Have yourself a super Super Tuesday. A slightly different format to the Morning Jolt today, as we sort through the four (three?) remaining contenders for the Democratic nomination. One week from tonight, almost half the states will have held their primaries.
The Choice Before the Democrats Today
I won’t be voting in Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary, even though Virginia doesn’t register voters by party and allows those registered to vote to cast ballots in whichever primary they prefer. I hate it when Democrats try to make mischief in GOP primaries and don’t think we should encourage this practice. I’d prefer to see “closed primaries” in every state. The Democratic nominee should be selected by registered Democrats, and the Republican nominee should be selected by registered Republicans. If you want a say in which candidate a party is going to nominate, you should be willing to spend the five minutes required to fill out the paperwork to join the party.
As I see it, the Democratic primary has one just-barely-bearable option and three bad-to-catastrophic options. Your mileage may vary.
If Joe Biden became the next president, and he was working with a Republican House and Senate, you could imagine him becoming something like second-term Bill Clinton without the sex scandals. Biden’s not that much of an ideologue; he’s in politics to be a back-slapping dealmaker. He offers casual blasphemy to his fellow Democrats such as, “I really like Dick Cheney for real. I get on with him, I think he’s a decent man,” and calling Mike Pence “a decent guy.” During the Obama years, congressional Republicans preferred negotiating with him because he didn’t waste time lecturing them. Of course, a President Biden would be picking Supreme Court justices and federal judges that conservatives don’t want.
But because the Democrats control the House and would probably keep control if Biden wins in November, a President Biden with a Democratic House and a tightly divided Senate would probably result in a hodge-podge of deals with contradictory compromise provisions. Biden wasn’t put on this earth to hold the line against his party’s left wing, he was put here to give it half a loaf and promise they’ll get the other half next time. Sooner or later, he would feel the need to throw a bone to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her allies. Still, from the perspective of conservatives, Biden is probably the least-damaging option in the Democratic field.
Biden’s only real competition for that title was Amy Klobuchar. It says a great deal about the modern Democratic Party that Klobuchar stands out because she’s willing to say pro-life Democrats still have a place in the party. Like Biden, Senate Republicans said that she’s so nice, easy to work with, and reasonable, that they doubt she can win the nomination.
But she and Pete Buttigieg are both out of the race and endorsing Biden.
The best thing you can say about Mike Bloomberg is that he not only accepts American capitalism, he’s sometimes willing to stand up and defend it. In 1997, before he started running for office, the business media mogul wrote his autobiography, Bloomberg on Bloomberg.
The book is full of sections that hopefully reflect the former mayor’s true beliefs but are verboten in a Democratic presidential primary:
America really is the land of opportunity and home to more start-up enterprises than any other country. In this country, banks, venture capitalists, and stock exchanges are all accustomed to funding new ideas. The United States has a culture that prizes innovation, its social hierarchy is primarily built around merit, and it rewards a risk taker. Low barriers that encourage trade, publicly funded research that spurs innovation, and favorable tax laws that encourage entrepreneurship have been critical to our country’s growth… The simple fact is, the public sector traditionally has not innovated very well. There are powerful disincentives working against government innovation, because innovation involves risk, and risk involves the potential for failure. And if there’s one thing that scares politicians — not to mention their political advisors, — it’s failure.
But the prospect of President Bloomberg brings a lot of downsides. It’s bad enough that he fundamentally opposes the Second Amendment, but it’s even worse that he feels it can be ignored without amending the Constitution. He’s the nanny state on steroids; he genuinely believes he was put on this earth to save you from your bad habits and the bad decisions you make:
“Some people say, well, taxes are regressive. But in this case, yes, they are. That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money. And so, higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves. So, I listen to people saying ‘oh we don’t want to tax the poor.’ Well, we want the poor to live longer so that they can get an education and enjoy life. And that’s why you do want to do exactly what a lot of people say you don’t want to do. The question is do you want to pander to those people? Or do you want to get them to live longer? There’s just no question. If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks, for example, they will drink less and there’s just no question that full sugar drinks are one of the major contributors to obesity and obesity is one of the major contributors to heart disease and cancer and a variety of other things.”
Mike Bloomberg is explicit about the idea that you cannot be trusted to know what’s good for you and to make good decisions for yourself, and that government must step in and use the full force of law — the tax code, stop-and-frisk, “broken windows” policing of the most minor infractions — to stop you from making bad decisions. Many of us are willing to accept bad outcomes for some people as a consequence of living in a country of personal liberty, where the government isn’t meddling in every choice you make. Bloomberg wants the opposite.
