thoroughgoing trashiness of MAGA culture. If it wasn’t, people agreeing on 95 percent of everything else wouldn’t be acting like such assholes to one another.

For me, it’s a symptom most of all of my helplessness, as the authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it whether we “win” in Washington or not, with the way one group of anti-authoritarians accuses another group of anti-authoritarians of being complicit “shitlibs,” and with that group accusing the first group of sole responsibility for every loss to the Republicans since the time when convention power brokers smoked backroom cigars. It was my New Year’s resolution two years ago to do whatever I could to keep an operational peace between “liberals” and the “left”; and how’s that working out for me?

As I like to point out in another of those arguments I kept futilely making on fka Twitter, the bad guys want to put us all in stretchers, not recognizing any distinction we’d care to make. It’s like an old joke from the 1960s. A cop bops a liberal on the head with a billy club at an anti-war protest, calling him a “Commie” as he slaps the bracelets on him.

“But officer, I’m an anti-Communist!”

“I don’t care what kind of Communist you are, you’re coming with me.”

No wonder I’ve been depressed.

LAST NOVEMBER, ON FRESH AIR, at the end of an interview with the outstanding and prolific writer Garrett Graff, who had written a new book on the possibility of life on other planets, Terry Gross asked him to reflect back on an interview they’d done two years earlier about a prescient article he’d published about the damage Trump might still do to democracy in his remaining weeks in the White House. “So I’m wondering what you’re thinking now about Trump … if he does manage, in spite of all the indictments, to get re-elected.”

I deeply appreciated Graff’s response. He said it better than I could.

“Let me give you an answer,” he began, “that, unexpectedly, is going to connect to UFOs.”

Gross laughed. I didn’t. I had some idea where he was going.

The scientists who work on SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—have this thing called the “Drake Equation.” It’s an equation that is supposed to predict the number of intelligent civilizations out there, and how many there are at any given time. The main variable scientists call “L,” which stands for the length of time an advanced civilization lasts. To me, the challenge is, L could turn out to be, based on where humanity is heading, a pretty short number. And when you look around our world right now … there’s no guarantee that human civilization is around for that much longer … So to me, when I look at Donald Trump’s possible return to power, what I’m thinking about right now is what it does to the L of American democracy and human civilization and how it could, and almost certainly would, accelerate the unwinding of modern American life.

Me, too. I can’t be the only one whose unconscious figures out ways to keep them in bed until noon, even on sunny spring days where everything else in life is full of safety, sweetness, rewarding work. Read Auden, he said it even better than anyone: We must love each other, or die.

But there I go again, being histrionic. I can’t help it. It’s simply how I understand the stakes.

 

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The Impartial Jurist

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

Pop singer Dua Lipa has condemned the military operations in Gaza, describing them as “Israeli genocide” in an Instagram post to her 88 million followers.

Reposting a graphic from the group Artists4Ceasefire, along with the hashtag #AllEyesOnRafah that has trended in the days following Israel’s bombing of the Palestinian city, she wrote: “Burning children alive can never be justified. The whole world is mobilising to stop the Israeli genocide. Please show your solidarity with Gaza.”

[cosmicway 1,333]

52 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Pop singer Dua Lipa has condemned the military operations in Gaza, describing them as “Israeli genocide” in an Instagram post to her 88 million followers.

Reposting a graphic from the group Artists4Ceasefire, along with the hashtag #AllEyesOnRafah that has trended in the days following Israel’s bombing of the Palestinian city, she wrote: “Burning children alive can never be justified. The whole world is mobilising to stop the Israeli genocide. Please show your solidarity with Gaza.”

We ought to show our solidarity with Gaza after Hamas is gone, especially if post-Hamas Israeli administration proves to be unjust.
No solidarity with Hamas-Iran-Putin.

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

The head of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation, it has been revealed. Yossi Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Palestinian territories.

Reuters

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The Weakness of a Violent Man

He pretends to be a strongman, but his desperation is always on display

https://www.americaamerica.news/p/the-weakness-of-a-violent-man

He attacks a judge’s daughter to stir up hate and conflict. He posts a video of the President of the United States, bound and gagged. He condemns millions of humans as poison, who, in their struggle to survive, have come to the United States to seek better lives. This is not a strong man, a man displaying his strength to lead; this is a malignant man who’s revealing his essential weakness and dangerously exacerbating a climate of violence.

