Bernie Sanders
March 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The good news for Joe Biden isn’t just that he is now almost certain to become the Democratic nominee for president. It’s also the fact that, unlike Hillary Clinton, he will become the nominee cleanly. He will defeat Bernie Sanders fair and square. Thus, Sanders and his supporters will have nothing resembling a legitimate grievance when Biden wins. The question, of course, is whether the lack of a legitimate grievance
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March 11, 2020 — Scott Johnson
We have quickly settled into the new conventional wisdom to account for the sudden rise of Joe Biden from the walking dead to the top of the former heap of Democratic presidential candidates. Biden will be the Democrats’ 2020 nominee for president. What is to be said? Below I offer a few arguable — even when clichéd, they are brief! — observations. 1. The Sanders crowd still represents the throbbing
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March 10, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Scandinavian history, that is. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist and has demonstrated a lifelong devotion to Communist regimes in the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela. But now that he is running for president, he deflects accountability by claiming that by “socialist” he means countries like Sweden and Denmark–countries which are not in fact socialist and which have, in many ways, more conservative policies than we do. Bernie finally was called
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March 9, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Less than two weeks ago, when South Carolina Democrats went to the polls, it was “win or go home” time for Joe Biden. Failure to win that primary would surely have been curtains for Biden’s faltering campaign. Biden won big. However, he still faced something close to “win or go home” just a few days later, on Super Tuesday. Biden needed a few more wins to stay afloat, and he
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March 8, 2020 — Scott Johnson
The late Paul Hollander wrote Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba when the Cold War was still raging (it was published in 1981). It remains a valuable historical study of the phenomenon of political tourism to totalitarian countries by high-minded residents of free Western societies. Hollander briefly observes in the preface that “the pilgrimages to the Soviet Union are a thing of the
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March 7, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Earlier this week, Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race. Unlike other recent dropouts — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bloomberg — Warren hasn’t endorsed anyone for president yet. Ideologically, Warren is more closely aligned with Bernie Sanders than with Joe Biden. However, it makes little sense for her to endorse Sanders. For one thing, Sanders looks like a loser now. A good showing in Michigan would change
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March 6, 2020 — Steven Hayward
As Paul notes below, the “objective” media is falling all over itself to explain Elizabeth Warren’s collapse as the result of sexism, despite the mountain of evidence that voters (including women voters in her home state) just don’t like her. Reminds me of the old story about the dog food company that spent millions hiring marketing consultants to determine why their dog food wasn’t selling, and after a lot of
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March 5, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
In this post, I addressed claims by Bernie Sanders’s campaign and other leftists that the “establishment,” worried sick about the Vermont socialist’s early successes, is conspiring to deny him the nomination. Finding no evidence of conspiracy, I concluded that if Sanders doesn’t win the Democratic nomination, it won’t be because he was conspired against, but because not enough Democrats want to nominate a socialist, especially an old male socialist who
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March 5, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This is the kind of thing that explains the stop-Bernie movement in the Democratic Party. Sanders is a Communist, or, best case, a Communist sympathizer. I am so old, I can remember when The Manchurian Candidate was fiction. The latest comes from NPR. I take it that this is one more instance of the mainstream Democratic Party lining up in lockstep against Sanders. NPR interviewed Alan Gross, who was for
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March 4, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Earlier this week, Chris Matthews announced on his MSNBC show “Hardball” that he was quitting. He then walked off the set. Later, we learned that the network forced him to resign. Why? One explanation is that Matthews made female guests on his show and some female employees “uncomfortable” with sex-charged banter. But reportedly, Matthews has been doing this forever. It’s true that an obscure journalist recently called Matthews out for
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March 3, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Bernie Sanders’s campaign has been sounding the alarm. The “establishment,” worried sick about the Vermont socialist’s early successes, is conspiring to thwart his movement of “working people” by denying him the nomination. President Trump has echoed this theme. Indeed, his campaign claims, absurdly, that Sanders is the victim of a coup. It’s true that establishment Democrats are worried about Sanders being the Democratic nominee. It’s also true that socialists are
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March 1, 2020 — John Hinderaker
At Front Page, Daniel Greenfield analyzes the source, by zip code, of donations to the Bernie Sanders campaign: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Their employees are three of the top 4 Bernie donors. Apple is in fifth place. These dot coms are not exactly organizations known to employ members of the proletariat. *** Geographically, Bernie’s top dollar zip code is 94110 in San Francisco. The average household income in this part
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February 28, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Whenever Bernie Sanders’s socialism comes up in the Democratic debates, he deflects criticism by saying he favors something along the lines of Denmark’s model. Sanders’s debate rivals almost invariably let this answer pass. (I think Pete Buttigieg tried to take it on in the last debate but couldn’t get the floor.) In reality, the policies Sanders advocates bear little resemblance to those of Denmark and other Scandinavian countries today. They
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February 28, 2020 — Steven Hayward
The Berkeley-IGS poll, overseen by my former office suite-mate and first rate pollster Mark DiCamillo, is out with new numbers today showing Bernie Sanders running away with the California primary next week, where 415 delegates are at stake: Sanders is now the choice of 34% of likely voters in the primary, twice the support of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, his nearest rival who is preferred by 17%. Former New York
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February 26, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I think it was Tom Bethell, back when he wrote the must-read Washington column for The American Spectator, who asked the pertinent question when Bernie Sanders was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives under the Socialist Party affiliation in 1990: How will we be able to tell the difference between Bernie’s socialism and the “mainstream” Democratic Party in Washington? That illuminating question has become suddenly urgent now that
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February 26, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Fifty years ago in leftist circles, communist sympathizers like me could take one of two lines on Joseph Stalin. We could condemn Stalin and say he betrayed the communist revolution or we could spout the following: “Stalin did some good things and some bad things. He should be criticized for the bad things and praised for the good ones.” I tried out the second line — the party line —
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February 25, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
“FORA,” the Forum on Ruining America, held another session tonight. Present were Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg. The Democratic contenders finally realized that they need to aim their fire at Bernie Sanders, rather than on their fellow trailers. Even Buttigieg and Kloubuchar were able to resist skewering each other. Only Elizabeth Warren seems not to have received the memo. She
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