Tag Archives: 2020 election

national news

Why should we care what AOC thinks about … anything right now?

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an appearance last night on late night TV and was asked by her host what she’ll do if Bernie Sanders is not the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States.

I keep circling back to this question: Why does — or should — anyone care what a freshman member of Congress thinks about the status of the primary race for the most powerful and exalted public office in the United States?

AOC wants Sanders to be the next president. Fine. That’s her call.

However, I continue to be amazed beyond all reason as to why she keeps getting the attention she garners.

AOC needs to earn her spurs. She needs to enact some meaningful legislation. She needs to develop a record of accomplishment.

I wish her well. I think she’s got a bright future in politics.

She’s just too damn green to be taken seriously … at this moment!

national news

Political diversity is far from dead

The next Democratic Party presidential nominee is going to be an old white man. One of the two remaining major candidates is 77 years of age; the other one is 78.

The gigantic 2020 Democratic primary field started out as the most diverse in history: five women; three African Americans (one of whom is a woman); an Asian-American businessman; a gay man; a Hindu woman.

We’re now left with the two old white guys: former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

I am all in for Biden. Never mind that … for now.

What’s left now is for one of these fellows to fight it out with each other and the winner to determine with whom he wants to run for the White House.

So much of the chatter has centered on the rivals who’ve dropped out. I want to expand the field of candidates for vice president way beyond building a “team of rivals.”

This much is as clear as anything one can imagine about the 2020 presidential campaign: The Democratic Party ticket is going to include either a woman, a woman or man of color, or possibly a woman of color.

So let’s quell the talk about the “death of diversity,” shall we?

As for the huge pool of potential running mates either for Biden or Sanders, one of these men can look far and wide well beyond the individuals whom they have defeated. Every state in the Union is full of competent, racially diverse individuals — including many women — involved at all levels of government.

I also agree that the once-huge Democratic field is full of competence, charisma and character. So, whomever emerges from the fight that’s about to commence from this day forward until the presidential nomination convention will have a rich field from which he can find a suitable running mate.

However, you can take this straight to the bank: The next Democratic VP nominee will not be an old white guy.

national news

Do these endorsements really matter?

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is a happy man today.

He received a ringing endorsement from a powerful South Carolina politician who said Biden is the best among the Democratic contenders running for president of the United States.

Rep. James Clyburn, a fellow Democrat, is all in with the former vice president. But I have to ask: Will it really matter?

Clyburn is the senior African American member of Congress. He is a fine fellow, from what I have been able to hear. He packs plenty of clout. It remains unclear to me whether his endorsement of Joe Biden is going to persuade South Carolina Democrats, who appear to be drifting toward Sen. Bernie Sanders in the late stages of the state’s primary campaign, to change their minds.

Which brings me to a significant point. Do endorsements of any nature really bring along votes?

There once was a time when voters waited to read what their local newspaper editorial boards thought about a campaign. They waited to see who the newspaper would endorse. They were motivated for two reasons. They either followed the newspaper’s advice, or — and this is for real — they cast their vote against the candidate the newspaper favored.

These days, with a plethora of information flooding us constantly, 24/7, nonstop, unrelentingly, many voters no longer look to those learned editors’ world views. They make up their minds, seemingly based on the views thrown at them by TV and radio blowhards.

It is becoming an exercise in futility for many politicians and others who get paid to offer their opinions on issues of the day and the candidates who are their champions.

The Dallas Morning News this year has announced it won’t endorse anyone for president. The paper’s editorial board didn’t say it, but my sense is that there is a possible back story borne of frustration that the newspaper would have little impact on its readers’ political leanings. So, why bother? The DMN instead is going to concentrate on the issues it deems critical to the voters and to the candidates who are seeking voters’ support.

I trust that Joe Biden will take James Clyburn’s endorsement seriously. He will ascribe high motivation behind it. Perhaps it’s merited. I will wait along with many other Americans to see if it translates into actual votes in a key primary state that propel the former VP back to front runner status.

national news

Hey, Bernie, Fidel was a bad dude!