And this is where Bloomberg’s overall intellect and competence work against him. In his first year in office, President Trump fumed on Fox News about his difficulties getting legislation passed through Congress. “It’s just a very, very bureaucratic system. I think the rules in Congress and, in particular, the rules in the Senate, are unbelievably archaic and slow-moving.” Trump’s idea of fighting the good fight is to send a lot of angry tweets.
Bloomberg has the same instinct that he should say “jump,” and the rest of the government should respond “how high?” The real danger is that Bloomberg would apply that intellect and competence to furthering an imperial presidency.
It’s difficult to see a path to the White House for Elizabeth Warren, but she’s still in the race. Everyone who lived through the events that set off the Great Recession can understand why a lawmaker would be deeply distrustful of big banks, the financial industry, and Wall Street, and believe that federal regulators and overseers have become sleepy night watchmen. There’s a reason Lou Dobbs used to be one of her biggest fans.
The problem with Warren — and a great many Democrats — is that they have limitless suspicion of the private sector but a bewildering faith in the abilities and good judgment of the federal government. Warren touts herself as the candidate with all the plans. Just because a president tells a federal agency to do something, it doesn’t mean that they will do it — quickly, efficiently, correctly, or at all. (I wrote the book on this.) Even when federal government employees want to enact the plan, the government is full of human beings, and human beings make mistakes. The EPA accidentally released 3 million gallons of tainted wastewater, turning rivers yellow in three states; the Office of Personnel Management put all of the potential blackmail material on every government employee who handles classified information in one place for Chinese hackers to steal; and the Transportation Security Administration failed to find hidden fake explosives in 67 out of 70 tests. If you put the federal government in charge of banning porn, you’d probably end up getting Stormy Daniels videos sent to your phone by FEMA. The federal government would not magically become super competent and wise under a Warren administration.
Oh, and even by the standards of politicians, Warren lies a lot.
That leaves the front-runner, Bernie Sanders. If elected, Sanders may be the oddest man to reach the presidency since . . . well, since Donald Trump, but they would probably rank number one and two in most improbable presidents. Trump and Sanders may have some uncomfortable similarities. Both men have been saying outrageous, provocative, and controversial things throughout their public careers. Both have benefited from improbable twists of luck to rise to the top of the political world. (If the NRA hadn’t decided to punish a turncoat Republican, Sanders might have never been elected to Congress.) While Trump had never been elected to anything before the presidency and Sanders has been in elected office pretty much continuously since 1981, they had roughly the same amount of influence on America’s laws until 2016 or so. Both men have a weird admiration for anti-American foreign dictators, just different ones. Neither man sees his respective political party as anything more than a means to an end. Neither man is instinctively gracious to those who disagree, and both men relish furiously denouncing their opponents as corrupt. Both see their mission in life to tear down an “establishment,” obliterate a status quo, and to turn American life upside down. Both men attract angry supporters; Sanders has a following that declares a desire to murder their opponents and embrace hate and then insists they were joking. After the attempted mass shooting at the congressional baseball game, it’s hard to shrug off people who are eager to play KGB or NKVD in a new Soviet America.
Many Republicans believe Sanders will be the easiest to beat in a general election, and they may be right. But I think Ramesh is correct when he warns that even Sanders winning the nomination would shift the Overton Window of American politics dramatically to the left:
If Mr. Sanders wins, it will mark a huge change in American politics. Self-described socialists have been elected in other developed countries, but never in this one. Here, “socialism” has been an accusation, not a boast. Politicians on the left wing of the Democratic Party have considered the label, and the associations that come with it, deadly to their electoral chances. Republicans hope it still is. If Mr. Sanders beats them, the taboo will be broken.
It’s not just a matter of the label. The limits of what’s politically possible will shift left as the political world adjusts to the new reality. Politicians, strategists, journalists, activists and voters who thought that certain ideas were too far left to make it in America would revise their sense of the country, and of what counts as extreme or as realistic within it. The ground on which future races for president, governor and Congress are contested would move left.
That doesn’t mean the U.S. would be Venezuela, or even Denmark, by the start of 2022. But it is reasonable to expect that government policy 10 or 20 years from now would be considerably more socialistic than it would be if Mr. Trump were re-elected — or if Mr. Biden were elected.
If you live in a Super Tuesday state and will be voting in the Democratic primary, choose wisely, America. The year 2016 should have taught us all that the candidates who supposedly can never win . . . actually can win.