Loose Ends (64)

After a solid week on the road, time to catch up with a few news items.

• Oh please, please make it so!

Hillary Clinton tells friends she’s leaving 2020 door open

Hillary Clinton may not be ready to give up on her Oval Office dreams, CNN’s Jeff Zeleny reports. “Clinton is telling people that she’s not closing the doors to the idea of running in 2020,” Zeleny said. “I’m told by three people that as recently as this week, she was telling people that look, given all this news from the indictments, particularly the Roger Stone indictment, she talked to several people, saying ‘look, I’m not closing the doors to this.'”

• Regarding Kamala Harris, National Review‘s Charlie Cooke notices something curious about her policy agenda announced on Martin Luther King Day. Its first item is a very large middle class tax cut, which isn’t Standard Operating Procedure for most liberals today. In fact it sounds like deliberate GOP-bait. She concludes her list with Medicare for all, which, if even a small version of it ever passes, will require huge, European-style taxes on the middle class to pay for. Maybe it is last on her list for a reason. And what was conspicuously missing from her list? Climate change. Is omitting climate change even allowed for potential Democratic presidents these days? Maybe she understands that it is tedious for most voters to hear the climate change dirge over and over again, and thinks she’d rather talk more about what people actually care about.

She may be more shrewd than we think.

• Tom Brokaw praised “assimilation” for hispanic immigrants, and you’ll never guess what happened next! Oh of course you don’t need to guess what happened. He issued a groveling apology faster than he could buy his next Gillette razor cartridge.

I’ve always thought Brokaw was the most overrated among the major TV “news” personalities, but that’s a low bar to clear. To paraphrase something Harry Jaffa once said, in a world filled with intellectual media pygmies, Brokaw has a firm grasp on the lowest rung. Still, this was fun to watch:

NBC News special correspondent and former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw received scathing backlash Sunday for remarks he made on a “Meet the Press” segment about Hispanic assimilation.

Brokaw, 78, made his remarks during a panel discussion about the fight for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. . .

Brokaw went on to say, “I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.”

His comments quickly drew strong reactions on Twitter, with many decrying what he had said.

Twitter, erupting against heresy against liberalism? You don’t say.

• I would love to be a fly on the wall in House Democratic cloakrooms to overhear what House Dems actually think about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Just remember that politicians all have large egos, and work hard to advance up the food chain in the crowded House to get key committee assignments, and especially to get noticed in the media. Along comes AOC, who is the It Girl for the liberal base, stealing the spotlight. She knocked off the number 3 Democrat in the House, who was likely popular with—or certainly well-known to—his peers, and she goes around talking about backing challengers to other House Democratic incumbents. She might well be able to deliver some defeats, just as Sarah Palin gave crucial help to some Tea Party challengers to incumbent Republicans in 2010.

I’m guessing a lot of House Democrats really really really don’t like her. Pass the popcorn.