I got into a snit the other day with some supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who at this moment is the front runner for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

They chewed me out for dismissing his candidacy. Well, here comes Round Two.

Bernie Sanders is wrong to give the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro any props for the “good” he did while leading the island nation for a seeming eternity.

Sanders told Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” Sunday night that Castro enacted a literacy program when he took over the Cuban government in 1959. “That’s a bad thing”? Sanders asked, rhetorically.

Well, no. It’s not. However, none of that negates the firing squads that Castro deployed to rid Cuba of political dissenters. Nor does it counter the myriad human rights abuses that Castro imposed during his tyrannical reign. Nor does it overrule the fact that in 1962 he welcomed Soviet missiles onto his island, allowing the Soviet Union military geniuses to program the missiles to strike targets in the United States.

Sen. Sanders is trying to make it clear that he despises autocrats, strongmen, dictators and tyrants. He is drawing a line between himself and Donald Trump, who professes to be “in love” with North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un.

OK, that’s fine. However, Sen. Sanders needs to navigate his way around any effort to speak well of another tyrant, Fidel Castro.

If Sen. Sanders has any hope of winning the 2020 presidential election in the event that Democrats nominate him this summer, he’ll have to assuage the anger he is igniting among a key voting bloc of Cuban expatriates in South Florida that has long memories of Fidel Castro’s monstrous rule.

political news

Hoping for a credible alternative to current POTUS

I have voted in every presidential election since 1972.

I have been forced to think long and hard before marking my ballot precisely once during all those elections. The rest of my choices have come easily.

I can think only of one instance where I might suffer from a touch of anxiety as we get ready to vote for president in 2020. It involves one of the Democrats seeking to run against Donald John Trump.

That individual would be Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont who’s running in the Democratic Party presidential primary.

I dislike Sanders’ pie-in-the-sky approach to policy. He wants to enact a Medicare for All medical plan; he wants all college students to attend college free of charge; he continues to rail against billionaires, making us think of that immense wealth is inherently evil.

Thus, I have to square my reluctance to embrace his policies with what I perceive would be the alternative if Sanders gets nominated and then must run against Trump.

You probably have presumed correctly that my view of Trump’s unfitness for the presidency means there is no way on God’s Earth I can support this guy with my vote.

My strong preference is a politician who takes a more centrist approach to governing. I prefer a pol who can work with fellow pols on both sides of the great divide. Sanders isn’t wired that way. Neither, I should add, is Trump.

I mention Sanders because he is the current frontrunner for the Democratic Party nomination for president. I have no clue how he’ll hold up under intense scrutiny by his fellow primary candidates.

I would much prefer to cast my ballot without having to consider the consequence of my vote. I fear that Sen. Sanders would force me toward that direction.

Will it force me to vote for the current president? Not a chance!

I just want the opponent to win.

International news

You mean the Russians are interfering again? Wow! Who’da thunk it?

It can’t be. The Russians cannot possibly attack our electoral system yet again after what they did in 2016. Can they?

I guess they can! The New York Times is reporting that the Russians are at it once more. Indeed, now we hear that Donald John Trump, the nation’s current president, was so angry over the news that he fired the acting director of national intelligence and installed a loyalist into the job as the latest acting  DNI.

Actually, it is being reported that Trump got mad because the former acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, consented to a congressional briefing. That’s reportedly why he replaced him with U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grennell, a guy with zero experience at any level of intelligence, let alone at the director of national intelligence level.

Let’s remember that Trump dismissed the 2016 election attack, most infamously in 2018 at the Helsinki press event in which he stood next to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and backed Putin’s denial over the U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia had interfered in the previous presidential election.

Now we hear that the Russians have done it again!

This is scary in the extreme. Trump already is known to have solicited another foreign government, Ukraine, for a political favor. It got him impeached by the House of Representatives.

