Month: September 2019

In 1992, Bill Clinton won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination despite not winning either the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary. That’s the last time that happened, and it’s a little misleading: Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was a candidate in 1992, and no one seriously contested the caucuses in his state that year. If Joe Biden wants to be be the Democratic nominee, he should probably make sure to win at least one of the first two contests. So, why, Jonathan Bernstein asks, is his campaign telling people that this isn’t absolutely necessary for his campaign?

It’s not just that failing to win would hurt Biden; it’s that failing to win would mean someone else won, and that candidate might be well positioned to capitalize on an early victory.

Plus, spin only gets you so far. If Biden can’t win, then one of his big supposed advantages – his appeal to voters – will be less credible. Moreover, at this point Biden is thought by most to be the front-runner, and that could make even a strong second-place finish seem disappointing. That means the news about Biden could be quite negative until he manages to win somewhere, especially if party actors turn against him or rally to another candidate. At this point, Biden has the most party endorsements in the race. But his lead could disappear quickly if he loses twice early on.

None of which is to say that Biden’s people are wrong to try to lower expectations. Convincing the media that a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire wouldn’t actually be bad news for their candidate can only help. And Biden is doing well enough in all the objective indicators right now that low-balling doesn’t risk taking him out of the conversation.

Bernstein is correct in his assessment here. While some lower tier candidates need to hype their chances to the media to get any coverage at all, the Biden team’s only incentives here are to lowball the press. As they point out, Iowa’s caucus system is unpredictable and New Hampshire voters often prefer candidates from New England, which gives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren a home field advantage. Biden has real strength with black voters, but that won’t be of much help in the first two contests. Should he lose them both, he’ll hardly be out of money or suffering any significant delegate deficit.

Playing the expectations game is important for both winners and losers. A winner who was expected to win all along doesn’t get full credit. And a loser who still exceeds expectations can gain momentum, as Bill Clinton managed to do by declaring himself “The Comeback Kid” after finishing in a distant second place in New Hampshire.

But 2008 offers a warning for Biden. Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner then, but finishing third in Iowa almost knocked her completely out as Barack Obama shocked the world by carrying a Midwestern state with a very small black population and carried tremendous momentum into New Hampshire. Had he won there, he would have followed it up with another gigantic win in South Carolina and probably could have cruised to victory from there. Unfortunately for him, he stumbled in New Hampshire and Clinton got her footing back. She wouldn’t feel compelled to concede until after all 50 states had voted. The lesson is that Iowa and New Hampshire have an influence that is out of all proportion to their delegate hauls. A frontrunner can be knocked severely off course by losing either of those contests, and losing them both will be perilous.

As Bernstein says, it’s not just that you’ve lost but that someone else has won. Winning early was critical to Obama’s chances against Clinton, and it will be critical to all the candidates not named Biden. Winning in the present is the best proof that you can win in the future, and with the Democratic voters desperate for victory in 2020, they’re turning to Biden for safety more than love. He doesn’t want the voters to conclude that anyone else is a safe bet.

Still, there’s absolutely no reason for Biden’s team not to lower expectations. Caucuses tend to favor a different kind of candidate than primaries, which is why both Obama and Sanders did better in them against Clinton than they did in primaries. And it’s true that Biden’s two main competitors come from states that border New Hampshire. It’s true that both states are far from good demographically for Biden. He actually has a decent case to make about why his strengths lay elsewhere and later in the calendar.

Plus, even if none of his spin were true, his team would still have an incentive to downplay his chances. He doesn’t want people to yawn if he wins.

I often find campaign spin trite and tiresome, or even risibly insulting to my intelligence, but that’s not the case here. Yet Biden will have a hard time winning if he doesn’t get off to a decent start. His campaign might be unusually vulnerable to early losses precisely because it’s predicated on him being the candidate who can win.

Hello music lovers!

Ready for some tunes? I am. Let’s start off with something I first heard on the long-defunct LA area radio station MARS-FM (103.1). That’s right – that station was what turned me on to Aphex Twin. This was the first track of his I ever heard:

Time flies. The station lasted for a brief time, but brought back the spirit of KROQ from its heyday just long enough to feel just a bit more excited about life. You all know the drill: infinite jukebox, the bar’s open, and hopefully all is well.

Cheers!

Someone whose name rhymes with Schmitch SchmcConnell has a guilty conscience:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday vehemently denounced political opponents who have dubbed him “Moscow Mitch,” calling the nickname an “over-the-top” effort to “smear” him.

