Dear Weekend Jolter,
Democrats haven’t abandoned someone this quickly since Donald Trump decided to run for president as a Republican.
Persistently paltry poll numbers combining with a string of defeats at the Supreme Court, economic pressures that refuse to bend to the will of tweets, and the associated gloomy prospects for Democrats in the midterms are cracking the coalition that helped get President Biden elected.
Politico warned back in November 2020 that this coalition was “broad but unstable,” comprising minorities, young people, women, independents, and some Republicans. He’s now underwater with all of them (save for minorities, who are evenly split on the job-approval question) in the latest Monmouth University poll. As progressives and others bolt the Wilmington zeppelin, the tableau conjures the spectacular evacuation scene from Spaceballs in which, as troopers scramble for safety, Mel Brooks’s President Skroob grabs his subordinate’s shirt and barks, “You gotta help me, I don’t know what to do, I can’t make decisions — I’m a president!”
Michael Brendan Dougherty sums up the mess:
The giant sucking sound you’re hearing is the panicked divestment of elected Democratic politicians, progressive activists, and the mainstream media from the Biden administration. The word is definitely out that the president’s stock is going to zero — and it’s time to get out while you still can.
Two weeks ago, in a foreboding sign for the White House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — with a finger to the political winds blowing on Instagram — announced that she wasn’t ready to support Biden in 2024. Then came California governor Gavin Newsom, asking “Where’s my party?” as Republicans and conservatives continue to score political wins. Newsom’s question sparked 2024 speculation for him, and then he stoked the flames even higher by buying ad time in Florida, demonstrating that he could identify and take on the real Republican threat, who is sitting behind a desk in Tallahassee: DeSantis.
That Newsom ad, going after Florida’s governor on his state’s airwaves, was a particular display of chutzpah. Perhaps it’s a play to reverse the traffic pattern of California residents leaving for Florida. Or, as Jim Geraghty notes, it could be a “not-so-subtle hint to Democrats across the country that if they want to reconsider their presidential options for 2024, he’s available and interested.”
This CNN article captures the frustration on the left toward the Biden presidency in its 18th month. “Debra Messing was fed up” is the first line, and one that should be preserved in amber so that future generations might understand the American political-power dynamics of 2022. The piece describes what are really two sets of complaints. One is that Biden is not meeting the “moment” with urgency, after the Dobbs ruling and other setbacks and amid persistent inflation. The other is that Biden and his team aren’t performing the basic work of running an administration:
Multiple Democratic politicians who have reached out to work with Biden — whether it’s on specific bills, brainstorming or outreach — often don’t hear anything back at all. Potential appointees have languished for months waiting to hear if they’ll get jobs, or when they’ll be done with vetting. Invitations to events are scarce, thank you calls barely happen. Even some aides within the White House wonder why Biden didn’t fire anyone, from the West Wing or at the Food and Drug Administration, to demonstrate some accountability or at least anger over the baby formula debacle.
Jim lays some blame on the staff. It’s not just insiders harboring these doubts. A recent Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey found 71 percent of Americans don’t want Biden to run again, numbers that roughly align with the percentage viewing the country on the “wrong track.” This, from Brittany Bernstein’s news story, is astonishing: “Just 30 percent of Democrats said they would vote for Biden in a Democratic presidential primary.” In fairness, the survey did not present this as a binary choice and allowed respondents to name a variety of potential candidates — but that’s a troubling number for an incumbent president who hasn’t even weathered his first formal shellacking.
So what now? Democrats have a couple not-negligible factors that could redound to their political benefit. We have yet to see how Dobbs and subsequent state-level abortion restrictions might motivate voters, and the revelations of the January committee could continue to stoke anti-Trump (and by extension, anti-Republican) sentiments. But there’s little indication that either of those issues overpowers inflation. Ditching Biden for someone with better hair — someone who “fights!” — might be a wallpaper-over-the-mold solution.
As Michael notes, this is about much more than Biden:
For now, cutting ties with Joe Biden doesn’t just mean the beginning of a desperate search for a new future leader of the Democratic Party and a potential president. At this moment, progressives are casting about for the means, the will, and the talent to effect a revolution against the features of the Constitution that allow Republicans to hold power at all.
Upending the Constitutional Order will make for one heckuva campaign platform.