Here come the Russians once more, working to re-elect the president. They want to ensure that Trump gets a second term as POTUS, a move that is sure to sow as many seeds of anger and mistrust in our electoral system that the 2016 attack managed to accomplish.

Think of it. That’s precisely what the Russians want to do.

Didn’t the president take an oath to protect this nation against its enemies? Didn’t he vow to keep us and our institutions safe from this kind of attack?

What the … whatever?

national news

Do you really want this, Democratic contenders?

All of the nine (or so) Democrats remaining in the hunt for the party’s presidential nomination say they want to be the person at the top of the heap.

But … do they?

It’s been fascinating in the extreme to listen to those in the the back-of-the-pack or the middle-of-the-pack crowd go after the front runners as they climb over each other in the race to curry voters’ favor.

We had Joe Biden standing as the prohibitive front runner for most of 2019. Then came the impeachment hearings and the Senate trial. Not only did Democratic opponents go hammer and tong at Biden, but then we had the congressional Republicans take up arms against him. They accused him, baselessly in my view, of being corrupt.

Biden has faded. Now it’s Bernie Sanders’ turn. Democrats are going after him for being a socialist, for advocating policies that will bankrupt the nation. Bernie is still standing relatively tall.

Oh, but Elizabeth Warren has gotten her share of brickbats from her Democratic foes, again largely on the same basis as the anti-Sanders attacks.

Pete Buttigieg has drawn his share of Democratic ire. He’s too green. He hasn’t developed a sufficient body of government experience.

OK, now it’s Michael Bloomberg’s turn. He is trying to “buy” the nomination. He is spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money to tell voters that he’s got the chops to do the job and — by the way — take down Donald John Trump.

It’s a nomination worth having for the moment. I am left to wonder though whether it will still be worth having when the Democratic contenders get done beating the stuffing out of whomever emerges from this donnybrook to go after the current president of the United States.

media news, State news

Newspaper gets it right with its non-endorsement

I questioned the New York Times’ decision to endorse two candidates for president in the Democratic Party primary.

Also, I cast aspersions on the Dallas Morning News’ decision to recommend two candidates for the U.S. Senate in Texas, also in the Democratic Party primary.

However, I see where the DMN is coming from in announcing Sunday that it will not endorse anyone in the race for president in 2020. Instead, the paper said it plans to focus on the issues that it deems important for voters to consider.

The paper is planning a series of articles titled “What’s at Stake 2020.” It will examine issues such as climate change, education reform, energy policy, war and peace, taxation, federal budgeting, defense policy … a whole host of issues that it believes should be the focus of the presidential campaign.

The paper didn’t say so, but my strong hunch is that the editorial board at the Dallas Morning News might have made a critical determination about the candidates seeking to win election. One is that the incumbent, Donald Trump, has not earned — nor will he ever earn — the paper’s endorsement based on his term in office. The other is none of the Democrats running to succeed him excite the paper enough to win its endorsement.

Near the end of its lengthy editorial, the paper appears to long for a return to civil discourse and declares that its turning to the issues is an avenue toward that noble goal. The Morning News cites President Lincoln’s second inaugural, given as the Civil War was drawing to a close. The president declared his intention to govern “with charity for all and malice toward none.” An assassin, tragically, prevented President Lincoln from fulfilling that noble pledge.

The paper says the election is bigger than Donald Trump or bigger than any of the men and women running to succeed him. It wants to turn its focus on the issues that matter, and away from the personalities who seek to outshout each other.

To that end, the Dallas Morning News has set a constructive path forward as we move more deeply into a contentious election year.

national news

Are we heading for a repeat of the great electoral fluke of 2016?

It pains me to the depths of my gut to acknowledge this, but my fear is growing that Americans are going to get Donald John Trump for another four years as president of the United States.

Yes, it looks to me at this moment that the Democratic Party is quite capable of squandering a golden opportunity to restore the presidency, to return it to a level of respectability and reverence that has been dismantled during the Trump Era.