Bereft of any vision of positive change, this is a man who is only capable of exploiting an aggrieved people’s worst instincts—who has figured out that he can get what he wants by stoking the fear, hatred and anger of others. He uses violence, not imagination. Conflict, not collaboration. Cruelty, never kindness. Retribution, not affirmation. These are the tools of a weak man inciting the mob to satisfy his hunger for carnage.

A man like this sells bibles wrapped in an American flag. Desperate for dollars and loyalty, he laughably claims the bible is his “favorite” book and that he has many of them. Empty and broken inside, he needs to compare himself to Jesus Christ on the holy weekend of Easter.

But this is a weak man, a narcissist in the extreme, who cannot tolerate his own failures or the painfully obvious reality that he will never get the total adoration that his bottomless pit of need seeks. This is a sad creature, utterly lacking self-consciousness. When he looks in a mirror, he never sees the truth.

We are living in complex, challenging times, in which our problems are increasingly global and often seem insurmountable. Climate change. Immigration driven by displacement. Murderous rulers set upon stealing their neighbors’ sovereignty, ending their commitment to democracy and exploiting their limited resources by undermining their allies’ commitment to support them.

In such times, we hope for leaders possessed of the necessary intellect and imagination, compassion and competence to engage the public in the arduous task of self-governance. At a time when the problems we face depend on genuinely strong leaders, capable of inspiring the public to pursue their better selves and work together, a weak man relies on scapegoating the most vulnerable among us and promising that he alone can fix our most intractable problems—and do it quick. The demagoguery is as old as the hills, only the details and the targets of hate change over time.

In less troubled times, a man like this would remain in the darkened fringes of society, limited in his ability to incite stochastic terrorism. In times like this, such a man can not only ascend to the nation’s highest office once, he has the potential to regain that office even after he’s been disgraced with two impeachments, engaged in a violent insurrection, lied more than a documented 30,000 times, and has been indicted four times and charged with 88 felony charges. Still today, his followers remain devoted to him, even after he was found guilty of raping and defaming E. Jean Carroll, as well as committing widespread tax and business fraud and facing fines of more than half a billion dollars. For Trump and his cult, rising political violence is assuredly a feature, not a bug.

Times like these make the weak man masquerading as the strong man look like a real answer for the aggrieved voters who are attracted to cruelty and brute force as a promised path to easy solutions. The increasingly poisonous hostility between parties only intensifies their dark desires.

I’ve quoted it before, but the prophetic insight and warning of George Washington bears repeating. In his farewell address from 1796, America’s first president worried about the dangers of factionalism and revenge-filled hostility between factions. “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” he wisely said. “And sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

I have also noted before the necessary insight of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on the topic of cruelty and kindness, but this too bears repeating. “When someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society,” he told newly minted college graduates in a commencement address. “They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their instinctual fears and so their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.”

The responsibility to defeat Donald Trump and the Trump Republicans could not be clearer. In another time, that may sound like a partisan urging. But this is about our commitment to sustaining America’s centuries-old democratic experiment.

Many of our fellow citizens look at Joe Biden and insist he lacks something they want. But his capacity for compassion and kindness, his commitment to democracy, and his record of competence and achievement should be more than enough for doubters to find a reason to support him.

The failure to achieve massive voter turnout can lead to a dark, fascistic future, led by a weak and desperate man who thinks he’s strong. That is a dangerous combination, which each of us has the power to help overcome.

 

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

22 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Many of our fellow citizens look at Joe Biden and insist he lacks something they want. But his capacity for compassion and kindness, his commitment to democracy, and his record of competence and achievement should be more than enough for doubters to find a reason to support him.

 

I wonder do Gazan's feel that capacity for compassion as he sells Israel the bombs which kills their children?

I think the best framing can be Joe simply being honest and saying:

"Look, Im the best the party can do right now, and I haven't been the worst president"

Which would be enough to get people out, and would be 100% true. He is, by far, the best the democrat party has to offer and has been a solid president. Until Gaza I honestly think his biggest(and only real) flub was letting his incompetent VP run the border issue, and that wasn't completely on her being chosen in the end.

 

[Vesper 30,085]

29 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

I wonder do Gazan's feel that capacity for compassion as he sells Israel the bombs which kills their children?

I think the best framing can be Joe simply being honest and saying:

"Look, Im the best the party can do right now, and I haven't been the worst president"

Which would be enough to get people out, and would be 100% true. He is, by far, the best the democrat party has to offer and has been a solid president. Until Gaza I honestly think his biggest(and only real) flub was letting his incompetent VP run the border issue, and that wasn't completely on her being chosen in the end.