“It’s modern-day McCarthyism,” McConnell said during a radio interview on Salem Media Group’s “Hugh Hewitt Show” when asked about the nickname he received after blocking Democrats’ efforts to pass bipartisan election security bills. “Unbelievable for a Cold Warrior like me who spent a career standing up to the Russians to be given a moniker like that.”

“You know, I can laugh about things like the ‘Grim Reaper,’ but calling me Moscow Mitch is over the top,” the Kentucky senator added, before suggesting that Democrats would “say anything and do anything.”

“This is what we’re up against with the hard left today in America,” he said.

Of course he “can laugh about things like the ‘Grim Reaper'”—he came up with that nickname himself. But Moscow Mitch stings, because it’s very likely true. Mitch IS close to Russia. In fact, his efforts to lift sanctions on Russia brought in “$200 million in capital to buy a 40 percent stake in the new aluminum plant in Ashland, Ky” from Kremlin-linked Rusal. And we all know about Mitch’s refusal to protect the 2020 elections from Russian Interference.

It’s clear why the Senate Majority Leader/Russian asset hates being called Moscow Mitch: it’s because it hits home (and that doesn’t even begin to explore his wife’s close ties to the Chinese government). What makes it funny is that the more he complains about it, the more it’s in the news.

Image courtesy of Matt Johnson.

I don’t really feel too bad about having difficulty understanding what the hell is going on in the United Kingdom because I don’t think the British really have a clue either. I mean, I think I’ve learned what I need to know at this point, but since it possibly involves something unprecedented in British history and another thing that hasn’t happened since the 18th-Century, I can be forgiven for being slow on the uptake. Right?

A parliamentary system where the prime minister doesn’t have a majority but is nonetheless left in power to twist in the wind of his own bullshit rhetoric and incompetence is not a sustainable solution, but it could be where those chaps are headed.

On the other hand, Boris Johnson might convince the queen to veto a parliamentary bill banning a no-deal Brexit which is something the Queen simply hasn’t done in modern times.

Even though Johnson doesn’t have a majority, he might get one if elections are called in October, so his opposition isn’t in a very strong position. Basically no one wants Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to be running things, so unless he’s willing to stand down as the primary opposition leader, it’s doubtful that any coalition government can be formed to replace Johnson without elections. But Corbyn isn’t going anywhere.

It looks like a total clusterfuck to this American. I find it hard to believe that the British people still want to Brexit after all the pain this has caused, but the consensus seems to be that new elections would bring a pro-Brexit parliament despite everything.

If that’s the case, the public there is getting the kind of governance they deserve. As an American, I know what that feels like.

The Hill is reporting that Mitch McConnell says he’ll bring a gun reform bill up for a vote in the Senate if President Trump gives him a green light.

McConnell’s comments underscore the political reality any push for new gun reforms faces.

Though House Democrats have already passed a background check bill and are expected to vote on additional bills as soon as next week, Republicans in the Senate are unlikely to back anything unless they get political cover from Trump. The Senate GOP is defending 22 seats this election cycle, most of those in deeply red states.

Asked on Tuesday why he wouldn’t bring the House-backed universal background check bill up for a vote, McConnell said that lawmakers and the White House were currently in a “discussion” about what action to take.

“I said several weeks ago that if the president took a position on a bill, so that we knew we would actually be making a law and not just having serial votes, I’d be happy to put it on the floor,” McConnell said.

Here are a few quick observations I glean from this news.

1: The mass shootings have taken their toll, and pedantic excuses about the Second Amendment and mental health aren’t working anymore. Even Wal-Mart gets it.

2: The GOP is worried about the elections. Their president is underwater in states he (and his party) needs to win. Mitch himself is getting challengers from the left and the right.

3: The NRA’s power is, perhaps, starting to wane? If nothing else, they are in disarray, and their endorsement is less valuable than it had been in the past. Gotta hold onto those independent voters!

The long and short of it seems to me that Mitch and the GOP need to at least LOOK like they’re doing something in the eyes of the voters, but even a weakened NRA is a powerful foe, which is why McConnell needs Trump.

It’s a fun mental exercise to game this out a little bit. My guess is that Trump will give Mitch the green light, since Trump is a needy little man who craves approval. In fact, we’ve already seen the president swing wildly on the issue of background checks, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he’ll give Mitch the go ahead.

But this will set off a round of shrieking from the NRA, Fox News, right wing radio, and Trump’s twitter followers. Which Trump could again respond to by reversing himself at the last minute, like when he left Paul Ryan holding the bag over border security. That went very well for the Republicans, don’t you think?

Trump might even flip flop a second or third time, in response to public outrage over the gun nuts, and then more counter-outrage from the gun nuts. He just backed down on deporting sick children, so it’s not like that’s out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, the ads and memes about how “the GOP isn’t protecting our right to own as many guns as possible” would be flying fast and furious. Hannity and Ingraham and “Judge Jeanine” (that title always makes me laugh) would be hammering the issue nightly.