That once-monstrous field of contenders has been culled to a more reasonable size. Who, though, is left standing? Who are the top contenders?

A zillionaire. A couple of “progressives,” including a “democratic socialist.” A former vice president who cannot stop tripping over his own tongue. A one-time mayor of a smallish Midwest city. A sitting U.S. senator who is trying to appeal to the center-left of her party. Another zillionaire who rose to prominence by funding an effort to impeach Donald Trump.

Joe Biden once was thought to be the unstoppable Democrat. At this moment his campaign is imploding. His so-called “firewall” in South Carolina is showing severe fracturing as African-American voters are now looking for an alternative to Barack Obama’s wing man.

Nominating a far-left socialist is the death knell for sure, in my view.

What is most maddening is that Donald Trump has spoon-fed the opposition all kinds of electoral grist to use against him. The House of Representatives impeached him; the Senate acquitted him, but the impeachment still stands.

Trump has angered millions of Americans with his hideous pronouncements, his foul mouth, his trashing of allies, his incoherent campaign-rally riffs, his pandering to religious groups with whom he has no actual alliance, his disparaging of the nation’s top military minds, his standing with hostile strongmen, his denigration of our intelligence analysts.

Oh, and then there’s the lying. It’s incessant. He cannot tell the truth about anything at any level. He gets caught lying and his political base blows it off.

On and on it goes.

Still, this most astonishing politician — the president — very well might win re-election because he is somehow, amazingly able to claim credit for an economic recovery that he inherited from his immediate predecessor.

This clown never should have gotten elected in the first place. He squeaked in by the narrowest of margins, losing the actual vote by nearly 3 million ballots but winning just enough Electoral College votes to win the election. I do not dismiss that he won according to the rules spelled out by the U.S. Constitution, a document of which he has zero understanding.

The 2016 election stands in my mind as the greatest political fluke in U.S. history. If he wins again in November, then we will have committed the next greatest fluke in history.

national news

A resounding ‘no!’ to a far-left ideologue to succeed Trump

I hope my views are clear by now about my preference for the next president of the United States.

If not, then I’ll lay it out in plain English: I do not want the next president to be a fringe ideologue with an overly aggressive agenda that has no prayer of being enacted.

That would rule, according to what we’ve witnessed to date, the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two U.S. senators who’ve become champions of the Democratic Party’s progressive movement.

That would leave in no particular order, say, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. I won’t include Tulsi Gabbard and Deval Patrick in that mix, because I think Gabbard needs to drop out of the race and Patrick, well, he isn’t making any noise at all.

My strong preference is to elect someone who can succeed Donald Trump who will be able to forge bipartisan coalitions, who knows how to legislate, who has a deep understanding of government and who adheres to policies that reflect more of a mainstream point of view.

The Democratic nominee, first off, needs to be able to defeat Trump this fall. I don’t know yet how he or she will accomplish that feat. It remains a tall order, given the immense power of presidential incumbency. I have maintained over many election cycles that incumbent presidents remind me of heavyweight boxing champions: To defeat an incumbent you’ve got to knock him out.

Will any of these contenders measure up to the huge task at hand?

In a normal election year, with a normal incumbent seeking re-election, it would appear to be more attainable than one might think. Trump’s campaign rally riffs are intense studies in incoherence. This individual cannot string cogent sentences together. I listen to him, try to grasp what he is saying and damn near every time I come away scratching my head, wondering: What the hell did this guy just say?

Donald Trump is far from an ordinary politician. He plays to his base exclusively. He fires ’em up with his untruths, his insults and innuendo. He makes patently outrageous statements that in a prior era would have doomed any normal politician. Talk about a Teflon politician. This guy embodies the description.

I want the next president to restore a healthy measure of respectability to the nation’s highest, most exalted office.

I want someone who knows how to govern and someone who understands that good government requires compromise. A fire-breathing extremist does not fit that important description.