 

yes, I agree he has cocked up Israel/Hamas nightmare

he needs to bring Netanyahu and the zio-loons to heel NOW

[cosmicway 1,333]

I don't understand all this hype.
In 1974 Turkey invaded and occupied Cyprus. They murdered many people and certainly all the soldier-prisoners, 2000 of them.
If Greece had the means to react -which it did n't- we would have bombed all the Turkish cities flat.
If some other enemy did the same to your country, your country would also bomb them flat and when I say bomb them flat I mean with 100% popular support.
So why not Israel ?
But I understand all the hype if, for the sake of a mental experimentation, I make myself into Putin's advocate.

[Vesper 30,085]

2024 ELECTIONS

Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden

One adviser to major Democratic donors keeps a running list of reasons Biden could lose.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/28/democrats-freakout-over-biden-00160047

A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.

“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”

Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.

The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country’s most liberal territories, including New Jersey and New York, to woo Hispanic and Black voters as he boasted, improbably, that he would win in those areas.

While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”

The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”

On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.

The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were expected to bring in more than $6 million for his political operation. But Healey said that wasn’t good enough.

“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” said Healey, a Democrat in her first term. “We’d like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”

Laughter rippled through the room. But Healey’s voice turned serious. With unusual urgency for Healey, the governor implored the room of high-dollar donors and local Democratic leaders to “think long and hard” about the stakes of the election.

There have been few moments in Biden’s term as president that haven’t been second-guessed, and his aides have made sport of sneering at grim predictions, compiling dossiers of headlines and clips in which the president was underestimated. Biden campaign aides and allies point to some positive polls, including in the battlegrounds, and Trump’s comparative lack of campaigning and infrastructure in the key states, including staff, organizing programs and advertising.

A Biden campaign adviser granted anonymity to speak freely stressed that the president’s team never made any indication that Trump’s hush-money trial would help — or hurt — him. Instead, the adviser contended that Trump will be forced to defend cutting back abortion rights, attacking democracy and advancing corporate interests as president.

“Trump’s photo-ops and PR stunts may get under the skin of some very serious D.C. people as compelling campaigning, but they will do nothing to win over the voters that will decide this election,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz told POLITICO. “The work we do every day on the ground and on the airwaves in our battleground states — to talk about how President Biden is fighting for the middle class against the corporate greed that’s keeping prices high, and highlight Donald Trump’s anti-American campaign for revenge and retribution and abortion bans — is the work that will again secure us the White House.”

Biden supporters who remain optimistic say they’d rather be him than Trump, before rallying around abortion and issues of reproductive rights, which Rep. Dan Kildee, a Michigan Democrat, called “a fundamental game-changer.”

“We have to run a campaign, where honestly, we drive home the message that Donald Trump takes us back to the 19th century. Biden takes us further into the 21st century,” Kildee said.

He did not remark on whether such a campaign is being run, or run to his satisfaction.

“A lot can happen between now and then,” acknowledged Rep. Ann Kuster, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who is retiring after the fall election. She, too, pointed to eroding abortion rights under the conservative-led Supreme Court remade by Trump. “I know a significant number of voters are going to be motivated by the Dobbs decision.”

But Democratic critics of the campaign’s approach — while agreeing that abortion should be a winning issue — said they’re challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.

“There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

In the swing state of Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky suggested Biden’s standing is so tenuous that down-ballot Democrats can’t rely in November “on the top of the ticket to pull us along.”

“In 2020, there was enough energy to get Donald Trump out and there were other things on the ballot that brought young people out in subsequent elections.”

She said, “That’s not the case this time. I worry that because we’ve had four years with a stable White House, particularly young voters don’t feel that sense of urgency and might not remember how disastrous 2017 was right after the Trump administration took over.”

Whatever the Biden campaign has been doing over the past two months — and it’s a lot of activity, including $25 million in swing-state ad spending, according to AdImpact — it has had only a limited effect. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average job-approval rating on March 7, the date of his State of the Union Address, was 38.1 percent. As of Friday, it’s 38.4 percent.

And his standing against Trump has also changed little. On April 22, the day Trump’s criminal trial began, the presumptive GOP nominee held a 0.3-point lead in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is up about a point since then, currently leading Biden by 1.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average.

Asked about polling, Munoz said: “The only metric that will define the success of this campaign is Election Day.”

