Making the click-through worthwhile: An uprising in Venezuela, a reminder that fear has been a powerful force in shaping American politics and culture well before 9/11, Joe Biden gets a big polling boost against his Democratic rivals, and the NRA Board of Directors meets for nine hours but doesn’t want to tell anyone what was discussed.
The Push to Topple Maduro Appears to Have Begun
Heads up, the situation Venezuela could get even more volatile quickly: “Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó took to the streets with activist Leopoldo Lopez and a small contingent of heavily armed troops early Tuesday in a bold and risky call for the military to rise up and oust socialist leader Nicolas Maduro.”
Sometimes when the people rise up against an autocratic and brutal regime, you get the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania; sometimes you get Tiananmen Square. Let’s pray for the former. Gordon Chang predicts, “Maduro will fall today if soldiers don’t follow orders.”
Good luck, Venezuelans. You deserve better than the awful Socialist-kleptoracy you’ve had forced upon you; if this uprising works out, better days are ahead.
Fear Showed Up at Our Doorstep a Long Time Ago
David Brooks, writing this morning in the New York Times:
I wonder if we’ve fully grasped how fear pervades our society and sets the emotional tone for our politics. When historians define this era they may well see it above all else as a time defined by fear. The era began on Sept. 11, 2001, a moment when a nation that had once seemed invulnerable suddenly felt tremendously unsafe. In the years since, the shootings have been a series of bloody strikes out of the blue.
Really? Two years before 9/11 was the Columbine shootings. The same year, EgyptAir flight 990 out of New York City crashed into the Atlantic Ocean with a calm co-pilot at the controls. John F. Kennedy and his wife died in a plane crash the same year; the following year the USS Cole was bombed.
I really dislike the interpretation of history that views the 1990s as the happy times interrupted by the 9/11 attacks on George W. Bush’s watch.
As I discuss in my forthcoming book — ominous foreshadowing, watch this space — there was a real darkness to the zeitgeist of the 1990s. A lot of Clinton-aligned political and cultural voices like to paint that decade as a big national party, a rollicking cavalcade of dot-com profits, harmless presidential sex scandals, and wildly embarrassing dance crazes.
Look a little closer and you see plenty of ill omens, and it feels utterly bizarre to see a period you lived through get so edited and airbrushed in modern reinterpretations.
In the early 1990s, we found out that some guy in Milwaukee had been eating people for more than a decade. In 1997, Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide with the arrival of the Hale-Bopp Comet. Two years earlier, Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin in the Tokyo subway system, killing 13 and injuring more than 1,000 people. Two years before that, David Koresh brought his Branch Davidian followers to a fiery end after a standoff with federal law enforcement.
I know people think that the news environment is busy today, but think of the summer of 1996:
On June 15, a massive bomb from the Irish Republican Army explodes in Manchester and injures 200 people. On June 25, 19 U.S. Air Force personnel were killed in Khobar Towers and hundreds injured; on July 17, TWA Flight 800 crashed off Long Island, with a great deal of speculation about terrorism (the official investigation concluded an explosion of fuel vapors); on July 27, Centennial Park at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta was bombed. Around this time, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was investigating a series of suspicious church fires across the South.
The sex scandals weren’t always the stuff of political farce; a murder-minded “Long Island Lolita” become a national anti-hero with three made-for-TV movies about her; the biggest stars in Hollywood feared the revelation of their names in the black book of an infamous madam; and Los Angeles crowds cheered a wife-beating double-murderer on the run. With the first World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing, mass-casualty terrorism arrived on American soil in the 1990s. Los Angeles burned from riots in April 1992. Whether you wanted to know about it or not, you were inundated with coverage of John Wayne Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, Marv Albert, and the allegations against Michael Jackson.
Something dark and twisted was working its way through the American psyche in those years. It’s not surprising that The X-Files was a hit; it tapped into this mood that while things may have seemed prosperous and peaceful, something much more dangerous and sinister was lurking underneath.
Fear’s been here a long time.
What if the Democratic Field Narrows Early?