* * *
Before I turn this newsletter over to the highlight reel, may I submit a gentle reminder that we are running a webathon in the post-Dobbs stretch, which you can donate to here. If you’re a long-time Jolter, then this won’t be the first webathon you’ve come across; what makes this one a bit different, though, is that a generous supporter is matching gifts dollar for dollar up to $100,000. So even if you give a little, it becomes a lot. These donations — along with subscription fees, digital-ad revenue, and the like — help keep this humble operation humming. If you are reading this, you are playing a part. So thank you.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
A farewell: Goodbye, Boris
Another mass shooting, another set of questions about what could have been done to stop it: When Gun Laws Don’t Prevent Gun Crime
Not exactly “pro-choice”: Elizabeth Warren’s War on Pregnancy Resource Centers
ICYMI, we published this to mark Independence Day: America the Awesome
ARTICLES
Jim Geraghty: A Pointless Horror in Japan
Isaac Schorr: What to Make of America’s Military-Recruitment Problem
Kevin Williamson: Lessons from the Left’s Implosion
Stanley Kurtz: DeSantis Blasts Fake Civics Bill
Jimmy Quinn: Huawei Launches New Surveillance ‘Corps’ in Creepy Military-Style Rally
Brittany Bernstein: Nate Silver Calls Pelosi Fundraising Email ‘Straight-up Misinformation’
Rich Lowry: Biden’s Shameful Gas-Station Attack
Marco Rubio: Expect Biden to Beg Beijing for Gasoline
Ryan Mills: Exclusive: Jeff Sessions Calls On Prosecutors to Crack Down on Gun Crimes
Ryan Mills: Brooke Jenkins Selected to Replace Former Boss, Chesa Boudin, as San Francisco DA
Dan McLaughlin: Boris Johnson Fell Because Character Matters
John McCormack: Video: Blocking Traffic Is a Cruel and Counterproductive Form of Protest
CAPITAL MATTERS
Robert H. Bork Jr. warns of a new phase of U.S.–European regulatory collaboration: Why Are U.S. Regulators Helping the EU Hobble Top American Companies?
A new kind of West Coast/East Coast rivalry is starting. Dominic Pino explains: Avoiding California, Shippers Clog East Coast and Gulf Ports Instead
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen writes about a reunion, and dishes on what museum elites really think about the next generation: What Williams Reunion-Goers Think of Covid Lockdowns and Museum Turmoil
Kyle Smith reviews a documentary about a famous NYC building and its eccentric residents: The Shabby Magnificence of the Chelsea Hotel
Armond White’s midyear movie roundup puts Hollywood on notice: 2022 Midyear Reckoning
MORE CONTENT, YOU SAY?
Jimmy Quinn’s reporting offers a powerful example of how China’s Huawei is not a normal company, folks:
During a bizarre, military-style ceremony that highlighted Huawei’s ties to China’s security state, the tech company launched a new internal business unit focused on developing artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance technology. The new unit will be focused on streamlining the embattled Chinese company’s efforts to become a worldwide leader in cutting-edge AI surveillance technology that can be deployed by cities around the world.
The ceremony puts the lie to Huawei’s global public-relations and lobbying campaigns that strive to dispel the well-founded notion that its ultimate loyalties are with the Chinese Communist Party. . . .
Last year, amid the international restrictions, Huawei’s revenue continued to decline, though its profitability grew as it pivoted to other sectors. Part of the effort to transform Huawei in response to Western bans is a reorganization of the company into various “corps,” each focused on a different emerging industry.
During the aforementioned ceremony on May 26, Huawei inaugurated its corps for “machine vision,” an AI-based computer analysis of images. This corps is key to the company’s efforts to enter the surveillance-technology market. What stood out from the event was the pugilistic way in which the company presented its work.
According to a Chinese security-media report, which the video-surveillance trade group IPVM shared with National Review, the ceremony featured a row of uniformed Huawei employees doing a raised-fist CCP salute onstage. Behind them was a banner that read:
“Application integration, Cloud coordination, Build a leading competitor! Deepen channel distribution to help customers succeed on the frontline. Stay focused and competitive to live and die with the Corps. Machine Vision Corps, Victory! Huawei, Victory! Victory! Victory!”
Rich Lowry explains exactly why Biden’s gas-station demands fall so flat:
For Joe Biden, the buck stops with small independent business owners trying to make ends meet.