Trump, meanwhile, has already started his incursion into safe blue states. His campaign’s psychological warfare in New York, California and New Jersey — where House districts will determine control of Congress’ lower chamber — is spiking Democrats’ already-elevated blood pressure.

“New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”

Biden’s weaker numbers bear that out. A Siena College poll released Wednesday showed Biden leading Trump in New York by only 9 points — 47 to 38 percent among registered voters. Four years ago, Biden won the state by 23 points. The president is under water with every demographic delineated in the poll — other than Black voters. Fifty-three percent of Latinos and 54 percent of whites reported having an unfavorable opinion of him. To that end, Biden released TV and radio ads in the Empire State on Thursday, ahead of Trump’s campaign rally in the Bronx.

Levine has been something of a Paul Revere in New York, sounding alarms two years ago when a Trump-aligned Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lee Zeldin, appeared to be gaining on Kathy Hochul, the moderate Democratic incumbent. Hochul narrowly held him off.

“I’m worried it’s going to be a 2022 situation, where everyone wakes up in the last seven weeks and has to scramble,” Levine said of his state, which hasn’t swung to the GOP since Ronald Reagan in 1980.

This cycle, Democrats also have to contend with the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which has deeply divided their ranks and contributed to a sense of chaos. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat known for his ardent defense of Israel, was similarly concerned for his party, though he pointed to the higher cost of groceries and goods that started during the pandemic and has yet to abate.

“The greatest political challenge confronting the president starts with an “i,” but it’s not Israel, it’s inflation,” Torres said. “The cost of living is a challenge that we have to figure out how to manage.”

He said Biden should focus on issues around affordability and continue to tout his success in capping insulin costs in areas with high rates of diabetes, like his Bronx district.

“The election is more competitive than it should be, given the wretchedness of who Donald Trump is,” he said. “In a properly functioning democracy, Donald Trump should have no viable path to the presidency. The fact of a competitive race is cause for concern.”

Trump has railed against blue-state officials, starting with the justice system in New York. In California, he dispatched his daughter-in-law, Lara, and one of his sons, Eric, to hold up the West Coast’s Democratic heavyweight as a cautionary tale.

“I’m sorry you have to live in communism,” Eric Trump said Wednesday at the Stampede, a country music venue in Temecula, an inland community between Los Angeles and San Diego. Trump casually dismissed California Democrat Gavin Newsom as the nation’s “worst governor.”

“Make no mistake,” Trump said, “there is a war happening in this country.”

The elder Trump is set to appear in early June at the San Francisco fundraiser hosted by tech investor David Sacks and his wife, Jacqueline, a clothing brand executive, along with venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.

Palihapitiya’s past political donations run the gamut, from Elizabeth Warren to a super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr. He also gave to the recall committee against Newsom in 2021 and briefly considered running for governor. Silicon Valley’s red pilling has brought even more unwanted national attention on issues of open-air drug use, homeless encampments and gangs of thieves who ransack retail stores across the Bay Area.

And as in New York, California Democrats are bracing for more incoming from Trump.

“San Francisco has changed with the taxpayers, the job creators, the tech CEOs who want to engage with the city and its politics,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the RNC committee member from California.

Dhillon was reflecting on her run-ins with Democrats in the city, where she spent years leading the local GOP before her law firm represented Trump in legal fights to remain on state ballots. Few Democrats are willing to confide in Dhillon about their fears, she conceded, but no one is sharing a sense of enthusiasm for Biden, either.

“The most diplomatic thing I hear from Democrats is, ‘Oh my God, are these the choices we have for president?’”

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

2024 ELECTIONS

Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden

One adviser to major Democratic donors keeps a running list of reasons Biden could lose.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/28/democrats-freakout-over-biden-00160047

A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.

“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”

Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.

The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country’s most liberal territories, including New Jersey and New York, to woo Hispanic and Black voters as he boasted, improbably, that he would win in those areas.

While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”

The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”

On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.

The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were expected to bring in more than $6 million for his political operation. But Healey said that wasn’t good enough.

“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” said Healey, a Democrat in her first term. “We’d like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”

Laughter rippled through the room. But Healey’s voice turned serious. With unusual urgency for Healey, the governor implored the room of high-dollar donors and local Democratic leaders to “think long and hard” about the stakes of the election.

There have been few moments in Biden’s term as president that haven’t been second-guessed, and his aides have made sport of sneering at grim predictions, compiling dossiers of headlines and clips in which the president was underestimated. Biden campaign aides and allies point to some positive polls, including in the battlegrounds, and Trump’s comparative lack of campaigning and infrastructure in the key states, including staff, organizing programs and advertising.

