My good friend Scott Lively, a former two-time candidate for governor in Massachusetts and author of The Pink Swastika, believes the fix is in for the Democrats to select Elizabeth Warren as their candidate for 2020. And I believe he is right. (Don’t blame Scott for anything else I say in the rest of this column.)
One of the things that strike me about recent press coverage of the Democrat primary is the absence of critical pieces about Ms. Warren. Every other candidate seems to come in for his share of criticism - except for the senator from Massachusetts with the creative ancestry. She seems to be getting a free ride from the Talking Snake Media.
This has led me to the tentative conclusion that she has become the de facto choice of the regressive left and its mavens in the press. Joe Biden, who is now in a dead heat with Warren nationally, has virtually been driven into hiding by the unsparing press coverage of his truly impressive array of gaffes. But what is missing is any concerted effort from the TSM to provide cover for him or to excuse or explain away his hoof-in-mouth disease.
Biden thought he could ride the “Obama-Biden” train all the way to the White House, but Obama is becoming a distant memory for younger candidates, who are certainly respectful of the former president but do not stand in awe of his presidency. In fact, they mostly complain about how many illegal immigrants he deported and how his health care plan failed to cover everybody, leaving them to clean up the mess.
Bernie Sanders is an unappealing candidate in many ways, and an unelectable socialist to boot. He too is complaining about receiving short shrift from the Democrat propaganda machine. Besides, Dems think, he had his shot against a thoroughly unlikeable candidate in 2016, and couldn’t get it done (rigged primary or not) so it’s somebody else’s turn.
Kamala Harris has been revealed as an unimpressive campaigner who is not quick on her feet and whose tenure as a tough-on-crime AG in California is running right into the headwinds of prison reform and marijuana legalization. Today’s Democrats would release all the pot dealers Kamala threw in prison.
Pete Buttegieg has no realistic shot at the top slot. As mayor of South Bend, he fired a black chief of police as almost his first order of business, and just recently one of his white police officers (justifiably) shot a black perp in a parking lot. His support among blacks in South Bend and nationally is barely registering a pulse. In fact, he recently polled precisely zero percent among black voters in South Carolina.
His flagrantly non-normative private lifestyle may make him appealing to Democrats but he is unlikely to cause much trouble in a general election. People who would raise his lifestyle as an issue know they will be hammered mercilessly by the TSM as raging homophobic Neanderthal bigots. I don’t know too many people who are willing to swim in those waters. On the other side, he and his “husband” will make irresistible subjects for fawning TSM coverage. All this makes Buttegieg a likely vice-presidential pick.
You can forget about everybody else, even though Beto is determined to hang in there, apparently thinking it would be beneath him to run for any office other than the one in the shape of an oval.
Mr. Lively pointed out something I had not even considered, but it is impossible to overestimate the impact of this. The 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote falls on August 18, 2020, right in the middle of the presidential campaign.
The 99th anniversary is upon us this weekend, creating the stage for a full year of Ms. Warren going wall-to-wall on women’s rights. The political stars have aligned for her in an almost spooky way. As Lively put it, the Democrats “are going to play that ‘woman’ card like you’ve never seen before.”
Antonin Scalia told a story in the Rapanos decision that went like this:
“An Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies ‘Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.’”
After this weekend, and until November 3, 2020, it’s Elizabeth Warren all the way down.
