Bernie Sanders
February 22, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This week’s episode, featuring listener favorite Lucretia, Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, was taped while the Nevada caucuses were in process, but now we know that Bernie Sanders has crushed it. He’s the Coronavirus of the Democratic Party—a long latency period that has now broken out into an unstoppable epidemic. It’s over: the only question now is who Sanders will pick as his running mate. Watch the next debate,
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February 20, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Bernie Sanders’s weakest moment last night is hard to single out, but one leading example would have to be his lame answer that some of the bad behavior of Bernie Bros are Russian false flag operations. Whereupon Keith Ellison came to the defense of Bernie Bros. Which set up Rep. Steve Scalise for what we can declare, even though it is only February, to be Tweet of the Year hands
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February 20, 2020 — John Hinderaker
One is tempted to say, after last night’s demolition derby, that the 2020 presidential election is over. Perhaps the Democrats can recover, but it won’t be easy. Tom Steyer was one of many who said, “I saw the person who won the debate last night whose name is Donald Trump.” Still, the night wasn’t entirely wasted. There was one clarifying moment, in which Michael Bloomberg (who had, all agree, a
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February 20, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Michael Bloomberg had a bad night in his debut appearance last night at the Democratic presidential candidates’ debates. What a pathetic performance. It may be too early to say, but perhaps there are some things money can’t buy. Bloomberg took a beating last night in Las Vegas. Looking like he had escaped from Madame Tussauds, Bloomberg responded to a Bernie Sanders comment by interjecting that his (Bloomberg’s) stents had been
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February 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
• So it appears the Democratic Party has decided to self-identify as unelectable. • Elizabeth “I Have a Plan for That” Warren says her simple solution to every problem is to “put power back in the hands of the people.” But somehow all of her plans involve putting more power in the hands of people in Washington. I wonder if that has something to do with her “more selective appeal,” as
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February 19, 2020 — Steven Hayward
It’s still early, but the Democratic Party nomination process reminds me of Yogi Berra’s line about center field at Yankee stadium: “It gets late early out there.” It’s already late for the Democrats, and it is becoming clear that the Democrats are doomed this year. At the debate tomorrow night, Bloomberg is going to be the big target because he’s got the means to challenge everybody. The big beneficiary will
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February 18, 2020 — John Hinderaker
The latest round of polling shows Bernie Sanders pulling away from the field with a 12-point lead, causing a rival campaign to worry that on Super Tuesday, “Sanders could build an insurmountable delegate lead.” And 538 now has Sanders as the favorite in the race, with an open convention in second place. My only regret is that I didn’t buy popcorn futures when prices were still low. I think that
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February 17, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Early this morning, Michael Bloomberg tweeted this attack on Bernie Sanders and his army of online hooligans: We need to unite to defeat Trump in November. This type of "energy" is not going to get us there. https://t.co/bPuUZMs2d6 pic.twitter.com/Tdp6mpWjcX — Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 17, 2020 Bloomberg is right: Sanders is trying to bully his way to the presidential nomination. Bloomberg, on the other hand, is trying to buy it–more
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February 17, 2020 — Scott Johnson
I found the video below via Twitter and the obligatory tabloid story in the New York Post’s “Topless protester confronts Bernie Sanders, de Blasio at Nevada campaign rally.” The whole thing reminds me of the famous New York Post headline about the “Headless body in topless bar.” In this case, however, there must be a metaphor struggling to get out. .@BernieSanders can’t control his rally. He lets naked women take
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February 14, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I got up this morning wondering about the plausible scenario that no Democratic candidate will have a majority of delegates going into the convention in Milwaukee this summer, thus producing a contested/brokered convention, which we haven’t seen since 1952. Here’s part of the email I sent to some friends (some of them known to Power Line readers) with whom I kick around the state of things several times a week:
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February 14, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Paul Krugman rejects the idea that Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Krugman writes: Bernie Sanders isn’t actually a socialist in any normal sense of the term. He doesn’t want to nationalize our major industries and replace markets with central planning; he has expressed admiration, not for Venezuela, but for Denmark. This made me wonder why Sanders has been calling himself a socialist all these years. Was it a way of
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February 12, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and Bartenders Union Local 165 (“the Culinary Union”) represents 60,000 workers in Las Vegas and Reno, including workers at most of the casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip and in Downtown Las Vegas. It is affiliated with UNITE HERE, which represents 280,000 workers in gaming, hotel, and food service industries in North America. The Culinary Union is a powerful player in Nevada politics.
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February 11, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Amy Klobuchar charmed Meghan McCain today by saying that, although she’s always been “pro choice,” she “believe[s] we’re a big tent party, and there are pro-life Democrats and they are part of our party, and we need to build a big tent.” That’s mighty big of Klobuchar. Pete Buttigieg may or may not be as big. He doesn’t read pro-life Democrats out of the party, but says he won’t “trick”
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February 10, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Jim Geraghty compares the 2020 Democratic nomination battle to the one Republicans waged in 2016. In 2016, he recalls, Trump profited from the fact that a crowded field of Trump rivals focused their fire on one another. Geraghty writes: [T]he other candidates were all convinced they could be the last man standing against Trump, and then beat him in a one-on-one matchup. Perhaps one of those non-Trump candidates could have
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February 6, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Spectator USA has posted Will Lloyd’s offbeat column about Larry Sanders — the unfunny Larry Sanders. The column is “The Larry Sanders show for the British left.” Subhead: “A night in London with Bernie’s actual bro.” Lloyd introduces his column with this anecdote: Larry Sanders, Bernie’s literal bro, moved to England in the late 1960s and settled in picture postcard Oxford. I was told that Bernie visited Larry there some
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February 4, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Bernie Sanders has visited the Soviet Union, Nicaragua (celebrating the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution), and Cuba. Twice. Bernie’s line on Cuba is that, while it is a poor country with a less than perfect government, there is much we could learn from Fidel’s regime. Cuba embodies the socialism that Sanders espouses, albeit without his “democratic” gloss. In this Turning Point USA video, four young Americans who are steeped
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February 2, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Lots of rumors swirling about why the Des Moines Register canceled the release of its final poll before the caucuses tomorrow night. The official word from the paper is that there was some kind of error or omission on some of the sampling calls, but this ought not to be a fatal problem for polling today. Pollsters routinely balance and weight their raw data to correct for a variety of
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