A Biden campaign adviser granted anonymity to speak freely stressed that the president’s team never made any indication that Trump’s hush-money trial would help — or hurt — him. Instead, the adviser contended that Trump will be forced to defend cutting back abortion rights, attacking democracy and advancing corporate interests as president.

“Trump’s photo-ops and PR stunts may get under the skin of some very serious D.C. people as compelling campaigning, but they will do nothing to win over the voters that will decide this election,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz told POLITICO. “The work we do every day on the ground and on the airwaves in our battleground states — to talk about how President Biden is fighting for the middle class against the corporate greed that’s keeping prices high, and highlight Donald Trump’s anti-American campaign for revenge and retribution and abortion bans — is the work that will again secure us the White House.”

Biden supporters who remain optimistic say they’d rather be him than Trump, before rallying around abortion and issues of reproductive rights, which Rep. Dan Kildee, a Michigan Democrat, called “a fundamental game-changer.”

“We have to run a campaign, where honestly, we drive home the message that Donald Trump takes us back to the 19th century. Biden takes us further into the 21st century,” Kildee said.

He did not remark on whether such a campaign is being run, or run to his satisfaction.

“A lot can happen between now and then,” acknowledged Rep. Ann Kuster, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who is retiring after the fall election. She, too, pointed to eroding abortion rights under the conservative-led Supreme Court remade by Trump. “I know a significant number of voters are going to be motivated by the Dobbs decision.”

But Democratic critics of the campaign’s approach — while agreeing that abortion should be a winning issue — said they’re challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.

“There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

In the swing state of Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky suggested Biden’s standing is so tenuous that down-ballot Democrats can’t rely in November “on the top of the ticket to pull us along.”

“In 2020, there was enough energy to get Donald Trump out and there were other things on the ballot that brought young people out in subsequent elections.”

She said, “That’s not the case this time. I worry that because we’ve had four years with a stable White House, particularly young voters don’t feel that sense of urgency and might not remember how disastrous 2017 was right after the Trump administration took over.”

Whatever the Biden campaign has been doing over the past two months — and it’s a lot of activity, including $25 million in swing-state ad spending, according to AdImpact — it has had only a limited effect. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average job-approval rating on March 7, the date of his State of the Union Address, was 38.1 percent. As of Friday, it’s 38.4 percent.

And his standing against Trump has also changed little. On April 22, the day Trump’s criminal trial began, the presumptive GOP nominee held a 0.3-point lead in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is up about a point since then, currently leading Biden by 1.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average.

Asked about polling, Munoz said: “The only metric that will define the success of this campaign is Election Day.”

Trump, meanwhile, has already started his incursion into safe blue states. His campaign’s psychological warfare in New York, California and New Jersey — where House districts will determine control of Congress’ lower chamber — is spiking Democrats’ already-elevated blood pressure.

“New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”

Biden’s weaker numbers bear that out. A Siena College poll released Wednesday showed Biden leading Trump in New York by only 9 points — 47 to 38 percent among registered voters. Four years ago, Biden won the state by 23 points. The president is under water with every demographic delineated in the poll — other than Black voters. Fifty-three percent of Latinos and 54 percent of whites reported having an unfavorable opinion of him. To that end, Biden released TV and radio ads in the Empire State on Thursday, ahead of Trump’s campaign rally in the Bronx.

Levine has been something of a Paul Revere in New York, sounding alarms two years ago when a Trump-aligned Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lee Zeldin, appeared to be gaining on Kathy Hochul, the moderate Democratic incumbent. Hochul narrowly held him off.

“I’m worried it’s going to be a 2022 situation, where everyone wakes up in the last seven weeks and has to scramble,” Levine said of his state, which hasn’t swung to the GOP since Ronald Reagan in 1980.

This cycle, Democrats also have to contend with the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which has deeply divided their ranks and contributed to a sense of chaos. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat known for his ardent defense of Israel, was similarly concerned for his party, though he pointed to the higher cost of groceries and goods that started during the pandemic and has yet to abate.

“The greatest political challenge confronting the president starts with an “i,” but it’s not Israel, it’s inflation,” Torres said. “The cost of living is a challenge that we have to figure out how to manage.”

He said Biden should focus on issues around affordability and continue to tout his success in capping insulin costs in areas with high rates of diabetes, like his Bronx district.