Consider Mitch’s predicament. His party is losing the gun control argument, so he has to look like he’s doing something. But Trump has so wrecked the party that in many states, they cannot sacrifice a single Republican vote. This may even be true in Kentucky. So he NEEDS Trump to give him cover, but Trump is not only the very definition of an unreliable ally, he has no love for the Senate Majority Leader.

In the end, I predict that after more sturm und drang than a German opera, no bill passes the Senate. But not before causing plenty of bad optics for Mitch and his party, lots of stuff for Democrats to campaign on, and absolutely no upside to pissing off the right.

It seems to me that the distinguished turtle from Kentucky is caught between a rock and a hard place.

If there were ever any prospect that Donald Trump would be impeached, that seemed to go out the window when Congress went into August recess without having formally initiated any proceedings. It doesn’t seem to matter that during that recess a milestone was reached when a majority of House Democrats went on the record favoring an impeachment inquiry. If the removal of the president is important, then it requires swift action, and the opposition party can’t go dormant on the visible aspects of their investigation (or their messaging) for a full month and expect to be taken seriously by the public.

With Labor Day now in the rearview mirror, it’s time for primary season to begin as we ramp up for the early 2020 contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. We’ve left behind the season for any kind of bipartisanship, however limited that is even in the best of times. Ramping up an impeachment effort now, after all the momentum has been squandered, will be met by a wall of resistance, internal Democratic divisions, and a highly skeptical press.

Yet, the Democrats are limping forward with every intention of resuscitating people’s expectations that Trump can be removed from office in any way other than the ballot box. And if the Democratic leadership actually supports these efforts, they are definitely holding their cards very close to their vests.

In the meantime, Washington is stuck in an impeachment muddle — with Democrats straddling an ambiguous line between impeachment proceedings and standard congressional investigations. It’s a dynamic that will test the unity of a diverse Democratic caucus this fall, and shape the party’s battle to hold on to the House and defeat Trump in 2020.

“I don’t think the public is really … clear about what’s going on,” said Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) on the state of play. “Whether that’s an intentional strategy or not, I don’t know. But I think that’s clearly the case.”

Yarmuth — who has long been in favor of impeaching Trump — said he expects top Democrats, led by Nadler, to make it much clearer in September that the House is indeed moving ahead with the impeachment process.

“I would bet that before mid-October, there will be actual articles of impeachment drafted by the committee. I don’t think there’s much doubt about that,” Yarmuth said in an interview this week. “I think Jerry’s committed to doing that, and I think, a significant majority of the committee is there.”

It’s been hard to discern what level of sophistication is informing Nancy Pelosi’s no-cart-before-the-horse strategy on impeachment. In acting as the Democratic brake on impeachment, she’s tempered expectations, reduced the resistance on the other side, and arguably bought her committees time to make progress in their investigations and in the courts so that when they present their case it will be formidable and game changing. She’s also set things up so that if she ever personally pivots in favor of impeachment, it will carry a lot of punch.

Yet, it hasn’t been clear that she’s approaching this with that kind of cool calculation rather than just responding to the survey information that crosses her desk everyday telling her the public has turned against the president but would rather vote him out themselves than endure an impeachment mess. Her first priority is to protect her majority, and that majority is built on seats that Trump carried in 2016. She is naturally more responsive to the pensiveness of her vulnerable members than the outrage of her safe ones. It’s possible that she means what she says, has no deep plan to throw the president out of office, and no intention of wasting effort on impeaching a president that the Senate will never convict.

A third possibility is that Pelosi simply cannot stop impeachment from moving forward because the Trump administration is stonewalling congressional subpoenas. At this point, it might be easier for Trump to run out the clock by offering cooperation because it would take the most potent irritant off the table. But that would probably cause him severe enough problems to greatly complicate his reelection efforts, so I doubt it’s a strategy that will be contemplated. He’s probably not temperamentally capable of adopting that approach anyway, even if his lawyers and political consultants advise it.

It’s possible none of this will matter to the president because the Democrats seem poised to do something incredibly stupid.

The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold hearings and call witnesses involved in hush-money payments to ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels as soon as October, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

Democrats say they believe there is already enough evidence to name Trump as a co-conspirator in the episode that resulted in his former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleading guilty to two campaign finance charges.