Over the holiday weekend, the president slammed gas stations for the purported sin of not passing along declining oil prices to motorists.
Biden took to Twitter to urge “the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump” to heed his message: “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product.”
Yes, sir, whatever you say, Mr. President!
The United States Oil and Gas Association mockingly recommended that the intern who posted the tweet should sign up for Econ 101, but it’s worse than that. Biden has hit the gas stations before on the same grounds. It’s hard to know where the economic illiteracy ends and the shameless demagoguery begins. Regardless, it’s another indication that the president’s approach to inflation is to cast about for scapegoats and villains, no matter how implausible.
So-called jawboning, or stern rhetoric directed at industries to get them to bend to the presidential will, is nothing new. The most famous example is from John F. Kennedy, who blasted U.S. Steel for raising prices in 1962. JFK’s tack was questionable, but at least he was targeting an enormously influential industry that had breached an agreement to hold the line on prices brokered by his administration.
Biden, by contrast, is going after the proverbial Liberty Gas Station and Uni-Mart down on Route 134 started by an immigrant couple hoping to send their children to college for the first time. These small-time entrepreneurs have done nothing wrong, except remain in business at a time when the president’s anti-oil-and-gas policy has backfired spectacularly.
Important news from California, courtesy of Ryan Mills:
Brooke Jenkins, a one-time San Francisco prosecutor who resigned from the district attorney’s office last year to support the recall of her former boss, Chesa Boudin, was named Boudin’s replacement on Thursday.
San Francisco mayor London Breed officially announced during a 5 p.m. PDT press conference that she had selected Jenkins, 40, to be San Francisco’s next district attorney. Breed said she considered several candidates for the position, but that Jenkins “stood out the most.”
“She sacrificed her career to fight for the people in this city, to fight for victims who needed a voice in this city,” Breed said of Jenkins, a political novice, who became a leading voice of the Boudin recall.
Jenkins, a one-time Boudin supporter, quit her job in protest after she said Boudin pressured prosecutors in his office to give lenient plea deals and that he acted more like the public defender that he had been than a prosecutor. During an introductory speech Thursday, Jenkins said the “paramount mission of the district attorney’s office is to promote public safety.”
Jenkins vowed to “restore accountability and consequences to our criminal-justice system.” She said hate crimes will not be tolerated, and “violent and repeat offenders will no longer be allowed to victimize our city without consequences.” She said a top priority will be ending open-air drug markets in the city and enforcing drug laws, “so that we can take back our streets.”
John McCormack flags a video that everyone should watch — as an example of how certain protest tactics, no matter the cause they’re meant to advance, blatantly hurt ordinary people:
It’s worth watching the first 30 seconds of this viral video of a parolee pleading with environmentalist protesters who blocked traffic outside of Washington, D.C., on July 4.
“One lane! I’m asking one lane!” pleads the man, who says he will “go to prison” if he can’t make it to his job. The environmentalist ideologues are unmoved.
The video is enough to infuriate anyone with an ounce of sanity and an ounce of sympathy. And it should make it clear that there is never a good reason for protesters to block traffic. There will always be parolees and average people who just need to get to work to support themselves and their families. Sick people will always need to be taken to the hospital (and so will pregnant women who need to deliver their babies). That’s true even if a particular protest doesn’t yield a viral video.
So it really does not matter what the protest is targeting — climate policy, vaccine mandates, or even abortion — blocking traffic is a cruel and counterproductive policy because it hurts innocent people.
Shout-Outs
Josh Mitchell, at the Wall Street Journal: Red States Are Winning the Post-Pandemic Economy
Eric Felten, at RealClearInvestigations: Biden’s ‘Whole of Government’ Climate Spending Spree
Matthew Goodwin, at UnHerd: Boris changed the Tories forever
Snejana Farberov, at the New York Post: Chicago cops barred from chasing people on foot who run away
CODA
I initially meant to respond on the Corner to Kyle Smith’s unwarranted denunciation of OK Computer, but even that would be too dignifying. “Suicide rock,” “ear poison,” “mild projectile vomiting” . . . these were among the gratuitous terms used on his canvas of kvetch to describe an album that, honestly Kyle, only sometimes portrays all humanity as caught in the double vice grip of isolation and despair. Maybe Kyle would prefer something cheerier. That’s fine. I’ll take “Climbing Up the Walls.”