“The election is more competitive than it should be, given the wretchedness of who Donald Trump is,” he said. “In a properly functioning democracy, Donald Trump should have no viable path to the presidency. The fact of a competitive race is cause for concern.”

Trump has railed against blue-state officials, starting with the justice system in New York. In California, he dispatched his daughter-in-law, Lara, and one of his sons, Eric, to hold up the West Coast’s Democratic heavyweight as a cautionary tale.

“I’m sorry you have to live in communism,” Eric Trump said Wednesday at the Stampede, a country music venue in Temecula, an inland community between Los Angeles and San Diego. Trump casually dismissed California Democrat Gavin Newsom as the nation’s “worst governor.”

“Make no mistake,” Trump said, “there is a war happening in this country.”

The elder Trump is set to appear in early June at the San Francisco fundraiser hosted by tech investor David Sacks and his wife, Jacqueline, a clothing brand executive, along with venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.

Palihapitiya’s past political donations run the gamut, from Elizabeth Warren to a super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr. He also gave to the recall committee against Newsom in 2021 and briefly considered running for governor. Silicon Valley’s red pilling has brought even more unwanted national attention on issues of open-air drug use, homeless encampments and gangs of thieves who ransack retail stores across the Bay Area.

And as in New York, California Democrats are bracing for more incoming from Trump.

“San Francisco has changed with the taxpayers, the job creators, the tech CEOs who want to engage with the city and its politics,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the RNC committee member from California.

Dhillon was reflecting on her run-ins with Democrats in the city, where she spent years leading the local GOP before her law firm represented Trump in legal fights to remain on state ballots. Few Democrats are willing to confide in Dhillon about their fears, she conceded, but no one is sharing a sense of enthusiasm for Biden, either.

“The most diplomatic thing I hear from Democrats is, ‘Oh my God, are these the choices we have for president?’”

 

Dem pundits were expressing the same type of pessimism about Hillary's chances in 2016 - and they were proved right.
One obvious thing about Biden is lacks personal charisma.
He is not a "jeune premier" like Carter - Clinton - Obama.
That's no good. The electorates everywhere love a jeune premier.
He is like some uni professors of mine who were talking to their beards - I liked some junior lecturers much more because I could understand what they were saying.

I hear Robert Kennedy jr. now polls about 10%.
That's a new Ross Perot really !
With 10% split vote you can kill the chances of even the best of dem candidates.
But the Kennedies are Democrats.
What kind of story is this and why does n't he withdraw ?
 

Edited May 30, 2024 by cosmicway

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

4 hours ago, Vesper said:

yes, I agree he has cocked up Israel/Hamas nightmare

he needs to bring Netanyahu and the zio-loons to heel NOW

He'll never do that though. He's a true believer in the state of Israel.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,920]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Dem pundits were expressing the same type of pessimism about Hillary's chances in 2016 - and they were proved right.
One obvious thing about Biden is lacks personal charisma.
He is not a "jeune premier" like Carter - Clinton - Obama.
That's no good. The electorates everywhere love a jeune premier.
He is like some uni professors of mine who were talking to their beards - I liked some junior lecturers much more because I could understand what they were saying.

I hear Robert Kennedy jr. now polls about 10%.
That's a new Ross Perot really !
With 10% split vote you can kill the chances of even the best of dem candidates.
But the Kennedies are Democrats.
What kind of story is this and why does n't he withdraw ?
 

His family has denounced him. He'd be a bigger spoiler for Trump as they agree about things such as vaccine skepticism.

 

The Kennedy dynasty is dead politically. John John(JFK Jr) was the last who had the charisma and was bred for the high office. RFK Jr was on the political trail with his uncle 40+ years ago and came across as unlikable, out of touch, and weird. He hasn't really shaken that either as his voice has given out on him. I think their big curse is that their grandfather died before he could make them into what he made his kids. All of that generation, with the exception of the eldest daughter he lobotomized, were true stars.

Edited May 30, 2024 by Sir Mikel OBE

[robsblubot 3,595]

1 hour ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

He'll never do that though. He's a true believer in the state of Israel.

That's irrelevant tho.

He would lose support (financial too) if he did that. This is not a popular subject despite of what some news tried. Would also be a very easy target for the GOP and Trump.

Regarding the elections, I still think it's early to be watching polls; people are not even thinking about it, again, despite of what the media wants you to believe. Until then perhaps Biden will come to his sense, or lose them enough that people will get him out of the race.
Any non-Biden from the dem can win against Trump.

Edited May 30, 2024 by robsblubot