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Warren wins big at Bloomberg’s expense
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Warren debated (eviscerated?) Bloomberg the way she would debate Trump—and yes, it matters
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White House spokesman offers bizarro explanation for Donald 'Lock Her Up' Trump's pardons
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Warren wins big at Bloomberg’s expense
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Wednesday’s Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, was one for the ages, with a reduced and feisty field apparently invigorated by billionaire oligarch Mike Bloomberg’s presence. But the undisputed standout winner was Elizabeth Warren, who didn’t just eviscerate Bloomberg, tearing down in two hours what he had spent $400 million to build. She also worked to build a case for her candidacy that ceded the party’s left-left wing to Bernie Sanders, while not abandoning core principles that would land her in the center.
At the debate and in her post-debate media victory lap, Warren has stressed that she is a capitalist, thus creating clear and unmistakable distance from Bernie’s self-proclaimed socialism. As such, she presented herself as a viable option not just for former Warren supporters who have defected to Sanders, but also for supporters of the other candidates potentially looking for a new home. Bloomberg is so clearly out of his depth that it’s hard to see him retaining what support he has, much less growing it. Joe Biden was a sad figure on the stage. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar had their moments, but their hatred for each other and incessant sniping diminished their stature.
We’ll know in the next week if the debate scrambled the polling, not to mention whether it gave Warren a desperately needed boost in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses. But if nothing else, the debate should go down among the best in modern history.
Check out my piece, Eight takeaways from the Democratic primary debate.
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Warren debated (eviscerated?) Bloomberg the way she would debate Trump—and yes, it matters
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If debates won presidential elections, we’d be gearing up for President Hillary Clinton’s reelection battle today, AND watching the Republican primary between Ted Nugent and Roy Moore. In all three 2016 debates, Clinton utterly decimated Donald Trump. She was prepared. He winged it. She was in complete command of the facts, and he did the Trump thing and made shit up as he went along. She was poised and self-composed, while Trump was creepy as hell. Remember him stalking Hillary around the stage?
So if debates are so irrelevant to our hyper-partisan and polarized presidential electorate, why should we care who is up on stage facing Trump? Because the way we win is by maximizing base excitement. Republicans have it easy—their white, older, male base always votes. Our young, female, black, and brown base is more likely to sit an election out. There are more of us, for sure, but we have to work harder to get us to the polls.
So consider this: We’re going to need to motivate young voters, female voters, black and brown voters, and—this is critical—disaffected voters from whichever wing of the party loses out in the primary. So we either have to bring Bernie Sanders supporters home, or we need to reassure the moderate center wing of our party that our nominee isn’t going to bring the whole edifice crashing down.
In other words, this October’s presidential debates won’t change a single mind. What they will do is signal to our less-committed voters whether it’s worth making the time to engage electorally and vote, and it will signal to the somewhat-committed voters whether it’s worth getting off their asses in the weeks before the election to knock on doors and make phone calls. And it will signal to the disaffected backers of other candidates whether it’s really worth sitting out and giving Trump another four years to destroy our country and planet.
We saw every candidate take swipes at Bloomberg last night. Which one of them would you rather have reprising that role against Trump later this year?
Ideally, the one that elicits this response:
Read more about why Elizabeth Warren would be the best debate opponent Democrats could field against Donald Trump. It’s all about base mobilization and turnout, and uniting the party.
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White House spokesman offers bizarro explanation for Donald 'Lock Her Up' Trump's pardons
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Daily Kos' Jen Hayden writes:
If you include the long, long campaign season, we are roughly five years into our Donald Trump hell. During that time, Trump has told thousands of lies. Layers upon layers of lies. And not only does he surround himself with people who do the same, but he demands it of them. Ask Sean Spicer, or ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who so struggled to answer for or repeat Donald Trump’s lies from the White House podium that she stopped having press conferences altogether.
Enter Hogan Gidley, principal deputy White House press secretary, a man with a penchant for delivering dizzying talking points in the White House driveway while standing under a $400 Burberry umbrella that matches his pocket handkerchief and his $2,000 raincoat.
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It’s a wonder these folks were able to convince a large swath of Americans that they represent blue-collar families, but I digress.
Gidley hit the television network, the only one the White House talks to, to explain Donald Trump’s most recent head-scratching pardons, and he offered an equally head-scratching explanation of why he chose these particular people to pardon: "The president is against aggressive sentencing,” whether it’s Alice Johnson or Rod Blagojevich."
“The president is against aggressive sentencing.” Excuse me, what? The man spent two years leading “Lock her up” chants about his political rival. He literally campaigned on aggressively sentencing his political opponent for the crime of … something something.
Continue reading here. It only gets more bizarre, and it's certainly worth your time!
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Addendum:
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• How Elizabeth Warren Exposed Michael Bloomberg as an Empty Suit, by Laura Bassett at GQ
• Roger Stone sentenced to 40 months ... start your pardon timers now, by Mark Sumner at Daily Kos
• Survey: Most Americans say environment should be a top priority, Democrats say it should be No. 1, by Daily Kos' longtime environmental writer Meteor Blades. "Last week’s [Pew Research poll] was also the first poll in two decades in which economics and environment both ranked about equally as a priority," he reports.
• "NBC News and MSNBC once again made television history with the most-watched Democratic debate ever, averaging nearly 20 million total viewers across the two networks, according to Nielsen Fast National Data. Last night’s debate was also the top-rated Democratic debate ever in the key A25-54 demo and attracted 13.5 million live stream viewers, surpassing any previously hosted debate this election cycle." Holy crap.
• "Warren stopped and frisked Bloomberg on national television because he matched the description," writes R. Eric Thomas in Elle, which has to be the line of the day, right?
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