Because the Democratic field is going to be huge — 20 candidates — one of the big questions is, how do primary voters react when instead of the usual five-to-ten candidates, they’re faced with so many? Right now, they’re looking at the political equivalent of the menu from the Cheesecake Factory.
One possibility is that just as you can be overwhelmed with choices in the cereal aisle of the supermarket and default to your standard old favorite of Cheerios, maybe the Democratic electorate never really engages with the lesser-known candidates. They stick to what they know they like, and most of the field never really gets a chance.
And you get a result something like the latest CNN poll:
A new CNN poll conducted by SSRS after Biden’s announcement on Thursday shows 39% of voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents saying he is their top choice for the nomination, up from 28% who said the same in March.
That puts Biden more than 20 points ahead of his nearest competitor, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — who holds 15% support in the poll — and roughly 30 points ahead of the next strongest candidate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (8%).
Warren ranks about evenly with South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (7%), former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke (6%) and Sen. Kamala Harris of California (5%), who round out the list of those earning 5% or more in the poll.
Separately, the Morning Consult poll has Biden comfortably ahead at 36 percent, Sanders at 22 percent, Warren at 9 percent, Buttigieg at 8 percent, Harris at 7 percent, and O’Rourke at 5 percent.
Now, here are all the caveats: The first day of the campaign is often the best day of the campaign for many candidates. Biden is going to get hit by the rest of the field a lot in the coming months. He’ll make gaffes. We haven’t had the debates yet.
But this poll should make all of the non-Biden candidates nervous. For Bernie Sanders, being at 15 percent in CNN’s survey when some previous polls had him really close to Biden should make him sweat. (Maybe his declaration that felons should be able to vote from jail went viral and played worse than his supporters think?) Warren’s got a little bit of a better number than the last few polls, and Buttigieg continues to be the early upstart star — keeping in mind that he’s at 7 percent.
Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris also have to be a little worried, as they have traits that ought to put them in the top tier on paper — strong fundraising networks, lots of good press — and they’re barely above the teeming rest of the field.
One other point — as much as Biden is going to get deserved grief for his age and not-always-flattering long record in elected office, he’s been in his situation before — two unsuccessful presidential campaigns and two successful vice-presidential campaigns. He knows what to expect. Sanders has his 2016 experience. But the rest of the field is comparably a bunch of rookies. Warren has one difficult race under her belt, beating Scott Brown. Harris has never faced a competitive general election in her life, O’Rourke’s never won a statewide race and Buttigieg has never run for anything bigger than mayor.
The NRA Board of Directors Meets Behind Closed Doors And . . . Doesn’t Say Much
Yesterday, after a nine-hour mostly closed-door meeting, the NRA Board of Directors did . . . something. They are apparently not willing to tell anyone what happened in the closed door meeting.
According to American Rifleman, the official publication of the NRA:
Executive Vice President/CEO Wayne LaPierre was re-elected unanimously and unopposed by the NRA Board of Directors at their meeting in Indianapolis, Ind., April 29, 2019. Carolyn Meadows was elected NRA President; Charles L. Cotton, First Vice President; and Willes Lee, Second Vice President. All NRA officers were elected unanimously and unopposed.
That is . . . at least somewhat surprising, considering how some board members seemed deeply concerned about the accusations of financial improprieties this weekend, before Monday’s meeting.
NRA Board member Allen West issued a brief statement on Facebook: “I wish we could have delivered on what our NRA members asked of us in the resolution they referred to the Board of Directors. The NRA and our Second Amendment is greater than any one person. It’s about the spirit of those Patriots who took the field on April 19, 1775 at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge.” This weekend a resolution calling upon LaPierre to resign was referred to the Board of Directors.
Alluding to the coming investigation by the New York state attorney general, West wrote, “I fight for that legacy and will never allow my fellow law-biding legal gun owners to be disarmed and rendered subjects by Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, or Letitia James. I will fight anyone whose intent is to destroy the NRA and undermine our Second Amendment.”
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, a question of whether our anti-Semitism problem, our gun problem, and our mental-health problem are all just variations of a “young men who find normal life unfulfilling or too difficult and choose to risk or end their lives in violent rampage” problem.