To explain why this is a bad move, I’m just going to go back to the last time the House of Represenatives impeached a president over crimes committed to cover up cheating on his wife. On January 21, 1999, while the Clinton impeachment was in its trial phase in the Senate, former Arkansas senator Dale Bumpers spoke on behalf of the defense. Here’s the most memorably part of what he said:

You’re here today because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse, a marital infidelity. Not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society, the two things [Alexander] Hamilton talked about in Federalist Paper number 65 — I recommend it to you before you vote — but it was a breach of his marriage vows.

It was a breach of his family trust It is a sex scandal. H.L. Mencken said one time, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money,’ it’s about money.”

(LAUGHTER)

And when you hear somebody say, “This is not about sex,” it’s about sex.

I think the impeachment of Clinton was more about a kind of Melvilleian obsession with harpooning Bill Clinton at any cost, but there were actual crimes involved. Charges of infidelity were not among the articles of impeachment. The problem for the House Republicans was that the public simply didn’t care enough about Clinton cheating on his wife to want to punish him for committing those crimes. When Bumpers said that it was all about sex, he wasn’t telling the truth but was nonetheless offering a potent political defense.  In basketball terms, it was a lay-up.

The Republicans are banking in lay-ups over this news already.

Trump allegedly had a one-night stand with Stormy Daniels in 2006 and also allegedly had a 2006 affair with Karen McDougal. Let this sink in: The sanctimonious Democrats are upset that Donald Trump might have had sex with two hot women 13 years ago.

The Democrats can argue all they want that the president’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen is currently serving time in federal prison for his role in covering up Trump’s affairs from 13 years ago, but the public will agree with the Bumpers defense this time just as they did twenty years ago.

It’s true that Trump, as “Individual-One” in the Cohen indictments, is very clearly guilty of having committed prosecutable felonies in the Daniels/McDougal case. The Democrats must be thinking that this us such a cut and dry case that it is stronger than more muddled issues like the Emoluments Clause or the president’s true relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin. They’re wrong about that. Going after the president for covering up his affairs in the closing days of the 2016 campaign is their weakest political argument, and impeachment is a political rather than a legal process.

Fortunately, this isn’t the only angle the House Democrats will pursue:

When the House returns to session next week, the Judiciary panel plans to continue focusing on five episodes of potential obstruction of justice by the president outlined in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s lengthy report this spring. Democrats have argued that Trump would have been charged with obstruction in those five instances were he not president.

The hush-money payments represent a sixth instance of potentially impeachable presidential misbehavior, they say.

They should absolutely deemphasize the sixth instance here because otherwise it will be the only instance that gets any attention, and then the collective whole will be swatted away like a fly.

The House Democrats have little choice but to move forward, if for no other reason than to defend the powers of their institution. But they erred badly by letting a whole month go by without any focus on the president’s criminal and impeachable behavior. Again, if this matters then it’s urgent, and showing a lack of urgency sends a message that it is not important.

I understand the impulse now to document the atrocities, and there are political and principled reasons for being comprehensive in that task. But they have shown too much patience and have too flawed of a strategy moving forward for me to give them anything other than failing marks.

I’m not in the least surprised that if you grow human brain cells in a Petri dish, eventually they will create neurons that fire in synchrony and emit brain waves. Scientists are growing these things and calling them “organoids,” and they are already trying to use them to steer a robot. They can introduce retinal cells that make these things sensitive to light, and I won’t be surprised if they begin to “learn” as a result. Nerve cells could introduce sensation and pain, along with all the learning that goes with that. So, now that they’re pretty far along in the process, they’re finally beginning to have a couple of ethical concerns and philosophical debates about what, in fact, an organoid actually is. The researchers may be a little biased but they say that they’re not creating sentient life.

As the organoids mature, the researchers also found, the waves change in ways that resemble the changes in the developing brains of premature babies.

“It’s pretty amazing,” said Giorgia Quadrato, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new study. “No one really knew if that was possible.”

But Dr. Quadrato stressed it was important not to read too much into the parallels. What she, Dr. Muotri and other brain organoid experts build are clusters of replicating brain cells, not actual brains.

To me, this is the flip side of medieval-level thinking about a divine spark or immaterial soul being a necessary component of human consciousness. The scientists err in thinking that human brain cells need an actual person or body to achieve consciousness. But that’s unlikely. A cluster of cells is a body. As some point, a complex enough system of human brain cells will go through a transition and create the soul-like conditions we associate with consciousness. The things that might prevent this, like the ability to sense the outside world, can be overcome by giving the brain cells the kinds of sensory cells we use to interact with the physical world.

So, if you start growing a human brain and give it the ability to sense light and sound and temperature, you should expect it begin to responding like a human brain in a human body. I’d still expect this thing to be less than a fully conscious entity, but only because you need to be fully human in order to act fully human. You need hunger and sexual drives, for example, and interpersonal relationships. But just because you aren’t creating fully human self-aware consciousness doesn’t mean that you aren’t creating some kind of consciousness.

None of this should be as controversial as it seems to be in the research community. If consciousness is explained by the action of brain cells, then growing brain cells should achieve consciousness. If, as we know, the brain cells are insufficient for this by themselves, then introducing additional cells that help the “brain” interact with the physical world and begin to learn from it, will probably get you there. If you want the thing to avoid extremes of temperature, give it enough cells to make it ambulatory, and it will probably learn to move away from heat and cold.

The only limitation is on how much a human body you give the thing. Eventually it will have a stomach and gonads or ovaries. I don’t know how far you can go before you have to concede that you’ve grown a person in a Petri dish, but there’s obviously some threshold beyond which you can’t go.

But they aren’t overly concerned about thresholds. The promise of medical breakthroughs is leading them in another direction, and they’ve now sent some organoids into space to see how they develop in zero-gravity environments.

The most important paragraph in Dan Balz’s Washington Post piece on the Electoral College is the one that serves as a major caveat for the rest of his argument.

The electoral map is never truly static for long. Before the Democrats’ “blue wall” there was the so-called “Republican lock” on the electoral college. Years ago, California, Illinois and New Jersey were presidential battlegrounds. Today all are solidly Democratic. Missouri long was considered a bellwether state. Trump won it by almost 19 points.

This variability should be constantly kept in mind when trying to predict the result of the 2020 presidential election. But it’s especially important if you’re trying to make the case that the upcoming election with see a historically low number of truly competitive states.

With some minor exceptions (notably, Indiana in 2008), the red-blue divide that developed in the 2000 election was remarkably stable through 2012 and didn’t provide shocking state-by-state results. The collapse of the Blue Wall in 2016 showed that the basic divide wasn’t stable, however, and the demographic shape of the electorate has shifted significantly in the era of Trump. This latter point was demonstrated very clearly by the results of the 2018 midterms which saw the Democrats take control of the U.S. House of Representatives despite its districts being drawn in a way that should have precluded that possibility.

That result came from a collapse of Republican support in the suburbs which flipped dozens of districts into the Democrats’ column, but the largest percentage-loss of GOP support came in safely Republican seats where the difference wasn’t enough to change the outcome. In statewide elections like those that decide the Electoral College, a vote is a vote regardless of from which district it is cast. That’s why Trump isn’t safe in states like Ohio and Iowa where he presumed to be the beneficiary of increased suburban/rural polarization in the national electorate.

In one sense, Balz is indisputably correct. Trump’s path to victory is so narrow that he’ll fight on a pretty narrow battlefield. He can’t afford to play defense in states he won in 2016. He’s going to need to win Florida and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and he’ll want to fight for at least one vote out of Maine which awards its delegates both by district and statewide results. But those areas may not even be competitive for him. The true battle may be taking place Georgia and Arizona and Texas and Iowa and Ohio. That doesn’t mean that a lot of resources will be put into those all of those states by the Democrat or that they’ll spend a lot of time campaigning in them. But they may nonetheless represent the true battleground states, meaning that they’re the ones that will be decided narrowly and can turn on small differences in investment and tweaks in strategy.

If you want to really think outside the box, you might consider Utah as a potential battleground state, since the president is remarkably unpopular there and most Utahns want a change. But that will only happen with a general collapse of Trump’s support reminiscent of the Democrats’ debacles in 1972, 1980 and 1984. It’s hard to say how likely that is to happen at this point, but I think mentioning it is worthwhile to help demonstrate a key point. The very concept of a battleground state seems to be premised on the idea that an election will be close enough for individual states to matter. That presumes a kind of red-blue divide which may not exist anymore.

At the moment, it’s hard to conceive of Trump winning any states he lost in 2016. Maybe he could win Maine outright. Winning New Hampshire seems like a fantasy at this point. He’s pretty well locked in to trying to repeat his state-by-state performance from 2016. But the Democrats are not limited in the same way. They’ll probably win or lose this election on a national basis, meaning that the country will make a decision that is far more decisive that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing. While the Democrats could easily win a repeat of 2016 simple by doing infinitesimally better in just a few states, it’s equally possible that they could just sweep the map with the exception of some very red states in the Deep/Appalachian south, prairies and Mountain West.

Nothing about Trump is normal, so I think it’s somewhat counterintuitive to expect a normal or expected Electoral College outcome in 2020. His ceiling appears so limited that we can see the shape of an election he wins. What I think we have a hard time imagining or predicting is the shape of an election he loses.